Chappie is Poopin' His Pants at the Thought of What's Comin'

 

  Chappie (no, that's not Chappie!) may look to you like a cute robot who has seen better days, but he's really just an aging white male American. Read this and weep, but only if sitting or lying down. Finally someone (Thomas Edsall in the NY Times) has written a 2016 electoral analysis that scares the hell out of me.  I feel like Dr. Bruce Banner staring at his image in a future-revealing mirror. Yikes! Green? Edsall's implied conclusion says that this election is (now that Trump is actually in the final and only a trip to the voting booth away) about white people and our secret (even to ourselves in many cases) feelings and attitudes about non-white people and the fact that WE can vote however WE FEEL in SECRET.  Hunh?

Because we block the admission of it from our own consciousnesses, people seldom if ever admit that they harbor racist convictions or feelings. Only 10% of whites consider themselves to be racist, but 38% of whites consider blacks to be racist. Apparently the fact that blacks would seem to have some cause to feel so doesn't penetrate this irony-free group's logic center. Nor does the obvious operation of psychological projection at work in the white mind. This dichotomy gives some idea of the mountain of distortion we all have to surmount. We monsters never see ourselves as such. 

Typhoid Mary was similarly clueless.

Edsall's argument, supported by evidence you must read, suggests that Trump is much closer to being elected than most of us imagine because he really is a one issue candidate whose issue is disguised by all the insults, bad taste and babble: Trump is the candidate of white resentment and white resentment of non-whites and the atavistic warp and weave of the contemporary world is much greater than (white) people with college degrees and liberal credentials realize. Since I write as a college educated white man, I leave it to other-defined people to figure out to what extent you may be kidding yourselves about what is coming. We will all face the same shit storm if it arrives.

So, racists almost never accept that they are racists. Perhaps Dylan Roof does? But racists are also generally sexists as well, since both are based on a conviction of human and gender inequality. I have given up on the apparently educated women who can't decide if they are "feminists" or not? Don't worry, 95% of the world's men know what you are and are just waiting to put you back in your place--and you thought it was only the women and girls of Kabul who needed to worry? 

I argue that there are two kinds of racists. I distinguish between racists who are "happy" with what they are and wouldn't change a thing (David Duke) and racists who sense that there is something "off" about their positions and are amenable to change given time and persuasion. Their hearts are still racist but their heads are further evolved and encourage them to get on the right side of history--or just the right side. George Wallace, the Alabama segregationist governor, was one such. He changed even his heart. So was Abraham Lincoln. Many of this sort actually voted for Barrack Obama once or even twice (given that he is an exceptional individual whose gifts and personal qualities were obvious to all when he first ran for office.) Even the other kind of racists like "their" colored friends.

The Democratic voters who may vote for Trump are many of the same ones who are now voting for Bernie. WHAT?  You don't see it?  If you are a working class male Democrat with job and other insecurity, Bernie with his talk of jobs and corrupt elites will appeal to you far more than the elite- connected Hillary. If Bernie became the Democratic candidate, you might actually have voted for Bernie--A SOCIALIST.

Of course, all of this silliness derives from the fact that perhaps a plurality of voters think of their campaign choice as a shopping expedition, a product choice (Let's give android a chance for a change, eh?)--actually believe the promises the candidates make or that the candidates (however sincere) have a snowball's chance of delivering on ANY of their pie-in-the-sky promises. Build a wall to the sky, Donald? Deport 11 million people, you pompadoured asshole? A "political revolution" Bernie? Free college education? This endlessly repeated "revolution" phrase alone should disqualify you from serious consideration. Want to know what a revolution (call it a civil war and look at who owns most of the guns, you NRA bashers!) gets you? Look around and find one that you'd like to emulate. Such talk is jejune nonsense, well-meaning and irresponsible as well-meaning people's passions so often are. The Road to Hell, Burnie.  Don't forget old Voltaire who knew everything about oligarchs and bullshit dreamers:  Le mieux est l'ennemi du bien.

