Give ’em an Inch

by

Will future generations come to perceive life as mere chemicals, manufactured processes or inventions of no greater value than industrial products? Or will we act to respect life, by resisting the ultimate temptation to turn living things into pure utility?—Jeremy Rifkin.

 

 

The previous article on plant patenting used up so much paper whining about tomato plants that it didn’t get to the real gristle of the problem which is that they have also started giving patents on animals. It shows that if you give them an inch, they’ll take the whole tamale and run with it.

It took the rich guys about 200 years to convince the Congress that plants, like everything else in America,  ought to be for sale. Then not 20 years later–the big day was 3-3-87–some unelected, bureaucrat dunderheads at the Patent and Trademark Office, without so much as a kiss-my-ass or a thank you, gave Harvard University a patent on a mouse. Harvard, actually, was just toadying for the Dupont Corp., which got the patent and now makes the cash.

Dr. Michael Fox called this deal “an arrogant presumption of authority.” I, Tiger Tom, call it a crock of human-centered speciesism.  Business as usual.

This was the first-ever patent on an animal, if you can really call a mouse an animal. They named it the OncoMouse, because they made it by putting a human oncogene into a mouse embryo. The wonderful OncoMouse, the first “transgenic” animal to be patented (transgenic, for you non-scientists, means freaky and screwed up), is a sizzling item in research labs because it is easy to give it cancer. I, Tiger Tom, declare that this is real progress in the War on Cancer: They haven’t done jack shit, it is true, to cure cancer, but they have got very good at giving cancer to mice and other animals unfortunate enough to fall into their clutches.

 

 

Oncos sell for $50 a head, which by the pound makes their flesh at least 8,888 times more expensive than cow meat. Since the OncoMouse they have whipped up lots more wonderful animals. One article I read tells how they put human genes into pig genomes to create bigger and leaner superpigs; what they got, though, were some pigs that had arthritis. They were “stunted, crippled, cross-eyed and sterile.” Too bad they were sterile. Otherwise we could have a whole race of cross-eyed, gimpy porkies running around.

Another animal they thought up was a girl chicken with her genetic trait for “brooding” removed; they hope she will put out 20% more eggs since she doesn’t have to waste time trying to satisfy her “mother instinct.”

I read another article about a Texas rancher making calves that are “leaner and milkier” by putting human genes into the embryo. He said this is important work to prevent disease because these calves could grow up to be big and meaty without steroids, “which have been linked to heart disease and impotence.” Same rancher, probably, who used to say steroids were safe as Ivory soap. Now the boy is a regular health nut.

In France a bunch of savants (that’s French for wise-asses) grafted quail embryo brain tissue into chicken embryo brain tissue to make a weird quail-chicken or chicken-quail, depending on your preference. Probably they hoped to make big, slow hunting birds, easy to shoot and with fleshy drum sticks. But all the birds died two weeks after hatching because their immune system rejected their brain. Brain rejection is a real bummer, but they’ll surely get a big grant to buy a lot of OncoMice with baboon brains so they can work on a drug for it.

What really melts my stripes is how human people are so good at rationalizing this stuff. No one but Mike Fox, Jeremy Rifkin (one of the five or six really smart people around) and a couple of others consider there might be something a tiny bit unethical about mixing human parts with other animals. If the Church of Science says it’s OK, then it’s OK. And if it makes Money, the Church of Science always says it’s OK.

By 1990 human genes had been put into at least 16 animals, mostly pigs,  mice, and fish. The priests of the Church of Science go on playing the same old mind game they always play about animal research. They say, these things are just like people: if it works on them, it will work on us; but if you tell them that what they are doing is cruel, they say, oh, these things aren’t like people–they don’t have any feelings. Now they are putting human parts into mice and pretending that they are doing experiments on mice but not on people. I, Tiger Tom, ask you to consider: how many human genes do you add before a mouse stops being a mouse and starts being human? How many human body parts and genetic traits do you have to transplant into bovines before you stop eating cows and start eating people? And when are they going to start granting patents on people? When will they start breeding special research people who are just like people but have no feelings or mother instinct and get cancer very easily?

 

Pain is not outside of life; is not something foreign to the living organism. Those strange writhing movements of the body in pain are as vital as the more healthy actions of the normal person in doing work. Contortions, as seen in pain, are not the actions of a stranger, but of the pained body itself. Pain is not desirable, but it is one thing to silence the nerves of sensation and quite another to remove the cause of the pain. — Dr. Herbert Shelton.

I had a question sent in about my last column from writer Diane Rozario, who wants to know why I said pain is necessary and why I said doctors should not be so quick to get rid of it.

This question is too easy. I, Tiger Tom, with no reference books, using only 1/4 of my brain, and with three paws tied behind me, can quickly answer it.

It is obvious that pain is necessary and very important because it exists. Bodies, tiger or human or anteater, have no unnecessary parts; neither do they have unnecessary gestures, sensations, and activities. Coughing, belching, hiccupping, frowning, spitting, wheezing, twitching, snorting, weeping, snarling, blinking, yawning, farting, flinching, sneezing, smiling, itching, licking, pouting, slobbering, shivering, laughing, grieving, groaning, hurting–all have their purpose.

Pain is not a disease. It plays a big role in the way the body conducts its business and is Nature’s main means of communication. Even people can understand its most obvious usefulness. It protects you from catching fire if your tail gets in the stove while you are asleep. It tells you when you have eaten too much salami..

