Geez folks, get some eggnog and chill out!

Image courtesy of AP and Cathy Willens; if you're logged into your Yahoo account you can vote for this image).

Tom Brooks writes in USA Today -

"The Christmas display in front of Joel Krupnik's Manhattan brownstone has all the subtlety of a blood-splattered Santa.

Which, in fact, is what it is.

'It's horrible, just terrible,' says neighbor Joe Nuccio, 79. 'He's got Santa Claus with a bloody knife in one hand and a doll's head suspended in the other. That's bloody, too.'

* snip *

Estelle Farnsworth was so upset by the life-size Santa strung up in her Miami neighborhood that she called police. Santa's hands were bound behind his back, his feet were tied together, and a noose was around his neck.

Have yourself a gory little Christmas, it seemed to say.

"I was absolutely furious," says Farnsworth, 65. "Everybody was upset."

A little girl in the neighborhood thought Santa had morphed into Satan and was going to get her, Farnsworth says.

Police told Farnsworth that desecrating Santa might be in poor taste but that it was constitutionally protected expression.

Like Krupnik, the neighbor who staged Santa's mock execution wanted to express his dismay with the commercialization of the season, Farnsworth says.

Point taken, she says. But she believes it could have been done more tastefully.

'Why not put up a beautiful manger scene?' ..."

Answer: Because it wouldn't have been funny, Estelle. Demonstrating that one doesn't have to live in Miami or be female to have a bug up one's backside, the article goes on to quote one of the neighbors in New York, of the first holiday decorator, who says

"Maybe Krupnik is bothered that Christmas has become too commercial, Nuccio says. "I am, too. All this nonsense about whether you should say 'Merry Christmas' or 'Happy Holidays.'

'But he shouldn't have done that to Santa.' (and there the article ends)"

Yo, Nuccio! Your parents did break the news to you about Chris Kringle, right? He's a fictional character, you mope.

As for anybody with an ounce of common sense reading this, which would exclude those you saw quoted in that article above: yes, you read that right. Somebody actually called the police on her neighbor and tried to get him arrested or at least cracked down on because she thought that his Christmas decorations were too irreverent. You can go click on the link above to see those quotes in their full context and see that they haven't been taken out of context. And, in fact, those decorations did come down a while later, though the article doesn't tell us just how free a choice taking down the display in Miami was, or how much arm twisting went into it. Judging from Ms.Farnsworth's tone, probably considerably much.

Maybe I'd toss out some snide remark about the general level of sophistication in Miami, if people there think that a response like that is warranted by the imagined provocation, but given Chicago's history in such matters, I'd be throwing rocks from inside a glass house. Fine, there's a lot of this kind of attitude going around. Which brings me to the next question - what ever happened to that first amendment that we used to hear so much about, a few decades back? And will the 90s ever be over? We're halfway through the millenial decade, and we're still seeing that 90s era, speech code inspiring belief that full grown adults are entitled to be shielded from everything and anything that they choose to be offended by.

Yes, choose. Guys, hello - people used to laugh about things like those santas. You know, laughter - that semi-warbling sound people used to make, as they explored the boundaries of our expectations, without anybody really being hurt? Yes, an old lady said that a little girl was frightened by the display. Newflash, guys - little girls are always being frightened by something; that's why little boys can't stand them. Remember? There's an excellent chance that you were once a child, yourself, though looking at how seriously some people take themselves, in some cases it's hard to believe. Pull up a few of your old memories, from when you were about that age.

Little kids, girls especially, live in a world where the boundary between fantasy and reality gets blurry, the latter never being terribly solid in their little minds, and so the nightmares rising out of their subconsciousnesses always seem to be taking flesh before them, until a parent or older relative or neighbor can put their minds at ease. I remember a kid in my neighborhood who used to be afraid, when a dark muddy puddle at the end of his parent's driveway froze into a path of ice as black as the ocean depths, that the puddle was as deep as its blackness suggested, and that if he stepped on it, he might crack through to the icy abyss below and drown. He imagined the ground beneath his feet melting away, the frosting of snow above concealing the hideous reality of the dark icecapped seas that flowed where the dirt used to be, poking through here and there to reveal themselves.

And you should have heard what the girls were worried about!

