Gulf of America: not an oil company ad.

 Lucius Cary, the second (or third, I'm not sure which) Viscount Falkland, has always been one of my favorite philosophers.  I doubt he would have thought of himself as a philosopher; he was a soldier and a man of action, a loyal servant of His Majesty King Charles II during the English Civil War (His Lordship’s side lost, in case you were wondering), and I believe that he would have thought prolonged philosophical thinking a bit of a bore when compared to the less intellectual delights of hacking and slashing His Majesty's enemies into a thousand tiny bloody pieces.  Lord Falkland never wrote a philosophical treatise of interminable length, unlike so many other philosophers then and now, who insist that entire forests come crashing down and get pulped into paper so that they can inflict their deep ideas about the meaning of it all upon a long-suffering and not terribly interested humanity.  No, indeed, Lord Falkland was an Englishman of the empirical school, whose entire philosophical output comes down to us in a single sentence, an observation that he made in passing to a friend. “When it is not necessary to change,” Lord Falkland said, “it is necessary not to change.”  That’s it, that’s the whole of it, and his lordship packed more philosophical depth into that one sentence than many philosophers can pack into tomes so physically and philosophically dense that I could drop said tome on a mouse in the absolute certainty that the annoying little rodent would not survive the encounter.  

So why am I subjecting you to all this philosophical beating around the bush about the subject of this screed? This is an exceptionally good question, and I am sure it might have something to do with my being a royal pain in the general posterior, but there is, in fact, an exceptionally good reason.  If you follow the news at all these days, and who isn’t, given that the current president is much more entertaining than the previous president, you will know that the Gulf of Mexico is now the Gulf of America, said change of name being the product of a presidential executive order brought on by a case of excessive pique at the current president of Mexico. I do not know why The Donald chose this name when there are so many more evocative names that come to mind: the Sea of Margaritas, the Bay of Spring Break, the Bay of Babes, or even the Gulf of Dixie for the politically incorrect . The Gulf of America suffers tremendously by comparison. The Gulf of Mexico is tropic heat and long white beaches, palm trees and the sound of Latin music, sweat trickling slowly down your sides into the small of your back as you sit in your beach chair with your margarita in your hand, watching the towering pastel clouds gathering on the horizon and the tanned bikini-clad senoritas, all smiles and laughter, strolling slowly by at the water’s edge, the sultry breeze coming off the sea, and the taste of tequila on your love’s lips as you kiss her in the moonlight. That is the Gulf of Mexico.  The Gulf of America, by contrast, is a gas station. 

Devil Walls

Well, here I am safely ensconced in the egregious mold pit wherein I labor for my daily bread and it is snowing outside. The snow started slowly at first, as snow is wont to do, and now the stuff is falling at a good clip and I am wondering when the powers that be in this place will make the decision to send us all home. Some of my co-workers have already slipped out the back, Jack, as the Paul Simon song says, but I fear that there will be no slipping for me, see. I am stuck. I am stuck because not only is it snowing outside, inside there is no access to the information superhighway, so that the public we serve with all our hearts can no longer use our computers to search for job sites, computer games, and free porn, and to ensure their access to all of the above, I must stay here in order to let in a computer / online services technician who is coming today to solve all of our digital access problems, providing, of course, he can get through the snow. So all is not well in my world, given that I would really like to get out of here before I have to cross-country ski my way home, but duty calls and I must remain. Frankly, that bites the big one.

Therefore, I must find ways to keep my mind occupied as the snow falls and the technician wanders blindly around the countryside following the instructions of an inferior GPS application and wondering why he didn’t listen to his mother and become a dope smuggler. Granted there are problems with the government-sponsored retirement system—not everyone can look stylish in orange, after all—but the work is incredibly remunerative and you can get rid of irate customers simply by blowing holes in them with automatic weapons and then leaving their bullet-ridden carcasses in the middle of the street, thereby informing any other disgruntled customers that they had better readjust their collective attitude and undisengruntle themselves quickly or else.  Gruntlement is a wonderful thing, you understand, especially if you know what’s good for you. He will, no doubt, still be thinking these charitable thoughts about his company’s customers when his inferior GPS application tells him he has arrived at his destination and the road signs tell him that he has arrived in New Canaan, Connecticut, which is not even vaguely close to where he is supposed to be.