What humans do not catch on to is that pain’s main role is teaching. Both in a physical and in a moral sense. People think they learn by having things explained to them. Manshit. That’s just the way you like to think you learn things. Real learning comes from pain. “By what men fall, by that they rise.” This wise yoga saying means: You screw up, life whacks you in the chops, and you go home a smarter tiger. For those who do not believe that pain is the best teacher, I, Tiger Tom, propose the following human experiment:

Take a large group of human cubs and divide them into three equal groups. Give the nippers in Group A a big lecture series on how not to burn themselves on hot stoves. Show them pictures of kids with singed parts. Tell them many times, “No, no, no! Hot!” With Group B you don’t tell them anything. Just take each little fellow to a red hot stove and mash one of his little hands against it until it sizzles. Don’t tell him anything. Just singe his little hand. Group C is the control group. These kids get no lecture, no pain. I, Tiger Tom, bet my stripes that if you keep records on how good these subjects are at avoiding stove bums for the next few years the cubs in Group B will will win paws down. I further bet that Group A won’t do better than Group C.

Pain doesn’t just teach simple lessons like stove avoidance. It’s a central part of the body’s feedback and information system that supports healing. Killing pain is like killing the messenger who brings bad news No more messenger, no more news. Probably teeth with holes in them could fix themselves if people were not so quick to kill the messenger. How can the body correct a condition causing a headache if people refuse to experience the headache? The weird practice of aspirin gobbling keeps the whole repair system in a state of ignorance and confusion. Do people really believe that the elaborate pain-sensing system exists just to tell them when they need to take an Advil?

You can’t fix it if you don’t know it’s broke. That’s my motto.

Editor’s Note: Gazette columnist Tiger Tom penned this piece as part of Gazette #44’s issue pleading compassion for the world’s wee folk. This is as compassionate as Tiger Tom ever gets.

Some Ethical Ramifications of Water Purification

A Scholarly Review of Existing Sanitation Methodology

by Tiger Tom

The Chinese spread their sewage on the ground and get worms in their guts from drinking contaminated water and eating filthy food. We in the Western world are more civilized–we take our sewage and dump it into our rivers. We then drain it into our water supply, strain it and inject chlorine into it. We don’t get worms in our guts, but we sure do get something else.–Dr. Joseph M. Price, M.D.

Some people get really steamed up when they talk about the hurt that chlorine puts on birds and beasts and plants and people, but I haven’t seen them shedding tears over bleach’s biggest sufferers. I mean the tiny water-dwellers that chlorine fries by the trillions of trillions. Having had the shits a few times myself, I’m no big amigo of bacteria. But let’s be fair. The little gut-dwellers are only doing their job. And a nasty job it is. I say they deserve a better fate than chemical warfare.

Being kind to little water creatures isn’t easy. Sometimes it’s them or us. When people started bleaching the water around 1904, diseases like cholera and typhoid fell quickly in the disease ratings. Doctors tried to take the credit, but it was really Clorox that did the damage. Bleach is a poison, and in water it mixes with other stuff and makes about a bezillion new poisons, which scientists call THMs. THMs cause cancer. Now we have a lot less cholera and a lot more cancer. And they keep putting in more bleach.

Some things aren’t killed by bleach. Probably you’ve heard of Cryptosporidium and Giardia lamblia. Crypto gave half of Milwaukee a very sick belly not long ago. A lot of people died. Bleach doesn’t even stun these boys. But they are giants, so it’s easy to trap them in a filter, which is really just a fishing net. Cryptos are so big that a fairly tight filter nabs them. That’s why I, Tiger Tom, say that it is easier for a rich man riding a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a Crypto to pass through a Doulton ceramic cartridge.

The public plan for bacteria has always been to fry them in bleach. There are other ways, though most aren’t any kinder. Iodine poisons them, and ozone fries them crisper than chlorine. Ceramic filters are 99.99% effective at snaring them. Even tight carbon filters strain them out, but carbon filter makers don’t brag in their ads about bacteria removal because it’s risky. Someone gets sick, calls his lawyer, and you’re screwed.

The kindest way to make water safe, and the way that I, Tiger Tom, recommend to my friends and closest relatives, is ultraviolet (UV) light. That’s how sunlight purifies water in a mountain brook. It leaves no chemicals behind. UV purifiers work by passing water close to an ultraviolet lamp, which looks like a fluorescent bulb, inside a quartz tube. After a trip past the magic lamp, the nastiest germs are as polite as shoe salesmen.

The interesting part is that the experts know that UV light stops bacteria, but they don’t really know how. Some just say it “stuns” the boys and leave it at that. They usually say something like this, which I, Tiger Tom, copied from aWater Technology article I read while I was using the bathroom:

“UV alters the genetic information of microbes, thereby inhibiting the metabolic processes including their ability to replicate.” The boy who wrote that was trying to say that the light screws up their sex life. They stop reproducing. In water treatment, if a microbe can’t reproduce it is legally dead. If human people followed this logic, they could collect on their insurance if they had a vasectomy. The logic with bacteria is, if they can’t reproduce, they can’t hurt you.

This explanation of UV light is the equivalent of the old “spay/ neuter” business. I, Tiger Tom, do not buy it. I have my own theory of how UV works. I say it’s related to all the other miraculous events that have to do with light. Scientists invented the neutering story because they aren’t allowed to talk about miracles. Science is a miracle-free religion. Unless they want you to believe some weird thing like the HIV story, which takes a lot more faith than the Virgin of Guadalupe business.

