When Chickens Come Knocking

It’s been a slow week in the Emerald City. No off-duty police officers have shot anyone. No plain-clothes County Cops have beat up bicyclists our Seattle Police had dibs on. So I’d like to take this time to breathe deeply and to reflect on a general trend I see establishing itself here.

I think what epitomizes the trend is the Supreme Court decision last month which excluded the exclusionary rule from the ways civil libertarians could hope to enforce the knock-and-announce rule.

Just a little more than a decade earlier a differently constituted Supreme Court told us that our Founding Fathers, writing the 4th Amendment, considered the common law principle that the police knock and announce themselves before breaking into your home a key ingredient of a reasonable search.

Not that they didn’t have other ways in mind that searches should be reasonable. Madison may have been the anonymous author of a tract railing against searches that required house owners to say Please and Thank You. Ben Franklin is believed to have thought searches dressed in clown or chicken costumes were unreasonable. Tom Paine more than likely thought it was unreasonable to search for intangibles, like the color purple, shrugs and sighs, affection, etc.

But not knocking and letting the people inside know you were the police was considered by our Founding Fathers the height of unreasonable. Why do I know that? Because it IS the height of unreasonable! It was unreasonable in the Middle Ages, it was unreasonable in 1776, it’s unreasonable now!

If they don’t let me know that they are the police, how do I know criminals aren’t invading my house? How do I know the people breaking in aren’t going to rape my kids and then kill them and kill me for being a witness? I’ll tell you how I know that. I know that ‘cause I’m going to use my Second Amendment guaranteed arms to shoot them all when they come in. Hey, even if they say they’re police, if they don’t show me badges and a warrant, maybe I should shoot them anyway. How do I know they aren’t lying?

The point is, knock-and-announce, and warrants, and badges, and uniforms, are all reasonable because without them the police are indistinguishable from a criminal mob, AND PEOPLE HAVE THE RIGHT TO DEFEND THEMSELVES.

I really think the average American, and I’m including Supreme Court justices in the average for the purposes of this sentence, don’t understand these principles because they’ve all been too privileged and too empowered and too ensconced in a majority of their own mental making to even imagine what it’s like to have total strangers, dressed in chicken suits, breaking into your home without warning, pointing guns at you, and screaming in your and your family’s faces. Hint: it looks just like terrorism, when it happens to you without cause. And it does happen without cause often enough to be safeguarded against. The Founding Fathers safeguarded against it with a mass insurrection.

We could safeguard against it by applying the exclusionary rule against evidence procured by unreasonable means, but the Supreme Court just complicated all our lives by preventing that. Thank you Supreme Court! We are now all officially living in interesting times!

Anyway, the trend is: you never know who’s going to beat you up under the color of authority next. They don’t have to tell you they’re coming in. They don’t have to be wearing uniforms to demand that you bend your knees to them. They only have to say, “You’re under arrest,” and that is supposed to justify any force they use, and constitute proof that they are entitled to use it.

And, who needs a secret police when you’ve got a whole army of off-duty cops to do the work of one?

And, what good is a democratic society if any clown in a chicken suit, or whatever, riding a motorcycle, or not, can shoot a bystander at 2am and get away with it because they happen to be cops 9am-5pm?

111 Cardboard Alley, Kissmahoochee, FL

Let’s talk about how stupid people can be!

I’ll start. I can be so stupid, that I could suppose the First Amendment would entitle a teenager to make an anti-Bush poster.

The Progressive reports that the Secret Service swooped down on a highschooler and his school, seized an anti-Bush poster the kid made, and interrogated him and the teacher who gave the Bill of Rights assignment the poster was created for.

The poster showed a photo of George Bush affixed to a wall by a threatening red thumbtack through the forehead area. Red! It also showed the kid making a thumb’s down sign. As we all know the thumb’s down sign today still means “slay the vanquished gladiator” just exactly as it did more than one and a half millennia ago. So Ebert and Roeper have killed hundreds of directors, and both collect “trophy ears” to show off at parties.

Thank you, Selective Service, for straightening me out on that!

Next, how about those Lynnwood police officers that say they were just doing their jobs when they let prostitutes go ahead and service them before arresting them.

I don’t recall the last time a police officer anywhere let a criminal shoot him so as to strengthen a case against him. But maybe the Lynnwood police should also consider that approach.

