Goodbye

It was a glorious summer, and I'm glad that I spent it away from the keyboard. As I explained in what is probably my last post on Right-Wing of the Gods, contributing to Blogger just stopped making sense. There were the statistical issues raised in that post, but there were others as well.





Call it a new year's resolution to clear the garbage out of my life, to make room for things that are more worthwhile. More recently, still a few months back, Webring announced a new "membership plan" with some very interesting fine print. Each free membership was allowed five ring memberships, with the next two levels above it being not much more generous. For those, one would be paying some tens of dollars per year, which made the next part of this even more interesting. There was a stipulation that while ring memberships in excess of what one's own individual membership level allowed would be trimmed later this month, membership fees were going to start being assessed starting in ... I think it was September. The way Mr.Killeen had his policy written, one could reasonably interpret it to mean that one would be billed for the equivalent of not one "level two membership" (not to be confused with what is now a level two membership), but a good number of them. This would mean that one would end up being presented with a bill for a few hundred dollars in the case of a mid level Webring management presence like myself at the time, and in the case of somebody truly prominent, a James Huggins for example, the bill could run into the thousands.

Bills can not simply be ignored or left uncontested; doing so renders them automatically collectable even when they are otherwise without merit in most states. The law shouldn't work that way, but it does, and to judge from his actions, Mr.Killeen seemed to be trying to make it work for him, in a way that could have been financially devastating for some of us, had we been a little less alert.










Had this been the first time Webring was a source of unwanted and unneeded drama in our lives, this would have been really bad, but Tim had struck before. Consider, for example, the case of the man who administered the Delphic Oracle webring before I did. One day he gets an abusive piece of e-mail from the Webring support staff, threatening him the placement of his ring up for adoption if he doesn't manage it. He logs in. His rings all have a navigational ratings of 100: every single member is passing. Not a single member is in the queue for any of them. Every image is in place, everything is working. There is literally nothing for him to fix, but Webring is threatening to take action against him, as a ringmaster, unless he fixes it. Very reasonably, he sends an e-mail back to Webring support complaining about the unreasonable behavior of the offending employee, only to get a threatening letter back, warning him that his "rudeness" is on the verge of getting him thrown off of Webring.

Were ringmastering a paid job, one would expect managerial behavior that insane to inspire a round of desertions, but it isn't. Ringmasters (now downgraded to "ring managers") perform volunteer labor, giving the Webring system enough free consulting work that were the system forced to pay for it all, Webring would be bankrupted within the year. "Do you know how much our facilities cost?" 1/4 of a cent per meg of diskspace, Tim. Do you know how much the PhD you had vetting additions to that science ring on your system charges for his time? I'll give you a hint - it's more than 1/4 of a cent.

When the quality and profitability of your product comes courtesy of the generosity of others, who have gifted their time to you, at the very least you should be prepared to say "thank you". Killeen and his staff, however, persisted in treating volunteers as employees, and badly abused employees at that. Some of us tried to reason with the man and his help in the gentlest of terms, and getting nothing other than more grief, found that we were running out of patience with a service that wasn't giving us much of anything other than a hard time. When we found ourselves at the point at which we not only being repayed for our service with abuse, but now were being expected to pay Tim a holiday bonus of a few hundred or even a few thousand dollars apiece, some of us decided that we had had enough, and began our departures from the Webring system.

One should have enough business sense to know who is giving and who is getting, and reality as it as existed on much of the Internet has ignored that reality. Those who provide content have often come on bended knee, as they are expected to, terrorized by those who have hosted content or linked to content (eg. Webring) without the logic of that situation ever being questioned. Consider, in the case of my own site, just how much time obviously has gone into writing, formatting and posting what is, after all, only the introduction to a much larger work. Consider how much more time has been eaten up defending it against meritless complaints lodged for censorious purposes. What, really, would I lose if one day I said "forget it", got up, walked away and just let the site die?

