A New Mass Shooting Meets the Same Old Mass Stupidity

I missed the story about the latest school shooting because I don’t follow the news. Please spare me the details, but I know that one must have happened because I suddenly hear people talking about gun control again. It’s funny how Americans have become conditioned to respond to every tragedy by volunteering to give up their rights. Kids OD on drugs, so we sign up for prohibition and sacrifice our privacy in the War on Drugs. We see poor people on our streets, so we write off our right to free speech with anti-panhandling ordinances. By the same Pavlovian conditioning, every time somebody goes berserk with a gun, Americans line up to write the 2^nd Amendment out of the Constitution.

Partially because of government propaganda, partially because of media brainwashing, and partially because of denial, many white middle-class liberals still believe that the government works for them, even though, in reality, most of them work for the government. The government, on the other hand, actually works for the rich, who use it to control the rest of us, but they do it in such a way as to convince the middle-class that it was their idea, because, of course, the rich will make the middle-class pay for it.

Middle-class people don’t have many ideas of their own. Instead, they let the rich fill their heads with a few carefully selected memes, endlessly repeated and dutifully conveyed by the media. By the time most people become middle-class, they’ve already sublimated years of conditioning in school, and they’ve learned to do what they are told without thinking about it much. That’s why every stupid middle-class liberal has the same stupid idea at the same time. That’s not thinking; that’s drooling, just like Pavlov’s dogs. The truth is, middle-class people have forgotten how to think for themselves, and instead, have learned to regurgitate whatever predigested pap the rich feed them through the media.

Meanwhile, the rich have created the greatest arsenal of lethal weaponry ever assembled on Planet Earth, and they use it to kill anyone in the vicinity of anyone who might dare stand in their way, with complete impunity. The rich spend a trillion dollars a year, of the middle-class’s money, to upgrade and improve this arsenal every year. The rich now have more bombs, guns, tanks and war-planes at their disposal than the rest of the world combined, and that arsenal is designed, built and maintained at-the-ready, by trained, well-paid professionals, who have learned not to think for themselves, but to do what they are told, because, of course, they make up most of the middle-class.

Stupid white liberals ignore the massive and rapidly growing, pile of bodies murdered by US, state and local governments, which they dutifully serve, lack the courage to oppose, and remain in denial about. Instead, they let the rich use them as ventriloquist dummies to turn these terrible tragedies into political footballs in a sleazy, underhanded attempt to undermine my right, and ability, to defend myself and my home. In so doing, they also distract us from the economic inequity, media manipulation and social dynamics that drives the phenomena of mass violence in our society in the first place.

Homelessness and Mental Illness

Last week I hosted a show about the housing crisis on my local community radio station. Like a lot of the country, we have a chronic housing shortage, especially affordable housing, and as a result, thousands of people sleep outside, or in their cars, on these cold, rainy winter nights. After the show, a woman approached me to make a comment. She told me that the people she sees on the street don’t seem very friendly to her. She noticed that the people who carry big backpacks and appear to be living outside, mostly talk to, and associate with, each other. They don’t make much of an effort to engage with the rest of society. She seemed to think that they owe us more of an effort.

I told her that I didn’t think poor people owed her anything. By the time you’ve made someone sleep outside in the rain, put up fences and bars everywhere, and paid cops to roust them from every dry, sheltered place they can find, you’ve pretty much blown your chances for friendship, and you should not be surprised to find them in a bad mood. Everyone seems eager to offer helpful criticism to poor people as to what they could improve about themselves to better deserve our compassion, but I have to ask, and I wish I had asked: What about mainstream society deserves respect? Why should poor people voluntarily participate in a system designed to oppress them? More importantly, why do any of us participate in a system that excludes so many people and denies them even the most basic of their human needs?

Once upon a time, we would say that our society deserved respect because we followed God’s word and we endeavored to obey God’s command, so only God could judge us, but to disrespect our society was to disrespect God himself. A whole lot of people still believe that, by the way. There’s really no point in talking to those people. Rational arguments only go so far with them, and I respect that. Belief is a powerful thing. A shared belief brings stability and cohesiveness to a group, even if those beliefs destabilize the climate, disintegrate the ecosystem, and contradict compelling evidence to the contrary.

These days, the rest of us mostly fancy ourselves rational, intelligent creatures capable understanding the world around us, and of making wise decisions for ourselves and the common good. This is every bit as stupid and crazy as believing in God’s word, but it is also just as important to our identity as Jesus is to Christians’. What’s more, this idea is foundational to the concept of democracy, which has become our new religion.

The News has replaced Mass, and elections have replaced The Holy Communion, but it’s essentially the same mass stupidity. Still, you can talk to these people, because they believe deep in their heart that they can solve any problem with rational thinking and creativity, even if they have no real experience at doing either.

If you believe in the supremacy of human intelligence, and your own ability to think something through, this is one of those things that maybe you ought to take the time to think all the way through: What about our society deserves your respect? And more tangibly: What about our society merits your participation? Think about that for a moment.

