The High Druid's Homily

How I solved the Immigration Problem in 12 simple steps

2006-05-23T09:03:00.000-07:00

My immigration plan.

Folks have gotten worked up about this issue, and as a resident of an area that has seen its immigrant population grow by orders of magnitude in the last decade, I’ve given this issue considerable thought. Behold my plan for making it work:

Create a Guest Worker program.
This really is a no-brainer. We need cheap labor, and our nation as a whole benefits it. In many ways it’s a choice between importing cheap labor and exporting whole industries to other countries where the cheap labor resides. Guest worker programs can work, with proper administration and enforcement. Mine would run like this:

1. Anyone can apply for Guest Worker status, after a reasonable criminal background check and a basic English test. “Basic English” is a stripped-down version of English, comprised of about 800 easy-to-learn English words, giving the immigrant basic communication skills. Health screening and immunizations would also be required at the point of entry. If the Guest Worker wanted to work a job requiring a driver’s license, then he/she can take the test like everyone else, but this class of worker would be required to carry insurance and know more English. There would be a cap on the maximum number of guest workers (probably between 5 and 6 million), to be apportioned to qualifying companies.

2. A Guest Worker could only work for 5 years. No automatic citizenship, no renewal, no second chances, 5 years and you go back home to your family. At the mid-way point of your tenure as an American Guest Worker, you would be required to return to your country of origin for a period no less than 6 months. This would keep the Guest Workers’ kids from growing up essentially fatherless, and keep the relations between workers and their families somewhat more stable. While Guest Workers would not be automatically granted citizenship, the five year period would count towards residency and a successful tour as a Guest Worker, along with a citizen sponsor, would bump the applicant to the head of the line.

3. A Guest Worker would be required to work at least one 40 hour a week job, and would be paid not by the company, but through the Guest Worker program, which would deduct money for taxes, social security, fees, and a special savings program. If the Guest Worker wants to work on the side for more money, they can work until their fingers fall off with no additional penalty, and get paid by the employer directly. If the Guest Worker is fired for whatever reason, they will have three uncompensated weeks leeway to find a new job, or face deportation.

4. ANY SERIOUS VIOLATION OF THE LAW, including drug and alcohol related offenses, would result in the loss of Guest Worker status and result in immediate deportation and restriction from applying to the program again.

5. Health care costs would be deducted from the Guest Workers’ pay up front, to ensure that they do not drain local resources. Guest worker would comprise a solid, fairly healthy and young pool of insurees, making them attractive for a government-underwritten HMO/PPO.

6. A Social Security surcharge would be added to help pay for the Baby Boomers’ retirement. They are largely already paying into the system and not collecting.

7. The Guest Worker program would also mandate a savings account that would be returned to the Guest Worker upon completion of their term of service, like an IRA. This would provide a built-in nest egg that would send the guest worker back to their country of origin with a capital stake. Conversely, in case of criminal activity, this account would be forfeit.

8. You can’t get married legally in the US as a Guest Worker. If you have a child, that child retains your country’s citizenship, not US citizenship. Children would be allowed to attend public schools, provided they also attend ESL classes.

9. The Guest Worker program would come with ombudsmen built in to investigate any violations of worker safety and employment law. Wronged Guest Workers would be entitled to compensation through special employment courts. Employers that are found guilty of Guest Worker abuse would no longer be eligible to participate in the Guest Worker program, and would be forced to hire Americans – who can sue. No unionization of Guest Workers would be permitted.

10. Guest Workers could be housed in government-run or government licensed hostels for a nominal fee. Former military bases, church-run establishments, and abandoned or condemned properties could be used in areas with a high concentration of Guest Worker use.

11. One day a month, the Guest Worker would be obligated to appear for a day-long “community service” requirement, allowing the workers to contribute directly and visibly to the community in which they live. In addition, their first year would require monthly (if not weekly) attendance in basic literacy and ESL courses. After one year the GW program would assist the Guest Worker in getting their GED, if desired.

12. All Guest Workers would be required to take a 3 week long orientation course that would include covering laws regarding traffic, insurance, alcohol, firearms, spousal abuse, police affairs, and employment rights. In addition, skills like basic first aid and “housekeeping” issues such as how to use an ATM, cash a check, wire money home, etc. would be covered. In the first six month probationary period, if the Guest Worker runs afoul of the regulations he or she would be remanded to a special employment court where the judge would decide if a return to basic orientation or deportation was warranted. In the case of re-orientation, the worker would get an additional 6 months on probation. In the case of deportation, the worker would be obligated to surrender their bond/savings and/or repay the Guest Worker Program for their training.

OK, it sounds ambitious, but it’s really cheaper than dealing with the issues as they stand. First, it removes the large number of immigrants who use expensive Emergency Rooms as their primary care physician at public cost. Secondly, it manages the quality of labor entering the country, and provides a certain amount of basic training and coverage of laws that are routinely broken by illegals, largely out of ignorance, which is clogging our courts and criminal justice system. It would standardize the pay and employment issues without jeopardizing the low cost of the labor. And it would provide a good return on the Guest Worker’s investment, keep them in contact with their families, and allow them the opportunity to maximize their potential work without cutting into existing jobs. This keeps accountability in the system, provides low-cost labor for those companies that can qualify, and grants more general benefits to the communities at large.

Questions? Comments? Rude remarks?

An Open Letter to Catherine Sanders

2006-05-03T13:44:00.000-07:00

Catherine Sanders recently wrote Wicca's Charm, a follow-up book to a series of articles about Wicca from the Christian perspective. While she's journalistically fair in her approach, and does get some things correct, I take issue with the thrust of her argument: that all the nifty stuff Pagans are drawn to in Wicca can be found in Christianity if you look at it the right way and hold your mouth right and ignore 2000 years of history -- so we should stop being witches already and come back to the church. While well-handled, her book is basically a guidebook in how to subvert the honest seeker from their chosen path and get them back in Church. Needless to say, I took issue with it, and here is the letter I sent to her:

Dear Catherine,

I’m sure you are assailed constantly by Wiccans and Pagans who take issue with your views. After reviewing your article on the subject, and purchasing your book last night, I wanted to join that chorus.

Since I have not yet received your book, I will limit my comment to your article. While I feel you have dealt fairly with the subject from a journalistic standpoint, I think that your analysis of the religion is shallow, and your comparisons to Christianity are off base.

As background, I have been a Wiccan and Druid for 20 years, come this August, and I have a degree from UNC-CH in Religious Studies. I consider myself a Pagan Theologian. I’ve devoted considerable time and effort in analysis of my religion and its wild growth in the two decades since I found it. I’ve also spent considerable time examining the relationship between Paganism and Christianity. Perhaps you would appreciate some of my insight to assist in your understanding of those factors.

The number of Pagans in this country is going to increase dramatically, and there is little that the Church can do to stem the tide. The factors are not, as you think, purely a failure of ministry to capture the attention of the youth, the failure is in the fundamental make up of modern Christianity – and the problem is so deep that there is virtually nothing that modern Christians can do to mend it, I’m afraid. The primary issues that most Pagans have with the Church are doctrinal, and they are so fundamental as to preclude any real return to the Church from Pagan ranks.

The combination of an undoubtedly Male godhead with radical monotheism has led directly to the spiritual disenfranchisement of women in the Church, and has further led to a patriarchal mind-set that permeates every aspect of inter-gender relations in the Christian Church. This is not a matter of letting the Ladies Auxiliary lead a service every now and then, it is a fundamental flaw in the make-up of all the Abrahamic faiths. When God is male, with no female counterpart, the deck is inherently stacked and any attempt at true coequal spirituality is dashed. Certainly the doctrine of the Trinity leaves open the possibility of feminine elements, but unless someone in true authority comes out and explicitly equates the Holy Spirit with the Goddess, the Church will remain fatally flawed.

The implicit denigration of Femininity in the scriptures also leads to a denigration of sex, itself. Until the Church is willing to recognize sexuality as inherently sacred, not inherently sinful, there will be few Pagans in your pews. Masturbation, menstruation, pornography, “uncleanliness”, and the host of petty bigotries based on scriptural assertions of the sinful nature of sex, a human universal attribute and font of all life, are anathema to Pagans. The whole concept of the Fall from Eden, predicated by feminine foolishness, is a slap in the face of every woman in the world, an attempt by a tribal patriarchy to provide religious justification for the virtual enslavement and mistreatment of women. You can make all the excuses you like, but the Genesis stories provide ample basis for this subjugation. In doing so, Jehovah has made war on the Goddess. How could we come back to worship the confessed perpetrator of such a crime?

Your take on Wiccan ethics, while accurate to a point, is limited. You do not understand the very sophisticated basis of our ethical life. In comparing our ethics to those of Christianity, you proudly tout that “Only because we have a transcendent Creator, who is perfect goodness and declared what is absolute good or bad, do we have grounds to condemn anything.”, while saying at the same time that “Wicca itself falls short of providing a basis for Wiccans to take social action.” Nothing could be further from the truth, and your analysis demonstrates a distinct lack of research on the subject.

No doubt the ubiquitous Wiccan Rede and the Threefold Law came up in your research. Most Christian critics of Wicca bring them up, praise them in a limited way, and dismiss them in favor of the “absolute good” Jehovah allegedly represents. They decry the lack of an “objective” guide for good-and-evil while ignoring the fact that under the “objective” rules in scripture the most horrendous crimes in history have been perpetrated. Yes, Wiccans do have highly subjective ideas about “good” and “evil” – but we aren’t nearly as concerned with the two as abstract concepts as are the Zoroastrian-influenced dualism of the Abrahamic Faiths.

Our Rede and Law are guides, ethical rules-of-thumb, not divinely given commandments. In our religion we depend on no one but ourselves and our own conscience to determine the rightness or wrongness of our actions. Do Wiccans occasionally transgress our self-imposed subjective morality? Of course, occasionally we do have people who commit acts that objectively could be considered “evil”. Do we forgive them, chalk it up to a skewed perspective and go on our merry way? We do not. We hold that person accountable for their actions.

Indeed, our religion revolves around the individual taking responsibility for their actions, good and bad. There is no Christian “get out of sin free” card. You are expected to make the right decisions, and if you do not, you are expected to live with the consequences. A Wiccan who truly understands what the Rede and the Law and the other ethical components you may have missed (the Codes of Chivalry, for instance, and the Path of Wisdom) knows that transgressions of commonly held moral views that hurt others hold powerful consequences, and encourage a tremendous amount of forethought before action is taken. Hurting yourself is not a violation of those principals – it’s just stupid, and is recognized as such.

Conversely, Christianity is packed full of people who pride themselves on being forgiven for their sins, and because of that they seem to be all the more willing to sin in the first place. “Only God is perfect” they say, as they indulge in one bad decision after another. They are never held to account, spiritually. It’s an ontological blank check, and Christians, in the Pagan perception, are constantly adding zeros to the amount. One reason why you see teens leaving the Church in droves for our covens and groves is because they tire of seeing their “devout” Christian parents indulge in daily hypocrisy. They want a religion that holds them to account. Wicca and the other Pagan religions are very big on constant and intense introspection about ethical issues, because we teach that no matter how much some transcendent deity may forgive you, it is you, and you alone, who must live with the responsibility for your actions. We don’t need commandments or laws to determine what is “good” and what is “evil”. We recognize that when a religion has such, everyone becomes a spiritual lawyer seeking loopholes, from medieval indulgences to modern televangelists crying on TV about their weakness for prostitutes and then declaring that they are forgiven. Our religion is not like that.

Can you tell me, Is Good really inherently good, independent of God, or is it Good because God says it is? Is Evil really inherently evil, or is it evil because God said it is? Under Christian doctrine and practice the “good” that the religion seems so proud of has been used to justify horrific crimes. When Christianity faces its collective responsibility and acknowledges the evil it has done in the name of supposed “good”, then we might come back.

But I doubt it. We’re not very forgiving that way.

You play up the environmental aspect of Paganism, and that’s all to the good. However, you fail to recognize the anti-environmental stance implicit in Christianity. According to the good ol’ Book of Revelations, the Earth is going to get burned up in the End Times anyway – so why bother with it? It is merely a tool God gave to Man, after all. You can quote other scripture all you like, but the overwhelming implication of Revelations, including the fatalism and hopelessness in that book, have forever tainted the Church against doing anything more than lip service to the environment. “Good Stewards”, indeed! Under Christianity we have seen our once glorious planet suffer as Man uses his Goddess-given gift like a rented mule. The tides are rising, the icecaps are melting, the species are dying, the Armada Storms have begun, all because for the last five-hundred years Christian doctrine has not only allowed the use of the Earth’s bounty with impunity or thought to consequence, it has actively encouraged it.

“The fact that all human beings are made in the image of God provides us with a basis to respect women and help the poor, while the pagan, pantheistic view of Wicca places human beings no better than inanimate objects such as rocks or trees.” This is another way in which you demonstrate the shallow nature of your study of our religion. “No better than . . . rocks or trees” . . . are we somehow “better”? Or is this attitude merely human self-aggrandizement, sufficient justification for the wholesale destruction of our world? The Church tries to claim moral superiority to our poor little limited view of humanity by claiming that Man was made in God’s image . . . when, in truth, we instead accept the idea that the rocks and trees were also made in the image of the Divine. If the Christian ethic based on this ideal held true, then we would not have the centuries of suffering the Church has spawned, up to and including the current war. Perhaps we hold human beings in no better esteem than rocks or trees . . . but we hold rocks and trees in pretty high esteem. When humans merit that esteem, we are more than happy to acknowledge it. Is a man worth more than a tree? Depends upon the man. Depends on the tree. Subjective morality is like that.

Christian missionaries approving clear-cutting of African forests to drive the animist tribes out of their arboreal lifestyle and into good little Church-centric villages, divorced from their livelihood; Christian missionaries in Southeast Asia buying little girls from starving families, only to raise them in convent schools and “ration them out” without brideprice on the condition that their future husbands convert – thus destroying a local culture that has evolved over a thousand years to maintain a careful balance with the fragile, limit natural resources at their disposal. The wholesale slaughter of tribal peoples in an attempt to pacify and civilize them while stealing the resources from their lands, with Christians more concerned about their souls than their lives. Christian bishops insisting that condoms do not protect against HIV/AIDS in Africa, and even saying that they spread the disease. Christians have a horrid history of abuses of both man and environment that has led directly to the current state of environmental affairs. And they do so because God told Adam he owned it all in Genesis and then told John the Divine that he was just going to destroy it all anyway.

And then there is the issue of basic Cosmology. Christians, of course, believe you get one shot to determine your eternal existence. Violate the rules, forget to ask for forgiveness at the right time, and you’re hellbound. Conversely, they cannot seem to agree upon what, exactly, one must do to escape the flames of perdition. Pagans see the afterlife as they see life, as a circle or spiral, granting plenty of opportunities for development along the way. In Christianity, you have the doctrine of unlimited forgiveness – but you wouldn’t need it if Jehovah hadn’t set up the rules to ensure unlimited damnation in the first place. Christ brings hope, perhaps, but it was Jehovah who established the hopelessness. Forgive us if we don’t think that’s a fair game. In respect to the afterlife and “eternal salvation”, Jehovah’s rules and attitude throughout the OT reveal a personality that, when sane, appears more like a Mafia don than a benevolent spiritual figure. Until the spiritual coercion implicit in Christianity ends, you won’t see many Pagans come back to the Church. As revealed in the OT, Jehovah simply does not measure up to Pagan moral standards as worthy of worship.
“As for spiritual reality, only Christian truth possesses a deity that took on human flesh, was real, and existed among us. Nothing is more real than Jesus and his Holy Spirit. He has given us the victory over the spirits of this world.” This statement reveals a gross ignorance of both other religions and your own. World religions are replete with examples of deities that took human form, took human flesh. There is nothing remarkable about Christ’s story, save that the mythology is hailed as history and stubbornly defended, despite any evidence to the contrary. It harkens back to the idea that the scriptures were, somehow, immune from the hyperbole and religiously-sanctioned mythologizing of the past that every single other contemporary culture and religion was subject to. And Christians make this claim without a real shred of evidence.
The divinity of Jesus? You can’t even satisfactorily prove the existence of Jesus, historically. How do you know the Bible is true? runs the argument. “It’s old!” the Chrisitans say, “and all these other people thought it was true.” But how did they know? “The Bible says it’s true – you just have to have Faith!” Faith is absolute belief without supporting proof. It’s a circular argument, and one that no self-respecting Pagan of sufficient maturity will fall for. And the implication, that unprovable “Christian truth” somehow trumps all other of mankind’s notions of divinity and automatically places it at the head of the morality line is laughable. You speak of victory over “the spirits of the world” without realizing the mystery: that the “spirits of the world” were never at war with us. We were at war with ourselves, and all Christianity did was to take that internal war which all man is heir to and express it as external war, turning the legitimate quest for spiritual truth into an all-or-nothing battle of evangelism and coercion. The Bible uses the language of warfare constantly, to devastating effect. The Goddess is above such conceits. She seeks not to war on the world, but enable us to live within it.
Indeed, the whole concept of a “divine book” is laughable to Pagans. How can a book be more divine than a tree? How can God say everything he’s going to say to one little tribe and trust them to pass it on to everyone else, untainted by local prejudice? As long as Christianity relies on the Bible as its basis, the “objective” standards you tout only serve as fodder to endless, mindless debate about interpretation, keeping people from true spiritual development as they wade through five millennia of mistranslated hagiography taken drastically out of context. As a rule, Pagans look on Christianity as a hypocritical, anti-female, anti-sex, anti-life death-cult that is bound and determined to see to the wholesale destruction of life on our world. For every positive example of Christian goodness there are a hundred horrific examples of evil done under the sign of the Cross.

