A famous racist often exclaims that hordes of murderers and rapists are coming to our southern border. As with a great many of his claims, this one is 180 degrees off, that is, the truth is the exact opposite and the people coming to our border are often fleeing murderers and rapists. But truth is an inconvenience to be ignored by our famous racist when he shouts his sky-is-falling claims to rouse the barnyard birds.

Far too many politicians have eagerly joined the Sky-Is-Falling School, and far too many journalists, writers, and investigators have enrolled in its sister college, the If-It-Bleeds-It-Ledes School, while the 5 W’s Institute of higher learning has seen a distinct decline in enrollment. This lamentable tendency leads to a focus on symptoms rather than cause. Far too many politicians shout that they don’t want to hear about root cause(s). They want action. Like snake oil or Ivermectin salesmen they join our famous racist in shouting all the louder when confronted with inconvenient truths. In the case of the murderers and rapists, many will find the truth to be highly inconvenient: If we concede that the people coming to our border are fleeing murderers and rapists, we might be required to let them in. Better then, to shout that they are murderers and rapists, and we have to keep them out. We have to stop this invasion, this tsunami, this falling sky. Pronto. To hell with your root causes. We have to protect ourselves and our 1950’s Norman Rockwell way of life.

If journalists, writers, and investigators even thought that the people at our southern border were fleeing murderers and rapists, they might feel obligated to at least pretend to attend to the 5 W’s. Recalcitrant journalists, writers, and investigators will argue that people don’t have the time or patience to read or listen to long explanations. Possibly another inconvenient truth. They will argue that if-it-bleeds-it-ledes is more profitable, a truly troubling truth.  But let’s, for brevity’s sake, simply ask WHY and let the other 4 W’s tag along.

The first gentle wave of this tsunami of immigrants lapped at our shores in the early 1980’s and consisted mainly of Salvadorans fleeing the terrible civil war in their country. At the same time a tidal wave of indigenous Guatemalans fleeing the most recent genocide in the Americas, struck the shores of Mexico in Chiapas and the Yucatán peninsula. That particular genocide killed around a quarter of a million people. Another quarter of a million fled to Mexico, and yet another quarter were internally displaced. The vast majority were Maya. This in a country the size of Tennessee, where the largest city, Memphis, had a population at that time of under 650,000.  I suspect that the inhabitants of Louisville would suddenly find life in Ohio a lot more attractive if all the inhabitants of Memphis and a good portion of its suburbs were murdered or disappeared.

As the Maya had systematically been denied education, they had little knowledge of geography or the United States and remained in Mexico where they put up with the evil they knew, working on the large plantations for near starvation wages. As they were not made completely welcome in Mexico, especially in the racist state of Chiapas, a few trickled north and gradually others followed. Another tributary flowed from Honduras and another from Nicaragua.

In those early days, the compassionate Reagan administration refrained from calling the immigrants murderers and rapist, but claimed they were all economic refugees and as such did not qualify for asylum in the U.S. In the ABC Settlement Agreement, the Immigration and Naturalization Service was forced to acknowledge the inconvenient truth that those immigrants were indeed fleeing from rapists and murderers supported by the Reagan and Bush administrations. A corollary to that inconvenient truth is the awkward fact that the more support ($$, training, equipment) military groups got, they more they raped and murdered. The Kaibiles in Guatemala, the Atlcatl Battalion in El Salvador, Battalion 316 in Honduras, and the Contras in Nicaragua were the elite rapists and murderers and always earned top grades in the School of the Americas. With the immoral support of the US government and the economic support of US dollars, they cemented the shithole status of their countries.

Our famous racist also shouted about shithole countries. He and his party (and it is his party) can’t be bothered to ask WHAT makes a country a shithole and WHY. That might lead to inconvenient truths. Their only concern is to keep people from shithole countries out.

Our support of the murderers and rapist was in a good cause, the fight against communism, and well, it was all so last century, the screamers will argue. But another inconvenient truth is that we still support corrupt militaries and businesses (maquilas) in tariff-free zones in the Northern Triangle of Central America. Those militaries no longer make a killing off their valiant struggle against communist boogeymen, and, to make up for lost income, they have invested heavily in the drug trade (also a tariff-free business). Rampant corruption has metastasized and the three countries of the Northern Triangle are only marginally functional and among the most violent countries in the world. If the situation in Tennessee were to similarly evolve, even more Tennesseans would hightail it to Ohio, swimming if they had to.  

Once we accept the inconvenient truths that what is happening at our southern border is blowback from decades (centuries, really) of our explosive support of rapists and murderers, we might just feel a very slight urge to do something other than build an enormous wall. We tell our children to clean up their messes. Well, we made a mess in Central America. Shouldn’t we help clean it up? Or should we just throw childish tantrums and stamp our feet and scream that the sky is falling.

PS1. I apologize particularly to Haitians for not including them.

PS2. None of this takes into account the blowback for our part in climate change 

It pains me to admit it, but I am the native son of a s***h*** country. I have come to this humiliating realization late in life. I have our ex-President/current Sore Loser to thank for the enlightenment.

As a brief dictionary search for the true and accurate meaning of s***h*** country yields no reliable results, I feel free to advance my own definition. Our thankfully ex-President but regrettably current Sore Loser who is credited with coining the term seemed to favor a racist connotation. Possibly, had he cared to expound on his usage, he could have gotten beyond mere racism, as I will do.

But first: I think we can all agree that the term “s***h*** country” is a slur. And most of us agree that in the last few centuries the country most deserving of a slur was Nazi Germany. As we all know, the Nazis were and are white supremacists.  Regretfully, my s***h*** country seems to be over-stocked* with that undesirable element. In keeping with our ex-President/current Sore Loser’s racist connotation, I present my country’s surplus of Nazis and white supremacists as my country’s principal qualification for s***h*** status.  

Furthermore—this is from my own deep thinking about the term, and I feel certain that its originator, not known for self-awareness, would agree, if pressed—I think most, if not all, of us can agree that a characteristic of s***h*** countries becomes evident when Presidents/Dictators don’t like the results of an election, loudly and repeatedly claim widespread irregularities and outright fraud; stop the vote count, confiscate the ballots, count them in secret or pretend to do so, then several days later, announce that they, the Presidents/Dictators won the election by a landslide.

Ample evidence has come to light that our ex-President/current Sore Loser and would-be Dictator attempted to do just that, but only after several other plots failed miserably. First he sent in the clowns cleverly disguised as lawyers. With straight faces those clowns claimed in more than 60 courts all across our s***h*** country to have irrefutable evidence of election fraud, but they only pranced and tooted their clown horns when asked to present that evidence. More than 60 judges, even those appointed by our ex-President were not amused. Where but in a s***h*** country could so many attorneys—officers of the court—moonlight at clowns?

When the clowns in the courtroom failed, our ex-President/current Sore Loser tried a fake elector scheme. Where but in a s***h*** country could so many politicians be found to eagerly sign up for signing their names, under the penalty of perjury, to documents they knew to be fake? So far no politician has come forward to state that s/he refused to be a fake elector, which means our ex-President/current Sore Loser had his finger on the pulse, as well as both hands around the neck, of the Republican party. He chose confidently, knowing that no eager-to-please party hack would turn down the opportunity to commit such obvious perjury. Our large and smelly pool of Uriah Heeps is further proof of our s***h*** country standing. 

Moving on to the Jan 6 insurrection, we see, in the many videos and selfies, members of the Nazi and white supremacist tribe violently and proudly doing the bidding of their tribal leader. Violent tribal uprising against a legitimately elected government is another certain sign of s***h*** country status.

As in all s***h*** countries, we have prominent and well-funded news media working around the clock to tell us that what happened didn’t happen or that the Nazi and white supremacist tribe we saw in the videos and selfies of the non-event were from the Black Lives Matter and Antifa tribes who cunningly disguised themselves as Nazis and white supremacists by wrapping themselves in Confederate flags and wearing MAGA hats. A not astoundingly large percent of our population and politicians—large but not astounding once you realize we’re a s***h*** country—get endorphin highs from the reaffirming news that what they saw happen didn’t really happen, and in any case someone else did it. This large but not astounding percent is addicted to the highs they get from the deliberately misleading media. Those addicts trust their pusher who gives them an additional high by shouting that the other media is the FAKE NEWS media. When the FAKE NEWS media dares report that the event we see happening in many videos did happen, and the people we see in the many videos and selfies who made it happen are Nazis and white supremacists, the pusher screams all the louder: That is FAKE NEWS! And the addicts nearly achieve nirvana.

The use of the term FAKE NEWS is the result of an unexpected literary allusion to a famous Orwell novel by our ex-President/current Sore Lose who only admits to having read and re-read Ayn Rand. Many in this not really astoundingly large percent of our population, as well as many politicians might be victims of Thought Police deception, but their tribalism makes them eagerly complicit in the deception, all of which easily elevates us to prominence in the s***h*** countries list.

If it eventually comes to light that certain military leaders were standing by, ready to send in troops to elevate the insurrection to coup status, or even to keep the troops from putting down the insurrection, that will forever enshrine us in the S***H*** Country Hall of Fame. Currently there is a question about the involvement of our esteemed Secret Service.

NB: While I give our Sore Loser/ex- s***h*** country President great credit for our supreme s***h*** country standing, I cannot give him credit for the ideas behind his failed attempts to overthrow the election. He and his minions merely plagiarized many Presidents/Dictators/Sore Losers from other s***h*** countries. That’s the s***h*** country self-perpetuating system.

*While absolutists may say that one Nazi or one white supremacist constitutes an over-stock, I think a hard, scientific examination of the evidence is a more convincing approach. Our ex-President/current Sore Loser garnered 74,000,000 votes in the 2020 elections. Even if all those voters weren’t Nazis and white supremacists, they were fellow travelers. Ergo, I feel secure in stating that our s***h*** country is overstocked with Nazis and white supremacist’s.

I confess that I have no background, education, or training in the field of economics, which makes me uniquely qualified for this lecture.

The most important lesson you might take home from this lecture is that the old cliché about supply and demand is not a law. It is not like Gravity. It is not even a theory like Relativity. It is merely an observation on human greed.  

Let’s say that unique fruit trees in my backyard produce golden plums that have great medicinal value: One plum cures a rare but fatal disease. And these trees grow only in my backyard. The orchard requires negligible maintenance, a little water, a little pruning. Let’s also say that the trees produce 10,000 plums a year. (I know, I know. That’s a lot of plums, but I like to dream big.)  Let’s also say that with good food and better wine I could live another 20 years. Let’s further say that I charge the deathly ill $50 per plum, a small price to pay for a life, and a substantial profit for my declining years:  $10,000,000. Before taxes. I could get by on that. What? You say that’s the income over a twenty-year period and I would have to get by on only half a mil a year? The horror.

Let’s say that the rare and fatal disease becomes pandemic and many more people are in need of my plums, but my unique trees cannot produce more plums. My expenses do not go up, unless word got out about my plums and I had to take security measures to protect my orchard from plum plunderers. Even so, only a minimal increase in overhead. But were I, let’s say a big Pharma or Petroleum company, I might well claim that I must obey the fictitious law of supply and demand and raise my rates to $10,000 per plum. That’s a lot of money for a plum, but, again, what’s the value of a human life? I would then earn $2,000,000,000 (two billion) over twenty years, or $100,000,000 (one hundred million) a year, enough to assuage any guilt feelings about profiteering. And enough to pay a creative accounting firm to help me avoid any and all taxes. Or I could violate the law of supply and demand, tighten my belt, and get by on the same measly $500,000 a year.