Off hand, I can think of a lot of reasons to be ashamed of our society. We should be ashamed of global climate change, and what it means for future generations. We should be ashamed that we have exterminated half of the world’s biodiversity in the last 40 years, and that we squeeze more than a hundred species of plant and animal out of existence and into extinction every day. We should be ashamed that today, having practically exhausted the Earth’s resources, all we have to show for it is a few billionaires, a host of toxic gadgets designed to exploit our every thought, and poverty, poverty everywhere.

Historically, we should be ashamed of genocide. We should be ashamed of slavery. We should be ashamed of internments, witch hunts, lynchings, black lists, prohibitions, Jim Crow etc. We should be ashamed of US foreign policy. That’s just off the top of my head, but it’s already a pretty serious list. I could go on.

I’m not trying to make you feel bad, I’m just pointing out that we sacrifice a lot, and we excuse an awful lot of really bad behavior, in order to participate in this society. If we could each choose whether or not to participate in modern society based entirely on principle, I’m sure that a lot of people would find our society too distasteful.

Unfortunately, most of us choose to participate in this modern society out of economic pressure, not principle. You work hard and pay taxes, not because of your burning desire to glorify the proud fatherland, but because you are hungry, and because you want to have a roof over your head. We participate in this society largely because of economic coercion, but we tell ourselves that somehow we are in control, and can fix it all with an election, because we are intelligent, rational people capable of understanding the world and making good decisions. That’s the mythology of a democratic society.

In reality, we mindlessly help the likes of Bill Gates, Elan Musk and Donald Trump mine whatever is left of the Earth’s natural abundance to further their plans to re-engineer the world, escape from the consequences of that re-engineering and put their name in gold letters across whatever is left of it, respectively. Not only that, we step over the broken bodies and spirits of our brothers and sisters to do it. Honestly, there’s nothing sane, rational or respectable about any of it. That’s the real crisis today. There is nothing respectable about modern society. It’s a crime, a disaster, and a failure all rolled into one.

Today, we see democracy for the fraud that it is, a thin veneer of populism over a machine built with violence and coercion, for the purpose of violence and coercion. We have plenty to be ashamed of, as a society, and our complete failure to meet the critical challenges of our time, only adds to that legacy of shame.

We no longer believe in God, but now democracy has failed us too. Our gods have died. Only crazy people worship dead gods, but worship them we do, because we have no idea what else to do. What’s more, we still expect the people we sacrificed to these gods to worship them too. And you thought the homeless were mentally ill.

So Long LoCO

In the time that I’ve written for LoCO, the wholesale price of cannabis has dropped by way more than 50%. Much as I appreciate the price break, the collapse is painful to watch. People are not handling it well, but they don’t need me to remind them that prohibition is an ugly way to make a living or to make fun of them for their excesses. Besides, the free market and legalization will change things around here more than anything I could ever say in an editorial.

I know that this is a hard time for people, and that a lot of people around here will have to find something else to do with their lives. I know how challenging that can be, and I sympathize with my neighbors who are going through that right now. In fact, I’m right there with you. Legalization has cost me my job too.

Much of what I write, here at LoCO, revolves around the excesses and the mythology of the black market cannabis industry. Now that the industry has collapsed in the face of full legalization, the myths quickly fade into legends, as the excesses evaporate and disappear. I’m not here to write folklore about prohibition, although that’s not necessarily a bad idea, but that’s not why you read LoCO.

Legalization has been my issue since 1988, when I wrote the first of many letters to my elected officials about it, and my first Letter to the Editor about it appeared in the Akron Beacon Journal. In 1990 I got my first paid writing gig when the Lincoln Journal Star, in Lincoln NE invited me to write a guest editorial about the economic benefits of hemp as a cash crop for Nebraska’s farmers.

 

In Boston, I founded and edited Mass Grass, the official newsletter, and a central organizing tool, of Mass Cann, The Massachusetts Cannabis Reform Coalition, the lead organization in that state’s legalization movement. In a sense, I’ve had a career working for legalization. It didn’t pay much, but I met some great people, had amazing experiences and smoked a lot of terrific weed. I really loved the work because I believe in it deeply, and felt I had something to contribute.

 

Now that prohibition is over, at least here in Humboldt County, there’s not much point in advocating for legalization any more, at least not locally. Legalization is just a fact of life now, and for too many people around here, it’s a painful fact of life. You don’t need to hear me say “I told you so,” and I don’t kick people when they’re down. Watching this whole community hit the windshield in slow motion, as the industry slams into a brick wall just makes me cringe. I can’t write about this anymore, at least not for the people who live here. It’s completely unnecessary cruelty.

That doesn’t really leave me much to write about for LoCO. Most of the things I used to complain about have gotten a lot better since the market collapsed. I didn’t hear nearly so much traffic on my road this past year. I heard a lot less heavy equipment, chainsaws and generators this year too. I didn’t get run off the road by any of those 50 cubic yard soil loads this year, but I have seen more litter, especially more soil bags, along our roadways. The smugness is gone too. In its place, I hear a lot of pathetic self-pity that would be funny if it weren’t so sad, and it weren’t my neighbors.