Income? In my entire life, my net earnings from the Internet have been what they've been for almost every content contributor - zero dollars and zero cents. Financially, this is a dead loss for me, $65.95 a year going to maintain a site at Freeyellow that gives me nothing more than the opportunity to give something away to people who, when they are heard from at all, spit on one 99 times out of a hundred. Recognition? If one wishes to view the discovery that one has had one's work plagiarized by somebody who has then included one's words in lessons he's sold for hundreds of dollars as being some kind of honor, maybe, but the buzz one tends to get running a site like mine tends to be of the kind that would bring out the lawyers, if carried out offline; it has been almost altogether libelous.

This means that the experience Webring is enhancing is one barely worth having at all. Even if vanishing off of the Webring system meant that one's site would never be seen again, a part of one should be ready to say "who cares", and judging from the one quarter of a million hits my site saw last year, of which maybe a few hundred came from Webring, this is not the case. Webring is thus left in the position of issuing a hollow threat that one will be denied the opportunity to give something away while being abused for having done so. This doesn't give them much leverage in any negotiations, if the other side has even the faintest hint of a presence of business sense. It does, however, give a reasonable man good reason to view the actions of our good friends at Webring with real anger, and many of us did.




There was something profoundly obnoxious about Killeen's stance. One found oneself reminded of the corporate practice of "constructive firing", in which conscientious older employees would have their careers cut short unjustly, so that management could give their jobs away as perks for younger employees, who presumably would be too excited about the fast track they were on, to ask what was going to happen when they reached the ripe old age of 35. Webring was applying this same approach to volunteer work; "thank you for building this place up for us, now get lost while we use the fruits of your labors to draw somebody else into the system. Bye, sucker!" That's outrageous, as was so much else we had seen, and so many of us decided to make a statement, the effects of which can still be seen here and there on the Webring system.

What some of us would do would be to delete our rings before exiting the system. Webring would just resurrect those, so the next refinement was to delete the memberships and then delete the ring. A little better, but I think the best was to delete all of the memberships except for those held by oneself and a few confederates, hold onto the ring for a while, and then have oneself and one's allies leave it a while later. I tried a few weeks later, which wasn't enough. Others report more luck, after waiting a few months and then deleting the rings. The point is the same either way: "Tim, if you're going to be a jerk about this, we're not going to let you turn a profit off of our work".

What is the one thing worse than this kind of New Economy pseudo-corporate scheming? How about a little of the opportunism that followed from somebody who tried to use somebody else's bad day as an opportunity to promote her (1) own obscure no name blog? This was from another Pagan, and serves as a beautiful illustration of why it is that I avoid the community like a plague.




I'm not going to name the place or give its url, or link to it, because I don't believe in rewarding unsavory behavior, but I'll give you a few representative quotes. The domain name for my account was deleted by me, not by our friend, who seemed happy to point the spambots in the direction of my inbox.

Pagans Should be Above the Negative Traits of other Religions

The vast majority of Pagans have been subjected to the lies of other Religions for as long as we can remember so you would think as a group we would hold ourselves to a higher standard. Yet what I physically see happening over and over again is something else.

Take for instance and email I received today from the new owner of a web ring I was a member of.

“Your site in the Ring, Pagan Philosophy, has been deleted. by antistoicus@**** (send REPLY) Sent: 10/01/2006 10:28:54

Nothing personal against you or your site, but when you find out about the new changes at Webring, I think you’ll understand exactly what is going on. ”

Of course I immediately wondered what was happening with WebRing. I had not heard of anything so drastic as to need anyone to start cancelling sites from their group. And I did not find anything I had not heard of, so I wondered why this person would say that.

When I checked the front page of the groups WebRing I found a rather obnoxious statement as follows:

“This ring is under new management, and the “come one, come all, as long as you shock and upset the middle class” spirit of the old management is gone. Posturing and expressions of how you feel is not good enough. I expect to see logical arguments in support of your positions, and like most Conservatives, I am not positively impressed by ranting and raving, or by childish attempts at winning through intimidation. For the time being, only Hellenic Pagan, Roman Pagan, and Conservative Pagan applicants will be considered for admission to this ring. Postmodernists need not apply. ”

Now even though I find what he has posted on his site to be somewhat obnoxious and feel he is telling everyone that does not agree with him that he and his way is superior to everyone else, it is his right to be obnoxious on his own site.