In both cases I was producing the same amount of plums for the same negligible expenses. The only difference in the equation is that when tempted by a billion bucks or two, I became a Plum Profiteer. In a rare moment of honesty, exceedingly rare for us PPs, I might admit that the increased demand in no way forced me to raise my rates per plum and I only did so because my love of the big bucks was greater than my love for sick and dying humans. Speaking of PPs, Martin Shkreli who raised the price of a life-saving drug (for children) from $13.50 to $750 a pill, serves as our Pharma Profiteers poster boy.

You could substitute any number of products for my plums in the equation and get the same result.

If hypothetical word problems frightened you to the point of paralysis in school, let’s keep it simple and get down to reality. In April 2021 the price of crude oil was around $60 a barrel. In March 2022 it shot up to over $120 a barrel. We’re talking only about the price of oil as it comes out of the ground. The cost of sucking it out of mother earth might have climbed a few pennies per barrel during that year if the famously generous petroleum companies gave raises to their workers. They are notoriously eager to share the wealth. The petroleum companies claim that were required to double the price for crude because the supply went down due to the (predicted) boycott of Russian crude while the demand increased due to a cold front in the north, a warm front in the south, and a looming battle front in Ukraine.

One oil company made a record profit of 22 billion in 2021, with a record profit of 8.9 billion in the last quarter, putting to shame my putative plum profits, all because they were forced, kicking and screaming, to obey that tyrannical law of supply and demand.

Remember: The only law here is that Petroleum companies are Profiteers. An essential corollary is: Petroleum speculators are Profiteers.

You will be tested on this, over and over, especially when elections are near and Petroleum Profiteers want to influence the results.

Don’t take my word for any of this: For you soldiers in the anti-vaxxer army who do their own research, just google “Price of crude oil per barrel 2021,” and you will get 6,540,000 results, enough to keep you too busy to troll public health experts for a while.

When I was a boy I heard Law and Order pronounced in Midwestern twang as Lawn Order. How could I not be opposed?  Our fanatical neighbors, the Joneses, set a bad example by spending hot summer hours pulling microscopic shoots of crab grass out of their manicured lawns, a ritual my overly competitive father made me imitate religiously. As my hearing and appreciation of the concept grew, I took the default position on Law and Order. Well, the Hollywood-movie and TV-cops-series position. I was suitably impressed by that all-American hero, Jimmy Stewart, as an FBI agent. I even believed that J. Edgar Hoover was one of the good guys. I didn’t personally know any cops until the dumbest bully in high school became one.

In my late teenagerhood, my few brushes with the law were innocuous enough. One midnight when two friends and I were cruising slowly up a dark alley, we found ourselves surrounded by unmarked cop cars. We had been out celebrating my boyhood buddy’s graduation from community college. On our way home we had spotted a dead cat in the street. It occurred to one of us that the deceased should be given, if not a decent burial, at least an open-coffin memorial on the front porch of a girl who had recently broken the heart of a friend of ours. We drove slowly down her street, the instigator holding the deceased by its tail, out the window. It was a dark street and we didn’t recognize the target house. The dead cat carrier was not about to admit defeat. It was his plan and he was determined to see it through. He suggested that if we drove slowly up the alley behind her house, he would somehow recognize it from the rear. The driver, being new to the game, turned off the headlights as soon as he turned into the alley which alerted the cops who, we subsequently learned, were staking out the neighborhood because of an epidemic of hub cap thefts.

One car in front, one in back, both with headlights on high beams, both with red lights flashing, a disembodied Voice ordered us out of the car, hands held high. Next the Voice commanded us to lean against a garage door, hands still high. Plainclothes cops patted us down and searched the car. They found the straw boaters the driver and I had worn on our night out on Gaslight Square, but failed to notice the cat corpse lying somewhere in the alley, perhaps buried beneath a cop car. The cops were relieved that we didn’t seem dangerous. We were white college kids and dressed somewhat better than your average midnight hubcap thugs. Two cops tried on the boaters and did a little shuffling dance, as a third interrogated us about what we were doing in the alley at that late hour, and when that question seemed to be beyond the scope of a community college education, they supplied the answer. Why didn’t you tell us that you had been out celebrating and had to stop and take a leak? They didn’t bother to breathalyze us. The concept of DUI had not yet been conceived. As I said, we were white college kids on vacation, good old boys out enjoying the warm summer night. The relieved cops seemed to enjoy the situation. They cracked jokes and one of the dancers apologized when, attempting an old soft gumshoe, he dropped my boater. Gene Kelly he was not.

The whole incident lasted maybe half an hour. Nothing really happened. We were White working class college kids who lived in a White working class neighborhood. We in no way considered ourselves privileged. We judged our position in society by our economic and educational status, not by race. Had we been Black or Brown and stopped in a dark alley a midnight by White cops…?

By the mid- 60s I heard and read about cops beating up long-haired hippies. I wasn’t sure what to believe. I never had long hair and couldn’t grow a beard if I wanted to, but I was on the side of the hirsute section of my cohort. Intellectually. I didn’t participate in protests against the war or burn my draft card, which is why I could only read about the Chicago convention and the Chicago Seven trial in week-old newspapers. Samo samo with the killing of Fred Hampton. I thought of the dumbest bully in high school and could easily imagine him beating protesters and reporters, with relish. He was a racist, but murdering a Black Panther? I had other issues, survival, for instance, weighing on my mind, and if I thought at all about police racism, I would have thought that being a hippie or anti-war protester or any critic of the dominant culture trumped racism in the minds of brutal cops. The White protesters dominated the news, relegating Black victims to interior pages. Then I moved to Philly, just in time for the spectacle of White cops strip searching Black Panthers in the street. A photo made the front page of the morning paper, which I read the day it appeared. Any illusions I had about the city of Brotherly Love vanished when the Police Chief was elected Mayor.

I had an early mid-life, not crisis, but evolution brought on by the news reports about the FBI’s Cointelpro and studying history at an inner city community college. I corrected a long-standing error by evicting J. Edgar from the Hall of Fame and placing him in the Hall of Shame.

In my San Francisco period I joined protests. Pressed against metal barriers at protests, I quickly learned not to rest my hands on the barriers when I witnessed a sociopathic cops smack resting hands with their nightsticks. I put that down to a few sadistically smiling bad apples, California cousins of Southern Sherriff Fatwhiteman. And I can’t say that I condoned throwing handfuls of marbles on the street to sabotage the mounted police. My sympathies were with the horses.

Getting beaten by a federal cop accelerated my evolving position on Law and Order. I no longer adhered to the few-bad-apples, high-school-bullies-who-became-bad-cops hypothesis. I believed that the system, from the politicians, the police chiefs, and the police unions, preferred and protected the high school bullies. Hell, even Hollywood glorified them: think Dirty Harry. Or any number of violent anti-hero-yet-hero cops on the silver screen.

One cool San Francisco morning, I reached the federal building soon after the protest began. The cops had just violently pushed a few young women off the front steps. I walked up a few steps and turned my back to the building, replacing the recently evicted. Suddenly a cop moved in front and Dolores Huerta’d me.  Fortunately, I had armored myself against the cool morning with a wool sweater and an insulated vest. I didn’t end up with a ruptured spleen, like Dolores, but I was in pain. Great pain. I doubled over and I believe that several cops pushed me down. In any case, I lay on the steps and passively resisted, mostly because the pain and the gasping for breath occupied my thoughts. The cop who D-H’d me stood over me and went to work on my rib cage with his nightstick, walloping me three or four or five times. My armor prevented any breakage, limiting the damage to a few cracked and bruised ribs. The cops zip-tied my hands behind my back. Although my thoughts were concentrated on my painful parts, I was aware enough of my wrists to keep the zip-tie handcuffs from being too tight—something I had learned during previous arrests. The cops raised me up, none too delicately, and hauled me inside the building the protesters and I were trying to blockade. They took me to an empty room on the ground floor, and dumped me on the industrial gray carpet. I could have slipped my hands out of the handcuffs, but I was afraid that would only annoy the cops and result in even more pain. I painfully scrunched over to the nearest wall, and slouched against the wall. As all movement was painful, I did my best to remain motionless. For several hours. I was alone in an empty, silent room. I meditated and hoped the sociopath who DH’d me was on a long break playing pinochle with his buddies instead of breaking bones of my buddies outside.

The cops finally remembered me. An older cop, a latino, pudgy and with a benign expression came in. He helped me stand up. He couldn’t help but see and hear that the process was painful, and he expressed a certain sympathy. He marched me out into a large corridor and onto an elevator. As we climbed to the top floor, he said that he knew that the demonstrators outside and I weren’t dangerous criminals, that we weren’t the enemy, and he even liked some of us. When we reached the top floor, the doors opened, other uniformed cops looked in, and the demeanor of the friendly cop did a 180. He instantly donned the tough cop persona and pushed me abruptly and painfully into the room and then into a cell, telling me in a harsh, commanding voice to shut up and get in there. The other, younger, tougher bullies looked on approvingly.  

I stepped out of the federal building and onto the deserted steps and sidewalk late that afternoon, tired, hungry, and in pain. I went to a nearby café where insult was added to injury: Lingering protesters told me that Ben n’ Jerry’s had given free ice cream to all the demonstrators shortly after I had been arrested. I consoled myself with the thought that they were probably flavors I didn’t like.

That was all so last century.

This century the Black Lives Matter movement has taken center stage and the mainstream media has finally noticed that white cops kill Blacks at a remarkable rate, and not just in the South. It made me realize how privileged I was as a White man when the cops stopped me in a dark alley late the night of the dead cat contraband. That childish prank could easily have escalated into an atrocity had we not been White.

This century we have also seen a resurgence of violent White supremacists, resentful of being relegated to the wings. Although the Hooverless FBI tried to alert the previous administration of the danger of home grown neo-Nazi/White supremacist terrorists, that administration and Conservatives in general, yawned and expressed sympathy for the fine people on both sides. Whites training with military weapons in the countryside were not as concerning as unarmed BLM protesters in largely peaceful protests. The Law and Order sloganeers did manage some outrage when a federal security guard was assassinated during a BLM protest in Oakland, CA, but decided it was old news when we learned that the assassin was a Boogaloo Boi trying to incite a new Civil War.  

Especially after the murder of George Floyd in the great northern state of Minnesota, the defund-the-police movement gathered steam. While I have great sympathy for the defund-the-police movement in general, specifically, I am opposed to the misnomer. Some overzealous activists, a few, might be in favor of completely defunding the police, but most, including me, want to renovate or overhaul or (add the verb of your choice, but not reform, please, which usually leads to meaningless changes) the police, top to bottom, root out the whackos and high school bullies zealously defended by the police unions, take away some of the military grade weaponry, create a national data base of police violence, and reassign some responsibilities, such as decomposition events of mentally ill persons, to trained mental health professionals, or to teams of cops and shrinks. I do not want to completely defund the police. When a man was mugged in front of my house, I called the cops.

And really, overhauling our criminal justice/law enforcement system is pro-Law and Order.

Presently, I find myself in a surprising position on the Law and Order issue: I seem to be more pro-Law and Order than the vast majority of today’s Republicans who seem to have abandoned Law and Order as one of their bedrock principles. I applaud the Capitol police who heroically fought the January 6^th insurrectionists, buying time that allowed the Vice President, Representatives, and Senators to flee to safety. I mourn the injured and dead Capitol police who valiantly defended the rule of law. Republicans want to make a martyr of the insurrectionist who was killed trying to lead the mob into the House Chambers. Progressives assist the FBI in tracking down the insurrectionists. Republicans, well, to be fair, the Republican Party, claim that the insurrectionists who threatened to hang the Vice President and trashed the Capitol, smearing shit on the walls, were “ordinary citizens engaged in legitimate political discourse.”

Although a protest veteran with a substantial rap sheet, it never ever occurred to me to spray bear spray into the faces of cops, beat them with flag poles or fire extinguishers, or charge them and push them back with their own metal barriers. Not even the cop who beat me up. It never ever ever occurred to me to smear shit on any walls. Not since my potty training days. It seems that I have been too ignorant to realize that those were legitimate forms of political discourse.