That little boy now has a degree in Physics, and the much firmer grasp on physical reality that comes with adulthood. He grew up, and one of the reasons he did was because with adult support, he faced his fears and saw their unreality, emerging into adulthood without the wealth of phobias and neuroses the more pampered children seem to end up with, in abundance. I wonder what Estelle Farnsworth would have had the parents and neighbors do - make sure that ice never accumulated in any of the potholes? A fool's errand, producing nothing other than the loss of an opportunity for the boy to mature - kids' imaginations are so vivid, and their fears so eager to find something to attach themselves onto, that a child will always find something to be afraid of, most conveniently for those adults whose greatest joy in life is that of depriving other adults of their freedom. "We can't say this or do this because of the children", an excuse that was offered for the passage of the Internet Decency Act, and for every piece of censorship seen before and since in a country that supposedly prides itself on the freedom it offers.

Freedom that we can't ever exercise, as a matter of practice, is no freedom at all. This is not to say that one should be able to hold a live sex show on one's lawn, but let's get real. What exactly did the alleged little girl see? I say "alleged", because narrowminded old ladies who like to run other people's lives are about as scarce as children with overactive imaginations, and a fair number of those "neighborhood biddies" are well known for their casual attitudes toward the truth; that little girl, whose unverifiable reaction is being offered as an excuse for the old lady to do what so many old ladies love to do best - pry - may be nothing more than a fabrication. But let's say that she's real, and that she really did express that fear. Then what?

How did she get from a Santa Claus figure being strung up, to Santa Claus being the Devil? Just like with the little boy of years ago who was afraid that the ground beneath his feet had turn to water, we're looking at the free association of an overactive juvenile imagination; even allowing for the unfamiliarity of the world to somebody who hasn't been in it for long, there's no connection between A and B, and nothing healthy about validating such fears by removing the object of them, implying to the the child who is then getting her way, that her fears had some merit.

What she saw was a collection of lifeless plastic figurines, some splattered with red paint and another with a rope tied around it. With good parenting from a pair of people who are willing to take the time to listen to her and put her fears to rest, she'll survive this and worse unscathed, and with the start on something a few adults seem to have grown up without - a sense of humor, something that she'll live a richer life for having. But that would require that the occasional parent, aunt, uncle, grandparent or even older sibling or cousin take a little time of their days to soothe the child, and that's just so terribly inconvenient, isn't it, especially when there's a spot on the couch that one wants to slip one's back into, when there's a book one wants to read or a party one wants to get to, even when the distraction is nothing more significant than the fact that Howard Stern is about to come on; anything other than attend to the needs of this tiny little person who needs to so much, and sometimes expects YOU to do something about it for no better reason than the fact that you are responsible for her being there, sometimes at the most inconvenient moments. "Who's Howard Stern, Daddy?" "Um, nobody, dear, you'll understand when you get older. Daddy's going to lock the door to his den, now; you can come by in an hour and we'll put your Barney tape on, then. When is somebody going to get that perverse Christmas decoration taken down?"

And when are people going to get the idea that raising children is supposed to be work, and that no matter what job one is doing, that the rest of the world does not exist for one's own personal convenience as one tries to get that job done? Yes, turning the world into a uniformly smothering, "child-safe" environment may seem to make the work of parenting easier, if one looks at the raising of the children in one's life in terms of one's own desire for immediate gratification as one tries to calm a child down quickly, but who ever said that the job was supposed to be easy? And if a parent, elder family member or other "caring adult" is this upset because he or she does have to make a little extra effort, then just how caring an adult is that one, really? We are happy to invest time in the things we care about, aren't we? If one is that angry about having to put a little time into helping that child become a well adjusted adult, one who doesn't run from imaginary fears, what does that say?

That some of the children running around in the world are well past their 18th birthdays, and that it's time for the rest of us to aid in their long overdue socializations by letting them hear the one important word that an adult says to a child, showing his love by helping the child grow into the person he or she would like to become. That one word being





Get ready to have a merry christmas and be your own strange happy selves. If one of the neighbors complains, tell him to get over it.

Tookie goes on a diet

It's Tookie's new look. Do you like it?

