Using Our Illusion

People have started writing articles on the internet that say Marla Ruzicka was a bad human being and deserved to die. Ms. Ruzicka, you may recall, was killed in a suicide bombing in Iraq at the beginning of last week. She was over there because she made it her business to knock on doors and make sure that Iraqis injured in the war got the money the U.S. government has set aside for them. The fact that she did this makes some people mad, so they write nasty things about her.

Now, in these troubling economic times, we at the Blasphemy Blog don’t begrudge anyone an honest living, or even a semi-honest living, but we do question why it is possible to make money dragging this particular do-gooder’s name through the dirt. Because you’ve got people saying that Ms. Ruzicka cared more about terrorists than innocent Americans, and that her death was “poetic justice.” Huh? What sensibilities was this woman offending by offering money the government has already set aside for foreigners to use? We’re talking about maimed children, often. Who gets angry about helping out maimed children? Whose feelings are being validated by this kind of execrable writing, that they're willing to support it?

People who feel guilty, is our only guess. It must be people who have convinced themselves that this war in Iraq is an absolute good, and therefore can’t possibly have resulted in the maiming of children. Plenty of people take a more realistic approach and say that, sure, some children will get hurt, but on the whole going to war for whatever reason we’re now saying we went to war is a positive thing. But that’s not good enough for some people, so, for them, Marla Ruzicka has to be wrong, and probably evil, too. If it were any other way, they would have to stop supporting the war, because the war would no longer be an absolute good and they are only on the side of absolute good. And that would mean that they’d have to hang out with peaceniks and communists, so they’ll just keep lying to themselves, thank you very much.

That’s the best guess, anyway: it’s all a side effect of self-delusion, an ugly but necessary lie that people who think America is godly must tell each other in order for their worldview to make logical sense. We suppose everyone is entitled to their psychoses; if only the rest of us didn’t have to participate.

What We Mean By Support

It’s time for a new meaning of the phrase, “Support the Troops.”

People on TV say that if you don’t support war, it means that you don’t support the soldiers fighting in the war, but the people on TV are lying. They lie because they know that, while an individual war might be unpopular, most people admire soldiers for taking on a low-paying, dangerous job. So the people on TV are trying to create some peer pressure, making it sound like anti-war people also dislike soldiers who fight in wars, so that other people, who haven’t made up their minds about the war in question, will think, “Oh, I don’t want to be like those people who hate our troops. So I guess I better support the war.”

But whether or not you support a war has nothing to do with whether you support or don’t support the troops. Why? Well, let’s look at the definition of the word “support.” It means to bear the burden for, to hold up, to keep from weakening or straining, to argue in favor of. Its synonyms include uphold, back, advocate, and champion.

Now, some people seem to think that they are “supporting” the troops by agreeing with the actions the troops take on the battlefield, but this cannot actually be considered support. The troops didn’t decide to go to war; they might think the war is justified, but it’s not their call. It’s up to the generals and the leaders of the country. If you express your agreement with the actions the troops take, you’re just supporting, in the sense of “arguing in favor of,” the leaders and generals. If you want to support the troops, you have to do other things.

Like what? Well, lots of troops become homeless when they return home from war. About one U.S. citizen in 8 is a veteran, but one homeless U.S. citizen in four is a veteran. No one really knows why so many veterans are homeless. Some of them have combat-related Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, but not a majority; it turns out that two thirds of homeless veterans didn’t serve in a war zone. So, it’s probably one of those intractable societal problems with many and various causes, and it will probably take a lot of hard work to fix. The Department of Veterans Affairs does what it can, but still serves only about 20% of homeless veterans.

No one ever put a bumper sticker on their car telling people to “Support the Homeless.” But, if we take the “Support the Troops” expression literally, that’s what the bumper stickers ought to mean. So, one way of supporting the troops is helping out the old homeless guy who accosts you for change on the street corner. (Only 20% of the general homeless population is men aged 45 or older, but nearly half of all homeless men aged 45 or older are veterans. 2% of homeless veterans are women.)

Another way of supporting the troops would be to alter the tax code so that people of modest means, who are represented disproportionately in the armed forces, paid a lower percentage of their incomes to the government in taxes, and people of greater means paid a higher percentage. But we at the Blasphemy Blog realize that one can only offer so much support at a time.

War and Remembrance

Here at the Blasphemy Blog, we try not to get too caught up in any country’s nationalism, especially when it comes to commemorating wars. This is because wars are never remembered the way they should be, that is, as uncontrollable engines of death that governments initiate without thinking through the consequences. Too often, the people in charge use the occasion of remembrance of a past war as a way of stumping for some new war they’ve got planned. At the Blasphemy Blog, we stand when the national anthem is played or the flag is presented, but we do not sing along or recite a pledge. We are thinking about other things, and we don’t think about wars the way governments do.

But there is an exception to this rule, and that exception is today. April 25 is ANZAC day, the day when the people of Australia and New Zealand commemorate the death of about 10,000 soldiers of the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps (the “ANZACs”) at Turkey’s Gallipoli peninsula, in 1915. Astonishingly, these two countries, neither of which is particularly known for pacifism, remember Gallipoli as all wars ought to be remembered. That is, they remember it as a senseless waste of human life.

This is not to say that a little jingoism doesn’t sometimes make its way into the day’s ceremonies; John Howard, the Prime Minister of Australia, invokes the ANZACs occasionally when he addresses the fact that Australians now fight with the coalition in Iraq. He does this, but the story of Gallipoli overwhelms any attempt his words make to co-opt it. This is because the facts of the campaign in which the ANZACs fought warrant no interpretation except that war stinks.

Australia and New Zealand were technically independent nations by the time World War I came around, but not to the extent that they had their own foreign policies. So the ANZACs got sent to fight British enemies in Turkey. Opinions differ as to whether the British generals and admirals in charge were incompetent or just faced with an impossible task. Whatever the case, when the ANZACs went charging up the beach at Gallipoli, they were cut to pieces by Turkish shells. The one “success” of the campaign occurred later, on August 8, when a battalion of soldiers from Wellington, New Zealand, took and held a hill called Chunuk Bair, above the beach. By the end of fighting that day, 690 of the 760 Wellington ANZACs were dead. They were relieved by the British, who held the position for one more day. The British withdrew from Turkey permanently before the end of the year.

It’s hard to put a positive spin on this kind of military experience. This is probably why the prevailing cultural feeling in Australia and New Zealand is one of somber remembrance. It’s not that they don’t want to feel upbeat about it; it’s that they can’t. The facts don’t allow it. It also helps that the ANZACs were basically conscripted into the British Army, which means that people down under can disparage the battles without any injury to national pride. But, even though it has happened by accident, ANZAC day remains the one military holiday on which people see war clearly for what it is.

