Suffer here a brief post that begins with the juxtaposition of quotes from two men of different eras:

"You look like a f***ing pig in heat, and if you get raped by a pack of n***ers, it will be your fault."

Mel Gibson
Oral statement to ex-girlfriend Oksana Grigorieva, 2010

"[Y]our persons, fortunes, wives, and daughters, shall be subject to the wanton and unbridled rage, rapine, and lust of Negroes, mulattos and others, the vilest and most abandoned of mankind."

Benjamin Franklin
Plain Truth, 1747

Readers interested in Mr. Franklin's race-bating about Negroes and claims about Jews, Swedes, Germans, and others of "swarthy" skin or other suspect features diminishing the Anglo-Saxon nature of the emerging American society can read Chapter 12 of the Vernon Johns Society's analysis of structural racism in America or go to the relevant referential material in Franklin of Philadelphia, by Edmond Wright (1986: Harvard University Press).

Readers interested in Mr. Gibson's race-bating, misogyny, anti-Semitism, and other distasteful leanings can find references in a July 1, 2010, radaronline.com article and may listen to the two-minute audio recording of his offending conversation with Ms. Grigorieva in a subsequent, July 11, 2010, article.

Notwithstanding the possibility that civilizations can evolve deepening understandings of rightful thought and action, the people of the present era should not be held to a standard of enlightenment any more refined than the people of the past, certainly not within the cabin of the broad and long-lived arc of Western Civilization. Cruelty, inhumanity, hate, and injustice swiftly emerged as undesirable and were understood as such well before the time of our Founding Fathers. Hate to advance personal will, Mel Gibson's choice, is no different in dimension than hate to promote political agenda, Benjamin Franklin's choice, although the scope of damage wrought by the latter can be staggering, especially to the extent that it allows for those of generations long afterward to believe that a place for intolerance exists within a society that poses otherwise to be kind, humane, good, and just.

The great and venerated are no less immune than the small and vile to the blackness of hate, be it for private injury or public consumption. Station in life and time of word and deed make no exception and, far more importantly, provide no excuse.

Rightly, loudly, and unrelentingly condemn and ostracize the hateful little men of our day—each in his own way, the Mel Gibsons, the Glenn Becks, the Rush Limbaughs, and their equally ugly kind—but at considerable peril ignore the venerated leaders who spoke and wrote with equal brutishness: the future will be no better if we seek unflinching inspiration from those who chose to lead by reprehensible words in the time when words were not merely expressive of sentiments, but formative of a nascent country.

The Los Angeles Times no longer allows anonymous comments, and it no longer has its own system for registering commenters. One must use a "third party" account, which means exposing sensitive information from privacy rights-challenged behemoths like facebook or Google.

Many sites block my commentary, anyway. This is the case at the Huffington Post and truthout.org; others like CNN.com used to sporadically published my comments on their articles, but I wearied so much of infotainment sites like CNN.com masquerading as news services that I no longer annoy myself by going there.

The Los Angeles Times has tilted Right under new management, particularly since eviscerating its journalistic ranks as it did several years ago, but it is still a site with decent news articles to read from time to time.

Let me share a comment that I would have posted at the Los Angeles Times were that news service able to provide its own commenter registration service.

The article on which I provide commentary, below, was about Lindsey Lohan, whose drunken excesses have earned her multiple court appearances, an alcohol detection ankle bracelet, and several nights ago a near-brush with another court appearance after the bracelet reported the presence of alcohol vapor just above her skin, indicating that she might have been drinking after her appearance at the MTV Awards.

Although I care not one bit about actors and actresses, their movies, their shows, their music, and their other less-than-stellar talents pumped up as genius by opinion makers, I most certainly do care about the rule of law, which has become a diminished farce in modern America.

You see, just two weeks ago at one of the local high schools, the police roamed the parking lot with their drug-sniffing dogs. Dozens of kids were hauled out of their classes and more or less forced to open their vehicles because four-legged animals had accused them of having drugs stashed in their cars.

Quite a few of those kids will go to prison. It's the usual stuff for heartland, family-values, Bible Belt America: meth, hillbillie, pot. The girls carry their Special K in tiny little vials, so the cops don't catch this too often; ditto for the other creepy stuff that's starting to show up around here. Girls at the junior and senior highs are more likely to get shaken down by school administrators for passing Tylenol for menstrual cramps. The pre-fab, FDA-approved kid-brain suckers like Ritalin get shared among the kids on the bus, at the mall, and at home, not so much at school anymore unless the kids are really defiant or just plain dumb.

