F--k the Birthers! (seriously, I've been reduced to such profanity)

I’ve been reading a lot about birthers lately… you know, the folks who can’t find it in their white conservative hearts to believe our black president could have possibly been born in this country. Oh, and of course there’s the small wing that accepts that sure he might possibly have maybe been born here but that doesn’t matter because by Emer de Vattel’s Law of Nations (which, even if it inspired our Constitution, does not dictate the terms of said Constitution until the Supreme Court says it does) says Obama still isn’t a “natural born citizen” because his father was not a US citizen. I’ve put together an ADS (after dinner speech) about the whole thing—and once I’ve run the thing at a few speech tournaments in the next couple months, I’m sure I’ll post the text of it here, but for now, a more angry rant

See, here’s the thing. Get past (or, literally, before) the whole mess of whether or not the Hawaiian governor can “find” Obama’s original birth certificate (the latest headline on the subject), get past military-involved court attacks like those filed by Orly Taitz, get past the kind of people who post stuff like the following: “I'll bet the only proof he was ever born sits in the mud hut of the VooDoo Doctor that conjured him.” That one just came up on a facebook group called Americans Who Are Sick and Tired of Obama (aka AWASATOO). Get past all that and see what Brian Montopoli mentiond in “Who Are the Birthers?” (CBS News): as soon as Obama seemed like a viable candidate for President (maybe even before that), rumors got going about him not being an American. There was no reason for these rumors. No Kenyan birth certificate had come out yet (and the two of those that have gotten around online are both fake (at least one of them (used by Orly Taitz, actually) has been proven a forgery)). His old grandmother hadn’t said in passing that she was there for his birth. Kenya hadn’t really started claiming him as one of their own. So, the only reason anyone had to distrust Obama’s Americanness was, well, racism, with maybe a little hint of Conservatives being insane bastards who get frightened if anyone drifts too far left. Obama was black

There was a fake dollar bill image going around with Obama on it a couple years back (during the campaign season) that had a bucket of chicken and watermelon on it, two staples of anti-black racist imagery (you can see the dollar here). Not sure of the exact quote, but what the person who made it said when questioned about it was that he just wanted to show how different looking Obama was from what was usually on our money… in other words, all those other money guys were old and white and Obama was not quite so old and, more importantly, black. Our first black president—obviously that would be a scary thought for racist right wingers. People hadn’t gotten started on him supposedly being a Muslim just yet—they were too busy commenting on his Christian minister, Reverend Jeremiah Wright, probably. But, what they could do was poke at his birth. His opponent, McCain was born in Panama, technically US soil at the time, so while his birth was maybe a little iffy compared to previous candidates, he was fine… plus, bonus, he was white. Gotta love that

But, Obama. He was born in one of our fringe states; actually, Hawaii wasn’t even officially a state yet, so that just makes it a little more suspicious. But, still, no fake Kenyan birth certificate had shown up yet. That Indonesian school application hadn’t even shown up yet, and already people were questioning whether or not Obama was born in America… or more importantly, if he was “American.” His ideology certainly had a hand here, as conservatives are so very afraid of socialists and communists and Marxist, so afraid that they can rarely tell the difference between the three. Here was this guy who didn’t look right for the job he was applying for, and who was sounding even more left than his fellow Democrats. Not to mention that name (a little too close to both Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein for comfort). What to do?

Lynching him was probably an option before he was running for President, but you lynch a Presidential candidate and the liberal authorities are sure to crack down and throw you in prison if they don’t just shoot you on sight, ‘cause we all know its liberal police that are the most triggerhappy

Anyway, no fake Kenyan birth certificate yet meant there was really only one fuel that would lead anyone to question Obama’s Americanness: hatred. Well, hatred and fear. And, we Americans are so good at fear. It’s driven numerous “scares” as new waves of immigrants came to our shores. It fueled the Cold War. It’s fueled the War on Terror. And, now it’s fueled the War on Obama

And, hatred is self perpetuating. You hate Obama then you hear a speech of his, all you hear is self-serving liberal bullshit; of course, on the other side, you like Obama and all you hear is hope and change and maybe some promise of release from the grips of the Right. After a while, if you’re able, you get sick of both sides and it’s a lot of the same rhetoric you hear from any President... well, any liberal President, anyway, plus the all-American extension of war, even if not to the proper cheerleading level. He wants to get healthcare to millions who don’t have it, when medical bills are said to be the biggest reason people go into debt and our economy’s shit, but it’s socialist and we ain’t havin any of that commie bullshit in this country, no sir

It’s pro guns, pro war, anti universal healthcare, anti abortion and all the other right wing extremes we’ve got in America or obviously YOU ARE NOT POSSIBLY AMERICAN

Well, here’s what I have to say to that: FUCK YOU, you ignorant, racist pigs. Get the fuck over your paranoia and move the fuck on

cultural artifact speech - "a fake, real tree"

Christmas season, 2007, Seattle resident Art Conrad, fed up with the commercialization of Christmas, erects Santa-on-the-cross in his yard to protest.

Ten years earlier, Robert Cenedella paints Santa on a crucifix. In Catholics decry crucified Santa, Bangor Daily News, 23 December 1997, Cenedella says, he was not responsible for replacing Christ with Santa Claus. You can point the finger at capitalism.

Afterall, Christmas is a big commercial racket. It’s run by a big eastern syndicate, ya know, as Lucy Van Pelt says in the 1965 classic, A Charlie Brown Christmas.

In the special, Lucy gets Charlie, depressed by the commercialization of Christmas, to direct the school play. When it’s time to get a tree, Lucy suggests he get a great big shiny aluminum Christmas tree, the biggest aluminum tree you can find. He instead finds a pathetic, real tree, prompting Linus to ask, do they still make wooden Christmas trees?