Probably you know the story of the big Christian persecutor Saul who got turned into the apostle Paul by a big light. He was on his way to Damascus one day to hassle Christians when a giant light whammed him. He was blind for a few days; then he was a changed man. I, Tiger Tom, say that this is what happens to bacteria. They aren’t neutered; they are converted. They see the light. Just imagine these darkness-loving little gut-dwellers, floating along happy as bunnies in the friendly blackness of a cool water pipe, doing their thing, feeding on slime,  replicating wildly, when suddenly they come around a bend and it hits them, as bright as a thousand suns, a light of about a zillion Angstrom units. This is clearly a miracle. Never in the annals of Bacteriadom has a light appeared in a water pipe. They fall to their little knees and kowtow wildly. They stop replicating and causing diarrhea and spend the rest of their short lives meditating. If they quit reproducing, it isn’t because their DNA is screwed. It’s because they’ve become celibate. St. Paul quit replicating after he saw the light, didn’t he?

If you have bacteria you want converted, call PURE WATER PRODUCTS for the very best: UV systems. They’ve got Pura and they’ve got Sterilight. They’ve got everything from countertops to whole house styles, priced from not much to a whole lot.

Turn It Off

by Lisa Reagan

Introductory Note: This article is dear to my heart because my own liberation from “it,” the serious menace alluded to in the title, came about, as in Lisa Reagan’s case, more by chance than by design. “Turning it off” is not the painful sacrifice you might imagine; it is, rather, an act that can set you free. Some thirty years ago my children and I turned it off and booted it out the door. I’ve never regretted that simple but decisive act of self-liberation.--Gene Franks.

Friends walked into our house in February, noted our television was missing from any main rooms, and quipped, “We give you a week. It’ll be back!”

It’s August, and the television hasn’t reappeared. It wasn’t that we made an informed, self-congratulating decision to take television out of our lives; it was just that the &^%#$ cable company missed our turn-on date three times! After our third turn-on date, and four weeks with no TV had passed, my husband and I sulkily surrendered to what we perceived as a divine message of intervention: We were not destined for the Discovery Channel.

Miraculously, we made it through this withdrawal period by developing other rituals with our discovery of TIME. More time for everything. More time for cooking healthy dinners, more time for walks, drives, journal entries, the perennial parade of household chores, and of course, more precious time for our wonderful son.

More time meant less stress. And with more still fleeting, still precious time on our hands, our lives became rich with the contact of each other – richer, and more fulfilling than I ever imagined life could be.

But before the gods took cable television out of our home, we would have sworn that we didn’t watch “that much TV.” It is only now, with 20/20 hindsight, that we realize the amount of time we spent watching television and it’s powerful, all-consuming effect on our lives. After six TV-free months, we re-experienced this effect last month in a Washington D.C. hotel room.

Our first evening in our hotel room we agreed to “just quickly see what was on”. One hour later, we opted for room-service instead of going out for a walk and dinner. Two hours later, I was surprised by how terrible I was beginning to feel. Still, we flipped and flipped, shooting past the ubiquitous violent imagery and juvenile sex jokes, commenting on how we probably shouldn’t be doing this, all the while feeling more and more inert, foggy-headed, distant… and worried.

“I didn’t feel this bad watching TV before, did I?” I asked myself. If I, an educated, adult woman, felt lousy watching the casual violence, sex and fast imagery of television, what sort of effect would it have on my young son asleep in the next room?

Brooding over these thoughts and images, I clicked-off the hotel’s TV and crawled into our king-sized bed with my eyes pulsating weird blue light, my head throbbing, and my ears ringing. I curled around my son’s small body under the hotel sheets, gently brushed my nose against his soft, warm hair and breathed in his innocence. I had just navigated 6 months without cable television, how was I going to navigate the next 16 years without cable, the computer, or video games? Crawl into a hole dragging my son behind me?

Still brooding, I placed a gentle kiss on my son’s cheek, gave him the breast he was fumbling for, and fell asleep promising to use my newly discovered extra time to find some answers to my questions when we got home. I did and here is what I found :

Even though the AAP’s policy that two year-olds and under should avoid television may seem extreme, it actually occupies the middle of the road. At my local library I found conflicting arguments for virtually banning television from your home, for placing limits on viewing and becoming “media literate”, or for rejecting “mediaphobes” and letting your children watch anything they want.

Media literacy advocates and television banners disagree over whether or not the content of children’s programs really matters. According to Joseph Chilton Pearce, author of Evolution’s End: Claiming the Potential of Our Intelligence, it doesn’t matter if your child watches Sesame Street or Power Rangers: “The major damage of television has little to do with content: It’s damage is neurological, and it has, indeed, damaged us, perhaps beyond repair.”

Both camps do agree on television’s effect on a child’s brain. Our brain’s “triune system” consists of the reptilian system, old mammalian, and new mammalian brains that control action, feeling, and thought, respectively. “The third and highest member, our neocortex, or new brain, is five times bigger than its two lower neighbors combined and provides intellect, creative thinking, computing, and if developed, sympathy, empathy, compassion, and love,” writes Pearce.

Creative play, conversation with adults and story-telling are Nature’s choice for developing a child’s neocortex. But with parent’s spending an average of 10 minutes a day talking to their children, and television monopolizing almost seven hours a day in the average home, the human interaction needed by children for higher brain development is practically non-existent.

“Failing to develop imagery means having no imagination… It means children who can’t ‘see’ what the mathematical symbol or the semantic words mean; nor the chemical formulae; nor the concept of civilization…A child who can’t imagine not only can’t learn but has no hope in general: He or she can’t ‘imagine’ an inner scenario to replace the outer one, so feels victimized by the environment…True playing is the ability to play with one’s reality.”

