We Followed Our Bliss

Why do we need myths at all?

My first position on the creation of life, the universe, and everything, is that demanding that God tell you the answer is sheer blasphemy. You don’t ask your parents to tell you how your conception went. “Was there a condom and did it break?” “Was a threesome involved?” “Was it good for everyone?” “Was it videotaped?” “Can I watch it?” These are questions you do NOT ask.

My second position on creation, etc., is that, if any crimes were actually committed by any of the principals involved, surely the statutes of limitations have all expired by now. So there can hardly be grounds for prosecution. Although, look up the “Problem of Evil” for a view that indicates civil action, perhaps including class reparations, might still be appropriate.

So why are so many making so much noise about all these ideas, when they have nothing to do with things that matter in our everyday lives, like the price of gasoline, the rising costs of housing, government invasions of privacy, racism, the dismantling of the biosphere, or will Katie Couric dominate prime time broadcast news?

I think the answer to the question I just asked is that I was full of it when I asked it. I think that creation myths have everything to do with homelessness, invasions by Alberto Gonzalez, Katie Couric, etc.

For example:

Scientists studying mass quantities of human and chimp cheek swabs, have set forth a rich new theory, namely that ages ago common ancestors of chimps and humans (I’ll call them chumpans) split into isolated populations which evolved separately into distinct varieties, I’ll call them chimpans and chumans. BUT, these then came back together and got the hots for each other, and they went for it, and lo, verily they did have offspring such as chimans, chullimpas, chichichumans, and chuchums.

And then, THOSE did also come to know one another, and bunches of offsprings maybe beat each other, and other bunches wasted their lives getting high on fermented berries, and others simply sucked at termite hunting and starved to death, and finally, only “chimps” and “humans” were left, and those no longer had sex together, right? Because it had no procreative purpose now, wink, wink, as they were by then different species. Praise Darwin.

This is a fine subcreation theory every bit as fun as that Garden, Serpent and “Apple” business is when you figure out what the snake is really doing there. You can tell your kids, “Yes, children, scientists have determined that the entire species of Homo Sapiens has original sin. In fact we once were ALL trailer trash. Our ancestors didn’t just mess around one Sunday afternoon in a public park. They were messing around for millions of years with ALL the apes in the neighborhood of a continent, in every park, street, and alley, whether the apes bathed, or not, or shaved their foreheads.”

In fact you could say this theory suggests that we humans owe our evolution of big brains and our domination of the planet to our long prehistory of sleeping with relatives. We evolved BECAUSE we were all Jerry Springer fodder, for eons.

But I digress. I was going to say that these ideas are NOT irrelevant to important questions of public policy, like starvation, Darfur, immigration, the exploration of space, Key Arena, what part of the horse Tim Eyman is, gay marriage, homelessness, WASL, Putin’s opinion of Cheney, or Katie Couric.

It’s true. When we all can agree on where we all came from it will be like the good old days when everyone always watched the Ed Sullivan Show and could answer questions about it the next day. Or like that time a couple years ago when we all saw the Paris Hilton clip.

When that day comes we will cease to be homeless people and non-homeless people. We will all be hairless apes whose ancestors once had sex with hairy apes, and the world will be as one.

Just Peace On My Plate, Please

Loving theories, whether they are true or not, broadly characterizes mathematicians like myself. That’s the theory, anyway. I don’t know; I just know I like theories and theoretical talk and theory-related stuff.

Take ethical and moral theorizing. What glorious fun it is to sit around all day out of the sun, in Seattle or in the shade, reading about “the aretaic turn.” It’s a wonderful thing. It’s not a theory but a whole turn of theories, like a flock of geese wheeling about in the sky preparing to migrate.

Any recent (last half century or so) theory to the effect that a moral philosophy should be based on seeking individual Virtue may be said to be part of “the aretaic turn.” There’s no end to the theories that’ll get you, and they’re all a hoot to a guy like me, even if all their proponents are deliberately full of themselves!

Another passel of theories I like (I wanted to say “passel”) is just war theories. In case you missed the Middle Ages, a just war theory is a theory used by theologians to fudge the Thou Shalt Not Murder commandment when advising kings on how to conduct wars and the odd pogrom. Some famous theologians came up with a particular (“the”) Just War Theory, and it’s still all the rage in theocircles. So much so that there are now multiple versions of it, all called Just War Theory. All as much fun as tort law. (Really: tort law is endlessly amusing.)

Let’s say you’re a Medieval King, “post-Fall of Rome,” and say you’re laying siege upon an enemy King’s city for Good Cause. Maybe he blasphemed the Holy Ghost or something. When is it OK to hurl rocks the size of outhouses OVER the walls, not into them, thus risking the lives and well-being of innocent women and children as well as killing defenders who deserve to die and burn in eternal hellfire, anyway?