Jesus isn’t the problem. Most Wiccans follow much the same path that Jesus preached. The problem is that Christianity has largely ignored his teachings in favor of glorifying his death and alleged resurrection. The Church teaches that the crucifixion is the important part and spends little time on the message. While it terrorizes your youth with images of human sacrifice and bloody torture, of eternal suffering and perpetual punishment, ours invites the youth to examine their lives devoid of threat and coercion. While the Church teaches damnation as the result of deviation from doctrine, the Coven and Grove teach the inherent worth and dignity of the individual, judged by no greater or lesser authority than yourself, with an emphasis on self love that is completely absent in Christianity. Jesus may have taught brotherly love and human understanding, but y’all lost sight of that in your liturgy and catechism long ago.

In short, most Pagans view Christianity as hopelessly flawed and devoid of meaning in our modern world. And attempts to preach at us, as kindly and gently as they may come, makes us mad. There will always be those Wiccans who go back to the Church. There will always be those Christians who find Wicca and the healing power of the Goddess and never set foot in a church again. But after twenty years of intense study on the subject, to have my religion dismissed so casually in favor of a pathologically crippled monstrosity, to have books written about how to subvert my coreligionists from their hard-won spiritual path, that infuriates me.

I have three small children who are all being raised Pagan. They are being taught a healthy respect for Life and Death, are being shown the eternal cycle of the seasons and invited to joy and delight in the manifold glories of Nature. They are being taught that God and Goddess are the Mommy and Daddy to us all. They are being taught to be truthful, helpful members of society who treat all people with respect and love. And yet they are constantly being told by schoolmates, teachers, and “well-meaning” adults that their mommy and daddy are going to Hell when they die, and the only way that we can be saved is to go to Church, where there’s this horrific dead guy on the wall and all the talk about blood. Christians try to get Pagan kids to sign “statements of faith” at “harmless” ice cream socials and Church sleepovers. Christian kids gang up on Pagan kids and call them devil worshippers and Satanists. Christians who tell Pagan kids their Goddess is a whore and a deceiver. The end justifies the means, that’s what Christianity is ultimately about. And you want my kids to come to this “wholesome” environment?

There are no books on how to convert Christians to Paganism. We don’t need them. Y’all are doing a fine job yourself. But I resent you laying out a plan to steal my children’s faith from them, I really do. Until Christianity can come clean and dramatically restructure itself, no amount of weaseling about how you can find “Wiccan elements” in scripture is going to make a convincing argument. It’s a creaky, decrepit house that keeps getting propped up, and every time it does it becomes more rickety and less able to provide spiritual shelter to those who hunger for such.

Arion the Blue

Post-Partum Sex: Myth or Legend?

2006-02-21T12:10:00.000-08:00

It’s not often that I plug another blog, but every now and then you come across something worthy of comment and pee-your-pants kinda funny. When that happens, you want to share. So here goes:

http://thenaughtymommy.blogspot.com/

Naughty Mommy. Heh. Anyone who knows me, where I work, or knows my wife realizes why this is personally a hoot. It’s one of those “sex-after-baby” sites, but one written with humor, talent and style. With the motto “Putting the T&A back in PTA” as a masthead, how could you go wrong?

The simple fact of the matter is that once you have a baby, your erotic life changes irrevocably. At first it’s depressing, maddening, and frustrating. By Kid #2 the dull, numbing realization that your genitalia have done their job and can go home, now, sets in. By Kid #3 your thoughts about sex tend to be more philosophical than primal, and you start thinking of your offspring in terms of your Genetic Legacy so you don’t think of them as ruthless midget cock blockers and entertain thoughts of infanticide after a particularly frustrating evening.

Rekindling that pre-child spark in a relationship is difficult because it isn’t going to be just about you and your partner . . . ever again. Apart from the involuntary insomnia and emotional trauma of the first 7-12 months of your offspring’s life, there is a new psychological factor present in your bed every night. The Child. They may not be there, physically, but they’re always Somewhere, and to be a good parent that Somewhere has to be on your mind constantly.

From the Mommy perspective, your body has just endured a year of physiological trauma akin to the transformation from a caterpillar to a butterfly. While you are learning to cope with the physical issues and infirmities that arise with labor and delivery, and its ugly aftermath, your hormones are raging like an out-of-control forest fire – but not in a good way. Sex is, literally, the last thing on your mind. You don’t need the intimacy – the bond you share with the New Kid is like fine wine compared to the cheap, flat beer kind of intimacy provided by your husband. Your boobs are no longer property of either you or your husband, and they are about as erotic as a beverage vending machine. Your nether regions are painfully recovering from the most distressing disturbance ever, and the very thought of your man making an erotic advance on you is vile sounding, insulting, and potentially denigrating to the whole concept of Motherhood.

From the Daddy perspective, you are a confused and frustrated ball of hormones and low self-esteem – but not in a good way. You are nearly as sleep deprived as the new Mommy. You also have the tremendous psychological impact of not only being utterly responsible for this new, helpless life you’ve sired, but also for this new, bitchy wife you’ve acquired. And you don’t have a single drop of the serotonin-enhancing hormones your wife’s body pumps out in compensation for the extreme circumstances. Every move you make under her eye is laden with suspicion and mistrust. You have become a junior partner in your marriage, yet the pressure for success goes up by orders of magnitude. You are held up to an impossibly high standard by your wife, her sisters, her girlfriends, her mother, and passing strangers who all have invaded your home and feel obligated to point out your shortcomings as a father, husband, and a man. There is no way you can ever meet this standard. And every sniffing comment on dirty dishes, unfolded laundry, and un-vacuumed rugs becomes a pronouncement on your fitness to be involved in the sacred rite of Motherhood.

Not Parenthood. And certainly not Fatherhood – who the hell needs ‘em? Motherhood is the gold standard, and you will never, ever, ever achieve it. Under the Maternal Microscope, nothing you do will ever, ever be right. This is Mommy’s show, you’re a mere stagehand – it doesn’t matter how many diapers you change, backs you rub, meals you prepare, or the work you take home because the scant compensated “Maternity Leave” your boss begrudgingly extended to you was taken up not with bonding with your new baby, but with catering to the constant physical and emotional demands of wife and child. If that isn’t sapping your self-esteem during this confusing and frustrating time, then congratulations! You’ve found the right medication.

The last ten months have been a roller-coaster of life-changing internal monologs revolving around the implications of the New Kid. The next ten months will be a long and frustrating battle to re-establish yourself as a real Player in your new family, and not a mere servant. You are emotionally shattered, physically exhausted, and psychologically scarred from seeing your favorite piece of anatomy on your wife turned inside out and stretched beyond recognition. Boobs? They seem to be out all the time, big healthy fluffy boobs, too, round, firm, fully packed and ripe for the picking. Just because they are lactating – who knew? – that shouldn’t be a barrier to your enjoyment of them. But. You. Can’t. Touch. Them.

You see sex as a relief, a vital reaffirmation of yourself as a human being and a man. Sex can bring it all back, you tell yourself. That heady orgasmic bliss will soothe your aching ego as well as re-establish the profound love that brought the New Kid into existence in the first place. Perhaps it will also remind your wife of your small, pathetic little needs, as well as the fact that you have purpose beyond Waste Management. You are biologically programmed to use sex as a bridge to your deeper emotional life – you have a difficult time “opening up” without it, so all of these extreme feelings you have are backing up like a broken septic tank. You need sex like an addict needs a fix.

And it just ain’t gonna happen.

It’s a shock when that fact settles in. If you are lucky you will be so busy those first few months that you won’t think about it. That first-six-weeks-no-intercourse rule hangs over your bed like a stern guardian of your wife’s vaginal security, but you intellectually understand the medical reasoning behind it. The Happy Place needs time to heal. And it does give you a goal – if you can’t have sex for the first six weeks, then surely you can have sex after the first six weeks.

There’s a big difference, however, between ‘can’ and ‘will’. Even as you get home from your wife’s six-week-post-partum check up, you are eagerly stripping off your clothes, selecting an appropriate G-string to wear for two minutes, and considering if it’s too early to re-introduce a little light porn, your wife will glare accusingly at you, clutch her baby (HER baby – not yours) protectively in her arms, and snarl “Just what the hell do you think you’re doing?!?” Game Over.

The temptation exists to stand around your wife while she nurses, whimpering like a dog begging at the table for scraps. It seems demeaning and degrading at first – and it is – but after a couple of weeks without sex your pride level drops low enough to keep your self-esteem company. Begging doesn’t seem quite so bad anymore. Do it right, it might even be kinky. Get rejected? Go back for more. Maybe if you grovel just a little harder this time . . .

There also exists the temptation to engage in an argument that would have been perfectly normal and healthy . . . pre-Baby. To do so now is to invite untold misery into your personal life. Blaming Mommy because Daddy’s head is about to explode with sexual tension is just a poor idea. It also invites the wrath of her maternal support network, who will have no problems verbally eviscerating you for your temerity. How DARE you blame her for your insignificant problems! And, of course, there is the highly pragmatic issue of an argument just not working the way that you want it to. Best to keep your fool mouth shut. Perhaps if you casually, humorously mention it: “Remember that thing we used to do? Wouldn’t it be cool if we—”

But no. Your natural desire for sex is a perverse sign of your flawed humanity in her eyes. That you could entertain such base thoughts at such an important time reveals your own utter lack of sensitivity. Push it far enough and she’ll start to verbally muse about what she saw in you in the first place. Try to take matters in your own hands – and get busted on it – and you are likely to hear the shriek “How can you jerk off when there is LAUNDRY to be done? What kind of man are you?”

And that’s without the complication of Post Partum Depression. Like PMS and Menopause, this is one of those great female Mysteries that you, as a man, must always be understanding about but must never mention in her presence. No matter how many baby bottles she throws at your head, you must not suggest that she might be feeling a little PPD, lest your possibility of getting nookie – ever – dry up completely. But PPD is a very real and very scary thing, and it is wise to take that into account when you are considering groveling. Remember: women with Post Partum have been successfully acquitted for murder due to insanity. Best not mention that last part to your honey.

Your personal dam will come under strain. Men feel the need to have sex when they are stressed, and nothing stresses you like a new baby, a temporarily insane wife, and a boss who grew up in an era where the Father, as functionary, did not become the focus of the childrearing experience until the kid was at least 12 – “Whaddaya mean you need to get off early again? Can’t she handle a little mommy-crap on her own? You’ve got important things to do! Keep this up and you can be a stay-at-home Dad!”

When the frustration level gets to that certain point, where your subconscious mind is considering which co-workers you would have an affair with in an ideal world and you look forward to a half-hour’s worth of masturbation the way you once anticipated Date Night, it can be hard to successfully communicate these inner feelings to your mate without sounding . . . selfish. And that’s the issue, to her. Your alleged sexual needs, she sees, are a selfish manifestation of your inherently selfish personality. They are something that has nothing to do with her or the baby – just a crude physiological self-gratification, the kind that you should be more than willing to trade in for the august position of Fatherhood.

REE-jected!

So you brood, and your mother-in-law wants to know what’s wrong with you. You sulk, and wife’s BFF thinks you don’t like the baby. Show the smallest signs of self-pity and anger, and you get accused of falling out of love for your wife and mother of your child just when she needs you the most. You cannot defend yourself against these accusations. To do so validates them in the minds of the females involved.

The best tactic to take is a kind of perverse stoicism. Cultivate a monk-like serenity. Go ahead, bottle up those emotions. Pack ‘em down tight – that’s the unselfish thing to do. Consciously distance yourself emotionally from your mate during the period where she wants you to simultaneously be an emotional punching bag, a flawless housekeeper, and a sensitive father to your new child. Cultivate that distance, because it will keep you sane during the next year, while she copes with Motherhood herself, recovers from the hormonal yo-yo, and redefines herself as a woman. As much as you crave it, as much as you need it like the breath of life itself, forget that such a thing as sex exists – any less sets you up for continual disappointment. Eventually, she might let you in. Until then, keep your damn mouth shut and your mind on the laundry.

Of course by that time your own emotional development has become stunted, and your self esteem shrivels up to a ghost of its former self. Your emotional survival and self-image as a man is in jeopardy. You suddenly understand that certain expression on your father’s face. Despite yourself you come to resent your wife and kids and know, instinctively, that your value to them is based solely on how useful you are, and not much more.

Someday, perhaps, your wife will want to have sex with you again. She won’t feel like it, she won’t like it, and it won’t be any good, but by that time a three-minute quickie while the baby naps is like tantalizing dew-drops to a man dying of thirst. No matter how bad the sex is – and it will be bad, mark my words – it will be the first tangible sign that you may have a relationship again.

Emphasis on may. There are no guarantees. Sometimes the strain of the new baby on a relationship is such that it becomes permanently broken. I’ve known even the strongest of relationships to break under that stress. And again, it isn’t just the two of you any more, even when it’s just the two of you.

A co-worker of my wife’s once explained to her the downfall of his own marriage one late night before we were married. He blamed it on the “little shit” scenario, the typical masculine response to the Big Freeze after labor and delivery.

The short version runs like this: New Daddy loves the baby, loves the New Mommy, love, love, love. But New Daddy gets no love of his own, knows New Mommy used to love him, and recognizes the New Kid as the alienating factor. New Kid goes quickly from being the light of your life to the little shit that’s monopolizing the woman you spent years, probably, making into the wife you love. Once the New Kid is weaned successfully, and the Boobies return to your ostensible possession, the little shit still keeps your wife from thinking about sex for the first year or so. The milestones of development progress – sleeping through the night, the need to belch, solid foods, etc. – and the excuses for no sex gradually fall away, but the little shit keeps getting in the way of you having the sex you so richly deserve.

Resentment builds, until you can barely look at your cute baby without blaming the little shit for the longest cock-block in history. Any experiences you do have are furtive, at best, with the constant possibility of the little shit crying or otherwise interrupting your savoir fare looming over the pathetic “moves” that used to work with your wife. Only now, instead of her warming up with your caress and laughing at your stupid pre-sex jokes, she blithely strips off her nursing bra and says with a sigh “We have to hurry – and don’t touch the boobs yet.” Keep it up, and the Little Shit will become a permanent wedge in your marriage, and ultimately keep you from a fulfilling relationship with your own kid. As you grow more and more resentful, your wife becomes more and more dissatisfied with your emotional distance. And your chances of scoring slide quickly to zero.

The one issue I have with Ms. Raykeil’s blog is her emphasis on quality over quantity. I respect it and understand it – to a new mother, few things are more sexy or life-affirming than a husband who changes diapers without complaint and folds laundry without being asked – but I take issue with it. No doubt there is a part of the New Mommy that finds new orgasmic heights in post-baby sex. But to a New Daddy, a single earth-shattering experience a month is a poor substitute for more regular, more mediocre sex. While New Mommy might see once-a-month Date Night as an opportunity for superlative romantic and passionate married-people sex, New Daddy would be so much more appreciative of a weekly handjob or so, just until things return to some semblance of normalcy. It isn’t a character flaw in us – it’s just how we’re wired. We can’t help it any more than y’all can help menstruation.

Now, all of this being said, I want to emphasize that the problems and situations I’ve discussed are by no means a reflection on my wife’s behavior during any of the three New Kids we’ve had. I won’t say that we had a seamless and problem-free transition between pre-baby and post-baby sex, but we were forewarned about the matter, and both of us made a conscious effort to deal with our mutual psychological conditions without recourse to personal judgments or verbal condemnations. But we’re weird. Most couples go through this long and painful transition with no clue what’s going on in each other’s heads, and little desire to add the complications of a real sex life to the already-complex world of New Kid. Not everyone has my wife’s obsession with communication or my own passion for personal introspection. They aren’t told about this by their elders, largely because they don’t want to re-live those wonderful, ghastly days, or discuss it with the grown up Little Shits who still get in the way of their sex life. And I can’t blame them. This column was hard enough to write, knowing how many of my friends, family members, and passing strangers will read it. But it is important that this point of view is expressed, and likewise important for my wife to know that I rarely, if ever, entertain the “Little Shit” model of post-partum sexuality.

Now, if I could just keep “Elmo’s Song” from playing in my head when I’m “doing it”, and I could look at a sexy bra without thinking “How the hell could she nurse in that?!?” I’d be one under par. As it is, I get more than most men in my situation, and my wife is a princess among women.

Maybe that admission will be enough for me to score tonight. But I doubt it.

An Open Letter to Dawn Ostroff

2006-02-16T12:45:00.000-08:00

An Open Letter to Dawn Ostroff

Dear Ms. Ostroff:

I admit, I had mixed emotions about the merger between UPN and the WB networks to create the “CW” network. On the one hand, both small networks have produced some quality programming (and, sadly, some less than stellar) over the years, taking programming risks that larger companies would not. As a result, a number of hit shows that would have languished on the larger networks were allowed to flourish. On the other hand, the combination of companies will undoubtedly make the resulting network stronger, as the better shows from both networks are combined. And then there is the chance for new programming, the subject of my letter.

Bring back Firefly.

