The new blog is in support of the book I just wrote:

Red Neck, Blue Collar, Atheist: Simple Thoughts About  Reason, Gods & Faith

The landing page for the book, with the full description, is HERE.

The book is up on Amazon.com HERE.

And the new blog, Blue Collar Atheist, is HERE.

Thanks to all those who have stuck with me as readers over the years — a lot of what went into the book was material I developed here and in my earlier blogging and blog commenting.

This is  a pretty good  book, and it’s not just me saying it. Early reviews have been really positive. I hope you’ll order one and let me know what you think.

I’m reading a piece over at Dispatches from the Culture Wars, where Ed Brayton focuses on the “hypocrisy of opponents of the Manhattan mosque, particularly the American Center for Law and Justice …”

And I understand that a religious freedom broad enough to allow equal rights of belief to all is, in some undeniable ways, in all our interests.

But it seems to me that it’s turning into a black-and-white knee-jerk issue of equal rights with too many of us unbelievers, when there’s a few shades in between that we should be pointing out.

I left a reply:

Ed, I’m disturbed at how much effort you seem to put into defending religious groups. In this case, I get it that it’s an issue of fairness in law. But really, you can write “… that law, which grants religious organizations exemptions from zoning laws that apply to every other type of building” and then follow up that phrase with NOTHING about how misguided the law itself is? That it’s just one more of thousands of different ways in which churches and religions are deliberately privileged by American law, despite the supposed church-state separation?

More generally, the public discussion of this issue is drawing an interesting line in which all too many of my fellow atheists are moving vigorously onto the “I’m with the mosque builders” side of it.

It seems to me they’re heeding a too-narrow interpretation of their humanitarian values that, rather than recognizing that Islam is an especially poisonous flavor of religious mind control, gives first priority to welcoming more anti-egalitarian goddiness into the world under the camouflage of equal rights.

Nobody seems to be saying “Well, sure they have every right to build the mosque. But is another ‘house of worship’ a good thing? Hell, I’d much rather see fewer churches of all types in the city.”

The point has been made that there are no synagogues or churches in Mecca, and refuted with the argument that we liberal Americans shouldn’t lower ourselves to the offensive barbarity of Islamic exclusivity.

But we shouldn’t let that offensive barbarity escape us, either.

This is more than the black “We cain’t let them evil Mooslims build that-there terrorist mosque on our hallowed ground” and the white “Oh, golly, yes, our Muslim brothers have the same rights as everybody else!”

There’s a nuance in the middle of it that I think thoughtful unbelievers should bring into every discussion of the issue.

This is not some minor peripheral point. Failing to bring it out is a disservice to ourselves as unbelievers and to a larger world in which pernicious goddiness ensnares billions of our fellows.

And I’ve been really busy with Life, and all that entails, so I haven’t been posting much.

But I went to see PZ Myers last night, in a talk at Syracuse University, and I see he mentioned me in his blog post, Early Morning on the Road, so I figured I’d better respond, just so people who click over to here know I’m not dead.

I can say from this experience that if PZ ever comes within a 3-hour drive of where you live, you should make a point of going to see him. He gives a great talk, there was a stimulating Q&A after, and afterward we went to a nearby pub and quaffed (according to Terry Pratchett, quaffing is like drinking, only with more spillage) beers until late.

Just FYI, I’m getting some last-stage feedback on the book from a few people, and I’d like to do the formal roll-out in early summer. The response so far has been overwhelmingly positive.

To the organizers of this talk, the great people at Syracuse U’s atheist group — great event, guys! Really nice meeting you, and I look forward to being on the other side of the podium when my fabulously successful book comes out.

Below: PZ Quaffing with friends (Carl Buell just to the left) — and yes, that’s a pic of Noah’s Ark behind him.

His original post is about depression, but it also touches on his own life accomplishments. Both subjects strike a chord in me, and I had to comment. As often happens, the things I write elsewhere I echo here, just to keep a record:

Chris: Heh. When the rest of us start climbing trees and despondently waving our feelers about, you’ll know [depression is] really a parasite and you’ve infected us.

Seriously, I recently realized I’ve occasionally measured bits of my life against a standard absorbed from a boyhood friend, the “tough guy” a bunch of us ran around with. I’ve thought, “What would Cody think of this?” Or “Boy, when I go back to visit, I want to show Cody all the cool things I’ve done.”

Nothing conscious, but there nevertheless. Dragging this out into conscious light recently, I realized I don’t really even have reason to respect the guy, either then or now. He was an ignorant thief and a thug back then who beat his horses and dogs and abused his wife, and a loudmouth who browbeat everyone around him. Contacts over the past few years show him and his wife turning into extremely goddy conservatives, who appear to believe Obama is a socialist bent on destroying America, and Bush was a saint.

One of the many things he used to say: “Uh-uh! You ain’t gettin’ me up in one of them airplanes! That’s CRAZY!!” Cody was almost 45 before he was FORCED to fly … after which he loved it. But I was flying fearlessly by the time I was 16 or so, and I loved every second of it.

Looking back on it, a lot of the motivation behind his bluster was so obviously fear. Fear of being wrong, fear of being contradicted, fear of new things, fear of being embarrassed. Much worse than him, I was afraid of just about EVERYTHING when I was a kid. Nevertheless, I hitchhiked off to California and started an entirely new life. I jumped out of planes, I ate sushi, I tried whitewater rafting, I rode bulls, I met new and scary people, I tried out new careers, new experiences, new cultures.