In a short while, Stanley "Tookie" Williams will most likely be executed by lethal injection, having been denied clemency by Gov.Schwarzenegger, and no doubt some snide remarks are going to be made about this being what one gets when one elects a film star governor. Although, some of the same liberals who make those snide remarks seem to have no difficulty at all with the idea of following an actor's lead when the actor is a liberal one. For anybody who was leaning toward support for the snarkiness, however, I'd urge them to read the governor's statement. There is nothing of the good old boy in it. It is a very persuasive piece of writing that makes a good case that there is no case to be made for special consideration.

The date of the crime, alone, should make one think - February 28, 1979. There are people well into middle age, right now, who were still in high school when these murders were carried out. That isn't long enough for appeals? Let's read some of the details. Like the one about him laughing about the sound made by his victim after he was shot, or the one of him scheming to blow his captors to pieces - with notes to this effect written in his own handwriting, or his refusal to even apologize, claiming innocence in the face of what most would consider overwhelming evidence of guilt. And on Tookie's side, the side of the man who organized the Crips street gang, and set them off on their trail of mass murder? He wrote a few children's books. Proving, what, that he's literate? He's playing us, or at least, he's trying to, it seems pretty clear to me.

I have, in the past, spoken in opposition to the death penalty, and I'm still opposed to, yes, even in a case like Tookie's. I haven't forgotten the Burge case in Chicago, and I know all too well how readily some witnesses can be persuaded to lie. "Beyond a shadow of a doubt" is never as far beyond it as it ought to be, certainly not in the world we live in. I have in the past suggested that scorn is sometimes a moral obligation, when encountering actions, attitudes or opinions that are far beyond the pale. But in this case, I can't put those two positions together and come out with condemnation of anybody but Mr.Williams. Could he become something other than the monster he seems to be? I would think so, which is one reason why I hesitate to endorse a killing, but do I know this to be true? I'd be lying if I said "yes", and I certainly wouldn't suggest that such an outcome would be very likely.

When we condemn people for what we perceive to be their moral lapses, in some sense we condemn them for not trying to do the right thing, or at least trying in a very lacksadaiscal fashion. I certainly could not bring myself to condemn somebody for feeling compassion for Tookie's fallen victims, or for feeling rage at the thought of what was done to them. Without some measure of rage, what would it even mean to say that anybody enjoyed society's protection? The bad guys would just wait until others were looking away before they struck, knowing that if they acted unopposed in the moment, that there would be no consequences to fear. The desire for revenge, then, to take an eye for an eye, may not make us feel good about ourselves, but nature bred it into us for a reason - a people who lacked it couldn't protect themselves, or preside over anything but a society that offered one the life of a character in a horror movie, always waiting for the next blow to fall.

The issue between those who would execute somebody like Tookie and those of us who would put him in a nice, distant prison - I'm thinking that the interior of Antarctica might be a decent location for a penal colony - isn't one between good and evil, but one of differing judgment calls as to how far is too far and how much revenge is enough, and on this what else can one do but agree to disagree? Tookie is no boy scout; anybody with roots in a place that has been consumed by one of the urban war zones knows in his gut just how evil one has to be to stand out in such a crowd, and there is no denying that the world will be safer once he has departed it. Is there a better way of getting that safety? Perhaps, but I'll tell you one thing. The thought that Stanley Williams will probably draw his last breath while I'm in bed isn't going to cost me much sleep.

No, you're right, poverty is not a good time

"One day Mal-2 asked the messenger spirit Saint Gulik to approach the Goddess and request Her presence for some desperate advice. Shortly afterwards, the radio came on by itself, and an ethereal female voice said YES?

'O! Eris! Blessed Mother of Man! Queen of Chaos! Daughter of Discord! Concubine of Confusion! O! Esquisite Lady, I beseech You to lift a heavy burden from my heart!'

WHAT BOTHERS YOU, MAL? YOU DON'T SOUND WELL.

'I am filled with fear and tormented with terrible visions of pain. Everywhere people are hurting each other, the planet is rampant with injustices, whole societies plunder groups of their own people, mothers imprison their own sons, children perish while brothers war. O, woe.'

WHAT IS THE MATTER WITH THAT, IF THAT IS WHAT YOU WANT TO DO?

'But nobody wants it! Everybody hates it.'

OH. WELL, THEN STOP.

At which point she turned herself into an aspirin commercial and left the Polyfather stranded with his own species.


