197. CASUAL AND MEANINGLESS PRODUCTS

From the Archives

(March 2006) As some readers know, I love the Pacific NW and would like to retire to Whidbey Island or thereabouts and spend the rest of my days kayaking in Lake Washington’s bird sanctuaries (where I will photograph and sketch birds) and off Vancouver (where I will cavort with the killer whales pods) and at Ebey’s Landing (where I will paint watercolors and watch birds).

I’d like to write on the deck of my tiny cottage and take long ferry rides and walk the wind-swept beaches while admiring the Olympic mountain range, then drive to Hurricane Ridge with my windows down and finally make use of my copy of How to Make Totem Poles (but I will never never ever kayak through the busy locks again as the huge boats nearly wash me into the walls).

Here’s something I don’t like about Seattle though: The Center for Science and Culture at the Discover Institute (which may sound like an organization that uses the scientific method to study and understand the world, but it’s really a bunch of so-called researchers who advocate the theory of intelligent design) is there.

(And I've already noted C-YA’s presence there.)

So, even though the Seahawks finally reached the SuperBowl (a game a coworker described as “they try to get more balls through the goalposts than the other team, right?”) and even though there’s all that water with mountains and fabulous sunsets and rain in one cool place, Seattle is nevertheless a little bit less appealing to me now.

The city's hosting the 14th Annual Women of Wisdom 2006 Conference (Return to the Well) though, and wow do I wish I could go to this crystal-squeezing feel-good event.

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And speaking of evolution (heh) have you noticed that the Catholic church doesn’t promote the fact that Pope John Paul II said (in 1996) that evolution is “more than a hypothesis” ?

He qualified his statement though:

Evolution in the sense of common ancestry might be true, but evolution in the neo-Darwinian sense—an unguided, unplanned process of random variation and natural selection—is not.

Whereas the new homophobic pope Benedict said that humans “are not some casual and meaningless product of evolution.”

And there you have it folks: two men in skirts who devoted their lives to scientific exploration in accordance with professionally established evidence-based methods of scientific inquiry have, in the typical voice of the (white male) expert, solved the vast mysteries of creation for us all.

Meanwhile Christianists recently coined the term “evolutionism” to categorize people who use the theory of evolution to refute what the Christianists call God’s hand in creation.

(Or was that a Martian’s hand? You can never be sure with their so-called Intelligent Design.)

Meanwhile, in the About Time category, a recent Supreme Court ruling said that Ashcroft’s Federal Department exceeded the proper bounds of its authority when it tried to undermine Oregon’s assisted-suicide law—or, as the Times says so well, the decision “rejected Mr. Ashcroft’s attempt to impose his religiously conservative ideology on a state whose voters had decided differently.”

Mastuh Ashcroft first tried to trump the election results with a federal law that was overturned. Then, as attorney general, he announced that the Controlled Substances Act granted him the authority to prevent doctors from prescribing lethal drugs for the purpose of suicide.

Clever little troll, isn’t he?

The current Bland Old Party is, when you think about it, amazing. Frist announces that he is capable of medically diagnosing a patient via video; Ashcroft announces that physician-assisted suicides are not a “legitimate medical purpose”; and Bush announces that he can wiretap anygawddamnbody he chooses because he is the commander-in-chief of the known universe.

(um that’s of the armed services, dude)

The GOP clearly believes that they, not doctors, can define the parameters of medical practice...

....Meanwhile, it is 78 degrees outside, so I am going to walk in the great outdoors now, where daffodils are suddenly popping out everywhere, and banish any images of Karl Rove from my skull.

Ciao.

193. WANT SOME TORTURE WITH THOSE CHEERIOS?, OR, THE GEOMETRY OF ATROCITY

From the Archives

(February 2006) I’ve been staring at the newest Abu Ghraib photographs.

(Yes, the ones that Bush & Co. tried so hard to keep under lock and key.)

The first batch was bad enough, but these are definitely worse. They also confirm that American soldiers beat at least one prisoner to death ... and for what? Loyalty to an administration that’s eager to eliminate anyone who challenges it?
Because they were just following orders, sir?

