We Remember...

...those who have served their country in its wars today. Wars for honor, for property, for liberty, wars to end all wars.

They wanted what most of us want: respect, self-respect, a family, a home. Some of them got to have that. Some lost it all. It's only right that we should honor them--not just today, not just by slapping a plastic ribbon on the back of an automobile, but by paying attention to how we spend the lives they sacrifice in our names.

No more blood for oil. No more blood for global corporate empire. Let it finally end.

No more holidays for the dead. No war, to end all wars.

Mega-mania?

An article in Harper's magazine offers a disturbing look at what it calls "America's Most Powerful Megachurch". It suggests a true alternative universe in which demons roam, looking for bodies to inhabit:

The demons are cold, they need bodies, they long to come inside. People let them in in two different ways. One is to be sinned against..... The other is to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. You could walk by sin—a murder, a homosexual act—and a demon will leap onto your bones. Cities, therefore, are especially dangerous.

So apparently are ethnic restuarants, women who work outside the home and anybody who doesn't look like you, think like you, and own a fake-white-picket-fence suburban cookie-cutter house like you. It's conformity as the ultimate expression of religious conviction.

These people don't need a logical argument in favor of universal health care; they need therapy. Is religious fundamentalism nothing more than a mega-construct for denial and the avoidance of reality on a mass scale? Is it, in effect, a form of mental illness?

There is an interesting, though passing, mention of this question in Jon Krakauer's Under the Banner of Heaven. What is the difference between faith (that is "faith", as in "faith-based") and madness? I suspect there is one, but reading articles like this one (above) makes me wonder if some true believers haven't crossed over the line.

Thanks J

You've persuaded me to pick up the pen...cudgel...uh, keyboard once again.

And Furthermore...

Things are getting hot for the world's remaining superpower as well. Tom Englehardt writes at Tomdispatch.com about "Moving Out of the Superpower Orbit" in which, having shown the limits of our global reach in Iraq, and having no attention, money or military left to exert any influence over events elsewhere, we are now seeing our global neighbors go their own way in ways that may have been inevitable, but wouldn't have been possible, even five years ago--that is, before the present Bush administration.

Maybe I should be grateful to the squinty-eyed bastard. He's been an agent of change all right, but not in the way he imagined. The rest of the world will no doubt be better off. As for ourselves, I have mixed feelings. I would have preferred a more gentle decline, not this steep dive down a rat hole that we seem to be doing. The unscrupulous, even brutal projection of American power has always offended me, but I am not naive enough not to know that I have benefitted from it in some ways. American clout has sucked money out of the pockets of poorer nations for half a century, and given me the middle-class lifestyle I now fear to lose.

Maybe impending memory loss will keep me from remembering too clearly how it used to be. That and a well-tended garden (oh wait...I live in a desert!) may be my only hope.

Missing brain cells and overabundant zuchini. What a sorry-ass end to empire.

I'm In Hot Flash Hell!!

I mean, I am officially in hot flash hell! It's 100 degrees outside, and either the swamp cooler doesn't work right or I'm having hot flashes. Probably both. All I know is, if I could fit myself into the refrigerator, I would--where I would probably immediately cause the entire freezer compartment to melt, and do god-knows-what to the cottage cheese.

Ah hormones! Ah fermentation! (Speaking of which, is that a beer I see in here??)