Yeah, I said it. You have experienced the incredible talent that Joss Whedon and his creative posse possess before. You know how fanatical his fans can be. This is an opportunity to bring high-quality programming, with an established track record and built-in fanbase, to the new network in truly superlative fashion.

Unlike the Angel/Buffy crew of stars, the Firefly cast has yet to sign on for long-term projects elsewhere. They are all still available. The set of Serenity is still there (I believe) and the enthusiasm that everyone shared for the show is just as present now, after the movie. This is a show that has already gone through the painful (and expensive) development phase already, has attracted a core of die-hard fans who are very active, very vocal, and loyal to the extreme, and has already proven its “legs” in a very well-received feature film.

Yes, there are obstacles in the way. Whedon is working in comics, on movies, and is far from his TV roots. The cast is looking at guest shots and searching for more permanent work. The crew that was so integral to the experience has in many cases moved on. But I believe every one of them would jump back on board, if given the opportunity.

This is the world of TV. Anything can be done if you want to badly enough – and I speak for about a million Browncoats when I say we want it badly enough. I therefore strongly encourage you to open negotiations with Whedon, et. al. and return this outstanding series to television. Whedon, for all of his genius, really needs an episodic format in which to develop the characters that drive his stories, and CW is going to need so thick, meaty, and popular fare to survive more than a year or two. Do us all a favor and lure Whedon to your new creation. Get him his ship, his crew. And put us in the air again.

You won’t regret it, I swear. Hell, the DVD revenues alone would make it pay.

Sincerely,

Terry Mancour
tmancour@gmail.com

Cracks in the Foundation: the Sudden Emergence of the Evangelical Center

2006-02-08T09:55:00.000-08:00

It was with great amusement that I read this morning that a group of Evangelical Christians has come out strongly against global warming. I was amused because this major political force in our nation, once seen as monolithic, is starting to crumble and splinter because reality doesn’t seem to conform to holy writ. It must be very frustrating for them.

Environmental issues have never played a great role in Evangelical religion, and it’s not because trees and bears don’t vote or tithe. There are two problems, one spiritual and one political.

Firstly, the major tenant of Evangelical Christianity, especially its 21st century manifestation, is at odds with the whole concept of conservation and environmentalism. Sure, there have been Christian calls for better stewardship of the environment, but these have either been completely flaccid publicity stunts to court environmentally conscious youth (who have abandoned the Church in droves for more spiritual, less organized religious expressions) or from the small, vocal, and impotent Christian Left.

Environmentalism, you see, is the idea that maybe we shouldn’t mess up the Earth too badly, because we and our children will need a place to live in the future. That is contrary to the Evangelical view that we don’t need to be concerned with the Earth, because it’s the End Times and its all gonna get blowed up anyhow. So for an Evangelical to step forward in favor of the environment is tantamount to that Evangelical denying the widely-held belief that the Second Coming is imminent, and will be televised live on Fox News with an opening address by George Bush. Which brings us to the political realm.

Bush came to power based in large part by combining the “boots on the ground” of the Evangelical voting bloc with the infinitely deep pockets of the Petroleum Industry. The two even have dovetailing interests in the Middle East, with Big Oil craving high prices and control of Iraqi oil fields (and eventually Iran’s as well) and Big Religion seeking a powerful Israeli state, so they can be a player in the coming End Times. Add in the Military-Industrial complex, which nearly starved to death during the post-Cold War reorganization of the Clinton Administration, and you have a potent political force. But one with some weaknesses, and this is one of them. To be pro-Bush means to be pro-Big Oil. And coming out in favor of the Earth is definitely anti-Big Oil.

The Evangelical movement is not a monolith, and this issue has revealed the cracks in its surface brilliantly. To the one side you have the pro-environment, anti-suffering Centrists, who may think we live in the End Times but who don’t see that as an excuse to eschew basic Christian principals such as compassion and stewardship. On the other side you have the far right-wing, most of whom have offices inside the Washington Beltway, have prayer breakfasts with Congress and Texas oil executives, and who automatically view with suspicion anything that looks like nature worship and idolatry.

You can see this split by seeing who signed the statement – and who didn’t. The Bush Imperium’s pet Evangelicals, including James Dobson’s Focus on the Family, Pat Robertson’s people, former Watergate conspirator-turned-Evangelist Chuck Coleson, Franklin Graham, and other stalwarts of the Religious Right are conspicuously absent. The parties that did sign are decidedly centrists and less-political. But they may well have earned the enmity of their politically-connected brethren for their social heresy.

The problem for the Beltway Evangelicals is that the list of signatories also represents a big chunk of the rank-and-file Evangelicals whom they successfully mobilized in the last two elections by using social issues such as abortion and gay marriage. To come out strongly and reprovingly against the measure – which is a slap in the face to their Big Oil allies in the Imperium – is to risk alienating a significant chunk of this base right before an important mid-term election. Yet they cannot let the centrists get away with this – to care for the environment so borders on apostasy in their religion.

In fact, Coleson, Dobson, and Richard Land, the president of the Southern Baptist Convention's Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, wrote a carefully worded but clearly unmistakable rebuke to the heretics, claiming that “human beings come first in God's created order.” "And that primacy must be given to human beings and for human betterment. If that means that other parts of nature take a back seat, well, then they take a back seat.” They further state that they cannot get behind the measure because there is not a clear consensus in the Evangelical community about this issue. While they didn’t end the letter with “This letter has been brought to you by Exxon,” they may as well have.

This, despite the heart wrenching images of Hurricane Katrina victims being plucked off rooftops and crying desperately for water, medical attention, and government assistance. The Centrist have declared that the ferocity of Katrina was due, in part, to global warming and environmental degredation – poor stewardship of the Earth. They looked at the faces of those God-fearing American Christians who were suffering, and realized that much of the world could look like that soon if something isn’t done. Following in the steps of Christ, it was the right thing to do to take action.

The Beltway Evangelicals saw the victims differently: when what those folks wanted was a little of that Compassionate Conservatism they’ve heard about for the last six years, what they got was smug pronouncements by the Beltway Evangelicals that their fate was sealed because of New Orleans rowdy tourism industry. Likewise the folks on the Redneck Riviera who got hit were getting retribution for letting casino gambling into their midst. The Evangelicals were strangely silent on the number of oil refineries that suffered God’s Wrath.

The problem for the Centrist Evangelicals is that they have little political clout, outside their ability to produce registered voters. They aren’t well-connected to the Imperium. Nor are they the loudest voices in the movement. They are merely deeply caring, highly religious people who are trying to follow the humane and responsible tenants of their religion. They are not they Apocalyptic-minded crowd who is dictating the Bush Imperium’s foreign policy based on the Book of Revelations. But by taking this step, they have cast doubt on the credibility of the Beltway crowd, and don’t think they won’t fire back. It’s what they do.

There is also a racial component here. Looking at the Centrists who signed the document, there are a number of black Evangelical churches represented. The Imperium’s pet Evangelicals are almost uniformly white. You couldn’t ask for a better demonstration of this split than the recent televised funeral of Coretta Scott King, wherein a number of very devout black Evangelicals publicly savaged the Bush Imperium’s policy, with George II sitting there uncomfortably and having to take it. Black Evangelicals have never come out solidly for the Republican party, and that split, as well, has been the dirty laundry of the whole Evangelical movement.

The whole tragic comedy has pointed up one of the three major things wrong with Christianity: the Book of Revelations. This ancient, nightmarish record of an early saint’s bad acid trip was, for whatever reason, included at the end of the New Testament, a fact that has doomed the religion from its inception. Christianity has painted itself into a theological corner with Revelations, and the impetus for salvation and participation in the final, glorious holy war is in direct odds with the compassionate message of Jesus himself. It’s hard to love thy neighbor while expecting to kill him some day on the plains of Armageddon. Revelations has injected a fatal air of fatalism into the religion, one which most “liberal” denominations gloss over, but one which the Evangelicals have embraced and celebrated. That’s right, Boys and Girls, the Finger on the Button was put there by folks who are expecting Bush II to use it in the glory of the Lord.

This myopic reliance on prophecy has always plagued Christianity, causing mass panics, crusades, and general freak-outs throughout the ages. Today it can be seen in the large number of mega-churches funded by well-meaning believers who were encouraged to take out second mortgages on their homes to build them, going on faith that they wouldn’t have to pay the money back because Jesus would be showing up Any Minute, Now. Rural bankruptcies have skyrocketed since 2000, and a lot of that money went to the bright shiny mega-churches and the Republican party coffers. When you compare, theologically speaking, the importance of electing a righteous leader who will protect the Holy Land to the viable sustenance of the world on which we live (but which won’t survive the Tribulation) it’s easy to see why the Imperium is more important than a couple of trees and forest creatures.

This is an especial moment of crisis for Christianity. It has a choice whether to take up swords and march on the infidel for one final, glorious bloodbath before eternal heaven, or to live up to the ideal of loving thy neighbor and practicing compassion and lovingkindness, bringing social justice to the poor and unprotected. It is just this kind of spiritual dilemma, one which demonstrates the religion’s hypocrisy, which has caused the majority of Pagans to abandon their parent’s faith and discover one which isn’t so depressingly fatalistic. It shall be interesting to see which way it goes.

Other cool links to this story: Salon http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2006/02/09/evangelicals/

New Geopolitical Blog!

2006-01-30T12:25:00.000-08:00

I've decided to spin off my geopolitical musings and predictions into a distinctive blog: The Crystal Ball. I'll continue adding articles to both of these, but this blog will remain more personal. Check out the new one: http://druidscrystalball.blogspot.com/

Thanks!

The High Druid of Durham

The Wisdom of Irv

2006-01-19T11:24:00.000-08:00

Today is my 38th Birthday.

I’ve always had a morbid dread of my birthdays, once the excitement of my childhood passed, as they were an annual reminder about how I was getting closer and closer to facing my own mortality and all the existential stuff that comes with that. 38 is particularly brutal, because I can no longer fool myself by saying, “Oh, I’m in my mid-thirties” anymore. 38 is Late 30s. Demographics don’t lie. If current life-expectancies hold true, my life is at least half over. My 20th High School Reunion is this year, and apart from one little New York Times Best Seller and two bona fide Dream Jobs under my belt, three precocious, healthy tots and a beautiful wife who makes more than I do, what do I have to show for it?

Oh.

I was struck recently by how good I’ve got it. I live in the greatest civilization the world has ever known, with all the world’s knowledge available for my study in the time it takes to Google, enjoy a standard of living undreamt of by the vast majority of history’s royalty and superrich, and just a century ago the likelihood that I’d be dead by now would be pretty high. It would make a great story to tell you how hard I struggled against overwhelming odds and untold suffering to achieve my current life, but that would be fictional bullshit. I’ve had it good from the start, and I can directly pinpoint the reasons that are most responsible.

This thought occurred to me the other day as I was passing by the playpen where my youngest son, not yet two, had grown dissatisfied with the entertainment value of Noggin and pleaded with me to pick him up, with his customary cry of “Holdju! Holdju!”, accompanied by raised arms and frantically waving hands. Cute.

Just then a flood of comprehension washed across my soul, and the planets aligned, and I had what some would call a quasi-mystical experience. I’d say it was a flashback, except that I was no where near as pharmaceutically liberal in my youthful experimentation phase as most of my peers. I just remembered being in a similar situation when I was around the boy’s age. And that made me appreciate my father, Irv, who himself just had an ostensibly important transitional birthday, his 60th.

If you don’t know Irv, you are the poorer for it. He, like me, is a father to three children, three boys, no less. He was a “Sedimentation and Erosion Control Technician” (read: “Dirt Inspector”) for Durham County for a decade and a half, and had other, less glamorous jobs before that. On paper, he was completely unexceptional: middle class, two-year degree, wife ‘n’ kids. But read between the lines there and you find out just how subtly exceptional he was.

My Dad is the wisest man I know, bar none. While our opinions on many subjects (politics included) have diverged slightly over the years, he remains the most astute analyst of human social interaction and behavior that I have ever known. The lessons he has passed on to me have gone far beyond the “fatherly wisdom” variety, and delved into deep, rich territory.

Unlike the vast majority of his peers, he did not pursue affluence or wealth. Prosperity, yes. Having just enough was enough. “Friends are more important than money” was one of the many, many maxims he instilled in me, and he proved it, over and over again. Faced with the inevitable choices that a middle-class family has to make about expenditure, he consistently chose the path that led to investments in his family, not in things. Oh, he could have, easily, by making the choice to pursue a soul-killing job in middle-management somewhere. But he didn’t, and I am the richer for it.

He was not the typical Boomer Dad, thank the Goddess. He was an outstanding parent, conducting the brain-busting, wallet-draining task of raising three precocious boys to men without investing a shred of self-important ego into the task. He didn’t cheat on his wife, indulge in cocaine or fundamentalist religion, go through some self-delusional pity-party midlife crisis, or any of the other asinine stunts his generation was prone to. He lived life well, a life to be envied, and he had no regrets about the way he did it. If he had disappointments in his life, I rarely knew about them, and bitterness was not in his nature. When I take a survey of my closest friends, I find myself in the enviable position of having the same set of parents, in the same household, that I started out with – which makes me an aberration. I don’t mind.

Perhaps I suffer as a writer because I didn’t experience the agony of “daddy issues”, testosterone-laden competition between father and son, mutual disappointments, constant arguments, or the idea that he “just didn’t understand” me, but I can live with professional mediocrity if that’s the price of admission to greatness. Irv always understood me. He never tried to dominate me, or live life vicariously through me or my brothers. He never tried to make me conform to an uncomfortable social stereotype, or worry overmuch what other people thought about me. We were never trans-generationally alienated. From adolescence on he treated me like an intellectual equal, if an undereducated one. He never tried to push me into a career, or really do anything but exploit my natural talents and interests. He ensured I learned the skills I would need in manhood, and did it in a non-coercive way. Seeing how my peers were raised, I know full well how lucky I was in this.

I know he had issues with his own father, and that makes his parenting that much more impressive. Faced with an occasionally belligerent and rigid-minded dad himself, he went out of his way to raise us with a healthy dose of affection and demonstrated love. He did not become his father.

I said Irv was wise. That’s not something you hear often these days, that a man is Wise; Wisdom is a highly undervalued commodity in our world, but Irv, in his wisdom, knew that, and took advantage of it. He taught us to look at a situation fully before acting, not act in haste without sacrificing the spontaneity essential for a well-lived life, and stay informed on everything that could potentially help or harm us. He taught us how to make strangers into friends, and friends into allies. He taught the art of the Hat Trick, solving your or your friends’ problems through networking, craftiness, and initiative. He taught us how to tell when we’re being bullshitted. He taught us drywall and auto repair and how to do little inexpensive romantic things to keep your marriage running. He taught us how to pay attention to those with wisdom (that is, learning from the mistakes of others; everyone can learn from their own mistakes.). He taught us to be our own men.

Irv was, and still is, a Boy Scout leader. Despite the issues that have arisen surrounding that organization, it still has tremendous value as a repository for knowledge and wisdom – merit badges are “survival tickets” and the moral codes taught by the BSA, while often viewed through a very narrow, conservative lens, are nonetheless strong and important values that are rarely taught any where else. In his retirement he and my mom have become Red Cross volunteers and Ruritans, because helping out your neighbors in a crisis and making your community a better place is the right thing to do. He taught us that community service isn’t just something a judge makes you do. He taught us that Enlightened Self Interest often looks like pure altruism, if you don’t look too closely.

Irv is a political animal, astute in recognizing power structures and adept at realizing their strengths and weaknesses. He is a shrewd negotiator, mostly because he doesn’t try to “get the better end of the deal” all the time. He frequently views the Big Picture, trying to put local issues in a greater context and seeing how trends in the greater world will have a local effect. During his tenure at Durham County, he became known as “the man with the hat”, and it was rare we attended any public event without at least a few folks shouting “Irv!” gleefully, then introducing their entire family. Irv once confided that the hats he wore were a sort of reverse camouflage – he could go somewhere without it, and most folks wouldn’t recognize him off-hand. He could disappear just by taking off his hat. Ingenious.

Despite having nominally racist parents and living in an apparently racist society, Irv never went that route. He taught us to be conscious of race, especially in the South, and taught us how to view people for who they were, not what they were. He taught us to recognize that there are plenty of Black people who are assholes, and that there are plenty of White people who are assholes, and why it was in your best interest to avoid the assholes of whatever color. He has some racist friends of both colors – he doesn’t let a man’s political view stand in the way of friendship, unless it turns him into an asshole. We grew up in a mixed Black/White neighborhood, and I can’t imagine any other way. Truth to tell, I don’t think my father could live anyplace that didn’t have Black folks in it. He can admire aspects of the culture without feeling the need to self-consciously ape it, and he can find fault with the culture without feeling the need to criticize in a patronizing manner. He taught us that, too.

Irv is one of those rare and special Boomers who is not technophobic, which pleases me to no end. He gave me my appetite for high technology and science-fiction (he passed me Heinlein’s The Rolling Stones when I was 8, and it changed my life – not that the book was that special, but it was Real Grown Up Sci-Fi). He has a knack for seeing the social implications of a new piece of technology and projecting into the future what effect it might have. At this late stage he is embarking on a part-time job in computer hardware repair.