While I’m at it, I can’t help but note that the Seattle Times story by Jennifer Sullivan and Christopher Schwarzen had this to say: “The Seattle Times is not naming the officers because they work undercover.” Ha!

Let’s move right along and across the country. Not that there isn’t plenty of stupidity around here. Just to stretch our legs.

The Florida State Department of Corrections, or the FSDC, as I’ll call them, had a bad man in their custody, who had been convicted of attempted rape. As bad as he was, he had served seven years and he was due to be released on probation. Before that, neither he nor the FSDC could get him housing, because nobody in Florida wants to house a convicted sex-offender. Since, by law, while the offender is on probation he must report his address, and since he wouldn’t have a regular address to report, the FSDC figured they could just save some trouble and re-arrest the man for probation violation before even releasing him.

Here is how stupid the Florida State Department of Corrections is: not only did they need a judge to tell them they can’t arrest people for being homeless even before they are, they also may need another judge to tell them that, because they’re planning an appeal!

As the judge pointed out, the guy could report his address as being under a specific piece of cardboard, if that’s all the housing Florida can make available for him.

Finally we leave this country altogether to note the story that really got me started on this batch of rants. This is the Mother of All Stupidity Stories, in which the Israeli Supreme Court had to inform the Israeli Army that it was not OK to use Palestinians as human shields.

How stupid has the Israeli Army been? Well, the Israeli Army was already in 2002 told by the Israeli Supreme Court not to force people to be human shields. So it instituted a policy whereby only “volunteer” human shields will be used.

It took another trip to the Israeli Supreme Court for the Israeli Army to be introduced to the difficult concept that when a civilian member of a hated group is “asked” by angry shouting men carrying automatic weapons, hand grenades, and pistols, to willingly “volunteer” to pick objects up to see if they are booby-trapped, nothing that civilian does or says can be considered voluntary.

One member of the Knesset said the court had ruled, "an army in a democratic state cannot act like terror gangs.” To learn this they need a court?

High Court High

Now they’ve done it. They’ve gone and made me mad.

Nothing makes me madder than waking up in the middle of the day and finding out that I’m on the same side of a losing Supreme Court opinion as Rehnquist, Scalia, and Thomas. Oh yes, and Sandra Day. Oh joyous Day. I’m so consoled that Sandra agrees with us on this.

Having Sandra Day O’Connor be the most liberal Supreme Court Justice on your side is like catching yourself trying to be “hip” by knowing who Pauly Shore is. It’s like being told by the prettiest girl at the party, “You’re a lot like my Dad. He’s old too.” It’s like finding yourself so drunk you’re telling your buddies you’ve had sexual fantasies involving Annette Funicello recently.

I’m talking about the decision of the court last week to allow any local government to exchange one private owner of a property with another purely on the grounds that higher taxes may be gained, eventually. I’m talking about the fact that I am opposed to that decision the same way I am opposed to, say, a repeal of the Civil Rights Act, or eliminating Social Security, or eating babies, or bringing back death camps -- but look! My side loses to the liberals! What the… ?

If I’m going to be the conservative on this one, I’m at least going to have the fun I’m due for it. I’m going to do the conservative rant I never get to do.

Just what were John Paul Stevens, and his PINKO traveling companions, Anthony Kennedy, David H. Souter, Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen G. Breyer shooting up their veins last Thursday when they decided to turn this country over to the communists at long last? Judge Stevens said that “appreciable benefits to the community” including “increased tax revenue” as determined by a locally elected government, justify throwing private citizens of this great country off their privately owned land. Who’s the Indian now, White Man?

That’s right, I said it. Those Latte-drinking, Volvo-driving, Yoga-doing, Embryo-killing, Affirmative-Action-loving-as-long-as-THEIR-kids-can-still-get-in-at-Harvard, Vegetarian, Commie-peace-nik, long-haired, PBS-funding stinking Liberals with a Capital L have infiltrated our sacred hall of justice and made it a home for the enemies of Freedom and the Great White American Way!

When I was a White Boy growing up in the fifties my Father promised this country to me. He said, “Look around you, Son. All this land used to belong to the Red Man, who held it communally for the good of wilderness itself and the good of all the people in their various tribes. But we came to America and taught the Red Man the new concept of Private Property, meaning every White Man is a Private, and every Red Man is in the wrong army, and White Men get the Property.”