Today I will be talking about that tree, what it was, what it has become, and why.

First, let’s look at that tree, and how the Christmas special was conceived.

As Robert Wilonsky recounts in Bless the Blockhead, Dallas Observer, 7 December 2000, given the task of making a Christmas special for Coca-Cola, Charles Schulz told his producer, I want this show to express what I think is the true meaning of Christmas.

According to Joseph B Perry in Merry Christmas! Celebrating America’s Greatest Holiday, Journal of Social History, Fall 2002, once a year, hegemonic American institutions, including church, state, the media, and commercial interests, line up to produce a discourse about what Christmas means.

Schulz thought about what was the opposite of the true meaning of Christmas and that was commercialism.

As Charlie Brown says, I won’t let all this commercialism ruin my Christmas. And neither would Schulz. He made something that decries commercialism, ultimately, in favor of a lesson about goodness, when the children get together, decorate Charlie’s sad little tree and dance around it.

Of course, a Herald Bulletin editorial, 9 December 2009, says in one of the great ironies, that year’s airing of the show was edited so ABC could fit in four blocks of advertising, which overcommercialized a show whose theme was overcommercialization.

This brings me to how that tree was transformed from an innocent symbol of something real to a commodity.

According to Squidoo.com’s History of the Christmas Tree, 1950s America saw the advent of the first artificial Christmas trees. This event, it says, was celebrated by Charles M. Schulz’ famous fable about the Charlie Brown Christmas tree. Except, his fable didn’t celebrate the artificial tree. While Lucy wanted one, Charlie’s choice of a real tree instead is what is celebrated.

Perhaps the maker’s of this à are readers of Squidoo.

From the ad text: Want to celebrate the spirit of the Charlie Brown Christmas special? Now you can buy a replica of Charlie Brown’s forlorn little tree that’s machine calibrated to be imperfect.

slowchristmas.org’s review argues: the notion that you can celebrate the spirit of A Charlie Brown Christmas by buying a replica of the imperfect, non-commercial tree that Charlie rescues from the aluminum tree lot is, frankly, nuts. What about buying a cheap knockoff made to mimic the imperfections of the natural world says goodwill toward men and love for the rough majestic beauty of conifers in winter?

But, how did it come to this? According to Leonard Peikoff in Why Christmas Should Be More Commercial, Miami Herald, 23 December 1996, life requires reason, selfishness, capitalism; that is what Christmas should celebrate—and really, underneath all the pretense, that is what it does celebrate.

Annie Leonard says, in The Story of Stuff, we seek to meet our emotional and social needs through shopping, a nearly sacred rite in the United States. In fact, in the wake of the 9/11 tragedy President Bush told us to hang out ‘America is open for business’ signs and keep shopping.

Every year, Black Friday to Christmas, we do just that—we shop and we shop. As Christmas shopping season starts earlier and earlier, you can start to see what Art Conrad and Robert Cenedella were getting at. Christmas isn’t about Jesus anymore but about Santa Claus, about buying and getting gifts.

Today, we’ve taken a look at the conception of A Charlie Brown Christmas, we’ve looked at Charlie’s tree and how it turned into this. Finally, we’ve seen why.

The conflict between religion and commercialism goes on. As Joel Waldfogel describes in Scroogenomics: Pope Benedikt XVI chided the increased commercialism surrounding Christmas but Bill O’Reilly and the American Family Association have no quarrel with commercialism in Christmas. Their problem is that religion—Jesus in particular—is absent from the mall.

Godweb.org’s They Tried to Outlaw Christmas suggests that at its best the spirit of Christmas is a mirror in which we see reflected the very best that life can be. We see ourselves moved by generosity, inspired by hope.

We keep coming back to Charlie Brown. Afterall, as Charles Schulz says in Schulz and Peanuts: A Biography by David Michaels, there will always be a market for innocence in this country… regardless of how far down the capitalist rabbit hole we go—I would add—or perhaps because of it.

teach a man to fish

Give a man a fish and he’ll eat for a day, teach a man to fish and he’ll eat for the rest of his life… but what if you limit his fishing options to just your pond, where you charge admission? What if your mining operation has poisoned his river and tainted all the fish? What if, instead of teaching him anything, you offer to lend him a fish, the value of which he will pay plus interest? Or, you will make him work for you and you will pay him in fish, but not enough fish for him to have any vigor or strength, just enough to keep him working but never enough to allow for his spirit to break out of your system. Or you sell him fish from your river at a lower “price” than it will take him to get his own. And, I’m bypassing entirely the notion that a guy—or a culture, as you could parameterize it up—wouldn’t figure out how to fish for his damn self if there are fish to be gotten nearby. Civilization was built around access to water, access to food. But, yeah, this one guy is not only hungry, but can’t be bothered to figure out fishing, a basic skill present in every society throughout human history, even where the water was only accessible through holes sawed through sheets of ice. Give a man a fish and he’ll eat for a day, but if he doesn’t have fish the next day or the next or the next or the next week, if he isn’t getting protein, he’s going to be undernourished and he’s going to die. But, at least you didn’t let go of your principles. And, who cares if this one guy dies? He was too retarded to figure out how to get fish out of water. He wasn’t worth saving in the first place.

another old speech: andrew jackson and the hydra of corruption

I used a shorter version of this speech in Speech 101 and in intramural competition. I never got around to using this longer version in any competition, and this year I’ve got a much better informative speech to use, so this one has been abandoned.



“Wall Street owns the Country”—that sounds like something you’d hear now, doesn’t it, with the recent $800 billion plus bailout of financial institutions by the government? But it was said by Mary Lease, in her Money Question speech at the Populist Party Convention in 1892. And, Big Money’s hold on the government had already come to the fore 6 decades earlier.

