Piece Of Mind

People are funny.

Obviously, we all like to believe that we are on the correct side of the fence on every issue.  In order to believe that we are right, we have to develop a perspective of what people on the other side of that fence believe.  We have a choice when developing these perceptions.  Do we do it from a distance, or do we do our best to talk to people who disagree with us to get an understanding of WHY they believe what they believe?

Along these lines, Steve over at Rabid Sanity and Wiley Cody over at Big Sky Cairn have shown their preference.  They like to look at us from a distance.  They’ve convinced themselves that (almost) all Liberals hold certain beliefs for very specific reasons.  Here’s the part from Wiley’s post that initially got me riled up:

Steve quotes extensively from an article that attempts to make sweeping claims about liberal in general. In my personal experience, many of the claims he makes ring true. Liberals claim to be for the little guy, but wealth redistribution is really just a way to force someone else to take care of the little guy. They are often motivated by jealousy disguised as perceptions of social injustice. They preach diversity while trying to force everyone to live exactly like they do (and hatefully attacking those whose ideals vary).

My responses and Cody’s non-response follow in the comment thread.  He skirts the issue, as he does so often when I deal with him.

This kind of thought is typical of Cody.  He’s quick to characterize, and slow to show us examples.  It begs the question:  What kind of “personal experience” is he talking about?  Did he get a Democrat drunk enough one night to expose his true motives for believing the way he does?  Did this Democrat (probably an unwashed, jobless hippie), slur the words “I don’t really believe in Social programs, I just want a handout from the Government.  I’m also extremely jealous of wealthy people and am anxious to get some of their money for myself without having to work for it.  I’m also convinced that we should use Government to force the population to believe exactly as I do.  I’ve made a secret pact with all other Democrats to never reveal our true motives.”  Or could it be that Cody’s just pulling this stuff out of his ass?

Why are Cody and Steve so anxious to give us liberals some kind of sinister motives behind our belief system?  The answer seems pretty obvious to me:  It prevents them from having to give any thought to the issues at hand.  If you’re busy believing that the other side is perpetually lazy and dishonest, why do any of the necessary groundwork to give your own beliefs some basis in understanding the other side?  Why bother arguing with real people when you can just characterize them?  Here’s the money quote, from Steve:

Integrity used to mean something. A man’s word was his bond. Now, a promise or a statement of fact are reneged as swiftly as the conditions warrant. Perhaps, I am too rigid in my thinking, but if I can’t trust the other side, why would I want to listen to anything that they say?

Why indeed, Steve?

UPDATE:

Disclaimer: Before the obvious retort of “The left does it too!!” is thrown at me, I wanted to tell you that I’m completely aware of it.  I’ve had lefties inform me that people who are in favor of the war are basically in favor of killing and not worthy of being listened to, and that Republicans are all anti-family.  This is not a left or right kind of problem.  It’s just intellectual laziness, and it’s equally palpable on both sides.

One of the few advantages of the aging process is the development of a cynical eye towards popular mythology. Very little in our kids’ history book is true as written, and even after passage of a decade or so, recent history is mythologized. Examples: The British attack on Washington in 1813 was in retaliation for an American attack on York (now Toronto), and not unprovoked; Alamo wasn’t fought for freedom, but rather for the right of Texans to hold slaves; Reagan played only a small part in the end of the Soviet Union, and Clinton didn’t attack Serbia for the sake of a few Albanian refugees. We sort of make this stuff up as we go. Each day we add new stories.

Here’s one that has just been debunked - the alleged “eyeball to eyeball” confrontation between the U.S. and the Soviet Union over nuclear missiles in Cuba in 1962. Books have been written (one by Robert F. Kennedy), a popular movie made (Thirteen Days, 2001) , all stressing that the U.S. drew a line, stood firm, and at the last moment, the Soviets backed down. That’s the official story, and it makes for good copy and an entertaining movie.