- Principia Discordia : How I found Goddess and what I did
to Her when I found Her, by Malaclypse the Younger



A common misconception among some moderates (and perhaps a willful misconception among many liberals) is that conservatives, as a group, are oblivious to the sufferings of the poor, or scornful of the poor as individuals. Living most uncomfortably below the poverty line as I do, spending far more time looking for work than actually getting to do it as I do, I am often amused when I hear preaching on this score, usually coming offline from very sensitive (and often very Anglo-Saxon) souls whose fashionably up-to-date garments telegraph the fact that at the very least, they weren't short on cash the last time they hit the department store, if by "short on cash" one means "too poor to spend a few hundred dollars on clothes". And yet they want to lecture me on poverty. Cute.

So how, as a poor person, one who hardly has spoken out in support of asceticism or any other form of masochism, do I bring myself to vote for the Republicans, the party of big money and the crusher of the poor? Because unlike some of the preachy individuals one encounters when this topic comes up, I didn't learn about this subject in my civic affairs indocrination session class, or at a rally. As the 20 year old hand me-downs that I've been treating gently for the last decade (and change) might hint, this I've learned about firsthand, and most of what is said about this subject is a pile of BS.

Some will point to the job situation, with young people fresh out of undergrad struggling to find work. Very young and very white, so their discomfort counts in the eyes of some, I suppose, as it would if they were very black, but these kids don't know how bad bad can be. Let's consider the case of "Sam". You might remember "Sam" as being the man whose experiences were mentioned in "Saying Goodbye." No, to answer a question sometimes asked, "Sam" wasn't a composite. He's a real guy, and his job seeking experiences, if anything, made his brief bout of anthropological curiosity amidst the Reader Circuit community seem idyllic by comparison.

Think that you're having a rough time in the personnel office, right now in 2005? Try standing, as many did in Chicago during the early 90s, in a line of hundreds of people wrapped around the block, shivering in the subzero temperatures blowing in off the Lake. Picture your extremities turning numb and hoping that you won't lose any digits to the chill like your neighbor did, wishing that you could get out of that 30 mph wind, or that you could have waited until after 4 am to get in that line, for an office which wouldn't open until 9, and knowing that you and all of those hundreds of other people were standing, freezing and waiting for a chance to fill out one of an all too limited collection of applications for a minimum wage hamburger flipping position, because management wanted to cut a few pennies on their printing costs.

Picture wanting to say "scr** it!" and go home, but not daring to, because on the $2.50 cents per day you get for food stamps, you've had a hard time keeping on body mass, you can't remember the last time you weren't hungry, you're already 40 pounds underweight and your caseworker isn't sure that you'll have any aid next month. Picture waiting all that morning and well into what you suspect is the afternoon, but can't be sure because the sky is a dark, featureless grey, and you haven't been able to replace the watch you lost to a mugger last year. Eventually, you stumble in, and about an hour after getting in the door, because personnel is in no hurry to pass out the forms and those filling them out are in no hurry to return to the cold, you get into the office. Picture filling out the application, handing it to the girl, and then having her laugh in your face, turning to see her tear up your application as you leave.

You stumble through the snow, which has been turning to a chemical laden slush from the heat rising from the subway grates, walking the next few miles back to home, because an El ride is a luxury you can no longer afford. As was medical care for the wounds the mugger left you with as he clubbed you from behind in order to get your K Mart special timepiece, or for the periodic blackouts you've had since, whenever you've been foolish enough to attempt any heavy lifting. Legal aid is something else you've had to learn to do without, something that you were left to ponder when the local police, noticing that you were having even more trouble with coordination than your already partially disabled self usually had, thought that it was funny to handcuff your hands behind your back and make you walk down your building's stairwell, trying not to stumble and snap your neck. You think of signing out a complaint against the officers, who according to word on the steet do this kind of thing a lot, but you remember the warnings about what happens to people who complain about Chicago's finest, some of whom at this point have been out "solving crimes" by grabbing those too poor to afford real lawyers, and torturing confessions out of them through the use of electroshock, suffocation, and beatings, and will for years to come, none of this proving to be of much interest to the office of professional strandards and practices. "So what makes you think that they're going to care about how many steps they marched your halfbreed, sand ni**er Jewboy a** down?" somebody asks you, with that s**t eating smile you've gotten so used to, but you know she's right. You'd better keep quiet, and maybe if you're lucky, they'll forget about you and you won't forget not to disappear some night. Or get carelessly splattered by some car that will show up out on nowhere, accelerating through your rapidly expiring body, the way "Teardrop" did.