(But no John Wayne noble soldier bullshit can justify this one, fellas, so don’t even start in on It’s a Grand Ol’ Flag or that old following orders routine.)

What we have is lies on top of manufactured weapons on top of human blood smeared from one end of a holding cell to the other on top of white Muslim asses with bright red cigarette holes burned into them.

(Nothing to wave your stupid yellow ribbons about either, folks.)

So how many Americans do you figure are following what’s really going on at Abu Ghraib, at Gitmo?

It’s time we recognize the necessity of bearing witness to the atrocities that are happening in our time. With our tax dollars. In our name.

You know, I’m a writer and I value words, but I also know that reading a hundred descriptions of abuse did not have the same impact of my seeing one photograph of a real human being reduced to a battered collection of chipped teeth and vomit and feces stains and hematomas all wrapped up in swaths of plastic wrap (to better what? Stew him in his own blood?).

So let that image sink in while you eat your Cheerios, dear readers.

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I downloaded some of the images and have been studying them the way I study Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians—in an effort to understand this geometry of atrocity.

I suppose these images are the twenty-first-century version of those black-and-white photos of cops and their dogs attacking nonviolent black protestors or that Vietnamese man who is one second away from getting his brains blown out by a soldier.

... So, yeah, back to my recovering-Seventh-Day-Adventist pal’s question regarding why anyone would voluntarily watch violence.

Here’s what I believe: Artists must walk into the fire with our souls bared and our eyes wide open and feed on the nightmares that are happening in our midst. And we must find a way to use these images—especially the horrific ones—in a manner that makes it impossible for people to hide inside their iPods and ignore what’s being done in their names.

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Meanwhile, did anyone else note that this Outsource Everything administration contracted control of our ports to the Arabs?

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And did you know that this past Sunday was EVOLUTION SUNDAY?

This little soire didn’t receive the publicity that Frist’s Creationist Sunday event garnered, but Evolution Sunday is part of the Clergy Letter Project—a religious response to fundamentalists’ insistence that real Christians must choose between modern science and their religion.

Turns out over 10,000 ministers disagree with Frist’s fundamentalism. They signed a letter stating that evolution is “a foundational scientific truth” and say that rejecting it “is to deliberately embrace scientific ignorance and transmit such ignorance to our children.”

They also said

We believe that among God’s good gifts are human minds capable of critical thought and that the failure to fully employ this gift is a rejection of the will of our Creator.

The bad news is that most of the signatories are from mainline Protestant denominations, which are shrinking nearly as fast as evangelical fundie churches grow.

And here’s an interesting spin on a vote that actually endorses incorporating intelligent design into South Carolina classroom materials.

John Drake opened his AP article thusly:

COLUMBIA—The Education oversight Committee voted Monday to reject standards for high school biology that deal with teaching evolution and insisted the curriculum incorporate critical analysis.

Now I know you’re probably thinking his “critical analysis” involves evidence-based methodologies, but he’s actually referring to creationism.

And now I’ll end on a personal note.

My triathlete ex Tree just found out that she has a 69 percent chance of surviving for 5 years if she has only radiation treatment and an 81 percent chance of surviving for 5 years if she has chemo and radiation. (She elected for chemo, naturally.)

So please give yourself a breast exam. Today.
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144. BIBLICAL LAW

From the Archives (August 2005)

If English was good enough for Jesus Christ, it’s good enough for us—1920s Texas governor Miriam “Ma” Ferguson, barring the teaching of foreign languages in public schools

What the Bible purportedly says is often the grounds upon which political battles are decided in our country and, these days, some Bible factoid that a slick preacher can encapsulate in a rhyming soundbite often passes as knowledge and is used to try to sledgehammer bias and superstition into policy.

The New York Times reports that an overwhelming majority of US citizens want both creationism and evolution to be taught in public schools. And many are under the erroneous assumption that none of the tenets of evolution are proveable. The fact that we are carbon life-forms, that our ancestors were carbon life-forms that can be traced to a certain era is not theory, but that's missing from this debate.