The police get their share of kids, though, and the prosecutors get their little piles of feathers in their caps with under-aged citizens charged as adults and copping pleas to lesser felonies to avoid going down for decades on trafficking charges.

But the celebrities? They get one chance after another. Even if they go to jail, it's usually small-time stuff in protected enclaves away from the general prison population. One way or the other, their wasted lives go on. They game not just the legal system, but a pathetically two-faced society that loves their salacious excesses and half believes them that it's somehow the "pressure" of their high-and-mighty lives that drives them to be grotesque, self-destructive monstrosities.

This bizarre double standard applies every bit as much to political celebrities as it does to those in the entertainment business. News, politics, tragedy, human suffering, triumph: it's all just entertainment, now, anyway. Stay in your seats and watch theatre, the enforced narrative that asks nothing more of you than your acquiescence to the latest authoritarian solution to the complexities of modernity and its confluences of peoples and events. Remember: as long as you, yourself, have done nothing wrong, you should have nothing to worry about, so enjoy the show through the looking glass whose name is Vicarious.

Anyway, just to ensure that the Los Angeles Times cannot silence commentary on its articles by mere demand that I subscribe to one of its oligolopic symbiots, below is what I had to say about Lindsey Lohan and what her worthless, wasting life story means to the real issue for which that worthless, wasting life of hers stands as sad statement.

A society functioning under the so-called "rule of law" ensures that every person is treated equally when the law is applied to the facts of a case. In the United States, the incarceration rate and the prison populations at state and federal levels exceed those in some of the world's most repressive, loathsome regimes. In this country, people of youth, of color, of economically distressed circumstances are processed through the courts in machine-like fashion with only the most paltry of defense attorneys, often over-burdened by the sheer numbers of clients they defend at the behest of the courts.

Yet here is the product of dissipated, extreme wealth, given one pass after another by a court. A young person of low socio-economic standing exhibiting this behavior, this contempt for a court and the relevant laws, would be imprisoned and subjected to the multiple dimensions of horror that Americans, in their deepest sickness, think is just and proper to set upon inmates.

Kids watch celebrities. The kids who see this mess of a human being coddled learn two lessons: first, it can be done; and second, it is rewarded with greater and greater fame. Later, when those kids see their friends sent to prison, and when they, themselves, get treated far more brutally by the courts of this land, they will develop an insidious disdain not just for the rule of law, but also for the nation that lies to them about it.

Readers here at The Dark Wraith Forums are free to comment without having a facebook or Google account.

The downside of that freedom is this: if your comment is stupid or disrespectful, someone — most likely me since this is my article — will almost assuredly eat your head off.

There is, you see, a fundamental difference between an authoritarian and a bitch. While I cannot be the former on most occasions, I am quite happy to be the latter on almost any day.

In the current war between those who support President Obama's Supreme Court nominee, Sonia Sotomayor, and those who oppose her, Right-wing critics have focused much of their campaign against her confirmation upon words she spoke at a University of California, Berkley, symposium in 2001, when she said, "Whether born from experience or inherent physiological or cultural differences... our gender and national origins may and will make a difference in our judging... I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn't lived that life."

Without the preceding part of that speech, those words unambiguously reveal a person who believes that she, as a "Latina woman," can "reach a better decision" than any Caucasian man could, at least "more often than not."

Ambiguity arises, however, when more of what she actually said is revealed: at the very minimum, she noted that wise decisions had been made by white men, and she made no statement whatsoever that would set aside the scope of common law that had been constructed by the white men who have dominated — indeed, controlled — the arc of justice to this very day. For her to have done that would have been for her to repudiate the legal system upon which she and others of a progressive heart rely for that arc to become more inclusive, more broadly just, and better with each generation.

I support the nomination of Sonia Sotomayor. I do not do so because hers is a particularly stellar legal mind; it is not. Neither do I support her because she is a woman and of color. While affirmative action is an altogether reasonable means by which employment opportunities can be opened in so many workplaces where the history of discrimination would otherwise ensure the perpetuation of that abominable practice, artificial guidelines that become as important as great merit in selecting among the qualified at the most powerful levels of society will lead to bad ends. I am hopeful that Sotomayor was nominated because the society, itself, has become so pluralized that her appointment is a natural reflection of the extraordinary diversity in the country: we are now (and, of course, always have been) one nation of many peoples, and the diversity of our ethnic landscape is so great, so compelling that the continued, uninterrupted selection of white males would be the obviously, unconscionably unreasonable path.