In any case, everyone in this our Great Republic is talking about walls these days. I am not kidding; walls are all the rage now, the way Pet Rocks and gluten-free peanut butter waffles used to be. You can hardly turn on the television anymore without hearing some hoary old pol screeching that walls are ineffective, unpopular, and worst of all, immoral. This last is somewhat odd, or at least I think so; I went to parochial school for eight years and no one, not one priest, not one Christian Brother, not one nun ever said anything about walls being immoral. How could they? Monsignor O’Malley could hardly denounce a wall as being the equivalent of Communism or masturbation as threats to a good Catholic boy’s soul when the nuns charged with teaching us how to be good Catholics lived in a convent with a fifteen-foot wall topped with broken glass around it.[i]  The only walls that were even vaguely immoral, so far as I can remember, were the Berlin Wall (built by godless Red Communists, as if there were any other kind) and the walls around the city of Jericho, which fell because the people inside were ungodly (but not godless) heathens who did disgusting things with their neighbors and their neighbors’ cocker spaniels, things the nuns could not discuss in religion class, but that were definitely evil in the sight of the Lord, things so evil that the Canaanites deserved to have Robert Moses knock down their walls and push a six-lane freeway right through the heart of Jericho’s business district in order to connect Jericho to the Staten Island Expressway. In short, they had it coming. And all of God’s children said, Amen.

Since it appears that no amount of biblical exegesis will support the contention that walls are by definition malum in se, the amateur theologian must needs look to the motives of the people saying such a thing. Here we come across an interesting point: the most visible person making this contention is the Speaker of the United States House of Representatives. The Speaker is, by her own admission, a devout Roman Catholic. However, the Speaker is also a well-known advocate of abortion rights, which puts her in conflict with the teaching of the very church whose doctrine she professes to believe. Since there seems to be no way to reconcile these two belief systems logically, the amateur theologian must therefore come to the conclusion that logic is not involved, that the only way the Speaker can reconcile the inherent contradiction between one set of beliefs and the other is to conclude that she is one of those politicians who would gut her own mother with a dull fish knife to get re-elected and whose political position and power is more important to her than any church dogma or political belief. In that context, then, we can understand her statement that walls are immoral. That which diminishes or threatens to diminish her political position is immoral, that which enhances her political power is moral; it’s not exactly Kant’s categorical imperative, not by any stretch of the imagination, but it works for her and what more can you ask of a philosophical system?

---

[i] The walls, in case you were wondering, were that high because an order of contemplative nuns originally owned the convent. The nuns—I think were French but I could be wrong about that—wished to live apart from the world and dedicate their lives to prayer and work, which was easier to do when the Bronx was part of Westchester County than it is nowadays. A century later, the Bronx having voted for inclusion in Greater New York in 1898, and the city having grown considerably since the founding of the convent, the nuns moved to a new convent somewhere near the Finger Lakes, it being easier to contemplate the mysteries of Christ’s suffering and dying for the sins of humanity when you don’t have to listen to the police sirens blaring at all hours of the morning, noon, and night.

Something there is about a wall, that wants it down, or not, as the case may be

I am perplexed, which should not come as a surprise to anyone, by a great many things these days. I suppose it’s because I’m getting older; I am 56 now and the world makes less sense to me now than it did when I was sixteen. Of course, for most sixteen year old males the world’s lack of sense is not perplexing; figuring out how to get laid is. I don’t imagine that the subject has gotten any simpler in the forty years since it was my primary obsession, but time has a way of giving you other things to think about, most of which revolve around paying bills you’d rather not pay.