Now with one Supreme Court decision all of that is gone! I can work all my life for Boeing or Microsoft or whoever, save all my money and buy prime Duwamish river-valley land, land my White predecessors stole fair and square, and I can even pay the mortgage off, and always pay my taxes. But if the Commissars on the Seattle City Council just decide they want a pay raise, they can condemn my property, force me to accept a fraction of what it’s worth to me in pay for it, and give it outright to anybody. The new owner doesn’t even have to be richer than me; they just have to look like they may, someday, down the road, pay higher taxes than me. If I refuse the money I’m offered, the government can just throw a box of beads at my feet and move the bulldozers in.

Stevens won’t see what an idiot he is until the day they tear down his own house and throw him out into the streets for the sake of some Operation Drive Out Trash. Welcome to Zimbabwe, By and By.

Permission to Breathe

Let's make this entire column about Terri Schiavo!

Why not? Congress, which has nothing better to do, just devoted all of a weekend and part of a Monday maneuvering to pass a law with the exact title, "An Act for the relief of the parents of Theresa Marie Schiavo." The law directs that one specific federal court, the US District Court of the Middle District of Florida, shall have jurisdiction over one specific case, namely that of whether Theresa Marie Schiavo's life support should be curtailed.

The good news is that the court is only granted jurisdiction to determine whether Schiavo's existing rights under federal law have been or are about to be violated. In other words the court has been given jurisdiction, by an act of Congress, no less, that it already had! (Tomorrow they may pass a law directing you to breathe!)

The bad news is that the intent of the act is to bring the power of Congress to bear on this case, even though Congress has no legal power in the matter, and they know it. To that end the act specifically directs the court to ignore all previous rulings in this case. The court is also directed to ignore any ongoing litigation in the state courts. ("You're to breathe, citizen, but only through this tube… ")

Whoa! That's a nasty slap in the face to your silly Founding Fathers and their silly "separation of powers," isn't it? Who needs it, when we can just order some judge, anywhere we want, in any individual case we want, to pay attention to nothing but what we say. Ignore the man behind the curtain!

Congress to the judge: "Fifteen years of court fights repeatedly resulting in rulings in favor of Michael Schiavo? What, fifteen years of what? Listen to your Congress… You are getting sleepy, very sleepy, and when we snap our fingers you will wake up and rule that Terri Schiavo's rights have been violated."

And if the court refuses to obey Congress, like on the grounds that they can take their unconstitutional law and stick it where their heads usually rest, no problem. Congress can just pass another act "to relieve the parents of Theresa Marie Schiavo, again," this time in a different court. If that doesn't work, well I don't know, maybe they would have to get serious and pass a law that would actually legislate something, but they'll cross that bridge when they get to it.

All of this could have been avoided if ten or fifteen or better, twenty years ago, Congress had sat down and actually considered such situations and what they would want to happen in these sorts of cases. Then Michael Schiavo would not have spent fifteen years of his life fighting in state courts for something that Congress was just going to rule against, after all of it.

Oops, did I say rule? Is that what they're doing, ruling in this case? Gosh, no, they wouldn't do that, because that would be unconstitutional. They're just ordering a federal court to rule, their way, according to new rules that they just invented, in a long-fought pre-existing case.

Can you say ex post facto? But they believe they can get around that by a technicality: she isn't dead yet. So the "facto" hasn't happened. So they can still butt in, without regard for that little detail of the constitution.

Can you say bill of attainder? Again, they've got a technicality: courts have only interpreted the prohibition of bills of attainder to include such things as depriving specific people of life, liberty, or property in cases where Congress would intend to punish them. But the intent here is to deprive Terri Schiavo of her right to refuse life support in accordance with her own wishes (as determined by the courts) for her own good, not to punish her.

Hey, I got my outrage back!

Bitter Sleeping Pill

Well, here we are. It's the Dawn of a New Day, America Has Spoken, the fat lady has sung, and birds everywhere have flown south for four years.

The good news: expect a resurgence of Fifties-ish-style paranoia to feed a renaissance of the paranoia-genre of horror-scifi movies. With modern cgi technology and the experience of this year's election under our collective-consciousness belt, we can look forward to some terrific movies. Titles like the Attack of the Evangelical Masters, or Night of the Living Neocons, or Invasion of the Constitution Snatchers spring to mind, but I'm sure talented writers could sublimate them way up better than I could. Sublimation was never my forte. Vomit is my forte.

So tell me, do I sound bitter? Good, because I'd hate to sound like I was living a lie or in denial or anything like that. No, unlike 51% of whatever percent of America bothered to vote, I live in the world of Reality, not the world of Bush-Think. So if I'm bitter I'm going to know it, and I'm not going to care if I show it.