Consider the above description of television’s effect on a child’s developing brain, and then recall that the average preschooler watches 54 hours a week.

The mountain of damage is staggering.

And that is not the worst of it. At age 11, in a natural house-cleaning process, all undeveloped neurons in the neocortex, up to 80 per cent, are dumped. Lost forever. “Only those neural patterns stimulated and sufficiently developed are left…Use it or lose it is nature’s dictate,”
writes Pearce.

Pearce believes that television is second only to hospital birth in contributing to the “current collapse of childhood.” He notes that before television there were no recorded child suicides, whereas today a child attempts to take his or her life every 78 seconds. He warns that as “our damaged children grow-up and become parents and teachers, damage will be the norm, the way of life.”

Is the damaged way already the normal way of life? What is prohibiting parents from taking action now to control television in their homes?

Marie Winn, author of The Plug-In Drug, believes that damaged and addicted parents and teachers are the reasons that media literacy limits are almost impossible to follow. Winn compares the experience of watching television to chemical dependency. She notes that television withdrawal symptoms parallel drug withdrawal symptoms, and the need to repeatedly watch, coupled with a lack of concern over what is being watched, is similar to a chemically dependent person’s cravings and lack of discretion over what form their drug takes.

In addition to our adult reptilian brain’s vulnerability to television’s hypnotic glare, we now have “a growing dependency upon television as a child-rearing tool… Despite their considerable guilt at not being able to control their children’s viewing, parent’s do not take steps to extricate themselves from television’s domination. They can no longer cope without it…Surely there can be no more insidious a drug than one that you must administer to others in order to achieve an effect for yourself.”

However, Winn concedes, there were a few families in her studies that were able to control television in their homes. Some of Winn’s families employed “natural” alternatives to controlling television viewing like placing the television in a poor location or using a fuzzy set that didn’t invite constant viewing.

For parents who want to take on the battle of controlling media in their homes, there is Screen Smarts, A Family Guide to Media Literacy, by Gloria DeGaetano and Kathleen Bander. This book contains tools for teaching your children to “read and analyze images” but warns, “it takes time to learn media literacy.” Screen Smarts recommends: discussing with your children how television programs are made, asking your children to rewrite the scripts of the programs they watch, or to count the number of violent acts in a show. The authors’ point that “media is here to stay” is well taken along with the fact that American children suffer from a complete void of information regarding their number one activity. In Great Britain and Australia media literacy has been established as an integral component of the educational system for more than a decade.

And then there is Jon Katz, a media critic who insists in his book Virtuous Reality that “Children need more, not less access to technology, culture and information. Responsible children have the right to participate freely in this world, and responsible parents should worry more about getting kids on-line and less about the dirty pictures they may occasionally find when they get there.” I suggest Mr. Katz put aside his job-security motivated opinions and undertake a quick read of Mr. Pearce’s aforementioned book.

And as Pearce et al, from Congressional Committees to the AAP have agreed: television viewing damages the developing minds of children. And no amount of bickering between CBS vice-presidents and parent’s watch groups over “what is educational content” or a hundred government agencies advocating the development of media literacy skills is going to reverse that biological, neurological fact.

Even if media education and AAP viewing guidelines are enthusiastically followed, even if Congress gains control of Hollywood and Hollywood gives all of its billions of advertising dollars to the “Children Damaged by Television Fund”, and even if television watching diminishes from the current seven hours a day to the AAP’s pipe dream of one hour a day, it will still be one hour a day, 365 hours a year, our children will neglect the urgently needed development of their higher brain cells; cells that will be lost forever at the tender age of eleven.

Which unknown potential shall we choose to forfeit the development of in exchange for an hour with Elmo? Which potential ability will never be fully realized in our children? Do you really want to count the number of violent scenes in a television show with your child?

Maybe our last best hope rests with the cable company. And perhaps Nature Herself will lend a hand and bring our evolution back on course by providing a meteoric catastrophe that will zap all of our cable boxes and force us to wait and wait and wait for the television-raised, damaged employees of the cable company to show-up and save us. And maybe by the time they do, we will have saved ourselves.

Lisa Reagan is President of Families for Natural Living.

Gazette Fair Use Statement

Medical Mistakes

by Peter Montague

Antibiotics–Are You Drinking Them in Your Tap Water?

By Hardly Waite,  Gazette Senior Editor

Bacteria that cause everything from ear infections to pneumonia are becoming immune to antibiotics. The primary cause is over-use and misuse by doctors and patients, but significant levels of antibiotics in water supplies could compound the problem.–CBS Evening News.

    When a 15-year-old West Virginia high school student named Ashley Mulroy read an article about antibiotic pollution in European water supplies, she started wondering if the same thing might be happening the the U.S.  Ashley, doing something that it has apparently not occurred to U. S. environmental scientists to do, set out to conduct some tests for antibiotics as a school project. With the help of her mom, she took water samples from a variety of locations on the Ohio river near her home.  With no trouble at all,  she found drugs like Penicillin, Tetracycline and Vancomycin in the river water.

Her science teacher was so impressed by her work that he encouraged her to pursue the matter and her efforts eventually led to her winning the  prestigious Stockholm Junior Water Prize. Her prize-winning essay,  “Correlating Residual Antibiotic Contamination in Public Water to the Drug Resistance of Escherichia coli,”  examines how inefficient wastewater treatment processes can lead to antibiotic contamination in American waterways and, in some cases, progressive resistance among bacteria to those same antibiotics (Penicillin, Tetracycline and Vancomycin, for example) that once controlled them.

