While I'm On A Roll.

I have never been a flag waver, but I'm also not a flag burner. I simply believe that all forms of worship, as well as terrorism, nationalism, patriotism, cronyism, fanaticism, and most other ism's are illnesses, constitutional weaknesses of character that breed hatred, violence, and likely will never be eradicated from the human psyche.

Take the ardent sports fan, please. I like the Yankees and enjoy the game whether they win or lose. The foul-mouthed idiots surrounding me in the stands are another story. I assume the fanatic sitting behind me is as difficult to be around for his family and co-workers as it is for me at the game. People don't display their character disorders selectively.

Take all the Evangelists, please. In olden times they furthered their cause with horses and swords, guns and knives, butchering all those who didn't share their beliefs. Today, they continue to slow progress of the human condition with less violent but equally ruinous tools. I don't mean to imply that an Evangelist is the only religious type who impedes human progress. Just a few months ago, a winning politician in India sacrificed two hundred sheep to thank his god for the victory. Is his god as hungry as his people? If only we could coexist like the lions and tigers and bears, but alas, we have the Sunnis and Shiites and Kurds, oh my!

The concept of Creationism has quietly crept into classrooms across the country. MY GOD! Everyone knows it takes 425,000 light years to travel from heaven to earth. What crazy dude would spend only a week here? Take all the creationists, please. Send them to Australia. They might get the concept.

Take all the rednecks, please. If Love It Or Leave It (redneck mantra) was actually the order of the day, all the progressive folks would probably move to Holland. The remaining homophobic hoards would likely tell them to go stick their thumbs in a dyke, and would convert all the libraries to beer halls.

While we're at it, take all the alcoholics, please. Imagine what a wonderful thing it would be if marijuana was cheap and legal rather than alcohol.  Make Love, Not War would be a way of life, not just a fucking slogan.
Instead of creating a major financial burden on our healthcare system, huge numbers of traffic fatalities, and over 40 million abused and neglected wives and children yearly, we would have cheap solar power, flowers growing everywhere, and rock and roll music blaring from speakers atop every geodesic dome. Pass the tofu.

Believing, as I do, that the foundation of morality is in showing compassion and concern for others, take or medicate all those suffering from egoism, please. Without anybody around who's overly concerned with self-interests, the world will be one happy rehabilitation center. My name is --fill in the blank-- I am a recovering egoist. What can I do for you?

Finally, I would like to announce that I'm not locked into this anti-ism philosophy, though admittedly, I have owned it for a long time. Being a freethinker, I'm living with it for now. Should someone manage to disprove any part of my doctrine, I'm prepared to embrace the new way of thinking and discard the old without regrets.

Here We Go Again- 8 Days and Counting.

Well, it's that time of year again. If I hear one more negative political ad, I think I'll never subtract again!

If someone created a montage of all the political promises and rhetoric from all the candidates over the decades, and played them, one after another, hour after hour, it would sound like instant replay, year after year, candidate after candidate, farce after farce, boring to the Nth degree, all empty, meaningless, repetitive babble, dumbed down, seemingly pandering to ignorant masses.

In reality, no politician can change the essential workings of the system, and the system is broken, always catering to the wealthy and forever discriminating against the needy.

Take all the politicians, please. Their game is a wasteful sham. If voting bolsters your illusion of freedom, then feel free to vote, but it doesn't matter a hoot who wins. Corruption runs too deep in the human psyche to be salvageable. I don't mean to imply that American politicians have a lock on immorality, arrogance, entitlement, greed, and other character disorders -- Corruption City is international and overpopulated -- it is just that our politicians are so handicapped by the fumes of their own stench that they should be easy to spot.
They all either have a foot in their mouth, their hands in the till, their heads in the sand, or a stick up their ass.
The wonder is that so many people are blind to it.

A Comparatively Short Story

     Perhaps it was the beginning of time, perhaps not.  Who knows what came before? It doesn't matter.
     The hot brilliant ball of light caressed the earth for the first time and like a new love, it responded with vibrant pulsating energy. Previously dormant particles of matter mated randomly in a frenzied microscopic orgy. Compatible particles reproduced and created simple life forms. On land, primitive vegetation sprouted and in the seas, early marine-life flourished. The process continued, naturally and unabated, for many eons.
     Slowly, those organisms most adept at adapting to their environment grew more complex.  Simple sprouts grew to woody shrubs, woody shrubs to majestic trees that seemed to reach the sky. Simple marine forms evolved to multi-celled creatures. Multi-celled creatures grew gills to process oxygen, and fins and tails for mobility. Fish began to populate and explore the vast reaches of the oceans. Many eons passed.
     Some marine-life, living near the shores of the oceans, found themselves washed up onto land. Over a period of millions of years, they adapted by growing legs for mobility and lungs to process oxygen, and the animal kingdom was born. Different oceans washed up different marine forms, which evolved to become different animals, adapting to the conditions of their environment. Eons passed. There was plant-life and animal/marine-life coexisting, evolving in an order of natural selection. What a perfectly balanced, magnificent place it was. Then came humans.

