Free Thinkers

People will believe anything they want to believe. For example, some people want to believe that I am high when I write these columns. Nothing could be further from the truth!

The truth: Every Sunday I turn in early for what I call a "pre-column nap", also known as "sobering". When I've napped enough, I get up to write this thing, usually just before dawn Monday, running entirely on reheated coffee. I don't touch a drop of hooch until at least 350 words have been written and not even then until the precise moment that I can see clearly how the thing will end. Then, I do a little noa noa, open the fridge, break the taboo, and get me a cold beer.

Some people want to believe that it matters that Chelsea Clinton thinks Mom would make a better president than Dad did. I think they're wrong. Matters of such consequence should only be decided by a vote. We should have a national election at a cost of a hundred million dollars, with Bill and Hillary the only candidates. We should vote as a nation, to decide which one of the two would be the better next president. The winner would get a cover on People Magazine. Then, in November, we'd have an election to pick an actual next president. That would be the democratic way to decide. America has no royal family.

A lot of people want to believe in Heaven. I agree there should be a place where people who take religion too seriously should go. I think all the hype on behalf of Heaven is done so those people will go willingly. They'd kick up a fuss if they saw too soon that the gates lock only from the outside.

There's people (anthropologists!) who wanted, as of 1920 or so, that teenagers in "primitive, unspoiled, cultures" were as sexually promiscuous as unleashed rabbits, because a chain of reasoning from there would have it justify something called cultural determinism. They wanted to believe the cultural determinism because a) it kept annoying biologists out of their college departments, b) if culture shapes human behavior then anthropologists are the new social engineers, and c) it paved the way for 1950s PSAs, Soviet Five Year Plans, and Dr. Spock, all good. So Margaret Mead went to Samoa and believed.

Because the Dalai Lama is coming to Seattle, I am every day hearing more and more fascinating beliefs concerning Tibet and the Mr. Lama that turn out only to betray the ultimate wishes of the believers. A self-proclaimed devout Christian said yesterday in my presence she would not go see the Dalai Lama because, "They drill holes in the heads of young monks and lock them in caves for a couple of years. That's not Christian." It's not only not Christian, it's not anything. Tibetan Buddhists speak metaphorically of the opening up of the head during spiritual awakening. But there's no drill involved, unless you want there to be a drill so bad you take the metaphor literally, in which case there has to be a drill, right?

Sometimes you can witness the beliefs turning with the winds. Michael Parenti, who is quite progressive, has written a tract concerning the Tibet of the 1940s and before with Medieval Europe, touching on documented tortures, mutilations, religious wars, priests raping youths, feudal oppression, etc. Oh, yes, and the CIA gave the Dalai Lama money. It's all bad, and so the arrival of the Maoist Chinese was a liberation, right? But at the end, Parenti says old Tibet may start looking better than it was, compared to the new free market China! Whatever!

If the CIA offered me money, I'd take it. More for me, less for them. And what kind of liberation is unasked for?

Here at home, some people want homeless people to be criminals. Our government obliges by making homelessness criminal, while homeowners rest smug and satisfied that THEY aren't sleeping illegally in parks.

Praise Lager!

Social Stupidology

I have always been obsessed with a certain something or class of things, for which I have never found a suitable name. Depending on my mood I call it, or them, the Exceptions, or the Weird, or the Fey. “They” are everywhere, they’re Strange, and I like them.

You’d think that a simple taste for the occasional Peculiar would just get me deemed Peculiar myself, but I’ve found out the hard way many times in my life that being a weirdnessphile can actually get you classed as evil in some circles.

It’s a fundamental principle of stupidology, which is to say the science of human stupidity. Humans are SO stupid, these scientists have learned, that when they don’t know what a thing is, they often reflexively assign negative qualities to it, partly out of fear of the object, and partly out of fear of what the object may reveal about themselves. “Don’t listen to the stranger, he lies about me.”

Let’s say for example you are an aficianado of the works of Pee Wee Herman. Be careful who you mention your fascination to, or they may be making the sign of the cross, and trying to round up a posse to help drag you behind a donkey to the county line and leave you to Fife. You will be most in danger from burly church-going men who claim to never touch themselves.

I mention Pee Wee Herman only for the sake of definiteness. Really, definiteness is alien to my subject. It’s the ignorance you have about the truly Weird which makes it so. It has to be not just any ignorance but a special kind of ignorance.

Think of the movie Alien. It simply wouldn’t have been so scary if they’d trotted the monster out for you to get a good look at her in a bright light in the first scene. She’d have still been a magnificent threat, but she wouldn’t have inspired terror.

“So Wes, what does all this have to do with all the usual stuff you dribble on about weekly?” Well, consider another example. The example that inspired me to write today is the example of a man known as Malua, the Wild Man of Samoa.

An archaeologist Joseph Kennedy (not JFK’s dad) discovered the grave of a man named Malua in an old cemetery near Pago Pago, Western Samoa. Because the name looks like it might be Samoan, and because Samoans didn’t usually bury their own people in cemeteries, Kennedy researched archives to find out who the grave’s occupant had been.

What he discovered was that Malua had been born in the 1800s in the Solomon Islands. He was Melanesian, not Samoan. He somehow ended up as a laborer, possibly against his will, in Eastern Samoan. He and a few fellow “employees” escaped Eastern Samoa by raft to Western Samoa, where they fled to the hills and lived off the land, sometime around 1880.

Eventually Malua’s companions were captured or died, leaving Malua to a solitary existence in the hills of the island of Tutuila. He was rarely seen by the Samoan natives, except in fleeting glimpses. From one captive, the Samoans learned Malua was a Solomon Islander, but beyond that they knew nothing about him or how he survived.

So it became possible to hang all sorts of fictions on Malua about how Malua lived. If a pig or chicken went missing, Malua ate them, probably alive. When some people disappeared it was assumed they too were eaten by Malua. He became known as the fearful Wild Man of Samoa. Protect your children!

Eventually, in 1923, Malua was captured. Once the Samoans could see him as a harmless white-haired bearded old man they took him in as a friend, and he lived happily ever after, until he died three months later of pneumonia, given to him by his new buddies.

The moral: You have less reason to be afraid of homeless people, than they have of you.