Irv knows a bargain when he sees it. While we were not the most affluent of families growing up, we usually lived much higher on the food chain than our family’s income would indicate, largely because my Mom is a demon shopper and my Dad can find hidden resources in the unlikeliest of places. He taught us that a two-year old car is better than a brand new car, and that the best car of all is one you got cheap and you can keep going until the wheels fall off. He isn’t above a good scavenge – he taught me that trash piles are unappreciated resources and that everything has value . . . eventually.

One of the most important lessons he taught me was that sometimes you just have to tip your head back and sing! That doesn’t seem particularly earth-shattering – lots of people sing. But in his immediate family such public displays of emotion were heavily discouraged – an unfortunate by-product, along with hard teasing, of our Scottish cultural heritage, I believe. He spent twenty years teaching himself how to play guitar and sing. After twenty years he became a pretty decent guitar player. He never became a good singer. Didn’t improve one iota. Couldn’t carry a tune in a gunny sack. Had little musical talent at all – but that never once stopped him from expressing himself in the media he preferred. He still sings – badly – but he doesn’t play guitar any more.

Which brings me back to the present, and back to my mystical experience, and back to my appreciation of my father in a way I hadn’t fully realized before. A few weeks before my youngest son (“Holdju! Holdju!”) was born, my father suffered his second stroke. The first had been bad enough; it had reduced his range of movement and strength on his right side. With some physical therapy and determination he had come back to the point where you really had to look to notice any defect. This second stroke, though, struck hard. He is mostly paralyzed on his right side which, among other things, precludes his ever playing guitar again. That’s got to be devastating to a man who had little natural talent to begin with, and whose ability was almost entirely self taught. That was a tumultuous time for us all – my Dad came home from the hospital to live with me and my wife and kids, because they live out in the boonies and I was closer to the hospital, as well as having through no fault of my own a handicapped accessible shower and toilet. A week later we went back to the hospital for the youngest to be born. He now walks with a cane (“Papa’s Hook”) and a leg brace, and there is just the barest hint of a speech impediment. But he walks, and he talks, and he still sings upon occasion. No, the stroke didn’t make that any better, either. But not much worse.

The reason I bring all of this up is that on my 38th birthday I am realizing that my father’s influence on my life, the lessons he taught me, didn’t stop when I moved out of the house. They continue to this day. The struggle he has faced these last two years have revealed a great deal of his character and his personal vulnerabilities that I was previously unaware of. I’ve seen dark parts of my Dad that I’d rather not have experienced – quite understandable, under the circumstances. He still faces depression on a daily basis, I know. But in facing that struggle, with all of its attendant heartbreaks, disappointments, and profound feelings of loss, my father has taught me lessons as valuable as any imparted in childhood. He has taught me how to face the abyss in your own soul, how to challenge adversity, and how to adapt to changing circumstances.

As he stood in the Ruritan hall at the surprise party my mother had so adeptly arranged (haven’t forgotten about you, Mom, you get your own article), he looked out at the crowd of Boy Scouts and grandchildren and friends, and in that moment he taught me how to age gracefully, love life, and deal with adversity. For a half-paralyzed, retired old man on a fixed income, my Dad remains active: he’s rebuilding a 1960s era John Deer tractor that he dearly loves – one handed. He remains a Red Cross volunteer and Scout leader, as well as an active Ruritan. He has a network of friends and allies that Karl Rove would envy. He has six active grandchildren that he remains very engaged with – he’s the perfect grandfather. For a man with one good leg and a quickly-retrained left hand, he accomplishes a remarkable amount. If that ain’t a lesson, I don’t know what is.

But it all started, if my flashback was accurate, when I was a baby my son’s age or thereabouts, with me looking up to his bearded face (God, when he shaved his beard off once when I was 11 I freaked!) from the daycare center near to Mott Community College where he got his 2 year degree, my arms extended, hands waving, shouting my own version of “Holdju! Holdju!” when he came to get me. And the smile on his face when he reached down and picked me up and played with me in a manner which most manly men would have avoided, clinging instead to their rigid idea of traditional masculinity and the very minor role that babies play in it. I saw that smile reflected back at his 60th birthday party, and now when I look at the long, slow journey of middle age and beyond, with the inevitable conclusion, I know how to handle it. Because Irv taught me. He continues to teach me. And I have many more lessons yet to come.

So I reached over and picked up my last child, hugged him tight, and went all Goofydaddy for a good five minutes when there was probably some important stuff I had to do. Because I learned from Irv that my most important job in the world is making sure that my kids have a happy childhood and that they have a friend, first and foremost, in their father.

High Druid's forecast: Mostly Wonky With A Slight Chance of Dictatorship

2006-01-19T09:05:00.000-08:00

The recent allegations around the NSA’s warrantless domestic spying on American citizens puts me in a difficult position: agreeing wholeheartedly with Al Gore, a politician I don’t particularly like. But the fact of the matter is that the Bush Whitehouse has, with this action, done more damage to the American way of life than all of the Islamic Jihadis in the world, combined.

Some have noted I often use the term “Bush Imperium” as opposed to “Bush Administration” in this blog. This is why. Not only has Bush invaded a foreign state under false pretenses, putting political ideology economic cronyism above the rational foreign interests of this country, but he has in effect marginalized the other two branches of government to the point of ineffectualness. To willfully contradict legislation he has signed with non-legally binding “signing statements”, he has usurped the power of the Legislative branch. And while there is nothing illegal about packing the court system with like-minded ideologues – which has a long and distinguished history in this nation – he has nonetheless made his Administration into an unchecked juggernaut, answerable and accountable to no one.

The quasi-legalistic term for this is the Unitary Executive Theory, the idea that the President and his men are, indeed, the dominant branch of government, able in a time of war to curtail virtually any constitutionally-protected civil right in the name of “protecting the American People”. This Theory is found no place in the Constitution – it is actually expressly undermined by investing the Congress with the sole power to declare wars. Bush’s violation of FISA and his warrantless searches, added to his cavalier attitude about prisoners’ rights and due process, the torture allegations, and sundry other legal issues are all a direct result of the Unitary Executive Theory. A shorthand term for this is “dictatorship” or “monarchy”.

George W. Bush has transformed our dear republic into an Empire, hence the Bush Imperium moniker. And his assurances that he will use his newly-usurped powers only for Good is the political equivalent of “I won’t cum in your mouth.” Some things, as J. Edgar Hoover proved, are just too tempting to pass up. If the Imperium can wiretap al Qaeda terrorists without judicial or congressional oversight, then the temptation to extend that intrusion for political gain is just too tempting for the Imperium to pass up. It is only a matter of time before the shadowy arm of the NSA starts moving from rabid Jihadis to radical anti-war dissidents to more mainstream politicians. We are staring into the abyss of a thousand electronic Watergate break-ins.
We are a hair’s breadth away from dictatorship, and dictatorship – however benign – is anathema to the American way of life.

There are plenty of folks out there who dismiss this claim as another leftist Democratic stab at Bush, spiteful and petty. By denigrating and “swift-boating” prominent dissidents in Congress, and lambasting Gore for his impassioned speech as mere sour grapes, the Imperium puts a thin veneer of saccharine public relations over the gaping fissure of its own misdeeds. The one saving grace about it is that the current regime resembles the Gang Who Couldn’t Shoot Straight more than an effective grab for power.

So what does the future hold, now? Bush’s poll numbers are a shadow of their former selves, his razor-thin “mandate” from the election has long evaporated, and his chief political advisor is under investigation and may face indictment before year’s end. While he has a political lock on all three branches, he faces mid-term elections that may well turn the tide and leave him facing one or both houses of Congress in Democratic – and very unfriendly – hands. There is no statute of limitations on high crimes and misdemeanors, and 2007 may well see articles of impeachment introduced into the House. The Abramoff scandal threatens to put a dozen or so previously “safe” seats in Congress into play, and the Democrats, while lacking any kind of message, know how to get out the vote.

On top of that, chickens put afield years ago seem to be coming home to roost in foreign policy. The current Iranian crisis has left the Imperium with its metaphorical dick in its hands. On the one hand, Bush cannot deal with another crazy, oil-rich Islamic country with aspirations of WMDs politely and appear consistent. On the other, if the one tough-guy card it has is played and the matter is referred to the UN Security Council, not only does it face lackluster support by China and Russia – if not outright veto – but it would give Iran an out from any further IAEA inspections, according to the laws already passed by the Iranian parliament. That isn’t the worst issue, though: the Iranian threat to halt all oil shipments in retaliation leaves the Imperium looking at $100 a barrel or more prices for crude, and puts us in a bidding war with China over the remaining stocks of crude.

As a nasty by-product, the other petroleum exporter that has become a thorn in US foreign policy, Venezuela, would reap rich rewards and strengthen its already strong position as an alternative to US patronage for the poorer Latin American states.

But Iran is the big issue. Because if we do not take positive action to halt Iranian
membership in the Atomic Bomb club, Israel will. And that will open up a shitstorm the likes of which will make us all think back fondly to the halcyon days of 9-11.
You see, we occupy Iraq right now only because we have the Kurds as firm allies and the Shiites as tolerant subjects, with the promise of an eventual US withdrawal that will leave them in charge. The Sunni insurgents we are currently fighting are a minority, and a minority that the Shia don’t mind beating up every chance they get. It is a precarious balance, and one that could change overnight with one little Israeli airstrike.

Remember the Tet Offensive? Imagine something similar, only with falafel instead of rice. A surprise attack all over the occupied country, egged on and supplied by Iran, would be as good as an Iranian invasion and twice as hard to manage. The relatively peaceful and stable south of Iraq could transform very quickly into the kind of house-to-house insurgency that Baghdad now enjoys. The Shia are better organized and better armed than the Sunnis, and they have a big backer just over the border, something that the Sunnis lack.

Any reprisals to such an offensive could be met with an Iranian invasion, with possible Syrian support (the two countries are close allies and recent events (http://www.breitbart.com/news/2006/01/19/D8F7QV781.html) have pushed them closer; nor is Syria a military slouch – they have a large, well-trained army and bought up plenty of Cold War era Soviet armor and munitions at scrap metal prices) which would leave our forces, as well equipped and trained as they are, trying to fight a traditional land war (at which we excel) on two fronts while simultaneously fighting a violent insurgency in their rear (at which we suck).
Sure, we can bomb and bomb and bomb – we got lots of bombs – but such wholesale destruction of Moslems in Iran/Syria/Iraq may well lead to regime change in some of our staunchest allies. Imagine Saudi Arabia with a hardline Islamic government. Or Egypt. Oh, sure, we own Kuwait, but trying to ship oil out of the Straights of Hormuz from Kuwait would be nearly impossible. The Kurds like us, and since they back up to our ally, Turkey, they would likely provide a stable base, but they are land-locked and poorly equipped compared to our potential foes – kind of like a Middle Eastern Colorado. Our bases in Qatar? That’s like owning Rhode Island.
So the Imperium must deal with Iran, and it is singularly unequipped to do so. I look for Israeli airstrikes before the end of February of this year. I expect a rise in Defense Department procurements of body bags shortly thereafter.

Which brings us back to the original point of this exercise: the Imperium’s inclination to trample our civil rights using the War and security as an excuse for nearly every dictatorial move. With mid-terms on the horizon and its hold on power threatened, the Imperium will not stand idly by and let itself be voted calmly out of office. As scandal-ridden as it has become, only a CNN-worthy military engagement overseas is likely to distract American public attention from their discontent with the status quo. The Imperium will turn its malevolent eye towards staying in power at any cost. That will be hard to do with their traditional bases eroding daily.
Fiscal conservatives are disgusted by the cavalier attitude with which the Imperium has treated the budget – expect them to jump ship or stay home on Election Day.

The traditional support that Veterans have lent to the Republicans likewise is eroding as the facts about how the war is prosecuted – issues like body and vehicle armor, using mercenaries (“Blackwater Security”) in combat, and even issues like declining veterans benefits are making this once-solid part of the base grumble, as Viet Nam era vets remember the abuses and corruption of that war when they hear back from returning Iraq veterans.

The Religious Right, who sees Bush’s foreign policy as the fulfillment of Biblical prophecy, isn’t very happy about many of the social issues that they were promised action upon. Expect to see lighter-than-expected turnout from them, even if Pat Robertson claims that God has endorsed the GOP and has the press release to prove it. The lackluster-to-incompetent handling of Hurricane Katrina, hitting the stalwart base of the Deep South, may well see a swing in the Dixiecrat electorate as well. The same issue may well prove to galvanize the Black vote in a way we haven’t seen in a generation – just as Cubans in the traditional Republican strongholds of South Florida are starting to examine Democratic candidates that seem more responsive to their own political agenda than the Republicans who have taken them for granted.

What’s an Imperium to do? To lose this next election is to see the Bush Whitehouse being called to account – and it’s a bill they cannot pay.

So expect to see the full range of traditional Republican dirty tricks – augmented by clandestine Federal assistance – this election cycle to make up for the lack. Expect to see muck-raking investigations into “safe” Democratic incumbents, increased harassment of the far-left anti-war/anti-globalization movement, continued stonewalling and condescension by the Whitehouse about the War on Terror, complete with claims that dissent is equivalent to providing aid and comfort to the enemy. And don’t be surprised if you see more than one Watergate-style bit of underhandedness, up to and including vote tampering, income tax audits, and sudden Democratic sex-scandals designed to eclipse the Republican influence-peddling scandals.

That doesn’t even count the potential backlash for very, very expensive gas, the idea that the NSA has been rooting through your porn collection on your computer without so much as a warrant, and the uneasy feeling every American has in the back of their mind when they hear about any prisoner being held and tortured by Americans without legal representation or legitimate criminal charges being filed. Or the picture of poor black folks on rooftops in New Orleans desperately calling on their government for help, only to be turned back by M-16 toting white Blackwater mercenaries hired with US tax dollars. We’re America. We’re supposed to set the example for the world. No amount of flag-waving will erase the specter of the Abu Gharib photos. The Bush Imperium is starting to leave a bad taste in the mouth of the American voter.
Should we have another untimely natural disaster – say an earthquake or tsunami or sudden downturn in the economy – or any further major legal issues, then expect the election to get very nasty.

It will be a hard fought, scorched earth campaign, one the Imperium knows it must win – because to loose means facing an all but inevitable round of impeachment proceedings and criminal indictments in the session that follows.

Why Iran is Going To Get Nukes -- and why we can't do a damn thing about it.

2006-01-12T13:54:00.000-08:00

The referral of the Iranian nuclear issue to the UN Security Council is seen by most as the last straw in the international arsenal. It is a matter of grave, grave concern, and Iran should understand just how serious the situation is.

Only is ain’t gonna work.

As serious as the situation is, a referral to the Security Council is likely to do nothing – nothing whatsoever – to the Islamic Republic’s ambitions. Why? Why wouldn’t this third-world, backwards-looking nation in West Asia be concerned with how serious the rest of the world takes its nuclear aspirations? Because nothing much will come of it.

Consider: the UN Security Council has five permanent members. Of those, two are dead-set against a Nuclear Iran. Two are ambivalent. And one is busy selling them the equipment that they need. The worst that could happen – and what will happen – will be a mealy-mouthed condemnation without sufficient teeth for enforcement. I will be very surprised if the UNSC returns even token economic sanctions. The problem is that there is no good, legal reason for keeping Iran from having nuclear weapons.

Consider the justifications that the other nuclear powers have given for having such weapons: The US has them because we invented them and we ain’t givin’ them up! Nyah, nyah, nyah.

Russia has them because the Soviet Union had them as a deterrent against unchecked US Imperialism and capitalist hegemony, not to mention an aggressive NATO that had designs on Eastern Europe. Russia still worries about an aggressive NATO – see its current spat with Ukraine for details – and now has the added problem of a coalescing Western European Empire on its borders. Russia inherited the nukes, and its status as a major world power is largely dependent upon their continued existence.

Britain and France have them because . . . well, because the US gave them to them, and they needed them once-upon-a-time to server as a deterrent to the Soviet Union. Now that that threat is gone, they have them because they are the backbone of the Euro half of the NATO Alliance, and giving them up would make them look like weak dependencies of the US, not full political and military partners.

The People’s Republic of China has them because it shared a long and tenuous border with the Soviet Union, a nuclear armed power, and did not want to become the most populous client state in the Soviet Far East.

India has them because it shares a long and tenuous border with the People’s Republic of China, a nuclear armed power, and it does not want to become the most populous province in a Greater China.

Pakistan has them because it shares a long and disputed border with India, one of the most populous nations in the world, and it couldn’t win an all-out war with India without them.
South Africa had them for no good reason and gave them up because they didn’t want to see nukes in the hands of the tin-hat African dictator they feared would come to power there.

Israel has them because they are surrounded by populous Arab countries who really don’t like the fact that Palestine was taken from their fold without even consulting them and given to Europeans, Jews or not. Israel knows that if the Arabs ever got their act together militarily, only the threat of strategic nuclear warfare would hold them at bay. Maybe.

North Korea probably has them because they ostensibly feel threatened by the presence of US troops on the peninsula and want a deterrent against invasion – as if their 1 million man strong armed forces wasn’t reason enough not to invade.

So under what justification can the Western World deny Iran the right to nukes?