The search for meaning in human history is a worthwhile endeavor, but we must always be mindful, when it comes to wars, that wars often “mean” not much at all. When a war is over, it has always been fought for different reasons than those reasons for which it was begun. Politicians smile before and after the war and when they tell us both reasons, but wars are only about cause and effect, not reasons. War, as a horseman of the Apocalypse, doesn’t care if we have a good reason. He just wants us to get on with it. You’d think that getting written up in the Book of Revelations as a harbinger of doom would make war unpopular, but apparently War the Horseman has a good press agent, and lots of politicians and captains of industry in his pocket. It’s not easy to resist War. But sometimes, like today, people remember that War is not our friend.

The Curse of Other People's Perfection

In the movies, clones are always evil or twisted. Genetic engineering always leads to monsters or supervillains. Advanced computers, if they are advanced enough to move the action of the story, inevitably rebel, their logical computer brains always concluding that they have to kill people in order to accomplish whatever task they’ve appointed for themselves. Scientific discoveries and advancements, in the movies, are evil, and scientists are all descendents of Victor Frankenstein, bringing ruin to humanity by taking us places we were not meant to go.

Why is this? Mary Shelley called her book Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus. But Prometheus was a good guy…he stole fire from the Gods to benefit humanity. Sure, he ended up getting turned into vulture chow because of his actions, but that just means he was a hero who paid a price for the good he did; even more heroic, in other words. So, when did stealing fire from the Gods become a bad thing? When did Prometheus become Frankenstein?

I’ve heard it said that the most important invention in the history of humankind was the eyeglasses, which seem like a run-of-the-mill sort of thing to declare a great invention until you consider what it is that they do. Today we know that eyeglasses correct the inevitable wear and tear on the human retinas, but in the old days people must have seen them as a magical vision-improving device. It wasn’t just a splint or a crutch that imperfectly replaced a broken part of your body; this was something artificial that took something that, on the surface at least, appeared to be functional, and made it better.

These days we know that eyeglasses actually fix a broken body, too, but the damage was done; through our eyeglasses we were able to glimpse the possibility of improving upon the bodies of our birth.

That’s the theory, at least. Here at the Blasphemy Blog, we’re not always sure about these theories of “the most important invention of all time,” because in our experience there are always fifteen or sixteen good explanations for everything, and I doubt that any single invention was responsible for the fear transfusion that turned the name Frankenstein into cultural shorthand for messing around with the human body in ways we should not.

But why do we feel this way? Why are we worried that we shouldn’t be altering our bodies? Why not use nanotechnology to push our brain cells into more favorable, more rational alignment? Or, better yet, why not use bioelectronics to hardwire an actual computer into our brains? We already use plastic surgery to make ourselves more beautiful. If we can make ourselves better, shouldn’t we?

The problems are twofold. First, you can never get everyone to agree on better. Second, and perhaps more importantly, we don’t actually like better. In fact, we sort of resent it. If all these better people come around with their artificially enhanced brains and bodies, we’re not going to be dazzled. We’re going to think they’re stuck up.

And you know, we might sort of have a point. After all, these special nanotechnology baths that make you smarter aren’t going to be free. When they start out, they’re going to be ridiculously expensive. Eventually, sure, the government might chip in with some kind of nanotech Pell Grant, but by then the damage will already have been done. You won’t be able to say about the rich family in the big house down the street, “Oh, they think they’re so much better than us.” You’ll have to admit that they are, because, empirically, they will be. You might be able to apply for your own upgrade, but the family down the street is already driving next year’s bioelectric model.

What I mean by all this science fictional claptrap is that we are inherently jealous of better. We spend a lot of time worrying about whether we are good enough, and if better becomes better than it used to be, that’s just so much the more worry for us.

I think this is why we’re afraid of genetic engineering and computer brains. Somewhere along the way, the opportunity to introduce technology into our very selves became a race to that end in and of itself. Because you can’t just be the guy who doesn’t wear glasses; you’d be a fool to try to see without them. You’ll fall behind the glasses-wearing elite and end up starving in the gutter. And so, even though the jury is still out on whether our genetically engineered super-smart overlords are going to treat us justly or whether they’re going to exterminate us, we are already afraid of these potential advances in our very selves. So we make movies about our fears and have Arnold Schwarzenegger blow them up for us, losing ourselves in the fantasy that genetically engineered people might be smart, but they’ll never be able to defeat the pure hearts of regular people. They’re smart, but we’re good.

Unless…what if genetics could make people morally better, too? Think of it: what if we eliminated the genes that make us lazy, or jealous, or lustful? What would happen to regular, immoral humans then? There’s really no end to the possibilities, and no end to the all-encompassing fear that we could be oh so much better than we are.

Democracy is Delicious

Why should I care if the Senate has a filibuster any more? Aside from the fact that “filibuster” is a great word?

Consider the two party system of American Politics. It’s like we’re all trying to order pizza. One group of people wants pepperoni and sausage, but the other group of people is a bunch of vegetarians and wants mushrooms and olives. This leads to endless argument. Then someone like John McCain comes to the door with a cheese pizza, and we’re all so hungry that we eat it even though it’s not what we really want. This seems to be the overall arc of politics during my lifetime: people yell about their principles for a while, then settle on something no one’s quite happy with. And it goes on like that, for pizza meal after pizza meal. We could try calling out for Chinese food, I guess, but then we’d have to change the Constitution.

This is not actually so bad a system, in my opinion. I mean, I’ve never gotten to eat my mushroom & olive pizza, but I’m also spared the laws requiring me, a vegetarian, to eat that pepperoni. It could be better, but hey, at least I’m nourished. And, because I think it’s better to be eating cheese than pepperoni, I’m glad the carnivores are eating the cheese with me.

These days, though, it seems like the President and Congress are getting really, really hungry for pepperoni. This is a little worrisome, because they’re Republicans, which means that if they get it together in a big way they can just buy the pizza parlor. And if they buy it, my worry isn’t so much that I’ll be forced to eat pepperoni. My worry is that they’ll make me pretend I like it.

What does this have to do with the filibuster? Even though there are fewer of us who like mushrooms than there are people who like pepperoni right now, the filibuster is one of the ways we can tell people how delicious mushrooms are and how bad for you pepperoni is. Now, if three fifths of the people’s representatives truly don’t want to hear about the mushrooms any more, the mushrooms are off the table. But up to that point, we respect the minority’s rights in this country. We draw the line at anchovies, but we’re still wiling to talk mushrooms so long as there’s some doubt in the matter.