And there he is back there turning to God, reliving that old, old pattern, like he never had one new thought in his life.

Thinking about it just a few days ago, I thought “Why am I dragging this little chickenshit around in my head? Hell, just leaving that cramped little culture where we grew up, going out and seeing some of the world, I’m twice the man he is.”

Bye-bye, Cody. It was nice knowing you, but I’ve got stuff to do, and having you in my head is like being tied to an anvil.

[---> Just to be clear to anyone in government who might read this later, no, shithead, I’m not renouncing my citizenship. I was born in Texas, I’m proud to be an American, I vote, I pay taxes, I drive a Chevy truck, I support the American government and the Second Amendment, I shed tears when I see an American flag, I intend to stay a proud American until the day I die, paying taxes and voting until I’m as senile as Ronald Reagan. I ride horses with good American WESTERN saddles and not those sissy English ones.

I like eagles, and purple mountain majesties, and I can even be convinced to watch football on occasion. Fully half my body weight is made up of Texas barbecue and pecan pie, McDonald’s hamburgers and Dairy Queen shakes. Oh, yeah: John Wayne is the greatest American who ever lived, and Islam sucks donkey dicks. <---]

The really nasty part, of course, is realizing that the people who seem to be most shaping our American identity these days have little or no understanding of the concepts that underlie it. The people who’d accuse ME of being a bad American are philosophically just a few degrees shy of Stalin and Khrushchev (Glenn Beck, say), and are just about the worst living enemies of American ideas.

The COW concept plays out mostly in the way I view issues that come up, for instance, health insurance reform, or marijuana legalization. If they work anywhere, is seems to me they can work here, just from the fact that the people in those other places are not some distant THEM, but rather an US living in a slightly different place. In other words, Americanism is a subset of this much larger thing, and it’s silly to focus solely on this place as if it was the only geographical entity that contains real human beings capable of performing useful social experiments..

More than that, though, COW refutes Humanitism itself (is that a word? – it refers to a blindly homocentric mindset). What we humans really are is a subset of a much larger category, one that encompasses more than just the needs and opinions of Homo sapiens. The environmental movement already hosts a strong COW mindset – a Citizen of the World might occasionally make decisions or espouse viewpoints that deliberately refrain from giving human needs first priority – but even it doesn’t fully encompass the things I’m thinking. For instance, a COW would definitely doubt the “right” of the disgusting Octomom to have 9 kids, or the brainless Duggars to have 19. A COW would see the last mountain gorillas as anything but the disposable property of the country in which they reside.

Are you a COW? Or are there COWs out there? I can’t imagine I’m the only one to ever think of it, but there’s a weird silence on the issue that I can’t account for.

During the hourlong tour and consultation, you ask “What are the classroom rules here at Bronfield Academy? What will be expected of my daughter while she’s actually in class?”

“Ah,” says the director. “Glad you asked, because we’ve got a list of the rules we send home for each new student before the term begins. Let me get you a copy of that. Yes, here we are.”

You read it, and it’s a lot of stuff you’d expect. Things you approve of.

• Students must be under adult supervision at all times. Students outside the classroom must be accompanied by a teacher, adult aide, or parent.
• A student must say ‘please’ when asking for additional art materials such as paper or crayons.
• Students must say ‘thank you’ when teachers hand out snacks at snack time.
• Students must act fairly with each other, so that each gets a turn on playground equipment.
• Students may not bring sharp objects such as metal scissors, knives, etc., onto the school grounds.
• Outside toys brought for playtime must be approved in advance by the teacher.

All good stuff, you think. But on page two, far down the list, you see this:

• The strongest boy in each classroom may be allowed to assist the teacher by spanking misbehaving girl students.

You look up in astonishment. “Wait, what? What’s this?”

“Oh, that’s something left over from the early days. The school was founded in the mid-1800s as you know, and it was a rule back then, just something the teacher could do if they chose.”

“But why is it still on the list of rules? There’s no way that can even be legal, can it? And I certainly don’t want a boy student SPANKING my daughter.”

“Oh, we don’t use it anymore. I mean, technically, it’s part of the Bronfield tradition, you know, but it’s extremely unlikely any teacher would think of using it these days.”

Whoa. Would you send your daughter to that school? However much you liked the rest of the place? Holy crap, no!

You’re checking the web for a nearby plumber, looking for someone reputable to fix the leaking faucet in the bathroom. You find one, but on the “About” page, you find this:

“As well-fed plumbers do their best work, we ask customers to allow our men free access to the home’s refrigerator, so each plumber may, on his own discretion, make himself a sandwich during break time.”

Would you hire that plumbing repair company? I wouldn’t, and I don’t think you would either. The thing sounds … well, tweaked. If they think rummaging in your refrigerator is acceptable enough to write it into their ad, what ELSE are they likely to do once they get into your home and you leave the room for a second?

You pick up your computer from the repair guy and he says “Okay, I upgraded your RAM like you asked, and dropped in a new 2-terabyte hard drive. The graphics card was old, so I got you a new one of those too. Oh, by the way, I hope you don’t mind, I used your bank account to transfer some funds around to keep the IRS off my back. I had to hack your passwords, but it’s no big deal, everything’s back to normal now.”