The answer, says some proponents of certain Just War Theory, is it’s OK, PROVIDED that it induces the defenders to surrender, AND leads to only so much harm to innocents as might be expected to be commensurate with the wrong done, by the enemy King.

If, on the other hand, hurling the rocks toward innocents makes the defenders defend all the more furiously, so that your siege either fails altogether or the amount of death or agony you visit upon innocents outweighs the wrong done by your enemy, then you SHOULDN’T hurl the rocks. OR, if you calculate that the outcome would be acceptable in the sense just described, you SHOULD hurl more, or fewer, or bigger, or smaller, rocks, as your calculation may determine.

So applications of the Just War Theory require real-world calculations of effects of real-world actions. You have to anticipate consequences, and you are only as moral as you are accurate. The theory depends on knowing stuff that’s beyond the theory to know! It makes me feel so axiomatically unencumbered!

Example 1. How many Branch Davidians do you have to shoot or burn to get David Koresh to give up his weapons stash? If you don’t know, what do you do? In that case the theory (as applied here to pogroms) would say, figure out what number of dead and wounded Davidians would amount to a wrong still less than the wrong of hoarding illegal weapons to that degree. Then kill and wound that many, AND NO MORE.

Example 2. King W and his advisors want to know whether to nuke Iran or simply carpet-bomb parts of it, for possibly having a nuclear weapons program. To hurl, or not to hurl, and how much, is the question.

How wrong can it be for Iran to possibly have nuclear weapons, later, if you would use your own now to deprive her of them? However wrong that is, that’s how much wrongful killing of Iranians you’re allowed, goes the theory. Adjust your bombing accordingly.

Don’t Rain on My Pleasure

Last week a California court, in the course of seeing to it that a cocaine possessor wouldn’t get off on a technicality, came up with what struck me as a very useful new legal theory.

The arresting officer had searched the man against his wishes after finding him urinating in a Berkeley parking lot. Of course, a police officer can’t search you against your will anytime he or she wants. He or she has to catch you committing a crime, or have a reasonable suspicion that you have just committed a crime, or some such thing. I don’t know the exact legal language of the rule, but one of the words “crime” or “illegal” is in there.

So it looked like Mister Crack Pants might beat the charge, since for some reason not explained in the news story where I found this, there’s no law on the books to explicitly make peeing in Berkeley parking lots illegal.

Now, before you all rush to Berkeley to enjoy the heady freedom to pee virtually anywhere in that urban paradise, I should warn you that the appeals court’s clever thinking has corrected the situation. They determined it has been illegal all along to pee in Berkeley parking lots, in spite of the inconvenient absence of legislation to that effect, on the grounds that it “interferes with the comfortable enjoyment of both life and property.” Shazzam! So the arresting officer had the right to search, so the cocaine can have been admitted into evidence, so the conviction stands, so let the sentencing proceed!

This is good news. All any of you need do to break the law now is interfere with my comfortable enjoyment of life. If you have any questions, that’s “my” as in me, Copyright Dr. Wes Browning.

It’s not just finding urine in my parking stall that hinders my absolutely precious enjoyment of every moment of my precious life and my precious pleasure in parking my motor vehicles, but there are certain definite other things I don’t like either, that are now -- post factamente, no contradicteme -- as illegal as peeing in a Berkeley parking lot. Make my day, or you’re under arrest.

Take public morning activities, for example.

I’m not going to say all morning people should be lined up against the wall and shot. For any of us to say that would only be to stoop to their level. All I’m going to say is that for people to drive around and talk and whistle while they work before noon interferes with the comfortable enjoyment of my life and that of other decent people and therefore such people as do those things are guilty of misdemeanors and they must turn themselves in to the police at once. The actual penalty for their behavior will be worked out later, when some more judges have worked out what the law has always been all along. Such work will wait until afternoon.

Recently I have been noticing some delays as I ride busses about downtown. Metro Transit has openly admitted that, subsequent to the tunnel closure, bus travel times across downtown have increased by an average of 2 and one half minutes. That is 2 and one half minutes twice each day subtracted from my comfortable enjoyment of my life by the criminal bus company. Again, I don’t say heads should roll, permanently, but only that they should roll for at least five minutes daily, or as much as jurists may later deem fair.

Thanks to this precedent having been set, It is now and always has been against the law to be Pat Robertson, Rush Limbaugh, Ann Coulter, or my former next door neighbor Steve G., or anyone else who hacks me, Dr. Wes Browning, off. Because when I get hacked off I’m not comfortably enjoying my life.