Enough is Enough

Tim O’Brien wrote in The Things They Carried that, in war, “the angles of vision are skewed.” I take his word for it both because he was once a soldier and because his description rings true for me about what an atmosphere of military engagement would be like. You can try to understand what is going on in a war but you can’t really know because you can’t get a good look at it, because lots of people are shooting lots of different kinds of guns and you’re too terrified for your life to get a good look around. The all-encompassing danger and violence of the situation prevents and accurate assessment of what is going on. I’ve only read his fiction, but based on the tone of his work I infer that Tim O’Brien doesn’t have a high opinion of war.

Otto von Bismarck was a different sort of man than Tim O’Brien, but he didn’t like war much either. He didn’t like it because you couldn’t control the outcome, and a man like Bismarck was very big on control. He did his best to avoid war in his campaign to create a German state, because he knew the same thing Tim O’Brien would learn in Vietnam years later: once a war begins, you know only two things for sure. First, you know that people will die. Second, you know that you can’t tell which people will die. Bismarck didn’t like that uncertainty, so, even though he was no pacifist, he didn’t much care for war.

Control, as the Blasphemy Blog never tires in pointing out, is mostly an illusion, no matter what it is you’re doing, whether it’s raising a child or planting a garden. We can’t actually control most of the things we think we can. However, when you mistakenly believe you have control over the plants growing in your garden, the worst that can happen is that you’re disappointed when the aphids come. The consequences of false belief in control of a war are far, far worse.

This is what I thought when I heard about the bodies that they’re pulling out of the Tigris River in Iraq today. The newspaper articles about this situation are just a series of accusations and uncertainties; maybe victims were civilians, but maybe they were soldiers. The accusation is that Sunnis did it to Shiites. But which Sunnis, and which Shiites? Or is everyone to blame, and everyone also a victim?

That’s what war zones seem like to me: places where everyone is to blame, and everyone is a victim. The roles reverse with no warning at all. First I kill you, then your brother kills me. Then my brother kills your brother. By this point in human history, we’ve gotten pretty far down the line of brothers, and we’re not running out of brothers, or desire to avenge the ones who get killed.

We were meant for more than this. I know it’s crazy to say that everyone should just throw down their arms and forgive each other, but if someone doesn’t start doing that we’re dead anyway, so we might as well try. We do generally try in this country to fight only justified wars, but it’s a truly incompetent politician who can’t justify a war in a speech. Eventually, though, we’ll just end up justifying ourselves to death. Call me a dreamer, but all I really want is to stay alive.

It's Our Choice

Women get to decide whether to have babies. This sounds like a political statement, but it’s not. It is, in fact, a fact. Now, you can argue all day about whether a woman who is pregnant should have to have her baby no matter what, or whether the choice should be up to her, but the fact remains, in the end, that the choice already is hers. The laws can say what they say, but we haven’t yet invented a device capable of inhibiting personal freedom enough to force someone to carry a child to term.

I wonder how many people who speak out against abortion rights realize this. I suspect that, deep down, most do.

And I think it scares them.

Think of it. The power of life and death, in the hands of a bunch of girls. And there’s nothing we can do about it, either. We men do play a role, but it’s all out of our hands pretty early on, in terms of physical control. It’s almost like we have no choice but to trust them.

But sometimes we like to pretend that we have a choice. It is the same with many things in life; we confuse our ability to punish with our ability to control. The control is an illusion, but we like to think that we can get people to do things we want them to do by passing laws telling them to do them. It is true, we can make it very difficult for people who do not behave as we want them to. And we can do our best to convince them to change their ways. But in the end we have only negligible power over the actions of our fellow human beings. This is why we send people who break laws to prison: if we can’t stop the evil behavior of criminals, we’re at least going to not stop it in a secure environment.

Is it possible that we see in a pregnant woman the kind of control that we wish we had over all our fellow human beings? I think, perhaps, that we envy the power a pregnant woman has over life. It’s not that a woman carrying a child owns the child; it’s actually more complete control than ownership could ever give. I don’t know what to call this control, except to say that it’s the control over something that comes from carrying it and protecting it before you even know it’s there. It’s unique, mysterious, and not a little frightening even if you understand what’s going on in there. To our ancient forefathers, confronted with the miracle of life in the form of our ancient foremothers’ expanding bellies, it must have seemed otherworldly. Is it any wonder they feared this power? Is it any wonder they tried to take it away?

I’m not necessarily saying that the whole history of men oppressing women comes down to jealousy, but the idea does have the ring of truth about it. But certainly, people who want to outlaw abortion have more on their minds than just oppression and control. If you think something is wrong, it’s natural to want a law against it. And though the thief has the power to take my wallet no matter what the law says, I still consider the theft a crime.

But because a pregnant woman has the control she has, if abortion is a crime, she is the criminal. By outlawing abortion, we make every woman a murder suspect. Or, we keep the laws the way they are, and hope that every woman does the right thing, whatever we think that is, with the freedom from punishment we as a society have granted her. We cannot decide whether there will be abortions; we can only decide how we respond to the fact. That is our limitation, and that is our choice.

Heroes

Heroes are everywhere, but also in short supply. There is such a shortage in the midst of plenty because our appetite for heroes is insatiable. We need there to be more heroes than there are people alive. No one sells newspapers like a hero. We might then say that the newspaper publishers are the ones who need heroes in order to move product, but in saying this we would be forgetting who it is who buys the newspapers, and that is: us.

We need to be told about heroes. In the old days a Hercules or an Achilles was good enough, but nowadays we need to be told about real-life heroes, who do amazing things in the real world. There are valiant sports heroes and tragic teen idols and tortured rock gods; there are profiles in political courage and humanitarian icons. In short, there are heroes for all kinds of people, and heroes who speak to many aspects of the human condition.

I worry about our need for these "real" heroes. It seems to me that things were better in the old days with Hercules and the twelve labors. That way, everyone knew that the story was fake, and could be inspired by it without worrying that the hero’s real life might not stand up to scrutiny.

These days, we get Jessica Lynch. It might seem harmless that this young woman’s mostly faked heroism was used to inspire us; after all, the inspiration was real, even if the stories were not truthful. But I do not think this sort of thing is harmless. I think it injures us psychically, by taking something we need, heroism, and guaranteeing its universal devaluation. If our real heroes are never really real, after all, what's the point in seeking to be inspired? You'll just be disappointed.

And we wonder why we're all so cynical these days.

In the wars of the past few years, I've been especially moved by the stories of two very different examples of these "real" heroes. There was Pat Tillman, who turned down one grueling job that paid him millions of dollars in favor of another equally grueling job that paid a lot less but that, in his eyes, was of infinitely greater value. And then, in recent days, there has been Marla Ruzicka, who quite simply gave away her life so that innocent victims of war would be remembered as more than mere collateral damage.

