Barack Obama---Son of Bigfoot!

Truth will out! After years of painstaking research, I, m g meile, have uncovered America's most AWFUL SECRET! Let facts be presented to a candid world: Barack Husein Obama is NOT the legally elected President of these glorious United States of America. For that living fiend, that monster of iniquity, that Barack Husein Obama, is not only a Muslim---and we all know how they are!---but that dreadful montebank, that crafty trickster, that traitorous Barack Husein Obama---no it's NOT an Irish name!---was NOT---oh, the humanity!---was NOT born in America.      But he wasn't born in Kenya, either.
      He was born in . . . Tasmania.

For millions of years a strange being roamed the lost continent of Sundaland. Slinking and solitary, it was never very numerous, or very noticeable. Shaped like a dog yet stalking its prey like a cat, a meat-eater yet not a carnivore, striped like a tiger yet the size of a dog, pouched like a kangaroo but with its pouch facing tailwards, this bizarre creature was still there when Sundaland sank beneath the waves, leaving behind what is now known as Australia. It was there when the human race first arrived 40,000 years ago, and became extinct in the 1800s. It survived into living memory in Tasmania, where, isolated from the world, it lurked in the island's forests until the coming of the White Fire.
     The Fire made short work of Tasmania's 30,000 or so humans: within 80 years of European contact the last full-blooded Aborigine was dead. It took longer to kill of the hunter, yet it happened quickly enough that there was no time for the Whites to find out what the Natives called it. To this day the creature that lived so long and so lightly has no common English name. Because it ate meat the Whites sometimes call it the "marsupial wolf"; because of its stripes some call it the "Tasmanian tiger." Here we will use its scientific title: Thylacinus cynocephalus, or in short, "thylacine."
      The last thylacine died of neglect in the Hobart Zoo on the seventh day of September in 1936. The grainy black-and-white photos show a rather uncomely beast, with a mouth like a viper's and a tail like a rat's; no one seems to know the animal's gender, or how in later years it came to be nick-named "Benjamin." With the passing of Benjamin the thylacine joined the dodo and the dinosaur, never to walk the earth again.
     Or did it?
     For to this day farmers on isolated farmsteads, ranchers watching over their sheep, travelers through Tasmania's still-thick jungles, and even dwellers on the edges of Tasmania's cities report seeing thylacines. And believing isn't just seeing: they've taken casts of paw-prints and gathered up suspected droppings, all in an effort to prove the creature they affectionately call "the tiger" yet lives. One website logs over 350 sightings  since Benjamin's death; others detail efforts to clone the beast.  And along with maps and logs and calculations there are---as always with such things---rants against public indifference and fiendish government conspiracies. Reading through these one is reminded of tweedy eccentrics dunking cameras in Loch Ness, or "cryptozoologists" trying to sound scientific in the pages of Yeti Researcher. But this blog is not the place to get into any of that.
       My interest here is the mind.
       For there is, I believe, a single mental process that underlies most if not all the sightings of thylacines reported over the past 75 years---as well as sightings of Bigfoot, Nessie, ivory-billed woodpeckers, Mothman, and the skunk-ape, not to mention UFOs and their LGMs. I think this same process motivates most of America's conservatives, especially those in the Tea Party and its wholly-owned subsidiary the GOP. And it is reason #1 for the existence of the birther movement. In fact, the similarities between cryptozoologists, birthers, and media hack(er)s like the late, lamentable Andrew Breitbart are so striking that many people might be tempted to find in them evidence of---dare I say it?---a vast, global . . . conspiracy!
     But I'm not one of them.
     I'd rather not devote a lifetime to debunking moon landings or building over-unity engines, or to hunting things that the overwhelming preponderance of the evidence says aren't there. I'd rather devote my life to meditation. And when you go to that school of hard knocks we call Buddha Bootcamp, the first thing you learn is to meditate on is your motivations.
     Motivations---not intentions. Everyone's intentions are honorable, and we all know what the road to hell is paved with. Intentions are what lie ahead of deeds; motives are what lie behind them. Finding your intentions is easy, finding your motivations less so: most of us are pushed through life far more powerfully, and more unconsciously, than we are pulled. In Buddha Bootcamp we're taught that motive is the mainspring of human behavior, the lynchpin of karma, the truth behind the appearances of our behavior. And so, instead of Howard Baker's famous questions---"What did the president know, and when did he know it?"---meditators ask: "what did the president want, and why did he want it?" Had voters asked those questions early enough, America might have been spared Watergate. Or Kent State.
     So what do the thylacine hunters want, and why do the want it? The "what" is easy: they want to see a real, live tiger, of course. Who wouldn't? What an amazing experience that would be! And how wonderfully hopeful! For where one, there might be more. . . and there might be Bigfoots, too, and plesiosaurs breeding away at the bottom of Loch Ness, and other highly intelligent hominins lurking about in some Mirkwood somewhere ("Elves, Mr. Frodo!"), and this hot, grey, overcrowded world might be just a bit more bearable. . . .
     But finding more marvel into the world is an intention, not a motive. What motivates the hunters to keep seeing thylacines, Nessie, or Sasquatch when it is virtually certain that none are there? I can't bring myself to believe, as professional "skeptics" might, that thousands of decent, well-intentioned people all over the planet are all either temporary schizophrenics, or victims of an evolutionary glitch in brain-wiring, or just plain liars. They can't be seeing anything, and yet they  are. So what are they seeing? It's a mystery. Or is it?
     No, it's not. They're all seeing something perfectly ordinary. Something anyone can find, anywhere, anytime: emotion.