Meanwhile, the science backing creationism or so-called Intelligent Design remains nonexistent.

The bigger question, of course, is WHY is manipulated public opinion dictating what people are taught in science classes?

When I was a child, a primary tenet of Southern Baptist faith was the absolute separation of church and state. Baptists perceive of themselves as hard-working, good-hearted minorities who would be protected by the rule of law, but they eschewed politics (and carved furniture and fancy make-up, and...) as worldly and unclean.

That’s all changed now, almost as radically as the Baptist version of Jesus has changed.

Jesus, back when I was creating tinfoil lakes and burning bushes in my Vacation Bible School diorama projects, was the supreme authority—the all-knowing, all-loving savior who made everyone equal before the eyes of God. Fundamentalists have replaced this authority with Old Testament fire and brimstone now and assert that the Bible is not open to interpretation.

Nosireebobtail, it’s not a human translation of original Hebrew or Greek written by a host of fallible people, but is instead the literal word of God. And this Old Testament God's wrath, not Jesus’s inclusion, is the authority now.

As the bumpersticker I see too often says God said it. I believe it. That settles it.

Interesting how the Baptists exclude some chapters of the Bible found in the same caves as chapters that are included too. Are these texts somehow less the word of God? Or are they less easily manipulated for social control or insufficiently patriarchal or a little too sexy? (Or too Catholic, as a Sundahy School teacher once told me.)

Baptist ministers are also “called,” which means that some never attend seminaries or receive formal education. Do these religious um leaders even know that these other chapters exist? Or that they were written in the original Greek and Hebrew?

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You and I can bring the rule and reign of the cross to America. That’s what Bishop Harry Jackson, pastor of the 2,000-member Hope Christian Church in Bowie MD said on so-called Justice Sunday II (8.14.2005). And that’s what the fundamentalists want to do: enforce their brand of faith onto this nation.

I guess they’ve overlooked the fact that our Constitution calls for three co-equal branches of government, since they are determined to undermine the independent judiciary and thus undermine the separation of powers.

One of their strategies is court-stripping, but “despite the Christian Coalition’s best efforts, those pesky federal courts keep upholding the Bill of Rights and the separation of church and state. But not to worry, the group has a plan to fix that: take away the right of the courts to hear those cases in the first place. This bold gambit, called ‘court stripping,’ is all the rage among the Religious Right these days.” (Rob Boston, AUSCS’s Church and State, Nov. 2004)

Jesse Helms worked hard to deny the courts the right to hear school prayer cases too. In fact, for years now, the Christianists have insisted that Congress has the power to remove some “issues” from the purview of the federal court system.

Our separation of powers was designed to maintain balance while keeping the will of the majority from trampling on the rights of the minority. If lawmakers infringe on constitutional rights, then the courts pull them back from the fringe and protect citizens from cultural whims and biases and the sometimes boneheaded will of the majority.

You don’t have to go very far back in history to realize why we need this division of power either. Remember when the federal courts stepped in after local and state governments ruled by bias and failed to protect African Americans? They overturned the oppressive Jim Crow statutes that denied a portion of our citizenry the right to vote and imposed segregation(...and many a white southerner has stoked a simmering rage against the federal court system ever since).

Court-stripping was not a strategy back then, but think about it in the context of the present, with the Christianists who are now in Congress running things. With our theocractic-leaning president running things. If a federal court overturned the Jim Crow laws today, a court-stripping amendment could be pushed through to uphold them before lunch.

Now let’s step back to the days of ducktails again. In 1964, George Wallace attacked the passage of civil-rights legislation this way: “Today, this tyranny is imposed by the central government which claims the right to rule over our lives under sanction of the omnipotent black-robed despots who sit on the bench of the US Supreme Court.” Not surprisingly, Wallace insisted that legislation be passed to “curb the powers of this body of judicial tyrants.”

Judicial tyrants.