The better is the enemy of the good. 

Seriously. 

But without Bernie and his charming, elderly male warmth, you, Shopper, are faced with someone you can't abide--how then can you vote for HER? Don't forget, if you ever knew it, that the rise of the National Front in France corresponded with the virtual disappearance of the Communist Party as a factor in French politics. The former Communists in a significant degree went to the racist, nationalistic, anti-Semitic National Front after 1970. Is that too much information?

The situation is a bit different with sexism since sexist ideology is hardly as stigmatized as the racist variety and is actually fostered in many cultures and cultural groups and religions, etc. Wow, it's a sexist world! The list of cultures that are not sexist and homophobic is by far a short list. Even inter-cultural groups share this: look at the music scene.

In short, Trump's chances are bolstered even further by the implicit, rock-solid sexist vote in this election. All the young women who reject the doughty Hillary for the adorable über sprite Bernie and react snippily that they are free to vote for the candidate of their choice regardless of gender--are, in my humble feminist male opinion, daft cunts who won't have any choice when it comes to their bodies (after Trump and his advisers reorganize the SCOTUS along racist, atavist male dominant lines) and won't have to worry about ever having another vaguely progressive serious woman candidate to vote for in their lifetimes. 

Of course, Trump may choose Sarah Palin as his VP and support her to succeed him after he's finished with us. Think that's ridiculous? Really? Who are you to measure the ridiculous? Insults and contumely are and will be your lot in life, GIRLS, until you get a clue and TAKE power and stop voting for Daddy or Gramps (Note that I didn't use the N-word, just the C-word and nothing will happen to me unless an asteroid swings off course--a risk I'll run.) Hillary, for all her negatives (whatever that means) is your one and only choice. Sadly, you may live long enough (six months?) to see that I am SADLY correct. 

Make me a liar, Bitches.

The feeling of equanimity I experience having a man like Barack Obama living and working in the White House will be gone in less than a year. I will probably never experience such a feeling again. I am surrounded by many nice people who seem to imagine that because a number of important battles have been narrowly won, that the tide of history has turned and a just world for all people is assured. (We're on the right side of history!) Well, let Trump be elected and WHITE atavism hold sway for a time, and you won't even be able to remember this Age of Barry.

This potential election of a white atavist man over a modern white woman offers the chance for a double whammy in reasserting the last hurrah of White Male Supremacy over bird, beast and bush. It could prove to be a perfect storm of racist, atavistic stupidity putting "the lesser breeds without the law" and the goddamned feminazis BOTH back in their proper places! I'm really scaring myself here. One thing I am absolutely certain of: should Trump be elected, America will wake up on November 9th feeling immediate buyer's remorse. Too late, Motherfuckers! Many who would be embarrassed to admit voting for Trump, will have thought they were registering a protest vote--that Trump could never win--THIS is how clueless we voters can be.

 

Edsall makes one point abundantly clear: the next and final test Trump faces will happen in the privacy of the voting booth where every voter can do whatever he or she wishes and NEVER have to answer for it, much less admit it to anyone, even in time to herself.* The country's fate could depend on millions of disappointed, confused and foolishly bitter white people NOT voting with their emotions...   Does anyone want to take that bet?

This moment feels like the 1980 and 2000 elections would have to me, if I had had sense enough to realize that white resentment could elect boobs like our 40th and 43rd presidents. I didn't. We did. How about our 45th?