Will you ever go back to that guy? In flashing neon letters six feet high, the answer is NO.

Assuming that all three of these services – the school, the plumber, the computer geek – are otherwise reputable and efficient, why really would you not deal with them?

Because even if everything else is fine, there’s a sharp limit to how much stuff you can allow to go on in the “not fine” domain.

Doesn’t matter how great a fellow your Cousin Clem is – he might be a pillar of the community, a self-made millionaire who gives to charity, organizes food drives for the poor, volunteers at his church, leads a Boy Scout troop, and tutors under-privileged youth in his spare time – if you know he fools around with underaged girls, you’re not going to leave him alone with your 12-year-old daughter. Not for 10 seconds. Not ever.

The Why of all of this is something I call “the range of permissible acts.”

Even if you openly admitted their good traits …

“Everybody down at the office sends their kids there, and their graduates have higher grades in every subject.” “This plumbing company shows up on time, does excellent work, and leaves everything clean.” “He’s the only computer repair guy I ever met who really knows what he’s doing.” “Cousin Clem is the most energetic and generous guy I know, and he does more charity work than any three people put together.”

… you’d still shy away from using them.

Each of these people might be ninety-nine and ninety-nine-one-hundredths percent reputable. But that tiny bit of unacceptable behavior would make them, for any normal person, for any good parent, untrustworthy. Because no matter what good might be contained in a service or a person, some things are completely beyond the range of what you can permit. Given a choice, you’d refuse to deal with this school, this plumber, this computer repair service, or this cousin.

And that’s really the problem I have with religion. The Range of Permissible Acts in religion is very, very broad. Not just in the things people in religious cultures do, based in their individual minds on the details of their religion, but in the things it actually says in each religion’s source book. The Bible and the Koran both have some freaky stuff in them.

The Bible clearly says “If two men are fighting and the wife of one of them comes to rescue her husband from his assailant, and she reaches out and seizes him by the private parts, you shall cut off her hand. Show her no pity.”

Gah.

The Koran says “… (as to women) on whose part you fear desertion, admonish them, and leave them alone in the sleeping-places and beat them …”

Yeah.

Religious apologists would accuse in both cases that any critic of such passages was taking things out of context, or misunderstanding them.

But in words that are hard to misunderstand, one says that it’s okay in certain specific circumstances to cut off a woman’s hands, the other says you should beat women, in situations where you fear they may leave you.

Believers would argue two more things:

One, that these passages are not taken seriously by anyone today. Second, that the good their religion does far outweighs any little aberrations written into it in some more primitive time.

The problem is, these things ARE written down. And not in some obscure commentary by a distant weirdo who happened to belong to some little splinter sect of Christianity or Islam, but in the very sourcebooks from which Christianity and Islam arise.

It’s not as if there weren’t opportunities to clean up those things. After scores of translations and secret meetings by religious leaders over the centuries, after passing through countless hands of those deciding what stayed in and what got taken out, it STILL says you should, in certain circumstances, cut off a woman’s hands.

There’s no way around it: The Range of Permissible Acts in Christianity includes cutting off women’s hands. The Range of Permissible Acts in Islam includes beating women to keep them from leaving you.

Here in the predominantly-Christian U.S., we see stories a couple of times a year in which people refuse medical care to critically ill children, who then die. We see stories in which people practice exorcism on children, who die or suffer psychological harm. A recent story entailed a woman bleeding to death while giving birth to twins, because she and her family refused a blood transfusion that would have saved her life. Growing up in the South, I must have seen a dozen stories over the course of my lifetime in which some Christian fool died from handling poisonous snakes. (And as to Islamic suicide bombers, which are now so common they’re hardly front page news … well, bloody-goddam-hell-on-steroids.)

Each time, though there is some public condemnation, we seem to assume that these things are aberrations. Something OUTSIDE the bounds of the religion.

But they’re not. They are written down, right in the Bible, there for everybody to see, there for anybody to believe and act on.

Though they may be outside the core beliefs of most Christians today, they are absolutely, provably, without doubt, within the Range of Permissible Acts for Christians.

Sure, nothing and nobody is perfect. But given that this is a widespread system of belief, purported to be something so good that it must be aggressively taught to both your children and mine, shouldn’t the effort be made to clean it up so that at least the letter of the religion should be as perfect as possible? To close down those boundaries of permissible acts so that each new generation would get the clear message that beating your wife is NEVER permissible? That refusing medical care to children is NEVER acceptable? That mutilating a woman by cutting off her hands is so abhorrent that only a disgusting psychopath would even THINK of it? That slavery is NEVER okay?

And yet it isn’t. Whatever good they might do, like that generous cousin, the Range of Permissible Acts in Christianity includes beating women and children. Burning unbelievers in fire. Allowing children to be torn to bits by bears. Performing unnecessary elective surgery on babies. Torturing and killing helpless enemies. Keeping slaves.

Things that should never-never not-ever be allowed. Things that should never, not ever, be believed.

One more thing, a point I think worth making in the broader context of religious beliefs in relation to society:

Right now in the U.S., there’s at least one preacher – and not some extreme freak who slithered out of an inbred backwoods swamp, but a mainstream voice reputable enough to make it into the news – who encourages his flock to pray for the death of the president.

