Fret Not: Another Time Out

Almost heaven:  the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia

Okay, as I did in late June, I now have to take another break from infuriating, disgusting, outrageous, maddening, horrifying current events before I get a mental overload.  When I was younger, I used to chew on my anger as a dog gnaws a bone, whether directed at private or public persons; but such is not the course of wisdom.  Anger eats you up inside, and has no effect on the other party:  a bad habit that I am finally trying to break after sixty years of learning the hard way.

So if I don't post about current events for a while, I hope my truckbuddies will understand that it's not that I don't know what's going on, or have stopped caring; but I have to take care of myself first, or I will be no good to anyone.  I'm sure my truckbuddies can see the present situation in this country as well as I can:  it's entirely obvious, the contrast between Good and Evil, True and False, Democracy and Dictatorship - or should I say, Dicktatorship.  You don't really need me to tell you that.  But I have to step back awhile and catch my breath.

In the meantime, I recommend Psalm 37 for anyone who needs a mental break, a bit of fresh air, a calming thought just now.  As an Episcopalian, not a Bible-thumper, I say take it all merely as poetry, if you please.  I offer prayers and psalms and such on this blog not to proselytize, but simply as a means to inner peace, renewal of hope, and faith in the power of goodness:  the Love that moves the sun and other stars, as Dante put it.

If it works for you, fine; if not, I hope you will discover another path that does.  This is the spiritual grammar and vocabulary that I understand, that works for me.  Sometimes, anyway.

Excerpts:

1 Fret not thyself because of evildoers, neither be thou envious against the workers of iniquity.

2 For they shall soon be cut down like the grass, and wither as the green herb.

3 Trust in the Lord, and do good; so shalt thou dwell in the land, and verily thou shalt be fed.


7 Rest in the Lord, and wait patiently for him: fret not thyself because of him who prospereth in his way, because of the man who bringeth wicked devices to pass.

8 Cease from anger, and forsake wrath: fret not thyself in any wise to do evil.

9 For evildoers shall be cut off: but those that wait upon the Lord, they shall inherit the earth.

10 For yet a little while, and the wicked shall not be: yea, thou shalt diligently consider his place, and it shall not be.

11 But the meek shall inherit the earth; and shall delight themselves in the abundance of peace.


35 I have seen the wicked in great power, and spreading himself like a green bay tree.

36 Yet he passed away, and, lo, he was not: yea, I sought him, but he could not be found.


39 But the salvation of the righteous is of the Lord: he is their strength in the time of trouble.

40 And the Lord shall help them, and deliver them: he shall deliver them from the wicked, and save them, because they trust in him.

Evil Is Real

Your Head Trucker presents this new video from the Lincoln Project for your consideration.  It is a political ad by a group of Republicans who seek Trump's defeat, and technically falls under the broad category of propaganda - however, propaganda may be true or false, and the video does seem to square with recent investigative journalism such as this article in Vanity Fair and this piece by NBC News.

So read, think, and make up your own mind about what kind of baby-faced demon would, in effect, condemn American citizens to suffering and death for the sake of political advantage.




While we are on the subject of evil, what would you think of a high federal official who deliberately sabotaged the United States Mail in order to throw an election? While the name of the crime might be debatable, TRAITOR springs to mind as a fitting name for the culprit.

Nixon: I am not a crook.

Trump:  I am not a racist.

Louis Dejoy: I am not sabotaging the election.

George Will: "This Sad, Embarrassing Wreck of a Man"

Embed from Getty Images

"Want to play with my ball, Donny?"

Your Head Trucker finds it odd that people keep trying to pin the label of mental illness on Trump, when instead it is patently obvious that he is no more than a big, dumb buffoon - a consummately vain, overgrown rich kid who learned little from his expensive education, and remembers less - a reality-show actor who keeps flubbing his lines and missing his marks - a mental infant in the paunchy body of a 70-year-old blowhard.  Had he remained in private life, the only ones really hurt by his incorrigible self-worship would be his many creditors, probably.

But as president, with the active connivance and abetting of the entire sycophantic Republican Party - and perhaps with the encouragement and blackmail of Trump's Machiavellian father-figure, Putin - Trump, like a rogue elephant in a bazaar, is doing incalculable damage day by day not only to the foundations of this Republic, but also to the finely balanced bulwarks and linkages of the Western world that have, in broad terms, kept the peace and enabled the general prosperity of the whole world these seventy years.  (I do not say it is or ever has been a perfect world - but just try to imagine how much worse a world it would be without America in the lead, morally, financially, and militarily.)

He also has made himself, not really the leader, but rather the tool of those hateful, benighted forces in this country that are inimical to liberty, equality, decency, and democracy, with baleful results we have already seen; even worse may be to come. If his childish, lurching rampage is not soon stopped, or at least neutralized, he stands a good chance of going down in history as an enemy of the human race and a betrayer, whether by sheer stupidity or malicious design, of all that America is and has been and should be.