*****************************************************

* My late parents, staunch Democrats and anti-racists, were also Eisenhower Democrats who supported Nixon in 1960. I was "politically active" as an 11 year old Protestant in a Catholic school tasked with being Chairman of the Republican Party in the mock election. Nixon got 4 votes, Kennedy 83, and I scored points with the nuns for being their patsy (this was partial revenge for my having been the #1 student in Catechism class for two years running despite being one of only two Protestants in the school. Sandra, the other Protestant, was usually #2. I developed a disdain for roman Catholic intellectuals that lasted until I met the work of Gary Wills and others years on. I still regard Jesuit training as duplicitous and deficient.) No matter, I supported Nixon all the way. Anyone remember his running mate? Henry Cabot Lodge. His campaign slogan? "Give 'em and inch and they'll take a mile!" (spoken of Red China's failed efforts to capture two doughty little coastal islands, Quemoy/Kinmen and Matsu, controlled by Taiwan.) My mother was critical of JFK and felt competitive with Jackie--this is my clear, uninterrupted memory. I don't remember Mom speaking well of JFK until he was dead, yet for at least the last 30 years of her life, my scrupulously honest mother insisted sincerely that she had voted for Kennedy. The idea that she had voted for Nixon (whom she had come to detest by '68) was utterly alien to her idea of herself. Looked at another way, how could I have been the only reactionary little swine in the family? Our neighbors, the liberal Crispells were great fans of JFK and since I adored the Crispell girls (to the extent an 11 year old boy could adore girls), the question arises how I could have been an adherent of Tricky Dick, someone they thought little of? Children obviously adopt the politics of their parents until they reach the age of rebellion, which was not eleven in those days.

 

Chappie Says What Happens on Television Should STAY on Television...

Could it be true? True that an American is more likely to be fatally struck by lightning than killed by a terrorist in any given year? Arguably this is so. I haven't fact checked yet, but I just know this is one of the more nearly true statements you'll have heard this week in reference to the tragedy in San Bernardino....  OK, now we have checked and find that the number of Americans killed by specifically Islamic terrorists this year has been about half of the number likely to be killed by lightning (14 vs. 27.)  The US suffers about one shark attack fatality every two years. Or something Blah, blah, Blah.

The first conclusion Chappie draws from the days long onscreen dance of concern and obsession with the religion obsessive "motives" of Syed Rizwan Farook and Tashfeen Malik, the San Berdoo Butchers (How's that for a headline moniker, Daily News?) is that we secretly enjoy this stuff WAY TOO MUCH. Many of us want to be angry, and to be angry first requires that you be afraid, very afraid. How else to juice up the fear factor regarding things that happen on TV and which have absolutely no relevance or connection to our individual lives than to hype endlessly the possibility (however infinitesimally remote) that something will happen: that Kim Kardassian's ass will finally fall off in the middle of some runway or other, that A&E will cancel Storage Wars in favor of a show about Donnie Wahlberg and Jennie McCarthy dating in real life (and leaving "Bates Motel" as the only scripted show on the network!) or that no one will revive the Pontiac brand EVER? You know what I'm talking about, don't you?

Coulrophobia: fear of clowns (painting by Michael Olivier, Grenoble France)

The second conclusion I draw is that the sum total of our mental parts is significantly less than the observations and evaluations of a single person. That would be ME.

Chappie Says "My God is the Onliest Only God--Not Yourn!"

Apparently there is a looming question in the minds of some people in this world concerning the identity of The Deity, the MONO THEO. It seems that evangelicals at prestigious Wheaton College in Illinois ( one-time bastion of abolitionism) have fired a "Christian" teacher for asserting that her God is the same as "Allah" (and one imagines "JaWeH") by virtue of the three sharing religious texts. What a concept! Identity politics gone ape.  Imagine if MY Barack Obama was the same as the "Barack Obama" of my Republican friend who loathes and despises HIS Red Obama? By the way I am very attached to my Obama.

  Red Obama

                   Blue Obama (the REAL Obama)

Why have I turned a discussion about God into one about Barack Obama? Well, there's no pitchers of God, and I gots to have pitchers on my blog to atone for my lack of content, so Obama is the next best thing, right?

Have I just raised the issue of RELATIVISM?  Oh, NO!