Andrew Jackson, our 7th President, was a laissez faire capitalist. He believed in the free market. And, he did not like the National Bank. He called it the “hydra of corruption.” In his State of the Union address, 1829, he said the Bank had “failed in the great end of establishing a uniform and sound currency.” And, as William Jennings Bryan in his 1896 Presidential Campaign Cross of Gold speech said, “Jackson stood against the encroachments of organized wealth” in standing against the National Bank.

And he wasn’t one to back down in a fight. In fact, he dueled many times. In American Lion: Andrew Jackson in the White House, Jon Meacham describes one of those duels like this: “Seven o’clock on the morning of Friday, May 30, 1806, on the Red River in Logan County, Kentucky, Jackson and [Charles] Dickinson faced each other at twenty-four feet. Jackson let Dickinson shoot first, and he hit Jackson in the chest with a bullet. Though wounded, Jackson coolly leveled his own pistol at his opponent and fired… killing Dickinson. Only later, as his boot filled with blood after he had left the dueling ground, did the extent of Jackson’s wound become clear. He carried Dickinson’s bullet in his body until he died.”

In 1832, his political rival Henry Clay set up an early recharter for the bank to use against Jackson in his campaign for reelection. Jackson’s dislike for the National Bank would put him against its strong-willed president, would win him reelection by the people and, while destabilizing the economy, would help our nation grow.

First, Jackson would be put against Nicholas Biddle, the president of the National Bank who historian Eric Foner, in his Give Me Liberty!, calls a “snobbish, aristocratic Philadelphian… as strong-willed as Jackson and as unwilling to back down in a fight.” Biddle, wielding great economic power, had bragged that his Bank had the power to “destroy” any State bank. But, Jackson would not “bow down to worship the golden calf.” In A Century and a Half of Pittsburg and Her People, John Newton Boucher has Jackson calling himself “incorruptible,” saying “the Spanish Inquisition could not compel me to worship the monster.” The monster… the Bank, Foner calls “an illegitimate union of political authority and entrenched economic privilege.”

Jackson vetoed the recharter, and in his Bank Veto Message, 10 July 1832, he said, “it is to be regretted that the rich and powerful too often bend the acts of government to their selfish purposes.” And “the powers and privileges possessed by the existing bank are unauthorized by the Constitution, subversive to the rights of the States, and dangerous to the liberties of the people… Will there not be cause to tremble for the purity of our elections,” he asked. Jackson believed “the country was being controlled by a kind of congressional-financial-bureaucratic complex in which the needs and concerns of the unconnected were secondary to those who were on the inside,” according to Meacham in American Lion.

Next, in making clear his stance that he stood for the good of the people, Jackson won reelection as President. According to Robert Remini in Andrew Jackson and the Bank War, Jackson wished “to buttress presidential power with mass support—something never done before.” Jackson showed that, as with his Indian Removal Policy, he believed in what Thomas Jefferson called in his First Inaugural Address, 1801, “absolute acquiescence in the decisions of the majority.” A hero of the War of 1812, Jackson won his first term with 56% of the popular vote. He received 178 electoral votes to John Quincy Adams’ 83. Jackson took his second term, even in the midst of a fight with a piece of his own government, with 55% of the popular vote. 219 to Clay’s 49. And, with popular support, as Meacham puts it, Jackson could be “an instrument of the people against [the] combined interests of the rich and the incumbent.”

But, now, Jackson’s veto would start us down the path to destabilizing the economy. The National Bank would continue operating until 1841. But, the federal government would no longer deposit funds. And, by 1833, the funds would be removed to State banks. Biddle would raise interest rates and call in loans. The British Central Bank would increase its deposit rate to lure investors out of our National Bank and back to England. Deflation and economic collapse would follow: the “panic of 1837.” But, Jackson would not get the blame. His successor, Martin Van Buren would. The people would call him Martin Van Ruin. And in 1841, President Tyler would veto the reestablishment of the Bank. We would have no National Bank again until the 1913 Federal Reserve Act.

Lastly, it is worth noting that our nation would grow immensely in the meantime. Lawrence Kohl argues in The Politics of Individualism that only with Jacksonian Democracy, with the veto of the National Bank and the concurrent development of “Manifest Destiny” did “a sense of an imagined community of Americans begin to solidify.” Klaus Hansen, in Mormonism and the American Experience says Jackson “made possible the creation of the modern American capitalist empire with its fundamental belief in religious, political, and economic pluralism.”

But, “will there not be cause to tremble for the purity of our elections,” as Jackson asked, when the Bank or Corporations run the government… an issue that has been around since the beginning of our nation and is still around today. In his Anti-Federalist Centinel I, October 5, 1787, Samuel Bryan said, “if the administrators of… government are actuated by views of private interest and ambition, how is the welfare and happiness of the community to be the result of such jarring adverse interests?” And, in September 2008, Barack Obama was quoted in the LA Times as saying, “the power to spend $700 billion of taxpayers’ money cannot be left up to the discretion of one man.” He meant then Treasury Secretary Paulsen. But the same, with less money obviously, could have applied to Nicholas Biddle. Or, depending on your political bent, it could apply to Barack Obama, now that he is President.

An interesting aside: all this also helped lead to “the insanity defense” according to the Gilder Lehman Institute of American History, when, in 1835, a deranged Englishman named Richard Lawrence walked up to Jackson and fired 2 pistols at him from a distance of 6 feet. Both guns misfired and Jackson was not only unhurt, he proceeded to attack Lawrence with his cane. Lawrence believed that Jackson’s attack on the second Bank of the United States had prevented him from obtaining money that would have enabled him to claim the English throne, a defense that led to his time in a mental hospital instead of jail.