At the same time that I would defend Judge Sotomayor against the outrageous charge that what she said in the 2001 UC Berkley speech was somehow "racist," I am not entirely at comfort with it, and my dismay is, on one level, quite personal; but on another level, my concern is wider.

The citizens of the United States number about 300 million. The population of the world is perhaps 6.6 billion or so. The living probably outnumber the dead, and among the two groups — those still alive and those who have passed on — is an incomprehensible, almost entirely untold story, the story of the human experience.

We who are still among the living, and those of our kind now gone, have each gone through so much, seen so many things, learned an untellable amount, and felt such emotions that words cannot contain the scope of the unimaginably amazing story. Some might think that we now have, or someday will have, machines that can store just about everything, but that idea is just plain folly: to collect the lives of everyone who lives and has lived, to capture every detail, every emotion ever felt, every turn of symbolism in every dream, every fantasy, every love, every despair, every hope, every fear — that is beyond any storage device that will ever be made.

For the remainder of this article, I address Sonia Sotomayor, herself, but I encourage readers to follow along, and if they are of a mind, to address me concerning what I am about to write. She will not read this, so it is for those who will that I set these thoughts to words, what I want to tell Sonia Sotomayor.

You do not know me, Ms. Sotomayor. Even if we were one day to cross paths, you would not. You have no idea what I seen, just like I have no idea what you have seen. To the same extent that I cannot judge the wisdom of any decision you make, particularly before you have made it, you cannot possibly judge the wisdom of any decision I would make, especially before I have made it.

To reduce me to a "white male" is grotesquely degrading. You have no idea what I have seen and how the life I have lived has intersected with the essential, enduring aspects of my inner self, where the world outside becomes distilled, interpreted, and used for what is to come.

"Wise decisions"? No, not for me; otherwise, I would make as much money as you, but instead I make about one-seventh what you make. I would have gone to a fabulous college and been one of the shove-and-bully types who gets the honors, the fancy diplomas with the Latin accolades, and the notice of the powerful. I would have gone up the ladder trampling people under me to make me do well, and I would have left the fate of family to the winds of someone else's decisions. I would have been one of those all-too-common, yet ever-curious case studies in people of mediocre mind who seem to keep percolating to this nation's pinnacles of power, including the presidency, the Congress, and the Supreme Court, where their non-existent brilliance is too often lauded by those who should know better and usually denied by those who know only spite without reason.

But "richness of experience"? Spare me some moral superiority. It is not only what we see, but also — and far more importantly — how our experiences affect us. I shall put a few of my meager cards on the table.

Let me start with death. I have seen it, and I just hate it. I hate it viscerally because it has hurt me so much. Anymore, I cannot stand the sight even of an animal suffering before death. I just hate it, and I hate the disgusting advice that I should just "move on," "work through my grief," or somehow "come to grips with" mortality. No, I choose not to do any of those things that would bring false joy to the world of all things that must come to an end. Even worse for me, to use an old saying among veterans of the Civil War, "I seen the elephant." With no intention to redundancy, if you know what that means, you know what that means. I had no mind to buy the ticket, but somehow I did. I wish with all my heart, with all my soul, that I had not. But I did.

Now, let me speak to violence. I have seen that, too, and it is horrible. Hurting people is but one part of willful cruelty that has, in its very worst expression, the purpose of actually taking pleasure in the suffering of the living, human and otherwise. I have been beaten quite literally to within an inch of my life; and, yes, I have been beaten by women. "Duty to flee" was my personal excuse for not fighting back and destroying them with one blow. In fact, by the time in my life that I was in such ego-destroying, demeaning situations, I could not bring myself to do to them what I hated so much that they were doing to me. For that reason, I could not find within myself the will to reciprocate the emotional abuse that was even more common. For the rest of my life, I will not go anywhere near emotional proximity to or physical vulnerability with a woman. I have no desire to be hurt ever again, and I consider myself at least smart enough not to go where risk imagined has already been danger realized. How is that for decision-making from experience? I think it's pretty good: I haven't been hit in a long, long time.