I don't mind the country's election choice nearly so much as the transparent mind meltingly bombastic canard of Cheney et al to the effect that George W. Bush now has a significant mandate. He does not. That the numbers of voters that put Bush over the top was a record does not erase the fact that the numbers that voted for Kerry was a record also. For an incumbent running for a second term, 3% is a slim margin. That was no landslide and I would put far more faith in the Bush Administration if it didn't consist of such cowards in the face of the truth that they couldn't even admit it and proceed from there.

If the administration can't rule without propagating fantasy after fantasy, then all of America will get into the act.

Do I sound bitter? Let's see, in news from Texas we've already returned to the days of after-school specials. The decision by voters all across America to affirm the lie that denying marriage to gays is justified has already begun to be followed by orders to require textbooks rewritten to reflect the majority opinion. As if elections determined matters of fact.

The precedent could lead to interesting new forms of oppression. For instance we can expect Texas to hold a state-wide initiative soon to decide Yes On Creationism, bypassing that whole free scientific discussion crap. Then when it passes, they'll announce that the majority has called it true so it's true. Schoolbooks will be rewritten, fools will gloat over the fall of the wise, and it won't be overturned because Bush will have, by then, installed additional fools in the Supreme Court.

In October 2001 I expressed the fear that the terrorists may win, because they might have succeeded in bombing us back to the Fifties. Well, it's happened. "What, Me Bitter?"

Hey, what's the worst that could happen? Sure, a man who's already prosecuted the first totally unprovoked war in American history based on fabrications has his finger on the red button. Sure, an arrogant blasphemer who thinks he's God's all-time favorite president has the power to destroy our environment for the sake of his corporate buddies, and he has the character and temperament to tell us it's for our own good and the Greater Glory of God. Sure, a "servant of the people" that thinks Habeas Corpus, the right to a swift and speedy trial, and the right to be free of unwarranted searches are all obsolete concepts has now got almost complete control of government. But you have to get over it, right?

So in the interest of getting over it, I propose a further slide into irrationality and denial and fantasy. Lets all say black is white and white is black and have us a four-year carnival of lunacy.

The terrorists are on the run. Osama is scared of the terrible visage of George W. Bush, Man of God and Macho Ace National Guard Pilot. If the terrorists do by chance succeed in striking America again, it will have been Bill Clinton's fault. Gays will never endanger our marriages again. Speaking out against a government of liars is an attack on America.

Sweet dreams, one and all.

Sticker Shock

The price of freedom is eternal vigilance. Are you feeling all paid out yet?

I am. First, we had the scare of being told that if George Bush or Donald Rumsfeld, say, decided to label us an enemy combatant, we could be imprisoned without trial indefinitely, even for life, just by shipping us to Guantanamo Bay. A lot of screaming and a Supreme Court ruling finally succeeded in regaining our right to be free from indefinite imprisonment without trial.

Why should we have to fight for such a basic freedom from our own government, a government whose duty is to protect our freedoms?

Then a couple weeks ago our precious Homeland Security, WHICH WAS ESTABLISHED TO DEFEND THIS COUNTRY, decided to see whether the 2004 presidential election could be postponed in the event of a terrorist attack.

Well let's see, the Constitution doesn't allow a delay, so we'd have to change that, and state constitutions don't allow delays, so we'd have to change about 50 state constitutions, and lets see, we would have 4 months to do that and get straight who does the delaying under what circumstances and so NO NO NO NO NO, IT'S NOT POSSIBLE, AND HOMELAND SECURITY IS RUN BY DUMBASSES!

So they said something like, well yes we know all that but we're just "looking into" the possibility.

To Homeland Security: Please "look into" the possibility of doing something legal for a change, like how are you going to do your duty and ensure that elections go on IN SPITE of any terrorist attacks.

Why should we have to yell and scream at Homeland Security to get them to defend our national elections? Who needs terrorists when we have defenders like these?

Then, periodically, we hear about some citizens being arrested or detained for "trespassing" at a Bush speech for either carrying anti-Bush signs, or as happened most recently, wearing anti-Bush T-shirts.

How long will it be, do you think, before our government, WHOSE JOB IS TO PROTECT OUR FREEDOM, will grant that freedom of speech is one of those freedoms they have to protect, not trample? How much yelling and screaming from the rest of us will it take? Will this require a Supreme Court ruling too?