In conclusion, as Robert Remini points out in Andrew Jackson and the Bank War, “historians are sharply divided: some insist that Jackson’s arrogance wrecked a splendid organization and initiated a century of unsound finance that made possible… chaotic business conditions…; others applaud the destruction of the Bank as a needed action against an overprivileged corporation that had the ability and sometimes the will to hobble business and bully the government.” Either way, it goes without question that Andrew Jackson stuck to his guns in taking a swipe at the “hydra of corruption.” As I’ve just explained, he went up against the strong-willed president of the National Bank, won himself reelection, destabilized the economy and helped our nation grow. And, maybe now, if “Wall Street owns the country,” then, as William Jennings Bryan suggested in his Cross of Gold speech, “what we need is an Andrew Jackson to stand, as Jackson stood, against the encroachments of organized wealth.”

we are all born atheists

The following is actually a mix of an early version of my atheism speech, which got me to finals twice, and a differently structured version that I hoped would get me an actual award (though, as it turned out, I never ended up performing the newer version in competition). There is a little problem with the flow in this mixed version, and I’m pretty sure the same set of quotes appears in two different places, but I left the various sections as they were.



A metaphysical metaphor
A hypothetical semaphore
Smoke signals out your pipe
You stand there spewing that tripe
You tell me about your god
And I find it a bit odd
The contradictions all about
In that book you dare not doubt
And the point at which you weep
For the lamb who made you sheep
That’s a poem I wrote, a response to thoughts about my upbringing in the Worldwide Church of God. It’s deliberately antagonistic, but I’d like to be a little kinder to the likely Christians here today.

Bertrand Russell, in an article entitled “Is There a God?” wrote of a teapot, orbiting the sun between Earth and Mars. If nobody could disprove his assertion that this teapot was there, then it would be, quote, “an intolerable presumption on the part of human reason to doubt it.” If “the existence of such a teapot were affirmed in ancient books, taught as the sacred truth every Sunday, and instilled into the minds of children at school, hesitation to believe in its existence would become a mark of eccentricity…”

In 2006, a gallup poll (gallup,com, last accessed 17 January 2009) found that 73% of American adults are convinced that God exists, and Rasmussen reports.com (last accessed 17 January 2009) found that 54% of American adults believe the Bible to be literally true. But, for those who do not get their religious beliefs from a strict interpretation of the Bible, where do they come from? Have they been told all their lives, like I was, that God exists? That he set in stone rules to live by? That there’s a point to all this? That the ills of the world will not matter once Jesus is here to save us all…

Albert Einstein once said “the idea of a personal God is quite alien to me and seems even naïve.” Today, I will tell you how atheism is not naïve, by looking at what religion gets wrong, then at some of the damage religion has wrought, then how to put it behind you. But, first a little background.

First, I will tell you about Atheism. In What Is Atheism?” Douglas Krueger defines Atheism as coming from “the Greek atheos. The prefix ‘a’ means ‘without,’ and theos means ‘god.’ Atheism means simply ‘being without god.’ There are generally considered to be three types of atheism:

First: Agnosticism is a concept “introduced by T. H. Huxley at a party in London to found the Metaphysical Society” according to Scottish philosopher J.C.C. Smart in her essay “Atheism and Agnosticism.” The basic tenet of agnosticism is that we cannot empirically know if there is or is not a god. My wife is an agnostic, at least until we’re in the car and I’m driving. In The God Delusion, Richard Dawkins says “one of the truly bad effects of religion is that it teaches us that it is a virtue to be satisfied with not understanding.” In the face of advances in science and truly extraordinary understanding of our world, it is not just religion but also agnosticism that misses the mark in my opinion in accepting and being satisfied with not understanding.

St. Augustine is quoted by Dawkins, about “the disease of curiosity… which drives us to try and discover the secrets of nature,” he says. “Secrets which are beyond our understanding… which man should not wish to learn.” Religion cannot like advancing science, for if we explain all of God’s doings, we will not need God any longer to explain them for us.

The second, Weak Atheism takes this a little further in assuming there are no gods. The distinction between weak atheism and the third, strong atheism might be defined as… the distinction between not believing there is a god and believing there is not a god. Strong Atheism is the explicit affirmation that gods do not exist.

But, there is also a fourth one that could be used for outspoken atheists like Richard Dawkins, or myself for that matter, those sometimes accused of being as rabidly fundamentalist as the Christians—nevermind that the heart of fundamentalism is you cannot change your opinion in the face of evidence to the contrary—it’s called antitheism, and, strangely enough, after thinking I had coined the term a few years back, I found that others had coined the term as well. A bit of synchronicity, it would seem, different atheists coming to the same conclusion and trying to find terminology for it. Antitheism is, by the way, when an atheist not only sees religion as being incorrect but sees it as damaging to humanity.

But, that question of terminology brings up a difficult point for atheists.

If we have our “ism” then we are not understood as having knowledge about there being no god but having belief, having faith. The term itself, atheism, is defined by the lack of god, when the default setting for anything should be the most basic, the least contrived… in this case, some new word that is the opposite of theism without theos as its root. After all, as humorist Don Hirschberg is oft quoted by atheists, “calling Atheism a religion is like calling bald a hair color.”

And, now I will tell you why I am an atheist, or at least tell you about some signposts I saw along the way to realizing I was an atheist long before I called myself one.

I was raised in the Worldwide Church of God, led by Herbert W. Armstrong. According to wcg.org (last accessed 17 January 2009), he was born a Quaker and became a preacher almost inadvertently, as he was a well spoken reporter who others in his congregation called upon to explain things. A self-proclaimed prophet and apostle of God, he would predict the apocalypse to come in 1936, then 1943, then 1972, then he would put it off indefinitely. His followers would go by a quite literal interpretation of the Bible, following for example Holy Days quite similar to Jewish ones, as described in Leviticus.