Finally, before I conclude this article with a story, let me briefly describe fear. It is terrible to live large parts of one's life afraid. The powerful, the rich, the mean, the corrupt, the heartless: they rule, they dominate, they control. I am not among any of those classes of people, so I have to scurry through the shadows, hoping they will not take notice of me; if they do, I get hurt, and it happens every last time. You are among the powerful; all you can do is hurt me. That's how power works.

You are a living representative of the law, and the law is the more-or-less civilized expression of the fist by which the powerful organize the society to suit their needs and especially their proclaimed values that they, themselves, cannot abide for their own lives. The icon of Lady Justice need not remove her blindfold; by the very fact that you are a judge, it is you and your kind who will ensure that she knows to bring her sword down upon me and my kind. Judging from the incarceration rate in this country, you and Lady Justice work with the efficient fury of machine guns on cowering civilians.

If you ever have occasion to meet me, to get to know me, I am quite certain you will come rather quickly to dislike me. People of power are that way with me, and this is especially true with women of power. The impenetrable mystery to me is the question of why women who are in no position of official power — be it corporate, academic, or otherwise — react so fundamentally differently to me. That question aside, I am most glad that we will probably never meet. All you would see in me is a swaggering, self-assured, pompous ass who acts like he knows everything and seems to be just a little too ill-tempered for all but the stupidest of rednecks and the dumbest of gang-bangers to disrespect. All I would see in you is just another power-wielding, ill-tempered, unimaginative cog in the machine of repression that is our modern system of justice.

What you see, and the basis upon which you would judge me, would be an illusion, partly of your own making because you see a "white male," partly of my making because that is what I want you to see.

What I see, and the basis upon which I would judge you, would be an illusion, too, of course. At the very least, that is my hope; and it is upon that hope — and only that hope — that I wish you success in your aspiration to become an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States.

I shall now conclude this article with a story. From time to time, I write and publish personal stories, some meant to be humorous, like "A Hill People Story for Sunday Night," some quite painful, like "I Am Become Battle," "Remembering Shelby," and "The end of all things."

Long-time readers of my literature might remember the one I am reprinting below as part of a larger article I wrote a few years ago. The purpose tonight is to share with you a single example in a life with "richness of experience" that is, in your own words, a predicate to making wise decisions. Above, I disclaimed any ability to make wise decisions; I will leave wisdom to you and others. Below, and in conclusion, I offer you an opportunity to dismiss some of the certainty you might have that your life has been richer than mine.

Quite a long while back, I told the following story in a comment here at The Dark Wraith Forums; but while that comment was a rather vague and quite truncated version of how certain incidents went down a couple years ago, here I shall be far less circumspect and much more vivid in details.

My last gig at one of those religious colleges is instructive on several levels. If I were to tell you the name of the college, you might recognize it right away. It has been the beneficiary of large infusions of cash, pretty much all of which has been spent on a few buildings, including the chapel, a student union, and the administrators' offices. These places on campus are just gorgeous, and people see these in the college recruitment brochures and on the campus tours.

The building in which I taught and had my office wasn't in any brochure and never did get included in tours given to parents and their high school-aged kids. My office was in a room on the top floor. It had no heat, so it was unbearable to be in there during the cold months. My classroom on the bottom floor of that building had water pouring into it through the ceiling every time it rained outside. In the warm months, because there was no air conditioning, the entire building was so hot that teaching and learning were quite a challenge, but no one was allowed to open the windows because the hornets would come in from their nests that had been in the overhangs of the roof for so long they could be seen from the street.

This building wasn't the exception, either. One permanent professor there told me I was lucky to be in one of the "good" buildings, falling apart as it was but protected by its status as a landmark.

Now, let's talk about the students. A handful of religious zealots dominated the campus; everyone else just stayed out of their way. During the 2004 Presidential campaign, the voter registration table was in the cafe where a group of old alumni sat around with the young religious bullies loudly yelling vile, sometimes even sick, invectives against Democrats. This went on every day of the week, all to the tune of Fox News blaring on a big TV in the corner.

Aside from the howling religious nuts, most of the students I met wanted to be elsewhere. Many, many of the kids had become disillusioned within the first couple of years of schooling there; some within the first couple of months. They hated the place, and they knew what prospects awaited them on the outside with their degrees. Only those committed to life within a religious community were very much at peace with their educational progress, but the overriding sentiment felt by students was that they were trapped by financial and psychological dependence on their parents and others. I was surprised by how many grasped that they were not getting anything remotely like a genuine, academically challenging, liberal arts college education.