Can it be that we are discussing different SUNS? Or different AMERICAS? Was MY mother the same as my brother's mother? Not to hear him tell it... Every election we hear knuckleheads (I used the term endearingly) of different stripes demanding to to take back THEIR country. Doofuses all. That's MY country they're talking about, and I don't want it back now that the top .001% own most of it--I'm priced out.

It should be a truism that when there is ONLY ONE of something and it is INVISIBLE as well as indivisible and otherwise intangible and occupies the same role in the lives of many people, that there is only one and the problem is that people have differing ideas of Him. Or HER? Or IT? Are people rendered so dippy by their fear and gratuitous bigotry that they will take away someone's employment? I guess so.

Remember WHEATON COLLEGE. They have some 'splainin' to do. Give them a wide berth...

Chappie Says, Religion Smeligion: We Are ALL Delusional...

We are delusional if we think that ISLAM is the base reason for the San Bernardino attack. But believing so and obsessing about "radicalization" as if it were a homicidal version of the mumps fits our national blindness well. The base cause for the SB attack is PAKISTAN. The wife, Malik, was a Pakistani ex-pat as was her hubby, born here of ex-pat parents. Why would two Pakistan-identified people living in America be motivated to murder a large number of innocent Americans? Sadly SIMPLE: they perceive (correctly or incorrectly) that American drones (and other forces) are and have been consistently killing hundreds if not thousands of Pakistani nationals for nearly 15 years, some of them innocent non-combatant women and children. This cannot be in dispute. Any honest American need only ask how he or she would react if Americans were being killed from the sky ceaselessly and without effective reply? Would it matter WHY we were being killed? Would it matter that we had our military in 150 foreign countries involved in the internal wars and insurrections of those usually highly unequal and unjust societies?  Are any foreign military forces in OUR country?

Don't argue necessity: do we NEED to have our military power in everyone else's backyard and in some cases, killing their nationals? Even IF this version of reality is true, do you really think the nationals or national identified people of those countries should be expected NOT to hate the sight and sound of our arrogance and dream of revenge against us? Get real, people.

                                                                                                                                                       2015 Millennium Films

As a footnote to this argument, I just screened an utterly derivative and mediocre "stop the terrorists" action movie that came out this year and which concerns the plot of several  European men who have lost loved ones through the misapplication of American arrogance and power (as conceived in Hollywood) and who plan to immolate everyone in Times Square when the big ball, packed with noxious gases, falls at the knell of midnight. Pierce Brosnan, a wonderful actor, plays the utterly unstoppable master assassin dripping sang froid. The point is: the world has all manner of people who hate us and WITH REASON. Reason(s) even we could grasp if we would open our minds a little. Why, you might ask, am I interested in the opinion of a middling Hollywood vessel? Precisely because it reveals that the existence of a revenge motive contra the USA exists worldwide and doesn't nearly require "radicalization" as the experts opine.

Islam, however, as a religious tradition, does give aggrieved people "permission" (and resolve) to seek what they conceive to be justice. This would be "jihad." For your information, Americans don't have a corner on deciding what is just or unjust in this world. One would have to be truly dishonest to deny the obvious fact that these American deaths in America  mirror Pakistani deaths in Pakistan. How is that? If it looks like justice and smells like justice and tastes...you get my point, and it is a BITTER taste I offer. Prefer the message of Trump or Cruz or Clinton or Obama? They are ALL full of it on this point. None dares say that we are paying the price of our behavior in the world and have been doing so for many years. IT IS OBVIOUS. Obama and Clinton are implicated and Trump and Rubio and the other war mongering clowns (Rand Paul gets some slack) on the stage are just idiots. But it's true: we are hated for reasons we must agree with. Read St. Matthew. There's that an eye for an eye part so many of us love. It's a gift that keeps on giving....