Whether this is based on specific words in the Bible – frankly, right this moment I’m not interested enough to look it up – it is based on something well-enough known in religious circles that there’s a common term for it: Imprecatory Prayer.

Imagine two prominent men saying this: “I hope the president dies. I want everybody within the sound of my voice to hope the president dies. It would be a great thing, friends and neighbors, if the president died. I call on all of you to actively contemplate the death of the president, to cherish the notion of him dying, and soon.”

The one is a religious leader. The other is a school teacher, an electrician, or a department store manager.

Which of those guys is going to get a visit from the Secret Service? Which may not? Right.

Which means the Range of Permissible Acts not only applies to people within these religious sects, it applies outside it. Whether or not we ourselves are believers, those of us in the larger society give great accommodation to these beliefs and acts. Not only do we not pass laws making such beliefs and acts unacceptable (which we know would have unpleasant side effects), we usually don’t even bother to make even the mildest of condemnatory statements.

If you’re a school teacher, or a mother, or a truck driver, or even a lawyer, there are socially accepted rules. There are some things you absolutely cannot permit yourself to believe or do, things all the rest of us insist you should not be allowed to believe or do.

But if you’re religious, the range of things you can allow yourself to think or do is so broad that it encompasses even vomit-inducing atrocities. It includes murder, torture, rape, bloody mutilation, genocide, even the wanton execution of your own children.

It’s been that way for thousands of years.

Considering the fact that no holy book I ever heard of undergoes revision, it will always be that way.

The over-broad, over-generous, over-zealous Range of Permissible Acts is why Christianity and Islam, and even religion generally – no matter how much good it claims to do, or to be able to do – must be unacceptable to any reasonable person.

We have a lot of words in common usage, and I mean a LOT of them, a whole specialized vocabulary, that refers to things that don’t actually exist.

So there’s a word for the thing, but no thing for the word.

Fairy. Werewolf. Ghost. Bigfoot. Vampire. Channeling. Telepathy. Telekinesis. Clairvoyance. Goblin. Teleportation. Afterlife. Leprechaun. Zombie. Valhalla. Hell. God.

There are multi-word terms in the same vein: Spirit guide. Trance medium. Guardian angel. Mutant powers.

Knowing this, and knowing that there was a time when I DIDN’T know it, I think that’s a fairly profound problem.

I have this concept I tinkered up some years back, something I call “mental access time.”

It’s the time you have, in every 24 hour period, for thinking and problem solving. I like to think of it as the time you actually DO spend thinking. I relate it loosely to wisdom, which I define as … oh, the aggregate body of useful conclusions to which you’ve come.

To discover these wisdom-bits, you have to access the abilities of your own brain to think deeply and long about the subject at hand. Why some people can take a compliment as a veiled insult (“What do you mean, you like my hair this way? Are you saying you didn’t like it before?). How, if you’re a man, a few ounces of tissue can control your behavior so profoundly, and over a span of decades. Or even: What evolutionary purpose that bright red flesh-thingie on top of a rooster’s head serves.

If you stay busy with other types of activity — say talking, or sending Tweets, or reading red hot romance novels, or eating lunch with friends, or cooking and watching TV at the same time, or having sex, or driving in heavy traffic, or feeling a little sleepy  after eating, or downing a couple of drinks after dinner, or walking around with your headphones on all the time, or working out at the gym, or any of ten thousand other things that could occupy large parts of your consciousness in ways that preclude the subtle, delicate mentation that rational introspection requires …

Well, you just don’t have the mental access time for this other thing. Your conscious mind focuses on these busy-busy things, to the exclusion of all others, and you end up with fewer useful conclusions about life.

If I spend ten hours a year thinking deeply about stuff, but you spend a thousand, at the end of the year you probably understand quite a lot of things I don’t.

The fact that every person reading this is probably familiar with the above list of words-without-things — so much so that I just know someone is going to chime in with a comment insisting that one or more of these things does exist (or that I can’t PROVE that they don’t, as if that means something) — implies that they occupy quite a lot of our thinking.

Certainly some of that occupancy takes up space that might be better used in other ways. In the statistical universe of all human mental activity, these words elbow aside a lot of more useful words and thoughts. Like a digital bug that slows the speed of our Internet connection, they steal some of our mental access time.

Which means they really do, really have, cost us something. And I suspect the price has been higher than any of us realizes.

I get it that some words-without-things — how about I call them “nullwords”? — are useful as metaphors: “She walked around like a zombie after finding out she’d lost the play’s lead role.”

But even that worries me, because, well, you can make metaphors out of anything; why waste time making metaphors out of non-things? It’s like saying “He’s as strong as a blarfazzle.” (And yes, I know the two previous examples are similes rather than, strictly speaking, metaphors.)

More than that, though, it seems to me that using nullwords, even if they’re useful as raw materials for metaphorizing, has one very large side effect: They reinforce fake concepts in the mind of the reader/listener.

If everyone you know refers to angels all your life — “My big brother is like my own private guardian angel!” — even if you decide you don’t believe in them, angels-as-a-concept has become a basic part of your thought processes.

Additionally, as I implied a few paragraphs back, just having a word for a thing makes it arguable. If I talk about the blarfazzle, there is immediately a yes-or-no dichotomy of possibility in your head. You have to look into the matter, then take some sort of active stand in your head to deny that blarfazzles exist. Alternatively, some of us might puckishly insist that they DO.

