My Pitch for Qatar 2022 World Cup Ad Space

black, fade in with tortured screams, cut into-

dungeon with 3 imprisoned workman in chains being tortured by 3 stereotypical Arabs/Muslims/Terrorists/etc, cut to-

small b/w tv on a table in the corner, announcer (in Arabic) "...blah blah blah World Cup 2022! Blah blah! Qatar! Blah blah," cut to-

everyone stops and looks at the tv. creaking of chains.

tv announcer "...blah blah Uzbekistan versus Iceland!" cut to-

raised eyebrows as all eyes meet. cut to-

the torture continues, but the everyone is distracted, paying attention to the tv, with only the occasional electrocution with a disinterested 'Ow' in response.

tv announcer's voice becomes more animated, motion/sound in the room stops completely. from the tv "and...and, and, AND AND AND....GOOOOOOOOOAAAAAAAALLLLLLLLLLLLLLLL"

everyone goes crazy, Qataris jumping up and down and prisoners rattling in their hanging chains. Some torturer trips and falls on another, screams from all around, someone hits the camera person and cut to-

VODAFON.

To Sec. State, Matt Schultz

Dear Mr. Schultz-

I've just become acquainted with your proposal for a Voter ID law here in Iowa, and would like a chance to respond. In more than 140 characters. I like Twitter too, when I'm in haiku-mode, but some things require a little more substance so I'm hoping you took a moment to click on the link leading to this.

First, I'd like to say what a perfectly sensible, level-headed and pragmatic piece of legislation this is. If this could pass the way you described it in your Iowa Press-Citizen guest opinion column, it's hard to see why any logical, reasonable person could argue against it. Second, I'd like to say why it'll never fly.

"With their input, I created a bill that allows any federal, state or local government-issued photo ID as well as any student photo ID from a public or private university, college or high school to be used at the polls. For the elderly confined to health care facilities, we only require an affidavit to be signed if they do not have identification. It also requires the state of Iowa to provide a free photo ID to any eligible voter who requests an ID.
In the case where someone does not have an ID at the polls, we allow someone to attest for them as long as the person attesting has a valid photo ID. If someone is unable to show ID, we allow them to vote a provisional ballot, but the burden of proof is shifted from the voter to the public. This requires the precinct election board to count the provisional ballot unless a member of the public can prove that the voter is ineligible to vote.
The law also will be implemented over a two-year period to give voters time to be educated and to adjust to the new rules."
http://www.press-citizen.com/article/20131027/OPINION02/310270013/Iowa-s-voter-ID-bill-model-country?nclick_check=1

There's been a lot of back-and-forth on this matter in the last decade and I get it. I do. You can't do anything without an ID these days; you can't rent movies, return something to a store for cash or credit, can't buy a pack of cigarettes even though if you have more grey hairs than the kid selling them to you has pimples... I've been walking the dogs in my neighborhood and have had police officers stop me and ask for my ID. Voting is surely more important than these things, so why shouldn't an ID be required for something so vital to our democracy?

How will the Democrats react? Just a guess, but they'll probably say 'why fix a problem that doesn't exist?' Which is a really good question. I'm aware of your disputes lately with the Obama administration over access to databases and the claims of some, like Joel Miller, on numbers of potential fraudulent voters in Linn County (where I live), and there are serious, valid points being made. But at the end of the day, not one election has been swayed by these instances. They are rare and inconsequential. Mr. Miller's office has said his office had identified around 100 potential voter fraud cases in the past year. Even if he's right- hell, let's make him triple-right, let's say they are 300 verified cases in Linn County. Crimes and criminals, all. Find them and prosecute, they have violated a law. But they have not changed anything.

How will your fellow Republicans react? Again, just a guess, but from what I've read about the lukewarm reception it's received so far, I'm guessing you're not getting any votes from the right side of the aisle, at least if the final bill looks anything like the quote from you listed above.

This is the 'let's get real' part of my response.

Looking around the country, we can easily surmise what the point of all the current Voter ID legislation is all about. The country is changing, the GOP is not, and they're losing votes. They need these laws. They need to be able to disqualify thousands of blacks and latinos and women and elderly folk, otherwise they wouldn't be able to hold on to their offices. Not as much here in Iowa, but certainly in more diverse areas of the country. Your proposed bill is a mockery of that agenda. There is nothing contained in there that is going to win more Republican seats, it will only bolster our democracy, so what's the point in that?

The title that the Press-Citizen gave to your piece was "Iowa's voter ID bill is a model for the country." I agree. Too bad that no one on either side of the aisle will agree with you.

My 'King Of The World' Moment

Not going to publish this to the general public, but I thought it would be easier to do this from my blog spot instead of in the comment box on a certain Facebook page.

The conversation, as initiated by myself;

New thread: We've all had experiences that fell outside of the explainable, everyday life that we all share, whether you labelled it religious or mystical or maybe just hallucinatory (while still significantly meaningful)....would anyone like to describe theirs?