I attended a private school owned and operated by the Church and had Bible class every year. In the 9th grade, my teacher assigned a paper: Why I believe in God? My honest response to this question, that I believed in God because I had been told to my whole life, earned me an F on the assignment, while one of my best friends got an A for claiming he had proven God’s existence in his heart, no follow-up, no evidence, just his heart.

Near the end of my high school years, a book was published, Ishmael by Daniel Quinn. Quinn draws connections between the agricultural revolution and the spread of Christianity, connections that reinforced ideas I was already having (more of that synchronicity) about the origins of our modern world. Agriculture did not spread because it was better, but because by its very nature it allowed for populations to grow rapidly. And, Abrahamic religion would spread with those agricultural populations. As Albert-Laszlo Barabasi explains in Linked, Paul’s spreading of Christ’s message depended not on the strength of that message but on the physical geography of Paul’s journey and the nexus-like cultural centers where he spoke.

A major breakup of the Worldwide Church of God happened to come when I was legally old enough to step away from attending.

Evolutionarily speaking, it is advantageous for children to believe what adults tell them. It is easier to know that touching something hot is painful or running near a ledge is dangerous without trying it out for yourself. As Paul Henri Thiry said in Good Sense in 1772, “the brain of man, especially in infancy, is like soft wax, fit to receive every impression that is made upon it.”

Culturally speaking, it is advantageous for the old to promote the idea of an afterlife, as they will be treated better as they grow old.

It is also advantageous for those in charge to promote religion in that religion promotes hierarchy. Napoleon is said to have called religion “excellent stuff to keep common people quiet.” And, “most theists see in god and devils, heaven and hell, reward and punishment, a whip to lash the people into obedience, meekness and contentment,” according to Emma Goldman in “The Philosophy of Atheism.” And, those without power are given hope by religion, are given comfort in the face of loss, in the face of hardship, in the face of the state of the world, with wars and rumours of wars, disease and moral decay.

Besides, to use a quote unfairly, “general moral instruction without a religious foundation is built on air,” right? You need religion to know what is right and what is wrong… But, Immanuel Kant, in his Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals promotes a basic moral law akin to the Golden Rule, an almost instinctual understanding of what is right and wrong, based on a simple thesis: Take stealing for example. It is only right for you to steal if it is right for everyone else to steal. If you would not like your things stolen, then you cannot believe it is morally right to steal. “That all [this] knowledge begins with experience there can be no doubt,” Kant says. But, I ask you, must this experience be told to you by your minister? Do you have to read it in Exodus or Leviticus to know it is wrong? Must it be a sin to be something you know you should not do, at least not without consequences? After all, as Ishmael points out in Daniel Quinn’s My Ishmael, “tribal law didn’t outlaw mischief, it spelled out ways to undo” it. Right or wrong does not even matter as long as we are prepared to face the consequences of our actions.

And, while some might argue that religious people tend to be good people, that religion makes people happy… and, while that may all be true, as playwright George Bernard Shaw once said, “the fact that a believer is happier than a skeptic is no more to the point than the fact that a drunken man is happier than a sober one.” Of course, having the notion of a purpose to all this makes people happier. The promise of a happy ending…

That unfair quote before, about moral instruction needing a religious foundation—that was Adolf Hitler, speaking 26 April 1933 about secular schools.

And, Adolf Hitler brings us to the next step in today’s exploration, a look at some of the damage religion has wrought. And, I say “some” because to list all the wars and atrocities would take more time than any of us have. Whether you look at the holocaust or the troubles of Northern Ireland, while you can call some conflicts ethnic in origin, those same ethnic lines all too often are drawn with a religious pen. And, as long ago as 64 AD, by order of Nero, the Romans were killing Christians, simply for being Christian. In the Crusades, Christian and Muslim were brought again and again to war over the Holy Land, a dispute which persists to this day. Pope Innocent IV in 1252, explicitly authorized the use of torture by the Inquisition for eliciting confessions from heretics, according to the Catholic Encyclopedia online (last accessed 1 February 2009). And, according to elanso.com (last accessed 1 February 2009), the current Pope, Benedikt XVI, was previously the head of the “Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith,” a leftover remnant of the Inquisition. And, we could come forward to Israel and Palestine or our own involvement in Iraq, or look at the burning times, the Salem Witch Trials—Pope Innocent VIII put out a papal bull against witches in 1464, responsible for numerous persecutions and tortures of purported witches, according to Raymond Buckland’s Complete Book of Witchcraft. But, let’s briefly go backward instead, to the time of Moses. Numbers 31. “They warred against the Midianites, as the Lord commanded Moses; and they slew all the males… burnt all their cities… and… took all the spoil, and… Moses said unto them… now therefore kill every male among the little ones, and kill every woman that hath known man by lying with him. But all the women children, that have not known a man by lying with him, keep alive for yourselves.” If the Lord commands war, and Moses can order his men to keep the young girls for themselves, what hope do any of us have against religion that has lasted another 3000 years since?

What can we do instead of siding with that religion (or any other)? In The God Delusion, Richard Dawkins says “one of the truly bad effects of religion is that it teaches us that it is a virtue to be satisfied with not understanding.” In the face of advances in science and truly extraordinary understanding of our world, it is not just religion but also agnosticism that misses the mark in my opinion in being satisfied with not understanding. St. Augustine called curiosity a “disease… which drives us to… discover the secrets of nature… secrets… which man should not wish to learn.” Religion cannot like advancing science, for if we explain all of God’s doings, we will not need God any longer to explain them for us.
So, the key is to look to science, to look for provable fact to understand the nature of the world. Here are the basics to understand two major points of contention with religion: the big bang and evolution, and I’ll keep it simple. All of the proof you need for the big bang version of the universe is covered by Einstein’s famous equation, E=mc2. Energy and matter are infinite and interchangeable. That matter exists is obvious, and that is all we need to know it always has. And, as for evolution, look around. Is each and every person identical to every other? No? That is evolution at its most basic. One generation is not the exact copy of its predecessor. Trends over time in these differences lead to speciation, but it is this simple genetic change with each and every birth that is the building block of all evolution.
As Richard Dawkins is often quoted, from his article “Snake Oil and Holy Water,” Forbes ASAP, 4 October 1999, “we are all atheists about most of the gods that humanity has ever believed in. Some of us just go one god further.”