(Hey. Here’s an idea: if someone enforces a law that you don’t believe in, then don't step back to question your own biases. Instead, insist that you’re being vicitimized by tyrants. They don’t like me becawz I’m a Chwistian! Waaa!)

(Aww. Would you cry me a fucking river?)

James Dobson sounds like George Wallace these days. “Stop Judicial Tyranny,” he says on his Focus on The Family website, as he promotes court-stripping bills and attacks the federal judiciary for any ruling that displeases his quest for power.

And he gets tax breaks for doing this. Amazing!

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Meanwhile, I’m reading What The Bible Says—and Doesn’t Say—About Homosexuality and A Response to Southern Baptists: A Gay Christian Answers to Fundamentalist Southern Baptists right now in an attempt to decide how to respond to my rabid aunt. This is from the latter title:

The conservative political takeover of Southern Baptist seminaries and other institutions has undermined the objective academic credibility of once great schools and boards and has made Baptists the object of scorn and ridicule in the scholastic world.... Baptists deny the Bible in their attacks on homosexuals. Baptist Greek scholars know, like all others do, that the Bible has no word for ‘homosexual’ in the Old Testament Hebrew or the New Testament Greek. Yet the same incorrect translations and out-of-context use of only six verses to attack and condemn gay people continues in this so-called ‘Bible believing’ denomination.”

Katherine Yurica transcribed Pat Robertson's television show The 700 Club in the early 1980s and points out that he was outlining his strategy to strip the federal judiciary of its constitutional powers 25 years ago:

Robertson wanted to reduce or eliminate the power of the judiciary. He denied that the Constitution provides a system of checks and balances between three separate and equal branches of government...

In fact, Robertson went further: he denied that the judiciary is a co-equal branch of the government. Instead, he saw the judiciary as a department of the legislative branch, which he believed was the dominant center of power in the nation. His reasoning went like this: Since Congress has complete authority to establish the lower federal courts and to establish "the appellate jurisdiction of the Supreme Court," the court system is necessarily subordinate to the legislative. Robertson's idea was that congress could control the court by using its power to intimidate. For example, he said, ‘Congress could say “There's a whole class of cases you can't hear” and there's nobody can do anything about it!’

Now let’s shift our gaze to Rep. John Hostetler (R-IN). He said, at a recent Christian Coalition gathering, "When the courts make unconstitutional decisions, we should not enforce them. Federal courts have no army or navy. The court can opine, decide, talk about, sing, whatever it wants to do. We're not saying they can't do that. At the end of the day, we're saying the court can't enforce its opinions."

Yes, he’s THAT Hostettler, the author of two recent court-stripping bills. (One was an amendment barring the use of federal funds to enforce the 11th US Circuit Court of Appeals decision to remove the 10 Commandments from a Montgomery courthouse; it also restricts the court’s ability to hear cases involving other religious symbols. Hostettler drafted the so-called Marriage Protection Act too. This bill strips federal courts of jurisdiction over legal challenges to the DOMA.

Then there’s the so-called Constitution Restoration Act of 2004, which bans challenges to state-sponsored acknowledgments of “God as the sovereign source of law, liberty, or government” and retroactively overturns all existing rulings even as it sets up a mechanism for impeaching federal judges who uphold church-state separation. And this was written by a judge!

Maybe he never had to take Civics. Or maybe most current Congresspeople these days didn’t. Or maybe the Christianists went to Christian schools and were only taught what would make them complacent believers. Or maybe the Christianists haven’t yet realized that they can’t buy courts the way they can buy elections.

Whatever the case, our nation’s separation of powers means that Congress does not have the power to decimate the authority of the courts through legislation that deals with issues surrounding our Bill of Rights, even if some citizens would like to turn the courts into rubberstamps for Congress and the Christianists.

There’s much more to rant about in this arena and researching the Bible in my efforts to draft an overdue letter to my Aunt Becky is pushing me up onto my soapbox, but I gotta go for now so ciao bella.