My story, though deep and meaningful to me, is naturally ridiculous to anyone else, maybe just goofy. That's the point of these kind of events, essentially, that they are experienced individually and can only be evaluated and understood in the same way. Unless you're an artist and can visually convey your 'vision' (for lack of a better term that everyone can kind of agree on) to others with the same weight of importance and significance with which you yourself experienced, these kind of recounts are hard to take seriously. It's great if you're a Samuel Coleridge or Thomas Aquinas or John Coltrane or Wolfgang Pauli or Salvador Dali and can translate the right information regarding theses 'events', these experiences that seem to not come from 'within' the self but from somewhere else, from some 'Other', providing actual contextual meaning...  For the rest of us, our stories are just gonna be goofy.

I will try to be brief and not generate an intolerable amount of boredom.

I was twenty years old in 1990, living in my mother's house (again), and employed at a warehouse where my job was tedious, repetitive and finally physically exhausting, which might be one in an oleo of factors contributing to the state of mind I found myself in one afternoon. I was hungover, tired and bored, normally a potentially disastrous mixture for me. That's when I usually get in the most trouble. I don't think I was stoned, didn't pick up that as a regular habit until a year later while living in Phoenix, so I can't put this down to psychotropia. 

At any rate, I was in a particular mood. A friend had lent me a cassette, Steely Dan's Gold, and I popped it into my Walkman. I'd never really gave the band a serious listen before, so I positioned a chair in the puddle of afternoon sunlight coming in through the living room window, kicked my heels up on the coffee table and slipped into it. 

It was okay. I liked it, I guess. A lot of jazzy riffs, good keyboards that didn't overshadow the other instruments, some good booze and drug references that made me chuckle (remember 'For Cuervo Gold/ For fine Columbian/ Make a tonight a wonderful thing'?), some good lyrical word-play. Like I said, pretty good.

By the time I got around to 'King of the World', I was somewhat hypnagogic. It's a dreamy-sounding kind of song in itself with rambling yet insistent apocalyptic lines set into an odd time signature, and it worked on my poor little ears and brain with what I can only describe as a peculiar effect. Listen to it for yourself:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gJz0c981F7U


When I got to the part, "When you come around/ No more pain and no regrets/ Watch the sun go brown/ Smoking cobalt cigarettes", something happened to me. Something somewhere clicked or shifted or aligned or sped up or slowed down, maybe some series of neurons and synapses snapped and popped in a certain pattern... Whatever it was, I was suddenly in the middle of something, something that was either a dream that felt like a memory or a memory that seemed like a dream, or some combination thereof. Whatever. It was something that was powerful enough to consume my entire attention and awareness, to the point that, for all purposes, I felt to be actually re-living the event.

I was a child. I was ill, had a high temperature and a feverish brain. I wasn't awake and I wasn't asleep. I was in my bed but I was also in a boat, sitting on a deeply black body of water, still and motionless, not a ripple disturbing the surface or rocking the boat. All around were mountains, also completely black and devoid of color so that no features were visible, only a stark silhouette that stood against a bright red sky, hellishly red maybe but I didn't feel like I was in any kind of Hell, didn't feel anything negative at all, just a peaceful calm. Though I was alone in the boat, there was a voice talking to me. It wasn't me talking to myself. I cannot overemphasize this. It was not a voice that came, in any way, from me.
It was some Other talking, telling me in a voice that wasn't unkind, This is a dream but you are awake, you must listen and remember, remember this place, these are cobalt mountains, these are the Cobalt Mountains, you will forget them but you will remember, you will know what this means... On and on or all at once, you know how dreams are, the disembodied words kept coming and coming...

That's it. Sorry if it disappointed, but do you see what I mean? A bunch of nonsense to you, reading this. Goofy, even. But for me, the whole thing was as earth-shattering as Saul's day on the road to Damascus or Pythagoras hearing the music of the spheres for the first time or Kepler tearing down centuries of misinformation and seeing in his head the true orbit of Mars or Terrence McKenna in the South American jungles drinking some vision-vine tea, and the process of sitting here remembering and writing all this has gotten me so upset that I've had to go and take a shower halfway through. 

There are no Cobalt Mountains anywhere in the world, outside of certain ranges being described as so. There's a ski resort, in Connecticut I think. There's a shitload of cobalt piled up in Africa somewhere that was a by-product of a mining operation that was once worthless but thanks to cellphones is now worth a gajillion bucks. There's a role-playing game that I've never played. I've been a'googling a hundred times or more now, and there is nothing else that I can find to provide any more meaning to any of this, outside the fact that I had a fucked-up fever-dream as kid and somehow recalled it exactly some twelve or thirteen years later. It didn't come over me as a religious experience, I didn't attribute it to God or Jesus or Satan or any saints or anything like that. I don't write it off just as some hallucination. I can't. It was too real, too vivid. I can just say again that it was contact with something outside of myself, some other thing, there is something outside of ourselves and that it had a message just for me. It wanted something from me, for me to do something.