My focus here, of course has been on Christianity, but every religion has its enemies. We are “enacting a story that casts mankind as the enemy of the world” itself, in the words of Daniel Quinn’s Ishmael. Religion puts us on the top of the biological ladder, a position that we prove all too often we do not deserve…

And, in conclusion, I would like to promote the idea that the default is not to side with God, even if Pascal’s Wager says you should, just in case. Religious teaching should not simply be accepted without question. Dawkins, in The God Delusion, calls, “religious opinion… the one kind of parental opinion that—by almost universal consent—can be fastened upon children who are, in truth, too young to know what their opinion really is. There is no such thing as a Christian child. Only a child of Christian parents.” As Paul Henri Thiry said in Good Sense, “all children are born Atheists; they have no idea of God.” We are born with no knowledge of… no love for… and no faith in God.

Even if you must hold to your personal belief in a creator, perhaps you can accept that the default position should be a lack of belief, awaiting evidence. We should not assume that Russell’s teapot is out there, orbiting the sun, simply because we cannot disprove it. We need hard evidence of its presence. We need proof.

I’ll leave you with this, from Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s “How (and Why) I Became an Infidel:” “The only position that leaves me with no cognitive dissonance is atheism. It is not a creed. Death is certain, replacing both the siren-song of Paradise and the dread of Hell. Life on this earth, with all its mystery and beauty and pain, is then to be lived far more intensely: we stumble and get up, we are sad, confident, insecure, feel loneliness and joy and love. There is nothing more; but I want nothing more.”

on cordoba house, aka the "ground zero mosque"

—Having too many Muslims poses a particular threat, because their ways differ substantially from those of the majority culture in the United States: We are utterly justified in controlling and keeping low Muslim immigration in terms of numbers, because of the fact that they, in too great numbers, may undermine our way of life, our living standards, our form of religion— (1)

This seems to be the sentiment with each new wave of immigrants, each new religion that finds a foothold in America. It also isn't that unlike the attitude we had toward Native Americans when we were sticking their children in "residential schools" to indoctrinate them into being "American." As Ronald Niezen describes it in Spirit Wars, outside religions are destined either for extinction or assimilation into American society. The powers of progress and improvement are seen to be such that no primitive religion can survive intact (2). Except, that isn't quite the case if we simply obstruct and protest against each new mosque—not just the one "at ground zero."

And, make no mistake, we are not simply protesting one mosque:

•Per the New York Times, 5 September 2006 (3), a mosque in Lewiston, Maine was desecrated.
•Per WSMV-TV, 17 June 2010, a proposed mosque in Murfreesboro, Tennessee was protested in such numbers at a public hearing that the authorities couldn't let them all in. (4)
•Per the Tennessean, 23 May 2010 (5), a proposed mosque in Brentwood, Tennessee was defeated through organized resistance.
•Per the Press Enterprise, 30 July 2010 (6), we protested the building of a mosque in Temecula, California.
•Per the Boston Herald, 9 August 2010 (7), we protested outside an existing mosque in Bridgeport, Connecticut.

And that's just a few examples. And, it is worth noting that this isn't only in America; similar protests have taken place recently in London and in Germany, just to name two. This is NOT some isolated protest centered on this one mosque, Cordoba House, in one city. This is NOT about the hurt feelings of the families of those who died in the World Trade Center; that is simply an easy excuse to exploit.

We call Ground Zero "hallowed ground," a "sacred" place. Yet, it remains a pair of empty holes.

Of course, those protesting this community center—just like any local YMCA includes a prayer room, this community center will include a mosque, which allows for the convenience of describing it as such, even though it has been compared (by reporters, and more notably, by Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf) in planned structure to the 92nd Street Y—probably don't get the notion of a community center. After all, they couldn't fathom the idea of a "community organizer" a couple years back, and now believe their Community Organizer in Chief to be the AntiChrist, a communist, a Marxist, a socialist, a fascist, a Kenyan and/or Muslim plant intent on destroying America, or all of the above.

But, there I've made the same mistake the Ground Zero Mosque Protestors (though I generally dislike initialisms and acronyms, hereafter referred to as GZMP) make; I've lumped them all together, shoved them all into one neat package of ignorance and hate. This is what they do with Muslims. Nineteen men, and maybe a handful of others who organized them—that is what brought down those planes nine years ago. But, the GZMP lump together all followers of Islam—some 1 and a half billion (roughly 20% of the world's population)—together as evil, violent folk. They cite verses like Sura 8, ayat 12 (that's from the Qur'an, for those who don't recognize the nomenclature), which supposedly includes this order: "instill terror into the hearts of the unbelievers: smite ye above their necks and smite all their finger-tips off them." They take this as a commandment (similar to the Bible's ten in that it should always be followed), to terrorize unbelievers and cut off their heads and fingers. Except they miss that the first line there begins with "I will," as in, it is Allah saying he will instill terror into their hearts, a promise quite similar to those made by the Old Testament God on numerous occasions. And, that second line is specific instruction in fighting a specific battle—this particular Sura is a story about said battle, the Battle of Badr. The Muslim side in the battle is being told to cut off the heads of their enemies—quite useful in making them unable to fight back—or to cut off their fingers—quite useful in that they will be unable to hold their weapons to fight back. As far as primitive battle tactics go, that's workable. But, this verse is cited as if it is the same as Exodus' "thou shalt not kill."

