stealing souls

I couldn't help posting this picture, taken at a recent art show I had the priviledge of being a part of, of a chap who happened to look almost exactly like the subject of the painting he perused. One of life's delightful coincidences. A glitch in the matrix, perhaps?

a smile and a sneer

Have you noticed that most of my posts have been either silly or satirical this last long while? I wonder if it's because I'm torn between a deep sorrow for which I cannot find words (and which I can only alleviate with laughter) and an unwillingness to let evil go unnoticed, or if, rather, I am just a lazy, failed intellectual unable to clearly state an opinion who is forced, as a result, to wallow in the ridiculous?

Wow! That sentence sure was a mouthful - a mouthful for which I do not have a ready answer. I think, instead, I will just add a silly picture and the following bitter diatribe...

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An old neighbor of mine recently suggested on his website that those environmental "scientists" who keep going on about "global warming" can't be making it up because they do not really have any reason to lie. I responded as follows:

"Sure, Juanito, on the surface of things it would seem that they don't have a reason to lie. But aren't you forgetting what Jerry Falwell said... that the whole global warming thing is just the devil's way of getting the church to ignore the important work of spreading the gospel? They're lying, you see, because the devil's making them do it - just like the devil is making those dirty, pinko-commie, "progressive", liberal "christians" lie and say that the "gospel" that Jesus brought us was about Ridiculous Grace that manifests itself as a desire for social justice and a loving, non-destructive lifestyle that seeks to live at peace with the whole world, both natural and human, thereby proving that the Kingdom of God is at hand - here! now!

Why can't these miscreants see that the True and only Gospel is about saving people like homos and liberals and abortionists from the burning fires of hell, where they'll most surely end up if we don't do something TODAY!

Seriously - what are they thinking! The earth can't be destroyed before God's timing (as it has been revealed through the completely literal testimony of the Book of Revelation and further illuminated in the sacred "Left Behind" series) - so nothing we do to the planet can affect that timing in one way or another.

God is completely in control of everything that happens ever. Everything that happens is God's first choice for how it could happen, and nothing we do can have the slightest effect on that. To suggest that God's best and God's choice might actually allow for us to make a few choices, now and then, is ludicrous! Anyone who says differently is a dirty fool, and if Our Father, John Calvin, were alive today, he'd have these heretics burned at the stake and poked, as they died, with sharp sticks.

The Bible, you see, is not so much a creative work of God through men who lived in a specific time as it is a sort of an elaboration of the ten commandments, which HE wrote with his very own FINGER. These are black-and-white prescriptions of Rules for Living, and the Only difficulty anyone can legitimately have with that is that there aren't enough of them. Even so, their meaning is always perfectly clear and perfectly in line with what we, today, think is right.

Sure, you might call it pride, in light of some of the misguided directions the church has taken in the past, for the modern church to think it has a direct line to the mind of God - but that was the past! Little indiscretions like the Crusades and the Salem Witch Trials and the wholehearted endorsement of Slavery were the historical misunderstandings of people who, unlike us, allowed themselves to be swayed by pride, economic influence, and political agenda. Today, however, through Progressive Revelation of the Most High directly to us (the collective Protestant, Conservative, Fundamentalist, Republican clump), we have at last arrived at a real and true understanding of the Mind of God.

That's right, His thoughts are actually Our thoughts and His ways are Our ways. At least, for the most part - enough for us to say with firm conviction, as revealed by God, that there is no such thing as global warming.

I rest my case."

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Too silly? Not silly enough? I just don't know any more. I do know, however, that as an expectant father, I'm going to have to stem the outrage if I'm going to give my kid-to-be a hopeful outlook on life. Ooops! Did I just admit that?

Yep, it's true. I've done my part to contribute to the overpopulation of this planet. Maybe it isn't an entirely bad thing - some of my more "fundy" relatives have informed me that the population is actually declining in the west, and only in those dirty muslim and communist countries is the population exploding. Having kids, apparently, is for me a way of fighting off the domestic labor shortage and keeping out those questionably brainwashed immigrants.

Who would have thought that procreation, aside from being such a rollicking good time, could also be so political?

if you can't hold your head up high... try holding something else

Every time I try to write my way into an understanding of the quintessential ennui of my generation, I find myself chasing rabbits around trees and into holes - and I never seem to end up in wonderland.

Are you a man... or a mouse?

The first and absolutely most importantest thing about being a Real Man is to pee standing up. This is because you have a penis, which distinguishes you from women, who can't pee standing up because it is too messy. It is pretty messy for you, too (what with all the splatter), but you still have to do it because it shows that you can do things girls cannot. Being a Real Man - and pay attention, because this is the untanned , bare bodkin of the matter - is about showing dominance by being able to do more things (and better) than other men.