Americans are as obsessed with religion as we are with guns and other people's choices in sex and marriage partners and contraceptive methods. Most of us foolishly believe that "our" ancestors" came to these shores in search of religious freedom. This notion is true only as long as one accepts that this early American notion of religious freedom included the power to limit the religious freedom of OTHER PEOPLE, as was commonplace in nearly all the 13 original colonies (Rhode island would be the sole exception.)  Catholics were effectively banned from this country until after the Constitution was ratified. Less than 1% of Americans were Catholic at the founding of the republic. "We" liked Catholics then about as much as we like Muslims now. Funny how things turn out. Catholics today are 27% of the population.

It is natural for us to look for the same nasty elements in others (Muslims in this case) that we have had and still have in ourselves. The Book of Matthew 7:3's account of the Sermon on the Mount has it correct:

And why beholdest thou the mote that is in thy brother's eye,

but considerest not the beam that is in thine own eye?

These words of the acclaimed Lord and Savior of all Christians are also just simple psychology or common sense. Although all of us are naturally hypocrites, none of us is particularly happy about it. Of all Jesus's sayings, this one with all the wood bits is the one which establishes His genius (in Chappie's humble view.) These words also indicate the presence of another psychological phenomenon which is virtually always present when we are thinking about OTHER PEOPLE and what they do or have done to us or might do: projection.  "A theory in psychology in which humans defend themselves against their own unpleasant impulses by denying their existence while attributing them to others." Sound familiar? If you learn about only one psychological concept (and empirical truth) in you long life, make it "projection."

If one is confused by this horrible but relatively insignificant tragedy, the San Bernardino Attacks, one needs to think broadly and stop listening to the myriad voices of morons and imbeciles barking and quacking in the land. You know who I mean. The most realistic and credible person I have heard speak so far is Saira Khan, sister of the dead gunman, Syed Farook, in her interview with MSNBC's Chris Jansing. She has no answers, but she is speaking with honesty and intelligence.

And, oh yes, gun availability is substantial part of the problem, but nothing trumps a strong motivation. Hate not religion kills people. It seems clear that there was a personal animus between Seyed, the killer, and the "Messianic Jew" Thalasinos. It also seems likely that Seyed Farook was influenced by his spooky wife, whose appreciation for Daesh has been established. All of these important details are secondary to the fact that we are hated, with cause by tens of millions of people who would never pick up a weapon and attack one of us. Knowing that the explanation is such a simple one should help us all sleep better at night, just like we used to do. Losses such as those in SB are a small price to pay for the privilege of waging unending war against "terrorism" anywhere we perceive it to be. I'm sure we can all agree about that. Sleep tight...

Chappie Says Ben Carson is So Wrong He's HALF RIGHT about the Pyramid!

Chappie knows it's hardly fair or helpful to join in the fray when someone has exposed himself as Ben Carson has on...let's see...the issue of the pyramids of ancient Egypt being constructed by Joseph son of Jacob as grain storage facilities? That's the one. Carson's religious faith tells him this must be true. Many folks snicker. Chappie, you see, laughed too because he thinks he is smarter than Ben, who has left his metaphorical fly unzipped, thus exposing himself to ridicule. In all fairness: Chappie has mistakenly left his fly open in the non-metaphorical sense--in front of a classroom full of students, no less! The best response would be to tell Ben (in a low voice so no one else can hear) "Be careful when you zip up, Doc, so you don't catch your thingy in the zipper!"  The plain fact is that even if Ben DID snag himself in that zipper, he'd probably emit little more than a low moan. He's a stoic, that Ben. All guts and thought-control.

The aforementioned "cheap shot" that I have taken at Ben is actually the remark I'm about to make as he's reeling from the effects of a particularly troubling bit of silliness: his "personal theory" about the pyramids of Egypt being built by Joseph to store grain in. The refutation of this bit of arrant silliness has been neat and complete. What is not complete is an evaluation of this incident for what it reveals about Carson's fitness to lead a large organization dealing in complex realities and issues.