I am perplexed, for example, by the Federal government’s curious inability to build a fence.  Since the beginnings of human civilization one of the few things that governments of all ideological bents have been good at is the building of walls, fences, moats, and various and sundry other ways of making getting from Point A to Point B as annoying and cumbersome as possible. In the Scriptures, for instance, we see the Children of Israel’s way into the Promised Land blocked by the towering walls of the city of Jericho and we rejoice a few verses later as those sonically challenged walls come a-tumbling down, although it is at times like this that one must wonder if issuing government contracts to the lowest bidder is such a good idea, especially as this lowest bidder’s next job was building the levees around New Orleans’ Ninth Ward. It perplexes me that no one in the Corps of Engineers noticed that building walls of any sort were not this particular bidder's strong point. Some things are just a dead giveaway, but one must never underestimate the government's desire not to see what is directly in front of it, I think. 

In another, perhaps more germane example, the first Qin emperor of China, the great and more than vaguely loony Qin Shi Huang, the man who united all the warring Chinese states into one great empire, decided that the people of the northern grasslands and the Gobi Desert were not worth the time and effort of conquering–that lot was simply too lumpen, don’t you know—and so to keep them at bay and off the freshly mown grass he decided to build a wall between his newly unified empire and the barbarians. And so it was that the Great Wall of China came to be. The Great Wall stretches for two thousand miles across northern China and for the most part it worked as advertised. Oh, on occasion a Mongol horde would get through and China would have to suffer through the hacking, slashing, raping, and pillaging that such breaches afforded, but in the main, the wall did its job and kept the barbarians out and the tourists and their money in.

And in the interests of fairness I should point out that the Romans built not one, but two walls across Great Britain to separate Scotland from England. Large sections of Hadrian’s Wall and the Antonine Wall still exist and you can go see them, if you care to see that sort of thing. The Romans built the walls to keep the Scots and Picts from raiding what was then the Roman province of Britannia, a fact that I am sure boosted the ego of many a Scottish and Pictish war chief until someone explained to them that the Romans regarded Caledonia—the Latin name of Scotland—as a great festering pile of pig manure no one in their right mind would want in the first place.

For even more Roman fence-type fun, we have the Limes Germanicus and the Limes Moesiae, which the Romans built to keep the Germans out of the Empire, the Limes Arabicus, which kept the Arabs out of the Empire, and the limes at the edge of the glass, which keep the margaritas out of me. To go a bit further afield, the British built the Lines of Torres Vedras, which successfully kept the French out of Portugal, and the French built the Maginot Line to keep the Germans out of France, which was somewhat less successful. The Russians built the Iron Curtain; its most visible manifestation, the Berlin Wall, was pretty effective until the East Germans got tired of looking at in 1989. The Iron Curtain’s less visible manifestations were the heavily defended borders between members of the Warsaw Pact, a harder to understand phenomenon given that no Bulgarian was going to risk his life and already limited freedom to defect to Romania.

Most recently, of course, we have the Israelis and their antiterrorist fence or wall or whatever the correct word for the thing is. The Israelis erected the whatever it is after waves of suicide bombers began striking inside Israel after 2000 in the wake of the second Palestinian intifada, the Israelis working on the entirely reasonable assumption that if the bombers couldn’t get into Israel they couldn’t kill anyone with a bomb. The dramatic drop in the rate of suicide bombings in Israel would seem to bear out this assumption, but the critics remain, of course; empiricism has never been popular amongst the chattering classes. There’s just something about facts and figures that makes your average idealist’s skin crawl.

All of which leads us back to the question of why the government of this our Great Republic cannot build a fence along the country’s southern border. I have heard all sorts of reasons for this peculiar handicap. Building such a fence is technically impossible is one reason I’ve heard, as well as that fence-building is a racist macroaggression, and the one I like the most, building the fence would cost too much. First, as to the questions of costs and possibility, it seems to me that if the first emperor of China can build a gigantic wall that you can’t see from outer space two thousand years ago then there is no reason why the government of this our Great Republic cannot build a chain link fence that you can see from Mexico with the naked eye.  Chain link fencing is a much easier material to work with than truly humongous blocks of stone and we could probably put a chain link fence up in much less time than it took the Chinese to build the Great Wall. The fence will have to come with all the electronic doodads beloved of the surveillance state these days, which will cause all of the usual cost overruns that we must expect whenever the government tries to do anything. But what of it? This country, after all, has spent trillions of dollars over the past fifty years trying to eliminate poverty and the poverty rate hasn’t budged an inch, and yet we continue to spend money on trying to eliminate poverty. If we can spend trillions of dollars on something we know isn’t going to work, we can certainly spend a few million on something that might; you never know, after all. Milton might be alive, he said, making an allusion so obscure that not even the guys on The Big Bang Theory can figure it out. Well, maybe Sheldon would catch it.