How can you see an emotion? Here's how: take a walk down a busy street. While you do so, keep in the back of your mind how pleasant it would be to meet someone who is sexually attractive. Whoa, that was quick: there's a hottie already! Whoo-whoo!
     Now look at this lovely person again. This time in the face.
     Oh. Not quite as exciting at second glance, eh? They almost always aren't, are they? You certainly already knew this (if you've gone through puberty), yet still you fooled yourself into thinking that something was there when it wasn't. Were you hallucinating? Was your brain malfunctioning? Or are you just a compulsive liar?
     I think we can be kinder to ourselves and our species by coming up with a different explanation: your initial, barely-conscious glance allowed your unconscious to project your emotions onto the sensory object, so that the object seemed, for a brief moment, to embody the emotion floating about in the back of your mind---in this case, sexual desire. A second glance, however, requires a more focused, conscious decision, and it's not your conscious mind that projects. A second glance is more likely to reveal what's really there---and what's really there is more likely to be someone less desirable than s/he first seemed. The screen is seldom as interesting as the movie projected upon it.
     All adult human beings have had the experience of sexual projection; it's nothing to be ashamed of. But in Buddha Bootcamp we're taught to take control of our projections, and to make second-glancing a habit.
    Cryptozooan sightings are almost always unexpected and fleeting, like that first glance on the street. Planned expeditions inevitably come up a cropper: a rancher minding a fence-line is more likely to see something than a guy with a Thermine field processor and a $200 pair of binoculars. Yet isolation, poor lighting, or extreme weather are no more necessary to sighting Mothman or Mokele-Mbembe than such conditions are necessary to "see" sexual attractiveness where none exists. All that is needed is unconscious emotion, an object to project it onto, and a cultural tradition that allows the viewer to gave a label to the thing sighted. Despite similar environments, no one sights thylacines in British Columbia, and no one sights Bigfoot in Tasmania.
     But thylacine-spotters and loch-watchers probably aren't hankering to pitch woo at the objects of their search. So what does motivate them? What emotion lurks in the backs of their minds? Who is the tiger? Who, for that matter, is Barack Obama? A screen, yes---but for what movie? What unconscious emotion do Obama, and Nessie, and Bigfoot, and the yeti, and the thylacine all unwittingly reflect?
     Guilt.

The destruction of the Tasmanian Aborigines is the most complete example of genocide known to history: a culture 35,000 years old, wiped off the earth almost without a trace. What ice ages, marsupial lions, and lizards twice the size of Komodo dragons could not accomplish British settlers did with guns, disease, whiskey, and social darwinism. Tasmania's modern Whites are well aware of the suffering on which their civilization is built, and like (some) White Americans, they are no longer willing to make excuses for that suffering. Even so, I suspect a certain measure of guilt remains. It's not as if the current masters of Tasmania can un-kindle the Fire, anymore than White Americans can take back those smallpox blankets. Having never known a Tasmanian I'm speculating here, but judging from the people I know best it seems logical to me that a wee bit of guilt would be as much a part of modern Tasmanian culture as it is of modern American culture. And I suspect that White Tasmanians have as many ways of dealing with that guilt as White Americans have.
     Any strong emotion challenges the ego and its defenses. Emotion can be so overpowering that it can leave the mind awash in pain. Remember that unrequited love from high school? Even now it hurts a little. And the worst thing about it was the ping-ponging back and forth among (a) pretending it was only puppy love; (b) insisting it was true love; (c) trying to divert your attention into your studies, or sports, or finding God, or anything else that would let you get away from that horrible, obsessive passion. Anything, that is, but simply acknowledging it and letting it subside by itself---which, with time, it always does. Most of us are no longer in love with our high-school sweethearts--sometimes, even if we married them.
     And if you've ever tried to make a habit of Watching the Mind until those thoughts self-liberate you'll know why we call it Buddha Bootcamp. I know guys who grew up in Tibetan monasteries who struggle with emotion. I know journalists, lawyers, doctors, professors who struggle with it. I know I sure as hell do. But I don't think the Tea Partiers do. They seem remarkably comfortable with emotion. As long as the emotion is hate. Guilt, on the other hand. . . .
     Watching the antics of America's conservatives we can observe the whole range of shell-games that people play to avoid owning up to guilt. And conservatives in modern America have plenty to feel guilty about: racism (of which Obama is a daily reminder), sexism, classism, anti-environmentalism. . . .
     And then there's Lord Georgeamort, the guy who approved of torture, the president who really DID cheat his way into the Oval Office. (Hanging chads---remember?) And if Republicans don't feel guilty about W, why do they never mention his name?
     In fact, you can read almost all conservative attacks on Obama as disguised admissions of guilt. Just about everything they accuse Obama of doing or wanting is something they themselves have done or wanted. Turn the accusations back on the accusers and the process of projection becomes obvious:
     "Obama hates White people" = conservatives hate non-Whites.
     "Obama is a socialist" = conservatives want socialism, but only for the rich.
     "Obama wants to take our guns" = conservatives need their guns to start a civil war.
     "Obama is running up the federal deficit" = conservatives would rather protect their rich buddies than raise taxes to pay for their own useless wars.
     "Obama is for big gummint" = it's the GOP one-party gummint that approved the Patriot Act, created the Homeland Security bureaucracy, and approved of extraordinary rendition . . . and, oh yes, torture.
     "Obama is anti-family" = the divorce rate in Red states is 26%; in Blue states it is 22%.
     "Obama is a pro-abortion baby-killer" = under W the US infant mortality rate rose for the first time in 40 years.
     "Obama is the next Adolf Hitler" = I rest my case.