Where my problem comes in is the fact that he tried to blame it on WebRing rather than just admit he doesn’t believe sites that are not directed a one specific path are worthy of being in this WebRing.

Really? This person shows up on the Webring site sometime around October 1, 2006 and expects us to believe that she didn't see anything out of the ordinary?

This was the time of what was easily the biggest blowup in the history of Webring.com, commented on at length in the member's forum, stating with this post from b24_bestweb entitled "Webring just committed suicide". The membership policy, much changed since this remarkable individual made her post, was up for all to see. The boxes of webring members were flooding over with announcements of rings being put up for adoption or deleted by angry ringmasters, many of whom invited their members to follow them as they relocated to Ringsurf. And what do we get out of this delightful woman? An attempt to play the persecution card on behalf of a site I had never even heard of, at the time when I started preparing the Pagan Philosophy ring for deletion.

Did this person notice, before I cleared the ring, that a good number of Hellenic Pagan and Conservative sites were present that weren't present afterward? How about the fact that a number of my own sites were deleted as well? Was I trying to persecute myself as well?

Do I feel that "my way", as in insisting on the presence of coherent argumentation in anything that would call itself Philosophy, is better than everybody else's? Yes, and anybody who feels otherwise should be sent in for psychiatric counseling, because that's what the word "Philosophy" means; complaining about the requirement that one present substantive and coherent arguments to get on a Philosophy ring is like complaining that one is required to do lab work in a Chemistry class; if that thought bothers you, why are you even present? In this woman's case, the answer was simple - to spam a ring.

As for the requirement that new applicants being Classical or Conservative Pagans, our backbiting friend knew full well why that requirement was in place, because this was explained both on the homepage and on the hubpage for the ring - because application to the ring had been made into a juried process, with the juries consisting of the active memberships of two lists I moderated ("A Graeco Roman Soapbox" and "Conservative Midwestern Pagans"), which effectively excluded liberal non-Graeco-Romans, because I had not yet hooked up with any lists on which their posts would have been on-topic. As the application process involved becoming an active participant on the list and then introducing oneself and one's site, until I could find an Asatruar list willing to participate, for example, I would have no way of having one of the liberal Asatruar run through the process without spamming one of the participating lists.

In other words, doing unto the list as our friend did unto the ring? Perhaps, but all as explained in simple enough terms, terms which she has edited very selectively, that anybody whose IQ exceeded her shoe size should have had no difficulty following the explanation. But a willful refusal to understand what was clearly explained did serve her purposes, as it gave her the chance to play the victim and get a little more attention for a site that would otherwise be too much of a snooze to be noticed. Pure, unprincipled opportunism, as we see when we get to watch her decide that she's going to tell me what I'm saying, instead of letting me decide that for myself.

Had the owner of the Pagan Philosophy web ring simply said “I’ve changed the rules for types of sites allowed in the group and your site no longer qualifies”, I would not be writing this post.

As a group however, everyone that follows a Pagan path must start placing some checks and balances on what is acceptable behaviour in public and when dealing with others. What you do in your personal groups is your business but every society will always have standards of what is acceptable in public that we must all abide by. Since we are the “new guys” on the block, it is up to us to set our standard slightly higher than everyone elses.

Sounds good. How about if we start with some version of "Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbor"? There are very few Christian denominations that teach their members that defamation of character is just one of any number of equally valid life choices. So long as the majority of the Pagan community insists on doing just that, Pagans are going to be shunned and scorned by the general population, not because they are misunderstood, but because most of them are understood all too well.

But then again, some of us live for the notoriety, so maybe for people like this individual, that's no deterrent. Some have asked why the pseudonym, why I don't just go by my real name in Pagan settings. Many reasons, not the least of which was the experience of hearing an Anglo-Saxon high priestess try to pronounce the unanglicized form of my surname, but the primary one is that as I take a good, long look at the people I've met through Paganism, I often find myself wishing that I had never gone to my first gathering, that I had stayed a solitary and kept my faith to myself. There are really very few good moments to balance the bad, just a group of scheming predators for the most part, people who see their newfound religion as the key to their fifteen minutes of fame or to the winning of riches their own native talents would never win for them honestly. Paganism used to be about the fresh experience of Man's encounter with the Gods on terms other than those we have been conditioned to expect; now it is about fringe science and quack medicine and sad delusions of grandeur on the part of those who, failing to even manage to be human, imagine that they can settle for being divine.