97. WILD IDEA

From the Archives

(May 2005) I had this wild dream last night, probably because I reread my entry BIG ENGINE, LITTLE RADIATOR and so was thinking about the theory of evolution and subspecies that survive and subspecies that become extinct and those idiots in Kansas with their insistence on so-called intelligent design and that little mustard plant that fixed its own defective gene etc. etc. etc. instead of falling asleep.

Anyway, in my dream I was a scientist sitting at a wrought-iron table outside a little café—the sort of place Ernest Hemingway describes in “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place”—smoking a cigarette and drinking a java and doodling on a newspaper while pondering the world.

And I said to myself, Self, we classify groups in a long historical glance but what if humans are really divided into two or more groups? If, like Cain and Abel, we are subspecies competing for the same land, the same products, our own laws.

Maybe mutations in our genes, these massive evolutionary changes that differentiate us, account for our superstitions, our insistence on religion, the differences between the reptilian brains of, say, a Kansas City flat-earther and an wiccan dude working in the creative force in Seattle.

My dream question was a radical one: Is there only one form of human walking around or could we be a collection of subspecies competing for survival in a common environment?

Odd dream. Had to write it down as soon as I woke up because I knew THAT wouldn’t stay with me for long!

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In other news, today I overheard a woman describe herself as having “free-hanging labia.” What a description! She also said, while describing a career change, “I feel like I’ve got my fanny hanging out there and everyone’s looking at my butt crack.”

The woman's got a way with descriptions.

LISTENING TO: That sexy Lucinda Williams song about masturbating: I take off my watch and my earrings, my bracelets and everything. Lie on my back and I moan at the ceiling Ohhhh my baby...

65. BIG ENGINE, LITTLE RADIATOR

From the Archives

(April 2005) Just finished half an order of tom kar gai and half an order of Bangkok duck and am now kicked back on my sofa in my batman pants and wienie woman T-shirt watching the National Geographic channel/relaxing.

This channel gets on my nerves sometimes because they sensationalize topics much as Fox does: Then, disaster struck! And one species was nearly lost . . . forEEEEEver! or Then, in the midst of their celebration, the big cat struck! and you see a fallen bicycle with one wheel still spinning and the child’s shoe, lying there in the dirt.

Still, this is my favorite channel of late and their shows about plate tectonics and anthropological or archeological studies and Alaskan bays and wild foxes and bear cubs are interesting. The station’s attempts to show viewers the ways that humans can coexist with other species are really interesting too. And they occasionally air a show in which my friend Hakon, several other anthropologists, and the girlfriend of the lead anthropologist who got the grant build a bamboo raft using an ancient design and attempt to travel down the Amazon on it.

My pal Hakon is an absolute joy and one of the most intellectually curious people I’ve ever met. He really does see the earth as one giant place to explore (and plays a mean game of basketball too).

Late in the show, Hakon et al. hit a patch of roaring white water and their entire raft comes apart underneath them, dumping them and all of their gear into a rapid.

But back to the present. Tonight’s show is about evolution, which no doubt will provide National Geographic with some interesting mail. The show explores why, at some point 70,000 years ago, we homo sapiens almost became extinct (mostly likely from a global catastrophe, and probably from a deadly volcano) and what allowed us to survive while other species did not.

Back to that in a minute but what caught my attention first was the life-like model of the remains of a giant species the scientists refer to as Goliath. They built this model to try to understand why Goliath evolved into a smaller species the same scientists refer to as a hobbit.

Adaptability. Or, as they say so well on the show, Goliath had a big-engine, little-radiator flaw. He was massive, but didn’t have enough skin surface to stay cool in a hot climate. So Goliath adapted in order to stay cool.

Since I’m always hot when people around me are cold, I plan to co-opt this explanation and refer to myself as Medea of the big engine, little radiator species. (-:

So. Why did homo sapiens survive while other species became extinct? Let’s jump ahead a few centuries to when cave-dwellers first began making things with an eye for beauty as well as function.