Although more Law and Order oriented than today’s Republican party, I confess that I am, at heart, somewhat Weak on Crime. I’m not in favor of putting people in prison, not to the extent that has led to our prison-industrial complex. I believe in repentance, redemption, and second chances. Even third or fourth chances. I am in favor of putting some criminals in prison: Sloganeers and screamers who dabble in treason and other high crimes and misdemeanors, from Nixon (Paris Peace Talks) to Reagan (Iran hostage negotiations and Contragate) to Trump, (Ukraine-gate and the January 6^th Insurrection), all those who cynically scream about the war on crime, who claim to be tough on crime all the while committing serious crimes of their own, they belong in prison.

I could go on and on, but I do have some restraint. About three weeks into their trial (not at the end as depicted in the film), Dellinger of the Chicago Seven (not Hayden as depicted in the film) attempted to read off the names of nearly 5,000 servicemen who had died in Vietnam during the trial. I don’t remember reading about that at the time, which for me would have been in another week old newspaper, but I knew about some of those names before Dellinger did. In any case, Judge Hoffman did not let Dellinger get very far (contrary to what was depicted in the movie). My own judgment will stop me after listing the names of a select few who died while we talked the talk about stopping police brutality, but failed to walk the walk: Rodney King, Michael Brown, Amadou Diallo, Breona Taylor, George Floyd, and on and on…

I liked to think of myself as a tolerant person, but on close in(tro)spection I find that a thriving crop of intolerance has taken root in the fertile fields of my convoluted brain. The impetus for this in(tro)spection was learning, second hand, about a long lost friend, a highly educated scientist, retired but volunteering with a climate change non-profit –all to the good—whose husband is a continuing supporter of ex-Pres. Trump—all to the bad. Reportedly, the old friend sighed and said they simply don’t talk politics. 

Hearing this, my first thought was “how can she tolerate living with someone like that?” My second thought was, “I did.” For too many years, many years ago, my partner was a Nixon supporter who went into the closet after Watergate. We simply did not talk politics. Fortunately, for my sanity, well, for both our sanities, we went separate ways before Reagan ran for president. My third and subsequent thoughts were that despite my checkered past, I could no longer tolerate living with a Nixon supporter, much less a Trump supporter. It’s bad enough that a few family members still have Trump leanings. They live nearly two thousand miles east of Eden with two mountain ranges and vast desert separating us. I tolerate them for 40-minute Zoom sessions, and even then only if we talk about our less than idyllic childhoods. Or the weather. But even the weather isn’t safe. My fault. Too often I cannot resist a snide remark about climate change deniers. Or when a recent blizzard left many Texans without power, I casually mentioned that it was just a Chinese hoax. Or when they ask about California’s out–of-control fires, I can’t help but lament that we didn’t rake our forests.    

Examining the cerebral weeds more closely, I have come to realize that I am intolerant of most Trump supporters, especially the politicians. I’m not talking about not wanting to live with them. I’m talking about spending five minutes with them. That would be intolerable. What could we possibly talk about? COVID? Vaccines? I feel certain that some innocent remark would escape from my mouth, and there are many to choose from. Do you do your own research? Did you inject bleach? Have you read the study about the good and bad benefits of Ivermectin? The good is that it will cure COVID, and the bad is that it’s a dewormer and will get rid of your tapeworms, which means you’ll gain weight. Has your research shown that the microchips in the COVID vaccine make you an easy target for the Jewish space lasers?

During the pandemic, I have gotten into the habit of watching PBS news. Previously, I found all TV news programs intolerable, especially the happy ones. In the movie Take the Money and Run, W. Allen has an insightful scene about the worst possible punishment in prison: He goes into semi-solitary confinement with a non-stop-talking insurance salesman. That movie was made before the Trump phenomenon, and I can’t help but think that now the insurance salesman should be replaced by (choose any from the House or Senate) Trump supporter. Confinement with Trump himself would be akin to capital punishment, against which I am adamantly opposed. Recently, PBS news ran an interview with a Senator who was a rabid Trump supporter. He projected anger at everything Biden was doing, especially Afghanistan and the debt. When the far too moderate moderator tried to interject a few facts about Afghanistan and the debt during the Trump administration, he merely shouted louder and faster, while ignoring the questions. It was a two- or three-minute segment. I confess that I could not tolerate being with that Senator for one minute longer, not even remotely. I also could not tolerate the moderator’s pusillanimity. PBS may strive to be impartial, fair, and balanced, but how impartial, fair, and balanced is it to let some idiotic politician rant without rebuttal? Without insisting on facts? Perhaps the frustrated moderators rant and rave and kick their cats after such a surrender, but I have a sneaking suspicion that they take comfort in their comfortable-class moderation and generous paychecks.

We live in an age of alternative facts, some delivered with a semblance of reason by dishonest press secretaries, some shouted with but the slightest semblance of sanity by dishonest politicians and foolish followers. We live in an age of mass media which has become a super-spreader of misinformation creating a pandemic of algorithmic-infected minds. Like all pandemics, this one is no respecter of class, economic status, race, or gender (although the virus might have a certain predilection for the Y Chromosome). My lamentable pandemic-enforced television habits have shown me that I could not tolerate five minutes in a confined space with a large portion of the population: the Trump shills, shouters, and screamers; the Q followers; the Proud Boys, the Boogalo Bois, and all the good ol white boys; the trollers; the stalkers of members of local education boards; the stalkers of election officials; the stalkers of vaccine advocates; and on and on and on. I could not tolerate five minutes with any one of this large segment of America. I would not have a beer with them, share a meal, not even a cup of coffee and a doughnut. I just couldn’t tolerate those intolerable people. I might be able to nod my head to them as I walked on by, but I wouldn’t smile.

Good liberals, of which I am not one, claim to have compassion for those people who were left behind. I make no such claim. I believe that many were not so much left behind as stayed behind. The back seats of my seventh grade class were occupied by what I think of as the black-leather-jacket crowd. I confess that some might not have had black leather jackets, which were expensive and therefore rare in my lower middle class 1950’s neighborhood. That crowd sat in the back row and did not participate other than to mock a boy who seemed effeminate. They were all older, 15, 16, and 17, recidivists waiting until they were 18 and could drop out of school and get a job in the brewery or can factory. One of them, Richard V., was 17 and six feet seven. When we placed soccer in the schoolyard during gym class he was always the goalie for the winning team. I have a clear mental image of him standing at the goal line, tall and straight in his black leather jacket, his shiny black hair slicked back to a D.A. The field was only about 30 yards long and if he caught a goal attempt he could throw the ball through the opposite goal posts while we pre-pubescent dwarves fluttered uselessly around him, our upraised arms barely reaching his shoulders.   

Not only did the black-leather-jacket crowd sit in the back but they stayed behind. I had nothing against them. They usually left me alone. Once, in science class, one of them punched me in the chest because I gave a long and complicated answer to justify an incorrect answer. I was clearly boysplaining. Looking back, I take satisfaction in knowing that, while the teacher seemed doubtful, my abuser was too ignorant to realize that my answer was pure nonsense.

I confess that I do sometimes judge a book by its cover but my tastes have changed over time. For instance, as a teenager, I was a sucker for books with lurid covers, while as an old fart I find them ridiculous. Equally, as an unwitting refugee in the conflict between humanitarians who said that clothes did not make the man and clothiers who maintained that they, and nothing else, did, I sided intellectually with the humanitarians but practically with the clothiers. I judged, and still do, people by their clothes, somewhat. But these are snap judgments, like flash floods in ephemeral streambeds, soon gone, leaving only a trickle I can easily step over. Some of my best friends wear black leather jackets but do not sport D.A.s, not necessarily as a statement but because of a lack of hair. As a teenager, the son of good friends wore, even in warm rooms, a black leather jacket, not because he was a back-of-the classroom staybehind, but because he was Goth. He even dyed his black hair blacker. He was an honor student and now a Ph.D. Again, sadly, no D.A.

In my brief and undistinguished military career, I met many who had stayed or been left behind. It wasn’t always easy to tell the difference. There were kids who joined because they wanted to make the world safe for democracy by fighting evil communism in a far-away land they couldn’t find on a map. There were kids who joined because the mines, the breweries, and the can companies weren’t hiring, at least not their kind. There were kids who didn’t make it out of high school. There were a few kids, teenagers who never owned a toothbrush—one was appropriately but cruelly nicknamed Moss Gums. There was a Sioux whose teeth disintegrated when the army dentist began drilling cavities. There were the black-leather-jacket guys who didn’t look so intimidating in their olive drab underwear and their heads shaved. There were aggressive rednecks and angry Blacks. It was all new to me. I formed close bonds with a few, and, because I had no choice, tolerated many that I could not tolerate today, especially not certain officers who enjoyed their power over those kids.

I work with people who might have been left behind but had the will to not stay behind, not the tough guys in the back of the class deliberately staying behind, but refugees who fled intolerable persecution: women beaten and raped by macho partners; Mayan girls raped by macho ladino (non-indigenous) men who think they can rape indigenous women with impunity, which they can and do; lesbians raped by macho men who think they’ll make real women of the victims; gays or transgender persons raped by macho men who think they can do horrible things to gays; etc, etc. If you don’t see at least a glimmering of a pattern here, I don’t think I could tolerate your company for five minutes, nor could I take five minutes with a macho man. And I used to be one. Well, wanted to be one.

I no longer want to be a macho man. Now my fantasies are different. Now, I sometimes fantasize about hiring a sicario (hit-man) to go after some particularly egregious macho man. And I still claim to be opposed to capital punishment.  

Pondering still further, I see that my creeping intolerance has been on the rise since the previous century, even to the pre-Reagan days. The woman who replaced me in a group house in San Francisco had been a regular in what I called the backgammon-and-cocaine set in the North Beach barrio. Shortly before moving in, she saw the light and switched to another game-and-drug set, evangelism. I didn’t have to tolerate her long because I was moving out. I bumped into her a year or two later. Batting her eyes and playing the role of the all-knowing seeker of knowledge, she told me that surely all my archaeological experience had shown me that the bible was literally correct? Fortunately, for my sanity if not hers, my emphatic two-letter response ended the conversation and I went my separate way. However, I suffered lasting trauma. A year or two later, now into the Reagan Age, an old high school friend somehow tracked me down and told me he was coming to town and wanted to get together. It’s only a slight exaggeration to say that my sleeping and waking hours for the week prior to his visit were disturbed by the fear that he had become a religious nut. On a trip to St. Louis I couldn’t help but notice an astounding number of religious-nut radio stations. I racked my brain for an excuse to get out of meeting my old classmate. Not that I was afraid of him, but I was afraid that my religious-nut intolerance would provoke me to a level of rudeness that would cause me many sleepless hours staring at the dark ceiling and thinking of the witty things I should have said instead of the witless things I shouldn’t have said. Fortunately for my sleep habits, he was neither a religious nut nor a Reaganite and I enjoyed his visit. 

I deny that I am intolerant of all religious people. Through the years I have worked with a great many and some of my best friends are religious. We seldom talk religion. It’s not a question of avoiding an incendiary topic or tip-toeing around a divisive subject as my long-lost friend and her Trump-loving husband do.  It’s more that we respect our differences. Well, perhaps some of the Nuns I have worked with simply bit their tongues while only occasionally easing up on the bite to tease me with gentle remarks such as I am not too old and stiff for kneeling.  

I do occasionally invade a church or temple to attend a baptism, confirmation, wedding, or memorial service, but I am reluctant to enter as a tourist. Whenever I do enter one of the great churches, cathedrals, or basilicas in Europe or Latin America to admire the architecture and art, I feel uncomfortable and out of place, as if I were in some stranger’s house. I cannot help but think that monumental architecture would be more admirable if it housed the homeless, and I feel as if I were in what should be some homeless persons’ house. There are many decent and tolerable religious people in the world, and I don’t want to accuse them of hypocrisy, but Christ did not preach in some monumental building. I don’t know about Mohammed, but I suspect that neither did he. Buddha sat under a tree.   