It took a very short amount of time for the student body to figure out that I was an aberration there, someone who had been picked up because both the institution and I were desperate.

Let me now get to the specifics of just how much I have my head in the sand about religious colleges.

The last significant incident in my mind about that place was trying to help a girl in her first semester hide the fact that she'd gotten knocked up by one of the football players. She was scared to death, and the pregnancy was making her a total physical wreck from the get-go. She was a small, mousy girl who could have passed for fourteen. She had little, puffy cheeks that framed large brown eyes she would raise up to me as she kept her head down out of some kind of deference to male authority figures. She trembled in even the slightest chill of autumn breezes. For this story, I shall call her "Ellie."

She was a stunningly good math student, at least at first. After about a month, though, she started missing more and more classes. Not too long after her absences had become a matter of concern to me, one of her friends in the class told me about the pregnancy. An older woman in the class whom I'll call "Janice" was right there at the time and explained to me that this had to stay a secret: Ellie would be expelled if the administration found out. Ellie's friends were covering for her as best they could. In fact, they were covering for more than a few girls. Janice, who lived in the area and picked up classes from time to time at this dump, explained that it was like this every year: girls getting knocked up and trying to hide it so their parents didn't find out and the school didn't hear about it.

Janice, herself, was bitter about the college. It seems that only a matter of weeks before the semester began, she had undergone a hysterectomy, only to realize that the classes she had already paid for would be a real challenge to attend. The college had no handicap access in the old buildings where most of the classes were held. The administration variously claimed the buildings were exempt from requirements under the Americans with Disabilities Act because they're landmarks, or the whole school was exempt because it's a "private religious institution." Whatever. All Janice knew was that she had to have a couple of the big horse-type guys help her up the steep steps so she could get to classes, including mine.

Anyway, Ellie was being torn up by the pregnancy, and her emotional state was something almost indescribable. She came to class only rarely. She'd generally be there if one of her friends in the class told her I was going to do a "surprise" quiz. (I started violating my long-standing policy about not warning of impending quizzes just because I wanted Ellie to know when she simply had to show up at class.)

Meanwhile, Janice—a tough broad who had been everything from a truck driver to an auxiliary law enforcement officer—finally got up the nerve to hint that she could get Ellie to an abortion clinic in the big city. I let her know in no uncertain terms that I would help. That meant I was going to stand ready to pay for the procedure.

My days at that school were numbered, even though I was still lying to myself by thinking that my great teaching would win the day. I had a religious lunatic for a department chairman: he would even sometimes stand outside the closed door to my classroom just so he could listen to my "unacceptable" use of language. In one instance that sent him into a hissy-fit, when I was about to pass back a test, a student asked me how they all did, and with a grin on my face I said, "Well, your tests sucked," to which the students laughed. All except for two, that is: young men with butch haircuts and a mission to tell the school authorities and their parents about every awful, horrible, un-Christian thing that happened at college. Both of those fellows, by the way, were failing my class miserably, and the other students hated their guts, in part because they squealed on everyone and in part because they were otherwise bizarrely withdrawn human beings. As one of them told me as he looked everywhere but into my eyes, "I am in this world, but not of it." (I replied to him with perhaps too much levity that he still had to study for my class and pass my tests or I would flunk his ass cold.)

Returning to the main story, Ellie's friends knew what we were planning, and several of them approached her with the way out of her mess. All I heard about that part was that she couldn't bring herself to reject the idea out of hand, but that she was simply horrified by the very idea of going even further into sin than she already had gotten. She wouldn't even tell anyone who, exactly, it was who got her pregnant; that part was left to one of the other girls at the party where it happened. (The young man, by the way, never suffered any punishment for his role in her pregnancy.)

If Ellie was going to get in even more trouble than she already was, she had no intention of taking anyone else with her. As November progressed, Ellie withdrew even further from those who wanted to help her. She missed the last term exam in my class, and no one volunteered any information about what was going on.

The last time I saw Ellie was in the cafe. The place was eerily empty despite upcoming finals. The TV wasn't even on. But there was Ellie. She was sitting in a chair with her legs pulled up to her; she was curled over in almost a ball. She had her back to the entrance, so she didn't know it was I who had come in until I was just behind her. She turned around and lifted those brown eyes up to me.

That smile across her pale, sunken face nearly made me choke. In her hand she was squeezing a bus ticket. She had nothing but the clothes on her back. Her light flannel hoodie was all that would keep the bitter December wind from her frail body.