The latest assault on freedom in this country comes from the President's own Orwellian-named New Freedom Commission on Mental Health. They are calling for mandatory mental health screening for "consumers of all ages" in this country, beginning with grade-school students who can be easily accessed through the public school system, then going on to include pre-school children and eventually adults.

Psychiatrists doing these mass screenings would use government-approved flow charts to decide who is mentally ill. The kids who test positive could then be required to take psychiatric meds, to control their illnesses and make them happy consumers.

I don't think the Constitution once refers to citizens as consumers, much less as "mental health consumers." The term is a favorite of pharmaceutical companies, which is a very big hint from me to you telling you who is behind this crap.

Just make sure that when your kids go in for compulsory psyche screening they haven't been "consumers" of any sugar-frosted cereal lately, as points will be deducted for fidgeting. Anti-authoritarian behavior will certainly be a decision point on the flow chart, so better tell them not to wear anti-Bush T-shirts.

Elder Bush motto: Don't worry, be happy. Junior Bush motto: Don't worry, take your happy pills. Or else.

To paraphrase Dick Cheney, I think Bush should go screen himself.

I Loved That Monkey

Let's talk about everything!

Usually, if I would have trouble deciding what to write about, I would blame it on being depressed. Maybe my pet monkey was just assassinated, or maybe I just found out that a certain legally prescribed medication shouldn't be, too late to stop it from turning me into a hairless goat. Or maybe my country was just taken over by yahoos and I started wishing I could move somewhere that had a constitution that the government in power respected.

Downturns like those can ruin your perspective so that you can't see straight enough to write about anything in particular, so you write about everything and hope for the best.

But upturns can have the same effect, I now know. Last week I got such good news that I am now giddy as a schoolgirl. I won't say why, because I'm such a tease, but I will instead distract you all with this: seeing Colin Powell sing as the construction worker in the Village People gave me new life and hope for America. How can you not love a man who can swing a hammer from his belt like that? Am I right, girls?

So here I am, feeling so good I'm ready to say: this IS the best of all possible worlds! Let's count our blessings!

Hooray! Saddam Hussein is being tried by the people we installed in his place, the very same ones we picked out because they hated Saddam the most! How great is that? They're even following our democratic example and making him submit to interrogation without letting him once see a lawyer! Not only that, but they're charging him with invading another country (Kuwait) without provocation! Our newly created allies have learned American democracy perfectly, and are beginning to master American hypocrisy too! I'm sure Saddam will have a wonderful trial, much better than any he could get from an international court. Maybe the Iraqis will even behead Saddam, encouraging more insurgents to behead more of us! Off with everyone's head!

Hooray! It's now OK for the President of the Senate to tell a Senator to go F-himself whenever it makes him "feel better"! Abuse of power and position be damned! It just feels good to tell the leader of the party out of power off for having the audacity to criticize one's precious self and one's superior political opinions. It's especially great to be able to tell some Democrat to go F-himself the same day Republican legislation passes to fine the bejeezus out of anyone else using the same word on TV or radio. Did someone say "hypocrisy"? I should have to call it H, or pay a gigantic fine! But even when we can't say it in print our leaders will still H. It will make them feel better!

Most of all, hooray for the newfound uses of detaining innocent people while calling them terrorists without formally charging them!

Last week the Supreme Court said you can't merely hold people as "enemy combatants" indefinitely. Eventually you have to allow them to legally challenge their detention, or you have to release them. This is called "human rights", something that we have said we were for, at least for the past 228 years or so, when we weren't doing the H-thing.

But the court will let the President detain potentially innocent people for reasonable periods of time, whatever that might be. I was worried about this loophole until I heard that the New York Times was reporting that the US, with Britain, had secretly traded Saudi prisoners held at Gitmo for Brits that had been tortured and held by the Saudis. How heartening.

The released Saudis were surely innocent; our government would never, NEVER, trade real terrorists even for innocent Westerners. That would be letting the terrorists win.

So there is something to be said for locking up innocent people, after all! Think of them as if they were pennies. Have a prisoner, give a prisoner! Need a prisoner, take a prisoner! It just saves trouble, and that's what America is all about!

Oh no. I AM a hairless goat.

There's Always One In Every Decision

RANT ALERT!

The good news: a panel of the 2nd US Court of Appeals finally, FINALLY, told the Bush administration that simply declaring someone an "enemy combatant" did not provide them with an excuse to deny that person a lawyer or rights to a trial. The bad news: it isn't over.