Take war, for instance. War has always been a great way for men to prove they're real by showing other men that they're better at swordplay and inventing nifty and (...er) inventive ways to kill their enemies, and their enemy's wives, and concubines, and children - yea, even unto the fourth generation (so help me God). This is cool - not just because of the the killing, though. There's also the violence that leads up to the killing, and the preparation and planning and strategizing that, like chess, allows you to show that you're more clever and crafty and intelligent than other men as you kill them. This, obviously, makes you more real.

Unfortunately, war has undergone in recent years a bit of a dip in popularity among the more educated classes. See, while war was always a very real, very final way of proving your manhood (because, let's face it, if you are alive and the other guy is only decomposing, carbon-based putty, you win the Real Man contest) there has always been the pesky little problem of the writhing and the screaming and the rolling on the ground, groaning for death to come. Not very manly, you'll agree.

Previously, the men who lived through war shrugged these dying pansies off and went back to sharpening their swords. Then an irrevocable event occurred - one of those rolling, screaming guys actually lived, went home, and made a movie about it. The movie wasn't pretty and so, for the first time, men started to doubt whether war was such a good idea, after all. Why go die in great pain ourselves, they wondered, when we can build up patriotic fervor and get all the males from the lower income, "lower class" families to go off and fight instead? That way, we get the benefits of war without the potential for getting our heads blown off. Population stays firmly under control and there are always plenty of women around.

This introduces, indirectly, two of the other main ways to be a Real Man - having lots of money and women. We'll get to that later, but first I should talk about sports.

From the beginning of time, sports have been fairly well derivative of war activities. The pre-Incans, for instance, played a game very much like basketball, with the notable difference that the losing team forfeited their lives, wives and manly toys to the victors. Then there was jousting in the middle ages, fencing, boxing, karate and football - all ways to enjoy the violence of war without the inconvenience of a stinking, rotting corpse. Elaborate rules developed over time in sports to ensure that (for the most part) all players stayed alive, but the same basic drive underwrote them all - dominate the opponent and by so doing prove that you are more of a Real Man. And if, as a man, you find it overly painful to wait for a final score to prove dominance, there's always smack, trash, or junk to be talked.

Now, the sad truth is that not everyone can be the most dominant - not even the many rich, talented people who so deserve that distinction. Fortunately, sport offers a variety of alternatives for the "losers". First, there are a whole mess of levels of sport, so that even if you are not the world's best, you can at least be the best in your country, or region, or town, or street. As long as you're not the absolute worst person at absolutely every sport, you can still consider yourself to be dominant, and therefore a Real Man.

And if, by some freak of nature, you don't actually like any sports, there are quite a few other ways that you can dominate other men. Like the aforementioned chess, or being a popular artist, or war strategizing (as long as it's the rednecks getting shot up, it's ok), or academia (debate, papers, et cetera), or building large buildings, or... or... nope, I think that's it. But seriously, you should probably get with the program.

Still, even if you suck at sports and can't build buildings, you have the option of revelling in glorious, vicarious Real Manhood. All you have to do is pick a team to be "yours". Then, when they dominate another team, you can prattle on about how "we" did this and that and the other. The best part is that if your team loses, they quickly become "those jerks" who just can't seem to get it together (the idiots). It is almost better than real sports or war, because you just can't lose.

Still, you can't always be going to war or encouraging others to go to war or watching or playing sports. That's where the money I mentioned earlier comes in. Have lots of it. It is that simple, and I don't think I really need to dwell on it. Have lots of money, and demonstrate your dominance over other men by buying the most expensive stuff you can afford. And if you can't afford it, buy it anyways - have I made it clear that your manhood is at stake?

Possession, you see, is another form of dominance, of power, of control. It's nine-tenths of the law, for Jim's sake! This leads to a note on women. Do whatever you have to to get a woman other men want. In fact, get lots of them. The more you get, the better. The Real Man's motto is as follows: "women want me, and men want to be me". The two things are intrinsically interconnected. Don't forget it.

Oh, and by the way, one of the best ways to possess women is to be a real man in other ways - like by killing their husbands or beating everyone at sports or owning the most expensive house, clothes, toys, tech and cars. Women dig that stuff, because they understand that their place in life is to be Ornaments to the monoliths that are Real Men. This is an important point: there is no such thing as a Real Woman. Women achieve and lose reality in relation to how they are perceived, desired and possessed by men. I mean, seriously - what woman ever started a war? Or peed standing up? Or asserted obstreperously in public assembly that another group of women (as distinguished by race, creed or economic status) was inferior and should be dominated? None. Ever. I rest my case.

Women do, however, serve many important purposes. They do housework, for instance, which allows men more time to dominate other men, prove their Real Manhood, and justify the possession of the aforementioned wife. Even if they do want to go out and get a "job", that will just end up bringing in more money to cover basic household stuff, which means more money for toys.