When I was younger and more idealistic, not to say naive, I thought it a very strange and rather silly thing, that custom of the ancient Egyptians and Romans, among others, to pronounce damnatio memoriae - oblivion - upon a despised ruler, once he was removed from office.  I must say that I have in recent years come to understand much better just why they did that.

George Will, one of the leading conservative pundits for the past four decades, a man of high intelligence and fine writing, who left the Republican Party in 2016 with the advent of Trump, began a column in the Washington Post this week with the same metaphor of an infantile leader:

America’s child president had a play date with a KGB alumnus, who surely enjoyed providing day care. It was a useful, because illuminating, event: Now we shall see how many Republicans retain a capacity for embarrassment. . . .

I recommend the whole essay for the perusal of my truckbuddies. But if you haven't the time to read it, Will summarized his views in the first five minutes of this clip from Wednesday's Morning Joe program:




I believe Trump will not last very long on the spotlit stage he occupies now - as them ol' Greek boys put it, after hubris comes nemesis, and a miserable end. But Trump is merely the image of the beast - a fake president, to use his favorite adjective - the willing, gullible pawn of evil men who are only too glad to feed his gluttonous self-love while using him to further their hellacious schemes - and beyond them, the credulous millions who eagerly follow and support, an army of willing tools and fools, worshipers of a god made in their own image.

If Trump for some reason were to fall silent tomorrow and depart the White House for some quieter spot, do you not think there would be plenty of others ready to fill the space he vacated?  Be sure that the fakery show would continue as planned, regardless of who sits in the Oval Office.  The dire problem we face is not simply that of one churlish buffoon alone.

If you want to see a preview of the next episode in this filthy saga, look no further than Steve Bannon, Trump's erstwhile campaign manager and political incubus, who has stated his own evil intentions quite plainly, for all the world to hear: "I'd rather reign in hell, than serve in heaven."  What he is now organizing is a world alliance of far-right nationalist parties, united in one revolutionary goal: the exaltation of dictatorship, tribal hatreds, and willful ignorance, along with the utter destruction of liberal democracy, the rule of law, and fundamental human rights; that is to say, the triumph of lust over love, of greed over goodwill, of darkness over light in the human soul.

Do not be deceived, my friends:  the long, pleasant Indian summer of the postwar era, so dearly bought with blood, toil, tears, and sweat, may be drawing to its close sooner than you think, if the present danger is not swiftly and firmly averted.

And somewhere, the cunning jackal Putin is licking his chops hungrily, while the foolish Europeans and Americans split and re-split themselves into warring camps:  divide et impera. I do not know the remedy to all this - I only point to the rising flames.

So quit fretting about Trump's mindless tweets, a child's babbling, a mere sideshow, and focus instead on the real peril, the mortal danger that lies straight ahead. Bannon's declared intentions are unmistakable, undiluted evil, straight from the mouth of the Devil.

And now you can't say you weren't warned.

The Nation in Peril: "A Unique and Present Danger"

I suppose you fellas have already seen and read the unprecedented editorial that the Washington Post published yesterday, condemning the Republican nominee as "uniquely unqualified" to be President, and a direct threat to the Constitution.  But in case you haven't, go read it, now, right here.

The Nation, our republic and democracy, is in grave peril, and we must all do what we can to defend it - or watch it dissolve into a perverted Orwellian monstrosity, infernal, putrid, and wretched beyond imagination - so says your Head Trucker, but I think I am merely putting into words what every decent, intelligent person (a particularly articulate one being the writer Joyce Carol Oates) already thinks, and has thought for the past year, ever since that braggart, bully, and charlatan threw his hat into the political ring.

It occurs to your Head Trucker that the word hubris might have been invented just to describe him, the perfect exemplar of what those old Greek boys called a tyrant.  Of course, he will meet his nemesis eventually, as such characters always do, bearing within themselves the seeds of their own destruction - Oedipus, Napoleon, and Hitler are names that spring to mind here, not to mention Faust and even Lucifer himself - but perhaps not until the tyrant has caused incalculable damage and suffering in all directions.  (Now aren't you sorry you slept through Western Civ and World Lit?)

So I will add nothing here to the mountains of commentary already flooding the airwaves and intertubes - but I also recommend that you all read this article, based on a New York Times report this week, which seems to reveal Trump's "business plan" for the Presidency:  namely, that he will let his running mate be "the most powerful Vice-President in history," handling all foreign and domestic policy, and all the other tedious daily details of the Executive Office - in other words, doing the President's job for him - while Trump loafs around in comfort like a chairman of the board and simply "makes America great again," pulling the strings from behind the throne and issuing imperial decrees at his pleasure.