Not so, says National Security Archive, and a new book by Washington Post reporter Michale Dobbs called One Minute to Midnight: Kennedy, Khrushchev, and Castro on the Brink of Nuclear War. Dobbs plotted the position of warships on October 23 and 24 of 1962. By the time the Soviets were said to have blinked, they were already 500 miles away from the U.S. line of resistance and headed home.

On the other hand, ships that were within a few hours of Cuba went ahead and headed into port without U.S. interference. This included one ship carrying nuclear warheads:

According to Soviet shipping records, Khrushchev permitted five ships already close to Cuba to proceed to the island. Since these ships were only a few hours’ sailing time from the closest Cuban port, there was little risk that they would be intercepted by U.S. warships. The ships included the Aleksandrovsk, which was carrying nuclear warheads to Cuba, and its escort ship, the Almatyevsk, which arrived at the port of La Isabela at dawn on October 23. The three other ships were the Divnogorsk, the Dubno, and the Nikolaevsk. The Soviet leader also ordered four submarines armed with nuclear torpedoes to remain in the vicinity of the quarantine line. Ships and oil tankers carrying non-military equipment were authorized to proceed to Cuba.

Here’s where it gets interesting:

Adding to the concern at the White House was the presence of a Soviet submarine in the vicinity of the quarantine line. [See the contemporaneous notes of deputy defense secretary Roswell Gilpatric available here.] The Soviet submarine was a Foxtrot class diesel submarine commanded by Nikolai Shumkov. Its Soviet designation was B-130, and it was given the designation C-18 by the U.S. Navy. (Gilpatric uses the designation N-22, which may refer to a still classified NSA designation.) For details on the sightings of C-18 and other Soviet submarines, see U.S. Navy logs here. According to the Navy records, C-18/B-130 was first spotted at 11:04 a.m. on October 23 (1504Z) but it had evidently been picked up earlier by NSA electronic eavesdropping techniques. The submarine bore the number 945 on its conning tower.

At the request of the Pentagon, the State Department had sent a message to Moscow early on October 24 notifying the Kremlin of their intention to bring Soviet submarines to the surface. The signal consisted of practice depth charges dropped on top of the submarines. Information about the signals was never passed on to the Soviet submariners, who were alarmed to hear depth charges exploding around them. B-130 was eventually brought to the surface by the Essex carrier group.

It is here that we learn from Robert McNamara how close we were to a nuclear exchange. Soviet submarine commanders were under orders to launch nuclear weapons, but did not, and were severely criticized back home for failure to do so. From an article about McNamara in the British Guardian:

McNamara did not realise how crucial that exchange had been until forty years later when, a few months ago, he travelled to Moscow for a showing of the film [Thirteen Days]. Afterwards a “man with a straggly beard who looked like Bin Laden” got up to ask a question. It turned out to be one of the Russian submarine commanders, who revealed that the subs approaching the blockade were carrying nuclear-tipped torpedoes. He claimed that they had orders to shoot ‘when they thought it was desirable’ if they were out of radio contact. Several did lose touch with Moscow, and continued preparing to launch for days after Kruschev had ended the crisis. McNamara has since discovered that when these submarine crews returned to the USSR they were severely criticised and disciplined because they had not launched nuclear weapons. He is visibly shaken by this recent discovery: “We had never heard of that until that time. And I was so shocked I lost my cool”.

So the “eyeball to eyeball” showdown never happened, but the U.S. came very close to triggering a nuclear war anyway. Those were indeed dangerous times. More interesting to this cynic - was the U.S. intent on invading Cuba in 1962? Was that why the Soviets were installing missiles?

Steve, who has a little corner of the teapot tempest called “Rabid Sanity”, wrote about Barack Obama’s Social Security plan. As often happens in our haste to write stuff while also leading normal lives, Steve misinterpreted the Obama plan, asserting that he wants to eliminate the Social Security tax for anyone making less than $250,000. In fact, Obama wants to create a donut hole, taxing incomes up to $102,000, then applying no tax between $120,000 and $250,000. It’s a horse designed by a committee, but that’s what politics does to logic.

Steve also goes on to make some larger statements that do well to point out basic difference in right and left-wing outlooks.