The big issue in modern politics isn't about policy, or the deficit, or who "wins" a primary. The big issue is motivation: specifically, what motivates conservatives to advocate policies that are impractical, unworkable, and just plain cruel. I've concentrated on conservative attacks on Obama here because hatred for America's 44th president is the unifying principle of the conservative movement---they hate him even worse than they hate women. Son of Bigfoot? Try "Son of Perdition," "Son of Satan," or even "Son of Malcolm X"---he's been called all these and then some. Take away that hate and like Roger Chillingsworth in The Scarlet Letter conservatives and their movement would wither like uprooted weeds. Such reckless hate cries out for explanation.
     The explanation I'm offering here is that Obama really is, on the unconscious level, the Son of Bigfoot: not Bigfoot as we'd all like to see him/her, but the more important "Bigfoot" lurking within our minds. The Native people I know all insist that Sasquatch is a "spiritual" being who should not be molested, and whose existence will never be scientifically proven. I think what they call "spiritual" is what White folk would call "unconscious"; whatever we call it, I think the Natives are on to something. Spirits cannot be captured or explained, but they often come to us with messages for our good.
     And one of the people they're bringing that message to is me. For it's not Rush Limbaugh's heart I'm trying to find here but my own. It's so easy to be bitterly angry at the conservative louts who are destroying my planet, raping my democracy, and injuring my children. It's especially easy to be angry when you live in a culture that sees anger as nothing to be ashamed of. So when I hear yet another backwoods boob babbling birther baloney, or some clean-shaven tub-thumper pretending to quote Leviticus though ignorant of Hebrew, I remind myself of something I heard a Tibetan lama say: If there is one problem your hate will solve, then hate is a good thing. Despite years of search I have yet to find that problem. The Tea Partiers haven't found it either. All any of us have found is  tinder for the next Fire.
     And so the motivation behind this blog: to argue myself out of hating the haters. Unlike them I've had the wonderful good fortune of a stint in Buddha Bootcamp, where I've been taught that hate is NOT "normal," or an "instinct," or hormones, or evolution, or something regrettable but inevitable, I've been taught that it is a Fire burning down the house of life---and that when your house is on fire, you don't need to know the name of the arsonist or the temperature of the flames. You need to know how to get out. Yes, conservatives are deluded. But so anyone can be, when hate is the master. And so I watch the hate within myself, lest I too start seeing things that aren't there.
     And I don't mean thylacines.

Telecommuter Talk: You've GOT to Read This: Lud-in-the-Mist by Hope Mirrlees

Telecommuter Talk: You've GOT to Read This: Lud-in-the-Mist by Hope Mirrlees

Four Men Who Will Save the World, Part 4

"Cowgirl" is an attitude, really. A pioneer spirit, a special American brand of courage. The cowgirl faces life head-on, lives by her own lights, and makes no excuses. Cowgirls take stands; they speak up. They defend things they hold dear. --Dale Evans

Perfection. The workers' paradise. Full prosperity. The New Jerusalem. Total well-being. Perfect health. Infinite wealth. Perpetual youth. Joy. In return for obedience, all these were promised--and still are--by the Masters of the 3Cs. Tomorrow.

It was never today, of course. The perfection promised by the Masters of communism, capitalism, and Christianity was always what Thomas Merton called the "proximate utopia," the earthly paradise just over the next hill, just around the next bend. A lovely place, this brand of utopia, where, as Merton puts it, "the last sins are currently being eliminated and when, tomorrow, there will be no more sins because all the sinners will have been wiped out." Once the authorities had managed to get a few hooligans and malcontents out of the way, once those sodomites had been sent to hell, once those lazy, stupid poor people dragging the rest of us down were kicked off welfare and forced to get jobs at Burger King, we, the Sons of Light, would get our just reward. It was all carefully calculated, prophesied, predestined, dialectically synthesized, Ayn Rand approved. It was inevitable. It was only a matter of time. And the time was always Tomorrow.

The final page of Kartinniy Slovar' Russkovo Jazyka, a children's primer, Moscow, 1950

Tomorrow. Soon. Someday. Never today. Today was for diligence, and obedience, and everyone wearing the same hair style, the same height of skirt, the same col- lar on the same shirt, going to the same church, the same job, the same role, thinking the same thoughts. It was the world I and my fellow elders grew up in, raised children in. And it wasn't exactly the nightmare you read about in 1984 or A Wrinkle in Time. Think Ward and June Cleaver, Dagwood and Blondie, the kids in Peanuts all fed, clothed, and sheltered by grown-ups who were never seen. . . . 

No, it wasn't that bad. Not for most people.

But it was what life was like in, say, 1965, and yes it was boring, and uncreative, and limiting, and people died in pointless wars, and people were thrown in jail or killed for their beliefs, and people who didn't conform because they couldn't were blamed for their "failure" anyway and thrown into various dark corners. And not just the poor, or the malcontents, or people with too much melanin. The average life-expectancy for a person with Down Syndrome in 1965 was 2 years. They could have lived much longer (as they do today), but they were shuffled off to those dark corners . . . and those corners were very dark indeed. But the vast majority of their fellow citizens never knew. They were the lucky ones. They were normal.

Normalcy. The ultimate drug, and everyone wanted it. Don't you? Think cozy living rooms and sunny Sunday mornings and watching parades go by. Think of Father Knows Best and I Love Lucy and Bob Hope and Dutch Reagan and his good buddies Roy Rogers and Dale Evans. Then don't think about Angel Unaware, the book Dale Evans wrote about her child with Down Syndrome, a child that she and Roy arranged to live in a corner that didn't seem dark until you looked closely. Robin Elizabeth Rodgers died just before her second birthday, and Dale never told us why.