It lives in a rough neighborhood. A publicly unfriendly power (the US) has invaded the countries on either side of them in the last decade, has occupied them with troops and has threatened military action against Iran despite the fact that Iran has made no overtly hostile moves against . . . anyone, really, in decades. That’s got to make the Iranians nervous. Add to that their enmity towards Israel – which is reciprocated, thanks to Iranian support of Hezbollah and the Palestinians – and you have a nuclear armed power in the neighborhood that doesn’t like it. A power, I might add, that has a history of unilateral surprise military action ala the strikes against the Iraqi nuclear facilities in the 1980s. So Iran could justly claim a security need for nukes – the same justification most of the nuclear powers have claimed.

We cannot say that we fear the stability of the regime – not when we permit Pakistan nukes, despite that country’s violent history of coups and revolutions. Iran has had peaceful transitions of power from one elected government to another since the late 1970s. Sure, they have a theocratic supreme court, but they also have fair elections, within their own constitutional framework. Indeed, Iran enjoys a stability most other Middle-Eastern countries envy. That includes Israel, where the government has experienced sometimes-radical shifts in power over the years.

We can talk about Iran exporting terrorism, but the only major terrorist movement they have sponsored has been the Hezbollah militias in Lebanon. And while this organization has not hesitated to use the tools of terror when it chose to, its typical MO is to launch a bunch of rockets and mortar rounds randomly into Israel. It doesn’t even go in for suicide bombers like al Qaeda or Hamas. Hezbollah is far more a typical insurgency than a terrorist organization.

So we come back to the idea that Iran should not have nukes simply because We Don’t Like Them. Which isn’t a very good or legal justification, when we get right down to it. Could we reasonably expect a nation who has been threatened repeatedly by neighboring nuclear powers to eschew a nuclear program of their own? We didn’t in Pakistan. Could we reasonable expect a country faced with a far superior conventional military presence on its borders to give up nuclear aspirations? We didn’t in Israel. So we can hardly do so in Iran without invoking a damaging double standard.

The fact is, Iran is going to process uranium, and it is going to build a bunch of nukes because, frankly, there is nothing we can do to stop it short of a full invasion. As the coming UNSC votes will show, China and Russia are not eager to piss off Iran. Russia, because it wants to sell Iran the nuclear technology it needs, and China because it wants Iranian oil – preferably in an over-land pipeline that is not subject to a US blockade. That would free up its foreign policy options tremendously. As it is, China is getting more and more close to the Islamic Republic for that very reason. China needs oil like an addict needs a fix, and right now it is leaking hard currency to get it at an alarming rate. Any quid quo pro between China and Iran would mean no clear action from the Security Council . . . and possibly result in a long-term alliance between the two powers.

In fact, I’d be very surprised if we didn’t see just such a thing. If China’s oil supply was no longer dependent upon the sufferance of the US Navy allowing tankers through to the South China Sea, then it could play a lot more aggressively with Taiwan – and beyond. And Russia . . . Russia doesn’t really want to see another nuke power on its borders, but when faced with the inevitable the Russians have a knack for going in whichever direction favors Russia. If they can tap into some of that massive oil revenue by selling pretty much anything to Iran, from thumbtacks to tanks to thermonuclear reactors, they’re gonna do it.

So where does that leave us? We can refer the matter to the UN Security Council . . . have it watered down or rejected by the other members . . . and do nothing. We can attempt to destabilize the Iranian regime – but we’ve been trying to do that for decades now without success. We can impose economic sanctions, but Iran has butt-loads of cash from $60 a barrel oil. With China and Russia willing to supply them clandestinely, economic sanctions appear to be pointless.

That leaves Israel, our proxy state in the region.

Israel would have no problem unilaterally attacking Iran with our tacit approval. Israel has the most to lose by a nuked-up Iran. Iran hates Israel and has stated so unequivicably. “Wiped off the map” I believe was the exact phrase used. Israel has the motive, the resources, and (assuming an ultra-liberal Knesset doesn’t come to power soon) the political will to attack Iran. But would that solve the problem? Iran has, no doubt, learned from Iraq’s mistakes in the 1980s and has concealed its most vital nuclear installations deep underground, where they can make bombs to their heart’s content. At the bare minimum such a strike on Iran would spark a state of war between the states – and in the extreme it would not be amiss to assume that other Islamic nations would join, considering the unprovoked nature of the attack.

We may well see massive riots in our occupied territories. We could see Islamic revolutions in our allied despotic client-states, Egypt and Saudi Arabia. We could well see a direct attack on US forces in Iraq by Iran and Syria. And we would damn sure see a concerted attack on Israel, with all the stops pulled out. If Iran already has nukes – a fair assumption, after all, since it’s been in the market for surplus Soviet nukes for decades – then Tel Aviv would be toast. Iran has at least 4 to 6 Cold War era subs, bought from Russia, and perhaps more supplied by other regimes. Putting a nuke over Tel Aviv wouldn’t be any big deal.

The aftermath of such a conflict could prove devastating to the West in general and the USA in particular. It may well usher in an era of “regime change” – but not in the direction we want. It could see the establishment of a radical Islamic superstate, a refounded Caliphate that includes most of Central Asia, the Middle East, North Africa, and beyond. Allied with a strong China, such a state would be (from a Chinese perspective) an excellent foil for the West.

So give up hope for a peaceful resolution in Iran. Those madcap mullahs are getting nukes, whether we like it or not. If we aren’t careful, we could inadvertently hand them everything else they want, too.

Monotheists, do not fear Pagans: all we want is your compost . . .

2006-01-08T07:05:00.000-08:00

Every now and then I will come across an article that bemoans the loss of the undisputed dominance that Radical Monotheism, as personified in the Abrahamic Faiths, has had over Western Civilization for the last fifteen hundred years. Usually they cite the appearance of publicly worshiping pagans as a symptom of the general collapse of spiritual and moral values. They point to the increased public presence of homosexuality, feminism, environmentalism, and, various “attacks” on the unofficial but ubiquitous dominance of Christianity in our public sphere as proof. Where society at large pays respect to Western civilization’s pagan past, they holler loud, such as they did at the presence of statues of the Goddess of Justice, Themis, in courthouses or the celebration of Greece’s pagan past at the 2004 Olympics in Athens as “proof” that we are sliding away from a moral society. Nothing rouses their ire more than the idea that we are worshiping, not “God” as typified by Jehovah/Jesus/Allah, but Goddess, with Her own unique and individual identity. That really pisses them off.

And it leads them to the conclusion that we are somehow immoral or amoral, because we do not have God as Lawgiver at the head of our pantheon. While lambasting Wicca and the other Pagan faiths for this, referring to the apparent lack of ethical and moral underpinnings for our morality, they commonly make the erroneous conclusion that we are inconstant moral relativists who sail through life changing our moral and ethical standards at whim. Had they studied the matter more thoroughly, talked to some serious members of the Neo-Pagan community, and investigated our beliefs even casually, they would find otherwise. Pagans in general tend to have high ethical standards, as it is endemic to our beliefs and practices. While these standards are sometimes – if not often – at odds with the established Abrahamic faiths, they are not ideas foreign to Western Civilization.

One reason we Pagans were excited about the return of the Olympic Games to their original home – if not to their original purpose as a religious celebration – is that it acknowledged and even celebrated one of the major pillars of Western Civilization: the contribution of these ancient Pagans to our identity as members of this civilization.

Often overshadowed by the more recent contributions of the Abrahamic faiths – faiths that codify the rites, customs, and laws of one single culture into the rule for all – the contributions of the Classical Pagans are easily as valid and important to the development of our civilization as those brought by the People of the Book.

Could you deny the profound moral and ethical effect that Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Pythagoras and the other Greeks had on our culture? Many Radical Monotheists conveniently forget that their modern ideas and ideals were both born in hearts raised in a vibrant, sophisticated polytheistic culture, which included (gasp!) goddess worship. Yet the same moral absolutists who deride us for “picking and choosing” spiritual elements from other sources have no problem pillaging the Classical Pagans for the ideas they find useful (Logic, mathematics, ethics, philosophy, democracy) while rejecting out of hand the spiritual foundation on which these ideas were built.

In delving into the emerging Neo-Pagan religion they would have found a body of deeply spiritual people, well educated and no more hedonistic than most of our Monotheistic peers. But we are not a people of Faith (the absolute belief in God without proof), as the Abrahamic religions are, but a people devoted to Wisdom (the art and science of Doing the Right Thing at the Right Time). We often value the truth of personal experience over the vagaries of interpreting the written word. We hold the development of our personal conscience more important than our perceived transgressions against written spiritual law. And we favor adaptability to our rapidly changing world over the blind acceptance of our circumstance as the will of a single, remote deity. Neo-Pagans place a higher premium on Responsibility, personal and cultural, than we do on Sin and its attendant apparatus. Neo-Paganism may be seen as a sort of shallow spiritual buffet by some, but is in actuality the realization of an emerging religious paradigm, one dedicated to navigating the complex web of modern life and not to the fulfillment of the prophecies of desert-born mystics.

It is therefore somewhat galling that some Evangelicals have used Jerry Falwell’s infamous statement on Neo-Paganism’s spiritual responsibility for the current War on Terror as a welcome word of caution about the dangers of our times. Considering that the parties involved are all Radical Monotheists, it seems supremely ironic to scapegoat the Neo-Pagan community for the crimes committed on September 11 and since by all sides.

To my knowledge no polytheists were involved, directly or indirectly, in the fight (Apart, that is, from a few brave and dedicated Neo-Pagans in America’s military forces who are today in harm’s way because their “moral relativism” made them patriotic and committed enough to American ideals to volunteer to do so). As a rule Pagans feel no need to spend their lives in futile martyrdom, dying to protect the Holy Land – for we see all land as holy. We find the depredations performed by Monotheists on one another as not only morally repugnant and unworthy of the very God they profess to worship, but also as dangerous and haphazard steps toward unconscionable human suffering, theocratic totalitarianism, and our eventual extinction as a species.

While it is all to easy for Monotheists to see polytheism as a cause for the current crises, I counter that the viciousness of al Qaida, the War on Terror, the Intifatah, the Wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and all the skirmishes in this conflict, known and unknown, are due entirely to the failure of Radical Monotheism to live up to its own grand ideals. For Radical Monotheism and the Abrahamic Faiths have it as an axiom that divine favor and utopic society can be achieved at the price of conformity of belief and adherence to “divine” law— as properly interpreted – and, outside of small, dedicated and openly mocked religious communities it has utterly failed to deliver. Unfettered capitalism and modern consumer materialism, after all, were inventions of Monotheists, not the pagans, new or old. Yet we continually receive the brunt of the blame for these problems in our society.

On the contrary, Neo-Pagans are not the cause of the problems, or even a symptom of the “sickness” of Western Civilization. We are, instead, a natural result of the failure of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam to adequately address the grave political, ecological, economical, social and spiritual problems that have arisen as a result of their own “successes”. We are the natural and entirely predictable result of the pluralism and pursuit of liberty our Founding Fathers enshrined into our most basic laws. As the great Monotheisms flounder around grave moral matters and the fundamental questions of our time, they have squandered whatever spiritual capital they may have once had in scandal, belligerence, and a thirst for political power that belies whatever great spiritual truths they may hold. If the presence of paganism is indicative of the erosion of “former certainties” that everyone worships the same indivisible divinity, as many Radical Monotheists insist, should we not call into question the absolute nature of those certainties? Are they worthy, necessarily, of fighting, killing, and dying over?

Polytheism by its very nature can contain within itself the concept of monotheism; the reverse is certainly not true. The belief in more than one aspect of Divinity, and the idea that it might be represented as both male and female, as is all of Creation, has caused considerable alarm in the Radical Monotheistic community. They gaze in abject horror at our willingness to see the universe differently than they and their immediate ancestors did, refusing to recognize that we have left behind Monotheism in general and Judaism and Christianity specifically because, as currently preached and practiced, they just don’t work. When their neighbors dare to consider the compassionate embrace of the Goddess as personally preferable to the baleful eye of a jealous and wrathful God, the Radical Monotheists proceed to have fits. That’s not the way the prophets said it should be, after all – even if that way seems to lead clearly to our destruction as a race.

Though we are denied and derided, we will persist because we are, in the final analysis, survivors. If the worship of the Great Goddess could lay dormant in our civilization for fifteen centuries only to spring forth again in such a dramatic fashion without (I might point out) any conscious desire of Neo-Pagans to prosetheltize, it must have some value to its adherence beyond simple “idol worship”. How the Radical Monotheists deal with it will tell us much about their moral and ethical character.

In the meantime, I assure all of you Evangelicals and Orthodox Jews and Radical Islamicists that despite your fears about us, society is not dominated by pagans – far from it. Radical Monotheism is still the default religion of the majority, and Polytheism is a tiny and innocuous nascent religion, often mistaken for a cult (we aren’t that organized). Many outspoken Monotheists will even admit that we are a tiny minority, a few hundred thousand on a continent of hundreds of millions. Our own estimates place our numbers closer to a million, but the statistical difference between the two is negligible: we are a tiny, tiny minority in our nation, with little control and virtually no organization. In pointing us out, they have given us far, far more credit for our impact on “pop culture” and the American Experience than we justly deserve.

We don’t offer an Ultimate Answer – we have seen three great religions propose them, and the results thereof, and we are not interested in such. But we do offer an alternative, one outside of the Abrahmic sphere of influence and absent its considerable baggage. If the Monotheistic establishment is indeed that worried about us, I encourage them to look elsewhere for the cause of his complaint. We are not to blame. We are a minority religion immersed in a culture often unfriendly and ignorant of our true beliefs, leaving us open to frequent attack and persecution by the majority – a similar position enjoyed by Judaism, Christianity, and Islam at various points of their history.

A Very Wiccan Holiday Season

2005-12-21T09:32:00.000-08:00

Ah, Yule! That glorious time of year that brings out goodwill towards men, the kindness of strangers, the fragrance of fresh-cut greenery and the inevitable prospect of numerous church-state First Amendment court cases on the part of the Evangelical Conservative Christians on the Right, and the litigious Wiccans on the . . . well, call it the Left, because the Evangelicals have certainly put it in those terms.

If you read the news, that’s likely the context in which you have been exposed to Wicca as a modern religion. It perennially pops up as third-page news every Hallowe’en (based on the Celtic fire festival Samhain and regularly reclaimed and rejected by above-referenced Evangelicals) and Christmas (all the Christmas Trees, mistletoe, crackling fires and gift-giving around the Winter Solstice have a distinctly Pagan feel and Pagan history about them) because of the Pagan connotations.

But what was once fairly safe historical-interest filler for the Religion section of the paper is now a hotbed of religious contention over symbols, beliefs, and public displays during the holiday season. Yes, those holidays were derived from Pagan roots, but until recently Paganism was a historical footnote, not taken seriously in the Western world of Religion as anything but fodder for quaint tradition.

No more. Wicca is a Pagan religion. It does not accept any scripture from the Ancient Middle East as a valid spiritual authority. It is a pantheistic/polytheistic Nature-oriented religion. It is protected by the First Amendment, recognized by the US Military (“an equal-opportunity employer”) and the legally savvy Wiccans are going to do everything they can to ensure that their beliefs are respected by the courts, if not the present Administration and the public-at-large.

Pretty heady stuff for a “made up” religion with less than 1 million practitioners in North America.

Wicca has been practiced in the Western world for over 50 years, now. Yet some claim that Wicca (an Old English-derived term for Witch, as in Witchcraft, as in magic, spells, wands and brooms) is some kind of kooky “made up” religion that was invented by an aging British civil servant, Gerald Gardner, in the 1950s. Still others claim that Wicca is the continuation of an ancient goddess-centric spirituality that dates back to Paleolithic times – when the evidence breaks down, blame the “monotheistic patriarchy” for trying to hide the truth. The facts and the truth lie somewhere between those extremes.

One of the common arguments against Wicca as a “real” religion is the fact that some early practitioners (way back in the mists of time, say the late 1960s, early 1970s), in an attempt to borrow legitimacy for their beliefs, made claims about the historical roots of the religion, often citing Margaret Murray’s now-discredited The Witch Cult in Western Europe as source material. With the rise of Wiccan practitioners in the 1990s, a whole new wave of historical re-interpretation was launched, asserting the overtly feminist history (or herstory, if you will) of Wicca, mainly basing their position on popular books such as Merlin Stone’s When God Was A Woman and Starhawk’s The Spiral Dance. Both books asserted a prehistoric matriarchal culture that universally worshipped a Mother Goddess, and the latter work claimed that Wicca was a descendent, spiritual or direct, of that cult. The scholarship was uneven, speculative, and in some places just fantastic; and while the books brought up an interesting – even inspiring –proposition, using them as a credible source for a historical base of the religion is difficult at best and intellectually dishonest at worst.

Wicca, as it is currently practiced, was largely formed by a small group of British mystics in the 1950s, themselves spiritual descendents of the previous age of British mystics who had used the British Empire as their spiritual smorgasbord. By borrowing mystical concepts from such diverse sources as Taoism, Buddhism, Hinduism, Sufism, and the Western European Occult tradition in the form of Freemasonry, Astrology and Alchemy, Gerald Gardner, Doreen Valiente and Alex Saunders, among others, “created” the bare bones of the religion now known as Wicca.
Most Wiccans are aware of that. Most Wiccans are cool with that.