Jose Padilla, a US citizen, was arrested in Chicago in May 2002 and has been held in a navy brig in South Carolina for a year and a half. He hasn't been allowed to see his lawyers. Although the government has said that Padilla was involved in a dirty bomb terrorist plot he hasn't been charged with a crime in any court of law. The view of the government is that they didn't even have to say what he was supposed to be guilty of, it was enough for them to declare that Mr. Padilla was an "enemy combatant" to detain him in the brig FOR LIFE in ISOLATION if they wanted to do so.

Bush's people still think that's the way it should work and will probably appeal. They are no doubt encouraged by the fact that one member of the 3 judge panel actually sided with them. The idea of the dissenting opinion was that the president needs the power to detain people who may be a threat to the public.

Let's reflect on that dissenting opinion to get a clear idea in our own minds as to what a screaming imbecile that one lame judge is.

The man has been detained for one and a half years. The immediate threat is over. HE'S IN THE BRIG. He's detained already. The issue isn't the detention. His arrest was proper. The issue is, once you've got him, YOU STILL HAVE TO LET HIM SEE A LAWYER AND TRY HIM AND LET HIM GO IF HE TURNS OUT TO BE INNOCENT.

And oh yes, the Bush Administration has had A YEAR AND A HALF to do that. Did I make that clear enough? A friggin YEAR AND A HALF.

Here is a personal note for that one lame judge: * Guess what? I think you're a threat to the American people. Good thing I'm not the president or I might declare your ass enemy combatant material and put you in isolation for, oh I don't know, how about for YEAR AND A HALF?! * -- Ha, ha, just kidding -- Dr. Wes.

Speaking of South Carolina, that was where police stormed a school recently and searched a hundred students for illegal drugs, some of them at gunpoint, because their principal thought it would be swell. What we have here is another threat to the American people. There are getting to be too many of these.

I don't expect the police to know or understand the constitution. That would be dreaming. But is it asking too much for a school principal to have read it with comprehension?

What part of the Fourth Amendment does that principal not grasp, I wonder? Was it the part about "the right of the people to be secure… against unreasonable searches?" Was he not aware that minors also constitute people? Was it the part about how search warrants were required to be specific? How specific is searching every kid in a school hallway whether they have done anything suspicious or not just because a crime may or may not have at one time occurred in that hallway days or weeks earlier by completely different people?

Here's another one, folks. Say you're on vacation in Guadalajara, Mexico, and our government, or some imbecile in it, decides they want to incarcerate you for life without charges or a hearing. Here's how they could do that. They would seize you in Mexico without clearance from the Mexican authorities. Then, they would take you to Guantanamo Base ("Gitmo") and imprison you with all the Taliban, as an "enemy combatant" (It doesn't matter if you are or not, they don't have to prove that part. They just have to declare it.)

Gitmo, a secure US military enclave, isn't really America, so all that constitution BS doesn't apply. -- that's the essence of our government's actual legal position as they fight for that power to the Supreme Court. What a crock.

Whites Priced At Five Dollars Each

Let's talk about religion!

No, let's not talk about religion! I don't want the headaches! Let's talk about religious authorities instead. Don't religious authorities do the darndest things? I guess it's because they're authorities.

Take your imams, for example. With all the war and misery going on in highly Islamic quarters of the world these days, I would be very surprised if the world's imams weren't making pronouncements right and left. But the other day when I went looking on Islam.com for a pronouncement or two to get the flavor of them, I didn't expect to see a fatwa on the importance of men tucking their shirts in. (Just so you know, the imam issuing the fatwa basically says tucking the shirt in isn't necessarily evil, although he personally would never do it.)

With that kind of focus on gender-specific grooming tips vis a vis fiery hell, you can all imagine for yourselves how the fatwa on homosexuality read on the very same page. Likewise re the archived fatwa on the same site concerning surgical hymen restoration. Hint from me on that one: "If you break it -- you pay for it." OK, that hint sucked. Let's try this one: "Every time you masturbate, God kills a kitten. Now go publicly bury this bucket of kittens in your front yard, you harlot."

Speaking of homosexuality, I want to take time out to say that, although I am not myself a homosexual so far as I am aware of, I am deeply grateful that the Supreme court has now recognized my right to practice sodomy in the privacy of my own bedroom with consenting adults, because I've been doing it anyway.