The problem is that a lot of us never get as far as questioning. We hear the word and instantly accept that the thing exists.

Even scientists feed the confusion. There’s a book out there with the annoying (to me, an atheist) title “The God Particle.” The title turned me off enough that I never wanted to read the book, but I doubt the gist of it is that there’s a subatomic particle that serves as — or proves the existence of — a god. Yet someone on the cusp of the question of whether or not gods exist could be swayed by the apparent support of the idea by a prominent physicist. (I imagine a guy browsing in the bookstore, coming across the book title and saying “Oh, look, even scientists believe in God. I guess it’s good that I do too.”)

In the end, I don’t think I’m really saying I wish nullwords didn’t exist.

What I am saying is that it was an epiphany to me, a writer who cares a lot about language, that some words are null sets, describing things that don’t actually exist.

I’m also saying that, as a person who lives in this world, in a society full of confusion about what’s real and what’s not, that I want everybody else in my society to know it.

There really are words for things that absolutely do not exist. Even very old words, words burned deeply into our language and culture, words that everybody knows and accepts, don’t necessary describe real things.

You shouldn’t believe in a thing just because there’s a word for it. Lacking a good handbook to the real and unreal — even dictionaries aren’t always helpful — it’s up to each of us to find out which words represent real things, and which are nullwords.

And just FYI: There are no such things as fairies. Or werewolves. Or even …

Con games and sleight-of-hand magic work because, one, we humans only have so much attention to spare at any one moment, and two, they direct that attention deliberately in one direction. If you look at where the finger points, you miss … well, everything else.

Like the movie teen backing through a darkened doorway in the serial killer’s lair, we focus intently on one thing while something more important takes place just outside the sphere of our focus.

I’ll give you a real-life example that has bugged me for a long time.

I met Timothy Treadwell some years back in Flagstaff, when he came to give a talk about grizzlies. Tim’s the guy who got killed and partially eaten by a bear in 2003 in Alaska, and was immortalized in the 2005 film “Grizzly Man” a “documentary” by filmmaker Werner Herzog.

I hated the film (and I think Herzog is a pandering jackass for making it as he did) because it projected exactly two messages into the minds of viewers: 1) Tim Treadwell was crazy. 2) Grizzlies are deadly killers.

The finger pointed in those directions, and most of the viewers looked that way. Treadwell was in fact killed by a grizzly. But off-screen, what the finger didn’t point at, and what most of us failed to notice, was that he lived within spitting distance of these huge bears for 12 summers.

Unprotected.

Unarmed.

Unhurt.

Out of all the things we might want to know about grizzlies, we already know “Any sane person knows them goldurned bears’ll kill yuh!” What we don’t know is “There’s a way to live right in among grizzlies for 12 years without getting hurt.”

I can tell you in one second which of those things I’d like to see in a film. Herzog, sleight-of-hand documentarian, wasn’t interested in it. Today we have one more titillating, somewhat stupid film pointing a finger at something we already know, and most of us still view bears as unpredictable, inevitable killing machines.

So here we are a few days past Earth Day 2009, equally awash in sleight-of-hand: Oh my gosh, are we ever jumping on the “green” bandwagon. You can’t watch TV for half an hour without seeing five commercials about companies going green. Corporations are going green, politicians are going green, builders are going green, banks are going green, cities are going green, for all I know states are going green. Green green GREEN — Yowzah!!

TV, billboards, radio messages, magazine ads, newspaper stories, websites — everywhere you look, clean, well-fed mommies and daddies and happy children are pitching in to cut water consumption! Save energy! Produce less trash! Reduce, reuse, recycle!

Man, I already feel better about it, don’t you? We’re DOING SOMETHING, at last, to Save the Earth. Let’s all heave a deep sigh of relief. Yessssss.

Meanwhile, in all those places where the finger doesn’t point …

Leaf Two

Was it only ten years ago I was writing an article about Baby Six Billion? She was born on or about October 11, 1999. I wrote about the world of progressive scarcity she would be born into, and I wished her well.

But we’re already talking about Baby Seven Billion, who is predicted to arrive on Earth in 2012. Which means that even though you’d expect Baby Seven Billion to be a daughter or granddaughter of Baby Six Billion, she’s not. (Unless Baby Six Billion got pregnant at the age of 12, that is.)

Instead, Baby Seven Billion will be born, give or take a few years, to the same generation that produced Baby Six Billion. The SAME generation.

Jeezus holy jacked-up shit.

Knowing that, I have to ask: What exactly is the point of going green?

I mean, if you and I conserve and recycle and stop eating endangered fish and refuse to support companies that log the Amazon, and do everything we can possibly do to keep the Earth green and growing …

And we each of us cut in half our annual environmental footprint on the Earth …

Where’s the net gain if, during that same period, our neighbors produce a quarter of a million more kids EVERY DAY?

(That’s 91 million a year, in case you wondered — equivalent to the combined populations of California, Texas, New York and Ohio, or slightly less than the entire country of Mexico.)

Your piddly-ass half-person conservation effort vanishes in the noise.

