It's God's Water

or
In Praise of Darwin

I stopped arguing about religion quite some time ago. I stopped thinking about God when I was about seven or eight years old. It seemed pretty pointless back then and even more so now. Death seems to be a particularly insignificant issue to consider in anything other than practical terms. Everyone dies and we don’t know anything that happens afterward. Get over it.

I don’t see how a lifetime of religious education makes someone more qualified to discuss something that cannot be proved. If you get the Pope, the Ayatollah Khomeini, Billy Graham, 20 esteemed rabbis, and the Mormon Tabernacle Choir together to discuss religion, the result wouldn’t be any more profound for me than listening to the stoned teenagers in Super Troopers talk about who owns the water. “You can’t own the water…it’s God’s water.” Well put, your Excellency. I don’t think the Ayatollah could have said it any better.

There are dozens and dozens of creation and salvation myths out there all vying to dominate one culture or another, or one culture over another. The Enlightenment was so named because it was thought that mankind could finally accept the light of more rational explanations for the world around him instead of relying on the tyranny of church teachings. Hundreds of years later the Enlightenment looks like a single match flickering weakly in a drafty cave. Most of the world’s established religions would love nothing more than to snuff out that dull flame and let man continue in ignorance and superstition.

The science of evolution has been caught in the crosshairs of this battle of superstitions going on in America (and only in America). I like to start at the source of these arguments, so I recently read Charles Darwin’s The Origin of Species. What struck me about Darwin was his insatiable curiosity. I doubt that he ever came across a single object that he didn’t measure, weigh, probe, dissect, and document. He had an unyielding lust for answers. You would find it difficult to name a single scientist who brought man more of an understanding of the world than Darwin. He has been called the Newton of biology.. It is criminal that American Christianity is trying to refute a century and a half of Darwin’s scientific legacy simply because they find his work threatening to their absurd creation myths.

The people who oppose the teaching of evolution seem to be pulling America towards some sort of Amish mentality—a culture that rejects most of modern science and technology. Most of this anti-intellectual crusade against evolution has been orchestrated by the Seattle-based Discovery Institute. I don’t understand what could possibly explain their motivations for pushing America back into the medieval era. They single-handedly fabricated the “intelligent design theory” which is anything but intelligent or a theory. If this sort of doggerel is taught in schools, it can only come at the expense of true scholarship and learning. Intelligent design just sounds like corporate-sponsored stoner talk to me.

As a lay person, I find that the study of evolution has been a constant source of marvel over the course of my adult life. I can’t remember the subject even coming up in high school, and my college career in biology consisted of a couple of required classes. Like most of what I know, I am self-taught in the field of evolution. I am indebted to the works of Stephen Gould and Robert Leakey, among many others.

It isn’t possible to have even the smallest knowledge of birds without being overwhelmed by their ability to adapt to their environment. Darwin raised pigeons and studied them endlessly. Jared Diamond, who has revolutionized the study of human cultural development, began his career studying the evolutionary patterns of birds. If you want to believe that this is all part of God’s plan, I don’t have a conflict with that. Just don’t try to teach your superstitions in our public schools. Let’s teach our kids the basics and let them make their own decisions on all of the creation and afterlife myths. Instead of intelligent design, let’s teach our kids more about birds.

My Favorite Things

The best thing about this war in Iraq is that it will be around for our grandchildren to enjoy. I don’t have any children yet, but I don’t think there is any hurry. As long as people can build cars that explode and blow the living shit out of everything within 50 yards, and there are American soldiers to act as human targets for Muslims fanatics who never get laid, there should be a war in Iraq. And please remember, our soldiers are volunteers so you shouldn’t worry if they get blown up. Have you ever heard of the 30 Years War? Well, this is America and we do everything bigger, better, and longer than anyone else.

The second best thing about the war in Iraq is that whenever we need to we can change the reason we went over there in the first place. Before the invasion no one said a damn thing about bringing democracy to Iraq. I’ll bet you that the average American couldn’t have given two shits about democracy in Iraq back then. Back then it was all about—remember this?—WEAPONS OF MASS DESTRUCTION. They were supposed to be everywhere in Iraq. WMDs were to Iraq what watches are to Switzerland if you believed our president and his business cronies. It doesn’t even matter why the fuck we are over there because our president has resolve, and as soon as we figure out why we are there, we will work resolutely to get it done. Maybe we should hold a high school essay contest in which students get to compete to give our reason for the war this week. We should write this week’s reason on a chalkboard in front of the White House.

