Note: Cross-posted from my newspaper blog.

That’s what went through my mind when I opened my email this morning. (Feb. 10)

“An gorta mor,” is Irish Gaelic and means, “The Great Hunger.” It refers of course to the Irish potato famine of 1845-46, when the potato crop was infested with a blight that turned the staple food of the Irish peasantry into an inedible fetid mush.

The famine was compounded by political stupidity and the incredibly callous attitude of the English government. The famine caused the starvation of an estimated quarter of the Irish population, and another quarter to permanently immigrate. It’s how a lot of us became Americans.

The reason I thought of this was that I am on the mailing list of the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation. Today I got a notice of an international conference next Wednesday, Feb. 15, commemorating the great famine of 1959-61 in China.

That famine was also the result of political stupidity and an incredibly callous attitude on the part of Mao Tse Tung’s communist government. The famine came about because of their attempt to reorganize Chinese agriculture during the so-called “Great Leap Forward.” The price of their ill-advised experimentation was at least 40 million dead, and cannibalism in the countryside.

I got on the foundation’s mailing list by chance when I was living in Washington for a few months. My first week there I came across the Victims of Communism Memorial, located at at the intersection of Massachusetts and New Jersey Avenues and G Street, NW, within view of the U.S. Capitol. The memorial is a replica of the statue the demonstrators at Tien An Min Square made, itself a copy of the Statue of Liberty with a Chinese face. The face was modeled on a woman who died under torture in a secret police dungeon for the crime of asking embarrassing questions of the regime.

When I stumbled across it, there were a bunch of Bulgarians conducting a memorial service around it. They were commemorating the panahida, a word which means a funeral service in Greek and many Slavic languages, but to Bulgarians means specifically a remembrance for the victims of the communist regime.

I introduced myself and told the organizers that I’d actually lived in Bulgaria and I wanted to write a story about the ceremony. I did, and there are Bulgarians who believe God personally directed my footsteps that day.

It was in Bulgaria that I experienced real hunger for the first time, living in a country that had not yet re-privatized agriculture, getting paid in local currency that depreciated at the rate of 10 percent per day. I lost an alarming amount of weight, with effects that linger to this day.

This morning I threw away half a ready-made lasagna that’s been around too long. Tonight or tomorrow I’ll probably throw away the rest of a bean and rice dish we won’t finish soon enough.

I can’t say this is going to change my behavior any. But for a while when I do throw food away, I’ll be a little more conscious of what I’m doing.

An Gorta Mor.

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(Cross-posted on my blog at The Marshall Independent.”

For those who enjoy following celebrity public spats, there was rather a good one at the American Airlines lost luggage area at LAX on Sunday (Dec. 18.)

Cuban-born star Maria Conchita Alonso spotted Sean Penn, approached him and braced him for his support of Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez.

Things escalated until Penn called Alonso a “pig,” and Alonso replied, “And you are a communist a**hole! It is great to live the way you do as a communist!”

Penn would not reply to press inquiries about the incident, but a representative told the New York Post that a “hostile woman was nonsensically berating” Penn.

Alonso later made a statement, “The only thing I regret is me calling him an a** hole because I lowered myself to where he is at, and took away my class at that second, but I don’t regret calling him a communist. The other thing I regret that nothing came out of this for us to meet in private. What happened Sunday isn’t really the way I wanted things to happen, I thought, ‘This is the perfect moment for me to go and tell him lets meet and talk.’ I have facts and he doesn’t. All he sees is what Chavez has presented. I am still not having a conversation with him, which is what I wanted to achieve that day. But all this is still good because I have an opportunity now to tell people that what Sean says is not true. How can you believe someone like Chavez? You have to be stupid, which I know Sean is not.”

Alonso was raised in Venezuela after her parents escaped Castro’s Cuba. She is a former Miss Venezuela and first entered show business in Venezuela and Mexico.

Penn is Hollywood royalty, the son of actor/director Leo Penn and actress Eileen Ryan. Leo Penn was blacklisted during the 1950s, and though you have to dig a bit to confirm it, was in fact a member of the Communist Party (CPUSA.)