As for the racism of it all, well, I don’t know about that. Every country has immigration laws and I’ve always had the idea that if everyone else has immigration laws we should have them too. It’s only fair, you know. And we should get to enforce them like everyone else. After all, Mexico has no qualms about shipping Hondurans back to Honduras if they catch them working in Mexico so why should we debate sending Mexicans back home? And if sending people back where they came from is racist, does this make the Mexican government racist as well? If this is the case, then this country should be doing everything in its power to stop the hordes of racist Mexicans from coming into our country, lest they infect our unsuspecting citizenry with their low, vile, and altogether contemptible racism. I hear, though, that this is not going to happen, as our Illinois Incitatus will be declaring shortly that the immigration laws are whatever He says they are on any given day, and that it will please His Elective Majesty to let these poor benighted wretches into this country. I suspect, however, that the poor benighted wretches will have to wait for November for the good news. The former junior senator from Illinois will not want to rile up the bitter clingers until after the midterm elections.  In a world filled with much confusion and perplexity, our prairie solon’s need to pander for votes is the one thing we can all count on. In this He is as true as the North Star, a mother’s love, and my dentist finding something expensive to fix at every checkup. Thus it ever was, saith the sages, and thus it ever shall be.

The end of the world, sideways, sort of

As I understand it, the world will come to an end next week.  This bit of not very good news comes to us courtesy of the ancient Maya, whose calendrical wisdom was such that even people pretending to be relatively sane, like Keynesian economists and life insurance salesmen, will bow their heads reverently in profound deference whenever the subject of calendrical eschatology comes up in polite conversation.  The end of the world as we know it carries with it no end of special duties and burdens, like spending more time with your family, comforting those distressed by this somewhat unexpected turn of events, going to church and confessing one’s sins or not going to church and committing fresh sins while you still have time to commit them, and paying your income taxes. No, this is not a joke. I am sure that the IRS will want you to know that, end of the world or not, you will still have to pay your income taxes for the 2012 tax year. Therefore, given the tentative nature of human existence post-December 21^st, you should file your Form 4868 for an automatic extension of your filing date as soon as possible. Apocalypses and extinction events are all very well and good, you see, but no one gets out of here alive or without paying what they owe to the government.  There’s just no way that’s going to happen.

Now, I know that the Maya, ancient and otherwise, are a Third World—Native American—First Nations—collective indigenous noun of your choice people, and as such are filled with virtues, insights, and traditional knowledge permanently denied to vile, decadent, and materialist Euro—American schnooks like me, so I know I shouldn’t question the wisdom of the Maya elders when they foretell the end of the Earth in only a few short days, but I have a question and apparently no one has the answer: if the ancient Mayans were so attuned to the ways of the universe that they could predict when the world was going to end several hundred years in the future, how come they couldn’t predict when the Spanish were going to show up and put an end to their world in the 1500’s?  