So called "people of faith" are believed to be favored by the American people as their (our) leaders. And yet none of our great presidents, NOT ONE (if we ignore Woodrow Wilson, the exception who proves the rule), has been what any god fearing holy roller or snake handler would consider much of a man of faith. Specifically not much of a church goer. This is not to say these men have not been spiritual. Perhaps the one good bad president, someone upon whom History may well smile, James Earl Carter, is both a man of faith and a spiritual man? Sadly, he will be leaving us ere long heading for that great Sunday School in the Sky, and at that time a great many of his fellow citizens will recognize, many for the first time, just who he was and how we'll miss him. Anyway, comparisons between Ben Carson and Jimmy Carter are very premature, not to mention invidious. Ben has to get elected before he can have a disastrous presidency...

My topic here is merely Carson's presumed fitness to lead the country, something which 26% of Republicans seem to be in favor of. Since card-carrying Republicans constitute no more than 25% of the votable population, only perhaps 6% of the population (26% of 25%?) believes that BC would make a good president. Better than Trump, say...

Since we know that almost all of the Republican candidates for the 2016 presidential nomination express skepticism about the reality of the global warming phenomenon and reject the "theory" of evolution outright, it shouldn't come as any surprise that one of them also believes that "Joseph" built the pyramids (the work of a thousand years, 2700 BCE to 1700 BCE.) Since Methusalah only lived 960 years and Joseph only 110, he of the many colored pipe dream coat has some 'splainin' to do.  Back to the calculator, Ben.

 
But let's not get carried away with this beat down of Ben Carson. Our topic is his fitness to be president. Alas, he is clearly not terribly fit. He is not even fit for a mid-level position with Archer Daniels Midland at the Brewster, Iowa silos.

How to explain this in a man so obviously intelligent? Well, a recognized medical/surgical expert who has helped thousands of people to longer lives is still a medical expert and as anyone who knows many doctors knows...they know pretty much everything. Yet there are doubters...Dr. BC is part of a helping profession that recent studies seem to indicate helps the most when it helps least. Can you spell i a t r o g e n i c  ?  I'll bet Dr. Ben can. Perhaps we'll just have to conclude that being intelligent doesn't make you smart.

Anyway, as Carson becomes the front-runner to 6% of the total US population, questions about the survival rate of his patients may reasonably arise as other areas of his judgement and common sense come into serious question. Chappie's theory, PERSONAL theory, is that Carson has confused Memphis, Tennessee with Memphis, Egypt. It's damned easy to do! If one visits the Mississippi River town today, one will see a pyramid that actually could be used to store grain because it in not a dense pile of cut stone. It's called "The Pyramid" locally after it has been called many things in it's failed career to be anything at all. WHY NOT a grain storage facility? The fact that the floor floods occasionally doesn't matter. THE NILE FLOODS 2!!!   Ben Carson is a problem solver, he solves them in his walking sleep!

The (former) Pyramid Arena, Memphis TN (Now a Bass superstore)  1991

The Hostess Twinkie truck parked in the foreground should raise some questions of a nutritional nature. But surely there is some grain product in a Twinkie?  Ben there, done that!

Chappie Says Tony Scalia May Be Onto Something...

The immensely honorable Associate Justice Antonin G. Scalia has let us into a secret. In a few words, AS asked rhetorically, "“Do you think the American people would ever have ratified the Constitution if they had been told the meaning of this document shall be whatever a majority of the Supreme Court says it is?”  BUT, Mr. Ass. Justice, "The American people" didn't ratify the Constitution, not by a LONG shot. And this is why:

A minority of propertied white men (such as you imagine yourself to be?) ratified it with some difficulty. Many combat veterans of the Revolution were excluded because they had lost everything and couldn't meet the property test. Other combat veterans of our war of independence because they were free black men. Property test? NO women and NO members of any non-white minority had a vote nor is there any evidence in the record that any of the men who crafted that remarkable but deeply flawed reactionary document in secret during the summer of 1787 ever thought for a second about any proposition that their WIVES might be entitled to vote in approval of the document which they hoped would rule their lives going forward. And our lives?