I can do better than to keep company such as this, and do so almost every time I step outside my door. My FreeYellow site comes up for renewal in a month or so. I doubt that I shall renew it, and if I do, I won't do so for long, maybe just long enough for the free version at Bravenet to come up in the listings a little more. My love for the gods is undiminished; their followers are the ones I have my doubts about, and it is away from the vast majority of them I have walked with great pleasure. Every day that has passed has made their absence fonder, until today, when I can scarcely remember why I ever bothered to place a Pagan site online at all.

On to better things.






Addendum, Jan.17: If you're desperately eager to find out who this person is, you can still easily find her by doing a blog search under my name, a fact that she may find difficult to explain because her position is that my name never appeared on her post and I had never been identified!!! This was yet another lie, as my full e-mail addess, of which my name is a part, was posted, and she ran on and on about the ringmaster of the Pagan Philosophy ring, who I still was at the time. But she didn't identify me, right? So nobody was defamed, in this fictive reality that she tried to create.

As you can see, if you've been to this post before, blog posts can be edited after posting, and edit she did, removing my address, though keeping the lies about what transpired in place and denying me my right of reply. Aside from a brief hiatus during which one of the members filled in for me, I was, in fact, the ringmaster for that ring for long enough that even this oblique reference is enough to get the rumor mill running. As I pointed out on a list of hers I found open, one needn't take what I'm saying on faith, either, as the cached copy of her blog post will remain available in Google for the next few weeks. She can rewrite the record and lie about its former contents, but the evidence will be there for all to see until Google refreshes its cache, however long that takes.

The spin she came back with was truly shameless, in a way that is disgracefully typical of the New Age community. There was the line that nobody would have known that she was talking about me had I not spoken up, which is wrong for reasons already given. What was even better was the argument that I was complaining about something she had posted three months ago and had been long forgotten until I brought it up. In actual fact, as you can see for yourself should you choose to do that search, at the time of my initial posting of this article, the article on this lady's woman's blog was still on the front page of that blog, as very little had been posted since, meaning that the defamatory remarks had been sitting out there next to my name, in plain view, for three months. Such a defense stands common sense on its head - obviously, keeping a slanderous rumor in public view for longer is going to do more to spread that rumor, and here we have her, in effect, saying "how can you complain about my gossiping, when I've been doing it at your expense behind your back for so long?

I was asked why I waited for three months to complain. How about because somebody's blog was an obscure, no name affair until she decided to take a slog through the mud, and I didn't even know about that post until recently? Having had this explained to her, she then proceeded to play the broken record game and ask the same question again, as if it hadn't been answered in the first place. Imagine the ever remarkable experience of confronting a pathological liar about her misdeeds, and picture how that would spiral downward.

Were this an isolated incident, I would wish that life would teach this person a lesson that she could not forget because libel and slander, like any form of betrayal, strike at the very fiber of society, but it wouldn't influence my decisions that much. The sad news is, though, that while this woman's behavior may be unusual in degree in the Pagan community, it is so far from being unusual in kind that in a Pagan setting, the backbiting is practically inescapable, and I've run out of patience with it. I've posted a closure notice of sorts on the Almond Jar. There won't be any new articles on it, as far as I'm concerned at this point. I may or may not post philosophical articles elsewhere - probably not, as I have other things to do - but even if I do, I almost certainly won't be doing so as "Antistoicus" and I'm not going to make them specifically Pagan or Traditionalist or Hellenist. To write for that world is to get stuck in that world, and I deserve better than this. The good news is that "better than this" is easily available, and I've been availing myself of it on a nearly daily basis, so far, as my work schedule has allowed.