I don't know what. I didn't know then, and I don't know now. I'm forty-three now and resigned to the idea that I may live the rest of my life without knowing what it was. Or that it meant anything at all. Probably didn't. I'll keep trying, every once in a while when I'm kicking back and letting my mind wander I'll think about it, try to superimpose something from the life I've lived since then on top of it and hopefully find something in it that I haven't before found. Maybe I won't even have to try, maybe I just have to wait and it'll just happen, and I'll just have to recognize it when it does. 

Who knows? 

Thanks for reading, and I'm looking forward to anyone else joining in this discussion.

The 9th Amendment: The Answer, or Gobbledygook?

            "The enumeration in the Constitution of certain rights shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people."

That's the Ninth Amendment to the United States Constitution.  I have read the Constitution many times, for many reasons, and reading it today for the umpteenth time for the umpteenth reason I still don't really understand this amendment.  When I encounter something I don't understand, whether due to vagueness of  language or abstract ideas that my widdle bwain can't bend itself around, I simply re-word the statement, try to make it simpler, so in this case I might translate this statement as 'In the process of listing all the rights and liberties of the citizens of this country, we might have missed some shit in the first eight amendments, but just because we didn't mention them doesn't mean that folks don't have those rights and liberties.'

But is my translation correct?  And, if so, what does it mean?  I know what it says, but...  When my primary method for understanding something fails me, I have a Plan B.  I look on Wikipedia.

Go on, give it a try.  Look it up for yourself, and if, at any point, you don't say to yourself  'Holy fuckballs!' then you're doing a lot better than me. 

I'm interested in gay marriage right now.  Not because I'm gay, I just simply believe that gay people are human beings too, which means they have human rights and civil rights as well, and the right to marry whomever we choose is not something that can legislated or be put up for a popular vote.  Arguments against gay marriage are usually rooted in either religious grounds or on sexual bigotry or both, and it's obvious to me that neither of these are legal tools on which to make a legal decision.  Apparently, it's not so obvious to everyone because the debate rages on every minute of every day in this country. 

Last night while bartending, I overheard some conversation on the subject, which you will no doubt be familiar with by now.  "You can fuck a dog or a goat, but you can't marry 'em.  If two guys wanna fuck each other, great.  But they can't get married.  It's...it's...unnatural!"  This was from a retired Chicago police officer.  It was Mardi Gras weekend, and the place was packed, so I didn't really have time to get in the conversation even if I'd wanted to point out the obvious, that people aren't fucking animals, whether they're straight, gay, white, black or otherwise and therefore deserve human dignity and the right to live whatever life they want to.  I wouldn't have convinced him anyway; this is one hard-headed sonofabitch we're talking about with a lifetime of bigotry and stupidity behind him. 

Another reason often cited is that gays marrying violates the sanctity of marriage.  This point is invalid.  We are not, no matter how loud and obnoxious some people want to be over this, a Christian nation.  We are a nation founded on laws, not religion, and at the end of the day marriage in America is little more than a legal contract binding two people in a legal union.  You can make it religious if you want to, all you like, with the priest or minister or rabbi or bhagwan or whatever, but the fact is as soon as you, your partner and a couple witnesses sign your names at the County Clerk of Courts and pay the fees, you're already married.  You don't need to wait for some guy in a dress to tell you to kiss the bride.  You can have as much or little sanctity marriage as you want to put into it, but it isn't necessary.  Sanctity is a term denoting the sacredness of something, which is an unquantifiable religious expression and therefore has no merit in a legal sense.  It has no value outside of it's own cultural context, and just because seven out of ten Americans feel that something is sacred, it doesn't mean jack shit to me.  Eight out of ten Americans believe in angels- does that make 'em real?  Four out of ten (dumbass) Americans don't believe in evolution, but I guaran-fucking-tee that we share the same ancestors as the great apes and that this will be undeniably proven one day.  Hell, there is a considerable segment of our population that feel that BASEBALL DIAMONDS are sacred spaces.  Why don't coaches have the authority vested in them to perform marriage rituals, in that case?

Sorry, I start ranting and I start losing the plot.  I was talking about gay marriage and the 9th Amendment.  There is no mention of gay marriage in the Constitution for a simple fact; namely, back when the Constitution was being framed, they'd string your ass up in the nearest tree if it was discovered that you were gay and engaging in homosexual activity, much less wanting to get married to someone of the same sex.  Or they might've skipped the rope and just beat you to death.  Either way, you were toast.  Not that it didn't happen, ever since there have been people there have been gay and straight people.  Back then you just had to be really ultra-top-shelf-triple-red-dog secretive about it.  But, these guy were smart, knew that the world is not static and there would be things our country would experience that they had no way of  foreseeing then, so they created a living, breathing, malleable document that could change with the times and cover issues undreamed of in their frame of reference.  They definitely were out to create something that would insure that everyone would have the freedom and the liberty to live as they wanted to.

Less freedom for some is less liberty for all.