For instance, in asserting that those making over $250,000 shouldn’t pay a FICA tax, Steve gives us the trickle-down litany:

Besides, what are they going to do with that approximately $75k anyway? Sure, they might not buy a new car this year causing unemployment in the auto industry, or they may not construct a new house causing further contraction in the construction industry. Or they may not invest it in a company preventing further enhancements to keep the company competitive, allowing all of that business to be speedily and orderly transferred to China. No, the rich won’t miss that money. But we will.

This is the essence of disagreement between left and right economic outlook - those on the right tend to think that the wealthy create wealth and incidentally bestow it upon us as they pursue more wealth for themselves. That’s why conservatives and libertarians lay prostrate before the wealthy classes.

We of the left attribute wealth creation to the sweat of one’s brow, and see it harvested by clever accumulators who have no particular interest in greater good and want only to accumulate more, no matter the cost to their fellow humans.

Another problem with this proposal: Does it change the basic social contract? For instance, at the moment everyone who works pays into the Social Security trust fund and expect to receive money back when they retire. The more you make, the more you are able to draw in retirement. But all workers would receive something more than just the equivalent of Social Security Supplemental Income [SSI], otherwise known as “federal welfare.”

I had trouble just parsing this. But it’s the logic of illogic - Steve is saying that since workers won’t be taxed under $250,000, Social Security becomes a welfare program, which is what the SSI program is. But that’s a step in the right direction - he tacitly admits that Social Security, as structured, is an insurance program. I’ll take what I can get.

This rending of the social fabric that would turn once proud workers into welfare recipients strikes me as appalling. I can only hope that Obama’s comments on his plan carry the same weight as support for Rev. Wright, or NAFTA, or clean campaigning, or campaign finance reform, or . . . well, you get the drift.

Well, that’s it. That’s all he wrote. I didn’t realize on first and second reading how little there there was there. But he exposes a lot of right wing thought. Their basic impulse is to scoff at any program that works in the general welfare. They misunderestimate us - they think we are all individualists who want nothing more what is good for ourselves, no matter the cost to others. This is the ethos of wealth accumulation and why we find this virus rampant among the wealthy.

People change as they grow wealthy - they become protective of their wealth, suspicious of their fellow humans. Because wealth is power, the wealthy often end up in control of government, and find themselves at war with ordinary people. In other countries this has translated into open warfare, torture, death squads, disappearances and imprisonment. In the United States, where our progressive forebears have given us strong laws to protect ordinary people, we have more power. The process is more subtle. Crafty politicians and their servile economists lure us into seductive reasoning to disown us of our best impulses to care for one another. They’ve given us trickle-down, anti-unionism, and anti-welfare. They fight any collectivist impulse among us. If they were honest, they would openly say that they hate unions, Medicare, Medicaid, and of course, Social Security. “Hate” is not too strong a word.

Steve doesn’t go that far. He’s not openly hostile to Social Security, though he is a fellow traveler of the right and does despair of an collectivist impulse. But in fact, people try to fit in larger communities, and we generally try to care for each other. In larger society, this basic familial instinct translates into welfare for the indigent, and health care for all, and a decent retirement for the elderly. These things cost money, and at are odds with instincts of the accumulators among us.

That’s what the right hates about the left. Conservatives want to remake us into self-serving beasts who are indifferent to one another, who let accumulators accumulate, who are at war with our good instincts. It should come as no surprise that people naturally reject right wing individualist philosophy and tend towards the ethos of greater good. It should also be no surprise that the right wing, in the end, backs authoritarian regimes, oppression and torture. They are ridding us of the disease of collectivism, and the iron fist is the cure. They want to remake us, by force if necessary.

II just got done reading another right wing editorial about solving our energy woes by drilling more oil wells. (Investors Business Daily, “What Do the Democrats Take us For? - you have to have a subscription, but any damned fool could have written it for them, so don’t bother.) It’s inescapable logic, hence its appeal to the right, but also (typical of right wing thinking) overlooks a few things:

In peak oil terms, there’s a couple of hundred billion barrels left to be discovered, but they won’t come on line fast enough to offset the decline that is going to take place naturally as we use up existing reserves. That’s already happening. Has been for many years now.