My third favorite thing about this war is that all of the assholes who have screamed the loudest in its favor are all about as far from a battlefield or a recruiting office as you can get. I think some of the neo-con pro-war people have actually been hiding under the covers for the past few years. I really admire these people because if I ran around all day screaming about how this war is so vital for America’s security, and then I was too much of a fucking coward to join the military and help fight it, I would crawl into an open sewer and die of my own shame. Not these folks, there are too busy questioning the patriotism of people who think that, just maybe, this war was a tremendous mistake. I wish that I knew how these guys do it because it would really come in handy if I ever do anything that I am totally ashamed of and I want to look another human being in the eye again.

The monetary cost of the war ranks right up there among my favorite things. Sure, it’s meant that we will have to mortgage the future of our country, we’ll have to dismantle our social welfare and educational systems to pay for it, but for whatever reason we are fighting and getting blown apart in Iraq, I think we can all agree that it is worth every penny. I wonder if there is any truth to the rumor that we are building a pipeline to Iraq so that we can pump money directly into the desert. Maybe we could fill the space shuttle with money and crash it into Iraq? We need to put America’s best minds to the task of figuring out the most efficient way to spend horrific amounts of money on the war.

What I really love about the war is how, in the beginning, not one single right-wing shit bag pundit predicted how badly the war would go, yet every left leaning moron in the country said that things would soon go to hell over there. I love how the right-wing shit bags throw about three kinds of seizures whenever anyone tries to compare Iraq to Viet Nam. They do have a point. Viet Nam will look like America’s greatest foreign policy success compared to Iraq when everything is said and done, so don’t go comparing the two.

Another great thing about the war—and I think we can all agree on this—is that it has pointed out to us what a complete joke our intelligence community is in this country. They have either got everything completely wrong, or they have manufactured false evidence, or they were used for political purposes, or they have been grotesquely incompetent. That is a good thing to know and all it took was this little war to bring all this out into the open. Hey CIA! ¿Donde está Osama Bin Laden? Do you remember that guy? Where in the fuck is he? Did we just give up on him? Do we have “bigger fish to fry?” Because I’m thinking he’s a pretty big fish and he should be fried, but what does a faggot peacenik like me know?

I have to stop thinking about all of the great things about this war or I’m going to become completely overcome by patriotism and do something drastic, like go out and buy a “Support our Troops” magnet for my car.

Harmless Entertainment for the Masses

Since I don’t have the opportunity to do it at home, whenever I’m in a motel room I scan through the cable TV offerings. You could say that I am taking the pulse of America; I would say that I’m zoning out in front of the TV. Even though I get little chance to watch TV, I can tell you exactly what will be showing. TV is a ritual, and the comfort in rituals is that they are static. This is why there is so little on television that is truly creative, because with creativity comes change, and change is the last thing people look for on TV. Anything different or changing scares the living shit out of most people. Anything outside the norm people find threatening.

The most static of all static rituals in the lives of Americans is religion. If ever there was a place to find the comfort of unchanging ritual, it is in religion. I found that there are two networks devoted entirely to religious programming. On the other side of the spectrum, I found a station that airs professional wrestling nonstop. I didn’t have to go back and forth many times to see a lot of uncanny and creepy parallels.

I couldn’t say between the wrestlers and the preachers who have the worst haircuts. Both groups probably spend more on their hair every week than their average constituent makes working at Wal-Mart. Maybe they all go to the same beauty parlor together. As far as the women of wrestling and religious programming are concerned, you would be hard-pressed to find anyone less tasteful. The amount of fake boobs and horrendous jewelry are about equal. The religious gals are a bit older, but if it ever came down to a gang fight, the safe money would be on the old broads. They probably wouldn’t know a fair fight if one tried to bite their ears off.

Preachers and wrestlers seem to have both graduated from the same school of public speaking. Their in-your-face style is identical. The tone, cadence, and volume of both groups are identical. They both employ a style of speaking that is grotesquely over-the-top dramatic and heavily steeped in mythology. If you didn’t speak English and you listened to both groups, you probably couldn’t tell which one had the message of eternal salvation and who was talking about smashing some punk’s head into the turnbuckle.

Both wrestling and the religious programs have fanatical live audiences. They looked to be entirely interchangeable. The religious people looked better dressed, but I’m sure that the wrestling hicks get cleaned up once in a while. Both groups show fanatical loyalty to their hosts. The most important intersection of these two groups is that their primary objective is entertainment. In this, the pseudo-blood sport and Jesus are partners, a ratings tag team.

I only tuned in for a few minutes and I heard two preachers bad-mouthing evolution. The Catholic Church has also been doing an about-face on its position on science. This is where religion and wrestling take separate paths. I found nothing outwardly anti-intellectual in wrestling’s secular message. No one at Wrestlemania advocated the assassination of a popularly-elected leader of a sovereign nation. If you are looking for entertainment, smart people avoid religion and stick to cage matches.