In other words, at a stroke, Trump would break apart the constitutional checks and balances on which our system has depended since its founding, and run it like one of his megabusinesses - a casino, perhaps.  Utterly revolting to the mind and chilling to the spirit.  As are all his other nebulous, infantile, utterly irresponsible ideas and self-serving proposals.

Some of you, at least, are old enough to remember the well-worn phrase used for practice by generations of student typists:

Now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of their party.

Though in need of a small edit or two, never has it been truer than now.  The prime springs of History often turn not upon great events, but upon small ones:  for want of a nail, the shoe was lost, and so on.  The choice between renewal and ruin, utter ruin, is ours - but only while democracy lasts.  And the clock is tick-tick-ticking louder all the time.

I am old and rather weary now, circumscribed in action and limited in resources; this slight blog post is about the extent of what I can do: a pebble thrown into a pond. But some of you can do a little more, perhaps, thereby encouraging yet others downstream, as it were, who can do even more than that, and so good luck to you.

 I close by simply saying, as so many patriots have said before me: May God bless the United States of America.  We certainly need all the help we can get.


Addendum, 9:45 p.m., 7/24: Yes, Hillary is well past her sell-by date, and fails to inspire for several reasons. But she is hardly the fiend that the foaming right has made her out to be, and for all her faults, she is, as the Washington Post observed in its editorial, not a threat to constitutional government.

The choice is between a flawed, ambitious leader who is experienced and capable of high office - or a bloated, preening, ignorant toad who with the help of his fawning lackeys would turn this country into the biggest personality cult the world has ever seen. To my mind, there is no question here.

Shine, Perishing Republic

And now on top of all the other horrors of this annus horribilis, the CIA torture report - that is, the 500-page executive summary, not the 6000 pages of the actual report, which the righteous, God-fearing Republicans in Congress don't want you to see - not now, not ever.

The New York Times reports:

A scathing report released by the Senate Intelligence Committee on Tuesday found that the Central Intelligence Agency routinely misled the White House and Congress about the information it obtained from the detention and interrogation of terrorism suspects, and that its methods were more brutal than the C.I.A. acknowledged either to Bush administration officials or to the public.

The long-delayed report, which took five years to produce and is based on more than six million internal agency documents, is a sweeping indictment of the C.I.A.'s operation and oversight of a program carried out by agency officials and contractors in secret prisons around the world in the years after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. It also provides a macabre accounting of some of the grisliest techniques that the C.I.A. used to torture and imprison terrorism suspects.

Detainees were deprived of sleep for as long as a week, and were sometimes told that they would be killed while in American custody. With the approval of the C.I.A.'s medical staff, some C.I.A. prisoners were subjected to medically unnecessary “rectal feeding” or “rectal hydration” — a technique that the C.I.A.'s chief of interrogations described as a way to exert “total control over the detainee.” C.I.A. medical staff members described the waterboarding of Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the chief planner of the Sept. 11 attacks, as a “series of near drownings.”

The report also suggests that more prisoners were subjected to waterboarding than the three the C.I.A. has acknowledged in the past. The committee obtained a photograph of a waterboard surrounded by buckets of water at the prison in Afghanistan commonly known as the Salt Pit — a facility where the C.I.A. had claimed that waterboarding was never used. One clandestine officer described the prison as a “dungeon,” and another said that some prisoners there “literally looked like a dog that had been kenneled.”

During his administration, President George W. Bush repeatedly said that the detention and interrogation program, which President Obama dismantled when he succeeded him, was humane and legal. The intelligence gleaned during interrogations, he said, was instrumental both in thwarting terrorism plots and in capturing senior figures of Al Qaeda.

Mr. Bush, former Vice President Dick Cheney and a number of former C.I.A. officials have said more recently that the program was essential for ultimately finding Osama bin Laden, who was killed by members of the Navy SEALs in May 2011 in Abbottabad, Pakistan. . . .

The Intelligence Committee’s report tries to refute each of these claims, using the C.I.A.'s internal records to present 20 case studies that bolster its conclusion that the most extreme interrogation methods played no role in disrupting terrorism plots, capturing terrorist leaders — even finding Bin Laden.

Many of the most extreme interrogation methods — including waterboarding — were authorized by Justice Department lawyers during the Bush administration. But the report also found evidence that a number of detainees had been subjected to other, unapproved methods while in C.I.A. custody.

The torture of prisoners at times was so extreme that some C.I.A. personnel tried to put a halt to the techniques, but were told by senior agency officials to continue the interrogation sessions.

The Senate report quotes a series of August 2002 cables from a C.I.A. facility in Thailand, where the agency’s first prisoner was held. Within days of the Justice Department’s approval to begin waterboarding the prisoner, Abu Zubaydah, the sessions became so extreme that some C.I.A. officers were “to the point of tears and choking up,” and several said they would elect to be transferred out of the facility if the brutal interrogations continued.