Drilling for oil and finding oil are two different things. ExxonMobil these days invests more money buying back its own stock than it does exploring. There’s a reason - most of the significant deposits have been found. The elephants are gone, rapidly depleting. What’s left to explore now are areas under polar ice (soon to be freed), and in Iraq, which deliberately set aside potential reserves for future development. That’s a big reason for invading - a very big part.

The electric car, which was used in California for a short while before GM canned it, was developed in response to strict California regulations forcing development of zero-emission vehicles. The regulations were killed, the car vanished. Fact is, necessity does spur invention, and the market is slow to respond, since it waits for an emergency, while government can be ahead of the game and create necessity through regulation.

If global warming is real … ah, don’t go there.

Even successful drilling will not overcome the declining dollar and market speculation. In terms of the euro, the price of oil hasn’t gone up that much. And since most oil is held in futures contracts hidden behind a black curtain, we don’t really know what it would trade for in a truly free market.

Why the push now to drill drill drill? It’s a never ending saga. Corporations have lobbyists because they want stuff from government - stuff like subsidies, exemption from regulation and, in this case, cheap access to the commons - our public lands. They are using the current price run-up to pressure the public into allowing them to drill the Alaska National Wildlife Refuge. That’s but one prize dangling before their eyes - others are protected offshore areas off our coastal areas. Drilling these areas won’t solve our energy problems - it will only extend the deadline by a few months. And it will be at least a decade before any new finds hit the market.

It’s public relations - the oil men are using current high prices to get the things they always want anyway. We need to hold the line. The real challenge right now is alternative energy, and it’s going to take a massive government effort to spur development. The private sector isn’t capable.

The private sector is not able to think long-term. They can’t see beyond next quarter’s results. Government, not subject to investor pressures to achieve instant results, can afford to think long-term.

Yeah, talking with our enemies sure is a bad idea.

If you guys on the right still need to find some kind of violence to watch in order to gratify yourselves, this will have to do.

What’s wrong with Obama’s foreign policy positions again?  Does anyone want to try and convince me that Kim Jong Il is somehow the sanest world leader we’re on bad terms with?

Developments [in the modern world] are not merely beyond man’s intellectual scope; they are also beyond him in volume and intensity; he simply cannot grasp the world’s economic and political problems. Faced with such matters, he feels his weakness, his inconsistency, his lack of effectiveness. He realizes he depends on decisions over which he has no control, and that realization drives him to despair. Man cannot stay in this situation too long. He needs an ideological veil to cover harsh reality, some consolation, a raison d’être, a sense of values. And only propaganda offers him a remedy for a basically intolerable situation. Jacques Ellul, “Propaganda, The Formation of Men’s Attitudes”

I feel this weakness every time I open a book or newspaper and read about current events. We are all essentially playing a game where we take the otherwise undecipherable events of a world that is complex beyond our ability to grasp and reduce them to manageable thoughts and concepts. Some of us who read a lot get very good at spraying words about, and can even deal conceptually in these matters, but it is really pretense.

The above quote isn’t talking about Joe Schmeau, the guy who doesn’t know whether to vote for Obama or McCain. He’s fine. His vote will rectify his despair. It’s talking about us pompous fools who think we really have a larger grasp of things. We are educated beyond 12th grade, given to one political outlook or another (liberal, libertarian, etc.), and we seek out propaganda. We need our propaganda. Without it, we can’t carry on with our essential business, that of having an opinion on every damned thing on the face of the earth.

The purpose of this post is to put my feet on the ground and accept that this is a game we play to fight our despair over our inability to control events that deeply affect our lives. We are hopelessly dependent on decisions and events we cannot understand, much less control. Putting up a blog is the ultimate expression of hopelessness. It’s a flimsy cover.

But it’s fun.