I mean, really, you and all your people are one with time, the universe, and everything, and you miss something like a large number of illegal immigrants about to show up on your doorstep intent on committing mayhem?  How do you miss a megahumongous load of bad karma like that? This was an apocalyptic event for the Maya--it would be a apocalyptic event for anyone--and no soothsayer worth his salt saw it coming? Was the psychic radar screen in need of adjustment that week? If you ask me, and I know you didn’t but I don’t care, the arrival of the conquistadores was the sort of thing you’d think a very good prophet would have picked up on, especially when the prophet—king—soothsayer did his predicting under the influence of psychedelic drugs while tugging a bit of homemade barbed wire through his genitalia, a feat that hurts just thinking about it. I know I would have predicted all sorts of things if someone were dragging a rope with imbedded stingray spines through my private parts; in fact, I would have predicted anything anyone wanted me to predict in order to get the fish parts out of my parts. The Spanish came intent on kicking ass in a truly gynormous way. And remember, in those days it took months to get from Seville to Mesoamerica.  Months, people, months, months of negative energy and an occasional bout of the dreaded scurvy were building up in Andalusia and then heading out over the Atlantic intent on doing vile and nasty things to the Maya. The entire point of the exercise from day one was to get some ass—the mestizos didn’t come from nowhere, folks—kick other people’s ass, and grab as much gold as they could carry before going home and lording it over the peons for the rest of their lives. This is not something the Maya could have learned by checking the airline passenger manifests for known troublemakers.  And it’s not like the conquistadors booked a weekend trip to Cancun and then decided to stay on for a few extra weeks to take advantage of the duty—free looting, pillaging, and forcible converting to Catholicism deals offered by Iberia Airlines. The Spanish came to the Americas packing large amounts of heat and with loads of malice aforethought on their minds. Something like that didn’t send a major league tsunami through the Maya equivalent of The Force?  Am I really supposed to believe that?

Yes, I am and no, it didn’t; the Spanish showed up the same way my Uncle Max used to, unwanted and unexpected, sort of like the flu, except with a better wardrobe, and none of the Maya knew that the Spanish were coming, or if they did, they did nothing about it. They didn't even put out a sign saying, Welcome to France, in order to confuse the conquistadors. That strikes me as being very odd, no two ways about it, so I hope you’ll please pardon me if I think that the Mayan prediction that the world is going to end next Friday is a load of toads’ gonads. Their track record to date doesn’t seem very reliable, if you’ll pardon me for saying so. I still have my money on a nuclear war with the Iranians or the North Koreans causing the apocalypse. I know that that’s betting the chalk, but I still think that the odds are better.

OLD GLORY AND THE DISCONTENTED: Now let me see if I’ve got this straight: in the state of California, a state that is slowly (and then suddenly, like Mike in The Sun Also Rises) going bankrupt, school officials have nothing better to do with their time than to tell a kid that he can’t fly an American flag on his bicycle because such flagwaving, an old and endearing American habit, by the way, would cause racial tensions with the Mexican inmates of this politically correct institution. That the child of American citizens, himself an American citizen when he is not busy being an annoying kid, cannot fly an American flag as he rides his American bike (all right, it’s probably Chinese) on American streets on his way to an American school run by (probably) American bureaucrats whose salaries are paid for by American taxpayers because such a display might annoy Mexicans is more than a little outrageous. If the Mexican contingent in the school does not like this display of American pride, I would suggest to them that there are Mexican schools in Mexico where one may fly the Mexican flag to one’s heart’s content and that you can do so for years without ever seeing the American flag and the sooner you take this opportunity to return from whence you came, the sooner you will not have to put up with annoying gringo kids flying their annoying gringo flag from their not-gringo bike.

Hat tip to Snoopy over at Simply Jews: I literally hadn't heard about this before.

ELECTIONEERING NEWS: I am sure that many of you will be happy to know that my run for the 2060 Democratic Presidential nomination is finally back on track and even, dare I say it at such an early point in my candidacy, acquiring some momentum. The money troubles that plagued the campaign in the beginning have abated somewhat; the money is not exactly pouring in, but the trickle is now a stream of sorts and we have picked up some powerful support. My commitment to raising the refund on all bottles and cans to 75 cents from one end of this our Great Republic to the other has garnered a good sized chunk of the homeless and mentally ill vote, and the good thing about having them on your side is that they are always available, except when they have to line up for their meds at the outpatient clinic, and that five people with multiple personalities can bring a candidate anywhere up to thirty to forty extra votes on Election Day, and a one man voting bloc is nothing to sneeze at, I can tell you.