Thank you California’s Court of the Appeal for the Second District! Now we won’t ever need stupid legislators again. One law fits all!

Your Virtual Prozac

Lately yours truly has been in a lousy mood. This may have something to do with the fact that I can't afford the anti-depressants anymore, or it may be because the airing of Joe Millionaire has shown me that trust and honesty are no longer valued, or it may be because I'm writing this in Microsoft Word and I resent the hold Microsoft has on my life. Whatever it is, I need something to lift my mood. That's why I want to talk about death, destruction, and the end of the world. Nothing cheers me up more than contemplating apocalypse. It must be a misery-loves-company thing.

I speak of apocalypse with a small "a" because I am not one of those Apocalypse-enthusiasts who cares only about identifying the Beast or the Whore of Babylon or speculating about the nature of New Jerusalem. Those sorts of things are very good, but any end of the world interests me, not just that one.

It doesn't even have to be the end of the whole world. It could just be the end of this little part of it. That would be fine. For example the other day I learned that the Australian continent is on target to collide with us here in the Pacific Northwest sometime in the next couple hundred million years. That should pretty much finish the Space Needle, once and for all, and not a million years too soon. When you're in a bad mood, who needs revolving restaurants?

Don't get me wrong. I don't actually want global warming to melt the polar icecaps and inundate the coasts, for example. I want global warming and the depletion of the ozone layer and all those other slow-moving disasters to reverse themselves, like any good liberal should. But there's something exhilarating about being in a train wreck, even one that takes a century or millions of years to happen.

Of course, faster disasters are more compelling. I think a lot of the appeal of Revelations is that the disasters are so dramatic and sudden. One minute everyone is all right and then – BAM – locusts. (Like you can't eat locusts.) This represents a challenge to those of us who would like to visualize world destruction but don't want to be constrained to the Biblical model. Can we top John?

I believe that if we apply ourselves, we can. Pestilence and famine are great, but modern life has so much more to offer.

We could start with nuclear weapons. Suppose for instance that North Korea has those two A-bombs everybody has been saying they could have. And suppose that they really do have an ICBM capable of hitting San Francisco, like some people say they do. Well, we here in Seattle are much closer to North Korea than San Francisco, and we are a hell of a target. Whee, we could be a fireball! Now that's dramatic!

But, I'm a baby boomer, and consequently nuclear weapons are pretty much played out for me. I need new possibilities of annihilation, new reasons to duck and cover.

Smallpox is pretty good. It beats anthrax, as there is no way anyone is going to cover more than a city block with anthrax, but with smallpox you could wipe out millions. In theory. Better would be a brand new genetically engineered disease, one that no one is expecting. Something with the symptoms of ebola but with the contagion of the common cold. Don't think nobody is working on this. Good old American know-how will always find a way.

Look out for nano-robots. They're the next thing. You know all those bastards creating computer viruses now? In twenty years the exact same people will be making microscopic robots that fly through the air and up your nose to take up residence in your lungs for the purpose of deleting all your files, figuratively speaking. Just because they can.

One of the great things about dwelling on possible ends of the world is that it makes Saddam Hussein look like a fly on the wall. I hope that reading this column has cheered one or two of you up in that way. For the rest of you, I recommend anti-depressants.

It's a Happ'nin!

Recently I was talking about how I am stupid. I was saying, actually, that everyone is stupid. The trick is to figure out, for each one of us, how. One of the ways that I am stupid is that I suck at history.

I don't completely suck at history. For example, I can be a part of history, no problem. You could in theory go back to certain of those old news tapes of events ("happ'nins") in the sixties and find me. OK, I would be the guy on the edge of the shot looking like I got lost on the way to the chess club, but I'm, like, there.

My problem is, I don't know where there was. In the case of the sixties this makes me good at history, because there wasn't any there there, actually. But it doesn't work for other times.

I first realized how much I was going to suck at history right at the beginning, when my third grade teacher was explaining to my class that history had to do with things like the Hundred Years War and some French girl who got herself burned at the stake and that that would be on the test. I looked around and I didn't see any charred remains, know what I mean? How should I know this girl got roasted? Then I found out that we were even supposed to know WHEN she got roasted, down to the exact year, and that it was HUNDREDS of years ago, and I knew this history thing was not for me.

One of my big problems with history was figuring out why, when we were talking about battles and what famous people were getting burned at the stake, THAT was history, but when we were talking about, say, ancient customs and what kind of culture they had, our history books were supposed to be closed because talking about culture was some kind of social studies. If history isn't social studies, what is it? I still don't get that.