My intolerance cannons are not trained solely on right-wingers and religious fanatics. In the Reagan years I participated in many protests against our genocidal policy in Central America. I did community service a few times because of certain mass arrests and convictions for expressing my convictions. Community service was easily tolerable since I was able to choose service for an organization I approved of. The intolerable part was participating in long meetings in which many fellow arrestees and I plotted our legal strategy. The universal theme of the meetings was togetherness: any decisions we made, we should make as a unified group. We debated at nearly intolerable length about whether we should plead guilty and pay fines, plead guilty and go to jail to clog up the system, or plead innocent and go to trial to clog up the system. In one meeting, I sat next to a young gay man who kept ranting semi-sotto voce about a young lesbian who had the floor for what seemed a long time. No doubt the rants made it seem longer. The young man kept saying he found her and everything she said intolerable, which encouraged me to sympathize with her. When the meeting finally wrapped up with no strategy agreed upon other than the importance of unity, the young lesbian said that she would like to meet afterwards with those who wanted to plead guilty and clog up the jails, particularly women.  

I couldn’t tolerate any more of those meetings, pled innocent, was convicted, and did community service for an alternative energy cooperative that had a grant to insulate houses for poor people. The first house we insulated belonged to an affluent couple with a Lexus in the garage. 

I was recently at Smith College where I was tempted to deface a large white banner on a lush green lawn. The large, black words on the banner, “INTOLERANCE, HATE AND PREJUDICE ARE NOT WELCOME HERE,” were the cause of my temptation. I wanted to dash to the nearest paint store and buy a can of black spray paint and somehow replace the weak word WELCOME with TOLERATED. Had I done so, I would also have put a comma after HATE, to demonstrate my intolerance for serial comma killers.  

I could go on and on, and to many it may seem that I have, but the simple fact is that I am intolerant. I am intolerant of many things and many people. Judging by the political divisions in the country, I can proudly boast that I am intolerant of about half the population. I am not ashamed of my intolerance and do not hide it in a closet. I have long since given up any foolish attempt to scale the heights to enlightenment. I firmly and proudly proclaim that I have attained a solid footing of discriminating intolerance. I am on the smoothly paved road to contentment.

Well, I’m no longer a 77-YEAR-OLD WHITE MAN due to an unavoidable change in circumstances but still posting under that false title, which, I confess, makes me a liar. If you can’t figure out which adjective inevitably changed, I would bet the ranch that you scored big, fat, ugly zeroes on word problems in math. Well, I suppose I could have changed the noun, but the probability of that happening in my time of life approaches that dreaded number written in bright red on your exam papers.

There have been questions from far-seeing readers—well, maybe just one reader—about what I would do when the inevitable happened and why the hell did I choose a blog name that might make me a liar. I have no good answer other than to refer you, dear lonely reader, to a previous post in which I confess to being a Liar.

While I have no compunctions against lying, it was never my intention to lie this particular lie. I only started this nagging blog with the ridiculous and fantastic hope that I could remind certain family members of those halcyon days when we were all Antifa and that stalwart stance made our parents members of the Greatest Generation.  Another in a long line of my many futile hopes.

Despite the futility of that hope, I continue with this bossy blog because it overrules my inherent laziness, prevails against my predilection to distraction, and commands me to continue doing that which makes me a liar.

The beauty and joy in this confession for you and me, dear reader, is that it is short.

In my long life I have learned enough ignorance to overflow a municipal landfill. A very large landfill. Most of it, I believe, in the first quarter or so. But is that belief based on ignorance?

When I say Learned Ignorance, I do not mean the ignorance discussed in De docta ignorantia, that I skimmed on the internet and which deals with deities and humans in a manner about which I am ignorant. To be clear about the subject, I wanted to see what Miriam-Webster had to say and was again disappointed. She defines ignorance as “the state or fact of being ignorant,” thank you very much. She goes on to add “destitute of knowledge or education…UNAWARE, UNINFORMED.” This is a sadly incomplete definition. In my world view, as it should be in everyone’s, ignorance is not only UNAWARE or UNINFORMED, but also MISINFORMED. We can be destitute of knowledge by simply getting our facts wrong. Often we get our facts wrong because someone has taught us alternative facts. We can be destitute in education by being wrongly educated. When I was MISINFORMED about a subject and incorporate that misinformation into my belief systems, I LEARNED IGNORANCE.

If you’ll allow a moment’s diversion, I would like to distinguish between ignorance and stupidity, a difference both important and personal. Many friends, family, and acquaintances, and how can I forget the long line of professors? throughout the years, have seen fit to inform me that I am stupid. I reject that far too frequently used insult. Ignorant, yes, but stupid? Don’t be stupid. M-W is yet again disappointing in her definition of the noun “Stupid.” If she had left it alone after her first, simple and concise definition: “slow of mind : OBTUSE; lacking intelligence or reason : BRUTISH,“ I would have no complaints. But no, she has to go on and on, finally ending with: “VEXATIOUS, EXASPERATING.” Annoyingly, she felt the need to capitalize the last two nouns, which, annoyingly, might be the meaning so many intended when calling me stupid.  I confess that by those last synonyms I would qualify for stupid. But I insist that, as vexatious and exasperating as I might be, I’m not lacking in intelligence or reason. I’m merely ignorant. In any case, this post is about ignorance, not stupidity.

Perhaps some in their ignorance will think it stupid of me, but I will give my definitions of ignorance and stupidity and they will be the only correct definitions for the rest of this post. Ignorance is simply lacking knowledge or possessing faulty knowledge. Stupidity is simply lacking intelligence. We use the word Stupid as a common put-down, an insult, but that’s ignorant. Some are born lacking in intelligence and the ability to learn a great many things that prevents them from overcoming their ignorance. Perhaps in our Australopithecine or Cro-Magnon days we left them out to die, but we have learned compassion, and we (should) nurture them and protect them. We even send some to Congress. Hell, we made one President. Why then insult them?

I am not ashamed of my ignorance. While I don’t brag about it, I confess that I sometimes make a vain effort to hide it. But it’s true. I am ignorant. We are all ignorant. No use denying or dissembling. Ignorance is a human condition. We cannot be aware of or have knowledge of or be (correctly) informed about everything. Neither can we comprehend everything, although I would argue that comprehension failures fall more in the Stupid than the Ignorant category. We must remain ignorant of practically an infinity of facts in this practically infinite universe, and we can only learn a vanishingly small amount of knowledge to overcome a pitiful percent of our ignorance. For instance, we no longer believe that the sun revolves around the Earth.  And give or take a billion years, we have learned the approximate age of our planet. But we remain ignorant about the life span of our sun, or any star. We do not know what happens to matter sucked into a black hole. We do not know why some COVID 19 victims become long haulers. We do not know why so many intelligent people can believe three impossible things before breakfast. At least I don’t.

We are all born ignorant. It’s as simple as that. Not the strongest nor the fastest, not equipped with vicious fangs nor claws, not protected by scales nor thick pelts, not able to produce protective poisons, born ignorant and slow to get on our feet, we puny humans, in order to survive, must overcome a certain amount of ignorance. We must learn. We have learned to live in social groups composed of families, friends, clans, tribes, and nations, and, surviving, we learn, individually or in the same social groups, to improve the quality of our lives, to increase our comfort and pleasure. We even learn for the pleasure of learning, for the gratification of overcoming ignorance. We also teach, individually or in those same social groups to ensure the survival of ourselves, our children, our societies, even the entire population of the earth, and, surviving, we teach to improve the quality of life. We even teach for the pleasure of teaching, for the pleasure of seeing our children and others learn.

And voilà, because of our capacity to learn and to teach, we puny, ignorant creatures have managed to become the dominant species in the world.

Before we pat ourselves on the back we should confess that we have, in our ignorance, wiped out whole species of living creatures and, since the internal combustion and nuclear ages, we have, in our ignorance, put ourselves on the brink of destroying life on the planet several times. And we are by no means out of the (burning) woods yet. How have we achieved this precarious state? By learning and teaching ignorance. We learn and teach ignorance, unwittingly or by design. Some are carefully schooled in ignorance, some self-taught, and far too many are willfully ignorant, either for pleasure, personal gain, or to avoid unpleasant facts.  An ignorant parent passes on his ignorance, as does any ignorant teacher, again, unwittingly or by design.

The history of humankind is the long thread of learning knowledge and gaining wisdom.  Entwined to form a virtual DNA-like strand is humanunkind’s equally long thread of learning and teaching ignorance.

I confess that I have always been a slow learner—just ask my grade school or high school teachers. Well, they’re probably no longer around, and I think that my mother burned all my report cards. You’ll have to take my word for it. But what does being a slow learner mean? I learned a smattering of science and math and history and geography easily enough, but I was very slow to learn which teachers and texts to trust and believe. My high school football coach also taught a Health class. One day, while looking fixedly at Jerry T. who was wearing a pink shirt, he interrupted his lecture on contagion to teach us the essential fact that the color pink belonged only on women’s underwear. I realized early on in that course that Coach didn’t know much about health or science and only taught the course because he had to. Still, he was the coach, and I respected him and his opinion.

When I read that we could survive a nuclear attack if we fled to a fall-out shelter, like Cherokee Caves, I believed it. I even considered digging a shelter in our back yard, but decided that was too much work, and anyway my father would invent some complaint about having a giant hole in our little back yard. I have always been credulous and have a tendency to regard the printed word as being carved in stone. And I must confess that I have always been quicker at learning ignorance than true knowledge. Which is how I came to overload that municipal garbage dump in my mind.

I grew up in a white, working-class family and neighborhood, surrounded by racists, anti-Semites, homophobes, xenophobes and misogynists that I learned to, if not idolize, at least respect. Well, accept. Teenagers don’t respect adults who aren’t coaches. My parents taught me a great deal of ignorance. Some was harmless enough and might even have been helpful psychologically or at least pleasing. They taught me to believe that some fat man flew around the world in a sleigh pulled by reindeer leaving toys for good little boys and girls, and lumps of coal for the other kind. They taught me to believe that a magical creature would leave a dime under my pillow in exchange for a tooth. With inflation the price skyrocketed to a quarter. They taught me to believe that a rabbit hopped around promiscuously strewing chocolate bunnies and little chocolate balls that looked suspiciously like bunny droppings, as well as dyed, hardboiled chicken eggs, and disgusting little, yellow, marshmallow chicks. I didn’t even have to be a good boy to get those goodies. All that misinformation did me no lasting harm, except for a few psychological scars due to the lumps of coal I found in my hung-with-care (we didn’t have a chimney) stocking.

My parents also taught me some ignorant things, such as gender roles. My father was a very stern man with definite ideas of what a man should be and do. My brother and I did the basement and outdoor chores while my sister helped my mother with the cooking and laundry. (We all had to help with dishes and sweeping the kitchen floor because my father, an ex-military man, had pulled a lot of KP for his many transgressions.) During the Eisenhower recession when my father was unemployed for some months and my mother got a job in the Sears Credit Department, my father, to his credit, did some housework. I can still picture him wearing an apron while vacuuming. Not in the least to his credit, he cooked a few meals. All I remember of those failures was the evening he fried eggs in an iron skillet for half an hour or so. Not only was biting into those sunny-side-up eggs as rewarding as biting a truck tire, but I had to scrape for what seemed like hours to clean the blackened bits off the skillet.

