Evil

Evil is an invention. Just as good is. It does not exist in nature. It probably did not exist in man before it was used as a means of justification. Every act is justifiable by the person doing the act at that time. Every act. Stopping evil is the justification for most of the evil in the world. If evil does not exist, then perhaps good does not exist either. Their definitions are culturally dependent. Without good and evil where does that leave us in the world? As Kurt Vonnegut said: Welcome to the monkey house.

Round

Things used to be round. At least rounded. There were a lot more knobs. Buttons can still be round but they tend to be configured in a rectangular space.

Dials were round and they were everywhere, Hoola Hoops, car headlights, in fact most things about a car had a curve to it. The fenders were rounded, the tail lights, the rear view mirrors, at least the ones on the outside the chrome bumpers, the dials, speedometer, radio, gages, you name it. Records were round and CDs still are I suppose. Food packaging like Quaker Oats, salt, milk bottles. Silverware, hairbrush handles, all kinds of handles, just about everything, was curved or rounded. It was a sign of sophistication. Rough hewn things were squared off because they were simply made, proper, polished things were molded to fit our hands and were generally rounded off, like the handles on your dresser drawers, no one wanted a square knob, it didn't make sense. It would be uncomfortable to hold. The radio you listened to had rounded corners and round knobs and a round dial. It looked nice. The circle is the perfect shape and designers worked it into just about everything they could. Light bulbs, door knobs, ketchup bottles, drains, telescopes and the wheel. Clocks were round, it only made sense. The world worked in circles, compasses, planets, seasons, time, lives… nature loved the circle.

Even the most popular women were rounder than the most popular women of today.

The very term square, was a derogatory term. Nobody wanted to be considered a square.

And then something changed. Angular equaled modern. I’m not sure exactly when. Maybe it was architecture. Skyscrapers began to be long horizontal boxes standing on end. There had always been the golden rectangle, that’s why the Parthenon looks the way it does. It’s another perfect in mathematics. But the new look isn’t the golden rectangle. It began to be a low rectangle. Something like a third of golden rectangle. Maybe it was Frank Lloyd Wright and Falling Water. Maybe it was just that it’s generally cheaper to make things square than round but we’ve never gone back. Look at cars. The lower the rectangle the more stylish it is. If something has rounded fenders they call it “Retro”. It didn’t help that they found out that certain flat shapes are harder to detect on radar than other shapes and jet fighters started to have that odd flat paneled look. Now we have stealth Cadillacs.

Look at your electronics. All low and flat. Look at your phone. Are there any ergonomics there? Nope. Low and flat. Ever hold an old phone? It curved around so that the earpiece was where your ear was and the microphone was where your mouth was. What a concept! It’s no wonder people shout when they use cell phones, they aren’t designed to work well, just to look good. I’m not suggesting we go back to dial telephones, buttons are certainly an improvement, but there are a lot of things out there passing themselves off as improvements when they are just change.

I’m not sure why we turned against the circle but it’s been fifty years or so and we haven’t turned back yet. Things just aren’t as round as they used to be. It’s square to be round. Maybe it’s just a cycle and … oh yeah, that would be uncool.

Religion

No matter your religion, if you believe in any sort of a concept of soul, and any sort of creator of these souls then you would probably stipulate that this creator did the work a long time ago. A very long time ago. Whatever the means, or purpose for this act, it was done, and considered finished at that time. The artist walked to the other end of the room, turned around, viewed the work and said "Yeah, that'll do".

Assuming souls are reserved for people, human beings, us, then the following paradox arises. If the business of soul creation has stopped, why is it that there are so many more of us than in antiquity? If there are a finite number of souls and more and more people are born into the world all the time what are we... fractions of souls? Are we souls divided? Partial souls?

This would explain a good bit. Look around at your fellows. Not very impressive are they? But when you read about people in history, they seem... well, better. Maybe they were. Maybe we are being diluted. Perhaps we have the genetic makeup of muddy water. We do seem to be de-evolving. Music becomes more primitive, language does, all of the arts really get more and more primitive and basic with every generation. A splash of paint where once there was beauty that made you believe in your deity. Where is our Beethoven? Where is our Michelangelo? But perhaps Beethoven himself was a lucky combination of the right genes that happened to create a whole, or at least nearly whole person. As far as music was concerned anyway. Could Michelangelo be the product of perfect inbreeding?

Could it be that John, Paul, George and Ringo each held just the right part of a whole that when they were together they dazzled us? Apart, not as much. Can it be that certain people really are "meant" to be together as the romance novel would have it? How do you find your soul mate and how do you recognize them when you find them? How do you know how many there are? How many numbers follow the decimal point that describes your particular fraction?