I had nothing I could say to her. She'd been ratted out by one of the Christian psycho-bitch enforcers in her dorm. She was expelled, her parents were told about the outrage of it all, and everybody on campus knew she was the latest case study in the wages of sin.

She was so small that she vanished quite easily from that world of decent people.

And there I was. I could have done something about it, but I didn't. All I had was a pat solution that freaked her way too much. I could have put alternatives in front of her: adoption agencies, and not those Christian predators, either; friends who would have gladly taken her in and helped her ride it out if that was her choice. I could have offered her more than a mere cowardly professor's detached, meaningless gestures by proxy. I'd been going extra miles for years, but there I was, off my game, somehow fantasizing for too long that I could make a living for a few years by playing both sides against the middle in that dump. Ellie vanished from my sight while I was standing there flat-footed like every other useless non-player in the high-stakes game of life.

The next semester I got a gig at a regional community college. The first day of the semester, I was out in the smoking area when around the corner came three young men, all from that religious college. They'd had enough, so they were willing to drive more than an hour just to get something approximating a real education.

They all stopped dead in their tracks and stared at me with huge smiles. "Oh my fuckin' God!" one of them said.

I walked right up and shook hands with them, welcoming them to real academia. They were so macho-tough-excited-giddy-laughing-profane. They were so normal, and they were so glad to see a familiar face. I told them I was glad to see them, too; but I told them I was still going to kick their butts if they were unfortunate enough to end up in any of my classes.

They informed me that they were but three examples of a continuing leakage that religious college had of kids who manage to find a way to get out. Apparently, the community college, along with several other colleges and universities in the region, had long been the beneficiaries of that continuing stream of students escaping what would otherwise have been a miserable, pseudo-college experience leading nowhere. One of those young guys even mentioned the "bullshit" that happened to Ellie and how that's the kind of thing that makes students get out of there if they can. It's just that most can't.

There was yet another option I didn't think about in my bag of tricks for Ellie. That community college is dirt cheap, getting a surprisingly generous matrix of subsidies from all kinds of sources.

God Almighty! had I been off my game. What a dumb-ass I'd been through that whole messy experience at that religious Hell-hole.

Four years before, I was running a two-year school that trained paralegals and court reporters. It was in an urban ghetto, about as dangerous as a place could be just going to and from the parking lot after dark. The students were mostly female, mostly urban African-Americans along with low-income Whites. Every last day was a ride through rough terrain, and I was at the top of my game. I could solve any problem, I could get even some of the most hopeless cases through the curriculum and out into decent jobs. I swear, it seemed some days like I could have fixed the whole damned world one person at a time.

God! how far I had fallen by the time Ellie and others at that Christian college needed me.

Someday not too long from now, I'll leave this part of the country where so many churches dot the landscape. Too many people here love their god; they love their god more than they love the child-women and child-men stumbling and falling on the hard concrete of adulthood where they then look up with soulful eyes to see if anyone's there to help show them the way to their feet again.

Someday I'll go back to the streets that are mean in ways I handle better. I'll try to do a lot of good and little harm, and I'll finish this life trying not to think about the awful failures on my conscience. I don't think I'll do too well at forgetting, though, since I'll be seeing Ellie in every class, on every street, and in every bus station where some kid is looking up hoping someone has a good reason that one-way ticket to the end of the line isn't the only choice left.


I'm finished writing for the evening, now.

The blogger konagod just published an article entitled, "Reducing Dependency on Oil: An Easy Start" (with a cross-post at Big Brass Blog), in which he rightly rails against the systematic, willful wastefulness of Americans when it comes to their gasoline consumption habits.

In one passage, he notes one of his own fuel saving habits: "Put in more personal terms, I'm probably keeping an extra $100 in my pocket each year by coasting when possible, and accelerating only when necessary."

That brought back to my own mind some fine, fine memories, along with some extensions into seemingly unrelated topics of current interest. To me, it all has a unifying theme and character; but I don't think it will to very many others. Nevertheless, I'll tell you a little story from my own time and the place whence comes my sometimes unpopular perspective.

I grew up in an old family. My father was born before the turn of the 20th Century (or just after, depending upon whose account is to be believed), and my mother was born at the end of the second decade of that magnificently complicated hundred-year stretch.

Both came from the hill country, and neither ever trusted the wealthy people. Didn't trust fancy technology all that much, either.