Leaf Three

I saw a beautifully designed book on the environment a year or so back, a thick, well-researched tome about all the possible things you can do to Save the Earth. (Wish I could remember the name, but I seem to have put it out of my mind.) I was so excited, I ordered it immediately. And man, when it came, I unwrapped it lovingly, admiring its heft, its colors, its stunning cardboard slip cover. I dove into it with excitement — it was like a whole weighty library of greenitude.

But I made the mistake, within an hour of getting it, of delving into the index for articles on population control.

Nothing.

Huh? I couldn’t believe it. I tried different words, different combinations. In the end, I discovered the entire book seemed to contain only two PHRASES related to the subject. I mean, there weren’t three whole sentences about it. Amid stories of fish farming and water conservation and energy from wind and sun and recycling plastic and improved strains of rice, there was virtually nothing about human numbers.

It was like going through a million-word book of instructions on how to save a sinking ship, reading a thousand different formulations of “Bail faster and better,” but finding no mention at all of “Plug the hole in the hull.”

I instantly lost interest in the damned thing. I mailed it to a friend who’s into green stuff, and have since then entertained several brief imaginings of punching the authors in the face if I ever get to meet them.

But … can I really blame them? I haven’t had the chance to read every book ever written on saving the earth, but I’ve found few recent ones that deal with population as the real core of the problem.

Is the subject taboo? Is it simple despair that puts it off-limits?

Maybe it’s the inevitable over-reaction. The instant you start talking about encouraging people to use condoms and contraceptives, to pursue various avenues of family planning, etc., to limit human population, the shriekers slam down on you like a rain of neutron bombs — blam, blam blam! “You want to murder babies!! You want to commit genocide!! Oh my God, why do you hate people so much!!?”

Whew.

Leaf Four

I had a cowboy friend, Tom Wood, who was an eternal optimist. I noticed the day I met him that he had this small purpley bump on the side of his face, and I asked him about it not long after, when we’d had a chance to get to know each other.

“Ah. That ain’t nothing.” Big smile, dismissive gesture with can of beer. “Been there for years! You gotta go some time!”

A couple of years later, the purpley bump was bigger, but the gesture and optimistic dismissal was the same. Every time the subject came up: “Hey, you gotta go some time!”

Except for the day he found out he had malignant melanoma, and the three or four months he lasted after.

Turns out optimism, like anything, is misusable. If you have a problem, but you refuse to grapple with it because you’d rather be optimistic and hopeful about the future, … well, there are side effects.

To get well, you first have to admit you’re sick. To climb out of a financial hole, you first have to admit you’re not handling your money well. To stanch the bleeding of a gaping wound, you first have to notice the gushing blood.

Sometimes, for a while, optimism has to slide over into the passenger seat, keep its smirking mouth shut, and let pessimism take the wheel.

In the midst of an emergency, in the face of a deadly threat, you have to think more about the worst that can happen, rather than the best.

The population of Planet Earth has yet to realize this.

Leaf Five

I’ve had people tell me I shouldn’t use the word “retarded.” And I get the point — it can be a callous insult to people with mental handicaps.

But like the shock value of carefully-applied profanity, it can also serve to slap people awake.

Here’s retarded: The smug idiot who laughs “Hey, we can’t hurt the Earth! Ha-ha! It’ll be here and fine long after we’re gone!”

Here’s retarded: “Even IF we were capable of wrecking the environment, God could fix it with a wave of his hand.”

Here’s retarded: Buying into all those corporate messages that if we recycle and reuse (with their corporate help, of course), everything will be just fine.

Here’s retarded: Every environmentalist and green advocate who ever lived who failed to recognize that the foundation of EVERY environmental problem is too many people.

Here’s retarded: The guy who repeats the vague reassurance that “Educated women tend to have fewer children. All we have to do is raise the level of education and social welfare in the world, and world population will level off at some sustainable level.”

We’re out of time on hopeful reassurances. The planet is already over the load limit on humans — there’s nothing left, no excess capacity to hold us until that optimistically hoped-for population leveling begins to kick in.

If ever there was a moment to be pessimistic, to attempt to be thoughtful and worried and to imagine the worst, this would be that moment.

We’re killing the Earth NOW.

Leaf Six

I don’t see it getting better in my lifetime.

Don’t think I don’t hate to say it.

I hate to even think it. Hey, I’ve been a fan of science fiction since I was about 11 years old and first read Zip-Zip Goes to Venus.

As an SF fan, I’m a devoted futurist. For years I thought about the possibility of cloning my dog, the Best Dog I Ever Even Met, but I held off on doing anything about it. Then one day he got sick, and it hit me that I could either 1) read about all the possible technological innovations but do nothing to make ready for them, or 2) I could live and act as if these imagined futures would be real.

I picked the second option. The future is a real place, a real time, and many things will become possible. I set the wheels in motion for collecting tissue samples when Tito died. Today those samples are frozen in liquid nitrogen, providing me a doorway into one of those possible futures. When (if) cloning gets to be reliable and cheap, I’ll be ready to have them build a puppy for me, the descendant twin of the Best Dog I Ever Even Met.

But futurist or not, no matter how much technological progress we make — on gene-engineered crops, fish farming, pollution-free energy — none of that can fix the hole in the boat, the hole of more and more people, more and more mouths, arriving daily like unstoppable civilization-smashing dreadnoughts of unthinking hunger.