Words and phrases that ought to be stricken from politics (I might add to this list and please feel free to add your own):

Freedom, Hope, Terror, Family, Prayer, Change, Values, The People, God, Security, Reform, Common Sense, and of course, Kansas.

Locally, we should not be allowed to talk about “Montana values”.

Test your candidate: Without these words, does this person have anything left to talk about? Remove some of those words from the following ad, and what are we left with?

Let’s face it - American politics is not rocket science. There’s damned little that goes on in a campaign that actually translates into policy once an actor (marketed like a box of cereal; the star of 15 and 30 second TV spots) is elected. There appears to be two dynamics at work here:

1. The Republicans are captive of the far right, and McCain has to play to that base to get elected. He is getting more extreme by the day. If he abandons the far right, he’ll lose the fundamentalist Christians, the hard-nosed neocons, FOX News, and the Limbaugh/Hannity crowd. He may have nothing to replace them with. He may be destined to lose save some earth-shattering event, like an attack on Iran, not out of the question with Bush.

2. The Democrats are captives of the Democratic Leadership Council, and are following a tried and failed formula - they appeal to the liberals and progressives in the primaries, and then abandon them in the general, and once elected. Liberals will follow, progressives will bitch. We’re an easy lot to con. In case the metaphor of Lucy and the football hasn’t been used before, I am using it now. I suspect that Bob Schrum is in the Obama mix now somehow.

There’s more at work with the DLC than just (and only apparent) stupid politics. The DLC, financed as it is by powerful think tanks and corporations, is interested in thwarting progressives and holding liberals in its pocket. It is not so much interested in winning elections as keeping American politics sterile - no health care reform, no campaign finance reform, no end to Iraq, tacit acceptance of the Bush agenda, strategic retreat - these are policies that the DLC is set to advance, and if it means that certain elements of the Democratic Party have to be stopped in their tracks, if it means losing elections, it doesn’t matter. Policy is more important than party. These are not stupid people.

One of the most widely read posts I’ve ever put up here was titled “Obama, Lieberman and the DLC“, in January of 2007. I wondered about Obama back then before falling under his spell. Two things stood out - one, the DLC spotted Obama and wanted him aboard, and two, Obama chose Joe Lieberman as his mentor when he entered the Senate.

That’s circumstantial, and it’s going to take a body of evidence to prevail in a debate now about how the heart of the Democratic Party has once again been stolen by its right wing, the DLC. It will be a matter of preponderance of evidence, and it is beginning now to mount. Since Obama clinched, he has backed down on his stance on NAFTA, and abandoned the fourth amendment to the constitution. Those, denial aside, are two issues of huge importance, and he has screwed us. More to follow, I’m sure.

If indeed, Obama is part of the right wing of the party, then let’s all have a good and hearty laugh. So was Hillary Clinton. We were screwed all along!

Liberals are the most squeamish political faction I have ever seen, forever captive of the myth of lesser of evils. They’re afraid to rise up, to demand things from those who supposedly lead them. They castigate and chide one another for failure to follow. Even lefty Thom Hartmann on his radio program says that we have to hope that if we elect a right wing Democrat, he might turn out to be a progressive after all. So far, it hasn’t worked.

Karl Rove understands that if a politician plays to our noble and higher instincts, he will take a thrashing at the polls. American politics is about very smart marketing people packaging products and selling them to a very dumbed down audience. The best we can hope for in such a situation is that a politician is playing the game for show, but playing for real behind the scenes. This is why I wrote what I did before, deluded as I was, that we have to place our hope in Obama. I have a hard time admitting that I’m as susceptible as everyone else to a packaged and marketed politician.

Now is the time to pressure Obama into advancing liberal causes. To do that, we have to bargain. The only way to bargain is to threaten to withhold votes. It’s the only thing he understands. Somehow, liberals have to be able to inflict pain as a consequence of failure to lead. But they won’t. Max Baucus has never been swayed by liberals because he knows they cannot hurt him, and wouldn’t if they could. So too have liberals telegraphed Obama that it’s OK to ignore him. Just win. And then they’ll do what liberals are so good at doing - looking the other way while he carries on with the business of the DLC.