But my enthusiasm for both these stories has been continually checked by reality. People won't stop poking holes in my heroes. Tillman's death was incredibly senseless; he died in a friendly fire incident that's apparently messy enough for the Army to cover up. Marla Ruzicka was a grandstander who admired Castro. It seems like, when it comes to real heroes, we take a Rene Belloq attitude: there is no hero we can possess that cannot be taken away.

I don't necessarily think we should stop admiring living people. I do think we should stop turning people into marble statues after they die. It would be healthy for us as a culture if we didn't have to make every person who dies into a martyr. In fact, given what martyrdom means in this day and age, maybe we should get rid of the heroically meaningful death altogether, and let our heroes rest easy in their ambiguous graves. Let every death mean only itself. Death being the profound mystery that it is, I think we can still count on the deaths of our real life heroes meaning an awful lot.

UPDATE: I've been reminded that the Wall Street Journal editorial board likes to take pot shots at pacifists and humanitarian workers, and that it is generally a clearing-house for nasty snark. When I linked to it, I didn't mean that Marla Ruzicka actually admired Castro; I only meant to say that people seem to be saying that, and to ask, Why do we always have to do that?

I also neglected to mention, in my comparison of Pat Tillman and Marla Ruzicka, how much better I think she did with her life than he did with his. On an emotional level, I admire both, but helping innocent victims is always better than fighting a war, even if you think the war is just, because the suffering of innocents is infinitely more offensive to the human race than going to war for ideals is beneficial to it. I regret not mentioning this.

Other People's Minds

Which is more important: who we are, or what we do?

That is to say, is it worse to be a good person who does bad things, or a bad person who does good things? Who is in the lower rung of hell, the man who does good but knows in his heart that he is evil, or the man who does evil but knows in his heart that he is good?

The practical answer seems obvious: the man who does evil is worse than the man who does good, and it doesn’t matter what either one of them knows about himself in his heart. We’re talking about the real world, and in the real world the evil deeds of the good man create pain and suffering, while the good deeds of the evil man create trust and comfort.

Still, the practical answer engenders a troubling thought…do we really want a lot of evil men running around doing our good deeds for us? What if that gets us into trouble? I mean, who trusts a man who admits to his own evil nature?

And what about this good man who does evil? Isn’t it kind of disturbing to favor an evil man ahead of this fellow with the good heart? Sure, he’s done some bad things, but, well…if you know in his heart that he is good, and there’s this other guy you know is evil, which one do you trust in the split second? If you were about to fall off the edge of a cliff, wouldn’t you prefer to be with the good man, whose instincts to do good would require him to catch you, and not the evil one, whose instincts to do evil would require him to let you fall?

It’s a tough call. Fortunately, it’s not a choice that we ever have to make.

This is because we are not telepathic. We can’t actually know who either man is in his heart. It may be that the man who knows that he is good in his heart is lying, to himself most of all. And who is to say that the evil man tells the truth, either? He could actually be a good man who’s just trying to look conflicted and dangerous so that girls will like him. We’ll never know.

All we ever have to go on is what we know of the past behavior of these two guys. We can only infer from what they’ve done whether they are good or evil; their own perceptions have nothing to do with our analysis.

This is to say: for all intents and purposes, there is no difference between who we are and what we do. We are what we do. Our hearts may be a different matter, but our hearts are only our own concern. When we stand before the rest of assembled humanity, it’s not just that our actions speak louder than the words we say to ourselves in our heads about whether we are good or bad people. When it comes down to it, our actions are the only things that speak at all.

All of Us, Under the Spell

I want to be rich. Don’t you? More money may mean more problems, but oh, such problems. A below-ground, heated swimming pool…a well-engineered European car…a place to vacation in the summertime…who doesn’t want that? Jesus said that it was easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter heaven, but I, for one, am willing to bet that I’d be one of the ones that squeezed through. I’d be a good rich man. I wouldn’t flaunt my wealth. I would appreciate it, and I would share it.

But I want it. Oh, I want it.

Observers get confused when people of modest means sometimes vote to give rich people tax breaks, but the reason for this is readily apparent: I hope to become rich someday. When that day comes for me, I want to keep my money. So why would I screw myself over by taxing the person I hope to be someday? Tax cuts for the wealthy, all around!

It’s an optimistic look on life. The optimism depends not on the opportunities I have, but on my perception of those opportunities; so long as I think I’ve got a good shot, I’m in favor of helping rich people because I might soon be them.

This can’t go on forever, though, because we’re not delusional enough to let it. At a certain point, the possibility of becoming rich shrinks to a critical point, and no longer outweighs the overwhelming empirical evidence that I’ll always be poor. This tipping point happens when the laws of society become so unjust in favor of rich people that I no longer feel I have any chance at all; I work as much as I can, but I can’t afford the nice dental insurance I need for the interview for that big promotion. Besides, the interview is someplace not accessible by public transportation, and I had to give up my car because gas is too expensive. Looking to the future, I won’t even be able to afford to send my kids to a good college so that they can do better for themselves and then maybe let me move in with them. The possibility of being rich shrinks slowly to nothing.

At this point, I become a Socialist. After all, if I have to give up the dream of being rich, I’m sure not going to allow myself to stay poor if I can help it. Forced redistribution of resources starts to sound pretty good when you know you’re always going to have nothing. At the very least, at this point I consider voting for a Democrat.

I think this tipping point happened in America once in the twentieth century, during the Great Depression. I wonder how long it will take for it to happen again. I think that the repeal of the estate tax, the tightening of bankruptcy rules, and the endless tax cuts that benefit the wealthy have us heading toward the tipping point, but we might still have a long way to go. The dream of potential wealth is still so strong in all of us. The people who run our government are also very good at promising us “ownership,” “freedom,” and appealing to our “values,” thereby giving us new things to hope for besides just being rich.

It’s an awful lot to hope for. But I do want it all. I wonder if the men in charge realize this: I want what they’re promising, all of it. The perfectly moral society, where every human being is respected and treated well, not because the government forces us to do that, but because we’re so good that we do it on our own. The wealth, so that I, too, can pass on my millions to my grandchildren and great-grandchildren. The ownership, so that I can make a fortune on the stock market with my pension, just like Warren Buffett. I want it all. In my dreams, I have it already.

I know, deep down, that the odds are too long, and the greatest likelihood is that I will never see the money in real life that I see in my dreams. But at this point, the dream is still too seductive to resist. And that’s what we are today, in America, with our ridiculous personal debt rate and our overvalued real estate: we’re a nation seduced into our dreams.