Sean Penn has palled around with Chavez, as well as spending some serious face time with Cuban dictator Raul Castro in 2008. Back in 2002 he toured Baghdad as celebrity guest of Saddam Hussein, and on his return erected a larger-than-life sized statue of the late unlamented dictator in his front yard.

So is Sean Penn a communist, a chip off the old block?

I seriously doubt Penn has the brains or the patience to wade through ‘Das Kapital.’ Nor does he seem the kind to give up his fortune to live in a commune, or subject his professional judgment to Party discipline as so many Hollywood writers did back then. His fairly lengthy arrest record for assault indicates “does not play well with others.”

Penn once described himself in an interview, “Let’s face it. I’m a person that feels pretty alienated from the rest of the world and never felt understood by anyone.”

Poor misunderstood fellow, with nothing to console him but his millions.

“I’ve been spreading the word around for a while that I’ve wanted to talk to him and Danny Glover and even Oliver Stone. But they haven’t wanted to talk to me. I want to believe that it is just ignorance. I want to believe that those amazing directors and writers and actors that praise communist leaders just don’t know the truth and have been brainwashed by the propaganda,” Alonso said.

With all due respect to Alonso, I think she misses the point entirely.

What Penn, Glover, Stone, and a lot of their ilk are, is dictator groupies.

Dictator groupies, to put it bluntly, like hanging around with people who kill people. Similar to gangster groupies, like the celebrities who liked to hang around with “Crazy Joey” Gallo before he got whacked in the Gallo-Profacci War in 1972. (But hey, he got immortalized in a song by Bob Dylan no less.)

Dictator groupies are not unaware of the mass murders committed by their idols, how could they not be? They admire them.

Probably everyone has had the “if I were king of the world I’d set everything to rights and kill all the no-good $#!+s” fantasy. The difference is, these people take it a lot more seriously than us grownups. And of course, who else but professional creators of fantasy would be so susceptible to taking that fantasy seriously?

But there’s another thing too I think. Academics, professional intellectuals, and people who have inherited wealth and professional advantages (and note how many prominent Hollywood people these days have inherited their intro into the entertainment industry,) tend to be a bit on the wimpy side. They admire strength, but they don’t know what real strength is.

And all too often, they think strength is brutality.

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Note: My personal blog is on indefinite hiatus, however I am cross-posting from my newspaper blog at The Marshall Independent and the print-only TV Guide.

Jeszcze Polska nie zginela,
Kiedy my zyjemy.
Co nam obca przemoc wziela,
Szabla odberizemy/

Poland is not lost,
While yet we live.
What foreign force has taken,
We will reclaim with the sword.
- Dobrowksi’s Mazurka, National Anthem of Poland

Today is Veterans Day in the United States, and Independence Day in Poland, two events linked by much history.

It is also Armistice Day, or Rememberance Day in Europe and the British Commonwealth, and Independence Day in Poland.

For me the meaning of November 11, is defined by the 13 years I lived in Poland, and by my children whose grandfathers were officers in the U.S. Navy and the Polish Army.

The holidays are all linked to the date of the signing of the armistice that ended World War I. On that day in 1918, hostilities formally ceased in Europe. With the defeat of Germany and Austro-Hungary, and the fall of the Russian monarchy, the nation of Poland was reborn 122 years after being partitioned and absorbed by the three powers.

In the “Fourteen Points” speech given by President Woodrow Wilson to a joint session of congress on January 18, 1918, outlining his hopes for a just peace, point 13 was, “An independent Polish state should be erected which should include the territories inhabited by indisputably Polish populations, which should be assured a free and secure access to the sea, and whose political and economic independence and territorial integrity should be guaranteed by international covenant.”

That is why all over Poland there are streets and public squares named after Wilson.

The celebration of Independence Day in Poland was officially forbidden by the communist government and re-instituted by the Polish Third Republic in 1989. I remember parties where we’d celebrate with fireworks, just like in America. However, November is usually very cold in Poland, so we’d have the party inside, set off the fireworks outside, and run back inside to watch them through the window.

I used to tell my students about how much fun we have on American Independence Day, and I’d joke, “The next time your country is overrun, have your revolution in the summer.”