I guess I shouldn't be completely surprised when I see somebody like our offending party post a link claiming to show the reader a way to find "effortless prosperity", telling him that it is his "birthright", and find her trying to con her audience later on; "shucking and jiving" are a snake oil salesman's specialty. What is disheartening is how many, what a clear majority of the community is willing to be taken in, both when it comes to seperating them from their money and seperating an honest member of the community from his deservedly good name. To try to discuss philosophy with those who place no value on honor is futile; all of the other virtues crumble to dust in its absence, and we are left speaking of the search for the truth and the promotion of morality with those who couldn't care less about the former and actively scorn the latter.

My only regret as I depart this project is that I didn't depart it sooner.






Note: (1) Yes, it was a "she", which is why I've replaced the generic masculine; I visited somebody's site and checked. I will not, however, refer to her as a "lady", because that connotes respect, nor will I made the terms of derision gender specific. A jerk is a jerk is a jerk, regardless of the jerk's reproductive function, and as mildly amusing as coining the work "jerkette" might be for the 0.25 seconds needed for the concept to become tedious, there's something to be said for letting the language reflect that reality.

Walkabout

The warm weather is definitely here, so what low level of posting you've seen out of me here and on Right Wing of the Gods will be dropping to zero until the cold weather returns. To continue the honesty, directed toward an audience I'm not sure I have, the volume after the cold weather returns is going to be low.

The Internet has eaten up a lot of my time, at the expense of other things of far greater importance (such as my research) and outside of a few very small corners, seldom been a source of anything other than aggravation for me. Back during the 90s, the default world was a lot like that too, for me and so many others. Times have changed, or maybe I've changed. A truism - I'm ten years older now than I was ten years ago, and that's bound to affect the way I get treated. Either way, the world outdoors is looking friendlier from my vantage point and that's where life gets lived.

What really killed my ambition in this area was checking out the site stats for Right Wing of the Gods. RWOTG has been a relatively successful blog and deservedly so. No, I'm not patting my own back. That blog is mostly Dan's work; I'm a latecomer. But, at the cusp of "Large Mammmal" status, making it one of the more heavily visited blogs, it averages seven visits per day. One can easily do better than this at an open mike. What this tells me is that there is little potential for growth in this area, and little point to making an effort.

There are too many blogs chasing too few potential readers, and the problem is much the same with the Web in general, I think. In the old days, a lot of us saw the Internet as being a good, cheap way to get information out to those who wanted it, and who didn't form a big enough demographic pool to be of interest to publishers, but now? Maybe zines will make a comeback. One can't very well take one's monitor under a tree on a sunny June day, can one?

Enjoy your summer.

Yes, I deleted a post

The thought occured to me that I have, at times, done far too much to win attention for some of the Net's and Pagandom's many undesirables. I'll leave it to the victim of the witchhunt I described to put a page up about the incident if he wishes, but helping somebody use her willingness to sink into the gutter, politically speaking, as a source of publicity for herself, is something that I just don't want to do.

Karma and Conservative politics for Hellenes?

By now, the reader has probably noticed a link to Right Wing of the Gods, where I'm one of the contributers. A warm winter has left me with an unusually busy January, chasing around nephews who are at an age at which they need to have elder relatives chasing them, and preserving food which the winter chill hasn't been able to keep frozen, so only now am I catching up to some of my correspondence.

In How does religion affect politics, which I am now responding to, Pawnman writes:

Paganism, at least in many forms, has a concept of karma. Do good, and good comes to you. Do bad, and bad things will happen to you. This meshes perfectly with the conservative view that hard work brings reward, and you should work for your own happiness rather than trying to appropriate someone else's.

With the moral component of that quote, I am in full agreement and I suspect that most of the ancient Hellenes would have been as well - what you describe is an honorable man's self-reliance; no society builds a healthy future for itself by praising thievery. Karma, however, I'm not so sure about.