Of course Islamic imams do not hold the monopoly on fatwas. The Vatican just issued one of their own on gay marriages. Having once been a card-carrying member of the Catholic Church (in my impetuous youth I favored the classics) I find its decrees delightful and fascinating. In much the same way that I find forced live oyster eating riveting. This particular decree compares especially well with the shirt tucking decree in its decreeness, or decree-osity.

Will someone please explain to me how exactly does allowing at least civil homosexual marriages undermine heterosexual marriages? What exactly do people think is going to happen? Do they think all the straight guys are going to wake up one morning and think, "Hey, I could have married one of my buds!" and immediately divorce the wife and ditch the kids and elope with Steve in accounting?

The Vatican decree whinges on and on about the blessed sanctity of procreation, as if allowing gay marriage is going to make one iota of difference to the frequency of condom failures during straight sex.

But enough of that nonsense. What I really want to talk about here isn't a fatwa or decree, but it's still coming from a religious authority. I want to talk about Bishop Fred Caldwell's decision to pay white people to come and diversify his overwhelmingly Black-attended church in Shreveport, Louisiana. Five dollars for Sunday masses, fifteen for Thursdays.

Whoa! Can you say "spiritual ho's?" My first reaction was to recall that when an impoverished homeless guy I was often bribed with food to attend meals. I thought: this just cuts through the BS. They pay the money; I can spend it the way I want. Maybe I don't want turkey tetrazinni. Maybe I'm in the mood for chicken diablo. It's my choice.

But then I thought, wait a minute, what's all this saying? I mean, first of all, how white do you have to be to collect your fee? Does a Quarter-white get $1.25 on Sundays? Does Michael Jackson get anything; does effort count? How about comportment?

You know, if it were me, in Louisiana, I'd pay more for an Asian than a white person, out of supply considerations.

When someone suggested that Bishop Fred might give the money to the poor instead, he said that that was the sort of thing Judas Iscariot would have proposed. I'm wondering: if Judas Iscariot were to tell Bishop Fred not to jump off a bridge, would he do it?

The Bigger the Houseboat, the Better

I hate the thought of staying in a shelter. In fact in all my time being homeless I never once stayed in one.

Gym locker rooms, libraries, marches, square dances, mosh pits, sports stadiums, crowded buses, crowded sidewalks, packed subways, shelters, they're all the same. Places where there are too many people.

If I wanted to sleep six inches on each side from two strangers, I would be a lot friendlier than I am. People who don't know me think I'm shy, because I don't talk much around them. What they don't know is that I'm just keeping quiet to avoid encouraging them to talk to me. Why would I want total strangers to talk at me?

I'd rather sleep in a patch of nettles or poison ivy or on rocks than have to talk sports with some Biff on the next mat.

But today the subject of shelters forces itself on me. I just can't ignore the fact that New York city officials just visited the Bahamas to check out the possibility of buying one or more cruise ships, TO USE AS HOMELESS SHELTERS.

It seems a New York State Supreme Court Justice over there is actually threatening to jail city officials if they can't shelter homeless families within 24 for hours after they apply. So immediately they got the idea to buy one-way tickets to the Bahamas.

No, that's not true. First they tried other things, like putting the families in gyms and defunct hotels and even jail. Some of these ideas worked. Others drew criticism. You had your NIMBYs. You had your whining homeless advocates complaining that housing people in jails is callous and cruel. City governments hate criticism. So hey, let's check out putting them on cruise ships, they thought. Then they thought, oh, there are defunct cruise ships in the Bahamas, let's go look at them. So they did.

Now they actually have some homeless advocates ripping them for this idea. No, I don't know why.

I've got to break ranks here. I think sheltering homeless families on defunct cruise ships is a terrific idea. I would especially like to see it done here in Seattle. I would even consider becoming homeless again if I were sure of getting a suite for myself and Anitra "On Whose Kitchen Floor I Have Sometimes Slept" Freeman, whom I would pass off as family for the purpose.

Think about it. People love houseboats. Houseboats are an integral part of Seattle's tradition. Why should just Tom Hanks get to live on a houseboat? Why shouldn't homeless people live on houseboats, too? OK, so you can't have a separate houseboat for every homeless person or family. So you do the next best thing. You spend a measly $20 million (that's around what the cheaper of the ships in the Bahamas would cost) for a cruise ship. You spend another few million to rip out stuff you won't let the homeless have, like the bar and the disco and the pool. Then you've still got a hell of a houseboat! I would be proud to live on one of these.