Sometimes people come along with audio-visual aids that help. So back when Masterpiece Theater showed its TV version of Winston Churchill's book, the First Churchills, I learned a thing or two about history then. I learned, among other things, what papists were, that there were such people as Roundheads, that in the olden days (at least ca 1700) everybody was incredibly erudite, and that there might be worse things than just being burned at the stake, parts of you could be burned separately in front of you. Ouch!

The other thing I learned was that Winston Churchill, a former prime minister of England, who wrote the book, must have been incredibly erudite himself. Or else he couldn't have wrote it.

Speaking of audio-visual aids, I believe Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, who also must suck at history but unlike me doesn't know it, has been watching too much of the History Channel. Mr. Rumsfeld is displaying all the signs of a man whose knowledge of the history of the world consists mainly in knowing how to make blowing up sounds. I wouldn't mind but now he's favorably comparing George W. Bush to the afore-mentioned Winston Churchill.

I mean, I didn't know Churchill. He wasn't a friend of mine. But shee-yeah, right.

I'd be less likely to scoff if Rumsfeld wanted to call GW Bush the William McKinley of the new millennium. Not that Churchill wasn't an imperialist in his own day, he was, he was, but I can visualize Bush being McKinleyesque without cracking up.

But that's not what I wanted to talk about in this column. What I wanted to talk about was the art of making blowing up sounds. I don't think it's wrong to be good at making blowing up sounds. I think it's a shame that more people aren't practiced at making convincing explosive noises with their mouths.

I firmly believe that the reason Rumsfeld and Bush want war with Iraq is because they have no buddies to play war with who can make good artillery and blowing up sounds.

I urge everyone who is adept at making blowing up sounds to contact the White House and offer their services in this regard. Thank you.

The Cheap Alcohol Theory

WHAT IS POETRY TO ME?

© Dr. Wes Browning

Your head, an orange,

a pencil up my nose.

A lost weekend,

found in my pants.

Chocolate cake,

vanilla snake.

The passing fancy,

the staying plain.

X marks the spot.

Anybody got an eraser?

Speaking of lost weekends, the North American Street Newspaper Association had its annual conference in Cleveland two weeks ago, and Real Change was there. Four of us, anyway.

I bet a lot of you wonder what we homeless and formerly homeless representatives of street newspapers do at these long weekend conferences. Do we exchange train hopping techniques? Do we share pigeon recipes? Do we drink gallons of coffee? Do we use these conferences as an excuse to have loads of wild anonymous casual sex?

Sure, we're only human, but there's more to it than that. That other stuff only takes so long and then you find yourself in the odd workshop listening to an ACLU lawyer or a labor pool organizer, and then Anitra "on whose kitchen floor I have sometimes slept" Freeman suddenly gets up and foments revolution.

That's right. Our Anitra, urging us all to help establish an alternative economy. Down with capitalism! Up with some other thing!

All right, I'm exaggerating. The closest we all came to fomenting revolution was when, in one workshop, after trading horror stories about the treatment of the homeless in our respective cities, we all agreed that "it's bad everywhere" and "we should make a list of common demands."

So now the street newspaper movement has a list of demands and principles, which includes such things as "people have a right not to be homeless."

Some other things we decided included "people should not have to accept illegal work (like prostitution, running drugs, transporting illegal immigrants) in order to survive," and people should not have to breathe asbestos in order to get a paycheck."

Radical stuff, huh?

OK, it was as boring as a Republican caucus in Peoria. The high point, for me, of the whole conference came when one of the organizers told us that our conference site (Case Western Reserve University) was the cultural center of Ohio, prompting me to ask, "If this is such a hot-shot cultural center where are all the 7-11's?"

You see I have this theory, that poor people are so essential to every economy that everywhere you go in the US and Canada it must be possible to find cheap alcohol. Somebody has to do the grunt work. Somebody has to clean the toilets, mop the floors, wash the dishes. And there have to be affordable drugs to make that all possible.

I go so far as to say that in every city there must be, within walking distance from city center, 40-ouncers of beer or the equivalent for two dollars or less.

So far I've always been proved right. I never found the 7-11 I was looking for near the campus in Cleveland, but found instead, right in the middle of the school, a drugstore selling 40-ouncers of Schlitz Malt Liquor for $1.60 including tax – score!

Don't get me wrong. I'm not against the poor drinking cheap booze.

On the contrary! My point is that the alcohol industry knows what it is doing. They know that poor people are a market. So they don't just sell expensive aged wine, they sell Thunderbird and Night Train.

So why can't we have the housing equivalent of Thunderbird? Why can't real estate developers see the market that is so plain and evident to Schlitz, and move in on it?

Your answers are anxiously awaited.