As John Rawls wrote in 'A Theory of Justice' in  1971, "No system can be called efficient if there is an alternative arrangement that improves the situation of some people with no worsening of the situation of any of the other people."

From our vantage point of history, we look back and think, 'How could it be that women weren't allowed to vote or own land back then?', or 'How could they think it's okay to not let black people go to school or vote or own land?  Or have jobs that actually pay?'  I firmly believe that fifty years from now, people of America will look back at our times and shake their heads, wondering 'Why would anyone give a shit whether someone else is straight or gay?'

(And probably also, 'How could they not see that Rick Santorum and Rick Perry were totally hot for each other?'  And 'Who the fuck was paying good money to listen to Justin Bieber?'  And 'Who couldn't have seen that Oprah was going to own her own planet someday?' And 'Wasn't it obvious that weed is good for you?'  And ......(ran out of time, they're closing the Playstation down for the day.))

Who Wants To Spend 10,000 Hours With Me?

Ten thousand hours.  That is the minimum number of hours required to become a world-class anything, according to Anders Ericsson.  He's a psychologist from Sweden, working at Florida State these days.  Whether you're into chess, football, violin, mathematics, fashion, basketball, writing, bartending, tennis, basket weaving, pole dancing, painting, cooking, whiskey drinking, doodling, playing pinball, erotic body-painting, mandolin playing, golfing....fuck, random list-making, for all I know.  This cat says it takes TEN THOUSAND HOURS to become a world-class anything, whatever you're into. 

How long is that really?  That's like 416-something days, almost 417.  Not so long, when you put it that way, but let's get real.  We all have jobs.  Or we're looking for one.  Shit, when you think about it, I'm a world-class seeker of jobs; I'm POSITIVE I've pounded at least 10,000 hours worth of pavement.  The local city governments should tax me extra for all the wear-and-tear I've put the local sidewalks through.  Damn!  I shouldn't say that, that'll be a talking point in the next Republican debate, and it'll be all my fault.  My point is, is doesn't sound like a long time,  less than a year and a half.  To become WORLD CLASS.  Better than 99% of everyone else on the planet.  Is that so hard?

OF COURSE IT IS.  That's a huge investment in time and effort.  Think about it; just having a job that pays the bills takes at least eight hours a day, forty hours a week.  And that's exhausting.  We bitch and bitch about it, as adults, having to work that much.  And as adults, our brains have pretty much shut down to learning new things.  What is that like for kids?  A year and a half to an eight year old, that's like eternity.  My five year old daughter can't sit through an episode of Spongebob without grabbing a toy or wanting to break a window, what does ten thousand hours mean to her?  It means, of course, twenty thousand episodes of Spongebob.  And a hell of a lot of broken toys and windows.

How much time have you put into your passion, whatever that passion may be?  Television doesn't count, the average American spends four hours a day watching shit on television.  That's 1460 hours per year.  Porn?  That's a question that's hard to answer, but the best I can say is that the average American watches 40 minutes of porn per WEEK. So you're probably not world-class at watching porn, either.  Before I had internet access, I used to read a book a day, no matter how many pages were in a book.  Since then, it's been about a book a year.  Stupid Facebook.  I suppose we're all world-class at Facebook by now.  

How about sex?  HAHAHAHAHAHA you must be joking.  I would love to say I'm a world-class lover...  Shit, now that I think about it, it really does take me a really long time, now that my hips and knees are degenerating and the pleasure I get from sex is totally overridden by the pain I feel, sex with me is like a Meatloaf song on karoake night, too long and too loud....

 Finally, I can say I am world-class at something.  Something I still suck at.  Sex, and the close second place, apologizing for sex.

America Is Sexually Fucked Up: An Overly-Longish Rant

I'm not a scholar or a scientist.  I didn't go to college, didn't even graduate from high school.  I did get my GED, but anyone who's taken that test knows that you only have to be moderately concscious to pass that one.  So forget about my official credentials.  But I have been around this craphole of a planet for forty-two years now, and being a pretty astute dude I've made a lot of observations and come to a lot of conclusions.   And if this seems sloppily written with a lot of mistakes and grammatical mistakes and errors in syntax, let me say I'm also not a fucking writer.  I'm a bartender, have been for a long time.  I've resided in a hundred different places here in America and a few places outside of the U.S. o' A.  I've read probably a quarter million books in my lifetime so far, and plan to read a million by the time I'm done.  None of which, I might add, were books on how to write well.  Accept it and continue reading, or go watch tv or water the lawn or something; I know some shit.  Plus, if you're reading this, chances are you didn't go to fucking Yale either.

