RIP U.S.A. ~ We Hardly Knew Ye

We have forgotten what we are. We live by the Bing! Of the microwave~O! giver of inadequate and unsatisfying meals we are helpless to improve upon~and we forget who we are, what we are, where we came from.

We are apes.

So why are we shocked and horrified by our sub-moronic orangutan leader? He won fair and square. He got up on his hind legs and beat his chest and twittered the incomprehensible aggression that thrills our simian souls.  So, ok.  He won our apey hearts.  Why worry?

[Self explanatory]

It is so now as ever it was. The power grabbers grab the power (because might does make right in so many ways) and the rest of us tremble in revulsion and fear, too afraid of losing the little left to us to challenge, to demand…to revolt.

Bing! go the Warm Pouches.  And we munch them gratefully because many of us (not all, gods forgive us, not all) live under roofs and have microwaves and wi-fi and satellite television and phones that can launch a missile but which we use to grouse about our local armies/sports ball teams and to gossip about the lives of the reptilian overlords (hi, QEII! Hi Willy and Kate!) who’ll rise up and crush we apes someday, just you watch.

Sometimes, too seldom, we can catch sight of a flickering beam transmitting desperately but erratically at the corner of our brains: “We can be so much better!” it blinks in the Morse code of our best synapses.  We can be great.

But such unpatriotic lights must be drowned immediately in Diet Choke and Snack Feed .

. . . .

Ahhh.  Blissful Non-think.

There, that’s right.

The fizzies and the carbs comfort us. We forget whatever we almost thought we might be thinking (or that we had dared think it all) and we wonder if the News is all last season’s repeats or whether we might find a new episode featuring a novel catastrophe or at least the latest comedy from the Orangutan-in-Chief. Hilarious, that guy.  [Or handsome, strong, and truthful depending on what side of the couch you consume your carbs from.]

O Bla De, O Bla Da.  Life goes on, brah (as the wise men rightly instruct us).  It goes on in a world in which the mad preppers are fat, sassy, and justified. They, the industrious oddballs, were hoarding T. P. long before doing so became a thing.  Clear win.

You there, standing forlorn and inadequately wiped in the middle of the paper goods aisle at Mayar crying “this isn’t an intestinal virus!”~arms spread, appealing to the gods of consumer panic~are so mainstream. The hipsters have your Charming and even your Brawnly and Cleanix. You are helpless now in your wrongness. You had your chance to stockpile MREs and M-16s, but did you? You did not. And now you are a bleating old man who has missed the most important millennial trend: prepping for the viral/zombie-or-whatever apocalypse.

O!  The Humanity!

But hey: if you take the long view (as do I) you see that nothing really matters. At all. (Hi, Freddie!). Nations rise under apes of vision, apes with fancy beliefs and noble aims.  And they fall under bloated orangutans who cannot even rise to the heights of the Pallinian word salad we use to so smugly deride.

The United States falls, nay, plummets as we burn our tongues on the gourmand fare too-freshly Bingged! and mouth-burny from the microwave.

Fewer than 300 years~the City on the Hill not even in living memory as a concept~and any lofty goals of equality and justice we ever did truly believe in are exposed, spread-eagle if you will, suffering and dying in broad daylight as we idly gaze at the drama through the kitchen window waiting for the next Bing!

The United States of America is jumping the shark. An orangutan bulging out of his golfing whites is heading up the ramp and I doubt he’ll make it over.

Because Donald Trump is not Fonzie.

Ya Know….

The sun is shining.  Today was going to be a beautiful day.

Then:

He is actually killing people now.  Can we have our country back?

It’s going to be a bumpy ride.

This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends

An Atheist’s Sympathy for Kim Davis

Look, I don’t know anything more about Kim Davis than the headlines I see on my FB feed and what I gather from the blurbs of the articles I click on and scan through quickly before moving on to the next complaint about special snowflakes or the latest time-suck of a loop from which I awaken 17 “replays” later.

But I feel a little bit sorry for her.

I suspect I wouldn’t if I knew more about her.  I suspect she’d repel me if I sought out video of her speaking her loathsome nonsense (I assume she’s been on the news?  I don’t get commercial television, so I’m not sure).  I suspect I’d be grossed out if I took the time to read more about her (to me) cartoonish beliefs about what her Imaginary Sky Friend tells her to do or not do.

But from my comfortable remove, I feel sorry for her.

Here’s what I know:

• Kim Davis is a County Clerk.
• Part of her job is to issue marriage licenses.
• She’s got an Imaginary Sky Friend (ISF).
• She imagines that her ISF doesn’t like homosexuals.
• She imagines that homosexuals should be unhappy because her ISF is on record as disliking them.
• She imagines that her ISF is so impotent that he needs her to do his policing for him. [I’m just guessing here, but I imagine that she imagines that her ISF will reward her for this policing.]
• She imagines that she is making her ISF happy by refusing to do her job.