Of the many Polish veterans who have served in America’s wars, the first were Polish exiles who fought in the American Revolution. The best-known of these were Kazimierz Pulaski, who has been called “the father of American cavalry,” and Tadeusz Kosciusko, who designed and built the fortifications at West Point.

Pulaski saved the life of George Washington on one occasion, and died in the battle of Savanah. He is one of only seven people to be awarded honorary United States citizenship.

Kosciusko returned to Poland afire with the ideals of the Revolution. He supported the Constitution of May 3, 1791, the second constitution written in the world after the American, which extended more rights to the peasants and limited the power and privilege of the nobility. It was seen as a threat by the surrounding powers and in 1792 a faction of the nobility formed the Targowica Confederation and invited Catherine the Great of Russia to invade the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth to secure their power.

To this day “Targowicaniec” (“person from Targowica”) means “traitor” in Polish, in the same way we’d say “a Benedict Arnold.”

In 1794 Kosciusko led an uprising against Imperial Russia and the Kingdom of Prussia.

He lost.

Kosciusko spent the rest of his life in exile working in vain for the freedom of his country. When he died he left his fortune to buy the freedom of as many American slaves as possible, with the land, tools, and education necessary for them to support themselves.

During the years I lived in Poland, I saw the medal of the Order of the Cincinnati given by George Washington to Kosciusko in the Polish Military Museum in Warsaw, and a signed military communique written by Pulaski in the Pulaski Museum in Warka, Poland. And once while touring the crypt beneath Wawel Castle in Krakow, I came across the tomb of Kosciusko with a plaque in both English and Polish commemorating this fighter, “Za nasza i wasza wolnosc,” “For our freedom and yours.”

I wish I could describe for you how I felt when I stood in the presence of these relics.

For most of the 13 years between 1991 and my return to the U.S. in 2004, I taught English, wrote for American publications about the changes I saw in Poland, and in a small way helped in the rebuilding of that country so linked to ours by history.

Though I never made much money there, the wealth I took away with me was first and foremost my children, the friendship and respect of the people I met, and the heightened sense of closeness to my own country I found while living abroad.

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“All societies are based on rules to protect pregnant women and young children. All else is surplusage, excrescence, adornment, luxury, or folly, which can — and must — be dumped in emergency to preserve this prime function. As racial survival is the only universal morality, no other basic is possible. Attempts to formulate a “perfect society” on any foundation other than “Women and children first!” is not only witless, it is automatically genocidal. Nevertheless, starry-eyed idealists (all of them male) have tried endlessly — and no doubt will keep on trying.”
– Robert A. Heinlein

One of the features of the “culture wars” is the back-and-forth about whether our country, and our civilization (the one called “Western”) is in decline: economic, military, moral and cultural.

Heinlein once said, “If you can’t put numbers on it, it’s not science, it’s opinion.”

I have some reservations about this, but another time. Here’s some numbers courtesy of Mark Steyn who’s famous for supporting his contentions with hard stats.

It’s from a review of James Cameron’s “Titanic” of all things. I wrote an unpublished review of the movie some time back, condemning it for slandering the reputation of the courageous dead. Contrary to Cameron’s dreck, all accounts say the wealthy passengers met their fate as any man who is a man would wish to.

“Mr Cameron notwithstanding, the male passengers gave their lives for the women, and would never have considered doing otherwise: Over three-quarters of the women – and only 20 per cent of the men (survived.) On a luxury liner sailing between two technologically advanced societies, the chaps had barely an hour to kiss their wives goodbye, watch them clamber into the lifeboats and sail off without them. The social norm of “women and children first” held up under pressure.

“Today, in what Harvey Mansfield calls our “gender-neutral society”, there are no social norms. Eight decades after the Titanic, or round about the time Cameron began working on his film, a German-built ferry en route from Estonia to Sweden sank in the Baltic Sea. Of the 1,051 passengers, only 139 lived to tell the tale. But the distribution of the survivors was very different from that of the Titanic. Women and children first? No female under 15 or over 65 made it. Only five per cent of all women passengers lived. The bulk of the survivors were young men. Forty-three per cent of men aged 20-24 lived.”

Any questions?