The problem with citing an instruction of a certain time as if it is an ongoing ordinance, though, will bite Christians as much as it bites Muslims. For example, in Numbers 31, as "they warred against the Midianites… the Lord commanded Moses; and they slew all the males… burnt all their cities… and… took all the spoil, and… Moses said unto them… now therefore kill every male among the little ones, and kill every woman that hath known man by lying with him. But all the women children, that have not known a man by lying with him, keep alive for yourselves.” We remove the context, we pretend this is instruction for all time, and we now have permission to not only kill all males and all non-virgin women among our enemies but also to keep their virgin girls for our bidding. But, this is NOT God's commandment.

They also like to suggest that this mosque will be called Cordoba House in honor of Cordoba Spain, where Muslims had a great victory of Spanish locals. They leave out the coexistence of Christians, Jews and Muslims that followed there.

But, let's move past petty religious squabbles.

The First Amendment to the United States Constitution, among other things, says "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof." This has been taken as our having "freedom of religion." We like to pretend we are tolerant of various religions… unless they are not Christian… and even Christians are in danger if they seem too bizarre (e.g. the Branch Davidians). We allow churches to be built. We allow synagogues. We allow gurdwaras, temples, shrines. We even allow mosques—there is a mosque already within a handful of blocks of Ground Zero, for example. We do not generally ask for a popular vote when it comes to what building goes where… there are zoning laws, yes, but they don't usually discriminate so specifically.

An old teacher of mine recently suggested to me that if we all had love as the basis for our decisions, then these Muslims would not build Cordoba House because it would hurt the feelings of so many people. But, if love were the basis of our decisions, then would we be lashing out at an entire religion over the actions of a few? Would we be suspecting every Imam who wants to build a Muslim community center (by the way, at least one of those Tennessee mosques mentioned above was also a YMCA-style community center that would include a prayer room, aka mosque, not a full-blown church-style mosque) as a terrorist sympathizer?

Let's be clear: Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf, on 60 Minutes, 30 September 2001, did say that "United States policies were an accessory to the crime that happened" (8). We, of course, take offense at this, nevermind Osama bin Laden's own explanation for the attack, as retribution for our presence—in the form of a military base—in the Holy Land. Our policy of putting out military installations permanently in other countries DID lead to what happened, 11 September 2001. The cause and effect are hardly questionable. The appropriateness of the response, however—that's open to debate. Rauf's use of the term "accessory"—that's also open to debate. But, let's add some context. What Rauf said—the whole sentence as opposed to that bit I just quoted and that is often quoted to paint him negatively—was, "I wouldn't say that the United States deserved what happened, but United States policies were an accessory to the crime that happened," and "it is a reaction against the US government politically, where we [the United States] espouse principles of democracy and human rights, and where we [the United States] ally ourselves with oppressive regimes in many of these countries." What he also said, earlier in that same program was that "fanaticism and terrorism have no place in Islam" and "there are always people who will do peculiar things, and think that they are doing things in the name of their religion. But… God says in the Koran that they think that they are doing right, but they are doing wrong."

The blame for the attack on 11 September 2001 is on those who committed that act, those who organized those men. But, that does not negate their reasons. It does not remove their complaints. The men and women killed that day were likely all quite innocent in regards to the situation that led to their deaths. But, our country is not so innocent. And, unfortunately, we do not like to hear otherwise. If one doesn't proclaim loudly that America is the greatest nation there ever was or will be, then one is suspect... I am suspect.

And, I will be attacked for saying what I just did. So be it. It is the American way. We have our free speech, to be divisive, to speak out against the establishment or against popular opinion. But we also have our free speech to put down those who exercise it thusly.

Moving on, as New York City Mayor Bloomberg said, "let us not forget that Muslims were among those murdered on 9/11 and that our Muslim neighbors grieved with us as New Yorkers and as Americans." This, per Time Magazine, 7 August 2010. He continued: "we would betray our values and play into our enemies' hands if we were to treat Muslims differently than anyone else."

A person is not a Muslim OR an American. He can be both. And, as with many another religion, in coming to America, in establishing a foothold here, the religion will grow more liberal (in some of its parts, at least), less rigid in the harsher elements that frighten us so much. What we do not want in a religion we so often find ourselves fearing and/or despising is to isolate it in the Mideast, to antagonize and oppress it. We want to set it free to grow into something we will no longer find so foreign. We do not want Muslims to have new reasons to hate and fear us.

(1) This is a deliberate misquotation of a passage from Buddhists, Hindus and Sikhs in America: A Short History by Gurinder Singh Mann, Paul David Numrich, and Raymond B. Williams. It has been altered to replace "oriental" immigrants with Muslims and the verb tense has been changed to the present.
(2) Again, quotation altered for verb tense and to remove the specificity of the indigenous tribes.
(3) http://www.ww4report.com/node/2433
(4) http://www.wsmv.com/news/23942068/detail.html
(5) http://www.virtueonline.org/portal/modules/news/article.php?storyid=12641
(6) http://www.pe.com/localnews/inland/stories/PE_News_Local_D_mosque31.6d6be41.html
(7) http://www.bostonherald.com/news/national/northeast/view.bg?articleid=1273330&srvc=rss
(8) http://www.islamfortoday.com/60minutes.htm

last year's 'cultural artifact' - "rambo: the spirit of america"

We all remember Rambo, the muscle-bound commando with headband, machine gun in hand, strap of bullets over his shoulder.