Leaf Seven

The truth is — brace yourself for some carefully-applied profanity —

We’re fucked.

Seriously. We’re raping ourselves to death with our own appetites. We are bent over, grabbing our metaphorical ankles, while a dick the size of Buffalo, New York — population just over a quarter million — rams repeatedly, daily, up our collective butts.

And it looks like we don’t have the brains to stop it.

For instance: Even the idea of conservation has enemies. And not quiet enemies, but active, loud, wealthy enemies. Enemies with TV and radio shows. Enemies with audiences of admiring millions. Enemies with the backing of huge, globe-spanning churches. Save the environment? It’s un-American, it’s crazy, it’s EVILLLL!!

But even those who aren’t active enemies of possible solutions are still thinking we can do pretty much all the same stuff we’ve always done. Everybody can drive cars and live in big houses, and buy everything we buy wrapped in a disposable plastic sheath, and have two or three or four kids. As long as we all pitch in and conscientiously — voluntarily! — conserve, everything will be fine.

Even those of us who are active champions of the environment, as long as we fail to bring the subject of human population into every single discussion, are little more than enablers, co-dependents who help wreck things by failing to admit the real problem.

Taken together, we’re the battered wife who won’t admit she needs help. “I know he loves me. He only does it when he’s drinking.” Wham! “It’s all my fault. I shouldn’t provoke him.” Wham! “He doesn’t really mean to do it. I just can’t leave him.” Wham! Wham!

Out here in the real world, we’re already dying. We’re already killing everything else we care about. It’s just that it’s been happening in slo-mo.

Like the stupid pigeon that stands still while the cat sneaks up on him in broad daylight — “Yeah it DOES look like a great big predator, but hey, it’s barely moving, and nothing bad’s happened SO far, right?” — we’ve sat mired in calm complacency in the midst of a slow motion crash.

But things are speeding up.

The Earth is bleeding to death under us, faster and faster, and the best we’ve managed so far is a string of very small Band-Aids.

When the real way to stop the blood loss, the only workable treatment, is the tourniquet of Everybody Stop Having Children. For a while, anyway.

Leaf Eight

Nothing I’ve said here is meant to imply that I have absolutely no hope. Even the statement “we’re fucked” is not something I feel in any final way.

But I’m not optimistic. The only hope I DO see is if we admit the problem, the real problem, and deal with that. Plug the hole in the hull first.

Stop human population growth. Now. Reverse it. Get our numbers down to four billion, two billion, whatever number really IS sustainable in the real world.

Because this is it, kids. The photo finish where humanity as a group crosses the line a split-second ahead of Mr. Death and lives as the better selves we could be, the ones who become rational adults and enter the next Age of life on earth.

Or the photo finish where Mr. Death beats us across, and we die attempting to claw our individual selves out of the sucking pit of our own sewage and malignant runaway growth … and kill everything else we care about — all the whales and wolves, the polar bears and eagles, and even the cats and dogs and horses — along the way.

There is a possible future, maybe even a probable future, where quite a lot of us will live to see the squalid, dehumanizing background-world of Blade Runner, or Mad Max, as the depiction of an enviable Golden Age. (Just FYI, all you rich people thinking you might survive inside some kind of walled compounds, I’d bet real money that the zombie hordes will be eating you FIRST. After all, you’re the fat, juicy ones. )

You, or your kids if you have any, will face this fact: A decidedly unpretty future of death, death and more death is coming soon to a planet near you.

Leaf Nine

And now — deep sigh — cue the shriekers. I obviously want to murder babies, and commit genocide on poor people, right? I’m crazy, I have no proof for my silly dark fantasies and I should probably just shut up (Mr. Gloomy, why do you hate people so much?), and try not to kill other people’s optimism.

Anyway, things aren’t really that bad, and Science Will Find A Way. Like, you know, mining asteroids and colonizing the Moon, sending our surplus population into space. Stuff like that.

Besides, somewhere out there somebody smarter and better informed than you and I has the problem in hand and will fix things up.

After all, those wise strangers, whoever they are — you know, like government people and such — care SO MUCH about you and I and our families, right?

Right?

Right.

This was my final shot at explaining how wrong I think that view is:

Shane: The news media are entertainers, yes. I’m glad you see that. I worked in the news media for a number of years, and yeah, news pieces are put together as “stories.” Each item is framed in a narrative the viewer will find interesting and digestible. This is known — from the first days a budding journalist is  learning to write news, you’re taught to do this. And yes, sometimes the story can overpower the facts.

Give you an example: Dennis Rodman once kicked a courtside cameraman. I saw the video, and he kicked the guy in the thigh, and not even very hard. The cameraman paused for an instant, then curled up as if he’d been kicked in the groin. Despite the video, the second story was apparently juicier to all the sportscasters, and played better to the meme of Rodman’s bad-boy-image. We got the titillating story — Rodman kicked a guy in the balls! — instead of the less-titillating fact.

But they also broadcast the video. Amid the entertainment, there was this objective bit of information.

Any day of the week, you can see entertainers of dance, entertainers of music, entertainers of imagery (artists). You can see entertainers of comedy: Jon Stewart, Rodney Dangerfield. Entertainers of combat: wrestlers, boxers, martial arts practitioners, but also professional athletes. Entertainers of drama: actors. Entertainers of adventure: outdoor travel guides. Entertainers of wonder: Carl Sagan.