“Where there are no men, be thou a man.” – Rabbi Hillel

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The guy in the picture is Faleh Hassan Almaleki. He looks like a fairly normal, kind of nerdy guy doesn’t he?

In October, 2009 he murdered his lovely daughter Noor, by running her over with an SUV. As a journalist, I’m supposed to say “allegedly.”

Oh please, he did it in broad daylight, in front of witnesses, and made no attempt to deny it. In point of fact, he justified it as being entirely right and proper by his lights. And it wasn’t a spur-of-the-moment thing. There was a long set-to of threats and stalking beforehand. In fact, the autocide happened in the parking lot of the state Department of Economic Security office in Peoria, outside Phoenix.

You see, Noor disgraced the family “honor.” It appears she wanted to live a normal life. You know, work at a job, date, get married to a guy she knew – rather than a guy back in Iraq her father picked.

On Monday Faleh is going on trial for murdering his daughter, and attempting to murder her boyfriend’s mother.

Presumably the couple were going to see what the authorities could do for the girl.

Well, as it turns out – nothing. But now she’s dead, they can do something.

Make sure the son-of-a-whore dies for this. And while we’re at it, can we try her mother as an accessory? That’s almost always the case in these “honor killings.”

I’m putting “honor killings” in scare quotes because this culture, these people, have no honor. They foul the word by uttering it. Murdering your daughter proves your culture is worse than barbaric, it is an obscenity that we cannot, must not EVER tolerate in our land.

An innocent girl, willing to live by our laws, trusted herself to the protection of our law. We failed her. But we can avenge her.

And before he dies, stuff his mouth with bacon and wrap his body in pig skin. Inject pigs blood into him with a syringe. Bury him in a pig yard.

We know he has no honor. The question is, do we?

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Last night, as I was about to call it a night, this idea just popped into my head, virtually full-grown.

Damned if I know where it came from, I wasn’t thinking about the Grand Scope of History, I was reading John Gardner’s ‘Grendel.’ It of course, owes a lot to Eric Hoffer’s essay, ‘The Role of Undesirables in Society,’ and Poul Anderson’s fortunate phrase, The Long Night. It probably ought to owe something to Toynbee, except I’ve never read him.

It might actually be called ‘History etc,’ except that doesn’t rhyme with cynic.

At any rate it’s a classification of five stages of civilization, perhaps ours, perhaps any other, which are:

1) vigor
2) virtue
3) decline
4) decadence
5) the Long Night

Vigor: the founding age, the age of the pioneers and founders. Brawling, lusty, vulgar, and definitely not the kind you’d bring home to dinner. Especially if you have pretty, nubile daughters.

(They’d throw themselves at them. Charming bad boys. Might work out, and you’d have some tough, strong, grandkids – or your daughters would regret it the rest of their lives and you’d wind up supporting your grandkids. It’s a toss up.)

Hoffer described them perfectly. He met their kind among the Okies, fruit pickers, and men in the labor camps set up during the Depression. He asked older local folks in California who remembered the pioneers, and when pressed they replied that the people who most resembled the pioneers were the Okies and migrants.

Virtue: the age of the stolid New Englanders who moved west, from perfectly nice places to live. The westward migration in the covered-wagon era was overwhelmingly a middle-class movement, as shown by the cost of the wagon and all the gear.

Hard-working, church going, tight-assed for sure, but self-reliant and enormously inventive. Where the voortrekkers broke trail, these built civilization.

What happens is, families and single women move in. The hell-raising pioneers either get hitched and settle down, or take advantage of the new civiliation (which means “city”) and colonize a corner of it.

That corner is called, “skid row.”

Decline: civilization has now existed long enough to feel natural to most of its living citizens. The idea of “enemy” is fading. Tolerance is the new frontier. Reason and negotiation, backed by armed watchfullness, will solve all problems with hostile strangers.

Decadence: civilization is accepted as eternal. “A stranger is just a friend you haven’t met.” Tolerance becomes agressive. In fact, the idea of tolerance is insulting. We must embrace what we formerly only toleated.

If reason and negotiation fail with hostile strangers, well then we can’t have been reasonable enough. Thus surrender is the only moral imperative.