You won't find a copy of Angel Unaware in my home town. Not in the libraries, anyway. Mom didn't have the option Dale Evans had, of being wealthy and well-connected enough to hire a nanny to care for her Down Syndrome baby. Nor did she have the option of building a separate dwelling for the child to keep her away from her other children as Dale did, supposedly under doctors' orders. (The other children might have been "disturbed" by contact with such an odd duck, you see, so Dale didn't let them have any.) 

And Mom certainly lacked the arrogant gall to write a book about her daughter from the child's point of view, and in a sickeningly sweet, pseudo-inspirational baby-voice that in comparison makes Rainbow Brite sound like Vlad the Impaler. No, you won't find a copy of Angel Unaware in my hometown. Mom tracked them all down and burned them. Blame it on her German ancestry, if you will. Or maybe Mom was just being a good cowgirl.

We're told Dale's baby "died of complications from Down Syndrome." My sister also tried to die when she was two. She tried to die when she was twenty. In fact, she tried to die just a couple of weeks ago. But she didn't. And not because of luck, or because of angels, or because "The Bible Tells Me So." (One of Dale's most popular songs--I used to sing it in Sunday-school.) Dale's gone to her grave now, and her husband Roy, and their good buddy Ronald Reagan, along with plenty of other famous rich people. But I wonder about Robin Elizabeth Rodgers, and where her grave is, and if anyone ever visits it.

The young women who grew up in the world of the Masters should have turned out as self-satisfied, narrow-minded and mindless as Dale Evans. That a signifi- cant portion of them did not must mean that something happened to them during that time of life when the mind is most open to influences outside the family: adolescence. The mothers who raised the current crop of under-30s reached this time of life during the 1960s, the decade so often called "tumultuous" by those who either weren't there or have something to sell. To hear pop-sociologists tell the tale, something about the time period itself got into the youth of those days like a virus or an evil spirit or a drug, something coming out of the radio or the TV or the movies or the akasha, something their parents couldn't control and that had even the Masters scrambling, something their dialectics and market analyses and ancient prophesies had failed to account for. What mysterious essence came oozing out of the ether and turned the docile young ladies of the 60s into the mothers of the Obama Generation? And what does this have to do with the four men who will save the world?

to be continued

Four Men Who Will Save the World, Part 3

The 1950s have a reputation for being a decade of conformity, but it may be difficult for people in the 21st century to realize just how stultifying 50s America (and, I suspect, 50s Earth in general) could be. It was an era in which the entire planet was ruled by what we may call the 3Cs--capitalism, communism, and Christi- anity. Yes, there were other ideologies in existence: a few hundred million Hindus, a few hundred million Moslems, the growing Black Liberation movements in Africa and the US, the tiny but influential Beats. But the hegemony of those who had authority within each of the Cs--let us call them "the Masters"--was overwhelming to the point of being nearly absolute.

Communist authoritarian- ism is well-known and justly despised, but the authoritarianism of the other 2 Cs was every bit as oppressive. Perhaps more so, as their Masters had had more practice. To give a minor example from personal experience: when my father was an undergrad in the early 50s he was forbidden to take a copy of Das Kapital out of the university library--despite being a sociology major. He was also required to swear to the infamous Truman loyalty oath, but the professor who was supposed to administer it refused to do so and dad--who found the oath repugnant and didn't want to swear to it--ended up never taking it.(Many who refused were branded communists and had their careers ruined.) Dad was no martyr for the cause of liberty and didn't see himself as such, but if you multiply these insults be a hundred million or so you get a society no much freer (though much more prosperous) than your typical police state. And that's what Eisenhauer's America was, as the overthrow of Mossadegh, the rise of Nixon, the terror of McCarthy, and the murder of Lumumba should make clear.

On a less personal level, anyone familiar with the history of American cin- ema knows the role played by the Hayes Office and the Legion of Decency, and the stranglehold they had on American popular culture. And then there's the role that both capital- ism and the Southern Baptist Convention played in promoting racism . . . and still play, if the move- ment to honor Nathan Bedford Forrest (co- founder of the KKK) is any indication. I could go on at length here (though Lies My Teacher Told Me goes on longer, and better), but regardless, there's plenty of documentation available to show that by 1965 the Masters of the 3Cs had most of the planet firmly in their grip, with a chilling effect (to put it mildly) on global culture. And that the Masters were no more inclined to loosen that grip than are the current regimes in China, Singapore, Missisippi, the Vatican, or Wall Street.

That said, it's important to realize that the vast majority of those laboring for the Masters were perfectly happy to do so. They didn't consciously think of them- selves as oppressed, and I'm guessing most of them still don't. I don't think this bland acceptance can be chalked up entirely to propaganda, brain-washing, or any of the usual ways many of us explain the hold an ideology other than our own may have on its believers. I don't think people are quite as naive, gullible, or stu- pid as they sometimes seem, any more than I believe bigots are simply irrational and have no descernable reasons for their delusions--or that all humans are Fundamentally Bad. I do think, however, that many people are easily bought--especially if they don't realize they're being bought.