Most marriages end in divorce. All the traditional ways of meeting and mating are changing as fast as technology can come up with new ways to try. We as a people move around a lot. And I don't just mean the fact that you yourself have no doubt lived in numerous dwellings in your life so far, even though you probably have. I mean we, as a people are nomads and drifters. It's how we're built. With technology we move further and faster than ever possible before. What do you think we are looking for? Perhaps the rest of our souls. eHarmony, MySpace, Facebook, it's all just an expression of the search. And maybe on occasion they work. But probably they have no better average than arranged marriages or any of the others. If we found the rest of our soul and it turned out to be fifteen people, could we settle down and be happy and productive? I don't know.




Frankly I myself don't have the answer to these questions I bring up. I can't define it in a testable scientific way. I can't even cite the variables. But let's face it. That's not exactly Elvis sitting next to you is it? We know it when we see it, and we don't see it very often. Most people you meet seem kind of... watered down. And maybe that's just what they are.

The Last Crusade

I think it started with the first Bush election. George W. that is. We should have known then, what with the suspicious election results. But we didn’t. And he was re-elected of course, but that seemed on the up and up at the time. Then there was the election of his brother Jeb to the presidency, twice. By that time they owned all three branches of the government completely. All they had to do was change the rules little by little to keep themselves in power. Nobody votes anyway. When the choice is between vanilla and French vanilla, most people just say whatever. This got us George W. back for a third term. They weren’t using the term empire, but that’s the term they use over here, but I’m getting ahead of myself.

The war in the Mid-East just went on and on. After the so called “Second Tet Offensive” when the other side took back Baghdad it began to change in nature. The press releases went something like “We’ve tried since World War II to convince the world that we’re the good guys and it hasn’t worked. Maybe it’s time to be the guys they think we are anyway for a while so they can see the difference. They think we’re evil when we aren’t even trying to be, let’s show ‘em what it’s like when we try and scare the living shit out them.” That’s when it really got ugly. They started using Bible quotes to justify the war: “Let us do evil, that good may come”; “For where no law is, there is no transgression”. The one they trained us with was “the wages of sin is death”.

When Pakistan and the Saudis openly joined the axis and China and Korea backed them up, the U.S. annexed Mexico. At first they just drafted all the illegals, but soon that wasn’t enough. They needed the manpower and Mexico had plenty of people. And they were Christians.

It wasn’t very hard to do. Quite a lot of them were all for it. Canada was outraged of course and Europe, but that soon turned to fear and finally they all became our allies. They had to, they couldn’t very well join the Jihad and it was us against them.

They didn’t call it a crusade until the Muslims took Jerusalem. That gave the Christian right, and the radical Jews a nominal common ground. The heretics were desecrating the Wailing Wall and Christendom’s most holy places with equal vehemence. Not that they needed the left’s approval anyway. The center of government was in Crawford by then, but they still gave lip service to democracy. Just because there had only been one President that wasn’t named Bush in the last 32 years was no reason to doubt democracy. There were a few people who tried to raise a stink of course, but they didn’t get much backing. The government legalized a lot of drugs just to keep the people out of their hair. Pot, Quaaludes, Valium, anything that’s going to make people quiescent. And that worked pretty well.

But religion was a different story. The good ol’ USA was officially made a Christian nation. They claimed it had been all along anyway. It was made an official state religion in 2030. Anyone that wasn’t willing to put his hand on that bible and pray to Jesus was asked to leave the country, or wish they had. Inquisition was another word never used, but then neither was heresy or a lot of the other old words. But a special branch of the judiciary was set up and punishments were doled out freely and quickly. The Jews were given a special category as the progenitors of Christianity and therefore an allowed, if misguided branch of the state religion, as long as they agreed that they were a sect, and it’s not like they had much choice. This also gave them an excuse to keep Israel as our base of operations in the Mid-East and they needed that toehold even in its reduced state.

It wasn’t just the former democracy becoming an empire that smacked of Rome. The model for the war was definitely Roman. It quickly got very brutal. Heads on pikes were everywhere. They didn’t actually crucify anyone, that could be seen as sacrilegious. When the other side kidnapped someone, or blew up a bus, hundreds of Muslims died. It didn’t matter who, those were the stated consequences and they lived up to them. When we went into an area, we weren’t just after the territory, we were after the people. What we couldn’t do with logic or example we were going to do with fear. “Work out your own salvation with fear and trembling”; another bible quote.