Few Americans are aware of the extent of antibiotic contamination of our waters.  This is a dark area that regulatory agencies and orthodox science have chosen to ignore.  Few Americans know, too, that a full 40%–almost half–of the antibiotics used in the United States do not go to treating human disease but are frivolously given to cattle for the purpose of fattening them rapidly and in the process fattening the profits of industrialized agribusiness.

The irony overwhelms one.  We have traded  the most potent medical tools ever developed for a few years of enhanced profits for Swift & Co

There is nothing anti-American about opposing the drive to war

Mike Marqusee
Guardian

Thursday October 4, 2001

“What’s at stake is democracy. Democracy wasn’t cancelled on the 11th of September, but democracy won’t survive if citizens turn into lemmings. If in the name of the war on terrorism President Bush hands the state over to the energy industry, it’s every patriot’s duty to join the loyal opposition.” –Bill Moyers.

Reading the fulminations against the alleged anti-Americanism of those opposed to the current drive to war, I feel I’ve come full circle. As an American teenager protesting against the butchery in Vietnam, I became accustomed to being attacked by some fellow citizens as anti-American. It always seemed frustratingly unfair. After all, we were Americans too, and so were the GIs we wanted to bring home, and wasn’t being American all about the right to entertain diverse views on our government’s policies?

Now, after 30 years abroad, I find myself in the dock once again for the thought-crime of “anti-Americanism”. This time, the charge is levelled not by US citizens, but by British liberals, including adoptive Americans such as Chris Hitchens and Salman Rushdie. I wonder what they would have said to Mahatma Gandhi, who told the people of the United States that their country was governed “by a few capitalist owners” whose “holdings cannot be sustained except by violence, veiled if not open” and that therefore “your wars will never ensure safety for democracy”. Or to Gandhi’s American disciple, Martin Luther King, who described the US government as “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today”.

The logic of the anti-American accusation remains as curious as ever. There is no rational basis for equating opposition to the demonstrably murderous policies pursued across the globe by the US government with hostility to the people of the United States. In my experience, the current anti-war protesters are motivated by a deep response to the suffering in New York and Washington. Surely it’s the politicians and commercial interests exploiting that suffering to promote their own long-standing agendas whose respect for the dead ought to be questioned.

In some quarters, the purpose of the anti-American jibe is simply to cast aspersions on the motives of dissenters in order to evade their arguments. Elsewhere, the impulses are different. People from many lands have long engaged in a passionate romance with America. This society of extraordinary wealth and diversity, with its contradictions, beauties and savageries, exerts a powerful fascination. What disturbs me in recent effusions (including Tony Blair’s invocation of the Statue of Liberty) is the glorification of the US as some kind of unique and sacrosanct human achievement, whose flaws are merely incidental, and of no relevance to our collective response to the September 11 atrocities.

This is an overseas variant of the aggressive boosterism that has for so long disfigured American political discourse and disarmed the American people in their own democratic arena. Too many British commentators seem intoxicated by America’s affluence, and too few evince any real knowledge or concern about the conditions in which most Americans actually live. What Americans need now is a realistic understanding of their nation’s place in the world, not the self-serving myths peddled by a corporate-sponsored political elite.

Since September 11 I’ve been in constant communication with friends and family in New York and Washington and overwhelmingly they oppose their government’s response to the terror attacks. They may be in a minority but they are as American as anyone else. I’ve also been in contact with friends in the peace movement across several continents. What has struck me is that so many of these people have sought refreshment at the well-springs of American popular culture, from soul music to Star Trek, and found inspiration in American social movements, from civil rights to gay liberation. Like the baseball lovers in Cuba and Nicaragua, they have no trouble distinguishing between a people’s culture and its government. They share an understanding that there is no monolithic America that one can reasonably be “pro” or “anti”. They reject the dangerous assumption that there is a single essence that defines a particular society, nation or culture. That delusion is the common ground between Bush, Bin Laden and the knee-jerk commentators who have fallen back on the charge of anti-Americanism.

Recent events have sent me scuttling back to one of my boyhood heroes, the peculiarly American writer Henry David Thoreau. In 1845, in protest against the US’s war with Mexico – a war of conquest driven by greed and jingoism – Thoreau refused to pay taxes and spent a night in jail. He explained his action in an essay entitled Civil Disobedience (it influenced both Gandhi and King). Thoreau urged America to “cherish its wise minority”. And argued that when “a whole country is unjustly overrun and conquered by a foreign army, and subjected to military law, I think it is not too soon for honest men to rebel and revolutionise. What makes this duty the more urgent is the fact that the country so overrun is not our own, but ours is the invading army”.

Mike Marqusee is author of Redemption Song: Muhammad Ali and the Spirit of the Sixties (Verso)

Reproduced courtesy of The Guardian.

Satan doesn’t wear sweaty socks

Jan. 19, 2002

by Matthew Parris

I love America. I love the place and I love the people. I admire the country as a nation. I spent two years as a postgraduate studying at Yale on a fellowship paid for by an American philanthropist, and assimilated fast.
I like their warmth, their courage, their vision. I like their individualism, energy and capitalist spirit; and I like their deep belief in liberty. You will not find a readier apologist for American values or the American way of life.

So if I sound a note of warning about the United States as a political ally, do not write me off as one of those sour European lefties with a grudge against Uncle Sam. I am a pro-American British Conservative.

My difficulty is not with America as America, but with Washington as a hoped-for coalition partner. Partnership in foreign policy is not in their nature. Consensus is not in their lexicon. They do not see their place in our world as we would do. America is either right outside, or right on top. For Americans, alongside is not an option.