Then picture yourself, at that point two years into a futile search for a job, any job, running into a pack of rich spoiled brats who will then preach to you about how "privileged" you are, because you're white (sort of) and male. You can't help but notice how much the very white, very Anglo-Saxon "oppressed woman" from the mean streets of Kenilworth looks like some of the Klan supporters who left you with such happy memories before you returned from the redneck town you went to school in, back to a hometown you can no longer recognize, to classmates dropping from untreated cancer because medical care and checkups are one of those "luxuries" that you and yours are supposed to be patient enough to wait for, without complaint, indefinitely. But at least you can talk to your "roommate", if you've reached the right state of mind, and he won't say anything condescending. Your "roommate" being the large norwegian rat who comes up through the hole in your floor to surprise you as you get up in the middle of the night, awakened maybe by the meltwater dripping through your ceiling, or the pounding on your back stairwell door (it's the wind, you're guessing?), or maybe the screaming from the other side of the courtyard that stopped so very suddenly. Hard to be sure, but those two bright eyes shining in the darkness present you with the friendliest companionship you've had all day. "Is he really blinking in time to the steady drip drip drip onto my mattress, and do I look good to eat to him?", you wonder in your first second of awareness. Alas, he seems to be harboring similar thoughts and disappears down that gap, not to return until a few hours later.

How many places have you applied to, somebody asks you. "Have a copy of the Chicago Yellow Pages", you respond. They laugh, but you're well on your way to not kidding about that. Do the math - you've been unemployed for two years, you've never tried to apply to less than 20 businesses in a day - thank God for long legs, and thank nobody for the fact that in the vast majority of the place you've tried to apply to, you've been refused the opportunity to fill out that application or to leave off a resume by people who've known nothing about you other than the way you looked and the way you've sounded, and have refused to know more. But as somebody points out to you, in one of the few places where you have been allowed to apply, how very silly of you to think that you could get an entry level job. After all, she points out, you only had a 3.7 average and the minimum for hiring is a 3.9. (The scale only goes up to 4.0, with the Dean's List beginning at 3.5), and how do you expect to get an entry level job without experience? The four years you put in as a teaching assistant in Grad school, working 60 hours per week before studies in exchange for a tuition waiver and a princely $6000/year stipend, not counting as real work. How could you expect to get a job with such weak academic credentials, she asks, and in such easy fields as Mathematics and Physics.

How is one supposed to get a job before one ever gets one's first job, and should you expect to hear the sound of one hand clapping at such a Zenlike moment of success, you wonder silently to yourself, because pointing to the unreality of what one is hearing at a job interview is known as being a quick path to a blacklisting. Moot point, though. Picture yourself going on to be denied employment after that on the basis that your lengthy period of unemployment reflected negatively on you, until one day you wake up and discover that you've now been looking for work for 16 years, and still haven't encountered so much as a single person willing to offer even the slightest amount of help. Oh, to be sure, some people did get work during that time, but listen to the words people use as they give advice to the chronically stonewalled - "you need to network". Translation from Jargon into English: people are hiring their buddies. If you had to work long hours putting yourself through school at a time when grants weren't available for any but the fortunate few who met the often quirky requirements (eg. of Norwegian descent from Logansville, Illinois, in the case of one grant program mentioned at the U. of Chicago) and loans were practically non-existent, you didn't have time to go out and party. You got up, you worked, and you went to bed, where you then collapsed into something resembling sleep. Where, living such a life, is somebody supposed to find "buddies", other than among the few equally unemployed classmates one briefly exhanges pleasantries with in the Hall, before racing to one's next obligation?

It is a standard that is as unfair and as discriminatory as discriminatory can be, one that condemns some to a life of grinding poverty with little real hope of escape, punishing more than a few people savagely for the heinous crime of having worked too hard and having accomplished too much in spite of a hostile environment set out for them from the start, and when one hears the racial epithets dropping from the lips of some of those same secretaries - the ones shredding the applications in from of applicants - one needn't look too hard for a reason why. In Chicago, as in much of the US, it's OK to be very, very WASPishly White. It's OK to be very, very Black. But, somehow, it's not OK to be anywhere in between, and if you should be one of the "marginally Caucasian", you encounter a strange world, indeed - not white enough to be accepted, but too white for anybody to acknowledge that the open ethnic hostility is wrong. And forget about any kind of civil rights action, because you are one of the privileged overclass, don't you know?