In fact, Tony, if they had seen YOU wandering off the boat, I very much doubt you would have been allowed a vote. If, as a swarthy, penniless Sicilian peasant, you hadn't been blocked from voting, as a Roman Catholic you wouldn't have been respected and venerated either. Actually, as a Roman Catholic, you almost certainly wouldn't have BEEN here in 1787. That's right, in 1787, Catholics comprised less than 1% of the US population, perhaps 25,000 total in the country. More than the Jews but not much more. There was a synagogue in Charleston, South Carolina FIFTY YEARS before there was a Catholic church. The first Catholic bishop in the US, John Carroll of Baltimore, wasn't installed until 1790.

Your endless celebration of "originalism" or textualism as you call it ignores that there was little or no place for you originally. Your conservative Roman Catholicism was no where in the mix among the founding fathers, exactly one of whom was a fellow adherent. Doesn't this give you a queasy feeling?  But leaving all that aside, consider originalism, the notion you famously promote that is famously summed up by your 2013 meltdown where you asserted that “Words have meaning, and their meaning doesn’t change.” What sort of ignorant, bomb-throwing undergraduate nonsense is that? You know as well as the next person that the meanings of words change radically with the passage of time, right? Aren't you pulling our legs, you queer old duck? This is egregious nonsense and I don't mean "remarkably good" as "egregious" once did. But even ignoring the incontrovertible fact that meanings and usage change with time, it is equally obvious to any breathing bi-pedal that different people at the same moment in time have in mind different meanings for the same word.

Your notion of "freedom" (which I would equate with sophomoric license) is not my idea of freedom. My idea of freedom is "to have meaningful choice in as many situations as possible." No, your assertion of your notion of the utterly conservative nature of language (!) with the clear implication that everyone who voted to render the document of Sept. 17, 1787 as the law of the land had the same understanding of the meaning of said words...is applesauce. And I mean it the way you habitually use it--errant nonsense--not as the delicious concoction of cooked apples, sugar and spices that I like to make at home. You must know what I'm going on about, you hypocrite.

Worshiping the Constitution? (Chip Somodevilla, Getty Images)

Facts, fact, facts, Tony...so many facts which all point to the simple fact that you, a conservative Catholic associate justice (one of SIX Catholics--out of nine justices...how did THAT happen?) do not represent the values of the Founding Fathers who in many cases voted in local ordinances discriminating against Catholics. They didn't like you or trust you or know you. Catholics in 1787 and for years afterwards were regarded as negatively in this country as Muslims (also people of the book) are today. Perhaps worse. The values of the FFs were anything but pristine and they are not the values of many if not most Americans today, people who weren't in any way represented in the vote that summer of 1787.

Besides which, the Constitution wasn't even ratified by a plebiscite of those few PWM eligible to vote, perhaps 30% of the total population.  Our defining document was ratified by state legislatures, a total of well under a thousand propertied white men out of a population of nearly four million. Democracy? I have a bridge to sell you...

Like it or not, the constitution of the People's Republic of China was ratified by a more representative group than was our own sacred founding document. There were actually women and members of minority groups involved, if only as window dressing. Facts are a bitch, Tony.

Since Tony, kindly if inadvertently, raises the gross non-representational origins of our founding document, perhaps he would go along with a call for a NEW Constitutional Convention? The first since that summer of 1787. A document that could potentially (if actually ratified) represent the actual beliefs, wishes and aspirations of people who were never dreamed of by the original drafters. I can hear the outraged screaming from all sides. Can the people, after two centuries be trusted to revise the rules under which THEY (we) and our descendants will live for the next century or two? Commie! Terrorist! Liberal!