During one waterboarding session, Abu Zubaydah became “completely unresponsive with bubbles rising through his open, full mouth.” The interrogations lasted for weeks, and some C.I.A. officers began sending messages to the agency’s headquarters in Virginia questioning the utility — and the legality — of what they were doing. But such questions were rejected. . . .

Taken in its entirety, the report is a portrait of a spy agency that was wholly unprepared for its new mission as jailers and interrogators — but that embraced its assignment with vigor. The report chronicles millions of dollars in secret payments between 2002 and 2004 from the C.I.A. to foreign officials, aimed at getting other governments to agree to host secret prisons.

Torture, extreme, extended, even unto death in the most grisly, gruesome ways. Secret prisons all around the world. Lies. Cover-ups. Excuses and deceptions at all levels up to and including the Oval Office. And not one member of the BushCheney criminal gang has been made to answer for all this stinking heap of evil. Not one.

Is this the America you grew up in? Is this what your tax dollars pay for? Is this what brings a lump to your throat and a tear to your eye when you salute the flag?

Oh, and you think it can't get worse? In January, the Republican will control both houses of Congress, and 30 states. And in just two more years, as I sadly believe, they will be in the White House too. And do you think they will ever let go of supreme power again, willingly? You ain't seen nothing yet, boys - mark my words. When Republican majorities can no longer be had by democratic means, then will arise a line of American Caesars to be the "protectors of the people" - and that will be the end of the Constitution and the America we know, forever.

I'm too old and too weary to say more, fellas. You can read the report for yourselves, and weep for the death of the Republic as we knew it. But know this: all those wicked deeds, like hateful birds of prey, will come home to roost right here in your hometown and mine, one day. If the President and those under his command can use torture at will against foreigners, with no accountability, no publicity, no justice or law, they can and will use it against American citizens, as long as they think they can get away with it. And then no one will be safe from the whims of the Emperor.

What goes around, comes around. And paybacks are hell. Enough said.


Update, 12/10: Senator John McCain (R-Ariz.) responds to the CIA report with a ringing condemnation of torture:




And thanks to Mimi at Wounded Bird for posting this crock of lies from 2007:

Controlling Your Body, Killing Your Soul

Title page of an anti-masturbation book originally printed in London in 1716, reprinted in Boston in 1724.

I suffered through years of agony in a fundamentalist kind of church, agonizing over my terrible but unstoppable sin of masturbation, to the point of suicidal despair.  I suspect some of you fellas can relate.

It's hard to believe that kind of ignorant, assoholic propaganda is still going on in the 21st century, but apparently it is.  Below, a foul-mouthed but brilliant dissection of the underlying motive for all that - which is to control you and sell you more toxic snake-oil.

There is religious faith which is wholesome, fortifying, and sane - and it's important not to throw the baby out with the bathwater, or to take someone's hope away.

But condemning young men to hell for beating off is neither good, nor sane, nor holy.  It is a monstrous con job, an evil mind-control scam.  But listen to what Dusty says:



Original anti-masturbation video here.

American Sadists

Poet and essayist Charles Simic in the New York Review of Books:

In the past, even the most venal among our politicians would now and then show that they have hearts. No more. Now that money rules politics more than ever before and those for whom private gain outweighs public good every time fill the coffers of both political parties, any mention of the plight of the sick, the homeless, and the old borders on political suicide. Polls show that most Americans do not quite share the callousness of our political class to the suffering of the less fortunate members of our society. But some do. We all remember, I hope, the cheers that went up in the audience during the GOP’s presidential debate last spring in Tampa when Ron Paul, the libertarian candidate and former doctor, stated that he would let an uninsured man lying in a coma die without lifting a finger. “That’s what freedom is all about, taking your own risk,” he said. “This whole idea that you have to compare and take care of everybody…” at which point, a few members of the audience shouted “Yeah,” cutting off the congressman in mid-sentence.

This is the new face of American sadism: the unconcealed burst of joy at the thought that pain is going to be inflicted on someone weak and helpless. Its viciousness, I believe, is symptomatic of the way our society is changing. Everything from the healthcare industry, payday loans, and for-profit prisons to the trading in so-called derivatives, privatization of public education, outsourcing of jobs, war profiteering, and hundreds of other ongoing rackets all have that same predatory quality. It’s as if this were not their own country, but some place they’ve invaded in order to loot its wealth and fleece its population without caring what happens to that population tomorrow. The only interest these profit-seekers have in us is as cheap labor, cannon fodder for wars, and suckers to be parted with our money. If we ever have a police state here, I’ve been thinking, it won’t be because we’ve become fascists overnight, but because rounding up people and locking them up will be seen as just another way to get rich. If the hell that Jonathan Edwards and other Puritan divines described in such gruesome and graphic detail is still up and running, I hope that’s where many of them are headed for.