Here’s why I feel sorry for her:

1. If it is true that this woman believes that she cannot, in good faith, do her job in the case of signing a form that will allow same-sex couples to marry, she is a very stupid woman.  Her stupidity is pitiable. If she cannot understand the difference between signing a paper that allows others to live a life she would not want for herself and condoning that life, she is a very stupid woman.  Her stupidity is pitiable.
2. In a remarkable case of the exception proving the rule, one can judge this book by her cover.  She is a physically ugly woman and people are calling her out on that fact.  But her ugliness is beside the point of this case and I feel sad for her that she is facing ad hominem attacks.  She’s a victim of a shallow culture that slips too quickly and much too merrily into name calling and insult slinging.  I pity her for that.
3. This point should be obvious from the main gripe that web culture is holding against her (outside of her unprofessionalism and her ugliness): she has been spectacularly unsuccessful in exercising the very right she would like to deny to others.  She’s been married four times.  That’s sad.  It’s pitiable.  Those of us who’ve been there know how draining one divorce is.  She’s been through three (four?  Is she currently married?  I don’t even care. I don’t like her, but I don’t have an ISF telling me that I should want her to be unhappy).
4. And again: she’s stupid.  It’s sad and pitiable that she places all her intellectual eggs in the basket of one very old, dated, and strange book~it’s even worse that she understands that book so inadequately and yet is so persistent in her willingness to open herself to the cruel wraths of today’s media hot seat in defense of what she thinks it is telling her to think.  If I (or you, or any intelligent person) was jeopardizing my job and facing so much scorn and public humiliation, I would take another good, hard look at that book in order to get my talking points in order.  We (you and I, oh fellow intellectual, my Reader) would find what we know from having looked into it before: that the hero of that book has absolutely nothing to say about same-sex marriage.  We also know that the hero’s dad, who says a lot of stuff about a lot of stuff that doesn’t have anything to do with the way we live now, does seem to dislike homosexuality~but he expresses a similar level of dislike for tattoos and shellfish, making his opinions a bit difficult to take seriously. So again, Kim Davis is pitiable; she’s holding on to a weird passage from a dated book that fewer and fewer and fewer people are taking seriously~and she’s risking her job and has opened herself up to ridicule in order to do it.  That’s sad.
5. She’s proud of herself now; she’s got supporters~but where will she be left when the frenzy dies down, when all the gay men and lesbians in Kentucky are back from their honeymoons and she wakes up unemployed (still in prison?) and on the wrong side of history?  She’s infamous now.  She’ll go down on the same side of history as those idiots who were against desegregation of public schools.  Her friends and family will be ashamed to say they know her.  She’s a symbol of the stupidity of a stupid moment in history.

In short: Kim Davis is (as we used to say) “a hot mess.”  She’s pitiable.

UPDATE, November 9, 2017

But wow!  Kim Davis looks like a freakin’ genius now!  We never saw this comin’: 

People, the Planet, and a Very Brief Start on the Topic of Human Evil

I can’t shake the inclination to believe that humans are not the best candidate for domination of this planet.  I assume we Astute Wonderers/Thinkers can proceed under the understanding (courtesy of elementary logic) that the fact that we have achieved domination is no evidence that such we “deserve” it or are doing a good job with it.

Set phasers to “homily.”

Remember the old Star Trek?  Here’s how I’d sum up the point of every episode: Humans are cretinous villains (who are capable of beauty).  I can’t point to a specific storyline, but that’s my over-arching memory of a series that probably had a part in forming my worldview.

Humans are mean (anyone who has ever seen a two-year-old will admit that).  We say that many are “evil”~although that seems to me to be going too far.

If asked for an example of human evil, most people will jump to this schlub:
⇐⇐⇐⇐

I’ve written a tiny bit before on sympathy for the worst people. This is a theme I wish I knew better how to develop: bad people can be inhumane, but they are not inhuman, so what can we do to make things better instead of worse?

Look: I’ve just thrown out the most obvious example of human “evil.”  Very few credible people will deny that if such a thing as human evil exists, Hitler was it.

Fine.  If human evil exists, Hitler was evil~but does human evil exist?

What is “evil”?

What worries me about the concept of human evil is that people talk about it as though purportedly evil people are not human~and what worries me about that is that if we deny that the capacity for evil is an all-too-real human capability we’re never going to be able to get past it, to corral or control it, let alone cure it and keep it from happening.

I worry that it’s too easy to pronounce someone “evil” and thereby excise him from humanity:  We (we humans) would never do such a thing.  That man is evil.

But even as we accuse someone like Hitler of being evil, we know we can’t go too terribly far with this tenuous string before it breaks.  Were all Nazis evil?  Our knee-jerk response is probably “Yes.”  But we know that’s not true.  We know there were people who were happy, thrilled, titillated, satisfied, eager to follow orders~but we also know that there were people like ourselves who (although they were too glad to scapegoat the Jews) were people like ourselves.

People get scared and frustrated and confused~and it feels good to have a place to dump all that baggage.  People like to feel superior and chosen and loved~and it feels good to have others to exclude from our unique worth.

But what do we gain through exclusion?

I think there are scholars who would say that the human tendency to want to “other” and thereby exclude others is ultimately about resources~and it might have made mighty good sense, back in the early-human days, to horde resources through exclusion~but now we have the technology to make it possible to share the over-abundance we create.

We don’t have to fabricate outcasts.

Please hum to yourselves for a sec. I’m thinking….

Let me back up a bit here~I’m pulling in too many threads for what I thought was going to be a short meditation.

Here’s the upshot:  As a species, people are mean and scary.  Individually people are good and bad.  It’s complicated.

I started this post by worrying that people are not doing well by the planet~I then rambled into the worry that people don’t do well by each other.  These worries are related.

Two themes too huge to wrap up in one post.

Sorry.  Life is not as tidy as I want it to be.

We’ve got a lot to sort out.

UPDATE: November 9, 2017

And now there’s this guy.  This poster child for the Dunning-Kruger Effect. I think we’re right to fear him.

This is the way the world ends.