I see this, and yet I vote Republican. Am I so evil, that I don't care about how people are treated? Do I have a case of desert fever, hankering for some Mayflower descendent girl who will get the hots for me if I turn into a half-semitic Uncle Tom? (Or would that be an Uncle Tomas?)

No. But I am amused at the standard of evidence used to support the strange demands made of me. Has Sam (and others like him) seen nearly unendingly hateful mistreatment? Yes, no sane person could argue otherwise, though more than a few ideologue crazies will try to, but you know, the funny thing is that most of those crazies are to be found among those "caring and compassionate" liberals, as are more than a few of those very white secretaries and personnel people who've proved to be such a nearly impermeable filter in the employment process. The people who bar Sam's way, and the way of so many others as they futily attempt to begin lives that have been stalled, now, for far longer than the length of the entirety of the great depression, by and large are not to be counted among the rich and famous. These aren't CEOs, this isn't Donald Trump or Bill Gates sadistically conspiring to keep the little guy in his place, especially if the little guy has dared to be something less than completely blond haired and blue eyed. The lives of these people who are being stomped into the mud have been slowly destroyed, not for greed and profit by the big guys, but for "s**ts and giggles" by other little people, or in some cases in a bout of outright hatred and spite by some 19 year old chicklet who has had her oppression studies class, knows how evil those overprivileged white males are, and feels vindicated in her bigotry as she takes her self-righteousness out on somebody looking like (and often related to) some of the same people her granddaddy would have sicced the unionbusting goons on, a few decades back.

Liberalism is not going to make such experiences go away, for all of the caring facade it presents, because Liberalism, more than anything else, is about giving people excuses to hate, and more than a few in this country are all too eager to do so. As for the government "helping", let's not forget that affirmative action - the pretext used to keep many like Sam from ever having a chance to apply for a number of positions - was a government program. So was "Project Chance". Oh, you didn't hear about that? Let me tell you what that was.

At about the time Sam and his peers were struggling to get by, in many cases because of circumstances that the government played more than a small role in creating, somebody felt that it was terrible, just terrible that all of these people were struggling to get by on welfare for year after year. Something just HAD to be done about this. The solution - make those lazy malingerers start looking for work! As if they hadn't been already. As if the stubborn unwillingess to break in a new employee except as a favor to somebody plugged into the old boys network (or who qualified as an affirmative action hire), or to accept a resume because (horrors!) one might be expected to file it, represented laziness on the part of those pounding their feet to a (sometimes literally) bloody mess on the concrete every day, instead of laziness on the part of those unreasonably saying "no", sometimes going on to whine a few years later about the shortage of junior employees - you know, the employees they wouldn't have had, had they not freely chosen to choke off entry level opportunities? So, one day Sam gets handed a sheet of paper and an ultimatum. Either he fills the list with the names, addresses and phone numbers of a few dozen businesses where he has just filled out an application or left a resume in the last week, or his luxurious $2.50/day lifestyle is over! His foodstamps will be cut off. "And if people refuse to let me do so". That's your problem he's told, but some of those in the "caring" profession of social work.

Not that explaining his predicament produced no responses, he says, with others reporting similar experiences. No, in some places the people he explained this to threatened to call the police, because they felt "threatened", and as any good feminist knows, feeling threatened is the same thing as being threatened. But he got those names, courtesy of a little added strength because the garbage bins downtown were a little less lean that month, he suspects - he was able to cover a little more ground. And so he managed to get to the point at which, without a phone, he was able to set up his first tutoring appointment, the temp work he has sort of gotten by on to this day beginning with him only going down to somewhere between 60% and 70% of his optimal body mass - ie. somewhere around the level that, overseas, would officially qualify one as being a famine victim. During this time, he says, he had no luck getting food at any of the missions or soup kitchens, because lines were long in those days, and everybody "knew" that the white boys were rich. Even when, strictly speaking, they weren't legally white in all of the states, I guess.