My first encounter with this truth came at Yale in the 1970s. A group of us were talking about oil prices and Saudi Arabia. My friend Dave McCormack, a spirited Southerner from Charleston, had pointed out that while US hegemony protected producers from the Russians, US technology enabled Arabs to extract their oil, and US demand created the market in which to sell it. “It’s our oil, goddammit!” Dave roared.

He meant it. When Ronald Reagan remarked of the Panama Canal: “We built it; it’s ours; and we’re going to keep it,” he was tapping into the same vein.

The vein runs deep. It is not unusually greedy; and not, in any malignant way, bullying. It is a simple conviction that America will decide. Her citizens do not see her as one country among many but as nonpareil, the biggest, the best, the one-and-only: final judge of her own interests and a pretty fair judge of what’s good for the rest of us too.

None of this is inconsistent with a strong sense of justice: a sense of justice characterises America at home and abroad, but it will be their justice and they will be the arbiters. Nor is it inconsistent with a wish to do good abroad: no people have shown such a consistently generous ambition to make our world a better place.

But their help will be given ex gratia and its terms dictated by them. America will save the planet if America must, and it will pay the piper: but it will then call the tune. A negotiated process of cooperation is not what America has in mind.

It seems to me that the past century of international affairs points this lesson in no very shaded way. British dreams of a transatlantic marriage of interests are always being dashed, yet still hope triumphs over experience. My earliest political memory is Suez, a debacle on which it is unnecessary to elaborate. Succeeding memories are of a colonial boyhood in Southern Rhodesia.

The United States was running her own clear policy in Southern Africa at the time and it was unfriendly to British interests and our gradualist approach to decolonisation. The American Reading Room in Salisbury (now Harare) was a focal point for impatient young African nationalists whom America was eager to befriend before the Russians did.

Washington may have been right. My point is that it would not have occurred to them to reconsider if we had not agreed. Twenty years later the Queen was actually head of state in Grenada when America invaded the Caribbean island, to the acute discomfiture of Sir Geoffrey Howe, our Foreign Secretary. Tory Eurosceptics, ever-vigilant for threats from an alliance in whose policies we do have a say, carelessly recommend one where we don’t.

Now that President Bush has signed up Tony Blair as British Robin to the American Batman, is there reason to think these verities have been suspended? The question is not posed rhetorically, for there are some reasons for hope. Terrorism is, after all, against all our interests.

But how we define terrorism, where we diagnose it, and to what resorts we think it right to go in combating it, are debates in which we Europeans and the United States may find our preferred positions sliding apart. I think that slide began this week, as the unsavoury pantomime took to the stage in Guantanamo Bay.

Take Donald Rumsfeld’s angry brushing aside of concerns about the treatment of prisoners, an outburst which, from the Prime Minister down, members of the British Government have been trying to sidle past, looking the other way. Said the US Defence Secretary: “I do not feel the slightest concern at their treatment. They are being treated vastly better than they treated anybody else.” In a saloon bar this will do, but is that the standard? How much does the Secretary of State really know about these individuals? And why are they not prisoners of war? Face it: Mr Rumsfeld does not care about the niceties and cares little who knows it. Washington’s way of “fighting terror” is not, despite appearances, the same as Britain’s. We seek to project the message that there are rules to which all nations are subject. America has a simpler message: kill Americans, and you’re dead meat.

The British Foreign Office may huff and puff that US swagger is “counterproductive”, alienating “moderate Arab opinion”, but Washington proposes a different approach: show them who’s boss.

America — not Britain, Europe and America and not “the international community”, but America — is boss. On this analysis Rumsfeld with his visual aids — cages, razor-wire, manacles and sedating syringes — is not maladroit: he’s on message. Be sure that frantic private telegrams are winging their way over the Atlantic explaining the embarrassment this is causing Mr Blair. Be equally sure where Mr Bush is putting them.

America has simple gods and likes to keep her satan simple, too. Every populace has a tendency to see for a while evidence of a single demon’s fiendish plans beneath every stone, but Americans take this to extremes. In Salem it was once witches. In Senator Joe McCarthy’s heyday it was Commies. Now it is al-Qaeda. And September 11 offered tremendous provocation.

Of the brutality and ill-intent of the United States’ fundamentalist foe there can be no doubt, nor of the righteousness of American wrath. But this does not make their assessment of the foe accurate.

We are told on very little evidence that the al-Qaeda network is incredibly sophisticated, yet the things we know it has done have been relatively crude, the technology modest.

We are told (and the slavishness of the British press in printing this unquestioned is depressing) that al-Qaeda “masterminds” are at work here — in London, Leicester, or wherever else some fundamentalist nutcase with nasty ambitions and contacts abroad is found in a bedsit. But in the claimed evil genius about whom we do know a bit, Richard Reid, we see little to justify the term. This imbecile is about as inconspicuous as a bag-lady. He has been attracting suspicion wherever he goes. When he flies El Al it puts a marshal in the adjacent seat. He couldn’t even devise a way of detonating his own shoes, short of bending down in his aeroplane seat, with passengers around, and trying to set fire with matches to a foot-sweaty fuse. Why didn’t he go into the loo? If this really is the cream of al-Qaeda then things are less dire than we feared.

You, reader, will have furrowed your brow about some of this already.

So will a million others. A silent minority used likewise to wonder if half the village really were witches; if the goofy clerk at work really was a key communist spy. Of course al-Qaeda exists; of course it is numerous; of course it is murderous; of course it must be fought. But it is not the only, and may not even be the cleverest, terrorist organisation in the world.