The news media, generally, strive to be entertainers of fact. Yes, to find out what’s entertainment, what’s info, you check a number of sources and, as we all have to do, figure out for yourself what’s true, what’s not. But they create these stories, they report the news the way they do, not because they’re in the business of telling lies, but because they have to, because that’s how their human audience is geared.

The part I think you’re not getting is that Fox has wedded news, for the first time, to a type of entertainment not generally seen in the field. Fox offers entertainers of anger. Of fear. Of rage. Of hate. Of rebellion.

We’ve had plenty of INDIVIDUALS in the field. Joseph McCarthy, for instance, was an entertainer of fear and suspicion. But as far as I know, we’ve never had a powerful broadcast corporation selling rage. Consciously, continuously, wantonly.

If you want to live in a civil society, the narrative you trade in has to be civility. You project civility to counter the uncivil: “We’re decent people.” Not killers, not liars, not thieves, not haters, not torturers.

Individuals may pursue actions in any of these fields, but the societal narrative counters any mass-social trend in those directions. Why? Because no society can survive coming to believe itself evil.

The narrative can be wrong. You CAN have an evil society. But as long as you do have the narrative, it acts to correct the underlying actions. Slavery — in a society that understands its wrongness — ends. Torture ends. Fascism ends.

But for the first time, a major broadcast network is creating a narrative of incivility — of fear, anger, suspicion and rage. A narrative of perpetual division.

Say what you will about the biases at CNN or MSNBC or even The Onion …

THIS is happening at Fox.

Hope things are going well for you all down there.

I’m self-employed just now, and struggling with it. I think things are about to turn around, but argh, I’m in a bind right at the moment. It’s not the economy so much as a few of my own bad choices, but the economy is definitely playing into it.

Other than having no money, life’s going good. It’s spring here. The place I live, I wake up most mornings to the sounds of wild turkeys in the yard. So far this spring we’ve had whitetail deer, raccoons,four kinds of squirrels (gray, red, chipmunks and flying squirrels), blue jays, cardinals, goldfinches and crows (plus a lot of other birds passing through) as daily visitors. Some nights we see red foxes, and there have even been a few coyotes strolling through in the moonlight.

I’m working on some websites for money, and that’s going well. I’m also doing a new site for myself, where I have an outdoor adventure every week and write about it. I hope to have that working in about a month.

I wrote two books over last year, but I haven’t sold either one of them yet. I hear the economy has affected the publishing industry, and maybe that’s it. Heh — I tell myself there’s no way they’re not good enough. Can’t be ME. Got to be THEM.

I actually think about you guys fairly often. It’s strange thinking that the people I have in my head, the ones I remember as you, are 30-plus years old, and the REAL people, the ones you really are, have probably diverged dramatically from them. So if I ever do get back down there, it will be like I’ll have to get to know you all over again. That’s always the quandary in distant friendships, I guess.

Plus, I hear the Texas governor is backing secession from the United States. Pretty soon, you’re not even going to be Americans anymore! In all the years I’ve been away, I have continued to think of myself as a Texan. And I can’t say I wouldn’t be proud in some ways to think of my native state being its own country. But … I’d sure hate to think it was largely due to that weirdo Glenn Beck, and some measure of poorly-hidden racism aimed at our first black president.

I made an enemy of my stepfather years ago when I said at the dinner table that I really admired the boxer Muhammad Ali. He was outraged: “You like that nigger?!?” But I liked Ali because he was mouthy, and because he backed up the mouth in the ring. Far as I could tell, he really was “the greatest.” One helluva good showman, he always delivered. He talked the talk, but then he walked the walk. Didn’t matter what color he was, he was cool.

I compare him to Glenn Beck, for instance, and I don’t see any of the same courage; I just see the mouth. And there’s something … I don’t know, DIRTY, about Beck. He just seems so phony and manipulative — like those tear-jerker dead teen songs that were on the radio when we were kids. Except the songs were only trying to wring a sniffle or two out of you, they weren’t trying to run the whole way you lived your life, or the way you thought.

And I could never give up being an American. My people, our people, are the single greatest nation ever to exist on earth. You don’t just walk away from that over some temporary snit about taxes. And especially not when the thing is being manufactured by the likes of Fox News and company.

Watching my homeland from a distance since I left there, I’m still amazed that Republicans, who didn’t seem to exist when I was a kid, swooped in and took over the entire Deep South, including Texas. Way back when, we were solid Democrats. Now it seems like Democrats are thought of as little more than traitors.

I was registered as a Republican for about 20 years in California, but I left the party in the 90s (no, I’m not a Democrat, in case you wondered), and these days the GOP just seems so mean-spirited.

I think Bush — that rich-boy fake Texan — wrecked the nation, and the character of the people in it, in ways we haven’t even seen yet. The bill for his presidency was a huge one, and we’ll be paying it for generations. These weirdos on TV, trying to make every problem out to be Obama’s fault (after only 3 months in office!), are only part of it.

Well, anyway, I do hope to get back down there sometime in the next year or so. I’m eager to get to know you all again.

I’ll bet you’re all every bit as slender and good looking as I remember, and you look exactly as you did when I left in 1974.

I know it’s true of me.

Tell ’em all I said hi. And send me some news!

Love,

Hank