See also the latest charts and current concerns at the Washington Post: "Obamacare's Five Biggest Challenges."

America: The Evil Empire?

Click to enlarge.

A very timely video, via Andrew Sullivan:



It occurs to your Head Trucker that while we now think the President will be revered by future generations for his legacies of such good things as Obamacare and gay rights - it's possible that those accomplishments will be overshadowed by his use of unrestrained drone warfare in Afghanistan or anywhere else in the whole world that the Administration takes a notion to drop a bomb on unsuspecting civilians, without warning or mercy, at any moment of the day or night.

No charges pressed - no law violated - no chance to surrender - no court of appeal - no defense. Just a quick, soft whistle in the air, and Boom! You're dead.  Too bad, man:  your name was on The List.  And all your family too, old and young and babes in arms. Nothing left but a bloody, mangled mess, a butcher's nightmare.  Even the pieces are unrecognizable.

Cui bono?

If this is not evil, what is?

Not the Real World

Via Towleroad, on the Dan Savage-Brian Brown dinner that was moderated by a reporter from the New York Times at Dan's house - emphasis mine:

After the dinner was over and the wine had worn off, Oppenheimer asked the participants, including Savage's spouse Terry Miller, about their shared experience. It seems no one truly enjoyed themselves, and Savage wishes he had held the event on neutral ground.

Mr. Miller pronounced the entire night a waste of time. “Brian’s heartless readings of the Bible, then his turns to ‘natural law’ when the Bible fails, don’t hide his bigotry and cruelty,” Mr. Miller wrote in an e-mail. “In the end, that’s what he is. Cruel.”

I spoke with Mr. Brown by phone, and he seemed to agree that the setting had made little difference. “There’s this myth that folks like me, we don’t know any gay people, and if we just met them, we would change our views,” he said. “But the notion that if you have us into your house, that all that faith and reason that we have on our side, we will chuck it out and change our views — that’s not the real world.”

As for Mr. Savage, he felt that being on his home turf had actually worked against him. “Playing host put me in this position of treating Brian Brown like a guest,” he said. “It was better in theory than in practice — it put me at a disadvantage during the debate, as the undertow of playing host resulted in my being more solicitous and considerate than I should’ve been. If I had it to do over again, I think I’d go with a hall.”

Brown is exactly right on the one point: the die-hard bigots, and they are legion, will never, ever change their minds about the gay. Not even if they live next door, not even if they are blood kin to you. That's not the real world - and I know, because I have lived it, and I've told you my stories here on the Blue Truck before.

Here's the complete video of the dinner debate. I can't stand to watch the whole thing, had to stop after a couple minutes of Brown's filthy, hateful talk. You might as well expect a confirmed Nazi to embrace the idea that Jews are human beings.  But if you can stomach the evil, here you go.



PS - You damn well better get your ass to the polls this November and vote Democratic. The fascists will certainly be casting their ballots en masse. Don't think what's happening in Russia, Uganda, and Zimbabwe can't happen here - you'd be surprised how very, very quickly your gay ass can be eliminated.

Time and Again

Socrates:

For I do nothing but go about persuading you all, old and young alike, not to take thought for your persons and your properties, but first and chiefly to care about the greatest improvement of the soul. I tell you that virtue is not given by money, but that from virtue come money and every other good of man, public as well as private. . . . The unexamined life is not worth living.

Buddha:

One should seek for others the happiness one desires for himself. . . . Hurt not others in ways that you yourself would find hurtful.

Confucius:

Never impose on others what you would not choose for yourself.

Micah:

He hath shewed thee, O man, what is good; and what doth the LORD require of thee, but to do justly, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God?

Hillel:

That which is hateful to you, do not do to your fellow. That is the whole Torah; the rest is the explanation; go and learn.

Mohammed:

As you would have people do to you, do to them; and what you dislike to be done to you, don't do to them.

Jesus:

And as ye would that men should do to you, do ye also to them likewise. . . . Love your neighbor as yourself.

Rupert Murdoch:

The News of the World phone hacking scandal, which has heaped such disgrace not just on the paper but on Murdoch himself, making him the object of an entire nation’s disgust and anger, is at once inexplicable and predictable. On the one hand, reporters who work at pressure-packed scandal sheets quickly become inured to crossing lines and destroying lives; it’s what they do. On the other hand, it’s still hard to believe that not a single reporter or editor at The News of the World had the sense to realize that tapping into the cellphone of a murdered teenager was deeply wrong — no matter how many great scoops resulted. That, however, appears to be the case. The Murdoch culture had stripped them of their conscience. . . .