Because the need to legitimize a spiritual belief by rooting it in the soil of ancient tradition or teaching is one of the legacies our culture bears from the Abrahamic Faiths: Christianity, Judaism, and Islam. As Wicca has grown and matured over the last 50 years, however, a large number of Wiccans have recognized that theirs is a syncretic faith. Upon further study, so were Christianity, Judaism, and Islam. This apparently occurs every couple of hundred years or so: as the society and technology and the economy change, so to does Religion change to conform to the spiritual needs of the people. It is no accident that Wicca’s recent popularity has coincided with the rise of the Internet, or the post-industrial economy.

The fact of the matter is that absent of any historically legitimizing text or practice, Wicca is a vibrant, potent spiritual movement in today’s society – much to the chagrin of many Christians, who take the very presence of this tiny religion as a sign of the Apocalypse. Wicca’s numbers have grown exponentially in the last few decades. And unlike previous nascent faiths, it has done so while actively shunning proselytizing of any sort. It has no central organization – and damn little local organization of any sort – and very few widely acknowledged leaders. Websites about Wicca abound, and are filled with as much rumor, urban myth and bad history as they are useful and practical information on the religion. With no central . . . anything, it’s easy to see how confusing things might get. As any three Wiccans of their opinion of any conceivable theological topic, it is said, and you will get five answers and a fight.

All of that being said, Wicca continues to expand, grow, and mature. Especially mature. No longer a “kooky cult”, it has been around long enough now to attract serious academic study as well as develop a very generalized theology, body of ritual, custom and lore. And virtually none of it came from ancient sources.

Are Wiccans “making it up as they go along”, as so many critics have insisted? Not quite. In the very best of religious traditions, Wicca is borrowing many diverse elements and creating a faith out of it. While this rankles the nostrils of those academicians who have spent their entire career viewing religion through a text-based filter, the fact remains that Wicca has co-opted perfectly sound religious principals from other religions . . . and other philosophical sources.

Feminist philosophy is one. One of the hallmarks of Wicca is the return of the Goddess – not the return of any specific pre-Christian Goddess, necessarily, but a return to the acknowledgement that Divinity has a female face as well as a long white beard. One common complaint among Wiccans about the current dominant faiths is that they are nearly totally lacking in divine feminine archetypes, and they place much of the burden of Christianity’s past sins squarely on its patriarchal shoulders. Bring back the Goddess, the Wiccans say, invite Her into your life and you invite Compassion, Love, and Caritas into your life. They aren’t pushy about it, and this isn’t the central focus for a lot of Wiccans, but Goddess Spirituality is a cornerstone of the religion.

Environmental Spirituality is another. As the effect of man’s presence on this globe is finally being felt in ways that cannot be ignored, a rise in the veneration of Nature and Ecology is to be expected. For some Wiccans it is a matter of picking up litter at public parks; for others it is the restoration or protection of environmentally sensitive areas. Combining social activism with religion is nothing new – Christianity and Islam have done it over and over – even if the realm of the Environment is relatively new spiritual territory. It helps that in absence of an Armageddon-like end-game, Wiccans are looking towards continued habitation on this planet for at least a few more hundred years. Elevating the Environment to the status of divine gives it more gravitas as an issue for them.

Science Fiction and Fantasy have also contributed to the syncretic nature of Wicca. While rarely used as “canonical” texts, Wiccans as a rule are as much well-educated bookworms as they are radical feminists or Green activists. Wicca in practice has co-opted much from the Society for Creative Anachronism, Sci-Fi Conventions, Star Trek, Star Wars, Renaissance Faires, and similar institutions, and the bookshelf of the average Wiccan has as much classic Sci-Fi and Fantasy as it does spellbooks. This gives Wicca a spiritual link to both the Past (Medieval Fantasy) and the Future (Science Fiction). It allows the religion to be open to new experiences and influences, such as the Internet and technology, as well as glean spiritually important insights from the past. The whole Goth aspect of Wicca stems from this wellspring. If the Geeks really will inherit the Earth, it will be a bunch of Dungeon-and-Dragons playing Wiccan Trekkies in charge.

The influence of “Eastern” religions is also present. While the belief in reincarnation shared by most practitioners was, indeed, a central tenant of the ancient Druids, it is more commonly understood by Wiccans today through a Hindu/Buddhist filter. Other Eastern spiritual practices inform the religious observances of Wiccans, without being a core component of the religion as a whole: martial arts, yoga, Chinese herbalism, acupuncture, and other exotic elements with very practical applications have seeped into Wicca. There’s also been a bit of Native American tradition picked up, which frequently annoys Native Americans. Most of the Wiccans don’t seem to mind.

Wicca is a syncretic faith, like all of the others. It has a dubious origin and questionable mythology, like all of the others. It has its zealots, its apostates, its martyrs, and its saints, just like all the others.

What it has that the Big Three lack is a deep spiritual commitment to Diversity and a focus on Wisdom (The Art and Science of Doing The Right Thing At The Right Time) instead of Faith (Absolute Belief Without Proof). It glorifies the sanctity of the individual spiritual experience instead of exalting the interpretation of the written word. It seeks religious truth through personal introspection instead of through conversion and confession. It is a religion of Orthopraxy (“Right Action”) as opposed to Orthodoxy (“Right Belief”). And it is an emergent faith, one that is still growing, still changing, still evolving.

And that’s cool with the Wiccans, too.

A Pagan Response to Terrorism

2005-12-05T10:29:00.000-08:00

Recently there has been a number of articles posted in the Wiccasphere about the moral position that modern Paganism has on the current War on Terror, and on terrorism in general. Most of these Pagan responses take into consideration our religious preference to eschew terms like “evil” when faced with complex moral issues such as the atrocities of the 9/11 attacks and the bombings in Madrid and London.

Yet I have to disagree with some of the conclusions, namely the idea that Pagans can theologically reject the concept of Evil. Certainly, the idea of a kind of institutional evil has been shamefully used by the dominant culture against more marginalized cultures for millennia, now. It was all too easy for Christian and Moslem missionaries to encounter aboriginal cultural practices that did not fit within their narrow idea of morality; this enabled them to classify such practices as “evil”, “the work of Satan”, or simply “immoral” and, therefore, justify an extreme, brutal, and (in many cases) economically lucrative response. One of the hallmarks of the modern Pagan Resurgence has been a rejection of this dualistic paradigm in favor of a more measured, more relative idea of morality.

But that does not mean that we have totally abandoned the idea of evil as a force in our world today. When faced with such astonishing events as the Holocaust, the A-bomb and other Weapons of Mass Destruction, and the periodic genocides that plague our world, it is hard to say that evil isn’t a valid descriptor of these things. As a Pagan thealogian I have had my share of debates with Abrahamists of all traditions on the subject of evil, and the issue is often how evil is defined by the relative morality of Paganism compared to the absolutist morality of the God of Abraham. And while most Pagans would agree that personifying evil as the Abrahamists do is both inappropriate and destructive to society at large, I think that we can, in fact, reach a good, general rule-of-thumb Pagan consensus on the subject: if it looks evil, it probably is.

On the face of it I agree with most of my colleagues’ basic premise: that suffering the recent terrorist attacks is one of the results of our decades-old foreign and economic policies, and that terrorism is the only available military response of the Oppressed. History is replete with examples of oppressed religious, ethnic, and national groups responding to unbearable pressure by resorting to violence – what the military currently calls “asymmetrical warfare”. In the past it was also known as “guerrilla warfare”, “irregular warfare”, “low-intensity warfare”, “insurgency”, and “politically based banditry”. It’s what happens when a group of people feels that no recourse but violence, but they don’t have the resources for a tank regiment. In other words, War on a budget.

Asymmetrical Warfare is the type of war known as a Police War; instead of infantry and cavalry, air support and supply chains, a Police War has other operators. It usually uses the regular and “special” police of a nation as soldiers, uses criminal-style organizations, and uses assassination, sabotage, espionage, counter-espionage, propaganda, press-releases, publicity stunts, kidnapping, theft, indictments, treachery, politics, and any number of dirty tricks to carry out the war. There are, at any given time, hundreds of these Police Wars going on between rival power groups. And it is important to keep that in mind when we talk about this: all warfare is a struggle between rival power groups with a goal to set policy.

Police War, like all war, is “diplomacy by other means”; a way for one group to get what they want over the interests of another group. Police Wars are usually undeclared, as they often take place between groups without proper states or governments behind them. Police War covers struggles as diverse as the Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka, the Basque separatists, the finally ending Ulster conflict, the endless narcotics wars in Latin America, the struggles between the Mafia and law-enforcement, innumerable revolutionary movements, and even some struggles between corporations may evolve into this kind of conflict – Halliburton comes to mind. Our own Revolutionary War started as a Police War before we got the French involved. In all cases, though, the goal is to project power in order to influence policy, like other types of warfare. And a Police War can be won or lost like any other kind of war.

Police Wars can be subtle affairs, such as the complicated and largely secret 50-year dance of the Cold War superpowers; or they can be nasty, bloody, and very public, as the IRA and the Basque Separatists once demonstrated. They can be conducted with wide-spread popular support, as the French Resistance enjoyed in WWII, or they can be fought with a handful of die-hard fanatics who are generally despised by the public, as was the 17 November organization in Greece. The classic model is that of a small, lightly armed insurgency organized by clandestine cells and embedded within a civilian population versus a larger, better funded and equipped government military force.

But Police War is still a war, and war has rules. That has been established since the earliest days of the professional warrior. And while these rules change as politics and technology evolve, there are some that are unwritten and universal: such as the crime of deliberately targeting innocent civilians. Any professional soldier – or professional revolutionary – despises that kind of conduct and recognizes that it is almost always counter-productive in fulfilling the aim of war, i.e. establishing the right to set policy.

Civilians get hurt in war all the time. The military has plenty of euphemisms concerning this unpleasant fact: “collateral damage” is the newest way to clean it up. Civilians have always been in the wrong place at the wrong time in war. Bombs do not recognize uniforms, and bullets can’t tell a farmer from a sapper. It is one of the greatest horrors of war, and in every discussion about the rules of engagement since the Stone Age, it has been agreed by professional warriors of all stripes and cultures that purposefully targeting civilians is anathema. Even the Mafia has rules about such things.

This is true especially in a Police War where civilians can be easily damaged, by both sides. Asymmetrical Warfare presupposes that an insurgency is going to hide among a civilian population, which means that inevitably the innocent will be swept up by the government in efforts to net actual insurgents – and some will be wrongfully accused, mistakenly prosecuted, and summarily executed or imprisoned without charge. Similarly, insurgents will often “shake down” civilians for supplies and support, often resorting to threats of violence to do so, or target innocents for assassinations based on faulty intelligence about collaborators in their midst or as leverage against a target. But making war on a civilian population is never a good idea from a policy standpoint. It loses the insurgents their base, and it alienates the people from the government that is trying to fight the insurgency – and collect taxes.

That doesn’t mean that it doesn’t happen – indeed, it happens at some point in nearly every war. But that doesn’t make it any more right, or less reviled, by any belief system. The soldiers and revolutionaries and politicians who fight a Police War know the risks of what they do. The average farmer or shopkeeper or commuter does not, and it is universally unjust to include him into the battlefield without his knowledge. When you make war on civilians you are increasing suffering for no real political cause. As a Pagan thealogian, notorious for promoting our “relativist morality”, I deem unnecessary suffering as a universal evil.

So without descending to the level of using the term “evil” to describe one side of our current conflict (which , thanks to Abrahamic Dualism, implies that our side is therefore “good”) I would propose that the actions in the case of the Jihadi war against the West should be viewed by Pagans as violations of the essential rules of war. As such, it is to be condemned, regardless of the religion of the critic, the victim, or the terrorist, as evil.

Most of us cling to the Rede (“An it Harm Ye None, Do What Thou Wilt.”) as our guiding moral principal, whether we are Wiccan or not. But the Rede doesn’t exist in a vacuum, nor can it always be interpreted in a way that covers the myriad of ethical concerns we face on a daily basis. As a Pagan, I use it as a great rule-of-thumb to make my moral decisions. But I also use two other important guides to daily living to assist me in the ethical labyrinth that I am faced with: the Path of Wisdom and the Codes of Chivalry and Hospitality.

The Path of Wisdom is an unwritten (or custom-written) set of practical suggestions for the express purpose of Doing the Right Thing at the Right Time. It includes every scrap of useful lore you were ever exposed to, and it is frequently referred to as “common sense”, although as many have pointed out, it is a lot less common that we would prefer. The Path of Wisdom is constantly evolving and changing as we grow and develop our own moral and ethical judgments. It is guided by conscience and tempered by experience. It covers all of those “gray areas” that are left open by the Rede, and it is unique in form and composition for every Pagan.

The Codes of Chivalry and Hospitality are the rules of “civilized” behavior that were developed by our Paleopagan ancestors to regulate the rights, obligations and responsibilities of an individual in peace or in war. It may seem antiquated, archaic, or even obsolete to some in our modern age – Christianity, industrialism and Marxist theory have dramatically eroded its popular respect over the years. And while they may seem like quaint matters of simple politeness now, in the formative years of the great Pagan civilizations these Codes were elevated to the status of holy sacraments in nearly all cultures. The Roman cult of Jupiter, for example, held Hospitality as a religious rite, not merely a social institution. The Codes were created to inform the people about what kind of behavior they could reasonably expect in certain situations.

For example, if a wounded stranger wanders into your territory, you are obliged by the Code of Hospitality to take him in, feed him, nurse him to health, and allow him to leave your lands unimpeded (providing, of course, that he did not himself violate the Codes). Likewise, as a guest you have the obligation not to steal or damage your hosts’ property, to treat his kin with the same courtesy and respect you would treat your own, and to contribute in whatever way is appropriate to the management of his estate.

The Code of Chivalry regulated the affairs of warriors and the conduct of war. While the term eventually morphed into a high-minded set of rules of etiquette for the upper class, at its base it was developed to bring a semblance order to the bloody business of warfare. It codified the elements of mercy and fairness that make up the foundation of our human society. It made the word of the Warrior his bond, to be kept no matter the price. It established the responsibility of the strong to protect the weak without demeaning them. It institutionalizes the idea of a Warrior’s Honor, without which he is little more than a thug with a sword. And among its most sacred principals was avoiding the purposeful slaughtering of civilians – especially women and children. Such a crime was a supreme dishonor.

Archaic though this idea may be, the ideal still holds tremendous resonance for modern Pagans. Chivalry was the code adopted voluntarily by the male fighting elite as a means of practicing compassion, an essential and boundless quality of the Goddess. Chivalry predates the Christian expansion into northern Europe (despite the Arthurian cycle) – indeed, the early Church fought hard against it, blaming it for institutionalizing warfare (true), until it wised up and co-opted the institution. At its core was the idea that it was a Warrior’s duty to protect the tribe, clan, family, temple, and nation – but to do so with honor, even if it meant the death of the warrior.

Nor was it an exclusively European invention. The Moslems certainly had their own Koranic code of Chivalry, as did the Chinese, Indians, and Japanese. The idea of Chivalry was developed in many cultures, and while the specifics of the Code changed with relation to time and culture, the central idea was universal. The Warrior is ultimately responsible for his own actions – and the actions of his warband. The ends do not justify the means, no matter how important the cause. War may be inevitable, but it need not bring more suffering than absolutely necessary.

Starhawk, one of the prominent spokeswitches in our religion, has made an analysis of the moral issue of terrorism. At the root, her analysis is framed with the idea that as horrible as terror attacks are, they exist in a context that must be appreciated in order to understand that horror. That we are, in effect, reaping what we have sown as Westerners for allowing our governments and corporations to create a climate where this kind of violence can thrive. While I cannot disagree that corporate leaders bear some large share of responsibility for the current situation – especially the petroleum consortium that exploits the oil resources of the Middle-East – and that our politicians have been sadly myopic in designing both foreign and economic policies in this region, I feel that Starhawk ultimately misses the mark when it comes to a Pagan perspective on this conflict.

For Paganism is not an inherently pacifistic religion, despite the personal convictions of many of its adherents. As I write this there are hundreds of Pagans in military service and police work – even in the Central Intelligence Agency, if my sources are correct. They are putting their lives on the line for our freedoms, regardless of the asinine leadership of our politicians, and we should honor and respect these Pagan warriors for their individual sacrifice and high personal ideals. I appreciate Starhawk’s syncretism of progressive ideals and the re-emergence of the Goddess, and applaud her continuing struggles for social justice – but from a thealogical perspective, I remind her that it is the right of all species and peoples to defend themselves in the face of aggression, no matter what the source.

One of the things I have learned of the Goddess is that She is capable of boundless compassion for all of Her children. She is truly the All Mother, and she looks after us and loves us all, even when we fight amongst ourselves. It’s a learning experience, after all, and we acknowledge the fact that sometimes it is necessary to suffer to learn, even if the lessons learned don’t become manifest until the next lifetime. But She does not abide unnecessary suffering. If there is a Pagan definition of “evil”, that has to be it.

When the World Trade Center was attacked, I was as rabid as any Red Stater about the necessity of removing a brutally oppressive regime from Afghanistan in retribution for their support of the terrorists who murdered 3000 people in an utterly senseless and unnecessary infliction of suffering on my people. I did this knowing that there would inevitably be civilian casualties and wanton destruction. But I saw it as necessary, even as I prayed to the Goddess to protect the innocent. And I stand by that position.