Neither did that learned ignorance do me lasting harm, but the cost, measured in time, effort, and humiliation, especially humiliation, to unlearn it was high. For instance, I was ignorant about laundry, which became evident when I stuffed the university washing machine with a load of clothes including a new red hoodie. Despite Coach’s edict, I wore pink underwear and dress shirts for a semester or two. I did quickly learn to iron—this was before perma press—and earned change for the soda and washing machines by ironing shirts for affluent friends. I also learned to hate Oxford cloth.

Young people experiment with new personas, trying them on and discarding them like badly ironed, pink shirts. I tried on various traits that I thought would make me cool. I put in more effort striving for coolness, unsuccessfully on the days I wore pink shirts, than I did striving for knowledge. I took up smoking because it was cool in those days. All the heroes in all the movies smoked. A cigarette was a necessary prop for the cool role. As was getting drunk. All the heroes in all the movies got drunk. I learned several really cool drinking games involving cigarettes. Drinking to excess and chain smoking seemed certain signs of cool maturity. After the Surgeon General’s Report in 1964 unequivocally linked smoking with lung cancer, I continued to smoke. I knew better than those uncool doctors who were themselves chain smokers. Besides I was young and healthy. I was willfully ignorant. I read that excessive alcohol intake killed brain cells, rotted your liver, and threw a wet blanket on your libido, but I did not stop drinking to excess. I was young and healthy, believed I could spare a few brain cells, and, anyway, I had few outlets for my libido. I was willfully ignorant.

It is not always easy to distinguish the motives of ignorance teachers. My father didn’t believe in Santa, the Tooth Fairy, or E. Bunny but he taught my siblings and me to believe in those myths because it was pleasant all around and, as I said, harmless. He taught me his brand of racism, anti-Semitism, xenophobia, homophobia, and misogyny because he thought it was right thinking. Hollywood, Bogie, and Bacall with their cigarettes and the Thin Man with his martinis, taught a lot of ignorance, but not maliciously. Yet now when I watch old black and white movies I am put off by all the smoking and drinking and pretentious savoir faire, and the cynical devil on my shoulder whispers sweet nothings about the malicious motives of cigarette companies that paid film companies to prominently display their products, products they knew to be harmful, products they deliberately made addictive. The cigarette pushers supplied the U.S. Army with garbage-scow loads of free samples, which the enabling military honchos generously doled out to young G.I.s, hooking future customers. For a year I had more free cigarettes than I could smoke. It was cool to smoke, to fire your weapon with a cigarette dangling from your lips, even to smoke in POL Points. However, I was not so ignorant as to smoke in an ammo dump, which some deceased GI’s apparently did, causing me some hours of pain and discomfort and causing themselves unbearable pain that ended in an instant.  As soon as I took my gas mask off, I lit a cigarette. As soon as every attack ended, I lit a cigarette. In my ignorance I enjoyed what was freely and maliciously given. Or is that too cynical?

Impressively, I rarely see anyone smoking cigarettes at the local university, regular cigarettes, that is. Now ecigs are cool. The smoking students may be among the best and brightest academically, but they also excel at learning ignorance. We humans have an aptitude for learning ignorance. Well, I certainly did and do.

I won’t get into religion here, because, as I believe I said in an earlier post, I don’t want to inspire an inquisition or a fatwa.  Let me simply state that I learned the Ten Commandments by heart and without question. Only later did I wonder about the Commandment against killing. It seems to be the only Commandment that has exceptions. Apart from the ridiculousness of the bayonet exercises we had in Basic Training, we also had to learn the religious call and response: What is the purpose of the bayonet? The purpose of the bayonet is to kill! And it seems to my poor brain that the more orthodox the Old Testament religion, the more the congregation finds exceptions to that Commandment. Possibly there was an asterisk or footnote on the stone tablet that Moses couldn’t decipher.

Humanunkind was taught and willingly learned ignorance that led many to do great evil in the name of doing good. To give but a few examples: Good Christian Germans killed millions of Jews, other non-Aryans, leftists, and homosexuals, as well as the occasional neighbors whose property they coveted, because they had learned and in turn taught the false knowledge that they were wiping out evil by purifying their superior race; the good Muslims who attacked the twin towers in New York, killing thousands, including janitors, busboys, and office clerks inside the buildings, as well as first responders and bystanders outside, had learned and in turn taught the false knowledge that by attacking the symbol of the non-believing evil empire, they were doing good and would go directly to paradise as martyrs; a thousand years earlier, good Christian Crusaders slaughtered and pillaged Muslim people because they had learned and in turn taught the false knowledge that if they freed the Holy Lands from infidels they would be doing good; recently, good Buddhists have been massacring Muslims in Myanmar for much the same reasons.

Well, I suppose I have touched on religion after promising I wouldn’t. In my defense I am not talking about the religions, only the adherents.

Teaching ignorance has always been with us, but has evolved beyond mere product placement into international business enterprises, profitable enterprises, some benign, some malicious. The ubiquitous tabloids with their ridiculous headlines that shouted at bored customers in the store check-out line seemed harmless and benign enough, even amusing:  ALIENS CLONE ELVIS FROM BLUE SUEDE SHOES; TITANIC SURVIVORS ALIVE, FROZEN IN ICEBERG; BIGFOOT, YETI, AND NESSIE FORM JAZZ TRIO; WEINER: I’LL STICK IT OUT. Well, OK, that last one might have crossed the malicious line.  

At first I thought QAnon was a high-tech version of the tabloids, full of ridiculous but harmless tales too absurd to be taken seriously. Jewish space lasers? A Cabal of Satan-worshipping pedophiles linked in a global sex-trafficking ring headquartered in the basement of a pizzeria in Baltimore? No one could take these fantasies as anything but jokes. But an armed believer drove to the pizzeria and shot it up, hoping…what? To free the child victims? To assassinate Hilary Clinton who was surely there busily abusing children? To fulfill some hero fantasy? And now hordes of anti-vaxxers believe that the COVID vaccine continues microchips.

The ridiculous tabloids prospered in the age of mass miscommunications and gave birth to the monster of MAIMSTREAM MEDIA. Maimstream Media is my term for the social, radio, and television networks that maliciously teach harmful, herd ignorance. They know they are peddling harmful misinformation, but they find it profitable. Those who teach harmful ignorance for spite or personal gain are public enemies. At least my enemies. Nixon had his Enemies List. Why can’t I have mine?

Thanks to harmful ignorance taught by the Maimstream Media, the longest surviving democracy on the planet was shaken by a coup attempt, a rather pathetic attempt because the enthusiasm of the insurrectionists and their teachers was completely overwhelmed by their incompetence. As well as the cowardice of the principal player who told the crowd he would be with them, then cowered in a secure location to watch, fingers crossed, no doubt.

We can blame our teachers for our ignorance. I certainly blame mine. But ultimately, after I left childhood behind, I became responsible for my ignorance. I have lived my adult years in an age of readily accessible information (as well as misinformation), and I am responsible for my beliefs, ignorant though they may be. I continued smoking long after I was aware of scientific information that it was unhealthy. I was not aware of human-caused climate change when I laughed joyously while watching the needle steadily arc toward E across the fuel gage of my roommate’s big Bonneville convertible as he sped along I-70. Even had I been aware, I believe I would still have laughed and enjoyed myself while I broke the Tenth Commandment by coveting my roomie’s muscle car.

How then can I blame the truly astounding number of people who believe truly astounding, if not impossible things? Well, I don’t really blame the masses who believe that lasers from Jewish space ships are causing the fires in California. They simply do not have the intellectual capacity to avoid ridiculous beliefs and it would be ignorant of me to blame them. I do blame the Jan 6 insurrectionists. A few might not have the intellectual capacity to reject the ridiculous Stop-The-Steal teachings of Trump, et al, while nearly all have the capacity but are willfully ignorant. They allow their racism and xenophobia to overrule their reason. Most are white supremacist wanna-be warriors. All willingly wallow in the toxic waste dump of ignorance spewed by the Maimstream Media. All are losers.

I blame the anti-vax, anti-mask crowd, most of them, for our failure to reach herd immunity. No matter how vehemently they say it isn’t, their position is political. They have the intellectual capacity to examine their beliefs, to study the science and data, but they are willfully ignorant. I mean microchips in the vaccine? A question of liberty? In the liberty or death choice they have chosen death, and not only theirs. Their ignorance is truly harmful. They spread this new Delta variant and keep the virus alive and well and evolving, possibly into even more virulent variants.

Well, I intended this post to be about ignorance, not stupidity, and painted myself into a corner by saying that it was ignorant to make fun of stupid people. I confess my ignorance, but the adjectives VEXATIOUS and EXASPERATING, seem to have been invented for the anti-mask and anti-vaccine crowd. They allow their brains to be shot full of learned ignorance from the Maimstream Media instead of having life-saving vaccines shot into their arms. Scientific and statistical data, logic and reason, teach us to wear masks and get vaccinated, while willful ignorance teaches them to ignore the science, the data, the logic, until they end up in an ICU, intubated, and dying. Their willful ignorance prevents all of us from achieving herd immunity but the anti-vax crowd has achieved herd stupidity. When I read of the painful, gasping COVID19 death of a prominent anti-vaxxer, I experience a moment, a brief moment, of schadenfreude, then a moment of guilt, also brief. For their sakes, I hope that deathbed conversions lead to paradise. 

All the blather these days about Critical Race Theory has inspired me to come up with a theory of my own: The Critical Loser Theory.

There are many types of losers, Gracious Losers, Good Losers, Indifferent Losers, Poor Losers, Sore Losers, and Complete Losers, to name a few. I confess that I HAVE BEEN the last four. Many times. I have also been the first two. Rarely. Because of my inexperience in those categories, Good or Gracious Losers will not concern us here except for a brief statement: Good or Gracious Losers are also Winners. However, my long lifetime of experience in Indifferent-, Poor-, Sore- and Complete-Loserhood enables me to make fine distinctions between those groups. In a nutshell, the principal difference between an Indifferent Loser, a Poor Loser, and a Sore Loser is one of degree, the amount of anger or emotional upset. A Complete Loser refuses to admit a done-deal defeat.

I’ve had several long losing streaks, and I don’t just mean at Monopoly or Scrabble. I take comfort in the certainty that I’m not alone. I mean, no one wins all the time, except possibly at board games. I confess that if I ever met someone who always won, outside of board games, I would be tempted to lose my pacifist principals.

Beginning in third grade, I had a secret—because it was known only to me—competition with Jane K. to see who could finish our in-class written assignments first. I don’t remember when the competition ended, fifth grade or so. I lost every time, but, Complete Loser that I was, for several years I refused to graciously, or even grudgingly, admit that Jane was smarter and faster. The result was that I could not break my habit of scribbling furiously, and, while Jane had elegant and effortless handwriting throughout grade school and high school and, no doubt, into adulthood, I developed, without the bother of going to med school, a nearly illegible and painful scrawl. 

In my baseball years, beginning at age 12, only in the very first game I played was I on the winning side. The demise of that impressive–to me only–winning streak wasn’t entirely my fault, although in my second game I could have made us winners. I was at bat with two outs in the last inning with the tying and winning runs in scoring position. The game was on my slumping shoulders. People in the stands, family, friends, and strangers, cheered me on. But I was too nervous to swing the bat and took three straight fastballs—little-league fast—down the middle, and Poor Loser that I was, I complained loudly to the umpire each time he called a strike and more loudly when he called me out and the ball game over. I eventually stopped being a Poor Loser, as far as baseball was concerned. With practice, I became a better hitter, and, with practice, rose in the Loserhood ranks from Poor to Indifferent: I expected that my team would lose and my expectations were not disappointed, not once.