Yes, it stinks that people treat each other this way, but guess what? Nobody held a gun to their heads and forced them to act like a**holes and to go on acting like a**holes in the decades that followed. They did that, in large part, because they got off on doing so. That's how people are, and that's where hard times have been coming from lately. Not from the so-called war, not from the economy crashing out due to some ill-conceived action on the part of this or any other administration, but simply because people have grabbed onto any excuse, any at all, to go out of their way to treat most of their neighbors like dirt, even when by throwing away people who would work hard and bring valuable skills to any employer who would give them a chance, they help to impoverish their employer, raising the likelihood that they, themselves, would find themselves walking the same streets that they got such a blast out of not letting others escape.

As the writers of the Federalist Papers noted, a democracy offers no hope to those who run afoul of the passions of a majority faction; if most of the population feels like being vicious just for the sake of being vicious, then a vicious society will result, no matter what laws we put on the books. All that getting the government more involved, at such a moment, is likely to do is get a few of those generally vicious people into a position of essentially unchallengeable power. As some of us have so often noted, if a private charity is badly run, those needing help are free to look to other charities and those donating money are free to do so as well. But if the government takes over the business of charity, driving taxes us so high as to choke off the revenue stream for private charities, and it is run badly, there is little recourse. The rising government payroll means that the misbehaving federal employees will be almost impossible to fire, and good luck getting a bad policy changed - bureaucracies are not democratically elected, they are appointed, they make their own policies, and as long as the payrolls aren't cut, the twits are in for life. As for the government bailing out corporations in order to "keep jobs in America" - consider Sam's story. Jobs for who? By eliminating the role of market discipline, such actions ease the hardship that uncompassionate waste of human potential would otherwise cause.

What we are left with, as we examine the situation, is the question Eris implicitly presents the author and reader with in the above quote - why do people look to authority on high for help with problems that they make for themselves, of their own free will? Individuals may have reasonable grievances, but on the whole, the responsibility for not shooting ourselves in the foot lies not with the government, but with ourselves, and if we refuse to exercise that responsibility, what is President Bush or anybody else supposed to do about that?

As for some of the current complaints, of people with terminal bachelor's degrees in fields like the humanistic study of videogames (I swear I'm not making that one up), mediocre averages and lacksadaisacal work attitudes, who bitterly protest that they had to look three whole months and settle for $35K or lower - if it sounds like I'm snoring as I sit through your tale of imagined woe, that's only because I am, so don't take it personally. Life could be a lot worse, and for many, it continues to be.

Perhaps, though, I'm being unduly pessimistic. If you look at the demographics of those entering the physical sciences, mathematics and engineering, very, very few of those people are very white or very black; like "Sam" they fall somewhere in that chronically despised middle, and they fall there by the thousands. Imagine that - thousands of desperate, hungry, and increasingly angry techies, getting told to "suck it up" when they express a wish to have a chance to enjoy what much of society takes for granted, and finding that they aren't being allowed a real chance to do so. Funny thing, though - these are the very people who have the knowledge needed to produce the majority of the weapons technologies known to man, and if you look at some of the skilled laborers having trouble finding work, any work - a whole bunch of them are machinists, electricians, and oh, everybody else needed to produce a wide variety of weapons systems, and those are highly marketable skills overseas, in a wide variety of places. As businessmen have often said, one should be absolutely ready to leave home and family behind to relocate to where the work is found, and desperation should be driving more than a few of them to locations they might never have otherwise considered, for the lack of better (or in some cases, survivable) options. So perhaps I should be of better cheer, for a new day may be dawning for many of us, with the help of these new business associates and the opportunities for them that the hunger-opened minds of these very highly trained individuals are likely to eventually create. Some may stubbornly say "no", maybe even most, but out of a starving cast of thousands, what are the odds that all will prove so altruistically stubborn when such an easy route of escape from otherwise inescpable troubles keeps presenting itself, as the desire for revenge becomes so well motivated. One offers both the carrot and the stick, and expects there to be no takers? Doubtful in the short run, inconceivable in the long run, if nothing changes.

Wow! I think I see the dawn of this brave new age already! Is that the sun rising out there in the West? Better stock up on your sunscreen, because we may be in for a very warm day, sooner than we expect. Sooner or later, if it pushes people hard enough, any society will find that loyalty, like patience, has limits, and no amount of preachy rhetoric will make that bit of reality go away. Nor should it. Societies, like individuals, are responsible for the free and informed chances they make, and if they don't like what they see at the end of the path they've chosen for themselves, they're always free to choose another.