I was also vocal about the utter foolishness of prosecuting the Iraqi war – ethical and moral considerations aside, it was a fundamentally unwise decision – and I (successfully) predicted the result. Our current Administration and their political cronies are de facto imperialists, turning our nation into a hegemonic Imperium, firmly in the pocket of commercial and Evangelical interests. And they apparently have only a nodding acquaintance with the concept of Wisdom. While fighting a bloody war on someone else’s territory may have some resonance in the heartland, sticking your hands into a hornet’s nest and clapping merits a dunce cap, not a victory lap.

Starhawk is also correct in her assertion that Pagans have no centralized . . . anything. The website Witchvox.com, a kind of Pagan USA Today, is our only truly common forum. We pride ourselves on our individual right to choose and decide and bear responsibility for those decisions and beliefs. We regularly receive criticism from text-based religions about our lack of absolute values, and why it makes us a kooky cult instead of a valid religion. But that does not stop us from recognizing, as a community, the innate wrongness that the Jihadis have demonstrated in their global insurgency. Without labeling their cause as evil, I feel fully justified at labeling their actions as evil when they make random war on civilian populations.

They are falling into the same pit of evil that the Marxists did last century: using an ideological system to justify random violence, to make it OK for angry young men to express their testosterone poisoning by blowing things up. If a group wants to prosecute a war of liberation, a secessionist movement, a struggle for ethnic or religious identity, or the violent redress of grievances from a brutal and oppressive regime, fine. There are lawful and moral ways to do so, some of which do include killing people blowing things up. Even guerilla wars have rules, though, and even wide-eyed fanatical holy warriors have honor. Regardless of the cause, regardless of the situation, violating such a fundamental aspect of the international Code of Chivalry is no less than evil – and should be called out as such by any Pagan who gives the matter much thought.

The future of Hollywood isn’t in Hollywood. It’s in Chatsworth.

2005-12-02T10:10:00.000-08:00

With the introduction of Apple’s new Video iPod, and faster and cheaper devices upon which to display video content, production studios all over the world – especially in Hollywood – are salivating at the prospect of new revenue streams as they watch box office totals and TV ratings plummet. TiVo, DVD sales and on-line video piracy are often held to blame for the disappointing earnings . . . but the same execs who cringe at the idea of a domestic box-office that doesn’t break even or a network show that can’t beat out the latest Fox reality show are watching DVD sales and getting erections. Even cancelled shows can make it big on DVD as Joss Whedon’s Firefly has proven. The $1.99 per episode download for Desperate Housewives and Lost, well, that’s simply a gravy windfall. If the ratings are low, direct-sales of such hits will still rack up $300k-$400k per episode, substantially decreasing the costs of production. How can that be bad?

What they ignore is the obvious: when distribution channels are so diffuse, what is to keep smaller studios – or (*gasp!*) talented amateurs from competing head-on with the major players for the customer’s viewing dollar?

It used to be assumed that the cost-of-entry for even small studios was too great to keep them from being a power. Now shot-on-digital cameras are relatively inexpensive. It used to be paradigm that newbie producers could never muscle their way into the incestuously small realm of motion picture distribution – that was before 50 million American households were broadband subscribers, able to download at will.

While these TV and Movie execs are lamenting about low BO and rejoicing about high DVD, they are about to be bitch-slapped with an altogether new reality: the entertainment world will soon have no need of their dubious services. While they bemoan high production costs and actors/writers/directors unions that drive up the cost of everything, a couple of guys in their basement are plotting their eventual downfall and ultimate ruin.

Get this: it costs anywhere from $250,000 to $1,000,000 a minute to produce a feature film in Hollywood. Low-budget TV reality shows cost thousands per minute. With budgets like that, breaking into the business is a daunting task for a hopeful newcomer to the industry. Even seasoned pros are constantly walking a line between brilliance and cancellation. But with the new cheap video technology, everything from special effects to distribution can now be done in one’s basement.

I can already hear the industry insiders scoff: who can make a movie of any length for under $1000 a minute? Even for TV?

Porn.

That’s right, the whipping boy of the entertainment industry has got this down to a science. Even elaborate porn features, such as Adam & Eve’s Pirates, which was launched in Hollywood style and featured Hollywood special effects, are filmed for a fraction of the cost of a “real Hollywood movie”. Some of the best-selling porn vids of all time were shot with a camera that cost less than $1000. A regular five-scene 90 minute (that would be two episodes of a TV show or one regular feature movie) runs about $60,000 when everyone gets paid – and that puppy is intellectual property, with loads of re-sell value. DVD, pay-per-view, Video On Demand, and the possibility of re-cutting and re-releasing scenes in compilations make the potential for a porn vid – even a hideously bad one – to break even pretty good.

Yes, there is a big difference in 90 minutes of Suburban Sluts #3 and the next Sharon Stone vehicle. Production values, for a start. Most porn vids are poorly shot, poorly lit, poorly written, acted, edited and directed. They almost never do re-takes of a scene, there is no union-mandated craft service, and the girls often do their own make-up. Pay rates are low, compared to Hollywood standard, and the specter of piracy, government regulation, and the capricious whims of Red State prosecutors make the business that much more difficult.

Yet despite all of these issues, Porn Valley (the tony SoCal suburb of Chatsworth where most of the major industry players have offices) produced a staggering19,000 films last year, most 90 minutes or more, for an industry that made somewhere between $10 and $14 Billion.

But Porn has proved an excellent trial balloon when it comes to pioneering new technology, and the incipient destruction of the TV/Movie entertainment complex is no exception. Porn has proved that some sort of entertainment can be shot with a low budget and turn a profit.

The other side of this coin is the amateur production. No, not Aunt Edna and Uncle Steve trying out the bondage room in the basement and sharing the results with their internet fanclub – though truthfully some of the highest paid people in Porn are mom-and-pop internet operations. The amateurs referred to are passionate amateur filmmakers who indulge their creativity with cheap hand-held video cameras and off-the-shelf animation and effects programs. Often obsessed with a particular genre, these “fan-filmmakers” have produced mountains of work – and like Porn, the majority is crap. But there are some who have invested enough of themselves into their pet projects to produce professional-quality “fan” films that rival what the major studios are producing.

Case in point: a few months before George Lucas unleashed the final chapter of his prequel trilogy, an enterprising and uber-geeky amateur in Virginia released his own ambitious Star Wars film: Star Wars Revelations.

Lucas spent $300 million on his movie. Shane Felux took out a second mortgage and spent $20,000. George produced two and a half hours at close to a million dollars a minute. Shane and his all-volunteer cast and crew produced forty minutes of quite credible action for roughly $500 per minute. Yet from the fifth row of the theater, you would be hard pressed to tell which movie had the huge Industrial Light and Magic SFX team toiling away . . . or the multi-million dollar talent paycheck.

Revelations is the first shot of a revolution in home entertainment. No longer is the world of feature film or TV confined to the graduating class of USC’s film department. Now the fans can take control, putting their amateurish visions on videotape and exporting it to the world. This almost seems like a pipe-dream, except for the fact that two big cable TV franchises, South Park and Tripping the Rift both began as hobbies in someone’s basement.

It won’t be long now, I predict, from the time when we will see the advent of “flash films”, productions that are entirely put together over the internet, quickly cast, filmed, and edited, then sold for public consumption at $.99 a pop. With a minimum of effort, a good ensemble of amateur cast and crew could easily do a TV show with every dime that’s made coming back to the creative people who made it, without distribution costs and three-martini lunches for FOX executives and agent’s percentages getting in the way.

Imagine, a dedicated group of say 20 folks decide to do a low-budget sci-fi series. They cobble together a script, handle the pre-production, do a little green-screening, and shoot the thing porn-style, with little or no re-takes, no trailers, and no lunch buffet with lobster claws. They nail enough footage in a weekend to edit it with some bitchin’ SFX courtesy an open-source 3D graphics application and produce a little 45 minute action show. Sure, it’s not Lucasfilm quality, but it looks better than most Dr. Who episodes and (hopefully) has a more compelling story. Total cost (noting everyone is working on spec) say $5000.

A month later, the post-production is done and they post this thing on the web at $1.99 an episode, giving out a three-minute teaser to hook the viewer. Say they get two thousand paid hits, which almost breaks them even. Then they lower the price to $.99 and get another two thousand hits. This is enough success to invest the time and effort to do a second episode . . . when they feel like it. No deadlines, no studio executives wanting to add a car chase or a dog (“’Cause people like dogs!”), no professional critics comparing it to Gigli. The second episode is published. This time five thousand people pay for the $1.99 download . . . and two-thousand more go back and hit episode 1 to catch up. By episode 4 everyone gets a residual check and the DVD with the first four episodes is commercial released, including lots of shiny extras.

How long until such a process becomes viable? How long until someone quits their day-job to do this full time? How long before someone decides to write and shoot all four episodes at the same time, reducing production costs still further, and making that much more profit?

It’s nichey, cheap and fan-oriented. But it is the future.

The Cynicalest Generation

2005-11-23T13:16:00.000-08:00

One of my readers recently made the case that this current generation is spoiled, that they did not appreciate the sacrifices that should be made in time of war, and that we should take a page from the WWII generation in regards to patriotism, nationalism, and civic duty.

The point is well-taken. I’ll be the first to admit that my generation (X, for those keeping score) is spoiled. But not any moreso than the generation that preceded it or the ones that follow.

On the other hand, I think that making a comparison between the current war (On Terror, in Iraq, or a blended combination of the two) and WWII reveals some interesting differences.

Firstly, the nature of the enemy is dramatically different. In WWII we were facing an open alliance of nation-states bent on a nationalistic ideology and territorial conquest. The foe we face today is a hidden political movement, which is using a very narrow interpretation of holy scripture to justify violence in the pursuit of a political end. Terrorists are not, in fact, nation-states. Indeed, the “War On Terror” should not technically be classified as a war, but as a police operation. War is “Diplomacy by other means,” that is, using violence or the threat of violence to influence other nation-states to protect the national interest.

We cannot be at “war” with Al Qaida, as there is no chance of diplomacy with them. Hitler and Hirohito could negotiate and surrender, and their armies would lay down their arms. If Osama bin Laden showed up at CIA headquarters, shaved his beard and repented of his every crime, that would not stop the war. You cannot fight a “war” against a decentralized non-governmental organization. You can, however, pursue standard criminal charges. Indeed such an approach is more effective, often, than the “send in the Marines!” method of conflict resolution.

Then there is the idea of sacrifice. My generation is not opposed to it, believe it or not. We shelled out millions to help the Tsunami victims and the Katrina victims, sometimes curtailing our own expenses to do so. But the fact of the matter is, the current regime has not asked us to sacrifice anything but our sacred freedoms.

Indeed, George II has specifically said that we should continue business as usual in the face of this war, going about our lives as if nothing has happened. The last thing he and the Energy Syndicate want is for Americans to stop buying gasoline and other fine petroleum products – gods forbid that the war get in the way of profits. It took two major hurricanes and the near-collapse of the petroleum infrastructure for the painful words “energy conservation” to come out of W’s mouth. Material sacrifice, which Americans (Gen X included) are willing to do, that is not asked of us by the regime. We’d even be in favor of slightly higher taxes, if necessary. That idea makes a neo-con’s heart turn to ice.

No, the only thing that we are sacrificing are the very liberties that our fathers and grandfathers fought for and died for. We are speeding towards the establishment of a Big-Brother style police state, thanks to the Patriot Act and similar legislation. National ID cards are proposed and narrowly defeated during nearly every legislative session. (“Papers, please?” the SS officer says in a crisp, efficient voice . . .) Better means to monitor and track the actions of every American are routinely requested and granted without adequate review. The right of habeas corpus, the very foundation of our entire justice system, has been suspended. In New Orleans after the flood government-hired Blackwater Security mercenaries fired upon unarmed civilians who sought basic necessities in a time of crisis. We are no longer free to read what we wish unmonitored by authority. In short, we have spent hundreds of billions of dollars doing to ourselves what we would have defiantly went to war to keep a foreign power from imposing upon us. If this is war, then we are losing because we are defeating ourselves and paying for the privilege.

When will these “temporary” incursions of our freedoms be restored? When the conflict is over? And when does that happen? I

n WWII we knew precisely when the war was over. When can we declare victory here? What criteria have been established as conditions of victory? Or are we condemned to sacrifice our freedoms piecemeal in a permanent state of conflict? That is not what the brave men who stormed Normandy beaches for, nor the ones who fought against the other enemies of the Republic.

Another major difference between Gen X and the WWII generation is a matter of sophistication and education. On the whole our population is far more educated than the WWII generation. While I’ll be the first to decry the deplorable state of public education in America, at the same time we have one of the most well-educated populations in the world . . . and we are increasingly using that education to examine the policies of our leadership. The legacy of Watergate has made our citizenry naturally suspicious of our government, and with good cause. The people recognize the importance of foreign policy, energy policy, and trade policy in ways that no previous generation did. And we are more willing, in general, to hold our leaders to account.

When the decision to extend China Most Favored Nation status came before Congress during the Clinton Administration, what would have been seen as a highly specialized and technical aspect of trade policy, best left to the governmental experts, in a previous age was widely debated as the ramifications of such a move were understood by a much wider portion of the population. In 1940 less than 1% of the population had a post-secondary education. Here and now you cannot even think about a decent salaried job without at least a two-year degree, and a BA is considered a bare minimum standard for most management positions – even in food service and retail. There are more college graduates in prison at the moment than there were in all of the USA during WWII. We are a lot less likely to invest our leadership with our faith and confidence on obtuse technical matters, because as a people we understand them much better than our ancestors ever did.

In WWII there were a handful of government-censored media outlets. Here and now we are getting our news retail, through thousands of outlets from blogs to CNN. Everyone can carry a video camera in their pocket, and within hours serious abuses of power that could be easily swept under the rug in that “Golden Age” are headlined on international TV – and often they are late getting the news. We have instant access to information, news, commentary, opinion, and debate. What would have happened if the illegally detained Japanese citizens in the internment camps had blogs? Would the American people have stood for the treatment their fellow loyal citizens were receiving?
Despite the current regime’s best efforts to brutally squash dissent, the blogosphere makes it impossible to conceal any shenanigans indefinitely. We don’t get reports from the battlefront just from the pre-scrubbed News; oftentimes we are receiving emails and photos and video from the combatants themselves, reporting as accurately on the real “on the ground” situation as any trained journalist could. Major political blunders and scandals, things that once could be comfortably concealed, are transparent despite the best efforts of the regime to hide them. Violating the law for the sake of political expediency is now, thankfully, becoming impossible. When someone in the Bush regime screws up (like former FEMA chief Brown, say) there is no hiding it. Not forever. Soon there won’t be any secrets left at all.

Better education and better access to information means that we are a lot less likely to blindly follow our leaders when they mislead us. How can that be a bad thing for a democracy?

The issues here are not the unwillingness of my generation to make sacrifices and serve our country. We have a definite desire to do so. But there are more ways to be a patriot than putting on a uniform. Our founding fathers envisioned a nation where informed debate and civilized dissent would steer our country through the entanglements it would find itself in. Now that we have such a society, why would we turn our back on the sacrifices our ancestors made to give us such freedom? Is ignorance somehow patriotic?

Some look at a war protestor and ask “How can they do that to the troops?” or “Why doesn’t she love her country?” The fact is that it isn’t the troops or the military that the war protestors of today take issue with: it’s the policies of the leadership that puts our troops’ lives in harm’s way without a damn good reason – and trumping up WMD charges of a former paid CIA agent in order to launch a war of conquest is not sufficient cause to do so. Pointing those facts out should not be considered unpatriotic – quite the contrary. Questioning the political motives and methods of our allies in the region should not be considered seditious, for America has no permanent allies, only permanent interests. And I was always taught that the Constitution established religious liberty, freedom of the press, and a fair system of justice to be perpetually in the national interest.

You can love your country deeply and still fear your government. My generation does just that. The reason that we aren’t marching down to recruiting offices in droves is because we simply know better. We know war is not glorious, that people get hurt and killed, that the psychological damage to the soldiers themselves will last years after the last shot is fired. Our actions as individuals have consequences, we know. Those who do serve, we rightly honor – but to expect us all to follow the current regime into battle without question, when daily its attempts to skirt the law and subvert justice become more apparent, just is not in our nature. We are not inclined to spend our lives cheaply, for a cause we are not convinced of, to be led by leaders who have lied to us, to further a policy that strikes against our clear national interest.

That’s the biggest difference between the WWII generation and us. We aren’t spoiled – we’re cynical. We’ve been lied to all of our lives, from “Read my lips, no new taxes” to “I did not have sexual relations with that woman” to “Saddam Hussein definitely has Weapons of Mass Destruction” to “We will be greeted as liberators in Iraq”. We’ve heard a line of BS a mile wide from every administration since we were old enough to vote. The only politicians we trust to mean what they say are on the political extremes – and what kind of choice is that? In the face of this cynicism we look to each other for advise and guidance, rather than our elected leaders.

But isn’t that what the Founding Fathers had in mind when they wrote, in big flowing, proud letters, “We the People . . .”?

Poor policy is what's bad for morale - not dissent.

2005-11-21T09:10:00.000-08:00

I keep seeing references by Republicans that all this pesky criticism of the war is “bad for troop morale” – this is despite their own assurances that troop morale remains high. They are, no doubt, doing a heroic job: they are fighting an aggressive and ingenious insurgency while at the same time they are engaged in nation-building that works often in spite of their leadership, not because of it. On-the-ground reports do show high morale, if a growing frustration. Yet the returning troops, once they are out of danger of repercussions from their superiors, have brought horror stories of corruption, confusion, treachery, and blatant incompetence that feed the growing anti-war movement.