My opponents still refuse to debate me, that much has not changed, but I am resisting the urge to go negative yet. There seems little point in my pointing out that my honorable opponents routinely behave in an un-Presidential manner when their mothers, of all people, will do that for me, and in public, no less. I don’t believe that I have ever seen a crop of candidates in any election cycle as psychologically immature and unprepared for high office as this one is. But as I said, now is not the time to go negative, I think. If you start with this sort of thing too early in the election cycle, I’ve found, you tend to turn off the voters, who will always associate you with negativity. This is not a good thing for anyone trying to gain elective office.

I have to say, though, that the thought of going negative now is pretty damn tempting, I can tell you. It’s not just the jejune nature of my fellow candidates, it’s that here we are facing the second half of the 21st century and for reasons I am not sure I fathom the Democratic Party was and is the party of nostalgia. It’s as if the last bright idea any Democrat ever had was the New Deal, and let’s face it, even that wasn’t everything Democrats crack it up to be. Franklin D. Roosevelt did not run in 1932 and 1936 on 54—40 or fight or on Tippecanoe and Tyler too, and yet all anyone ever seems to hear from us Democrats is the same old New Deal programs repackaged for a new generation. We keep appealing to the same old class warfare nostrums without thinking that the same old class of people we aim those nostrums at have picked up and moved on. But we don’t want to hear that, because that would mean having to change the game and we like the game as it is, even if it is way out of date.

Still, there may be hope for these Democratic stalwarts. A new underclass may emerge, although just where we’d find this new set of potential voters is a little hard to figure out. We could convince California and its scads of underprivileged to rejoin the Union, even if more than one cynic has pointed out that back in the day, Baja California didn’t start in Oakland, or we could ask the Mexicans if they would rent Texas back to the United States for a little while. That doesn’t seem very likely to me, though. The reemergence of Mexico as a world power was certainly one of the more surprising developments of the past century and I saw in the New York Times the other day that Russia demanded that Mexico stop its ongoing aggression at the latest meeting of the Security Council. The Mexicans denied that they were committing any aggressive acts against Russia—they always deny their hostile intent, no matter what the circumstances—but this time the Russians had proof: a live satellite feed showing shadowy figures in blue jeans and baseball caps crossing the Bering Sea bridge on foot in the middle of the night. Then the Russians showed many of these same people standing outside a 7—11 in the Siberian city of Yakutsk, waiting for los rusos to come and give them a day job working construction or digging snow in the hot July sun. The tenor of the meeting was definitely hostile, with the Russians claiming that their country was not going to meet the same fate as the Disunited States and the Dominion of Nuestra Senora la Virgen de Guadalupe, which I always think sounds so much better than Canada anyway, even if it's hard to get all of that on a bottle of ginger ale, and that the Russian armed forces would use force if need be to halt this ongoing attack on the sacred soil of the Rodina. The Mexican ambassador, clearly outraged by these charges, told the Russian ambassador to go chinga a tu madre, cabron and that if the Russians didn’t stop whining like mi vieja and shut the hell up, Mexico would have no choice but to ram the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo up their culos sideways. Clearly, the Mexicans are not in any mood to rent Texas back to the somewhat United States, not when there are fresher fish to fry.

That’s what happens when you wind up on the D-list of nations; no one on the A-list wants to take your phone calls and you wind up talking to some punk kid right out of diplomat school who wants to impress his boss by making you feel like the poor relation asking for a handout. Once upon a time in this country, Mexicans came across the river to work for Americans. In 2060, some Mexicans still come across the river to work, but that traffic is very well—regulated nowadays; it is much harder, though, to stop the traffic in Americans crossing the Mississippi to find work in Mexico. That’s one of the major social and economic problems of our times and none of my opponents want to address the issue, not when they can promise the voters that they won’t have to pay for anything ever again. I’m still not sure how they intend to pay for that; we’ve already sold off the Dakotas, and most of Illinois, as well, and I don’t want to frighten anyone here, but if you live in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, you might want to learn Mandarin or Arabic in fairly short order. Just giving you guys the heads up. Have a nice day.