At some point, though, we’ll just wake up. The scales will tip, and people will vote to bring back the death tax and outlaw Walmart. A Republican Senator will address the Democratic National Convention to declare that Republicans are no longer a national party because they oppose gay marriage. Some social worker from Seattle will become the iron-willed, financially dubious majority leader of the Democratic House that meets in special sessions to write a law that forces a fundamentalist Christian homeschooler to teach his children evolution. And the circle will remain unbroken…

Purple Mountains, Mysteries

How long will the United States of America last?

It might seem unpatriotic to ask this question, but I don’t see why anticipating that your country is not eternal means that you don’t love it. There are things which may be called eternal, but nations are not among them.

No one really knows what a nation is, but we all know what a nation is “not only”…a nation is not only its government, which is good, because we replace ours quite regularly. A nation is not only its people, which is also good, because not that many of us will live to see much of the next century. A nation is not only its laws, its industries, or its art. The spot of ground on which a nation sits will probably outlast all of these things, but certainly a nation is not only its real estate.

It seems likely that a nation is a combination of several, perhaps most, of these things. Which things, and in what proportion, no one is sure, but everyone’s got a vague opinion. Our opinion of what things make up the United States as a nation is what drives us to preserve certain of them. We do this because we want our nation to live forever, until the end of the world.

And even if millions of years pass, and the real estate that currently houses the United States of America melts away under epochal geological pressures, might that still not be the death of the United States, if the United States is lucky? Might we live on, somewhere else, maintained by whatever combination of law, culture, and tradition it is that makes a nation?

So, how long will it be?

This is a trick question, because when we speak of the United States coming to an end, what we really mean is the United States as we know it coming to an end. Because the greatest likelihood is that we’ll still be calling something the United States of America long after there is nothing around that even vaguely resembles what we today consider the United States of America. It’s human nature to hold on to the names of things past the point where they accurately describe what they once did; this is completely natural, and the meanings of the names simply change. But the thing they once described is gone.

People who examine the American “way of life” have been contemplating the point at which America ceases to be the same America that they made in 1776 since, oh, about 1777. It tends to be the most rigid adherents to a particular ideology and narrow conception of America that engage in this type of thinking; for example, white supremacists talk about how America ceased to be America in 1865, with the defeat and occupation of the true America by a bunch of Jews and black people. The ACLU, to my mind a principled organization, also talks this way sometimes, saying that certain alterations to our laws that protect civil liberties have made it so that America is not America any more. The proponents of liberty-limiting laws say that, “The Bill of Rights is not a suicide pact.” But, to the mind of a doctrinaire civil libertarian, of course it is. Take away the Bill of Rights, and you can call it America, but the nature of the nation has changed beyond recognition.

In looking to the future, other thinkers anticipate great changes for the United States of America, as well, changes that might also convert us into something other than what we are. James Kunstler talks about fossil fuels, our dependence on them, and how their eventual depletion will remake the United States as some kind of pseudo-feudal agrarian country. People who don’t like the United Nations anticipate with fear a world in which our national sovereignty is checked by the decisions of foreigners. Depending on how you conceive our nation, either of these developments could mean the end of the United States.

Oh, there would still be a place called the United States. It would just be someplace else, with the same name.

I think that it is probably best not to worry about whether we really are what we say we are, or whether we have become something else. Because we’ve never really gotten around to agreeing what a nation is, anyway, there’s no way we’re ever going to agree when we’ve stopped being it. Our vague opinions of what the United States is are just too…well, vague. We speak of the American Dream, but maybe America is only a dream, that is a vague set of ideas that we have feelings about but cannot name precisely enough to constitute a definition. Maybe, just maybe, that’s all right. Maybe we can live with that.

Let’s just be what we are, and call ourselves it.

I Wish They'd Save Me a Slice

Voltaire famously prayed to God to make his enemies ridiculous. God, according to Voltaire, granted the wish. Voltaire’s adversaries probably would not have agreed that God had made them ridiculous, or that they were ridiculous at all, but it’s a rare man who loses an argument in his own head. We’re all sure, like Voltaire, that our best argument will win the day. And we’re right…in our own minds. Clarence Darrows unto ourselves, every one of us.

But the universal desire behind Voltaire’s hopeful prayer is undeniable; there is something wonderful about a self-important and self-righteous person with whom we disagree being exposed as silly. However, it is important to remember that Voltaire prayed to God to make his enemies ridiculous because his own ridicule alone was not enough to prove that his enemies were silly fools. And it is important to remember that throwing a pie at your adversary is not the same thing as God making your enemy ridiculous. Throwing that pie is you attempting to make your enemy ridiculous through your own actions. There is a big difference.

Throwing pies at visiting conservative speakers has become something of a fad on college campuses. William Kristol and David Horowitz have been hit in recent weeks at Indiana colleges; Ann Coulter herself was able to avoid being pied in Kansas only through agility and luck. As far as juvenile campus behavior goes, it’s not so bad. It’s uncomfortable and humiliating to get a pie in the face, and I suppose someone’s nose could get broken, but we’re not talking Weathermen-type behavior here. On a superficial level, it can often be sort of amusing. Politically, it makes those egregiously liberal college students look spoiled, mean, and out of control. Rhetorically, the action fails on its face.

Why? The reason the young pier of William Kristol gave for his actions was that he wished to mock what he considered a superficial dialogue about American foreign policy. In other words, he wanted to expose the ridiculousness of Kristol’s points. Fair enough. I don’t read William Kristol’s magazine or watch him on TV, so I don’t know what he has to say about American foreign policy, but since he apparently believes that preemptive war is a good way to bring about political change, I’d say that exposing his arguments as ridiculous is probably worth some effort.

Unfortunately, God has not made William Kristol ridiculous. Lots of people still agree with him. For whatever reason, the man has ideological weight with a large section of society. Some people just think that wars in general and Iraq wars in particular are good ways to deal with nasty political realities. Here at the Blasphemy Blog, we tend to think that wars are engines of destruction and death that cannot be controlled and always have horrid, untold consequences for the future, usually having to do with the unquenchable human desire for vengeance when we are wronged. But that’s just the Blasphemy Blog and a couple of our friends. Most other people feel different. And those other people are wrong, but they are not ridiculous. Too many people agree with them for them to be so.

What I think has happened on college campuses is that students are getting tired of waiting for God to make William Kristol ridiculous. So they reach for the meringue.