So which is it? And what should we do about it?

On the face of it I have this urge to scream and doubt the noble principals our Republic was founded upon every time I hear a Republican say we shouldn’t criticize the policies that have brought us to this war, because “it’s bad for morale”. Yes, we are in a time of war, no doubt about it. But is the Republic to serve the needs of the Military, or is the Military to serve the needs of the Republic, as established by the Constitution?

Criticism and dissent are vital to a functioning democracy, and were considered so important that the First Amendment establishing absolute freedom of the press was the very first item on the Bill of Rights. Some members of the current Administration may have been asleep during that part of civics class, or perhaps they long for the halcyon days of George III, but never did the Founding Fathers intend for there to be censorship of dissent during a time of war – or any other time.

When our nation wages war it is through the auspices of our elected leadership, an elected executive who is answerable to an elected legislature. For five years, now, the Republicans have had a lock on both branches, and because of that anyone who had serious enough concerns about the policies that led up to the war to voice dissent were marginalized into ineffectiveness, not to mention having their patriotism questioned at length. But what the current regime doesn’t seem to understand is that the blank check they wrote themselves to prosecute this war is due at the bank, and they are seriously short of political capital.

What were the stated reasons for going to war in Iraq? WMDs were the primary reasons. Removing an intolerable despot was next, a preserving regional stability after regime change was third. There were vague and ominous references to an Al Qaida/Iraq connection, but those connections were tenuous then and upon further review they are only true now because by invading Iraq we gave Al Qaida a dream-opportunity to strike back at Evil American Crusaders without having to get a passport.

We went to war because the Administration we elected told us there was a danger. They presented us lots of “facts” that they had gleaned to support this. Even back then, during the limited debate on the war, those “facts” were suspect. In retrospect there can be no doubt that the Bush regime cherry-picked the intel, letting their pre-established policy of invading Iraq (something that they had been mulling over since they took power) dictate which reports they would present, not letting the mass of the reports speak for themselves and dictating policy. As a people we were deceived, as correspondence between the Bush Imperium and its former allies is now coming to light reveals.

So when was the time to criticize this policy? Back when we went to war in the first place? Some did just that. While we were abandoning diplomacy? I recall some brave souls screaming that we were doing the wrong thing then, too. Bush told us that he had clear and compelling reasons for going to war, then showed us just enough to get us upset. He didn’t source it (“national security”). He didn’t prove its veracity. Much of what he said was bombastic retelling of rumor and speculation and damn few actual facts. He asked us to trust him that he and his administration had identified a clear and present danger, and we gullably did so.

Four years and hundreds of billions of dollars later, some are finally starting to make some noise about it. His regime is rocked by blatant incompetence, scandal and corruption (the CPB fiasco, Harriet Meirs, Scooter Libby, FEMA secretary Brown, the allegations of torture and the blatantly unconstitutional suspension of habeas corpus at Guantanamo, the no-bid contracts that went to Halliburton in Iraq and Afghanistan, Abu Ghraib, several indictments of key Republicans in Congress, and others). In the face of this he has circled the wagons, descended into the bunker, avoids any sort of press conference, and loudly denounced the opponents of the war as irresponsible and unpatriotic because they do not continue to blindly follow his leadership.

What has our $300-400 billion investment in Iraq got us? The undying enmity of the Arab nations, a country beset by a de facto civil war on top of our occupation, a recruiting and training program for a whole new generation of American-hating terrorists, a spiraling debt (weren’t the Republicans supposed to be the party of fiscal conservatism?), a much more secure and belligerent Iran, and a nervous and heavily armed Syria peering across the boarder and wondering if they are next.

What hasn’t it gotten us? Cheap oil. Let’s face it: we did invade Iraq over oil, but not to keep it flowing freely. Petroleum companies don’t make a lot of money when oil is cheap and plentiful. They make money when supply is short and demand is high. If Saddam had miraculously liberalized his government and gotten the sanctions lifted, the first thing he would have done would be to start pumping oil like mad, selling it for whatever he could, and driving the price down to under $20 a barrel – the Kiss of Death for Big Oil. By tying up Iraq in a hopeless political situation that precludes the free flow of oil, Big Oil has been able to score the biggest windfall profits in history. It’s made it cost-effective for Texas to become an oil-producing state again.

It has also enriched Iran immeasurably. Remember them? An “Axis of Evil” state with nuclear ambitions? Yeah, they’re making out like bandits while we pay $3.00 a gallon for gas.
The casualty figures for Iraq, as depressing as they might be, are actually pretty light, in consideration of the scale of the deployment. Our troops are better trained, armed, and armored than their Viet Nam counterparts, and have an advanced communications network that allows for a much more flexible force. Our troops are performing admirably. No one is calling them “baby killers” or war-criminals (that seems to be reserved for the Blackwater mercenaries that we’ve hired to do what we can’t legally employ American troops to do).

The conduct of the troops (with a few lamentable exceptions) is not the issue. The leadership and their policies, those are at issue. And those are fair game for free debate, dissent, and criticism in a participatory democracy. Only the Bush Imperium doesn’t think so, and they’re doing everything they can to stop it. No regime in American history has so blatantly come out against dissent as George II. Having the FBI investigate and intimidate American anti-war protesters under the auscpices of anti-terror legislation is a blatant misuse of authority. Thomas Jefferson would weep.

But the anti-war zealots who advocate a pull-out are just as mistaken. Pragmatically speaking, we are committed, for right or wrong, to see the war through. Not for military victory – as long as there are fanatics who will blow themselves up, that war will never be over. But for something that resembles a legitimate armed authority. The Sunni Triangle needs to be pacified, and the fact of the matter is that the easiest and quickest way to do this would be to withdraw the bulk of our troops North into Kurdish territory, let the Sunnis and Shia duke it out, and be ready to come back in to sit on the winners. Brutal and bloody, yes. Also effective.

But a pull out? That isn’t where the opponents of the Imperium need to focus their attentions. As long as they do that, Bush and Cheney can hide behind the flag and the troops and avoid accountability while making this an issue of patriotism.

Forget a pull-out. Try an audit.

A big, mean, nasty full audit of every dime spent in this war, how it was spent, who it went to and for what. Let’s have an audit with teeth to remove and punish by fine and jail anyone who misused the situation and used that blank check to their advantage. Crawl up Halliburton’s ass with a microscope and I bet we’ll see some action. Get Blackwater Security in front of a Senate committee with cameras and reporters, and we’ll see the Imperium’s policy for what it is: a cynical attempt at market manipulation at tax-payer expense. Once our own house is clean, then we can preach accountability in government to the Iraqis and all other nations we seek to influence.

How can the Imperium have trouble with that? Pressure them on the torture and human rights issues and they plead national security and expediency. Pressure them on faulty intelligence and they play a shell-game with the facts. But hold their feet to the fire with an army of accountants backed by some Congressional clout, and we’ll see Bush’s fiscal conservative base – already exceedingly unhappy – melt away.

In the mean time, keep up the dissent. It’s your constitutional right, and it drives them crazy.

"Let's Poke It With A Stick!"

2005-11-16T09:28:00.000-08:00

Just when you thought that W couldn’t get more moronic . . .

This morning it was reported that George II gave a speech in Japan – which has just come under fire throughout the East Asian world for its Prime Minister visiting a shrine dedicated to Japan’s Imperial war dead from WWII. Seen as offensive by the countries that the old Rising Sun Empire tried to conquer – or did conquer – in WWII, this hardly makes Japan the ideal spot for a major policy speech on East Asia.

Strike One!

While George astutely avoided repeating history by NOT throwing up on his hosts, in retrospect this might not have been a bad alternative to what he did do: he mentioned how the People’s Republic of China really needed to ease up on the whole repression of democracy thing and let folks who disagree with the Party have their say without imprisonment, reeducation, forced labor, and all that great Maoist stuff that lies so near to the Western-style surface of modern China.

Strike Two!

Not satisfied with antagonizing a rising superpower by mentioning its dirty laundry in public, he continued his speech by praising Taiwan – which the PRC considers a “renegade province” and swears it will eventually re-integrate back into Greater China by hook, crook, or cruise missile – as a glowing example of how a free and democratic Chinese nation can enjoy Western-style prosperity.

Strike Three! And he threw the bat.

Usually, when a President’s domestic poll numbers start to fall, he hits the road, where he can look Presidential by attending state dinners, visiting troops, and greeting foreign leaders instead of dodging “helicopter questions” from a rabid press corps. This has worked for most POTUS in the past, Clinton, Nixon, Carter and Reagan among them. It didn’t work as well for George I (that vomiting/Halcion thing in Japan, remember? Good times.) and it doesn’t look like George II is going to be able to recapture any public relations points or recoup some political capital on this one.

And with that speech, he may have just dragged us five feet closer to a war with the biggest, meanest, most fanatical army in the world. Go George.

Things wouldn’t look so bad, if George II had better sense – or at least sound economic policy. But he doesn’t. Consider that after decades of Republicans accusing Democrats of being “Big-Government-Tax-And-Spend-Liberals”, running up taxes and paying for inefficient social welfare programs, George II and his Neocon posse have made one of the classic mistakes: getting involved in a land-war in Asia.

Invading Iraq was a bad idea – I’ve always said so. Threatening to invade Iraq was a brilliant idea. We could have done that for years and it would have cost us pennies. But George and his gang – Darth Rove, Cheney, Condi, Rummy, Wolfowitz of Arabia and others – had the stupidity to drum up a pretext for an invasion, and then went and actually did it. The result is widely publicized, and the last thing I want to do is to rehash just why it was stupid. We’re talking about China.

So what does China have to do with Iraq?

Well, a lot, actually. Because instead of being “tax-and-spend” types, the Bush Imperium is a “borrow-and-spend” outfit. We are currently spending about $1 Billion a month in Iraq, over $400 Billion so far (and don’t forget the opening act, Afghanistan) and we haven’t raised taxes to pay for it. Indeed, George II has cut taxes repeatedly. And wants to do some more. So where are we getting the cash to pay Haliburton to fight in Iraq?

The People’s Republic of China.

America funds its debt by issuing Treasury Bonds, one of the most stable, secure investments in the world. Backed by the full faith and credit of the United States of America, we sell these bonds to investors around the world, promising to repay them at a decent rate of interest. Problem is, the last decade or so, China has taken its exploding economy (averaging about 11% annual growth over the last ten years) and invested the proceeds in US Treasury Bonds. So China is one of the USA’s biggest creditors.

Oh, wait. It gets better.

You see, even though China is trying to shed its Maoist image and cash in on free-enterprise without giving away the Party store, it is still a command economy. If the Party says do something, something is done. There are no alternatives. The Chinese Communist Party is filled with conservatives, and among their ranks are the ultra-conservative generals who run the People’s Liberation Army. Thanks to a five-thousand year old cultural precedent, Chinese Armies are encouraged to be as self-sufficient as possible, keeping the costs of having a truly huge army down for whoever held the Mandate of Heaven. Back in the good old days of the Emperors, when the Army was needed to keep the Central Asian savages out, this meant soldiers farming and practicing skills for the enrichment of the army. Today, it means Generals are as much CEOs as military commanders. The PLA accounts for a hefty chunk of ownership of most of the state-owned enterprises, and has partnered pretty heavily with foreign investors to take advantage of China’s manufacturing expertise, low labor costs, and government subsidies to produce really cheap stuff to sell abroad.

Mostly to America. Prominently to Wal-Mart.
(“These Extra-Low Prices brought to you by Haliburton and the People’s Liberation Army! Merry Christmas!”)

So one of the major investors in US Treasuries is, ironically, the Red Army. China is funding the Iraq War. And George II, like a little boy who has come across an animal he doesn’t think is really alive, just poked them with a sharp stick. It’s like calling out the banker who handles your mortgage during a Rotary Club meeting and telling him he should really be nicer to his troubled teenager and alcoholic wife. While it might be true, it’s just not a very wise thing to say.

But wait! There’s more!

You see, along with China’s record economic growth (due to selling cheap stuff to Wal-Mart without tariffs – Yay Free Trade!) comes a growing dependence on petroleum for its energy needs. All those Hummers the People’s Generals now drive don’t run on rice. Nor do the textile and furniture factories they own. And China has virtually no domestic sources for oil. Like Japan, she has to import every barrel. Which presents an interesting situation:

Our biggest creditor is also our biggest supplier of Cheap Crap; their economy is dependent upon two things: petroleum and American markets. We control a bunch of the former, and most of the latter (being GATT signatories, as well as members of other free-trade treaties, obliges us not to arbitrarily raise tariffs on foreign merchandise.) In order to get the oil that they need, they have to buy it on the open market, and because of all sorts of market factors and artificial manipulations, the price of oil has skyrocketed, which has severely curtailed the profits involved in the Cheap Crap trade. Right now the American military thinks that it can keep a check on any militaristic moves by the PRC by the simple expedient of choking off its oil. Almost 90% of which comes through a single narrow strait in the Indian Ocean. We hold that strait, we control China by its economic balls. Brilliant plan, that.

Only China is also intensely aware of that fact, and it is rapidly taking steps to block any such move. In addition to spending its fortunes on upgrading its missiles and navy to something a little more 21st century, it is quietly looking out its back door to the wide steppes of Central Asia towards some of the states there: the Stans, they’re called. If the might and economic clout of China can bring these poverty-stricken former Soviet republics into their camp, then China will have the means to build a pipeline across the old Silk Route into the heart of Central Asia.

Where Iran lives.

Iran doesn’t like us. They don’t particularly like China, either, but they dislike us a lot more than them. If China offered them a good deal on pumping oil into a Central Asia pipeline to get it to western China – and out of the reach of our subs and aircraft carriers – they might just look at it as a good idea. Why? As stated previously, they don’t like us. And they have a big army, too, and oil to (pardon the expression) burn. They have nuclear aspirations. And they now have American puppet governments set up in the states on either side of them. A powerful, nuclear armed ally might be a good thing to have. Especially if China’s manufacturing machine could pay for that oil with war material.

Then it wouldn’t have to listen to what George II – and his successors – say about pretty much anything, anymore. They’d be able to pursue their ambitions of regaining Taiwan, and possibly extending their influence more heavily among the other East Asian nations. And they would fund these Imperial ambitions by cashing in on their valuable US Treasury bonds, even as their surrogates in Korea stirred up trouble against our allies and military bases there. It could go after Taiwan a lot more aggressively, no longer having to worry about the economic consequences of a blockade of oil tankers from the Middle-East. With their oil issues taken care of, their economy would only have to deal with markets – the US market, to be exact. And while we could impose tariffs on Cheap Crap from China and make it unprofitable here (which would also put a hurtin’ on Wal-Mart, its employees, stockholders, and folks who have achieved a dependency on Cheap Crap) China is also developing other markets which, while they are less profitable, are nonetheless adequate. Latin America, India, Asia and Africa – oh, and don’t forget Russia. Plenty of places left for Wal-Marts.

Does your head hurt yet?

This whole complicated mess comes back to a simple question: George, what the hell are you thinkin’, son? When you come across a bear in the woods – even a panda bear – your first inclination should not be to poke it with a stick to see if it’s alive.

‘Cause it might be. And that could be bad. Worse than throwing up in an ally's lap.

A Brief Introduction

2005-11-16T07:53:00.000-08:00

I’m Arion the Blue, the High Druid of Durham.

That sounds impressive – or pompous – I know, but I got that name back in my misspent youth. When I got it, it was really more of a description than a title.

But I am a Druid, that is, a follower of the Neo-Pagan religion of Druidism, a cousin of Wicca. I’m a Wiccan, too, and a wizard, which just shows you how accommodating Neo-Paganism can be. Consider these names, like my title, to be descriptions. How do you know a druid? S/he does druid-y things. Same for wizard, witch, and Wiccan. All of these words have a root meaning of “wise”, so I like to consider myself a practitioner of a Wisdom Religion, as opposed to a Faith. Faith plays a role in Neo-Paganism, but Wisdom is really the focus.

So what does a Druid do? Blog, for one. Traditionally, the ancient Druids were the professional class (doctor, lawyer, archivist, priest, auger, herbalist, scientist, poet, singer/songwriter, etc.) of the pre-Christian Celts. Among their functions was keeping an eye on the lords and kings of the warrior class and making sure they didn’t get out of hand. Other functions included social commentary and criticism, predicting the future, speaking on issues of morality and ethics, and generally ministering to their community. Thus, a blog is a perfectly druidical sort of thing to do.

My community is both here, in Durham, North Carolina (“The City that Cancer and Fat People Built”) and more broadly across the internet. My “ministry”, such as it is, is not reserved exclusively for my fellow Pagans; indeed, a Druid of an area was responsible for ALL the people in that area, regardless of religion. And while I will be discussing Paganism from time to time, much of my focus on this blog will be in areas of interest to non-Pagans. Exactly what that might be, I’m not certain, yet, but you can bet it will include: the future, politics, economics, sex, entertainment, kids (I have 3), marriage (I have 1), science fiction and Southern stuff. Be prepared for some blistering commentary. And don’t be afraid to ask me questions about Neo-Paganism, Wicca, and Druidism.

Without further ado, let the rancor begin!

Arion the Blue