So how do the Masters retain their hold over their followers? It is their ability to appeal to certain emotional needs that all humans have, through another 3Cs--a program we may call "contentment through conformity and continence." Each ideology bought off its believers and stifled potential dissent by promising those under its control lives of mild, moderate happiness, of simple pleasures and more- or-less fulfilled expectations (assuming the expectation weren't too high). A dacha on the Black Sea and a Lenin medal on your chest . . . a vacation in the Bahamas and a house in the burbs . . . coffee and donuts in a cozy church basement and a promise of reuniting with loved ones in the afterlife . . . these pleasant satisfac- tions could come to anyone willing to conform to the dictates of authority and contain their passions within certain acceptable bounds. (Acceptable to the Masters, that is.) And why not? You've gotta pay the piper, true? Don't we all have to earn our pleasures? It's not as if the universe handed them out on a silver platter. Arbeit mach frei--jah?

And if the dacha was a bit shabby? The vacation a wee bit boring? The love of Jesus something less than all-consuming? At least it was better than what THEY got. You know: the sinners. The counter-revolutionaries. The lazy, the stupid, the poor. The losers.

And anything is better than being a loser. Anything is better than being left out. Anything is better than being alone.

Needless to say (in the 21st century), the Masters paid for their power, and their servants for their servitude. And the price was, and is, survivor guilt.

Yet as Stewart Smalley might say, "But that's . . . OK." For to sweeten the pot, and to make that guilt a bit more palatable, the Masters promised their servants some- thing else. Something more. Something that, for a brief moment, actually was delivered. . . .

But not by the Masters. Not by Marx, nor by Jesus, nor by Adam Smith. It was delivered instead by the four men who will save the world.

to be continued

Four Men Who Will Save the World, Part 2

Let's examine the assertion of American conservatives that hetero pair-bonding is the "foundation of society." Plenty of philosophers have searched for the rela- tion(s) that society is "based on"--K'ung Tzu (aka Confucius) comes immediately to mind--but from a scientific standpoint, the idea that all human relations are dependent on marriage is patently ridiculous.

Swedish Semites by Luca della Robbia, Florence, c. 1455

As a quick illustration, con- template for a moment the history of European visual art. For every one depiction of Mary and Joseph there's probably a hundred of Mary and Jesus--as an infant. Virgin and Child is (I'm guessing) the most all-time popular motif in European art, and not just because Europe has been solidly Christian for the past thousand years. It would seem the ancients knew what some who claim to follow them today have chosen to for- get: the most important relationship in human existence is the physical and emotional bond between a child and his or her primary caregiver. It is this relationship, especially as it plays out during the first 3 to 5 years of the child's life, that lays the emotional foundation for everything that the child will do and think and feel for the rest of her days. It's not the emotions themselves that come into being at this time--the brain takes care of that by itself--but the way the child will process emotions--the emotional coping style--that is established within this crucial time period.

An emotional coping style is made up of a person's habitual responses to anything that triggers emotion: novel stimuli, relationships with others, and especially stress. If a young child experiences love, trust, security, and empathy within the caregiver bond, she will carry those feelings into every subsequent relationship; she will respond adaptively to novelty; and she will tolerate a fair amount of phys- ical and emotional stress. If, on the other hand, the child experiences anger, randomness, fear, and cold-heartedness within her primary bond, these experi- ences will damage her ability to relate to others in every area of life from the boardroom to the bedroom--and the nursery. She will be mistrustful of novel stimuli (since the changes she's already experienced are likely to have been painful), and will be easily knocked off her equilibrium by stress.

Sai//gai and son =Toma, c. 1965

The emotional coping style is not a series of conscious choices. Infants and young children do not chose to throw tantrums, suck their thumbs, play with their own feces out of boredom, or shriek whenever they're put to bed. Nor do they chose to become the kind of people who, later in their lives, will take drugs, have too many babies, drive Hummers, or commit mass murder. There is a robust correlation between the emotional coping style that a child develops in the first 5 years of life and how that child will behave as an adult. That is: there are direct causal connec- tions between how we rear our children, the kinds of people they become, and the type of society they create. If you want a stable, humane, and honorable society, your first order of business is to raise happy children. The Bushmn did it for 100,000 years. It's time the rest of us to get on board.

So why haven't we? Because we as a society are still used to the notion that "some people are just born bad," or even "all people are born bad." You might call it the doctrine of Fundamental Badness (FB). Its the deep-seated belief that to be born human is to be born, somehow, BAD--and that this badness is so deeply ingrained that it can never be rooted out or overcome. To put it simply, current global culture is in despair over the future of the human race, because it sees H. sapiens  as being unworthy to have a future. You've heard the public laments: "WE are ruining the planet" or "WE are disrupting the climate," or even "Nature would be better off without us." Politics has little to do with it. Liberals believe "we" are "naturally exploitive"' and (eagerly) await the breakdown of civilization; nothing will happen to them--they'll just grow their own granola. Conservatives think "God is angry with us sinners" and (eagerly) await Apocalypse; nothing will happen to them--they're morally superior. They hate queers, don't they?

But in the words of the old joke, "Who you mean WE, paleface?" There's not a shred of scientific evidence that humans are born with a propensity to wage war, commit rape, over-exploit resources, or murder our children. All of these evils are learned behaviors, no more innate than is a knowledge of trigonometry; they are far less innate than is a taste for mango-habanero sauce or a preference for the color green. There's not much I can do about global warming or legalizing same- sex marriage, but there's plenty the Koch brothers can do--and don't. People who voted for George W knew he didn't give a damn about the climate and voted for him anyway--I voted for Gore. And I'm not taking a bum rap just because I happen to belong to the same species as Adolf Hitler--I also belong to the species that gave the universe Aung San Suu Kyi, Harriet Tubman, and the Dalai Lama.