In Hellenism or any offshoot of Hellenism (eg. Christohellenism), the cause and effect relationship is going to become a little less clear because the gods are not uniformly benign, and they don't work together harmoniously. Even generally benevolent deities such as Zeus have their malevolent aspects, which certain rituals seek to turn away, and in the case of some of the deities (eg.Eris), if they had benevolent aspects as they were known in antiquity, those aspects were kept well hidden. One does not take for granted that good actions will be rewarded with good fortune through the action of any sort of Karma or Divine Grace; rather, one builds a relationship with the Divine in an attempt to promote those conditions in which that desirable result may occur.

Good actions, then, are a necessary but not sufficient condition for the blessing of the gods to bring the sort of good fortune that a rational man would desire; that, and the showing of proper respect for the gods through the offering of their traditional honors. (I am NOT going to place twinkies and pepsi on an altar as a sacrifice to Aphrodite, and then sing "sounds of silence"; I can do much better than that, as so I would and should be expected to). Even good fortune, even when it comes to one from Olympus, does not guarantee good results; it merely tips the odds in a direction more favorable to one as one works through one's own challenges. If, for example, it's AD79, and you're a small child in Pompeii, with or without the blessing of the gods, you're still almost certainly going to be barbecued; the level of blessing you'd be asking for to avert that outcome would be incredible - miraculous, in fact.

In the more purely human arena, part of the problem with the good karma = good fortune equation is that it forgets that the others we encounter in the course of our lives are as much free players as are we, and that we are never quite as independent of the need for the help and cooperation of others as we'd like to think we are. Good men who've shown their goodness through righteous acts have still met with the hostility and outright evil that their fellow men are capable of. Indeed, to deny the possibility of this is to deny the very possibility of negative karma or divine displeasure at one's unrighteous conduct, because if nobody can ever be harmed in any way which he does not deserve, then no action can ever work an injustice upon anybody, leaving nobody with any opportunity to be unjust.

On balance, this might not be ideal, but no circumstance could be. For the gods to enter the world so bluntly as to insure that justice would always be done in the here and now, regardless of the choices those around us made, would be to make all of our individual battles meaningless and to leave us with no opportunity to pursue any sort of virtue, because we would never have the opportunity to do for anybody but ourselves. The price of this opportunity is that individuals may find themselves confronted with battles they have no chance of winning, and in some cases (Anne Frank) no chance of even escaping, but at the other extreme, Man becomes a dependent upon G-d, and the blessings of the Divine a sort of spiritual welfare. The gods are too kind to us to be that kind to us.

Similarly, if someone attacks you, they have some bad karma coming. Who's to say you can't deliver it yourself? Many modern pagans seem to feel that no conflict is ever worth the cost. I say that history is full of examples of pagans going to war.

Absolutely; take a look at the number of war gods and goddesses in the various pantheons, and the lengthy history of warfare during ancient times. How many Christians were fighting during the Peloponessian wars?

If you shorten the whole rede to "harm none", then it's easy to see how you can be a strong proponent of peace. But if you take the original rede that Crowley put to paper, you see the nuances:

"Do the least amount of harm possible, to the least number of people possible".

"Harm none" is an impossible goal; at the very least, one will harm somebody else through an act of ommission, because needs and desires come into conflict, and some of the players aren't going to try to be nice, fair or even civilized about it no matter how others will treat them. To stop the bad guys, you have to take away their ability to do harm; nobody has found a way of doing that which the bad guys end up feeling happy about, to date, angry pacifists included.

So, what's the worse harm? Letting your own countrymen get steamrolled by a foreign power because you don't want to harm anyone? Or standing up and protecting those who cannot help themselves. I'm inclined to think that the latter leads to fewer people harmed all the way around.

True, and more importantly - you've protected the innocent; ie, those who did not choose to force a choice between their well-being and that of others. Aren't our militant rede pacifists found of saying "An ye do no harm, do as thou wilt"? They have chosen to place themselves in a situation in which they must be harmed lest those who have not chosen to force such a dilemma be harmed themselves. One might say that they have chosen their pain; why deny them their wish, when they have worked so hard to make its fulfillment a reality?

(Comment: I placed an announcement of this response on Right Wing of the Gods, where Pawnman should be able to find it, in case anybody was wondering).

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.