Most people outgrow their twentysomething selves. As they age, they realize that the impulses and excitements of youth need to be tempered with the judgment, empathy and caution that come with maturity. They get a better feel for the lines that ought not to be crossed. Journalists, in particular, learn that there are stories that ought not to be pursued. Not every scoop is worth it.

Murdoch’s essential problem is that he never grew up. His instincts as a journalist are the same as when he was 22. “I love competition,” he said at the end of that Esquire interview. “And I want to win.”

A little too much, it turns out.

(--Joe Nocera in the New York Times)

The Great Agnostic: Robert G. Ingersoll

Happiness is the only good.
The time to be happy is now.
The place to be happy is here.
The way to be happy is to help make others so.

Reason is the highest attribute of man.

The truth is, our government is not founded upon the rights of gods, but upon the rights of men. . . .  It is the only nation with which the gods have had nothing to do.

Argument cannot be answered with insults. Kindness is strength; anger blows out the lamp of the mind.

Happiness is the only good, reason the only torch, justice the only worship, humanity the only religion, and love the only priest.

The other day, while doing a little research on the history of divorce laws in this country - which just goes to show that the straight boys have been changing the rules of marriage all the time, just as they pleased - your Head Trucker happened to stumble upon this very interesting work:  Is Divorce Wrong? 

Written in 1889, it is a response to the question by three well-known public figures of the time:  Archibishop Cardinal Gibbons of Maryland, who naturally condemns the very idea out of hand, holding squarely to Roman Catholic teaching on the sanctity of marriage; Episcopal Bishop Henry C. Potter of New York, who as a good Anglican naturally waffles a good deal about it, pro and con; and finally Colonel Robert G. Ingersoll, known as "The Great Agnostic," who ringingly denounces the tyranny and injustice of religious precepts against divorce, which cause so much needless harm to innocent people, though at the same time very warmly and rather poetically defending the sanctity of marital love and the family home.

Somewhere along the line I had heard of Ingersoll's name before, but couldn't remember anything about him.  So a little further googling turned up the very interesting facts of his life, and his numerous speeches and writings, which you can browse through at your leisure if you have nothing better to do after brunch.  Many of which are quite good, and even amusing at times.  "The Most Remarkable American You Never Heard Of" - yes, and I can see why he was never, ever mentioned in the history books down here in the Bible Belt when I was a schoolboy.  Or if you don't have time for reading today, at least check out this video, I think you'll be amazed for one reason or another:

[For some strange reason, none of Ingersoll's videos will display here - how odd. But try this link for an overview of his life and work:]

What I Say:  Ingersoll was a man of great intelligence, and of great compassion for the human race.  It seems to me that he is a more outspoken proponent of Thomas Jefferson's famous vow of "eternal hostility to every form of tyranny over the human mind."  And I agree wholeheartedly with Ingersoll's great aim of removing the shackles of ignorance and superstition from the human race.  Quite an admirable man, who deserves to be better remembered than he is.

Yet from reading a few of his works, I think Ingersoll, in his zeal to bring light and freedom to his audiences, sometimes overstates his case - as all zealots do.  Just as Ingersoll inveighs against ever placing "unquestioning faith" in any scripture or supernatural authority, so your Head Trucker would offer a gentle warning against placing the same kind of blind faith in any one remark of Ingersoll's.  To take just one example, in one of his writings he heaps great scorn upon the book of Job and condemns it as essentially worthless.  Perhaps so, if you think it was written to be taken literally.  On the other hand, if you approach it as a work of fiction - moral fiction - to begin with, then you may take an entirely different view of its worth.

Continued after the jump . . .

Unwanted and Unmentionable

The willful refusal to see any worth in human beings outside one's own kind is a species of that evil I wrote about the other day.

Two cases in point:  first, the mayor of Yuma, Arizona - figures - uses a Memorial Day speech to condemn the worthless "lacey-drawered, limp-wristed" fags who would ruin our military:



Yesterday, in a telephone interview with the local newspaper, the mayor said:  "As mayor I must respect the lifestyle choices of others, no matter how disagreeable they are with my personal beliefs or my personal moral standards.  I apologize for my comments at the Memorial Day service at Desert Lawn cemetery on Memorial Day."

Notice that the translation into plain English is:  It's a choice, a filthy nasty perverted choice, and I ain't changed my mind one bit.  So bite me,  faggots.

The Yuma Sun article, picking up on the mayor's reference to George Washington, correctly notes that Washington's chief of staff in the Revolutionary War was Baron von Steuben - who brought his French lover with him to the battlefields.  And did a helluva great job of warfare too.

Oh, you didn't hear about that in history class?  Really?  No wonder - teh gayz have always been erased from history - wiped off the page.  Repeatedly.  Deliberately.

Why?  For this simple reason:  you are just too shocking to explain to a 7-year-old.  As Congressdouche Ike Skelton, R-MO, House Armed Services Committee Chairman, makes so clear:

Don't even mention the gays - the kids might ask questions!