I’m grateful for the relief from the noise, but I would rather clean up roadside trash than write about it, and I’m not ready to immerse myself into the cesspool that is Humboldt County politics enough to write a weekly opinion column about it, so it’s over. Hank isn’t interested in my critiques of media and the internet, and I’m not interested in beating a dead horse, so we’ll call it done. I’ll continue to publish my blog, but you will no longer see it at LoCO and it will no longer remain so Humboldt-centric. It might even get funny again. You never can tell.

I’ll miss the exposure, and I’ll miss the checks, but I’ll never miss prohibition or the War on Drugs. It’s high time for me to do something else with my life, anyway, and that’s probably true for most of us. I’m sure there’s better things ahead for all of us, but we’ll never get there, unless we let go of what’s holding us back. My blog remains one click away, and you can still hear me every Monday morning on KMUD. It’s been fun, LoCO, but bye for now.

Metamorphosis of the Queen

…as heard on KMUD’s Monday Morning Magazine

Electric Earth Music

Kaleidoscopic imagery derived from the ’70s sci-fi movie Invasion of the Bee Girls accompanies this haunting little piece for didgeridoo, tin can fiddle, Omnichord, medicine drum and rattle blocks.

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The “Polarization” of American Politics

They say that American society is becoming more “polarized.” Many blame the media. They say The News doesn’t delve deep enough into the issues, and that media pundits have degraded political rhetoric down to name-calling and wedge issue litmus tests. Of course, both of these things are true, but I think that what’s really happening in American politics runs much deeper than that.

First, I don’t think it makes sense to call it “polarization,” because “polar” implies a pair of equal but opposite extremes. Democrats and Republicans are not opposites. They are remarkably similar, with a few modest, but notable, differences. Democrat and Republican are competing brands of essentially the same product, and neither brand is nearly extreme enough for the American people. In reality, we have dozens of brands of extremism here in the US, that both oppose and attract each other, to varying degrees, and often exchange wing-nuts. Some of them work in coalition with the major parties, and some don’t.

Second, the parties and candidates manufacture their so called “ideals” out of pure hypocrisy and gall, specifically to attract campaign contributions, but also to encourage self-motivated zealots to volunteer for their campaign. How many of the people who answered calls and knocked on doors for Trump in 2016 do you suppose would identify as white supremacists, believe the Earth is flat, or think the universe is only six or seven thousand years old. By the same token, how many black block anarchists, Occupy Movement radicals, and EarthFirster’s got behind Bernie Sanders? The boots on the ground in both parties are just as wacky as rest of America’s lunatic fringe. The only difference is that the wackos in the major parties are managed by professionals, well paid professionals who think they deserve to make even more money than they already do. That’s the real problem in American politics.

The professionals always want more money, because they hate their jobs, and they know that if they had more money, they could make money off of their money, by investing it, and then they wouldn’t have to work. At the same time, the professionals also want investors to make money off of their investments, because the professionals want to live off of their own investments one day, too. That means that investors and professionals, including the ones who run both parties, are constantly looking for new ways to suck more money out of the rest of us.

The more the professionals and the investment class press their game, the more ridiculous the story they have to tell us, to justify the extortion. The more far-fetched and unhinged from reality those stories become, the less difference there is between the major parties and anyone on the lunatic fringe. How stupid do you have to be to believe in trickle-down economics? …or democracy for that matter? Why should it be any harder to believe that the Earth is flat, or that the Moon is made of cream cheese, or that aliens are coming to take us away to a distant galaxy?

Honestly, we’ve all been force-fed a diet of aggressively misleading bullshit since the day we were born, and if you bought into any of it, by now bullshit slingers have built skyscrapers of bullshit on top of it. When it comes down to it, scientists can be just as misleading, and wrong, as religious leaders and politicians, and all they really want is your money. By now, everyone knows this. So, if you really want to believe in something, you might as well believe in something you really want to believe in.

Today, thanks to the fire-hose of bullshit we call the internet, it becomes easier for people to eschew facts and logic just as effectively as both major political parties, all major religions, and most corporations. Why should working people have to face reality when no one else does? Who can blame people for concocting their own mythology and gravitating towards others with similar fantasies?

Americans have become radicalized, not by fundamentalism or religion, but by the non-stop assault on their credulity, and a political system that designed to pull the rug out from under them. American radicalism is a lot more individualistic than the kind of religious fanaticism or populist political movements we’ve seen in the past. Right now American radicalism is a wide open field. Whether it’s a queer antifa motorcycle gang, freegan vagabonds, or militant anti-abortion activists, increasingly, Americans are thinking outside the box, outside the system, and can no longer even agree on basic facts of reality.

This shattered reality will not be remedied by better reporters and more civil debate in the media, nor will it be fixed by a populist politician with a unifying message. The disagreements run too deep. The system has failed, and the lies that we told about it have taken on lives of their own. “Polarization” is definitely not the word to use for what is happening to the American body politic. “Polarization” implies some great mass in the middle, holding it all together. Instead, we should call it the “disintegration” of American politics. What’s more, we should recognize that fact, face it, and figure out where to go from here.