One observation I've made, or one conclusion I've come to (either apply), is that America is fucked-up about sex and sexuality.  For the most part.  There are plenty of people that are enlightened on the subject, people who have great, healthy sex lives with people they genuinely care about and with whom have normal, healthy relationships.  These people aren't hard to find.  But equally easy to find are their exact opposites.   Turn on C-Span or read a newspaper, ANY newspaper, local or national, or or listen to the average fuckface on the street and you're gonna read and hear and see a bunch of backasswards shit.  Sex is for procreation solely, sex outside of marriage is evil.  Teenagers should never have sex.  God is love, but god hates fags, and they're all evil child molesters.  Condoms don't protect you from disease or even prevent pregnancies.  Watching porn morphs normal people into rapists and again, child molesters.  The fact there are pleny of rapists and child molesters.  The anus is the Devil's Playground.  Britney's vag looks good.  Clay Aikens is a sex symbol.  Mel Gibson is what women want?  Really?  A whole slew of wacky shit.  Of course there is plenty of rotten people who rape and abuse childred and oppress gay people and generally think shitty thoughts outside of the US, but we're so fucking convinced we're the fucking apex of civilization and history, the rest of the world has got to be wrong.

So what's the deal?

This is what I remember from school about the founding of America.  The Puritans in England were being persecuted for the beliefs, so they hopped in some boats, sailed the Atlantic, made friends with the cats they met when they landed,  they had some nice meals together, then all the sudden they owned the whole place from sea to shining fucking sea.  Free to create they society they'd always wanted and everyone would be free, equal and happy.  Seriously, that's what I remember learning.  The key words being 'what I remember', of course.

Since I have learned to not listen to or trust the motherfuckers that tell and teach shit like this in schools and textbooks and Hollywood scripts and People fucking Magazine.  And you don't believe them either,  don't lie to me and say that you do.  George Washington told a lotta fucking lies.  Abraham Lincoln didn't think black people were much more than animals and in no way equal to or superior to white people in any regard.  Except working really fucking hard for no pay until you die.    They were awesome at that.  Ben Franklin didn't invent electricity.  AND he was an asshole that fucked his best friend's fiance after promising to look after her while he was gone on a job.  Turns out Hoover, the guy in charge of rooting out the evil homos in this country and fucking their lives up forever was, in fact, a homo with a penchant for especially effiminate textiles.  The Kennedy boys were DP'ing Marilyn Monroe every chance they got because they married the women they were supposed to, not the kinky kind they wanted.  And they were on crystal meth.  We KNOW this shit.  I could go on and on, but if I do I'll forget what I was trying to say in the first place.  You can look this shit up the same as me, lazy bastards.

What I'm trying to say is that this country was founded by sexually fucked up assholes.  Were they really persecuted in the Old Country?  I have to think, maybe they were being holier-than-thou assholes back home, telling people that God and Jesus didn't want them jerking off to French poetry or actually enjoying it when they fucked their wives, and people probably just told them to shut the fuck up and mind their own business and to not worry about who and what and how they were fucking or whacking off to?  Just maybe.  Same as you or I, right?  So these tight-ass motherfuckers said fine, we'll leave and go create a Godly society somewhere else, where they're aren't any other people.  A place where no one fucks or jerks off.  So they came here and lo and behold, there were other people there.  People who were even worse than the heathens they left behind.  These people were fucking CONSTANTLY, without being married or worried about if the neighbors caught a glimpse of some bare titty and ass.  AND, they didn't even KNOW WHO GOD fucking WAS!   Fucking animals!  These weren't even human beings!  So they started slaughtering them.  After accepting a bunch of dinner invitations from them.  Assholes!

These guys were such assholes, they'd fucking KILL you if you were a woman that fucked around before marriage.  The guys they were fucking didn't get killed, of course, they were the victims of a satanic plot.  Chicks who put out were put in public stocks with their pusses and asses and tits hanging out, branded with irons,  burned at stakes for fuck's sake!  To save themselves and the women they were torturing from, you guessed it, the Devil.

Fast forward, a little or a lot, and things took a long time to change.  In the ninteenth and part of the twentieth centuries you could get locked up in a mental institution if you got caught jerking off.  Everyone was doing it, of course, everyone's always jerked off ever since there has been the opposable thumb, but if you got caught?  The Devil!  Makin' folks crazy.  Lock 'em up!  And if you were gay... I'm really sorry.  Until 1861, if you were discovered to be homosexual you were put to death.  After 1861 things got a little better, you were simply imprisoned for the rest of your life.  Whew!  Punitive measures for adultery, that's still a tricky one.  A couple of recent cases pop up in my memory.  A man in North Carolina (I think) sued another man for 'stealing his wife away' and was rewarded some $35,000 by the courts, and another in Maine (again, I think) where some guy came home, found his wife in bed with another man, and blew them both away with a shotgun.  The local judge ruled it 'justifiable homocide'. 

