Mitt Romney and the Temple of Doom

Christopher Hitchens, my favorite conservative athiest, has written a crackerjack editorial about Romney's duck, cover, obfuscate and dodge strategy with regard to his religion and answering questions about it in the press.  My position:  While I hold no personal animosty toward individual Mormons per se (with the lone exception being Orson Scott Card), the church as a whole has the kind of nutty supernatural/science fiction nonsense shared by Scientology.  Purported golden plates and faux old testiment nomenclature are not enough to make me a believer.  As I have said before and am proud to say again, I believe Joseph Smith was a False Prophet.  If I didn't, I would be a Mormon, wouldn't I?  I suppose that goes without saying, and that by saying it, I'm effectively spitting in the eye of the CJCLDS--be that as it may.  The famous anti-Morman South Park episode, which turns the tables at the end, taught us: all religions are a little bit nutty--what the church believes doesn't matter, it's what the flock does that matters.

Oh, really? 

Hitch raises the specters of racism and polygamy that the LDS eschewed by prophetic fiat at critically convenient times.  Some might see that as divine inspiration, while others might see it as the Prophet holding his spit-covered finger in the wind.

My position: I don't know what's in Romney's heart, nor do I presume to judge.  I only know what he does, and says.  Right now, he's saying nothing about an issue that matters.

Gaming

Why don't I like Dungeons & Dragons 3.5 as much as I should?  The game is far too complex.  Rules for rules's sake really, which relegates story and structure to the back burner. 

I like roleplaying games because I get to play a role--not roll a bunch a dice.  Role/roll--get it?

I still think that Chaosium's Fantasy Roleplaying (CFR) is the best system I've ever used.  Granted characters can die much more easily than in D&D, but them's the breaks as they say.  I became familiar with CFR playing Call of Cthulhu.  The "game" aspect of the activity was simply a method for gathering a group together to create interactive stories in which the game designer creates the scenario and the players interact with each other and the given circumstances.  This is the kind of gaming I like.  Fast.  And roll checks are simply there to throw obstructions in the players' paths.  Because if it's too easy, it's no fun.

But it's also no fun if it's too hard!  I played D&D last night, but it is simply too complex.  In order to combat the drow rogue I was fighting, I had to stand inside an anti-magic area which negated all my magic bonuses.  I didn't care to do the necessary math so I simply made up a number.  I guessed.  When you're roleplaying, it's difficult to engage the part of the mind responsible for calculations and math.  So I simply don't.  Not my job, as they say.  My job is to roll dice and have fun.  Someone else has to do the math.

Political Pragmatism

Okay, so I didn't vote today and I don't plan to.  I'm leaving the area in a few months and they can have it.  It's hard not to get apathetic when the majority of the electorate votes against new sports stadiums several times and they get built anyway, and when the majority votes for a particular kind of mass transit four times and it doesn't get built.  But that's Seattle politics for you.  Democracy shemocracy.

We can't let issues of such importance be left to an uneducated and politically incorrect electorate!

I'm tired of political correctness, except when I'm not.  What I really want to discuss today are gay Republicans.  Or more specifically, Republicans caught with their pants down with someone of their same gender.  Usually with Republicans there's at least a generational age difference between the two parties, usually but not always, boys.

Thus do gay activists get their homophobic cake and eat it too.  First, a member of a party that is unfriendly to gay concerns is outed as a gay person themselves, and by extension a hypocrite.  Another c**ksucker is exposed in the party of family values, is the subtext, and gay activists know it, and they know it's homophobic.  Their rationale is that they're using homophobia against the homophobes.  But they know the hate and the irony go even deeper.

They know that political correctness has seeped into the very fabric of American life there will be Republicans who will not deal harshly with the gay Republicans exposed in their midst because they don't want to appear to be gay bashing.  They don't want to appear to be the homophobes they probably are...

Gay activists know that this is how they'll react.  So the gay Republican at the center of the scandal is allowed to keep his position because his party members don't want to appear to be intolerant and some of them really are tolerant.  But the gay activists know that the longer the gay Republican stays in office the more difficult it is for the party of Lincoln to appear to be the party of family values.  The gay activists are counting on those gay Republicans at the center of the storm to become a priori evidence of Republican hypocrisy at the next election.

Thus are the gay activists exposed as the homophobes they are.  But hey--it's a political win-win for them...  Karl Rove isn't the only one who knows how to use fags to further his own political ends.

Studying Genocide

Pacific Lutheran University has received an endowment for a Holocaust Studies chair.  I've never heard of such a thing, but it makes sense.  I've researched only one of the concentration camps, KZ Mauthausen, and have discovered that what I knew about the holocaust before undertaking the research was a mere drop in the ocean.  I learned enough to know that I knew very little. 

So much of what I knew about the holocaust was based on films and television, and the odd documentary or two that I had glimpsed.  The truth of the horror was far more involved, planned, and complex than I had imagined.  The genocide of the European Jews was an industry that employed tens of thousands of people - only a fraction of whom were ever brought to justice. 

We must find a way to understand how it happened.  To simply say it was the abberant result of a madman's fiendish plan is to completely discount the possibility that it was the result of a fundamental shift in the conscious, shared perception of reality in the minds of millions.  And that it was facilitated by the poison of propaganda.

We look back at the militarized politics of Germany and say that it could never happen here.  But it may be happening right now!  In 60 years, how will the world look back on what we're doing, or allowing to be done, by our leaders?