Mark Walker suggests in his book Vietnam Veteran Films that Rambo represents the very American idea that, “the right man in the right place can win any battle.” In fact, Rambo represents America itself, evolving over the past 4 decades from his leftwing roots to his rightwing heyday to his apolitical present, along with our political ideals and our popular culture.

Rambo began as a leftwing reaction to Vietnam vets’ difficulties adjusting to civilian life. In David Morrell’s novel First Blood, Colonel Trautman tells Sheriff Teasle “you tolerate a system that lets others [kill] for you. And when they come back from the war, you can’t stand the smell of death on them.”

In the novel, Rambo is portrayed as an almost psychopathic killer, but the film adaptation downplays this, with him only causing one death, first because, as Susan Jeffords says in her essay The Reagan Hero: Rambo, “it would be difficult to maintain his characterization as victim…. and second, because helpless, screaming men far more effectively portray the consequences of a weakened masculinity than silent corpses do.”

Weakened masculinity to go with a weakened superpower, coming off the loss of the Vietnam War. In fact, Albert Bergesen argues in his book The Depth of Shallow Culture that “the ideal/reality gap” between the war in Rambo’s mind and the war he’s waging against the police has “geopolitical origin in the early moments of hegemonic decline.” He compares Rambo to Don Quixote, two men idealizing old ways of fighting to the point of delusion, “acting on the basis of a hegemonic code… when the material base of that [code] is dissipating.”

Then came the Reagan era, a pair of new rightwing Rambo films and a kids’ cartoon.

Along with Uncommon Valor and the Missing in Action films, Rambo: First Blood Part II was one of what Siskel and Ebert called in June of ’85, the “this-time-we-win films” in which, the Vietvet, returns to fight Vietnam again. Notably, as Colonel Rhodes says in the earlier Uncommon Valor, “this time nobody can dispute the rightness of what we’re doing.”

First Blood Part II “triggered long suppressed emotions,” says Sylvester Stallone in People Weekly, 8 July 1985, “Suddenly apple pie was an important thing on the menu… Millions of kids, too young to remember the nightly news clips of the war we lost [were] screaming and hooting at each new death” in the film.

Popular opinion was deliberately missing the point of the earlier Rambo story. America wouldn’t let Rambo be a symbol for rejecting war. Instead, by rescuing missing POWs in the second film, “a galling defeat could… be turned into a symbolic victory,” says Time magazine, 27 May 1985. Hegemonic decline be damned.

Meanwhile, Rambo became the first R-rated film franchise to get a kids’ cartoon, Rambo: The Force of Freedom, in which Rambo is more superhero now than soldier. He is called in the show’s opener, “the honor-bound protector of the innocent” and “liberty’s champion.”

Like the shallow, materialistic culture of ‘80s America, the third film, Rambo III, couldn’t have much depth. Despite a dedication to “the gallant people of Afghanistan,” the film spends most of its time with the protagonist and his rescue of his father-figure, and little time exploring the freedom fighters he would help to victory. In fact, in response to rumors that Stallone was rewriting the film “to be more philosophical” the producers quickly countered that he couldn’t turn it into a “talky-thinky film,” according to Forbes, 1 June 1987. If he “took out the action,” they said, he wouldn’t “have a film.”

The more recent, apolitical 4th film, simply titled Rambo, puts Rambo on the side of the Karen freedom fighters in Burma, but steps away from political motivation.

Entertainment Weekly, 6 June 2008, called Rambo, “humorless and derangedly violent.” David Morrell, on his website, davidmorrell.net says the film is “spot on” in how he “imagined the character—angry, burned-out, and filled with self disgust.” In the age of so-called “torture porn” films like the Saw series, the over-the-top blood and gore of Rambo does not serve the purpose of Stallone, now directing as well as starring, to show the horror of the violence itself.

It is telling, taking Rambo as representative of America, when we have two wars going, and he says in the film, “there isn’t one of us that doesn’t want to be someplace else. But this is what we do, who we are.” He tells himself, “war is in your blood. Don’t fight it.”

He is talking about us.

He is talking about America.
Rambo has gone from left-wing, anti-war, as America was reeling from loss in Vietnam, to right-wing, jingoist as the Reagan era reinvigorated American nationalism, and more recently, he’s fallen into an apolitical, more realistically violent quagmire, as America is stuck in two wars abroad with no end in sight.

In conclusion, Loved or hated, Rambo has stood at the front of American culture and remains to this day an icon of… the spirit of America.



Works Cited

“Is there life beyond rambo?” Forbes 1 June 1987.
“Rambo: First Blood Part II” (Review). Time 27 May 1985.
“With a $100 million gross(out), Sly Stallone fends off Rambo’s army of adversaries.” People Weekly 8 July 1985.
Bergesen, Albert J. The Depth of Shallow Culture: The High Art of Shoes, Movies, Novels, Monsters, and Toys. Boulder: Paradigm, 2006.
Collis, Clark. “Rambo” (Review). Entertainment Weekly 6 June 2008.
Davidmorrell.net
First Blood. Dir. Ted Ketchoff, Carolco, 1982.
Jeffords, Susan. “The Reagan Hero: Rambo.” The War Film. Ed. Robert Eberwein. Piscataway: Rutgers UP, 2005.
Morrell, David. First Blood. …1972.
Rambo III. Dir. Peter MacDonald. Carolco, 1988.
Rambo. Dir. Sylvester Stallone. Lionsgate, 2008.
Rambo: First Blood Part II. Dir. George P. Cosmatos. Carolco, 1985.
Rambo: The Force of Freedom. Ruby-Spears Productions, 1985.
Uncommon Valor. Dir. Ted Kotcheff. Paramount, 1982.
Walker, Mark. Vietnam Veteran Films. Metuchen: Scarecrow, 1991.