No matter that all the evidence indicates that it is a corrupted childhood--not a corrupted "soul," whatever that is--that is the source of "evil," broadly conceived. No matter that for 99% of our history as a species we lived almost exactly like the Bushmn, who have no history of war, rape, environmental degradation, or child maltreatment. Not matter that we now know enough about the developing brain to observe the effects of different child-rearing strategies. No matter that the international scientific community has spoken out on the origins of war--certainly the ultimate "evil"-- and has concluded that war begins in nurture, not nature. No matter: the "doctrine" of Fundamental Badness is so deeply ingrained in western culture that it's hard to find someone who doesn't believe in it. (Although actually it isn't: the Dalai Lama is one who doesn't. But he's not a Man of the West.)

The one we read in high school.

The idea that we humans are somehow "bad" in our essence, souls, genome, or what have you, is the most irrational, pernicious, and inhumane notion anyone can hold. And yet people can be quite shocked when you contradict it. I remember reading Lord of the Flies in high-school and vigorously arguing with my teacher that the novel was flawed because of its central premise:

Fancy thinking the Beast was some- thing you could hunt or kill! You knew, didn't you? I'm part of you? I'm the reason why it's no go? My poor, mis- guided child, do you think you know any better than I do?

And Simon the visionary looks on "with the infinite cynicism of adult life." Infinite? William Golding got a Nobel Prize for this well-written piece of trash, so beloved of English teachers and the pseudo-learned. Even the Funny Times quotes Golding in their "Curmudgeon" column: "Man produces evil as bees produce honey." Though to give them credit they also quote A. A. Milne: "No doubt Jack the Ripper excused himself on the grounds that it was human nature." I think it's time to stop making excuses for despair.

*   *   *

The difference in attitudes toward same-sex marriage that we observe in the mem- bers of the over-50 and under-30 generations are best explained by differences in the way the generations were raised. The old folk (like me) were raised with a certain level of fear, mistrust, and anger, so that when confronted by anything "abnormal" they respond with these emotions. The youth, on the other hand, do not respond to the "abnormal" in this way because they were raised without the same level of fear, mistrust, or anger. If we can identify just how the under-30s were raised, and what made their childhoods different from those that came before them, we may be able to create future generations of  people who don't reflexively buy into the malarky of Fundamental Badness the way the over-50s do. And once people have gotten FB out of their way, they will be free(er) to be more caring, tolerant, compassionate individuals, and thus--eventually--to create a better society and a better world. That IS what we all want, isn't it? Those of us who aren't Tea Partiers, that is.

So who raised the current generation of under-30s? What made their parenting style so different? To be under 30 in the year 2011 means to be born after 1980. Assuming the parents of this age-cohort were between 20 and 35 years old when their offspring were born, this means the parents we are interested in were born between about 1945 and 1960. Seeing that the vast majority of child-rearing in all known human societies is done by women, we may simplify matters here and ignore males, and instead concentrate on women who are now in their 50s and 60s. What made these women so special? What made them different from their mothers?

For the fact is, they shouldn't have been. Almost all the significant advances in our understanding of child development were made after these women had already matured. And, as the followings of James Dobson and John Rosemond attest, scientific discoveries in this field have been slow to penetrate into the general population: anti-attachment child-rearing is still gospel among many who know nothing of those discoveries and don't care to. Given all of this, the special women we are concerned with here should have been carbon-copies of the women who raised them. Instead, they became something subtly, profoundly different--and not because of anything scientists told them. Nor was it thanks to artists, or writers, or even the Bushmn--it was the doing of those four men who will save the world. . . .

to be continued

Four Men Who Will Save the World (Part 1)

Whenever I despair over the state of the planet Earth, I recall that I am old and dying, and that this is a very good thing.

No, I don't mean that I look forward to death as an escape from the disappearance of Bangladesh, the desertification of Beijing, the nuking of Jerusalem, or the inauguration of President Gingrich. Rather, I figure that if I am dying, so are my age-mates. And not a moment too soon.

The Tunguska Impactor didn't kill anyone--or threaten to.

Here's a key statistic: most Americans over the age of 50 are opposed to legal- izing same-sex marriage, whereas most of those under the age of 30 are in favor. This simple factoid reveals something very profound about America, about its future, and about the future of the species. For I believe that an indi- vidual's attitudes toward homosexuality hint at that individual's basic attitudes toward a broad range of issues--issues that must be confronted, attitudes that will make or break the civilization of the 21st century.

From a strictly legal standpoint, gay marriage is a no-brainer. The 14th Amend- ment to the US Constitution clearly and firmly guarantees equal protection under the law, and that equality cannot be denied without due process. A century's worth of Supreme Court decisions have established that dividing people into categories and treating the members of each category differently--that is, creating "differen- tial standards of treatment"--is only permitted within narrowly defined limits. In par- ticular, a differential standard must serve a definite and necessary social purpose, and it must not be "arbitrary and capricious."

The legal drinking age is a good example of a properly established differential standard. Setting the legal minimum for consumption of alcohol at 21 means that all human beings are divided into two categories (those above and those below the limit) and that members of one category are treated differently from those of the other (those above 21 may drink legally, those below may not). Twenty-one is certainly an arbitrary number---it could as easily be 20, or 37---but it is not capri- cious, because society has a clearly rational need to discourage people from drinking before their brains have finished maturing. The boundary has to be set somewhere, and 21 is a traditional and convenient number. (Teenagers may disagree, whereas on scientific grounds the legal age should be 25.)