     Only a couple of hundred thousand years passed. In the blink of an evolutionary eye, humans raced through dramatic changes, from primitive people with sloped foreheads, stooped and hairy, to early civilization and people with perfect Olympian bodies, to modern humans, sophisticated, hi-tech, nearsighted.  Accomplishments like skyscrapers and laptop computers, space travel and modern medicine, did not translate into a more insightful, compassionate, fulfilling existence, merely a more decadent and corrupt one, leaving millions of people suffering in unimaginable ways.
     The culture morphed into hi-tech so fast that genetic codes did not have the time to evolve and adapt. Over a period of forty or fifty short years, the earth  became populated primarily by people raised in this strange new world--confused, misdirected, disoriented people whose genetic codes still demanded old-world living while their culture required hi-tech lifestyle. The confusion ran deep down in the hard drive, a permanent virus--vast hoards of people with poor impulse control who required constant, overwhelming input in order not to shut down. 
     Due to apathy and ignorance, the environment became less and less friendly. Random and rampant violence and pollution escalated over the years until the last vestiges of order disappeared and worldwide anarchy prevailed. Starvation and disease followed. The ugly side of humanity ruled until there were none.
     Their demise mirrored the quickness of their assent.
    
    

La-and of the free . . . and the home . . . of the . . . brave.

Not!
I'll start allowing the above refrain to instill me with pride once it's actually true.

Meanwhile, I'll wear my purple sneakers today [Oct. 20th, the official -- be who you want to be, wear purple day] in support of the beleaguered LGBT community, along with all other groups who experience bigotry, hatred, and bullying in this land of the pseudo-free and home of the not so brave.

Brave people acknowledge and accept differences, learn from them.

The bullies, bigots, and other hatemongers are the weak souls among us. They are the ones with the character disorders, and they represent a good portion of our population.

So, I'm holding off on waving the star-spangled banner, and will remain silent during the singing of the anthem, until there's no longer a need to designate a day to remind people to celebrate diversity.

1984 in 2010

There's a dangerous enemy out there. It's called PR, and it already controls much of what you see and hear. Can you name the most powerful public relations firms?  Clients of the biggest PR firms include state and national governments, terrorist groups, large corporations, and illicit cartels. While there is some legitimate public relations happening, big money PR remains invisible and corrupt, disseminating propaganda disguised as fact in order to promote their clients' agendas. Press releases are presented as news stories by lazy or incompetent journalists, editors, and news directors who, handcuffed by the will of the big-money players, fill air-time or print-space with the daily flow of free releases from PR firms. The strategy of funding biased or phony research to support corporate profitability remains rampant today. The main thrust of the PR business is to get the public to ignore various atrocities and lies(i.e. the tobacco industry half a century ago). There are powerful PR firms working for brutal dictatorships.

We're now almost fully Orwellian, with most alternative voices silenced or shackled by powerful factions with unlimited resources and great expertise at molding public opinion. With fewer and fewer ever more powerful voices dictating to larger and ever more passive audiences, it is only a matter of time before we all meet our "rat" and start turning in our neighbors.

Unlike true beauty, our democracy is only skin deep. Dare to delve down a bit. Perhaps you'll emerge enlightened and outraged. One must recognize oppression before it weighs on one's shoulders. Then one can be a soldier in the fight for true freedom.

Photo is of an oil painting on a wood panel, 1976.

L'CHAIM-TO LIFE

Since today is the 18th, a spiritual number for Jews, symbolized by the Hebrew word "Chai," meaning "Live," I would like to toast all the people who have died protesting, throughout the centuries, in the name of freedom, especially those who have never been memorialized in photos or songs. Some of us know who they are.

"My Anxiety Dream" -- Expository Writing Class Assignment, 1993

     The telephone rang in my dream but nobody was on the other end.
     "Hello? Hello? WTF?"
     Since I was awake, I got dressed and headed downstairs for breakfast, but every time I came to a landing another set of stairs materialized below me. I was going to be late for school.
     "Shit."
     In the kitchen, I made myself a cup of coffee and a bowl of cereal, but the food stuck in my mouth, super thick, sticky and gummy, hard to separate my upper jaw from my lower jaw to chew, impossible to swallow. With difficulty and a little aid from a couple of fingers, I managed to remove the vile glob from my mouth. All but three of my teeth came out with it.
     One by one, with great accuracy, I spit my remaining three teeth into a small paper cup across the kitchen table. A pretty woman clapped. I smiled a toothless smile. She took off her shirt and offered me her breast.
     I could not find my car keys. I looked everywhere.
     "Shit," I was going to be late for school, and it was my turn to read my essay. I wondered how I would sound without my teeth?
     I arrived on campus but could not find a parking space.
     "Shit."
     When I finally got to the room, the door was locked. I knocked repeatedly but nobody heard me because someone else had just finished reading her essay, and the entire class was standing and applauding loudly. The professor was doing a little jig on her desk, clearly ecstatic with the writer's work.
     "Magnificent!" she exclaimed, as she heeled and toed. "Interesting language! Great narrative flow! Such depth of feeling! Incredible insights! Wit so sharp, one could hurt oneself!"
     "Holy shit. How can I follow that, even if I had all my teeth?"
     The classroom door creaked open slowly. The professor climbed down from her desk, straightened her skirt, and said, "You're next, Rubin. Read your title and then proceed."
     "My Anxiety Dream."
     "It all began when the telephone rang. . . ."
   
     RING. RING. RING. RING.
     "Hello?"
     "Ed, it's Mom. You're supposed to be in class."
     "Shit!"