Note in passing: It’s just a blog. I try to remember that. I just linked to myself three times in this post. I’m the smartest guy I know, I guess. By my calculation, there are perhaps 25-100 of us who regularly pass through this and other places, more elsewhere than here. Most do it while they are at work, God bless ‘em, so traffic on Friday afternoons and on weekends is light. I like doing it, but always try to stay grounded. It doesn’t matter. Just like those people in the park who fly their toy planes on weekends, it’s a lot of fun, but not one passenger has even been transported anywhere.

The latest viral email making the rounds asserts that Barack Obama cannot be president because he is not a natural U.S. citizen. I got it from a friendly Bozeman conservative - I cannot reproduce the color and large print of the original (these emails are always designed visually to appeal to the sixth graders among us). But here it is in full:

Interesting question: CAN OBAMA BE PRESIDENT ???

It seems that Barack Obama is not qualified to be president after all for the following reason: Barack Obama is not legally a U.S. Natural-born citizen according to the law on the books at the time of his birth, which falls between December 24, 1952 to November 13, 1986.

US Law very clearly stipulates: ‘.If only one parent was a U.S. Citizen at the time of your birth, that parent must have resided in the United States for at least ten years, at least five of which had to be after the Age of 16.

Barack Obama’s father was not a U.S. Citizen and Obama’s mother was only 18 when Obama was born, which means though she had been a U.S. Citizen for 10 years, (or citizen perhaps because of Hawaii being a territory) the Mother fails the test for being so for at least 5 years **prior to** Barack Obama’s birth, but *after* age 16.

It doesn’t matter *after* . In essence, she was not old enough to qualify her son for automatic U.S. Citizenship. At most, there were only 2 years elapsed since his mother turned 16 at the time of Barack Obama’s birth. His mother would have needed to have been 16+5= 21 years old, at the time of Barack Obama’s birth for him to have been a natural-born citizen.

As aforementioned, she was a young college student at the time. Barack Obama was already 3 years old at that time his mother would have needed to have waited to have him as the only U.S. Citizen parent. Obama instead should have been naturalized, but even then, that would still disqualify him from holding the office.

Naturalized citizens are ineligible to hold the office of President. Though Barack Obama was sent back to Hawaii at age 10, all the other info does not matter because his mother is the one who needed to have been a U.S. Citizen for 10 years prior to his birth on August 4, 1961, with 5 of those years being after age 16. Further, Obama may have had to have remained in the country for some time to protect any citizenship he would have had, rather than living in Indonesia.

Stay tuned to your TV sets because I suspect some of this information will be leaking through over the next several days, weeks, and months.

The email is debunked here. He’s a citizen because he was born in the United States, the state of Hawaii, the 50th U.S. state at the time of his birth. Anyone born in this country, except for the children of diplomats, is a citizen automatically, by birth. Many would like to change that law, but it is a law, and was at the time of Obama’s birth. End of story.

More interesting is this: Where did this email originate? Who wrote it? How does it get into the “right” hands? (I am a left winger, and I never get left wing viral emails. What’s up with that?) Viral emails are a vital subculture in this land. Much information passes hands that way, much garbage is passed on without verification. If I were running a presidential campaign, and if I were unscrupulous, I would take advantage of the gullibility of ordinary people. I would make sure that untraceable emails like this went out on a regular basis. I would remember the words attributed to Mark Twain, that “a lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes.”

This email is officially debunked. Can’t wait for the next one.

June is by far the best time to be in Yellowstone, except for May. The crowds have not yet peaked, the landscape is still green, the animals still in the lush valleys. Wolves and grizzlies are killing and eating elk and bison babies, and bringing out their own young for viewing.