Yes, this law is frequently broken--but that does not make it irrational. Law is not just about coercion or punishment: law also serves to embody society's values: in this case the value that society places on the health of its young people. Society can't hold anyone to a standard unless that standard is set up somewhere where people can see it, and in America that somewhere is the law.

Barack Obama is personally opposed to same-sex marriage on religious grounds. Yet he's also a scholar of constitutional law--it's what he taught at the University of Chicago--and he has instructed the Justice Department not to defend DOMA, the so-called "Defense of Marriage Act" forced through Congress by Newt Gingrich, and which forbids the federal government from recognizing same-sex marriages. Obama knows that DOMA won't hold up in the courts, and he sensibly wishes to save the taxpayers time and money be refusing to defend an indefensible law.

Social conservatives such as the members of the Tea Party claim they wish to "restore the Constitution" and to "return to the values of the Founding Fathers." So why do they continue to oppose same-sex marriage? Their arguments amount to calling for a differential standard of treatment under the 14th Amendment. Mind you, those in favor of same-sex marriage need prove nothing--the onus is entirely on the tea-baggers and their ilk. To succeed in court they must prove that such a differential--treating homosexuals as different from and inferior to hets--is neces- sary to the proper functioning of society in the same way that setting the minimum drinking age at 21 is necessary. And they must also prove that such a standard is neither arbitrary (what about bisexuals? transgendered people? masturbators?) nor capricious (i.e., based on personal prejudices).

What kids really need--tiger moms take note.

Yet the anti-gay-marriage forces can mus- ter no such arguments. In fact, they don't even try. Instead, they focus entirely on gay sexuality per se, as if sex were all that gay people did, leaving them no time to raise families, care for sick partners, join the army, or any other myriad other things my gay friends, neighbors, and co-workers do. By claiming gay sex is wrong conserva- tives claim that gay marriage is wrong, as if sex and marriage were the same thing--which, in the eyes of the law, they are not. (The eyes of various churches are another matter.) When not claiming that the Bible forbids gay sex (which it does not, and I can prove it), social conservatives claim it's "unnatural" (so is underwear--do you see any other animal wearing any?), or that "the union of a man and a woman is the foundation of society" (which it certainly isn't, and here's a summary of the evidence). These three claims--from the Bible, from nature, and from social structure--simply don't hold water legally, logically, or morally. So why do so many of my fellow elders continue to make them?

When people are being grossly illogical there's usually a perfectly logical reason for it. That reason is emotion. Emotions don't just pop up at random: they are caused by certain experiences. Experiences that link regularly to emotions are commonly called "triggers"; when someone has a powerful emotional reaction to a seemingly innocuous trigger, we suspect an illness such as post-traumatic stress disorder. Sometimes the relation between trigger and emotion is evident--a smiling baby makes us happy, a Simpson's rerun makes us laugh, the brilliant acting talent of Rondo Hatton inspires a feeling of awe.

But the relation of trigger to response can also be buried in the unconscious, and here is where things can get tricky. And dangerous--it can be all too easy to blame the trigger for the severity of the response. We've all heard of cases in which a war veteran cannot tolerate exploding fireworks because they remind him (or her) of bombs. However, I know of no veterans who consciously think fireworks are bombs, or who think that July 4th celebrations are sponsored by Al Qaeda. A diagnosis of PTSD, oddly enough, may help protect the veteran from making the mistake that conservatives make in reacting to homosexuality--reading into the trigger stimulus something that isn't there.

No gay person I've ever met is any more dangerous, offensive, immoral, or annoy- ing than any straight person I've known, and I have no reason to believe my ex- periences with human beings are fundamentally different from those of most people. If the majority of my conservative age-mates find gay people more dan- gerous, offensive, immoral, or annoying than they find straights, I am forced to conclude that my age-mates are reacting to a trigger in much the same way that veterans with PTSD may react to loud noises. That is: by venting their spleens at queers, they reveal themselves to be reacting to something not in their triggers, but in themselves. Like shell-shocked veterans they have a mental disorder: one captured as well as may be by the term "homophobia."

If homophobia were merely a garden-variety irrational fear like arachnophobia or claustrophobia, we as a society might sympathize with it or offer its sufferers some kind of thearpy. But since homophobia is a fear of a particular kind of people, it is potentially damaging to those who are feared (because they are likely to be targets of violence--think Matthew Shepard), and thus damaging to the society of which they are members. And it seems that, like PTSD, homophobia is positively correlated with a wide variety of other anti-social behaviors, so that a homophobe is likely to be several other brands of bigot

Chicxulub--Yucatec Maya for, "Bye-bye dinosaurs."

The tendency of illnesses to appear together--e.g., PTSD and alcoholism--is called "co-morbidity." Co-morbidity explains why the same people who would make the lives of gay people miserable would also do nothing about global warming (or make it worse); would interfere with women's ability to control their own bodies; would sabotage Obama's presidency because he's smart, good-looking, and Black; would do nothing to rein-in the reign of the rich; would let the poor and downtrodden die painful, preventable deaths; and would cheat the rest of us out of our only opportunity to obtain health care. Homophobia, in other words, is co-morbid with racism, sexism, climate denial, class warfare, and mindless worship of the Invisible Hand. Homophobia is just one part of a complex of attitudes and behaviors--fears, resentments, greeds, hates-- that has made the Republican Party and its astroturf offshoot the greatest threat to the health and well-being of this planet since the Chicxulub Impactor.

And the GOP's core constituency is old people. My age-mates are trying to kill the planet. And they're succeeding.