Okay, so now do you get the picture:  not only are you a worthless fag that everybody, including God, hates with a passion - but also your very existence is unmentionable in front of children. In fact, you have no right to exist, period, you disgusting creep.

That's evil.

Us versus Them

Quotes from two posts on Sullivan's blog illustrate the old, old story, the sorry human condition - which is the cause of so much suffering in the world and always has been.  And that, at the hands of "good" people too - like you and me.

1. From a reflection by Robert Ebert on that school mural in Arizona:

I began up above by imagining I was a student in Prescott, Arizona, with my face being painted over. That was easy for me. What I cannot imagine is what it would be like to be one of those people driving past in their cars day after day and screaming hateful things out of the window. How do you get to that place in your life? Were you raised as a racist, or become one on your own? . . .  The hard-won social struggles of the 1960s and before have fundamentally altered the feelings most of us breathe, and we have evolved, and that is how America will survive. We are all in this together.

But what about the people in those cars? They don't breathe that air. They don't think of the feelings of the kids on the mural. They don't like those kids in the school. It's not as if they have reasons. They simply hate. Why would they do that? What have they shut down inside? Why do they resent the rights of others? Our rights must come first before our fears. And our rights are their rights, whoever "they" are.

2.  Sullivan recounts a conversation with a friend over the Israeli attack on that flotilla:

I grabbed some food the other night with a longtime Jewish friend. We had an honest conversation - the kind you cannot have on US television. He's a big liberal but strongly sided with Israel in this latest incident. Why? "They're my people." But you're an American, I countered, you're not an Israeli, let alone a supporter of Netanyahu. None of that mattered to him. His attachment to Israel was indistinguishable from his attachment to America, and, if push came to shove, Israel came first, right or wrong. This had been dinned into him since childhood. His iPhone was deluged with texts from relatives and friends all appalled by any criticism of the commando attack, and immediately seeing it as anti-Semitic or designed to end the state of Israel for ever.

To charge dual loyalty is described as a blood libel, a vile anti-Semitic charge, and it often is. But my friend was very frank about it and unapologetic. That's just the way it is, he said. It was deeply ingrained. . . .

No decent human being who has a grasp of history, let alone the enormity of the Shoah, can fail to have a deep sympathy for the Jewish people, Israel, and respect for its enormous achievements. But the fanaticism and emotionalism that many Jewish Americans have with respect to Israel is so intense that, for some, it overwhelms rationality, and makes a cool strategic analysis of America's national interest close to impossible. Their total identification with Israel is often emotionally as strong, if not stronger, as their identification with America. . . .

That tribal loyalty - my country, right or wrong - is a very human but very insidious thing.  As we have seen, it will cause "good," upstanding, devout citizens of this or any other land to perpetrate and justify every evil under the sun, not excluding the most extreme reaches of torture and murder and genocide.

It makes me remember a conversation nearly forty years ago with a great-aunt, now long deceased - the very upright sort of Sunday-go-to-meeting old-fashioned Southern lady.  She told me the story of how back in the 1920's in a small Arkansas town, a black man had shot her brother, the local sheriff, to death in some altercation.  Whereupon the entire town immediately turned out to hunt down the culprit and hang him in broad daylight in the public square.  About which my great-aunt said, with quiet pride, "I was there, I watched it all."  And never turned a hair.

Us versus Them.  If They get out of hand or overstep the line, no punishment, no retribution is too awful for Them, the nasty beasts.  Even elderly Southern ladies who crochet lace antimacassars and have their blue curls shampooed and set every Thursday afternoon agree, without the slightest hesitation.  Or shame.

A very human thing.  And very ugly.  The quiet cruelty, the everyday evil that we all are capable of, potentially. 

And yes, I mean evil in the full philosophical and theological sense of the word.  Evil is no monster of awful aspect and frightening mien - evil looks just like the people you see on the street every day:  driving to work, shopping for groceries, going to church.  Evil looks just like that man in the mirror, bud - just exactly like him.

Which is something none of us likes to realize or remember.  So on and on the long, tragic story of humanity goes.  Right here, right there, wherever we are, all over the globe:  except where those few scattered points of spiritual light shine through humble, chastened souls.

And I could tell you other stories - like the one of the old gentleman I happened to meet once when I was in high school who recounted with great amusement, laughing, how when he was a boy in rural Mississippi attending a one-room schoolhouse, they used to use the scalps of lynched Negroes as erasers for the blackboard - and swore to the truth of it.  Laughing.  He was a nice old guy, very friendly, would help a neighbor with any job, give you the shirt off his back if you needed it . . . . you, of course, being one of Us, not Them --

But I suppose you get the point.

Photo:  Barry Somers Photoblog.