Suicide bombing is as old as the bomb, and dangerous prisoners who would stop at nothing have been transported and held in custody since courts and prisons were invented.

This is not the greatest evil the world has ever seen, nor the cleverest, nor the first — and nor, certainly, will it be the last.

But America is moving into a phase of believing so, and America is apt to throw her weight around.

It may go to some lengths and last some time. We should hang back.

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What the Guys in Wigs Really Thought About God

I know that for some this will be like telling you that your mother isn’t a virgin, but someone’s got to say it

by Hardly Waite

Aug. 31, 2002

A Madrid newspaper recently said that the great Pledge of Allegiance debate in America was especially “emotional.”  And it should be, the paper remarked, “in a country that puts ‘In God We Trust’ on the item most sacred to its philosophy–the dollar.”

It’s funny yet sad to hear Americans–a full half of whom, polls now tell us, would be perfectly willing to give up their First Amendment guarantee to free speech in exchange for having to worry less about getting an anthrax letter or being infected with smallpox by the Evil Ones–to hear these same nervousnelly patriots whimper and whine about not getting to say “under God” when they repeat the “Pledge.”  After all, they always say, it’s what the Founding Fathers intended.

Never mind that the Pledge was dreamed up by someone a hundred years after the Founding Fathers had finished doing their intending,  and never mind that the “under God” part was not spliced into the Pledge until sixty or seventy years later, in the McCarthy years, when people were too afraid of being called Commies to suggest that it might not be quite in keeping with the separation of church and state. (That was around the same time, by the way,  when they started regularly putting “In God We Trust” on our national idol.)

And never mind that when the likes of Thomas Jefferson and Tom Paine and George Washington and Benjamin Franklin and Ethan Allan spoke of Nature’s God they weren’t even talking about the same Guy that the Undergodites are evoking–the insecure Almighty who has to be constantly reminded that we trust in Him and Him alone and who, the Bible thumpers admonish, may not be able to make good on all  his Armageddon threats unless America pitches in with some serious Arab ass kicking.

Thomas Jefferson said:  “I have examined all the known superstitions of the Word, and I do not find in our particular superstition of Christianity one redeeming feature.  They are all alike, founded on fables and mythology.”

Most of the guys in wigs, the Founding Fathers, whom the Undergodites like to cite as models of Christianity,  weren’t Christians at all in the sense that we use the word today. Not even remotely.   Most were deists, which means that they believed in a God of Nature.  This God is also sometimes called the Divine Clockmaker. He built the universe, wound it up, then went about his Divine Business while the thing runs itself.  He did not give a flip whether people said the Lord’s Prayer before the football game, or, for that matter, whether they coveted their neighbor’s ass or remembered the Sabbath day to keep it holy.

If Ethan Allan were around today, that lusty fellow would probably stop the Pledge in progress to demand an understanding about who exactly this God guy is. That’s what he did at his own wedding  He halted the ceremony at the first mention of God to make sure that everyone understood he was saying his vows before the God of Nature, not the cruel, jealous Old Man of the Old Testament.

As for the Bible, Jefferson liked to call it a “dunghill,” and Tom Paine said it was a dishonor to the Creator to attach his name to “this filthy book.”

Our first president thought Christianity was pretty silly.  Though he didn’t make a big deal about it in public, those who knew him attested that he tolerated it but didn’t believe a word of it.  And our second president, John Adams, called the concept of the divinity of Jesus a “convenient cover for absurdity,” and he signed into law a treaty which declared straightway that “the Government of the United States is not founded in any way on the Christian religion.”

I’ll leave off here with the presidents, except to say that in a sermon of October 1831, Episcopalian minister Bird Wilson was still able to say,  “Among all of our Presidents, from Washington downward, not one was a professor of religion, at least not of more than Unitarianism.”

So . . . for my part.  if you want to pledge under God or over God or under or over Anything Else, go ahead. It’s your nickel.   But please, spare me the “Founding Fathers” nonsense and the “Christian Nation” stuff. At the time of the Declaration of Independence, just 7% of Americans belonged to a church. Any church. That’s a fact.

Kissing Jesus

by Lisa Gabriele

May 1, 2002

One of my first crushes was on Jesus. I thought he was handsome and kind, but distracted and lonely; good in thought and deed, but the worst kind of hard-to-get imaginable. Jesus was probably a template for the guys I have fallen for since; those with overbearing dads and Messianic tendencies toward self-exile.

They can be somewhat intimate with many, though never fully intimate with one. Jesus had a hot body too, very rock-star skinny, and he was constantly half-naked. My dirty mind would wander under that loincloth, linger for a moment, then dissolve into a confused mist. I couldn’t imagine what hung dormant underneath — I just knew the Virgin Mary’s unsexy outfit and super-calm demeanor did nothing to draw me into her boring camp.

My friends and I used to practice kissing on Jesus’ life-sized statue in the cemetery across from the church. He was so often molested that you could see the pink-stained cement showing through the white-wash paint. When I tell non-Catholic friends about these dirty forays, they cringe in disbelief. But other Catholic girls understand because sex, for us, would never be a reality until blessed matrimony. Necking with Jesus at the age of ten was more about love than foreplay. It was benign and silly, not sexual and thrilling. And totally normal to us.

During this time, when thousands of priests stand accused of sexually abusing children and teenagers, I often think about these innocent interpretations of love. Recently, in the marbled Vatican halls, papal sycophants were heard tsk tsking The Amoral Americans. Their culture is soaked in sexual images. Americans place such huge premiums on sex. But it’s the other way around.