Homo sapiens alone have a sense of pride or beauty that drives our work, the scientists report. And our ancestors must have had a little extra time on their hands because it didn’t take them long to carve fancy arrowheads and intricate stones and to string shell jewelry.

You don’t wear jewelry unless you care what other people think about you, and that character trait is part of what makes us who we are. (Vain?)

So think about it. Creativity is a huge evolutionary leap. I mean, ten thousand years ago, everyone was making jewelry; eighty thousand years ago, no one was. What a leap to make!

Why did we emerge alone from the crowded field of apes?

Well, creativity generates multiple ideas. Yo. And chimps never could control the bullies within their own communities.

Compared to the chimps, we are surprisingly nonviolent. We tend to be peaceful and cooperative and we work well together (sometimes), building on each other’s inventions.

Go-it-alone erectus had but one tool to solve every problem, but we use our creativity to create new tools to solve specific problems. And our grain is an infinite toolkit.

Language, however, is what really allowed the weak among our ancestors to team up against the bullies and create a “coalition of the timid.” (Nice phrase.) Eliminating the bullies that threatened the whole with their unbridled aggression improved the odds of our species surviving.

There. That’s what I learned while lying on my ass in my batman pants: Language and creativity generate species-saving solutions—or, creativity is the ultimate survival tool.

Gotta love it.

45. GENERATING NOVELTY

From the Archives

(March 2005) Maybe I should call this entry “Farewell Evolution?, or, Mendel, We Hardly Knew Thee” or something instead ... and I sure wish I remembered more from my genetics and biology coursework because this discovery of a little mustard plant that “fixed” its flawed gene is utterly fascinating—as is the fact that the genome isn’t even made of DNA.

So the little self-improvement plant that could—let’s call our plant representative Mildred just for fun, shall we? Yes, Mildred the Mustard Plant, that’s catchy—so this little Mildred inherited a defective gene from mom and pop yet somehow reverted to normal, improved on heredity.

Now yes, smartypants, it's true that scientists have altered genes for a while now, but they need a template, a corrected copy of the gene for mutation purposes. Mildred’s actual gene changed. No template. No fog and mirrors.

How’d she correct the actual sequence of DNA units in her own gene? Did Mildred just reach down into her magical kangaroo pouch or something and pull out a backup copy of the flawless sequence ’cause she wanted to be normal, Mom, just like the other little mustard seeds?

Could this ability to correct inherited defects apply across the board in nature or is it limited to Mildred and her brothers and sisters? And what has Mildred done to Mendel’s laws of inheritance? For that matter, what does this handy back-up system that allows organisms to fix themselves—or, as NYT science writer Nicholas Wade so elegantly puts it, to generate novelty—what does this back-up system do to the theory of evolution, to the assumption that mutations, not back-up systems, fix us?

Wade made this observation, too:

The finding could undercut a leading theory of why sex is necessary. Some biologists say sex is needed to discard the mutations, almost all of them bad, that steadily accumulate on the genome. People inherit half of their genes from each parent, which allows the half left on the cutting room floor to carry away many bad mutations. Dr. Pruitt said the backup genome could be particularly useful for self-fertilizing plants, as arabidopsis is, since it could help avoid the adverse effects of inbreeding. It might also operate in the curious organisms known as bdelloid rotifers that are renowned for not having had sex for millions of years, an abstinence that would be expected to seriously threaten their Darwinian fitness.

If humans contain backup copies of correct genes then I want to go back to whatever great-great whatever did not have schizophrenia and diabetes and bypass “the usual mechanisms of heredity.” My family's odds of passing schizophrenia on are incredibly high too, and I would like to correct that in all immediate my family members.

(And let’s don’t even talk about how much I won’t let myself ponder which of my numerous nieces and nephews will start showing the signs, the shift into paranoia...)

FINAL FACTOID: the mutated gene is known as a hothead gene .. and I just know there’s a Hothead Paison joke in there somewhere. (O hey, I got it and can see the headline now: Liberal scientists hatch evil plan to turn GOPers into lesbian hotheads!)