Again, I'm not just bashing America.  I'm bashing human beings.  This kind of thing has gone on all over the world and is still going on today.  But since I am an American, this is the place I'm focusing on, and trying to figure out why we're so backwards about sex and sexuality.  TO THIS DAY.  It's election time here again, and since we have a Democrat in the White House we are constantly barraged by folks vying to be the Republican opponent come next November.  Rick  Santorum wants to criminalize contraception, pornography, abortion, and homosexuality.  Why?  He's a Puritan.  Because of his faith and the fact that he's a self-loathing closet homosexual.  Ron Paul agrees about abortion.  He's a doctor, he makes a living delivering babies.  Just white babies, though.  I'm pretty sure he's okay with abortions for black people.  Probably sterilization, too.  Newt Gingrich?  Don't fucking get me started on that fat, lying hypocritical bag of mashed spuds; everything he claims to be against, he's already done himself.  Mitt Romney... well, it doesn't matter what he says.  Tomorrow he'll say something else.  And he wears magic underwear. 

NONE OF THEM KNOW A FUCKING THING ABOUT SEX.  Not that they will publically admit, anyway.  Newt thinks he does, but really he just knows how to con a younger, prettier and less-ill woman than the one he's married to to go down on him.  They are all Puritans in an age that has left Puritanism far behind, speaking to and exploiting a desperate audience that has been fed a steady diet of fear and hatred of 'otherness' for so long that they will grasp onto any straw that promises a return to the 'good ol days', no matter how weak and fragile that straws is.  And they all want to be the leaders of our country and, by all of their own statements, are willing to legislate our bodies and our sex lives.

The Good Ol' Days weren't really all that great, really.  Unless you were a straight, land-owning white guy, things kinda sucked.  And even those guys were probably sexually frustrated.  Unless they found a way to do what they wanted, without getting caught...

Whew!  This is a long one for me.  And I haven't even had a beer yet! 

I believe in America, though, and I believe in Americans.  I believe we, as a nation, will find a way out of the morass of fear, intolerance, bigotry and superstition that we are mired in and find a way to go forward.  Recongize that while we have a foot in the past, we have an obligation to take a step forward into something that possibly is unknown to us now, but something that can be far more satisfying and beautiful and fulfilling to all of us.  Believers and non-believers, straight and gay, black, white, red, brown, etc., Republican, Democrats, Independants, Xboxers, PS2ers and Wii's.  Cats and dogs, too.  I'm really tired of listening to them fight. 

As always, thanks for your kind blah blah blah.

Apparently, I'm One of The Most Hated People In The World

Just reading a Pew Research opinion poll and graphic that I found interesting:

(http://www.pewforum.org/Public-Expresses-Mixed-Views-of-Islam-Mormonism.aspx)

I'm pleasantly surprised at the numbers on Islam, considering the hateful climate in America lately.  I would think that 43% is pretty high.  But 53% unfavorable towards a group of people that, by definition, aren't even in the game?  That's like 53% of Nascar fans being unfavorable towards David Beckham.  I read about a study that claims that religious people trust atheists about as much as convicted rapists.  I'm REALLLLY hoping that this is an instance of statistics and numbers being manipulated to prove an already existing hypothesis, but I'm not holding my breath.  That study was done in Canada, anyway.  Who ever believes Canadians?

And really, just saying 'Muslims' is kind of vague.  There are huge differences between different groups of Muslims, just as there are amongst Christians.  You think that Catholics, Methodists, Calvinists, Mormons, Lutherans, Baptists, blah blah are all the same?  Of course not.  Otherwise there wouldn't be so many churches in town, everyone would go to the same place.  There are different kinds of Muslims, there are different countries that are fundamentally Muslim, and there are differences between the Muslim people who are from the same countries as well as the same religion.  Just don't ask me what the differences are.  I don't pay all that much attention.

I am not a person that believes in much.  I have many ideas, but not many beliefs, and I don't put much stock into other people's beliefs because usually they're just things they were taught as children by parents and teachers or other adults in general.  Sorry, but they are people too, and are often wrong, because the things they 'believe' are the same things that they themselves learned as children.  That's how bullshit gets perpetuated, and this ofay ain't playin' that.  But just because I don't believe the same as others doesn't mean that I can't respect other people and their beliefs.  I can.  I respect people.  I just don't agree with them on many things.

When the average American or Canadian is asked how they feel about Islam and Muslims, I don't give a shit how they reply because I know for a fact that they are responding solely on presupposition and what they've heard on the television.  How many Muslims do you know?  How many times have you talked to them?  How many mosques are there in your town?  Have you ever visited one?  Ever flipped through the Koran?  Just ask yourself.   I'm not requiring a response, and frankly, I figure if I did, you'd lie.  That's what people do.

Almost ten years ago I moved to Europe, more specifically Belgium, where there are plenty of Muslims.  There's a bunch of Jews there as well; outside of New York and Israel itself, you're not going to find a larger population of Jews as you will in Antwerp.  But I didn't get to know any Jews there.  The Hasids of Antwerp are a clannish lot.  When walking through Jewish neighborhoods, I never got so much as 'hello' or 'goed Middag' in response to my greetings, and none frequented the cafe that I worked at.  Muslims, however, were all around me and pretty much never shut up.