This period is actually the most fun to live in for party animals. The possibilities for pleasure are endless, and can be enjoyed openly. The only social sanctions are against being an intolerant killjoy.

But these are a different kind of party people than the vigorous men who could wake up with tremendous hangovers and work them off with an hour of hard labor and lots of water.

Metrosexuals seldom live a life physical enough to have negotiating room with their vices.

This era is followed by…

The Long Night: preceeded by a transition period in which there is first a breakdown into the default male form of organization – the gang.

Since disorder is the least tolerable of social states, society re-stablilizes into the only truly natural units of human society – the family, the band, and the tribe.

Enemy means stranger. Strength means brutality – and you don’t dare be less brutal than your enemy.

Women lose all gains in freedom and independence, their status is dependent on attaching to a powerful man – who can brutalize them at will.

******
Gee, sure am glad I had that nighmare before I went to sleep.

You needn’t take any of this seriously, but… which stage do you think we’re living in?

I vote for late decline/early decadence.

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Note: This is my weekend op-ed for VCTR.

“Half the harm that is done in this world is due to people who want to feel important. They don’t mean to do harm — but the harm does not interest them. Or they do not see it, or they justify it because they are absorbed in the endless struggle to think well of themselves.”
T.S. Eliot

As we ring in the New Year, the news is full of accounts of the High and the Mighty and their great plans to do us good in an awful hurry. The question of whether we want good done to us is regarded as of no consequence.

The more of life I see, the more I appreciate the truth of Eliot’s observation.

In national politics, importance means accomplishing Great Reforms, or eliminating Great Evils. Nobody promises just to be a capable executive, frugally administer public funds, and cautiously tweak the system to see if some improvements can be made. Indeed it’s doubtful if anyone could get elected running on such a platform.

In journalism, importance means breaking The Story of the Century. (How many have we read in the first decade of this century so far?) Nowadays big time journalism regards itself as the fourth branch of government and a mighty Force for Good, rather than the watchdog of a free people.

Case in point. Last week I watched journalism goddess Lesley Stahl on former Republican Governor Mike Huckbee’s show on FOX. They were commemorating the life of legendary journalist/producer Don Hewitt, who founded the “television news magazine” 60 Minutes in 1968.

Stahl described how she started at 60 Minutes in 1991. A few years ago she had to take a $500,000 pay cut so CBS could afford Katie Couric ($15 million per year,) but still makes a reported $1.8 million per year.

Stahl’s first journalistic coup was an expose of the baby selling market in Romania. She posed as an American woman trying to buy two handsome boys, ages six and eight years, from their mother for $2,000. Huckabee ran clips of the piece, showing Stahl and a middleman haggling with the mother, right in front of the kids.

Baby selling! The very words invoke horror. As opposed to a civilized American adoption where the agency gets exorbitant fees and the mother nothing.

“We shut them down,” Stahl crowed, as Huckabee nodded appreciatively.

I had a different reaction. You see, I’ve been to Romania too.

Five years after that broadcast I relocated from Poland to Bulgaria by train. The trip included a four-hour stopover in Bucharest. By the time I got on the train to Sofia, I didn’t know whether to get out of the country and never come back, or stay and join a religious order.

Because communist dictator Nicolae Ceaucescu mandated high birth rates while impoverishing the country, the capitol was full of abandoned children. For blocks around the train station, no manhole had a cover, because the children where living in the tunnels under the streets.

I saw legions of filthy children begging. Some showing off hideous orthopedic deformities, some sniffing glue in corners. many reportedly HIV positive.

Though I lean lukewarm against the death penalty, I’m glad they killed that monster and his wife. (Yes I know, the trial was a farce and the verdict a forgone conclusion. Guess what? I don’t care.)

When I went back a few years later, the children were gone. I like to think they’re being cared for. But I didn’t ask.

Any mother in those circumstances who loved her children would joyfully send them to America with a loving family, even at the cost of never seeing them again. I’ve known two lovely, healthy, and intelligent young women raised by American families who found them abandoned on their doorsteps, in India and Korea respectively. They bless the mothers they never knew.

But you shut them down Lesley, you and 60 Minutes.

Congratulations.