There’s a regular pack of people who watch wolves, kind of a paparazzi. It is led by an alpha-male, non-ranger-who-dresses-like-ranger Rick MacIntyre. Rick drives a yellow Nissan Exterra that has antennae on top, so he’s easily spotted. And 365 days a year he drives up and down LaMar Valley, chronicling every wolf kill, every pack interaction, every sighting. The wolves are spread now throughout Greater Yellowstone, mostly in the back country. Rick’s job is to foster public support, so he patrols the valley where they are most visible. He’s an excellent PR man, patiently answering every question asked and allowing we the rabble to view the wolves through his spotting scope. (Without one, wolves are nothing more than gnats.)

Anyway, my wife loves following the wolves, knows their names and numbers, and three or four times a year we go to Yellowstone to watch them and the other (lesser) animals. We’re thinking of using our stimulus money, if it ever comes, to buy a spotting scope. That’s how bad it has gotten.

This year is special. Gasoline prices are high, so the Yellowstone experience is not unlike one we had in Canada last year - free of monster motor homes clogging the highways and campgrounds. We stayed at Tower Falls campground this year, and it was filled with - get this - tents. Bear jams were manageable, as cars and pickups can sneak past one another. I counted motor homes in the Tower store parking lot - only one or two at any given time, and of the smaller Cruise America variety - none of the Greyhound class.

Yellowstone is a pleasurable experience again. Keep them gas prices high.

We got off the beaten path, hiking high above LaMar on Specimen Ridge. There were four of us and it was a beautiful day. Our hiking partners were a couple whom we met through mutual interest in wolves, and I knew I was going to like the male half of the couple when I learned that he did not fish. I’ve spent many a dinner party and barbecue talking about three things - the big three: hunting, fishing, and tools. With Martin there was a general interest in intuitive things like politics and history - he said he understood the mechanics of fishing, and also accepted that people catch and kill and eat fish. But fishing for pleasure? Catch and release? He, like me, draws a blank. Gratuitous indulgence for the human, life-threatening trauma for the fish. Nothing there for us.

Martin and his wife Ilona are both writers, he retired from McGraw Hill, where he edited a trade newsletter. That’s all I know at this time, but I look forward to learning more about them. I’m suspicious that Martin doesn’t hunt, and doubt he has a shop full of work toys behind his house in Jardine. If we by chance barbecue with them, we’ll won’t have the big three to talk about. What a pleasure that would be.

We have XM Satellite Radio, and driving through Paradise Valley on the way home, Channel 154, National Lampoon Comedy, was doing nothing but George Carlin. I was delighted (I can listen on ear phones as my wife enjoys her music or even silence). Only later did I learn that they were doing a tribute, that George had died.

That was a blow. George Carlin was the opposite of Tim Russert, the man whose death brought the scorn of proper folks upon me when I didn’t pay homage to his sycophancy. George was a candid observer, and he frankly admitted he didn’t care about us, our species. He thought we were jerks and fools - he delighted in describing the ways we kill and torture one another. He did the comedian’s most important function as well - he could Seinfeld. He reminded us of the little things that annoy us, like the driver whose turn signal has been blinking “since 1955″, etc. But George was more about the big stuff.

Everyone has a favorite George Carlin routine - I prefer to remember him for pointing out the obvious in all of his work - that we butcher and kill one another with ease and take pleasure in it; that necrophilia or torture are unique to our species, and that some among us are so pompous and self-important that they us have taken it upon themselves to “save the planet”.

The planet will do just fine, he reminded us. We are like a virus - we will pass through the system and do some damage, but the earth will adapt and continue on, easily recovering. Right now it is heating up, much as our bodies do when infected by bacteria. That may rid our planet of us, the pest.

In the end, said George, it may be that the earth was using us as an elaborate means to manufacture plastic.

I watched his last comedy special on HBO, and thought he looked more like an old man than ever before and wondered who would take his place when he died. With Russert, there’s any number of fools who will easily slide into the slot of “Dean of Journalism”. With Carlin, there’s perhaps Lewis Black, but it isn’t quite the same. He has the words but hasn’t quite embraced the music.

There was only one John Lennon, one Fred Rogers, and only one Carl Sagan. These are people who brought serious messages to us in an entertaining way. People of that caliber are indeed rare. There will never be another George Carlin.