Yes, I have lost many times in my long life, but only in my own small-potatoes way, except when I was on the losing side in a war. Losing a war is a big deal. Again, it was not entirely my fault. A quick internet search reveals that there were about 2,700,000 other losers on my team in that war. None was entirely to blame either. Perhaps many of the low level losers, including me, were Poor Losers, but only the glorious leaders and top brass were Complete Losers. Gen. Westmoreland, famous for enlightening us on the fact that the Vietnamese didn’t feel or mourn the loss of their dead, was the brassiest, stating in front of a camera: “The Oriental doesn’t put the same high price on life as does a Westerner. Life is plentiful. Life is cheap in the Orient.”

What kept me from being a Sore Loser was that I truly did not care if we won or lost. Neither was I an Indifferent Loser—only sociopaths are indifferent about war—due to my single-minded goal of getting back to the world in one piece. My second goal was to make it back alive, even if missing a few pieces. My third goal was to get my buddies back to the world but not in boxes draped with Old Glory. I was nearly a Complete Loser because, when I was involved in that losing proposition and read that we were losing the war, I objected. Semantically. I didn’t see us as losing so much as being in command yet not winning. And after the last GIs left by helicopter from the roof of the embassy—six years after I picked up my pieces and returned to the world—I still didn’t consider that we lost. We didn’t really lose the war so much as our will to keep at it, which I thought was a good thing to lose. A quick internet search shows that about 58,000 Americans were wasted—a euphemism but descriptive. Nearly half of that waste occurred the year I was there. Supposedly, we wasted ten times that number of the enemy, and the collateral damage—a Complete Loser of a euphemism—was uncounted, which is to say, didn’t count. I know we often lied about kill ratios, usually exaggerating the number of enemy fighters we wasted, but N. Vietnam authorities estimated that we wasted over a million of their soldiers and another million or two civilians. In any case, it seemed clear to me that statistically we won. Which made me a Nearly Complete Loser. But I was gracious and wise compared to our glorious leaders and top brass who dragged the peace talks out for six years.

When it finally sank in to our glorious leaders and top brass that we would have had to kill just about everybody to win—a not-to-be-thought-of solution proposed by a retired Air Force general and failed Vice Presidential candidate—our glorious leaders declared peace with honor and sounded retreat. Never admitting defeat. We picked up our toys and went home. Well, we left quite a few toys behind in the form of landmines. As well as an ocean of Agent Orange. As far as Losers go, I was a piker. The goal of our glorious, Complete-Loser leaders had been to stop communism, to stop the dominoes from toppling. Well, WE toppled three, Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos. And I’ve adjusted my semantics such that I now freely confess that we lost that idiotic war.

Our glorious Complete-Loser leaders neither admitted defeat nor learned the proper lessons from that loss. Instead, they learned denial, qualifying them for the Complete Loser laurels. They are the best. They did learn one lesson from that loss, that the PR battle on the home front was the most important battle, and they began imbedding reporters who generally reported the desired version of battles. In 1991, Geo Bush the First, after our first Iraq War, said, “…by god, we’ve finally licked the Vietnam Syndrome once and for all.” That went so well that a decade later his son in a photo op after the invasion of Iraq had a banner draped on an aircraft carrier that said, “MISSION ACCOMPLISHED”. He also gave a pep talk to troops in Afghanistan and said, “Mission Accomplished.” And now Iraq and Afghanistan are the envy of the world.

In a war closer to home, the American Civil War, the Slave States, slavers, and racists, also have a long and enduring history of Poor-, Sore-, and Complete-Loserhood. They lost the Civil War—not the fault of Johnny Reb so much as their glorious leaders and their top brass. In case you’ve forgotten, let me remind you that losing a war is no small-potatoes kind of thing. Behaving like Losers after losing a war can be a smoldering problem ready to burst into flames. Think of all the Poor, Sore, and Complete Loser Germans who opted for anger and denial when their glorious Kaiser and top brass surrendered to end WWI. In the memorable lyrics of Tom Lehrer: “We taught them a lesson in 1918/ and they’ve hardly bothered us since then.”  

The slave states lost the Civil War. Lee, like the Kaiser, might have been gracious when he surrendered, but the slavers and racists opted for anger and denial, and for the next century and a half, they have continued fighting that lost cause. The Bloody Bushwhackers in Missouri and Kansas, Cole Younger and Frank James, along with Frank’s younger brother Jesse, became bank robbers and mythic heroes to Confederate symps. Because Lincoln and the abolitionists were Republicans, white southerners became Democrats—in our political musical chairs, when the Democratic Kennedy and Johnson administrations passed Civil Rights acts, the white, racist southerners, et al, became Republicans—and they promoted the myth only recently and incompletely busted that Reconstruction was a great evil, that Blacks were incapable of voting and holding office, and all white northerners who went south were corrupt Carpetbaggers, especially those who supported the right of Blacks to vote and hold office. Those Poor, Sore, and Complete Loser Democrats succeeded in ending Reconstruction 12 years after the end of the war and they’ve been busy writing their own version of that history, which the Poor, Sore, and Complete Loser Germans did after WWI. Throughout the South statues and monuments were erected to honor Confederate Brass. Schools and plazas and even military bases were named after prominent Confederates. The Confederate flag was prominently displayed at events like NASCAR races and college football games while bands played Dixie.

Poor, Sore, and Complete Losers donned white hoods and evolved from the Bloody Bushwhackers who robbed banks and merchants into the Ku Klux Klan, often under the command of bankers and leading merchants. Poor, Sore, and Complete Losers instituted Jim Crow in the south. They called it separate but equal, but it was apartheid without homelands. It was a campaign of terror that included public lynchings and private rapes.

Embedded Hollywood producers, directors, and writers perpetrated the Poor-, Sore-, and Complete-Loserhood myths in Revisionist and pro-Confederate movies such as D.W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation, Buster Keaton’s The General, and, in modern times, Clint Eastwood’s The Outlaw and Josie Wales. Oh, those poor persecuted white southerners! And don’t forget all those heroes at the Alamo.  

The war was over, the slaves were free, but governments, businesses, and financial institutions continued battling to keep them from rising, socially and economically.

These are facts. This is our history.

And this is where my Critical Loser Theory comes in. Key to my theory is calling a Spade a Spade. Let’s come right out and say that the blatherers and bellowers about Critical Race Theory are racists. They are the pseudo-intellectual descendants of the Poor, Sore, and Complete Loser Confederates and their sympathizers that have plagued our nation for a century and a half. They are Poor, Sore, and Complete Losers lamenting the loss of a war by that terrorist organization, the Confederate States.* They are the descendants of the Bushwhackers and the KKK and all the revisionists who erected brass monuments to the Confederate Brass and glorified those terrorists in print and film and prevented a Black man or woman from being hired, promoted, or buying a house.

Critical Losers do not want school children to be taught a history in which white people did truly evil things. Which they did. Just ask Native Americans. Just ask the victims of the Master Race. Well, 7 million of them, mostly white but not white enough, were killed and cannot speak for themselves. Just ask the victims of the White Man’s Burden.

No one is saying all whites are evil, not the proponents of Critical Race Theory and not this 77-year-old white man. We are saying that we should be honest and open about our history, genocide, slavery, and all, which might even make us Winners. If we don’t admit our errors, well, confess our crimes, we cannot redeem ourselves; we condemn ourselves to a Loserhood that will metastasize, and we risk losing our democracy. Witness the January 6 Complete Loser Insurrection.

*Interestingly, the Poor, Sore, and Complete Losers in Congress, still upset about the outcome of the Civil War, were also Clueless Losers. When they rushed through the Patriot Act—without reading it—they charged all their heroes in that losing war with being members of a terrorist organization. They decreed that flying the Confederate flag or putting up a statue to commemorate a Confederate general is Material Support of a terrorist organization.

I confess that I am a fantasist. Perhaps it’s another of my fantasies but I believe that anyone who survives past infancy is also a fantasist. As it’s always good to be clear on what we’re talking about, let’s check with good old reliable Meriam Webster who defines fantasist as: “one who creates fantasias or fantasies.” Since fantasias are organized or composed as in music or theater and requires a good deal of work, that part of the definition doesn’t apply to me. And anyway, shouldn’t that be the realm of FANTASIASTS? The Collins dictionary defines fantasist as: “someone who constantly tells lies about their life and achievements in order to make them sound more exciting than they really are.” Although I reject that definition for its narrow-minded focus on politicians, I couldn’t help but smile as I conjured up the image of a twice-impeached ex-President. Like all good researchers, I kept at it until I found a source that agrees with my preconceived opinion: the unimpeachable Cambridge folks state that a fantasist is “someone who often has fantasies, or who confused fantasy and what is real.” Bingo. That’s me. An inveterate daydreamer.

Now that we know what we’re talking about, let me clear up one possible misconception: When I confess to being a fantasist I’m admitting that I often have fantasies and have indulged in them since early childhood, but as far as I can remember, I have never confused my fantasies with reality. Not really. Although I often wished they were real.

Examples of fantasies given by the illustrious sources cited above run from daydreams to nightmares and hallucinations. I don’t recall ever hallucinating, except perhaps once after a strong toke, when I was certain that I was on the verge of understanding everything, on the verge of all knowledge in the universe. I strained mightily to focus my mental powers, but I couldn’t quite make that final necessary step, which made the experience somewhat stressful. I had some frightening nightmares as a child. Some of which I can still see clearly, or maybe that’s a fantasy. Now, the nightmares have been replaced by stress dreams, usually about an imminent final exam for which I have not studied or even bought the text for and don’t know where the classroom is—the usual student dreams. On the whole, my fantasies are more in the daydream class, even though much more frequent at night, in bed. As I matured, well, got older, those fantasies began demanding logical scripts, background stories, and dramatic arcs.

Warning: if you want to make a systematic study of fantasist by adding the suffix –ism, an internet search will divert you to S and M sites.

This might be a good place to confess that a great many of my post-puberty fantasies have had to do with sex. But in my sex fantasies no one ever gets hurt and everyone ends up happy, ecstatically so.  As a teenager reality seldom intruded on my sex fantasies, while as an old man it rears its annoying head. I impose limits on my fantasies, and although I work with a number of attractive people, I do not fantasize about them.

And that’s about all I’ll confess to in the sex fantasy realm.

I suppose I had boyish cowboy and Indian fantasies. How could I not? We got our first TV when I was an impressionable seven and from that age on I was inundated with western dramas. Plus, my father was a Western aficionado, so much so, that I suspect he sometimes confused them with reality. He liked Gunsmoke and Paladin in which, as he often said, the heroes were real men. Gary Cooper in High Noon was the epitome of a real man. He always wanted me to act like a real man, even when I was a seven-year-old boy. He would have been devastated had he known that another shining example of a real man, Randolph Scott was gay. My father had a difficult life and he told some whoppers to make his “achievements” “sound more exciting than they really” were. I suspect that he fantasized about being a gun-slinging cowboy in the days of the old west but can’t say that he confused those fantasies with reality a la Walter Mitty. If I couldn’t, as a seven-year-old boy, fantasize about being challenged to a duel at sunset by an ornery gunslinger on the tree-lined street I grew up on, I suspect that neither could my father. Still, I believe that he fantasized more about being a quick-draw gunslinger rather than an Indian fighter. He boasted that he had Cherokee blood in him but, as I graciously wrote in an earlier post and repeated above in this paragraph, he was creative and not always to be believed. I recently asked my sister who had done some family history research about our possible Native American genes, but she admitted that she only traced our mother’s side of the family to proto-Nazi Germany.

I had crooner fantasies, mainly when I sang in the shower. I was convinced that I sounded pretty good and fantasized about my hit records and concert appearances, but by the end of my teen years I had to come to grips with the reality that I had no musical ability. None. Zip. Zero. As one cruel friend said, I even got static on the radio.