It was the end of April, 2002 that I flew over.  I was engaged to a girl from the Netherlands whose visa had expired in the summer of 2001, so in order to get married it was going to have to be over there.  I didn't mind, I'd always wanted to visit Europe and the idea of actually living there was mind-blowing to a small-town, broke-ass Iowa boy like me.  So I jumped at the chance.  Even if I had to get married to do it...

The journey by air is fuzzy in my memory; there was the jet-lag that I'd never experienced before (it's a ten or eleven hour flight to Amsterdam), and the fact that I hate flying so much that copious amounts of alcohol are required for me to get on a damn plane in the first place.  I vaguely remember a layover in Reykjavik, Iceland, and being disappointed that I didn't have the opportunity to check the place out (I'm a big fan of Bjork), and waiting for hours at Schiphol Airport in Amsterdam for Jetta to show up (she'd gotten bad information from the airline about when I was arriving), a couple of train and tram rides, and there we were in Antwerp.  If I was Paul friggin Theroux, I'm sure I could come up with a better travel tale, but there you have it.

Now, you have to realize this is April 2002, just six months after 9/11, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq are just heating up, people of all nationalities and religions are a little pissed about the way things were.  Already I could see signs with messages like "Bush Is A War Criminal' and 'No Blood For Oil' in windows all over the place as we traveled by street car to our apartment that Jetta had procured a month before, so right off the bat I was a little nervous.  And when we finally got to our neighborhood in South Antwerp and walked the couple of blocks from the tram-stop to our apartment, EVERYWHERE I looked all I saw were Arabs standing around in groups, smoking cigarettes and talking to each other in a way that made me think violence was imminent; harsh-sounding dialogue with lots of hand gestures.  I later learned that's just how they talk.  They could be commenting to someone on how nice the weather is and that the fuzzy kitties their kids have at home are so adorable and life couldn't be any better, and to us Westerners it all sounds like 'I'M GONNA FUCKING CHOP YOUR HEAD OFF AND CHKUDDAH DOWN YOUR NECK.' (That's Arabic for 'shit', I think...)

We get to our tiny little chkuddah-hole of an apartment, two rooms and a kitchen for five hundred euros a month, the toilet's not even IN the apartment, we have to go out into the stairwell to get there (which led to a lot of incidences with me drunkenly peeing in the kitchen garbage can, of course), and I'm not real happy about this.  I stood there in a semi-jetlagged, mostly paranoid daze looking out the window at all the Arabs in the neighborhood that she'd moved us into, and I see the street sign on the building across from me.  Of course I don't speak the language, I never really did get a handle on it, but I tried sounding it out to myself--Gijzelaarsstraat, Guy-zee-lar-strat...

Me: Honey, how do you pronounce the name of the street we live on?

Jetta: Gijzelaarsstraat!

Me: Yeah, ok...and what does that mean?

Jetta:  Mmmm, let me think...Oh, it means Hostage Street.

Me (in my head):  WHAT THE FUCKING FUCK?!?  YOU GET A TINY, TOO-EXPENSIVE  CRACKERBOX  APARTMENT, SIX MONTHS AFTER NINE ELEVEN, MY FIRST TRIP ABROAD, IN AN ARAB NEIGHBORHOOD ON FUCKING HOSTAGE STREET?!?!?!?   WHAT THE FUCKING FUCKITY FUCK FUCK WERE YOU THINKING???

Me (out loud):  Hm. Interesting.

It turned out totally fine; it was a Turkish neighborhood, and though I didn't know it at that moment, Turkish people are TOTALLY cool.  Their country is the guiding light of the Arab world, every Muslim country wants their government to be like Turkey's, they are allied with most Western countries (including the US), they don't hate Americans, and this may be a generalization, they seemed to me to be the CLEANEST people on Earth.  Seriously, like three times per week all the women would all run hoses out of the ground floor windows, hose the sidewalk down, use these big deck-scrubbers to clean the sidewalks off, wait for them to dry, bring out all those beautiful, ornate rugs from inside, lay them out and clean them with hoses and deck-scrubbers, wait for them to dry, take them back in and THEN AGAIN clean the sidewalks the same way as before.  Seriously.  I never went into any of their apartments, but I imagine they were spotless.  The Turkish bakeries and restaurants are exquisite and very often inexpensive.  The people in working in the bakeries, restaurants and shops were always nice and polite to me, even after they found out where I was from.

I cannot say that about the Muslims from other countries that I encountered.

They have a system for shops in Belgium.  There are two kinds; dagwinkels (day shops) and nachtwinkels (night shops).  The dagwinkels are open from 6am-6pm, the nachtwinkels open the other twelve hours.  In the ten or fifteen minutes it took me to walk from my apartment to the Penny Black, where I worked, there were at least ten of each type of shop.  Which was a damned good thing, because all of them were owned-operated by Pakistanis or Afghans or Moroccans and they generally LOATHE Americans.  It was a familiar, well-defined patter; I would walk into a store, grab some Jupiler or Stella Beer for me, some Kriek (cherry) beer for Jetta, then have to ask the person working, in my intolerably bad Flemish, for 'een pakje Camels and een pakje Marlboro Lights, alstublieft.'  After two or three such transactions, the question-and-answer phase would begin.