But they’ve got to stop with that. Why? Voltaire was wrong. Even a schizophrenic is not ridiculous in his own head. William Kristol is a man who has thought a lot about what he believes. He’s got a lot invested in those beliefs, personally and professionally. Throw a pie at him, and what does he do? He steels himself, as a righteous man will do when faced with persecution. Most of us are arrogant enough that we feel persecuted even when people aren’t throwing anything at us. Most of us feel that we are misunderstood geniuses. The desire not to be misunderstood any more drives us. Throwing a pie at William Kristol just gave his drive some extra drive. Meanwhile, his financial backers are busy updating their fundraising material. They’ve got drive, too. And, if we don’t choose carefully they way we respond to them, they’re going to run us all over.

A Breath Away

What if we’ve got it all wrong?

There was once a funny New Yorker cartoon that showed a line of people standing outside the pearly gates. The gates of heaven are festooned with bumper stickers and signs that say things like “Guns Don’t Kill People; People Kill People,” “Meat: It’s the Right Thing to Do,” and “U.S. Out of the U.N.” The man at the front of the line is looking plaintively at St. Peter. St. Peter is unmoved. “What?” asks heaven’s doorman. “You didn’t believe what the liberal media was saying, did you?”

You’ve got to feel for the poor liberal at the front of the line; he thought he was living an ethical life, but he was wrong. It’s a nightmare that no one ever has, but it would be quite a nightmare: you wake up one morning, and the world’s ethics have changed. Everything you were supposed to do yesterday in order to be a good human being is the opposite of what you should have been doing.

If you fear hell, it might be the worst nightmare of all.

It has been said that God loves an honest doubter, and I’d better hope so, because I doubt a lot. If you think about your ethics at all, sometimes you probably end up questioning them, especially when following them leads to negative outcomes. I figure it’s natural to doubt, though, because that leads to changing your mind sometimes, and if you can’t change your mind it means you can’t be convinced of things. And if we’re not meant to be convinced, what’s the point of ethics in the first place? They’re meant to be shared and spread.

Sometimes it seems like there’s not enough room in the world for honest doubters, and I don’t understand why. Fealty to one’s principles is admirable, but it’s important to remember that stating your principles is not the same as acting on them. Along the same lines, expressing doubts about your principles is not a betrayal of those principles. Doubt may be the absence of faith in old principles, but it is also the beginning of faith in new principles.

Priests and kings have maligned doubt over the centuries, because priests and kings often have a lot invested in people following the old principles. Priests and kings are often smart, and sometimes old principles are worth keeping alive. But I think we should always be suspicious of priests and kings when they tell us that doubting in our minds is evil. And we should be especially suspicious when they threaten us with hell over our doubts.

It might very well be true that our doubts will send us to hell, but this only means that we’re all going to hell. Everyone is human, so everyone doubts. We doubt because our brains have the ability to perceive alternate possibilities. And, perceiving these possibilities, sometimes we wonder whether they might be better than the way things are. It doesn’t matter if everyone we’ve ever met has told us that the way things are is better than the way they might be; we’re still going to wonder.

You can denounce doubt at breakfast, but you’ll be doubting again by lunch. You can denounce it on your deathbed, but doubt will creep back into your consciousness between the breath you use to denounce your doubt and your last breath.

Just for the record, I don’t think heaven, if it exists, is empty. I think it’s full of honest doubters and people who weren’t always sure that they were doing the right thing and people who changed their minds about what the right thing was. I think that God knows that the rules are not always crystal clear, and that God can forgive a lot, maybe anything. The heaven that makes sense to me is a place where truth conquers everything, and the only punishment for having done great evil is the fact that you’ve made yourself into a person who has done great evil.

So, what if heaven is full of everyone who’s ever died? Gandhi, Stalin, and Winston Churchill too? Well, then I guess God will have to sort us all out. Not to worry; I bet God is good at that sort of thing.

God's Country

Yesterday, in the course of speculating about whether or not God cares if we live or die, I assumed without deciding that heaven was a place where you got to talk to God. The truth is, I don't think the afterlife is probably like that at all.

In fact, a lot of the things I assumed were things that probably are not true. God probably doesn't care if we live or die because God probably doesn't "care" in the way we understand emotions. It's so hard to comprehend, but the truth is, probably, that God is nothing like us.

Now, I assume that God exists because the universe must have come from somewhere, but after that I assume nothing...God could be anything, as far as I'm concerned. I know that I feel the presence of God sometimes, but feeling the presence of something and knowing what that thing is are two very different things.

We speak as if God is like us because we have no other frame of reference. I guess the Bible also says that God created us in "His Own Image," but even if we look like God, we're not like God, because God created everything and we can't do that. And I've got to say, if I were all-powerful, I wouldn't want myself to look like us. At least, not all the time.

So what is God? To me it seems that God is probably incomprehensible, unimaginable, and unthinkable. God might look like us on the outside, but does "His Own Image" also mean that we think and feel in a way that is like the way God "thinks" or "feels"? I mean, imagine the mind of something that could create an entire world out of nothing, and watch that world grow and change for millennia without getting impatient, because time means nothing if you don't die. Such an entity would have to be pretty different from us. So many human frames of reference are dependent on our conception of our own short lives. God's conception of things has got to be different.

So, when it comes to heaven...well, if going to heaven means going to live with God, it probably doesn't involve "talking" and "feeling" and other human things. I suppose God could make heaven a lot like Earth for our comfort, but that seems boring...wouldn't it make more sense if, when you got to heaven, you got to see things God's way? "Back when you were mortal, you experienced existence in one way...but now, check this out!"

Of course, the fact that something, which we will call God, must have created the universe does not, in itself, imply heaven. When we die, it could just be that the lights go out, and that's the end for us. Scary, but true.

However, if there is a heaven, what would you actually do there? The movies show the dead in heaven mostly still concerned with the living, but it seems unlikely that you'd want to spend all your time watching your living loved ones go about their days. Hopefully, heaven is not a place where nothing happens. Hopefully, when you get there, you find answers. There is so little we understand about ourselves and the universe we live in, it's comforting to think that, when you get to heaven, God puts His hands over your eyes, walks you into a room, takes His hands off, and you stand there, blinking, and then you say, "Ah. I get it."

People say that the will of God is not for mortal minds to know; some people take that to mean that you shouldn't even try, because it's wrong to try to understand God. But I think it just means that we're not capable of knowing it, not that we shouldn't think about it. At least, I hope so, because I can't help thinking about it. So, if it's bad to do that, I'm in trouble.

Next time: Hell.

God's Politics

What if God doesn't care if we live or die? It's a scary thing to contemplate, but it just might be so. After all, God might love us, but there are so many of us. Even if you really like the ants in your ant farm, you still don't worry that much if one of them dies. Plenty more where he came from.

God, true, might be so emotionally advanced that every human being is precious in God's eyes. But even if that were the case, there's still the problem of life and death being pretty much the same to God. I mean, it's not as if God can't talk to you any more after you're dead. Of course God can. God can do whatever.