We stopped using camouflage uniforms after the Bush family helped Schwarzenegger keep control of California. It’s not like the camo was hiding us from anybody anyway. If we were going to start acting like Red Coats, we might as well look the part. But of course we did it in a very “American” way. Even Bush started wearing garish costumes. Then he replaced “Hail to the Chief” with “Green Onions” as his theme song.

The merger of Hollywood and the military was truly frightening. That was the idea. It was meant to be. We made war like a scary movie. It was fought with special effects with complete control of lighting and sound. It was kind of like that scene in ‘Apocalypse Now’ where the helicopters played Wagner to scare the Vietnamese, only with everything modern technology could bring to it. Giant projections of Christ wielding a flaming sword would appear in the sky to the pounding of Beethoven or heavy metal music depending on the general in charge of the operation. All choreographed to the actual missiles and bombs going off around them. Thousands of foot soldiers in body armor made to look like Captain America’s uniform would come swarming at them wielding flame throwers and tracer bullets supported by armored vehicles each with a laser light show that looked like a Superbowl half time.

It was more important to those in charge that the Muslims (they wouldn’t let us call them the enemy), should be afraid of us, than it was that we should kill people or capture land. The objectives were mostly psychological. Don’t ever go to war with America. They should learn to fear the Lord, our Lord. Our God is bigger than your God. Our God has a bigger dick than yours. This is the lesson we had learned from the medieval Christian crusades. They hadn’t converted the heathen, they just took the land. Eventually the heathen took it back. But the Romans, they offered you Roman citizenship if you played the game, and you could reap the benefits. But you had to take their Gods, their ways.

I was in the Batman battalion. An honor, but that cape was a pain in the ass. Our old man liked to use the Danny Elfman music from the Michael Keaton ‘Batman’ movies. Our sponsor was Coke, another honor. Every battalion had a sponsor, the bigger the product, the more pride in the unit. Every military vehicle was painted up like a NASCAR entry. The red and white of the Coke made a striking contrast to the blues and blacks of the Batman outfits.

Those armored tank suits were air conditioned but it was hot even with one on. Now that I don’t wear the suit anymore it’s even hotter. I have come to know what a miserable place this is. I was once on patrol and it was our job to go into this building and throw magician’s flash pellets around and a smoke canister (red, for Coke) and burst out of the smoke to the sound of the finale to Jesus Christ Superstar and shout at them in their own language through this device that made us all sound like Darth Vader to lay down their weapons and to shoot them if they didn’t. The most dangerous part was for the guys that had to get in first and throw a spot light on the smoke as we burst through it, so it would make a good effect.

So we burst through the smoke, and they threw down their weapons and got down on the floor like we had told them to, but one guy raised his head up and said “Batman is a children’s comic book” before the guy next to me blew his head off. I stood there for a moment wondering why I hadn’t blown the guy’s head off myself. It was standard procedure. After all, what were these guys to the United States of Fucking America? They eat goats for god sakes.

I do miss hamburgers among other things. This is a dry, hot, piss poor excuse for a holy land. The entire ecology here is based on animals that can live on weeds. There is no grass, and no grass equals no cows to speak of, and that equals no meat to speak of. Everything in the food chain is something that can get by on something kind of weedy, so the people at the top of the food chain are kind of weedy too. A weedy guy like that telling me that I was a comic book. Sure it was a comic book, an American comic book. And one American comic book is worth way more than every copy of the Koran in existence. I was a Batman, the Batmen don’t give mercy, and they don’t listen to weeds. But I hesitated that day, and I’ve hesitated a lot more since. I’ve thought about a lot of things since then. But I’m not really a Batman anymore, not really. And I don’t suppose it matters anymore anyway.

We had the privilege of liberating Jerusalem itself. Which is why I’m still alive I suppose. It’s kind of funny. This god forsaken hole is sacred to every one of the dumb sons-a-bitches so this is the one place nobody is gonna drop a really big bomb. You wouldn’t want to muss up a place as nice as this.

I’m just conjecturing, that they all must have started lobbing mushroom clouds at one another. We don’t really know what happened. We had just about secured the town when the communications went off. All of it. We can’t use a phone, GPS, can’t raise a satellite, ham radio, we can’t raise dick. Patrols that go out don’t come back. We sent helicopters out, they didn’t come back. Our orders were to take the town, and wait for more orders, but more orders never came. We kept military discipline for quite a while. But eventually the weeds went back to eating their goats and the goat to eating their weeds and the weeds eating the dirt and that’s the way it’s always been here. Just like we never came.