Also, they bear children - who are possibly the most important emblems of a man's dominance. Children allow a man to take another human life and shape it, from the cradle, into the sort of person he wishes it to be. A man teaches his children their place and their roles in the hope that they will one day go on to remember him to future generations as a Real Man. It is important to be remembered so you can dominate more than just the people who happen, by circumstances beyond your control, to perpetrate the indignity of populating a time other than your own. The key is to extend your power as far as possible. That's how you'll be a Real Man.

This fathering bit is tricky, though. Sons, for instance, tend to think that they have to show their dominance by killing their fathers - or by ignoring them, which amounts to pretty much the same thing. There is no easy solution to Patricide. Except suicide, which is unmanly (unless, of course, it occurs in battle). This is unfortunate, but inevitable. The struggle to be a Real Man is always that - a struggle. You never fully succeed, because there will always be other men lurking around, trying to dominate you in turn.

But do not falter, men, and do not fail. You must persevere, because this is the way things are, have been, and always will be. Take pride. Crush the weak. Win always. Be strong. Be men.

the Great Potato

Ironically enough, it may very well have been the tragedy of the Great Potato Blight that cemented in the corporate Mind of America the comforting (and completely erroneous) idea that potato cultivation originated in Ireland. The mass emigration that resulted from this catastrophe brought the Irish (and their potatoes) in droves to the crowded halls of Ellis Island and the historical psyche of North America.

This misunderstanding might be laughable, if not for the fact that it directly diminishes the rich cultural heritage of Peru, the country where for seventeen of my most formative years I made my home.

Peru, in point of fact, is the country of origin for the cultivation of the starchy tubers, and boasts a panoply of no less than thirty-four varieties, which are prepared in numerous delectable ways in a variety of dishes by Peruvian chefs, cooks and housewives - perhaps the most highly esteemed preparers of potatoes in all of Latin America - if not the world.

This potato diversification and specialization traces its roots (pardon the pun) to one distinct and very nearly forgotten pre-Incan societal grouping known as the Cotahutecs, who first harnessed the nitrogen-fixating properties of the plant and created a staple that would not be discovered in Europe for over two thousand years.

Dr. Hiram Bingham, discoverer of the long-lost Incan holy city of Macchu Picchu, devoted the latter years of his life to the study of the Cotahutecs, and while he was often quoted as saying that he felt that these people were his greatest discovery, the spectacularity of the hilltop city has overshadowed his work and doomed the highly developed culture to anthropological obscurity. Such is the tragedy of modern-day pop history.

I write, therefore, in the hope that this article might shed some light on this fascinating people and their most spectacular discovery, the "cotahuatexsacsayhuaman" which, loosely translated, is the legendary "Great Potato". Most of the information we have on the Great Potato is derived from conjecture, inference and legend, but this we know for certain: the Great Potato was like no potato the world has available to it today.

It has been demonstrated that the Incas, descendants of the Cotahutecs, where an extremely developed society, with stonemasonry unmatched in the modern world and an impressive list of accomplishments in science and medicine that we struggle to comprehend, including successful brain surgery and a highly efficient postal system.

What, then, is so great about the Great Potato? Well, this particular variety, from which all Peruvian potatoes are derived, allegedly had properties as a hallucinogen unparalleled in the modern world. Not only did it allow those privileged to eat it the ability to transcend both space and time, but it also had virtually no side effects. Furthermore, the Potato was said to impart, on consumption, a euphoria similar in nature to a mildly orgasmic experience - a sensation that lasted not seconds or minutes - but weeks. This euphoria, hieroglyphic evidence seems to indicate, removed from the Cotahutecs the normal human attributes of strife and bitterness that prompt the aggressions that so often lead to war and allowed them, instead, through a careful diplomacy of culture, to subsume the cultures around them and to usher in an era of great peace and prosperity in which the advancements so often attributed to the Incas were free to develop.

It is for this reason, Dr. Bingham said, that his "earlier Incan discoveries were not, as has been supposed, the work of the historical giants the Incas, but rather the patient, methodical labour of giants upon whose shoulders the Incans were barely fit to rest."

The Incan civilization, in fact, represents the decline of a once great culture. The horticulturally exact techniques for the cultivation of the Great Potato had been lost, you see, in the excesses that resulted (perhaps inevitably) from the wild successes of their forbears. Gradually greed and fear, those most universal of human attributes, crept back into the minds and hearts of the Incas. They became a brutally violent , superstitious people, with the result that when the Spanish Conquistador Diego Velazquez Hidalgo arrived in 1380 A.D., he needed little more than a flash of shiny armor and a show of modern weaponry to bring the Incan empire crashing down into ignominious subjugation. The Fall of the Incan Empire is thus understood in a historically plausible manner that still, somehow, does not fit well with traditional theories more appealing to our modern sensibilities - like, for instance, the idea of the subjugation of a peaceful, highly developed society by the grinding Imperialism of Western colonial expansion.