So thorough is our indoctrination, our brain washing as to the unsurpassed perfection of The Document, that few Americans could even CONSIDER calling a constitutional convention. Am I wrong? But why not? Perhaps the third time would be the charm? We would have the original (actually our SECOND constitution--the Articles of Confederation were absolutely our first constitution) as our default in case we couldn't decide on a re-write of #2. Could we be that much worse off than we currently are? Yes. Could we get there without a Constitutional Convention? Absolutely.

We need a Constitution written by Americans with Tony Scalia and his ilk both in mind and participating. Let's do it!  Oh wait...Tony says this is not a good century in which to re-write the constitution?

PS. All the white people who view the coming of a time when their (our!) kind no longer comprise a majority of the American people but simply the largest minority in a nation in which no group has a quorum--white people should grasp that there will NEVER be a more advantageous time for them (us!) to call a Constitutional Convention than...yesterday.  

Chappie Has Some Odd Thoughts...

For example, consider this observation: we can pretty well say how little is too little of anything or how small is too small, but we almost never seem to be able to agree on how large is too large or how much it too much. Is this a foolish topic? I can remember the first school writing assignment I ever had that revealed the role of writing in thought. It was in 7th grade, Mrs McKeith's class, and the assignment was to write a paragraph for homework on the question, "How small is small?" My first reaction was "This is stupid!" but within moments I realized (without knowing the word) that the real topic of the question was the meaning and importance of "relative." This may have been the frst time in my life that I engaged in abstract thought of a higher sort. I was astonished and have never forgotten that assignment after more than half a century.

At that time, the extent of the cosmos was barely dreamed of.

So what is it about this large/small conundrum?

Computer renderings and actual images of a DNA molecule, as seen through an electron microscope (Enzo di Fabrizio via New Scientist)

I am particularly struck by the apparent impossibility of our putting any limits on how large we will grow? In any area or zone. Americans in particular consider any discussion of placing limits on the growth of anything as an affront to their basic freedom. One id obliged to add that both cancer and obesity are biological processes characterized by excessive, unlimited growth. Just saying...

A cogent argument says that things like population naturally limit themselves. Perhaps Malthus was getting at this? But there also seems to be a realistic lag time involved which, given the size of the entities involved, could possibly lead to catastrophe. Consider Easter Island.  Although scientists are increasingly at odds in their respective views of what happened on Easter Island after the arrival of humans, the clear implication is that the ecology of the island and it's ability to support a variety of life forms was altered permanently by the arrival of Man and his pests (rats or European diseases.)

The purpose of this line of thinking is not to demonize mankind for its success in colonizing the planet and thereby causing numerous extinctions (including proto-human extinctions), as regrettable as this may be. If I take a view that would be acceptable to a Dominionist, I would still be obliged to recognize that in the case of Easter island and in numerous other historical instances, the scale of "our" dreams and aspirations made real have had devastating consequences. But we were either unable to see disaster coming or we were unable to help ourselves once recognition had set in.

The current problem of global warming is in this vein. Interestingly, most of the opposition to crediting the reality of global warming and the mortal threat it poses to our continued presence here comes from the same primitive Christian elements who propound openly or implicitly the Dominionist ideology. Christianity is being revealed as a religion not primarily of Love but of Death. Or of love of death and a yearning for the End times. (The charming adherents of the Islamic state share this mordant fantasy with all the Flat Earthers here and there and everywhere.) Death loving given the implicit promise of Life After Death...  I you really buy that I have several rusting bridges to sell you.   It is not my desire to single out Christianity since the negative effects of human over-population and lack of self-control are most extremely demonstrated in the societies of Asia, which are decidedly non-Christian (though not without values highly similar to Christian ones...patriarchy?)

We see everywhere about us evidence that nothing succeed like excess. But where can it lead? To too much of good things and bad. To a world with too many of us in it and no place for any of us...