It's a Wonderful Life?

I came close to throwing myself off a bridge yesterday. In a fit of despair and exasperation I decided to end it all. I saw no point in going on with the charade, nay, the lie that was my life up until that point. I actually did jump off a bridge, but it was only about twenty feet to the water below, and since it was a hot day I found the experience refreshing enough to do over and over again until I got hungry, so I gave up on the ending-it-all scheme for the day and went and had a sandwich and a beer.

I woke this morning with the usual existential dread that has plagued me over the course of a meandering life seemingly devoid of purpose. I thought of returning to the same bridge. I wanted to try to do a one-and-a-half, but instead I thought that it was high time to put an end to this cruel joke of a life. This time I found a really high bridge. I figured that I could do a ten-and-a-half off this sucker. Not a bad way to go out, if I do say so myself. I finally found myself at peace with myself as I stood balancing on the top rail.

Just as I stepped into the abyss I felt myself transported into another dimension. I felt like I was in a dream. The angel Gabriel stood over me and asked me why I would want to end my life. I was hysterical; I told him that my existence meant nothing; I would not be missed; I would not be remembered. The angel Gabriel bitch slapped me. Then he began to lay into me with a flurry of punches and kicks. I screamed out to him, “OK, I get it. Knock off the hysterics.” I preferred my idea of throwing myself off a bridge to getting beaten to death by one of the Lord’s thugs.

Gabriel told me that my life was important. It was important to a lot of people. He then demonstrated this to me by showing what the world would have been like had I never been born.

First we visited the ski chalet of the CEO of Ketel One vodka in Davos, Switzerland. “Had you never been born, Ketel One vodka sales would have been mediocre, at best. Their CEO would never have been able to afford this 6br/5bath chalet. He would have been forced to keep his 2br/3bath condo. Could you live with the shame he would have had to endure?”

He transported me to many places and showed me that things would have been different had I not lived a life of excess and complete selfishness. I saw pig farmers unable to send their children to Harvard because I wasn’t there buying my weight in pork products week after week. Entire cheese producing regions in France reduced to crippling poverty. Next we visited an abandoned cigar plantation in the Dominican Republic. He was about to take me to a marijuana dealer I had supported single-handedly while living in the dorm in college, and then on to the home of the editor of Jugs magazine who had been reduced to doing wedding photography. I told Gabriel that I got the fucking point. Enough of the life-affirming bullshit already, it was starting to get embarrassing.

The angel Gabriel took off and then I found myself in a no-holds-barred cage fighting match against a beaver dressed in a drum majorette’s uniform. These sorts of bizarre dreams are common while in a morphine-induced haze. As it turns out, I really did jump off that bridge this morning. I hit a steel girder about twenty feet below and now I’m in the intensive care unit. It’s great to be alive!

Brother, Can You Spare a Q-Tip?

I’m not “paying it forward.” I wouldn’t call them random acts of kindness. If I had to call them anything, I would call them random acts of bizarre, head-scratching, “what the fuck?” I do them more to entertain myself than to spread goodwill, but I suppose that there is a bit of generosity involved. I do believe in helping those less fortunate, there are many charities I support, I think global and act local, it’s just that sometimes my generosity takes strange forms. Let me explain.

I was driving out of town last week to go mountain biking. I had a bad case of swimmer’s ear and I was already too far from home to turn back. I needed a Q-Tip or I was going to go crazy. You can only stick your finger so far into your ear, especially when you are driving. I pulled into a Quickie-Mart in downtown Seattle just before the freeway entrance. The only Q-Tips they had were the huge 300 count size and all I needed was one lousy Q-Tip. At that point I would have paid $100 for a single Q-Tip, so I bought the big box and headed back to my car. There was a panhandler just outside the door to the Quickie-Mart asking for spare change. Instead of money, I gave him 299 Q-Tips and continued on my way.

There is a 24-hour grocery store near my apartment that seems to have a panhandler stationed in front of it 24 hours a day. I never give the on-duty panhandler money, but I almost always pull some random item out of my bag and offer it up. It may be a piece of fruit, or a Power Bar, or a thing of yogurt, or a bottle of beer, or perhaps an entire roasted chicken if they look really hungry.

I feel that “homeless” is an over-used euphemism for problems that go way beyond not having a home. Panhandlers represent a wide variety of issues that may or may not have a solution. I think that the city of Seattle does quite a lot for those individuals who are homeless. I support local homeless shelters, but I think that my “give a bum a piece of chicken” program is also a good idea, and because I don’t think that you can sell an opened box of Q-Tips, I would like to think that because of my actions there is a group of crack heads out there with clean ears. I would like to think that somewhere out there a panhandler is a little more regular because of the bananas I gave him.