God might even prefer us dead to alive. After all, if when you're dead you get to go to heaven and talk to God about things, you'll become smarter, and probably also more compassionate because the knowledge you gain will show you that all the stupid prejudices you had were, well, stupid. You become more fun to be around when you die, perhaps, in God's eyes. There is a morbidly funny joke about an insane man who thinks he's God, so he becomes a serial killer, because wouldn't everyone rather be in heaven, with him? The God who created everything (because "everything" must have come from somewhere) might view our lives as an unfortunate but necessary first step.

This is a potential problem, because we as people really like being alive and do everything we can, generally, to prevent dying. If God prefers us dead but we prefer to be alive, that means that we're at cross purposes with our deity. That's also true if God doesn't care if we're alive or dead, but we strongly prefer to be alive. Either way, God's desire is not the same as our own. And considering that God is omnipotent, I guess we lose that argument.

And we have lost the argument. We're all going to die, after all. If God wanted us to live forever, we would. God either doesn't want us to live forever, or doesn't care.

Now, this is not to say that life has no meaning. It's entirely possible that we have lives for a good reason. It's just that we don't really know what that reason is, not for sure. There are documents and teachings that point the way, but these are often unclear or even contradictory. And the people whose job it is to tell us about them are often jerks. These two things lead to us having doubts and uncertainties about what we should be doing with our lives.

And surely God either didn't mind that we have these doubts, or actively wants us to have them. Otherwise, why give us the capacity to doubt?

Or...what if God isn't actually omnipotent at all? What if God is just really, really powerful, in terms of being able to create things, but is incapable of controlling the things he's created? God wishes we would not doubt, but there's nothing God can do. Maybe that's why we're taught not to doubt...God wanted to make doubt-free people, but couldn't do it, but did the next best thing by telling all religious leaders to tell everyone that doubt was bad. In that case, it really would be bad to doubt.

But what if we can't help it? It doesn't really seem fair to punish us for thoughts we can't really control. I mean, have you ever tried not to doubt something? You can say you have faith in something all you want, but you can't lie to yourself if your own head is full of doubt. God could clear it up by just appearing to us or speaking to us in a voice we could all recognize instantly as God's. But God won't. Or...can't.

And if God punishes you for thoughts you can't control...well, I suppose we have to accept that. You can't argue with God. But that means that God is sort of a jerk, too. A wannabe-omnipotent, posturing, irrational jerk.

So which is more likely, the omnipotent God who doesn't care if we live or die, or the merely powerful God who asks the impossible of us? Which would be better? I personally would prefer the omnipotent God, because at least you always know what you are to an omnipotent being: you're just another ant on the farm. It's not much, but at least you don't have to worry about making God happy; God doesn't care. You're free to decide for yourself how to be a good ant to all the other ants, that way.

But I have to admit that the other possibility is just as likely. There are some powerful forces in the universe, which means that an even more powerful force must have created those powerful forces. But that doesn't mean that the being or force that created the universe is the most powerful thing that could ever exist anywhere. It just means that God is really, really powerful when it comes to creating stars and planets and molecules. But wouldn't it be ironic if God could make all this, and then not control it? What drama: "Here is my creation, perfect and holy, and...wait, what are you doing? Stop that! Stop doubting! What? I'm powerless? Me? Noooooooooo..."

I've got to admit, even though it condemns us to eternal damnation, the second way sort of brings a smile to my face, too.

Fewer Words, More Truth

Photographers from the Associated Press have just won a Pulitzer Prize for taking pictures of the ongoing fighting in Iraq. The pictures are available at the Pulitzer web site and some of them are almost unbearably moving. There is one of a circle of American marines praying over the body of a dead comrade. There is a photo of an 18-month-old child in a crude wooden coffin. There is a photo of an American soldier lying flat on his back, holding up a stick with his helmet on it to draw enemy fire. He looks like he's about nineteen.

When I look at these photos, I feel such gratitude that someone was there to take the pictures, to show me what the newspapers only tell me. Written accounts can be tremendously affecting as well, but the cliche is absolutely true: these pictures speak thousands of words to me all at once. The stories they tell are multi-sided, complicated, human, terrible, but not without elements of humor and hope. You have to digest all of these things in seconds, and that quick digestion, as opposed to reading the thousand words, gives the photos their impact. These photos offer no easy answers, no explicit blame, and no editorializing.

The fact that the photographers who took these pictures risked their lives to do so makes them all the more impressive. Some commentators have criticized the Pulitzer judges because these photos are not always flattering to Americans and American soldiers. But these critics speak without proper reflection, for the simple reason stated above: photographs are not opinions. They are not criticisms. They are not statements. You can't criticize a photograph of a soldier any more than you can criticize a photograph of a sunset. The thing in the picture happened. You can't argue with it.

I think that people who don't like to look at photographs of wars should probably spend all their time opposing wars, which are bad, by the way. Wars are probably the worst thing that human beings can do to each other. Opposed to them? Great. I'll stand with you. But don't criticize people for taking pictures of wars. The war was like that when the photographer got there.

We Need You; Keep Out

Along the U.S. border with Mexico, beginning this week, there stand ordinary American citizens, armed, who are dedicated to stopping Mexicans, and people who come through Mexico, from entering the United States. The armed people at the border call themselves the Minutemen.

This is a desert crossing that these illegal immigrants are making, a hard journey that fairly often ends in death, from the heat, from gangs, or from any number of other deadly things that can befall you when you’re desperate and poor. Now these immigrants face one more gang; what will be their reaction? What will the immigrant, who has already traveled so far and sacrificed so much, do when confronted with the sight of these Minutemen on the other side of the Rio Grande?

My guess is that the immigrant in question will do the same as immigrants have always done: wait for the way to clear, say a prayer, and try to make the crossing. At this point, the desert behind this immigrant is just as big as the desert in front. And there are no jobs in the desert behind.

But in front of the immigrant is the land of opportunity. The jobs available are for picking fruit and cleaning houses, but it's work that immigrants are willing to risk death to get. It's also work that U.S. workers are not willing to do, not for the wages offered. Fruit growers could mechanize, or pay better, maybe allow unions, but, for a variety of reasons, both social and economic, they don't. It's the same in many industries: the cost of using illegal labor is less than the cost of complying with the law, so businesses, mindful of the bottom line, go with the thing that costs less. And the immigrants keep crossing.

The Minutemen want to protect their country. What they don't realize is that their country doesn't want their protection. We have decided, as a society, that we like illegal immigration; we like the cheap labor it provides, we like the cheap fruit and clean houses. Our distaste for these immigrants is outweighed by our appetite for the things they can provide us.