Soon all who had direct personal experiences during the holocaust will pass away.  We must find a way to preserve their stories.

Life of the Party

Pardon my silence.  I've been so busy over the past few weeks.  I have a new part time job writing for the Bella Sara website. and we've been trying to do a major update that launches today.  Please visit the site, learn more about the fantastic world of Bella Sara, and most important, buy cards.  

I also went to a Halloween party on Saturday.  The theme was Rock & Roll.  I went as the only rocker I'm qualified to impersonate: Meat Loaf.  Had a lot of fun singing Karaoke.  I learned through this experience that pop songs are very difficult to sing.  The recording artists make it seem easy--which is why they make the big bucks.  I suppose it helps when the song is arranged in your key.

Finally, politics:  I'm not embarrassed to admit that from time to time I watch Fox News.  And that usually means Bill O'Reilly.  (I also watch Keith Obermann's trenchant, sardonic critiques of Mr. O'R as well).  At any rate, I was watching the other day and something he said had stuck with me.  He had on one of his bimbos that he "converses" with--essentially they are there so that he can have a dialogue with himself.  She read a dictionary definition of "patriotism" that defined is as having love or allegiance to their country's "authority."  My heart sank.  (i.e.: I fell for it...)  I certainly don't love or pledge allegiance to our current president.  Could that mean I am truly not patriotic?

Hold your horses buster!  Authority in the United States is vested solely in the Constitution--not in any one man--not in any administration.  Yes, I can condemn, disparage, criticise, hold in contempt, and otherwise denigrate the President without being unpatriotic because I think he's vile and pursuing policies contrary to the values I think America stands for.  I am a patriot after all even by the Bimbo's definition!

One final thing--the Supreme Court agreed to hear the appeal on the Exxon matter.  That means there will be no resolution for another year.  Once this collection of corporatist, right wing idealogues gets hold of it, there'll be nothing left. 

One paralegal here opined that their easiest route would be to simply declare that Maritime law applies, and there are no punitive damages in Maritime law.  I think that will probablyhappen.  They wouldn't have agreed to hear the case if they didn't think that there was a possibility of reversal.

Comparisons are odorous

In Shakespeare's masterpiece Much Ado About Nothing, one of his characters, Dogberry, says to his sidekick Verges:  "Comparisons are odorous.  Palabras, neighbor Verges."  A little research reveals that the phrase is a malapropism: what Dogberry means to say is that comparisons are odious.  That phrase pops up in Cervantes, Donne, Marlow, and Sir John Fortescue; it was a common axiom, proverb, expression of the time.  Palabra means a word, or to talk, possibly related to the root of "palaver."  Dogberry seems to be cautioning Verges to "get to the point."  Shakespeare sui generis certainly knew the difference between odious, "something foul" with odorous "something that smells foul."  Odorous is a much more sensory, concrete evocation of foulness than the abstraction odious.

For Dogberry the line is a tossoff, a response to a nonsensical simile that Verges made in the previous line of dialogue.  But its implication runs deep.  And it is a phrase that means a great deal to me personally, ever since I played Verges in 1981.

One of the axioms heard in Alcoholics Anonymous meetings is: Don't compare your insides to someone else's outsides.  It makes a good deal of sense.  The axiom cautions against looking at someone else's success and comparing your own situation to that, and finding yourself lacking.

Success has not come easily for me.  In some ways I am successful, but in other ways I wish I were more successful.  Yesterday I received an e-mail from Pacific Northwest Writer's Association that our monthly talk would be given by Seattle author Jim Thayer.  Thayer has not only written and published 12 thrillers, he's also maintained a law practice, and runs an editing service.  Compared to him, I felt quite inadequate.  My fevered brain began bellowing at me.  And last night I had a very difficult night--a nightmare woke me up moaning with terror (Molly was quite upset) and other problems sleeping. 

I need to remember the wisdom I learned from my good friend and former sponsor Matt Hornyak: There's success at every level, and there's value in that, no matter what level you're on. 

Inept Democrats

A letter castigating Rush Limbaugh for calling troops who disagree with him about the War in Iraq "phony soldiers" has backfired on the senators who signed it.  Rush is auctioning the letter on E-bay with proceeds going to an education fund for children of Marines KIA.  (The fund has already dispersed $29 million in scholarships--this is significant).  Rush has turned the tables on the senators, showing them up as inept grandstanders, just exactly like the senators who signed onto the condemnation of MoveOn.org's Petreus/Betray Us ad.  The republicans seem to know instinctively how to seize upon a political opportunity and squeeze every millileter of juice out of it.  Democrats, attempting the very same strategy, stumble, bumble and issue incoherent, pathetic diatribes. 

The sad fact for America is that the democrat's ineptitude never rises (or lowers) to the incompetence of the republicans when the republicans are actually governing.  Why?  Arrogance.  Democrats are incoherent sometimes because they're always self-reflective.  They often change their minds.  When they do they're called flip-floppers.  Republicans have the luxury of total self-confidence, sure in the knowledge that they are completely, and totally correct in everything they do and think.  When is America going to get tired of this mind-set?  That's the only thing that will bring about the sea-change necessary to rescue our democracy from the hands of those who place ideology above the law.

Personally, I'm content with the shifting of poles between democrat and republican power.  From time to time we need a big bully in the white house in order to show the rest of the world that the U.S. is not to be trifled with.  But most of the time, I'm much happier with a democrat who builds bridges (rather than watches them fall down--as the residents of Minnesota know all too well George Bush has done).