I suppose we’re stuck here, until the food runs out, the batteries that run our Batsuits ran out some time ago. Maybe a radiation cloud will come by, or nuclear winter or whatever is supposed to happen when an all out atomic war has finally happened. So we wait. We wait just to see what happens. We await God’s wrath? Maybe. We let most of the prisoners go. The real troublemakers we just stopped feeding. There’s a lot of praying going on of all sorts. Most of the natives went back to their old God, even some of our guys are not as devoted to ours as I assumed they were. I’m not going to bother. I figure whichever God he (or she) turns out to be, he’s going to be seriously pissed off, and it won’t do any good anyway.

Work Crazy

I’m suckin’ on the tailpipe of the one in front of me and nobody want to look at the lead dog’s ass so I shave a few microseconds off the destination that none of us want to get to anyway and get around the son of a bitch but there’s a never ending supply of lead dogs in this race because it’s an endless loop and then it turns out someone’s taken my crappy little space and that really pisses me off so I screw somebody else and take their crappy little space and start the zombie walk from our crappy little lot which is three blocks from where I actually work loaded down like a bunch of zombie bag ladies and I realize that we’re actually all naked without our cars and even though we have all this stuff nobody really does any work anymore but these businesses just live on used toilet paper while we’re tweaking our My Yahoo pages between pointless phone calls and it’s getting narrower and narrower while our asses are getting bigger and bigger so you just make a wad and go back to glaring at the dick on the cell phone who’s talking while you’re trying to talk on the phone because they never have anything to say which we all know because they always shout – “I am here… where are you? Can you hear me?” which is a far cry from “I think therefore I am” because there obviously isn’t a lot of thinking going on there and the real point to the call is that they’ve just realized that they’ve let themselves get interested in something for a whole minute and let go of Mama’s skirt and now she’s three steps away and panic is setting in but they can bridge that gap thanks to the telecommunications revolution and the fact that manners are a thing of the past and we’ve only ourselves to blame about that because we thought we were freeing ourselves by going past the rules just like Picasso did but we screwed up because we didn’t teach them the rules, and you’ve got to know the rules before you can disregard them or it’s not Art, it’s ignorance and that’s why TV is so bad, but it’s really big and really clear and what else are you going to do when you get home? Think? Let’s face it, we’re happier with white noise, they proved that with rats in a cube farm maze but the rats couldn’t personalize their cubes by cutting out a comic of which there are hundreds of thousands of copies and pinning it to the wall of their cube about how Dilbert is stuck in this cube farm and pins a comic to the wall to prove he’s an individual and not a rat in a cube farm maze pinning a comic to the wall of which there are hundreds of thousands of copies… I think I’ll email this comic to all my friends instead. The phone isn’t ringing anyway and it’s really pretty funny. God I can’t wait for this day to be over.

Ruby 2's Day

there once was a rolling stone
he rolled and rolled all along the clock tower
he didn't want to be late to the beetle battle
the who? said ruby two
the beetle battle said ruby one
it's not a serious battle
kind of a bug tussle said the man on the flaming pie
then there was a lull in the conversation so they named it jethro
this is your day said ruby one
thank you, i'll take it, said ruby two
jimmy's hen creaked so they dressed it in janis' poplin sweater
and grateful fred, who owned the hen, turned a deep purple
goodbye said ruby one, it's a beautiful day
so i'm going to visit elenore bigsby bender bar
goodbye said ruby two, and it's my day too!
goodbye rubies, said the rolling stone
and since the day was nearly over
the rolling stone said goodbye ruby two's day

the song of mehitabel

the lives & times of archy and mehitabel by don marquis (1927) is a wonderful book. archy is a cockroach who was reincarnated from a vers libre poet and types by jumping up and down on a typewriter. His friend mehitabel is a cat who claims her soul transmirated from cleopatra and occasionally makes attempts to eat him.

Here is an example:

the song of mehitabel

By Don Marquis, in "archy and mehitabel," 1927

this is the song of mehitabel
of mehitabel the alley cat
as i wrote you before boss
mehitabel is a believer
in the pythagorean
theory of the transmigration
of the soul and she claims
that formerly her spirit
was incarnated in the body
of cleopatra
that was a long time ago
and one must not be
surprised if mehitabel
has forgotten some of her
more regal manners

i have had my ups and downs
but wotthehell wotthehell
yesterday sceptres and crowns
fried oysters and velvet gowns
and today i herd with bums
but wotthehell wotthehell
i wake the world from sleep
as i caper and sing and leap
when i sing my wild free tune
wotthehell wotthehell
under the blear eyed moon
i am pelted with cast off shoon
but wotthehell wotthehell

do you think that i would change
my present freedom to range
for a castle or moated grange
wotthehell wotthehell
cage me and i d go frantic
my life is so romantic
capricious and corybantic
and i m toujours gai toujours gai