Deranged Plane Attack on IRS in Austin

What a fucking idiot.



The guy left a rant against the government, the IRS, Wall Street, and the Catholic Church on his website; you can read it here.

Problem is, it's not possible to feel any pity for someone who feels no pity himself for other people's lives.  Two dead, two critically injured; all to feed one sorry sonofabitch's pride.  How sad, how utterly, utterly selfish.  How utterly infantile.

The Austin IRS center is where millions of tax returns from several states are filed.  Anyone could have been in that building today, along with the workers:  all innocent of the "crimes" this guy was so enraged over that he didn't care who he hurt.  God bless the victims and their families.

You want to get respect, you have to give respect; you don't love anyone, why should anyone love you?  You don't value other people's lives, yours has no value either.  No matter how hurt or angry you are.  That's the way it works.

The Big Question

A little reflection on recent news, skip this post if you don't want to think about anything too heavy today.

Last night, we had some weather in these parts. The damage wasn't so bad in Texas, but up near Ardmore, Oklahoma, a couple hours north of Dallas, 8 people were killed by a tornado and more than that injured. Even though we're used to bad storms around here, still, every time you hear about so many lives snuffed out - boom - just like that, you realize it could have been you just as easy. Why them, not me? Why anyone at all?

An even worse case: the nearly 200 people burned up in a flash by the horrible wildfires down in Australia. Most had no idea how close the danger was until it was on top of them, fire dropping out of the sky, a wall of flames 4 stories high, trees and cars exploding, entire towns and their populations burned to a cinder - nowhere to run, no way to escape. Just nauseating.

Again, regardless of whether it was caused by arson or lightning or whatever, the question arises in your heart: why did this have to happen, such a horrible death, so many people, children, old folks, disabled people, whole families? When something bad happens to one person, you console yourself with thinking, well he was just unlucky. But so many people at one time - why?

Where is God when things like this happen? I don't believe God causes bad things to happen to anyone - that would be a demon, not a god. But such huge catastrophes make you question, even against your will, the whole concept of a kindly Providence watching over things, listening to your prayers to protect your loved ones.

Of course, we can pile up many, many examples of disaster and death. There was the tsunami in the Indian Ocean just a few years ago, when thousands died in many countries. And before that, who can forget the sudden shock of 9/11? All those thousands of ordinary, everyday people, going about the normal routines of life on a blue-sky Tuesday morning - suddenly gone. And we can go on back and back through the decades and the centuries, counting the sudden, inescapable tragedies of millions.

Why?

And then there are the uncountable individual tragedies, such as each one of us is intimately familiar with. Bad things that happen for no particular reason, wounds unhealed that scar the soul and turn your life down a path you would not have chosen to go.

Why?

I don't know. Nobody else does either. The great minds of theology and philosophy have exercised all their finest talents on figuring out the problem of evil; and lots have come up with answers, but none of them are satisfactory as far as I can see.

There is no answer to that why; not in this life. Things just are the way they are. After a lot of reading, thinking, praying, and living, that's the best I can come up with.

But against all of that, we have to weigh the occurrences of unforeseen, unexplainable good. Times when blessings come, perhaps in answer to prayer, perhaps even before you knew you needed it. And those rare, very rare times in each person's life when some little miracle - and a miracle when it happens is the most ordinary-seeming thing in the world - some little act of Providence does occur, and leaves you stupefied with awe and gratitude.

So does it all balance out eventually? Some people seem to have all the good things in this life; others seem fated never to have much at all. And some get it all snatched away from them, and not through any fault of their own.

Why? I don't know. But I have to believe that somewhere, beyond space and time, it all does get balanced out, and the good outweighs all the bad. Lots of religions - not to mention lots of self-proclaimed messiahs - can give you all kinds of details on the when, where and how of this; but I don't trust any of them. We just aren't there yet. But we all will be, one day.

Atheism is very ultra-fashionable right now in some circles - which to my mind is like the current vogue of ladies' heel-less pumps. Silly and utterly impractical; a show-off thing to demonstrate oh-look-how-cool-I-am.

Because to believe that there is no place and time of balancing out, as I've put it here, trying to avoid traditional religious terminology, no moment, no place beyond this mortal life where all the wrongs of the world are made right, somehow, some way - well, the alternative is to believe that we are all simply road kill. Nothing more.

But just look at the person you love most dearly and try to hold that thought at the front of your mind. Or look at your own hand, warm and familiar, sitting there holding the mouse as you scroll down this page; one day that will be the hand of a skeleton, and you know it, but none of us can bear to hold that thought very long; nor can we bear to say truly that there is no point to it. No point to me.

I believe there is a point, and that point is ultimately good. More than that I can't say. And I don't trust anybody who says any more than that. All I know is that faith and love lead the way to that point, and that's enough. It has to be.

If you don't have faith, work on love.