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Note: This is my weekend op-ed for the newspaper. I penned it early because this Saturday I’m headed out on the road again! My son and I are going car camping through the north western states, maybe all the way to the Pacific.

Maximilien François de Robespierre, a leader of the French Revolution and architect of The Reign of Terror, was sitting with a friend in a sidewalk cafe in Paris.
Suddenly a huge crowd rushed by. Robespierre jumped up and ran after them.
“Robespierre! Where are they going? What are they doing?” his friend calls.
“I don’t know, but I have to be in front. I’m their leader!”

Last Saturday, September 12, a crowd of protesters descended on Washington, D.C., a big one.

They came to protest the massive expansion of government and the national debt.

How big a crowd is debated. News reports first said, “thousands,” quickly revised to “tens of thousands.” Eyewitnesses known to me say, “six figures minimum.”

The London newspaper Daily Mail, estimated at least a million, others as high as two million. To the cautious that sounds a bit over the top.

All of these figures come from eyeball estimates. Counting crowds is dicey at best. You define a square, get a rough count of the people inside it, then count how many squares cover the crowd. Then there’s the question of how dense the crowd is. People tend to cluster near speakers, for example.

The National Park Service said they’d have an estimate later this week, based on analysis of aerial photos. The Park Service hasn’t done crowd estimates for 14 years, since their 1995 estimate of the Million Man March sponsored by Louis Farrakhan’s Nation of Islam turned out so disappointingly low.

We’ll see how long it is before they’re allowed to do another crowd estimate after this. But from the pictures, no one can doubt this was huge.

From photos and interviews some facts are emerging.

This is not the Republican Party still sore about the election. This is a lot of Americans from all over the country who are really sore about both parties. A sentiment expressed on one T-shirt, “Impeach Everybody!”

There are Republicans trying to ride this movement’s coat tails like Robespierre – and they’re being told to sit down, shut up and listen. They should consider themselves lucky, Robespierre was guillotined.

Media call the crowd “conservative,” and it may be in the sense that 41 percent of the electorate label themselves. Which means something different from what conservatives in Washington (a.k.a. Big Government Republicans) mean by it. It might be Populist, if anyone could tell me what that means. There appears to be a strong libertarian “leave us the hell alone” streak in it.

These people are not happy about insults they’ve received, as expressed on one sign, “It doesn’t matter what this sign says, they’ll call it racist anyway.”

This is the real thing, in that overused phrase, a grass-roots movement. Not “astroturf.”

The pictures show a crowd generally well-dressed though not upscale, orderly, an average age surprisingly high, and contrary to critics not lily-white either. Minorities are represented though sparsely, as are a surprising number of immigrants.

This is the middle class on the march, and I’ve seen it before. In several countries where people got utterly fed up with their government.*

A people fed up with a recklessly spendthrift Republican administration turned them out of power. Democrats took that as permission to join the Republicans in running up debt to levels many say looks like national suicide. Someone’s not listening.

After Sunday an anonymous commenter remarked, “When people with jobs demonstrate, you know something is happening.”

Folks, this is a game-changer. A lot of angry Americans have learned that when you’re frustrated, insulted, and feel like nobody is listening, demonstrating is fun.

*In Bulgaria, Yugoslavia, and Romania I marched with people who had had enough of their government and turned out in numbers too big to ignore or shoot down; students, professionals, workingmen, little old babushkas and elegant ladies in fur wraps. In Yugoslavia it was a very near run thing. I may owe my life to a police chief who refused to give the kill order – and was killed for it.

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My weekend op-ed in the newspaper.

To conspire,” verb: from the Latin con spirare, “to breathe with”: 1. to join in a secret agreement to do an unlawful or wrongful act or an act which becomes unlawful as a result of the secret agreement . 2. to act in harmony toward a common end. – Merriam-Webster

“Never attribute to conspiracy that which can be adequately explained by stupidity.”
- The First Principle of Conspiracy.

The Daily Kos website recently posted the results of a survey that purported to find that in spite of contemporary birth announcements in newspapers and Hawaiian state documents, 28 percent of Republicans believe President Obama was not born in the U.S. and 30 percent are not sure.