But is this, in fact, the case? In true postmodern form, this author cannot help but meander haphazardly towards the bottomless pit of historical deconstructionism. There is something in this story that does not sit just right. Could it be, rather, that the Cotahutecs were not, in fact, the superiors of Dr. Bingham's reckoning?

One minor Peruvian scholar, a Senor Alberto Guzman, has suggested (in, we must admit, true Marxist fashion) that "the Cult of the Great Potato", as he calls it, was "yet another religious mythology foisted upon the proletariat by a bourgeoisie elite intent on gathering under their fat jowls as much power and influence as possible." He goes on to argue that it was the Cotahutec Priests of the Great Potato who invented the mythology of the Potato's properties in order to control the people and manipulate them in the direction that they (that is, the priests) wished them to go. There is no direct archaeological evidence, he argues, "to indicate that a single non-priest ever tasted the smallest bite of the Great Potato, the secrets for the cultivation of which were as closely guarded as was once the Chinese method for the production of silk."

Guzman suggests that even though the early priests seem to have had the best interests of the people in mind (as evidenced by their many positive advancements), the inevitable corruption of the power they thus attained through such unscrupulous methods inevitably contributed to - or caused - their degeneration.

This theory, as well, deserves credence - if only for the fact that a staunch Marxist such as Guzman would admit that dialectical progression, in this case, had resulted in a downward (rather than upwards) slide, and that political ends do not always justify their means.

Another, perhaps more acceptable theory emerges. Could this all: the Cotahutecs, the Great Potato - everything, be the product of a deranged and yet highly creative mind, writing fact and fabrication into a tapestry so tightly interwoven that the undiscerning Internet patron is unable to distinguish between the two?

Could the Conquistador Diego Velazquez Hidalgo be a court painter in the Spanish Baroque era? Could Alberto Guzman be the man who led the Peruvian, Marxist terrorist group the Sendero Luminoso through the Eighties and early Nineties? Could the very Cotahutecs themselves be gibberish, distilled in the mind of a writer with far to little verisimilitudinal integrity? And finally, could the concept of the religion of "the Great Potato" be an idea formulated in 1997 by a couple of high school kids plotting a path to the wealth inherent in the founding of new religions?

These are intriguing questions that even this author is unwilling to dismiss lightly. As insane and paradigm-shattering as they may seem, the fact remains that the Internet is a huge, unregulated frontier, where the possibilities for the dissemination of information both true and false is endless - the perfect vehicle for the expression of the postmodern disconnect.

What, then, can our response be to a situation where truth is so easily manipulated? There are no easy answers, but I'm sure they Cotahutecs (if they even existed) wouldn't want us to worry about it.

The End.

riding the titillation wave

Jack Handy once said, "Broken promises don't bother me. I just think... why did they believe me?"

It's funny, I think, because it is so very true. The thing I've been noticing about people the past few years (well, one of the things) is that most of them don't seem to mind at all if they break their word. Mostly it's just the little things. Like, folks will say they want to do something, and then they'll call you up shortly before the planned time and say that, basically, something they wanted to do more has come up. Or they don't call.

My parents beat it into me that telling the truth was super-primo important. Then, in my pre-teen years when I was snarfing down Louis L'amour novels by the dozen, I learned that if you wanted to follow the cowboy way, you had to tell the truth, because "a man is only as good as his word". I took this to mean that once you told someone you would do something, you would go ahead and do it. Or at the very least, if something else came up that would be oh-so-much-more-fun, before you'd agree to a change of plans you would call back the first person and let them know about the new option - to ask if it would be OK to do it and perhaps even to invite them along. It's common courtesy, right? Wrong. Maybe I'm just hanging out with the wrong sort of people, but the little broken promise thing keeps happening all the time, and with folks who generally seem to be reasonably decent.

Why is this? Well, it seems to me that this is just a dribble-down effect of the self-centered attitude taught with great gusto by our overly individualistic society. If individuals are the most important thing, and I am an individual, then it stands to reason that I am the most important thing. Therefore, if we've planned to hang out fishin' at the old water hole and some ludicrously wealthy uncle drops by and offers to take me out in his luxurious yacht to troll for sailfish, I'm going to say yes without giving you a second thought. Furthermore, since I don't want to jeapordize my chances with uncle moneybags, I won't even think about asking him if I can bring a freind.

This is raw capitalism as an individual's strategy for living. The economics of narcissism preclude commitment. Without commitment, real relationship is not possible, and without real relationship, true community cannot form. The self-actualized modern person, then, floats alone through life, blown hither and yon on the breezes of titillation, blissfully unaware that he or she is little more than a selfish child, an instinctual beast.