They hated FDR, too. Just the flip side of Hoover, selling snake oil to the desperately poor instead of the wickedly rich. The older I get, the smarter those two old folks are. That's a little strange, considering they've both been cold in their graves for many years.

My father's people came from Pennsylvania: Pennsylvania Dutch, in fact, but my grandfather broke away to make some actual money; he settled in Kentucky in the early 1800s. The census records show that, unlike just about everyone else in the county, he had no Negroes in his possession. He did, however, have no fewer than five unrelated girls between the ages of 13 and 20 in his household. We Germans are always supposed to be on the sociable side, or so I've been told.

My mother's folks came just about from the very soil of Kentucky: French and English trappers in the lower Ohio Valley. Just don't mention the Indian women some of them hitched up with, though; that was almost a worse secret than the European Jews in my father's bloodline.

When I was growing up, I did more than my share of time in hill country, and every last time we'd be at the top of a big rise, the manual transmission would get popped into neutral, and we'd coast down the road. Most of the time, my mother or father would say something like, "Time t' cheat ol' John D. for a while." This was, of course, a reference to John D. Rockefeller and the monopoly power he'd once had over the gasoline markets. My father even recounted watching as a youth as some towns fell to John D.'s gasoline station spatial monopolies created through predatory pricing.

Understand that, down in the hill country of Kentucky, West Virginia, and southeastern Ohio, it's not just that some of the hills go on for a long way down, and it's not just that they can get steep. The excitement comes with the surprisingly abrupt turns those roads can take. That, and the perilously icy conditions that prevail in the later Autumn, all through the Winter, and into the early Spring.

Although the seemingly uncontrolled descents into the valleys never bothered me at all, there was the occasional passenger who would get fussy when we were cheating ol' John D. and my dad would suddenly, in a small voice, say, "Shit."

It always worked out for the best, though.

Until I finally got an automatic transmission car, I would cheat ol' John D. whenever I could, except for when I had old junkers with bad (or, in one case, pretty much no) brakes.

To this very day, I still have my routines, but they're not so much with automobiles; instead, I have a Linux (SUSE) partition and a DOS (Novell 7.0) partition on my hard drive. Whenever I boot to one of those systems instead of Windows, I tell my cat, "We're gonna cheat ol' Bill G. for a while."

My cat understands. Sometimes, he even asks me to tell him again about the magnificent DLC/neo-Keynesian President and his Internet-inventin' Vice President who should have stopped ol' Bill G. in his tracks and thrown him in prison back in the mid-'90s but didn't, either because they really were clueless or, more likely, because they actually thought the Information Age needed its own round of Industrial Policy, complete with monopolies and oligopolies for a new American century.

Darned, but Mom and Dad were right when they said, "His mug's no better'n t'other one's butt." (They might have been right when they said Eisenhower was the last great President, too.)

I should go, now. People are suddenly standing around outside saying someone told them the sky is falling. I don't think they're really going to believe me when I tell them the inconvenient truth of this new American century.

The sky already fell.

It seems that last hairpin turn, the one into post-modernity, was a bit much.


The Dark Wraith should probably just stay inside and write code tonight.

We run television shows that feature people killing people, and the Federal Communications Commission says nothing. We have a split-second shot of a breast with a pasty-covered nipple, and that same Federal Communications Commission assesses hundreds of thousands of dollars in fines.

Kids can watch Internet videos of people beating each other to bloody pulps, and people just go, "Tsk, tsk." A substitute teacher didn't know how to stop pornographic pop-up spam on a school computer kids had been playing with, and that teacher is facing 40 years in prison.

We have theme parks, tournaments, and weekend camps all over the country where people can use each other as human targets for laser tag and paintball. The White House pressures U.S. Attorneys to use vital resources to doggedly prosecute companies that do interstate sales of obscene literature.

We reduce nations to anarchy and rubble; we have our puppets hang their leaders like dogs; we kidnap, torture, and terrify people on suspicion and rumor; we have our police unload dozens of rounds into drunken men on a bachelor party outing; we build weapons to induce searing pain in protesters; and we incarcerate millions of our own citizens in prisons where we ensure they will be beaten and gang-raped.

Then we are shocked when someone murders little Amish school girls in their one-room schoolhouse and when someone else murders college kids in their classrooms.

Is something wrong with this picture? No, not really. It's just another day of programming on Channel America. Just sit back and enjoy the show.

There's no channel changer, so quit bitching. The commerials are pretty funny.