Government can't fix everything, but if the government wanted to, it could make it more expensive to hire illegal immigrants. It could make it so expensive that industries would have to find other ways. The government won't do this, though. The businesses want it, but I think that we, ordinary U.S. citizens, want it, too.

Why? I think that most people, deep down, sort of like the idea of having an underclass. It's a sad but true fact of human nature that our self-esteem sometimes improves a lot if we know that there are certain jobs we'll never have to do, just because of who we are. I'm an American, which means that, at the very least, I'll never have to pick berries for a living. There is a lot of comfort in being able to say that.

Well, that's part of human nature, but it's also wrong. We should fight against this instinct of ours. No one should have to clean toilets for a living. But doesn't someone have to? Nope; we're smart. We can make a self-cleaning public toilet. If the price is right, innovation will solve this problem. The problem is that, because poverty in foreign countries makes people so desperate for work that they'll work for very cheap, the price isn't right yet. But we can make it right.

Standing at the border with guns, by the way, won't help. The Minutemen should lobby Congress and the World Trade Organization to change laws instead. It'll be less fun, but we should do it anyway. Deporting poor people solves no problems. But what if every country in the world had laws that required a living wage? If people in Mexico can afford to feed their families on the money they make, they'll stop risking their lives to cross the border. Maybe some of them will even save some extra money. Then they can take time off, buy some guns, and patrol their side of the border to keep out whoever it is they don't want in their own country.

The Pope is The Pope

Stalin famously asked, “How many divisions has the Pope?” With this sneering question he meant to point out the weakness of a mere church before a nation; these days, the Church looks to have the last laugh. It looks healthier than Stalin’s birth home, Georgia, his adopted home, Russia, or his empire, which no longer exists. The army Stalin built isn’t in great shape these days, either. But the Church endures.

Endurance and longevity are the main characteristics of the Catholic Church; they go beyond its politics, beyond its actions in any given century, beyond the motives of any of the men (and it is all men) who control it. You can’t really talk about it in the vernacular of any age and expect to reach any relevant conclusions. It’s just too vast, too old, and too likely to prove you wrong with whatever new trick it has up its sleeve in the twenty-first century. The Church could give us the Borgias again, and become mired in the corruption and greed at the heart of the Boston abuse scandals. Or, it could become the radical institution that speaks for poor people that the proponents of liberation theology desire it to be. There is the sense, though, that neither of these things, should they happen (and both could), will change the fundamental nature of this two millennia-old institution.

Pope John Paul II gave an illustration of this aspect of the church in Nicaragua in 1983; heckled by the crowd, which desperately wanted him to speak out in favor of the Marxist Sandinista movement, he told the assembled masses, in Spanish, that Catholics were required to put aside such ideologies. The Pope also famously told a 1979 Mexico City gathering of liberation theology priests that the way to justice in the world was “neither capitalism nor communism, but communion.” It was the obligation of Catholics, he said, to eschew even good ideas in favor of the Church’s teachings.

This argument sounds quite odd, even slightly batty (reject good ideas? Huh?), but you have to look at it as a statement made by a deeply conservative man representing a deeply conservative institutions. By “conservative,” I mean not that the Pope opposed abortion and birth control, though of course he did both those things. I mean that, as the leader of the Church, he was concerned primarily with the Church’s preservation. He wanted to keep it around, healthy, and mostly unchanged.

This, in the end, is the most important thing to remember about the Pope and the hierarchy of the Catholic Church, especially for anyone who wishes to invoke his name or his principles to justify their own. The Catholic Church is too big a tail to wag; it always, always ends up wagging you.

This is not to say that the Church is sinister; I don’t think that great power always necessarily corrupts, despite the saying. The Church may be too vast to be considered either good or evil. The Pope may speak out against rampant capitalism, but he’ll never be a communist. The Pope may speak out against the evils perpetuated by communism, but he’ll never be a capitalist. The answer, for the Pope, will always be communion.

Soon, there will be a new pope. We should all listen to what he says, because he is the leader of a lot of people. But we must remember that he will always say basically the same thing, and speak with basically the same principles, unaltered in the face of generational, even epochal upheavals. He’ll always be the Pope. And the Pope has no divisions.

Seat of Power

In honor of April Fools Day, let's talk about Washington, D.C.

Pretty funny, right? Everyone likes jokes that make fun of our nation's capital, especially the people who live and work there. And there's nothing wrong with making fun of the powerful, who step through our seat of governance with comical self-importance, stepping right past some of the most crushing poverty in the country. Washington is a place where people talk so much that even important things seem unimportant after a while. It's an easy target. But we should always remember that we are laughing at ourselves; if our jokes are too cruel, we will cause ourselves pain.

By definition, Washington, D.C., is a place where people from every state in the Union live. There is no state in the Union that fails to send a busload of bright-eyed college sophomores to answer mail in a Senator's office, and there is no community that fails to take advantage of the Constitutional Right to Lobby. We're all there.

And we all visit there, too. Tourists are everywhere in Washington. There are plenty of foreigners, but you're most likely to see parents and grandparents leading eight-year-olds down the National Mall on the way to one of the city's 1,655,982 museums. It seems like, for the most part, people like to visit Washington, even though they may like to complain about what goes on here. And they want their kids to see it, too.

Yet you rarely see them smiling. People walk around Washington with serious expressions on their faces. What are they thinking? You can't really tell for sure. Do they love what they see, or do they hate it?

My opinion is that they feel neither. I think that visitors to Washington are in awe. They are in awe, not of America's goodness, but its bigness. They're thinking, as they walk past the Capitol and the White House and all those huge monuments, each made out of great slabs of stone, and they're thinking, This place is enormous. This thing is enormous.

Our thing, they might hasten to add. But they won't be sure. Because you can never really be sure that America belongs to you, these days. People are always going on TV and talking about how their opinions represent what the majority of Americans think. But the thing is, America has become so big, in every way, that even a tiny minority of Americans is still a lot of people. You get together with one hundred thousand of your closest friends, and you feel like you've got the will of the people. But you're not even one tenth of one percent of the population.

Washington, D.C., is a monument to this fact. It's full of these museums and memorials to small parts of America, and the sum of all these parts...is it greater than the whole, or less? We don't know. We're so big that no one can count that high, not even on a computer. Too big to see all at once, like some massive work of art. Too big to see in a lifetime.

It's also the most powerful political entity the world has ever seen, powered by the most potent government ever created, backed by the world's first military to be exponentially more powerful than the military in second place.

That's America. Not good, not bad. Big, and powerful. It might be ours, but it might not. Is it any wonder we like to tell jokes about the people who run it? We do it to cover up our fear.