From prepubescence into senility I had sports fantasies. When I was old enough to go to the playground and shoot baskets by myself I fantasized about scoring the winning shot for various local universities and the St. Louis Hawks. I passed endless hours practicing on the sloping asphalt court with a dilapidated wooden backboard and a bent rim, fantasizing that someone was watching and that someone was understandably impressed by my skills. Baseball wasn’t something I could practice by myself other than to pitch tennis balls against the stoop, fantasizing that I was striking out the great hitters of the day. Seasonally, I regularly fell asleep getting fouled while driving the lane for the game-tying layup and then, despite my injuries, which most mortals would not have been able to endure, sinking the winning free throw, or, with two outs in the bottom of ninth, hitting the come-from-behind, game-winning grand-slam, or pitching a perfect game. Not wishing to cheapen my fantasies in the early 60’s I never dreamed about pitching against those inept but lovable losers, the Mets until they became the Amazing Mets. Long after cigarettes, booze, and injuries ended my sports careers, the fantasies lived on. 

As a young boy, growing up in the shadow of WWII, I had many war hero fantasies, usually in the European theater, a few in the Pacific, but none in Korea, perhaps because of a lack of Korean War movies and TV series. My buddies on the block and I played war games, and my best buddy and I, after dark, ran across peoples’ front yards, nine-year-old boys hiding behind the shrubbery from enemy snipers or infiltrating enemy lines. Those fantasies were soon benched by my sports fantasies, and, it should go without saying, the sex fantasies.

When I was 24, Uncle Sam sent me an invitation I couldn’t refuse—I wanted to refuse but the sports injuries had healed and the family G.P. refused to find bone spurs. I had a few fantasies about living in Canada, and a surprising number of war hero fantasies, surprising my pacifist self. I did not have war hero fantasies in Basic and Advanced training because I concentrated on the sports and sex fantasies, but when I was sent to a place where there was a much greater potential for realizing a war hero fantasy, I, I am ashamed to confess, indulged. I fantasized about being the last man standing during a human wave attack. But even those indulgences were rare. Although I like to think of myself as creative, reality again reared its ugly head, and I conceded that I was more likely to try to melt into the ground and keep my cowardly head down than to drag my M-60 and several ammo belts to the top of a CONEX container to mow down the attacking human wave. I had a few other, minor, war hero fantasies, but on the whole I stayed with my tried and true fantasies, sex and sports.

Many of the boys I served with, and boys most of them were, 19 and 20 years old—I became an elderly 25 that year—were quite open about their war hero fantasies. [N.B.: I was careful to only call the white kids “Boy.”] One boy wrote laborious letters to his girl back in the world, explaining that he didn’t know how to write love letters because he was only trained to kill. He often went into great detail about some fantastic combat mission in which he was the hero.  He was proud of those letters and showed them to his hoochmates. Most of the kids—looking back it seems that it was mostly white boys—fantasized out loud about strutting their stuff when they got back on the block. They would wear their dress greens with sharp military creases and several rows of fruit salad on their chest. Some even voiced the opinion that they might wear the actual medals. They all fantasized about the war stories they would tell back on the block, and, I feel certain, they could picture their buddies and girlfriends, mouths agape, as they marveled at our hero’s exploits. Having personal war stories was the goal, second only to making it out in one piece. A few wanna-be heroes, fellow fantasists but with an immature grasp of reality, committed reckless actions that led to death and destruction, and not only to themselves. And not only the uneducated ones. One boy with a college degree, a 2^nd Lieutenant, eager for a long and glorious military career with combat hero indelibly inked in his records, couldn’t distinguish his war hero fantasy from reality, and in a vain and completely stupid attempt at heroism, a failed attempt, got himself killed. I was saddened by his death but at the same time angry because he got several other boys killed. Our Commanding Officer felt compelled to recommend him for a posthumous medal. How would it look to tell the family back in the world the truth, that their son, husband, brother, did something stupid that caused unnecessary casualties?

The big brass abetted and encouraged the war hero fantasies. It was an unpopular war, and from a P.R. point of view, it was better to give out lots of medals to win the hearts and minds of the folks back home. I was contemptuous of the medals, and when my C.O. put me in for a medal I complained to my buddies. But he botched the recommendation, and I was disappointed when they awarded me the lowest possible medal for valor. I could hardly go back on the block and brag that I was a lowly decorated combat veteran, could I?

I think that my racial prejudices began during my by no means illustrious military career. Pre-Vietnam, I had played sports with and against White boys and Black kids, but in that particularly hostile environment I was elbow to elbow and ass to ass with red neck White boys and inner city Black kids. I was contemptuous of many of the White boys and their war story fantasies, while I cut the Black guys some slack because they mostly fantasized about getting laid or getting some good job, their first good job, when they got back in the world. A Black company cook fantasized about being a short-order cook in a chef’s hat in his own diner. A close friend fantasized about joining the Black Panthers, but I suspect that he secretly—because he thought I wouldn’t approve—fantasized about taking a burst of six (re-enlisting for six years) for the $10,000 bonus and the job security. It was an escape route from the certain poverty waiting in ambush back home. I was contemptuous of the military, but I saw the attraction to the kids from the ghetto and the boys from the farm who had never had decent jobs in their life. I was, not amazed, but somewhat taken aback at how many of the White boys and Black kids bragged about their hometowns, hometowns that failed to nurture or educate them.

I think my superpower fantasies began about then. I cannot be certain but perhaps they began at the same time as my tinnitus. I fantasized that the ringing in my ears carried a message from outer space, and if I could only concentrate and decipher the message hidden in the constant, but sometimes pulsating, sometimes louder, sometimes insistent, buzz in my brain, I could learn great and valuable things from superior beings somewhere in the starry night, knowledge that might enable me to rise up in the night sky to escape from the madness, or enable me to put a stop to all the childishness around me. I read lots of sci fi in those days: every month we’d get a carton or two of free paperbacks, and, as most of the kids didn’t read for entertainment, many books made their way to my AO*.  Another common fantasy: As an aid to drifting off to sleep at night, I fantasized that I could project a protective dome or force field over my frail flesh-and-blood body to block incoming rockets and mortars. When the incoming fell all around but not really near, I thought maybe it had worked. When the incoming came hot and heavy and really close, I ditched that particular fantasy for a while.

Another confession: This blog is the result of a fantasy. A truly fantastic fantasy. Some of my family members are supporters of he-who-shall-not-be named. Thinking about it, from what I thought was a logical perspective, I could not understand how people who grew up in the same environment could have such polar opposites views. I mean, we were all born during WWII when the fascists were the enemy and now my relatives think there’s an antifascist group called Antifa who is the enemy. Since I can’t discuss politics with them, I decided to write a blog. The first post was on Antifascism. I fantasized that my relatives would read it and come into the light. Even more fantastic then my superpower fantasies, no? Or some of my sex fantasies.

None of my relatives has ever mentioned my blog and I suspect that if they even went so far as to open a post, they never made it through to the end. I think there are only two readers and one is a troll. Still, I enjoy writing and editing late at night with my cognac and dark chocolate. And at my time of life if I find something I enjoy, I keep at it, but I no longer fantasize about converting my relatives.

I started this particular post because seeing photos and videos of the Jan 6 insurrectionists, I was reminded of all the boys I knew back in the day. I say boys because all the insurrectionists I saw were White. When I see Proud Boys and Boogaloo Bois and fellow travelers, I see wanna-be heroes with their own war-story fantasies. The boys I knew fought, killed, and died to protect South Vietnam and all the dominoes from falling under the yoke of evil communism, although most of them couldn’t define communism, and more than a few didn’t understand the domino theory. The Jan 6 boys were itching for a fight to protect our country from an international pedophile ring and Jewish space lasers and rapists from Mexico and refugees from shithole countries. Like yet unlike so many of the boys I knew who swore allegiance to their country and bragged about their hometowns, the Jan 6 boys have sworn allegiance to and brag about their leader, a man who nurtured and educated them on a strict diet of racism, lies, and misinformation.

 When we studied the American Revolution in sixth grade, I fantasized about participating in the fight to throw off the yoke of the evil Brits. But only in class. After school, it was back to sports. But even in class I didn’t lose myself completely in the fantasy. As I watched the big hand on the wall clock tick slowly, oh so slowly toward the longed-for number 11, I saw myself in the rowboat with Washington, crossing the Delaware. But I barely stuck my toes into those or any revolutionary waters. I don’t think I ever carried a musket or ambushed a British square. I certainly didn’t get frostbite at Valley Forge—I have never liked being cold, let alone fantasized about it.

I believe that the Jan 6 boys let their fantasies dominate their lives. They spent great sums of money and time making their fantasies more real and allowed them to evolve into hallucinations. They stockpiled assault weapons, ammunition, large capacity ammo clips, and bomb-making material. Some went to military-style training camps in remote areas to prepare themselves, not in the event, but in the hope that there was a wave of violence in which they would be the heroes, the brave defenders of their fantasy-driven visions of America. They are like the boy I knew who bragged to some girl that he was only trained to kill, yet not like him because he was able to laugh at his fantasies. They are like that idiotic 2^nd Lt. who got two people and himself killed and another two wounded in an act of stupidity doomed to fail.

The insurrectionists fantasized about liberating America from the evil yoke of Democrats, Jews, and Blacks. They were protecting the White race from threatening darkness. In their fantasies they followed their glorious leader into the halls of Congress where he would retake the reins of power. Well, they were the advance guard. Their glorious leader only led from behind. He urged them into battle and said he would be with them, but then he quietly retreated to a secure location to watch the insurrection on TV. It was if he declared bankruptcy, yet again sticking his creditors with the bill.

The idiotic 2^nd Lt. was a nice guy and had a sense of honor and decency.

And what about that glorious leader? What can his fantasies be like? He is most certainly not the foolish 2^nd Lieutenant because that role would require a certain amount of discomfort and risk. I suspect that he fantasizes about Eastern European escorts who mistake him for a buff stud, or shooting par without dozens of mulligans, or humiliating that Black ex-President in his personal game of one-upmanship. I suspect that his principal fantasy is living in one long political rally before adoring White fanatics, manipulating them, into roaring rages and gratifying applause and shouts. Or receiving the Nobel Peace Prize for restoring himself as President for Life of the United States.

* Area of Operations

I confess that I am guilty of hypocrisy. Often. After a lifetime of resorting to hypocrisy when it suited my purpose, I will do so again, several times, in the next few pages. I can’t help myself. But first a plea to the judge and jury:  I humbly ask that you not selectively prosecute and condemn me; after all, who is not guilty of hypocrisy at some time or other?

In my second act of hypocrisy in this post, I will turn to Merriam-Webster, a source I have maliciously accused of inaccuracy and failings when it suited my purpose, for a definition of the word: “1: a feigning to be what one is not or to believe what one does not: behavior that contradicts what one claims to believe or feel; especially: the false assumption of an appearance of virtue or religion.” M-W gives a quote from Lucius Garvin, a late 19^th and early 20^th century Rhode Island politician, according to Wikipedia. According to M-W the great statesman stated: “our conventional morality often serves as a cover for hypocrisy and selfishness.” I have no desire to denigrate Rhode Islanders. I have but limited knowledge of the Ocean State—I have gleaned some facts from watching Family Guy, and I passed through the state, in the blink of an eye, once or twice when I lived in New England—but why a quote from this particular Rhode Islander? And isn’t the example twisted wrong way round? According to me, adopting conventional morality to cover selfishness is hypocrisy, not a cover for it. I don’t know what Peter Griffin would say. 

And isn’t “a feigning to be” rather awkward phrasing? M-W’s definition 2: is a tautology and not worth repeating. Still, I concede that the failing M-W’s definition 1: gives us something to work with.

Curiously, while we mere mortals feign to disdain hypocrisy we often let hypocrites get away with it. We might call them liars or frauds, but we rarely charge them with hypocrisy, especially politicians and preachers. Because we expect nothing better? Because it’s difficult to distinguish dishonesty from hypocrisy?

