CURRENT INVECTIVE

One of your progeny or mine could be the last white man. Skin color is an adaptation to climate. Dark skin predominates in the tropics where it is hot and often arid. White skin seems to have evolved to make the most of a temperate or arctic climate. The earth of the future is a hotter and drier place than the planet we are now trashing, the inexorable result of a process that promises to continue for many generations. At some point, there may be no place here for light-skinned humans.

We once thought that the consequences of human pollution would be unbreathable air and undrinkable water, but these turned out to be the least of our worries. We didn't reckon on an abrupt change in climate that would make our planet especially hostile to whites. We haven't yet faced the irony of our situation: that we privileged members of the dominant race, notorious despoilers of the earth, are the least likely candidates for survival in the holocaust ahead.

It is probably true that the first billion victims of climate change will be the poorest of the poor, mostly non-white, who will starve when widespread droughts, already under way, make food much scarcer, and hotter oceans and rising sea levels wreak havoc on poor coastal communities everywhere. But, if scientific predictions are accurate, the changes will be big enough in the coming decades to move temperate zones to the far north and the far south. Sometime in the not-so-distant future--nobody can yet say when--the rest of the earth will no longer be a fit place for whites, who will be forced to breed with other races or perish.

This is also ironic, because the thing whites most hate to do is to make children with dark-skinned people. They don't mind having sex with them, but they don't like the idea of kids who are darker than they are. Stupid notions have come and gone in human history, but this one is among the most idiotic, and it's hard to see how it persists. When malaria and other tropical diseases overtake Texas and Florida and Washington, DC, the toll will fall most heavily on inbred whites, who will not have picked up the genetic resistances and immunities that have evolved in tropical peoples. Skin cancer has already become a threat to the least pigmented among us.

Mankind could get smart, cut polluting activities, and maybe avert a climatic catastrophe. More likely, we'll continue what we're doing, relying, for the future, on the conviction that we're in the path of an asteroid that will end arguments about the state of our planet.

Admiration Society Meets Idol in Journalistic Simulation

Did the gaggle ask any hard questions on the occasion of Bush's "press conference?" Did they ask whether any leader has ever "won" a war without public support?: Did they ask whether Bush targeted misbehaving prosecutors for retribution? Did they ask whether he exposed the identity of a spy to punish her husband? Did they ask whether he defied the advice of his attorney general to initiate illegal wiretapping of Americans? Did they ask whether he actually believes that Alberto Gonzales can't remember where that list of doomed prosecutors came from?

Did they ask how many prison sentences he's commuted for strangers? Did they ask whether he thinks people might suspect he Libby-rated his acolyte to keep his mouth shut? Did they ask whether he intentionally falsified a rationale for war against Iraq? Did they ask why he sat reading children's stories after the plane crashed into the building on 9/11? Did they ask whether he's sorry he fired the generals who said he would need a half-million soldiers to conquer Iraq? Did they ask whether his domestic surveillance acitivities have uncovered dirt on people in Congress or on other opinion leaders?

Did they ask which lawyers told him his "signing statements" don't conflict with his Constitutional duty to see that the laws are faithfully executed? Did they ask whether he knows that Cheney exercises presidential powers and whether he's OK with that? Did they ask how long before the people displaced from New Orleans will be able to return?

Did they ask whether it's a good idea to keep state militias deployed abroad when they might be needed here? Did they ask how much his successors in office should be willing to spend, in lives and money, to postpone a U. S. acknowledgement that it lost the war he started? Did they ask why none of his daughters, nieces, nephews, cousins, friends, or associates is serving in uniform?

The reporters joked with him. They laughed at his wisecracks. He evaded their questions, instead bloviating endlessly to cut down on the number of questions they could ask. He mocked them. They must adore him. This wasn't a press conference, but a kissass conference, and they did. It was an insult to all of us.

Fortunately, the panic is confined to the news-mongers. Despite the blitz of terrorism "news," there's no sign of mass hysteria. That's probably because so few people believe what they're told by the commercial media. News-consumers have been disinformed so many times, they don't know what's true and what's not, and great numbers of them have quit trying to follow current events altogether. It's hard to scare people who aren't paying attention.

If you don't share the gut feeling of the Director that an attack is imminent, you're resisting a wave of hype that's transparent in its purpose: to scare the hapless people of the homeland silly. Why would the government and the mass media want to scare you? Is it possible that our political leaders and our opinion leaders profit in some way from terrorizing us? Could they be applying the old axiom that it's easier to control people who are frightened of an enemy? There's no question that government and the media want to control us, and their motives seem to be entirely material. In the case of government, the object is to enrich government officials and their patrons. In the case of the media, the object is to sell stuff for profit. The path to these ends is a lot easier when the people you are exploiting are fearful.

NPR goes so far as to congratulate itself for apprising you of the manifest dangers you face. They hawk hysteria, and this is supposed to make you feel safer and thank them for it with a pledge. Listen at pledge time the next time it rolls around for how good your local affiliate is at keeping you informed of terrorist alarms. It's worth asking why NPR and the others would credit any of the stuff that comes to them as "intelligence. " Every key pronouncement so far has been false, but this one's true? Most likely, the folks at NPR don't believe it any more than you do. They report it knowing it's probably false. When your source is the govenrment, according to prevailing canons of journalistic ethics, one source will suffice.

To those who resist the temptation to be afraid it looks as if the leaders of our government, in collusion with a talented cast of shills and touts pretending to be journalists, have used the events of September 11, 2001, to maintain a stranglehold over the American public. Government and the media are the only interests that derived a benefit from those events, and they have kept the public on a terror alert ever since. If terrorism means frightening people for political or material advantage, the terrorists are all here. They're in the White House, in almost every seat in Congress, in the courts, and especially in the media. These fellows laugh when they give us some tidbit from the National Intelligence Estimate or from other estimable sources, like Chertoff's gut. "Any imbecile that believes this crap," the reporters seem to be saying, "deserves what happens to him. "

If you're not scared of an attack on the homeland, maybe it's because, like me, you don't happen to live in a homeland. Maybe you live in a republic. Or maybe you insist on living in a nation, even at a time when nations have been declared obsolete. I refuse to live in a homeland. To the tiny minority of people who want to turn my country into their homeland, I say, "We're trying to maintain a nation here. Find someplace else for your Nazi homeland. " This term, along with the rest of the alarmist nomenclature adopted by the press, leaves me fearful, not of terrorists in distant lands, but of terrorists in my own government and their agents in the commercial media.

Fire in Belly

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