The Catholic Church is soaked in sexual imagery: Catholic schools are named after the Holy Conception, Mary is never without her virginal moniker, everyone’s on their knees, wine flows freely, and Jesus Christ is tongued and swallowed on a weekly basis. It’s the Catholic Church that places a huge premium on sex, simply by banning it outside the confines of marriage.

American pop culture has often remarked on the church’s twisted sexual hypocrisy. Lou Reed and Billy Joel extolled the virtues of Catholic girls, of adolescent flesh bursting out of plaid skirts and tight white shirts, and many of us lived up to the stereotype. We grew up to be sexual provocateurs, because in our religion, there’s no half-way. Catholicism teaches that women are holy vessels to be worshiped and adored, or filthy temptresses to be fucked and avoided.

As girls, we knew that once we started down that sordid path, there was only one way to go: hell, which is in the general direction of down. Hence the fact that Catholic girls are infamously great at giving head. How else to preserve the sanctity of virginity? How else to explain Madonna’s early appeal? Camille Paglia was the first to point out that Madonna used Catholic imagery to talk about sex; wearing those rosaries and crosses as thrillingly subversive accessories, she brought a pagan, backwards religion into the realm of shiny, pop culture.

Years after my crush on Jesus dissolved, along with my spiritual connection to Catholicism, our parish priest, Father J., left town in a cloud of sexual scandal. He allegedly molested some boys I knew, boys who’d never make these things up in the small, working-class town where I grew up. One boy, a neighbor, who was considered slower than his brothers and had endured years of taunts from kids like me, found solace as an altar boy. He was the first of six boys to come forward, claiming that Father J. molested them on a regular basis. Father J. was questioned by the church, released, then fled home to Malta before any formal investigation took place.

A.W. Richard Sipe, a former Catholic priest turned therapist, has spent four decades studying sexuality and abuse among Catholic priests. His numbers dovetail with other studies that claim nearly half of all priests are, or have been, sexually active. About a third are gay: half of them actively so. But with whom? Each other, and post-pubescent boys, it seems.

In the course of his research, Sipe administered psychological tests; he found that most Catholic priests have the average emotional and sexual maturity of a thirteen-year-old. Sipe claims priests mostly target sad, needy kids between eight and thirteen, because that’s with whom they psychologically relate, and consequently spend much time. Some priests were abused themselves, so they repeat the cycle, but most simply never advance beyond adolescence because celibacy doesn’t exactly foster sexual growth and maturity.

I now understand why I never wanted to be around priests all that much. The ones I’ve known, like Father J., were unintellectual, uninteresting and childlike. They hugged too much, smiled too easily, and nodded too readily, like black-clad, sacral Teletubbies. Their facial expressions floated between squinty, Robin Williams fakery and wide-armed, Michael Jackson creepiness.

And who can blame them: preaching celibacy and virginity until marriage is inherently infantilizing, a set of rules simple to understand but impossible to follow. The church must abolish celibacy so that priests can finally grow up. Let them fuck other consenting adults legally, because we now know they’re hiding more beneath those holy robes than sacred, throbbing hearts.

What’s being overlooked here is that celibacy is not an organic Christian tenant. Jesus did not preach celibacy, and there’s no proof that he lived by it. Celibacy is a medieval concoction, an eleventh century papal land-grab, which prevented property from being passed down to a priest’s son and has enjoyed a phony endurance for eight ignorant centuries. There is an irony here: Celibacy law may have made the Vatican rich, but victims of sexual abuse are now suing the Catholic Church for billions.

For guidance on how to handle the current crisis, the Vatican need only note how the Protestant, Anglican and Jewish faiths are coping with their respective sex scandals. Oh, right, they don’t have any. Those religions, though endorsing piety, do not endlessly obsess about sex, nor do they ask their clergy to take an impossible vow like celibacy. Those religions probably attract healthy-minded, sexually mature adults who enjoy physical expression and release with consensual partners who are not children. Meanwhile, the Catholic Church will continue to attract the sexually confused, stunted and ashamed to its blessedly shrinking ranks.

I used to defend my affinity for Catholicism as a kitschy hangover from my youth, when memorizing prayers, songs and psalms was comforting and fun. It made me feel a little holy back when I needed to belong to anything other than my own screwy family. But today I find sex and shame to be sorry bedfellows. When a religion tells you that a little masturbation will guarantee you a spot in hell, you have to laugh. How can you tackle the more challenging aspects of Catholicism, such as celibacy and sexual orientation, when you’re told a bit of diddling will result in eternal damnation?

Catholic shame nearly crippled me; I can only imagine it hits devout, homosexual teens even harder. They’re in love with a church that clearly hates them. For them, celibacy must be a weird panacea: maybe they can pace, chant, and pray away their demented thoughts! Lord knows, I tried. Problem is, you’re kneeling in front of a naked hottie, tortured, because of you and your rotten lust.

I’ve never wondered what type of person I might have become had I remained a virgin for my worthy husband. Nothing about that woman intrigues me, in all her pious obedience; a “good” girl who listens to her “wise” priest. But smart women walked away from the church long ago in droves, and it’s too bad.

The church needs vital women now more than ever, to bust up the male propensity towards hierarchy and stoicism, which have contributed to the church’s current perverted state. And frankly, Jesus never struck me as the type to live with hypocrisy or to live without passion, risk and worshipful babes.

Lisa Gabriele writes for Nerve.com, where this article originally appeared. 

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