Note however, this is the same website that took seriously columnist Andrew Sullivan’s claim Republican vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin was not the mother, but the grandmother of her child Trig.

In 1997 when I was living in former Yugoslavia a student very seriously asked me, “Do you think (President) Milosevic is working for Clinton?”

After 9/11 a student in Poland asked me, “Is it true that all the Jews who worked in the World Trade Center were told to stay home that day?”

What is the appeal of the notion events are ruled by sinister groups of conspirators?

For one, conspiracy theories appeal to our sense of self-importance and the thrill of possessing occult knowledge. “Everybody’s been duped about how the world really runs but me and a few like-minded comrades. We know things nobody else does.”

Conspiracy theories offer reassurance. The realization the powerful are not inherently wiser than we are can be terrifying. The idea those in charge are sinister conspirators is actually reassuring, if the alternative is that no one really knows what’s going on.

And then there are people so convinced of the self-evident rightness of their position the mere existence of people who disagree is incomprehensible. They must have ulterior motives for denying what is so obviously true.

For example, the reaction of the proponents of the administration’s health care plan to the opposition amounts to sheer incomprehension that so many people could sincerely disagree. Which causes them to, equally sincerely, attribute dissent to “a vast right-wing conspiracy” in Hillary Clinton’s famous words.*

Real or not, widespread belief in conspiracies has driven historical events more often than we’re comfortable thinking about. Historian Bernard Bailyn has documented how much popular belief in a conspiracy against American liberty motivated the American Revolution. The Nazis claimed a Jewish conspiracy against Germany justified the “Final Solution.”

Calling a claim someone is making a “conspiracy theory” can be used to dismiss, rather than address a position.

The Associated Press recently ran an article stating, “Conspiracy theories about a secret Mexican plan to reclaim the Southwest are also growing amid the public debate about illegal immigration.”

Calling it a “conspiracy theory” is disingenuous. In fact, there is a “conspiracy” in the sense of “acting to a common end,” but it’s not the least bit secret. It’s openly discussed in articles, websites, and speeches by Mexican officials and Mexican-American intellectuals who have never forgotten what Americans never remember – that the southwest quarter of the U.S. was once the northern half of Mexico.

And, sometimes there really are conspiracies. That’s why we have criminal conspiracy laws.

“Never be surprised by conspiracy. Conspiracy is normal primate politics.”
- The Second Principle of Conspiracy

* Hillary’s dismissal of claims her husband had “sexual relations with that woman” and lied about it under oath.

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This is the Doonesbury strip from July 1.

Mother Boopsie says, “See how many female protestors there are? That’d be impossible in most Arab societies. Images like that are incredibly empowering to gals all over the Middle East.”

Daughter remarks, “Arab girls need empowering.”

First of all, let me say that I agree whole heartedly.

It almost makes me regret what I’m about to do to Gary Trudeau.

I’ve been following Doonesbury on and off since near the beginning. More off than on these days I’m afraid. Since Gary Trudeau became more a social commentator than a cartoonist he’s been preachy, snide, and to put it baldly – either a liar or woefully ignorant of history.

He recently identified waterboarding as the same torture practices used by the Spanish Inquisition and the Japanese in WWII – a lie. Whether you excuse the practice of waterboarding by American interrogators or not, the fact is the torture techniques used by the Inquisition and the Japanese are similar only insofar as they use water.

But the worst sin of all is – he’s not funny anymore. At least not as much or as often as he used to be.

As an Okie, I still treasure his hilarious take on the Oklahoma county commissioners scandal, lo these many years ago.

“Say, you’re Emma Doonesbury’s boy ain’t you? Well, we just want you to know your Uncle Henry is a good ‘ol boy who always took care of his people.”

“Thanks, I appreciate that,” Uncle Henry replies.

“Say Henry, do you think you could do my driveway afore you goes to jail?”

So it’s with a certain “gotcha” feeling that I have to point out to Mr. Trudeau, IRANIANS ARE NOT ARABS YOU TWIT.

And furthermore, I am gobsmacked that anyone who has been so loud about his opinions on the war on terror (silly term though it is) and the Iraq strategy thereof, wouldn’t know that.

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