Clerk: Where are you from?  England?

Me:  Nope, America.   (I was SO tempted to say Canada, but I never did.)

Clerk:  (disgusted look)  AMERICA?!?  Your President is a verrry, veerrryy bad man!

Me:  I know!  I voted for Gore!  (Which was a lie, I didn't vote in the 2000 election, and the guilt is still eating away at my innards.)

At this point, the conversation would go one of two directions.  I would either infer through body language and slamming cash register drawers that my business was not welcome and to leave, or they would say 'Wellll...  you don't seem like a bad person, but your President is A VERY VERY BAD MAN!  What's wrong with Clinton?  Why isn't he still President?'

I got that a lot, from people of all nationalities.

At some point, I had to stop going into the stores that did welcome my patronage, as the word would get out that an American was shopping regularly there and soon there would be groups of men standing around and waiting for me to show up.  Ribs would be nudged, necks would be craned, words would be quietly hissed, fingers pointed....  I obviously was never kidnapped or even really accosted, but that was because those would be the last times I ever went into those stores.  There was always another winkel on the next block up...

That was the process in the dagwinkels on the way to work, the same process in the nachtwinkels on the way home.  It was exhausting, really.

There were other instances that stand out in my memory; while wandering around and trying to learn the layout of the city, I stumbled out of an alley and onto this scene, captured by a local newspaper:

(Note: This is the wrong fucking picture. I can't find the right one, but if you look through the archives of Antwerp's Algemeen Dagblaad, you can find the right one. But this is basically what I saw as I popped out of the cobblestone alley onto the Meir.)

This was a seriously anti-American, anti-Israeli, pro-Arab march moving down the Meir, one of Antwerp's biggest shopping districts.  The picture doesn't really make clear the size of the march; there were thousands of people, carrying signs that called for Bush's crimes to be accounted for, if not his head, and generally for Americans to burn in whatever Muslims call hell.  I just lowered my head and did an about-face back into the dark alley I'd just popped out of and speedily walked home, locked the door and smoked hash until Jetta got home.  She called me a pussy and said not to worry, get used to it, these kind of things happen all the time.  Yaaaay!

Then there were the riots sparked by the killing of a young Moroccan, an Islamic teacher that was beaten to death by some Belgian guy who's father lived next door.  The Belgian guy was a member of the Vlaamse Blok, or the Flemish Bloc, a notoriously fascist organization that thrives in the neighborhood bars and cafes of Flanders whose motto is 'Flanders Is For the Flemish'.  They didn't dislike only the Moroccans and Turks that had come to their country in the 1940's and 50's to work in the mines, or the Africans who had come in the last few decades to escape civil wars and racial atrocities or the Ukrainians and Estonians and Belarusians that had flooded the local economy with cheap labor (and better-looking prostitutes also- people were apparently bored with the local labor force), they hated ME too.  Because I'm not Flemish.  Anyway, the Moroccan riots was big news for a bit, with it's own celebrity, a certain Abou Jahjah.  Jahjah was the head of the local European Arab League and they had started patrolling Muslim neighborhoods much in the same way that the Guardian Angels patrol New York and Philadelphia, only that they're there to protect fellow Muslims.  I didn't leave the house for a few days around that time.  Maybe I am a pussy.

But really, what's my point?  All I'm saying, how many problems would I have had if the Muslims I encountered in Belgium had they known I was an atheist?  Probably a lot more.  I have a feeling that if a survey were to be taken among European Muslims, the 'disapproval' numbers would be a lot higher than 53%, and though I hate to use generalizations and stereotypes, those cats like to cut people's heads off and drag bodies through streets.  Or at least stone you to death when you don't follow their rules.

And Christians aren't any better, historically speaking!  They might not be chopping off heads or dismembering you when encountered with dissension, but they're pretty quick with a match and a stake.

Does anyone ever take a public survey of atheists on their views?  Why bother.  We can't even come up with a correct number of people who don't believe in a god or some sort of spiritual force that runs the universe.  Pew polls come up with a figure of about 15 million, the USA Today numbers are around 50 million.  Either way, we're the most despised group of people on the planet in non-racial matters.  If you ask me, based on my experiences, I would say that 4 out of 10 Muslims have been total assholes to me, and 5 out of 10 Christians.  As I've mentioned, I haven't known that many Jewish people so I can't really give you a number.  Brian Erlich and another kid from school, that's about it, and they were always pretty okay to me.  So I guess I could say that one hundred percent of Jews, in my experience, are cool.  Not exactly scientific, but there you have it.  It doesn't really matter what religion someone belongs to, to me there's about a 50/50 chance that you're a dick.

In the final analysis, my only real point to all this typing, is that 53% of people, religious or otherwise, can suck my balls.  Thanks for your kind attention!