i know that i am bound
for a journey down the sound
in the midst of a refuse mound
but wotthehell wotthehell
oh i should worry and fret
death and i will coquette
there s a dance in the old dame yet
toujours gai toujours gai

i once was an innocent kit
wotthehell wotthehell
with a ribbon my neck to fit
and bells tied onto it
o wotthehell wotthehell
but a maltese cat came by
with a come hither look in his eye
and a song that soared to the sky
and wotthehell wotthehell
and i followed adown the street
the pad of his rhythmical feet
o permit me again to repeat
wotthehell wotthehell

my youth i shall never forget
but there s nothing i really regret
wotthehell wotthehell
there s a dance in the old dame yet
toujours gai toujours gai

the things that i had not ought to
i do because i ve gotto
wotthehell wotthehell
and i end with my favorite motto
toujours gai toujours gai

boss sometimes i think
that our friend mehitabel
is a trifle too gay

More Time

We manipulate time. All the time. Even early man could think about tomorrow and yesterday and communicate those ideas with those around him. He planned for winter. He drew pictures on the cave walls of past exploits. He told stories around the fire, people memorized those stories and told them long after the death of the author. Eventually we invented writing and were able to hold these ideas for generations and compile them for others to read.

It has become a form of time compression. When you read a book or see a movie, you essentially enter a time machine. You compress time. You feel as if you have lived a large part, or sometimes an entire life of some character other than yourself, and in a relatively small part of your personal time.

We can go to places and times we could never actually go, live the sort of lives we wouldn't, shouldn't and couldn't live, and all, in so short of time that we couldn't possibly have had time to do so in the course of our actual lives.

There is a Twilight Zone episode from the 1950's where an old man has a 'special' radio that plays radio programs from his youth. None of the other old people hear it and we are never sure if it is the radio that is magical or if the man is simply mad. That's the plot. Can you imagine a time when a re-run was something spooky? When everything on mass media was the first and only time you were going to experience it? No copiers, scanners, tape recorders, VCRs, CD burners, Tivos, MP3s.

Of course there were books, and movies and paintings even then, but there was a time when they didn't exist either. You experienced life from your own point of view, and anything else was hearsay. That's why old people were more useful than they are considered today. They knew stuff you didn't. They had no one to call them liars. Other than other old people of course.

There is a price for all this time compression of course. What we exchange is the normal physical worlds time. The way the animals experience it, or so we would assume. It's a bit like relativity. In Einstein's famous thought experiment where the man is traveling at near the speed of light and his time experience is different than the man who is not doing that. If you are compressing time in one of the many many ways we have of doing it, it's a little disconcerting when you stop. When you come out of a movie which was very sunny and it's dark when you come out, it makes you feel funny doesn't it? Especially when it was day when you went in. Getting off a plane and experiencing jet lag is another. You are not where you by rights should be, you've cheated time and you have to find your place in it. Catch up. We like the speed of it. We flip channels madly to go from world to world to world to see how fast you can comprehend that time and place just to move on to the next. We like to phone and text and email and watch TV all at once, bombarded with information on every front to test our ability to make sense of it all. You're missing some of it, but you're experiencing more than one life at once, getting more than your share. Much more than we were designed for.

You can stretch and distort time in small ways all the time, but they add up. If you drive to work, which doesn't seem far, to us, but chances are it would have taken you all day to do it without the car, and while you are doing it, you listen to a book on tape and experience a large chunk of someone's life as if you were there, and then when you get to work you talk to someone in another state on the phone, email someone on the other side of the world who you've never actually met yet is nevertheless a good friend of yours, you can find that you've been operating in your time machine for hours.

That's why when you finally decide to go to lunch you can be totally surprised that it's raining. You weren't in real time, you were in your own personal relative time. You didn't see the clouds form in the west and slowly come towards you. You didn't watch them and judge the distance and speed all day and determine that it would probably be raining by noon. You missed all that. But many more hours have passed for you. You know about the hard years spent by the person in your book while he was in prison, and how many yards of fabric they have in Delhi that your company needs, and how John's son passed his Eagle Scout test, and that you'd better pick up whole wheat bread on the way home, but you missed the rain. You gave up the rain to live many lives within your own. People are want to say that the modern world is more fast paced than previous times. It is more to the point that we live more lives in the same amount of time. It's about quantity rather than speed. Are you the same person online that you are to the people at a family gathering? Are you the same person even to different groups of friends or different groups on the internet? You get to be more than one person. In a small village, you had to be one person because everyone you knew, knew everyone else. Now you don't. The quantity is staggering and always going up. Who knows how many more lives we can stuff in our brains?

The Spud