But the youngsters . . . there's more to being a progressive than being in favor of same-sex marriage, and I daresay the under 30s have their fair share of fears, resentments, greeds, and hates. Yet from my observations I would say that those in favor of same-sex marriage are also more likely to want us to get below 350 ppm, to advocate for the rights of women, workers, minorities, the poor, and children, more likely just to be aware. They may not know just what actions to take, but they want to do something, and they care about the future. They are going to be living there, after all, as I and my fellow elders are not.

And so we return to this mother of all generation gaps, the profound differences in attitude and outlook between the over-50s and the under-30s, the gap I am sum- ming up in shorthand terms by dis/approval of same-sex marriage. Why the big diff? What can anyone do about it? Should anyone even bother?

And what does it have to do with the four men who will save the world?

to be continued

A Request to the Reader, or, The Ghost of Humphrey Bogart

#18 in the series, "J.R.R. Tolkien--Smut Peddler!"

Help!

As of this writing I've completed 17 blogs on the subject of sex in Tolkien's Lord of the Rings. I've had a blast writing them, and from what I'm hearing on the cyber-street at least a few people have been having fun reading them. But now I'm stuck. Try as I might, I can't get a handle on what to write next about everyone's fun couple, Galadriel and Gimli. And I don't think it's writer's block. It's something more . . . sinister.

Part of the joy of writing is that you're constantly discovering things. Your readers, your material, your own subconscious: they're all a strange far country seen in the distance, and you really want to get there. And to get there you have to stretch yourself, poke at the boundaries hemming your life in, crawl under the fence and run around in MacGregor's garden chomping carrots. To write today, you have to be someone slightly different from who you were yesterday--someone more. The "more" is hard to categorize, but it's there. Maybe it's more intelligent, more obser- vant, more creative . . . it doesn't matter. What matters is the far country. But it's hard to get to.

Which is why it's come to this. Simply stated, I'm out of my league. I suppose I know as much about sex as most mammals, and I also know (approximately) how to write about it in ways that respect its power without letting that power overwhelm reason and turn W2WW into just another porn-site. No, the naughty bits don't trouble me, and I hope they don't trouble you. What troubles me is the stuff that H. sapiens does that no other species can even imagine. Stuff I'm not sure I can imagine myself. Stuff I don't think I can write about. Stuff I don't think I want to. It's . .. ugh . . . dare I say it? . . . It's . . . romance.

I HATE ROMANCE! I can't stand the Valentine's Day bilge, the hearts and flowers, the soulful gazes and sundry symbolic gropings, the bridal registries and soft- focus photos and crappy poetry. And don't get me started on kissing! Whenever Aragorn and Arwen start pitching woo in Jackson's movies I just close my eyes, turn my head, and concentrate on parsing the Elvish. (David Salo's got 'em using too many datives for my taste. Liv Tyler does a fine job on the fricatives, though. But I digress.) Just thinking about the mushy stuff sets off a powerful knee-jerk reaction in my brain, a distaste bordering on revulsion.

I'm not quite sure why this is. I've got a long-standing debate about it going with an old buddy of mine. I say I have some kind of autism, some form of brain damage that prevents me from comprehending the subtleties of romantic expression. He says I just have an extremely low tolerance for bullshit. Maybe it's both. At any rate I have never married, never will, and don't understand why anyone bothers.

And how DARE anyone call all that romantic balderdash "love"?! I spent 33 years of my life watching my mother patiently slaughter herself taking care of my pro- foundly handicapped little sister. I saw her sacrifice friends, career, marriage, and finally her life for the sake of someone who couldn't so much as speak her name or say thank you. And mom though herself the luckiest human being on the planet for having such a person in her life. And she was. And so am I. THAT is what I dare to call "love." My little sis taught me everything I need to know or ever will on the subject. Lesser mortals have nothing to tell me.

Remember Wood Allen's Play It Again, Sam ? Lovelorn Woody-the-nebbish says to the ghost of Humphrey Bogart, "But all I want is a meaningful relationship!" To which Bogie replies--in words that should be carved on a mountain somewhere-- "Relationship?! What kinda woid is that? Sounds like something from one of your Madison Avenue shrinks." My sentiment exactly.

Hanta i Valar Galadriel and Gimli don't ever have a "relationship"! Yet they do have something. So what is it? What do I call it? How do I explain what I think Tolkien is trying to do? What IS the Master of Middle-earth spending so much time and effort trying to tell us? For it seems to me something is peeking out from behind the thicket of stately diction and sly innuendo, something that is more than sex, more than romance, but isn't "love" in either the hearts-and-flowers sense or the sense I'm used to. To me, love is a kind of work. Joyous work, yes, but still work. Yet to Tolkien it's almost as if "love" was a kind of poetry--an artform. Love as an artform? I'm truly out of my league here.

And so, as I sit in my office pouring over scripts from old Bogart and Bacall movies, I'm asking for your help. I'm not asking for clever ideas or brilliant insights--creativity is my responsibility here, one I took on when I first decided to enter the blogo- sphere. I guess I'm just looking for support. Maybe one of you have encountered a similar difficulty in navigating this aspect of reality and can let me know how you fared--and if it gets any better.

Because just seeking the far country is scary business, neighbors. I feel like a not-too-bright little kid walking down a dark alley and it's way past my bedtime. Any flashlights tossed my way will be more than welcome. And in the meantime I'll be trying to make sense of maps like this one:

Vivian (Lauren Bacall): Well, speaking of horses, I like to play them myself. But I like to see them work out a little first, see if they're front-runners or come from behind, find out what their hole card is. What makes them run.


Marlowe (Humphrey Bogart): Find out mine?

to be continued