Hypocrisy was a gift born by Greeks, the word, not the act we feign to disdain. That Achilles heel in our virtuous personas is far older than any ancient Greek. Hypocrisy is, no doubt, as old as humankind. Well, to give our progenitors a break, it might have taken Homo sapiens a few generations to learn to lie, an essential first step in hypocrisy, and possibly H. neanderthalensis never did. But once H. sapiens evolved into H. mendatiousensis, can there be any doubt that they quickly became hypocrites? To speculate on early human behavior, we often look at modern or recent hunter gatherer societies in the belief that many cultural practices will have remained unchanged through the millennia. But if I ever read an ethnography about lying and hypocritical hunter gatherers I have forgotten it. On the other side of that coin, I do remember one famous, relatively, ethnography that completely condemned the tribe under the microscope, while failing to mention several personal problems the ethnographer had with the people he studied, as well as their persecution by a neighboring group that had more advanced weaponry. Then, to top it all off, he neglected to mention the source of his funding: a generous international corporation that wanted to exploit the tribe’s land. Neglecting to mention certain problematic conditions in what purports to be a comprehensive and detailed study is not necessarily a lie, but is certainly dishonest and hypocritical. At least in my world view. Perhaps not in Peter Griffin’s

As the hunter-gatherers have failed to enlighten us re the hypocrisy of early H. sapiens, I will resort to personal experience. I have reason to believe that the first hypocrite, that pioneer in the field, was a young boy hoping to escape punishment. To demonstrate his artistic superiority, he ruined a cave painting with childish smudges. When confronted by an angry elder, he adopted an air of innocence, denied having smeared that excess of charcoal over an exquisite, fleeing bison, and claimed that his older brother did it. When asked about all the charcoal smears on his face and hands, he protested that he was merely trying to clean up his brother’s mess so that dear brother wouldn’t be harshly punished. I have no doubt that this early cave-child learned a valuable lesson: Clean up the crime scene before laying the blame on the fall guy.

Possibly my first lesson in hypocrisy came from my father who had a completely different lesson in mind. When punishing me for some minor misdeed, which I mentioned he was also guilty of, he commanded, “Don’t do as I do, do as I say.” Throughout my childhood I had trouble with that commandment, not because I condemned it as hypocritical—I had never even heard of the word, much less knew the meaning, and, as a rule, I was not concerned with ethical considerations—but because there seemed to be a malfunction in my obedience genes.

I don’t know how old I was when I learned to lie, but I proved to be precocious in that endeavor, and lying was the gateway sin that inexorably led to my addiction to hypocrisy. Several times when I tattled on my brother, I assumed an angelic pose, hoping that my father could see or imagine a halo hovering over my head. To my unending dismay, my father proved to be incapable of such advanced vision. Now that the statute of limitations has expired, I freely and hypocritically confess that I was a hardened hypocrite, often and outlandishly so, but on a small potatoes level. I was just a kid and had no access to the elite levels of hypocrisy that preachers and politicians have.

I did learn that when the evidence against me was overwhelming the next easiest course was to confess. My father would then invariably ask why I committed whatever the sin in question was, and I would just as invariably reply, “I dunno.” Pleading ignorance was my fallback position in the misdemeanor field, but in fields in which I was truly ignorant, sex, for instance, I could not admit ignorance but always adopted a superior been-there-done-that attitude, when in reality I hadn’t been anywhere or done anything. This particular hypocrisy continues with a twist. Now, in my advanced state of senility I simply plead that I don’t remember how or where.

Looking at modern man to make assumptions about early H. sapiens, I would bet the ranch that early man was many generations ahead of early woman in learning to lie and, of course, hypocrisy.

I beg your indulgence beforehand—sort of like Rep. Gaetz asking for a Get-Out-Of-Jail-Free card (Presidential pardon for non-Monopoly players) from he-who-shall-not-be-named before he was accused of any crimes—because the topic of Hypocrisy will prove difficult to write about. First, I am reluctant to discuss my own failings or feignings in this field—there are several I am aware of and, no doubt, a great many I am blissfully unaware of. Second, there is such a surplus of hypocrisy these days, so many producers and purveyors of the product, that the market is flooded and the price has plummeted to rock bottom. People, especially politicians, are reduced to giving it away for free. This places a great burden on me. Of necessity I have to winnow out the many, which winnowing leaves me open to the charge that I am picking on the few and am guilty of the same selective persecution I used as a defense in the first paragraph. But perhaps you will see the halo hovering over my head as you read on.

Where to start in this tsunami of hypocrisy currently swamping society? Surprisingly, to me, he-who-shall-not-be-named, now that he is banned from social media, does not elbow himself into the front of the pack, not in my mind. No, M. McConnell takes the lead. He had the gall, or lack of self-awareness, if you want to give him a break, which I don’t, to threaten corporations that are putting pressure on the Peach State to rescind their most recent Jim Crow voter suppression law. He actually claimed, with a straight face, that corporations had no business meddling in politics. This is the Senator who claimed, with a straight face, during the Citizens United battle, that corporations had an important voice that should be heard in politics. That battle, if your memory needs refreshing, was about allowing corporations to donate unlimited funds to politicians and political groups—often conservative and Republican. The Supremes, also with straight faces, hypocritically pretending to be fair and impartial arbiters, ignored stare decisis and a century of campaign finance restrictions while ruling that money is speech and its free flow is therefore protected by the First Amendment. Monetary Mitch’s statement approving of that decision must have slipped his mind for the moment—self-interested forgetfulness being pandemic in politicians and judges—when he admonished corporations to butt out of (Jim Crow) politics. But then he remembered, or his staff reminded him, and he clarified, stating, still with the straight face but with a few worry lines in his forehead, that he wasn’t talking about donations. He wanted to set the record straight: corporations were welcome to donate to politicians, such as him, and campaigns, such as his and his friends’, but other than donations they should butt out.

Mitch’s house of hypocrisy is built on the hypocritical foundation laid by Peach State politicians who claimed that their voter suppression law was necessary to prevent voter fraud just a few months after the Governor, Sec of State and his elections ass’t, after several closely watched recounts, assured he-who-shall-not-be-named and the nation that the 2020 elections in Georgia were honest and fair. Which explains why a law was needed. If he-who-shall-not-be-named loses in the Presidential election and two Democrats, particularly a Black man and a Jew, can win Senatorial elections in an honest and fair election in the Peach State, then something surely needs to be done about it.

Jumping on the Jim Crow bandwagon, politicians in some forty odd states are currently debating voter suppression proposals after what observers universally declared to be free and fair elections. Well, not universally. Quite a number of shysters sued in court to overturn what they claimed was a fraudulent election. He-who-shall-not-be-named raised many millions of dollars to advance this argument. However, they rushed into court without any evidence to support their argument, sort of like Napoleon’s army rapidly advancing into Russia without winter wear. Or even food. He-who-shall-not-be-named’s shysters had nothing nourishing to sustain their arguments. This rogue wave of suits served to irritate judges who dismissed them as frivolous. Which still did not stop he-who-shall-not-be-named from continuing to raise money to overturn the elections. After all, why give up a well remunerated shtick? While I cannot speak for M-W or Lucius Garvin, I smell foul hypocrisy oozing from the fund-raisers and lawyers bringing the frivolous suits like cheap hair dye oozing down Giuliani’s sweaty forehead. Speaking of whom, I cannot categorically state that Rudy G. was guilty of hypocrisy for his role in these suits. After all, he was reputedly billing he-who-shall-not-be-named $20,000 a day for his efforts. Prostitution is not necessarily hypocrisy. Pretending to enjoy sex with a John is not the same as feigning virtue to cover self-interest. I think even the religious right will agree on that. And, Rudy, good luck in getting your money from the John who takes great pride in stiffing honest tradesmen and women.

I suspect that these lawyers and politicians had their fingers crossed behind their backs when they swore to uphold the Constitution but not when they took the Hypocritic Oath.  

Which brings me to Matt Gaetz who brings out the hypocrite in me. I pretend to take the high ground, or, as M-W would put it, feign to be what I am not, a fair and partial arbiter who waits to hear all the facts before making a judgment, but I confess that I have already convicted Matt of being a sleaze ball. I don’t know him and don’t know all the facts, but there is so much smoke that I believe there’s a fire, and the alarm was sounded under Bill Barr’s watch. I confess that I have tried and convicted Matt of hypocrisy, of feigning to be a family values sort of man, while the reality is that he is a pimp, a porn purveyor (apologies to honest pimps and porn purveyors), and a sex offender. I have no trouble believing that he had sex with a minor and indulged in sex parties with other politicians. I have no trouble believing that when he said, “…I will always stand up for family values,” he was feigning morality to win the vote of the religious right gang, while, at the same time, he was showing images and videos of nude women he claimed to have had sex with to other family-values Congresspersons. I don’t know if he will be convicted of a sex crime, but I find him guilty of hypocrisy.

Hypocrisy might have been around since our early man days, but modern man has polished and refined it to the extent that we now have mass media hypocrisy. I’m not talking about the many ugly lies spread on social media with great relish by ugly people who do not feign to be other than what they are, truly ugly people with warped personalities built on a painstakingly constructed foundation of stupidity. I’m talking about the regular programs on the radio and television that purport to be news programs but are nothing of the sort. People like Rush Limbaugh and Glen Beck. They aren’t stupid and they don’t believe much of what they say. In Rush’s case I should use the past tense, and I believe that Glenn has finally confessed that what he purveyed to his listening public about the Sandy Hook massacre was a pack of lies but he kept telling those lies because they sold so well. I suspect that his repentance is not sincere, but merely a feigning to be to ward off a huge monetary judgment. Or was that Alex Jones? I get all these old, faux angry, white hypocrites confused.

Yes, we are in the age of mass hypocrisy. Shouters and screamers are given venues in which they sell outrageous lies to their audience because they make money and because it advances the agenda of those who control the venues, think R. Murdock or the remaining Koch brother. The Republican cult, married en masse as in a perverted ceremony performed by the Rev. Moon, currently chants its bipartisanship chorus, accusing Biden of reneging on his pledge to be a bipartisan President while they refuse to even acknowledge that Biden won and he-who-shall-not-be-named lost the election. They accuse Biden of not working with Republicans while they say that his proposals are DOA. They support the shouters and screamers because they are likeminded liars. They sell the big lie because they know one big truth: if they shout their lies loud enough and long enough their target audience will believe them. And reward them. As will the billionaires.

To be fair—warning: my use of that phrase might be another example of my hypocrisy—I readily admit that not all Repubs have signed up for the cult, but most, with the exception of Liz Cheney are in the closet. And really, through the years a great many Dems eagerly donned the “false assumption of an appearance of virtue” persona The example that springs to my mind, after my late evening cognac, was Reagan’s yearly White Paper certification that the Guatemalan dictators were improving the human rights situation in that battered and bruised country. He even added that they got “a bum rap” on human rights. This at the height of the most recent genocide in the Americas. This to get around the Congressional restriction of military aid to human rights abusers. Dems as well as Repubs in Congress accepted the certifications that they and everyone knew were false. But they were afraid of another Nicaragua or Cuba. And if anyone ever challenged them for continuing aid to those truly evil generals, they could fall back on the claim that the President had assured them that the generals were compassionate conquistadores. In the military this kind of hypocrisy is called CYA.

Well, to be fair once again, possibly one person did not know those White Papers were tissues of lies: Reagan’s Alzheimer’s might have played a greater role than we knew. Anyway, he was such a nice guy, who was going to blame him for supporting a little genocide in some country most Americans couldn’t find on a map? If he-who-shall-not-be-named had adopted a halfway decent-guy persona he might have gotten away with supporting the Russian invasion of the Ukraine, which most Americans couldn’t find on a map. But then if he had projected a nice-guy persona would all the Nazis and fascists have sworn allegiance to him?