The ships examined hold thousands of people. Of course some space would have to be reserved for the crew and the all important activities director. Even without the bar people are going to need activities. It would be cruel to deny people shuffleboard under the circumstances.

Even when you add in janitorial and other maintenance I'll bet the whole thing could be done for a mere thirty million down plus a few million a year. Where can you find a housing bargain for that? And no NIMBYs except at the end closest to shore!

Maybe we could snag some old surplus battleships or submarines to use for shelters, too. The Navy just uses the old ones for target practice anyway. I bet Seattle could get a bunch for no more than what we would spend for one lousy skyscraper. And they already have beds in them. Imagine the savings that represents.

All in all, a sound, realistic, proposal. Let's get started!

Inspired by Super-Shakti Toothpaste (Really)

For this column I wanted to talk about the demise in court of the anti-postering law, but then a couple of things got in the way. First of all, I don't know anything about the demise in court of the anti-postering law. Except that it has something to do with the Washington State Constitution, a 70 or so page book that I can't begin to make heads or tails of. Second of all, a book that was lying around the office distracted me.

You may all recall that last issue in this space I alluded to the fact that Henry D. Thoreau was deceased, but that certain of his concerns live on. When reading the blurbs on the back cover of this distracting book I was shakti-ed, simply shakti-ed, to learn that the book was one of Henry's concerns. No, I wasn't, but I couldn't resist saying that. Please forgive me.

Really, the Bhagavad-Gita (or the "Gita" as we aficionados like to call it) is just like the Washington State Constitution to me. It's a 70 or so page book that I believe is very important but that I can't begin to make heads or tails of. Yet, I am strangely attracted to it, in the same way that I am attracted to ducks. I keep coming back to it year after year, only to be bewildered as ever.

Part of the attraction of the Bhagavad-Gita is that it is a big poem, after all. It is a piece of the Mahabharata, the ancient Indian epic that has been called the world's longest poem. The Mahabharata is so long that I haven't even had the endurance to see the movie, much less read the book, but I know it goes on. So it was inevitable that we at Adventures in Poetry would have to mention the Mahabharata eventually, if only as an example of another way to write a poem to get noticed (write one really really long.)

Part of the attraction is that as far as its content goes, considered as a poem, the Gita is unbelievably audacious. Who starts out to write a poem about a big battle, and then has the main guy of one side of the battle say he can't go through with it, it's wrong, and then spend the remaining vast majority of their huge poem not on details of battle blood and gore but on laying out the main guy's conversation with his chariot driver about the nature of life-the universe-and-everything? And his chariot driver happens to be the Supreme Godhead, incarnated as the blue guy in those cool Hindu paintings, so He has all the answers? Can you say "cosmic"? I thought you could.

[Try it yourselves, you budding poesists! Write a poem like the Gita. Start out by talking about somebody planning to do something, I don't know, like writing a column. Have her/him stop and say, "Naw, I don't want to do it." Then spend 70 freaking pages of poetry describing a conversation between him/her and some form of God, in which the God explains everything in the world, so that the upshot of the conversation is that at the end, God says, "So, just do it. But hey, it's up to you." Then take it to an open mike. Your audience will tell you just how audacious your poem is.]

Part of the attraction, also, is that the Gita is an ancient classic, therefore written for a world that doesn't exist anymore (it has mostly gotten worse.) This makes for a lot of the difficulty in reading it, but that just adds to the charm.

OK, sure, the surface message, which seems to be that if you belong to the warrior caste, then you ought to do war, strikes many of us today as outrageously conservative and narrow-minded. But then we think, as justifications for war go, at least this one doesn't reek of hypocrisy. And we can escape the conclusion that war is justified by rejecting the premise that there is, any more, in the nuclear age, a warrior caste.

No, certainly nobody today is born with a duty to wage war. So, as an argument to preserve the status quo and keep the conquerees conquered and the conquerors conquering, the Gita would appear to have aged.

But the Gita does speak eloquently of duty. Now, the question still is, what's that?

My Stand on the Plej of a Lejents

I want to talk about the recent 9th Circuit Court decision about the Pledge of Allegiance in schools, because it's such a hot topical subject. But then I realized that the only experience I've had with reciting the Pledge in schools is over forty years old, so in order to talk about a hot topical subject I'd have to reminisce about my passage through the Fifties as a grade schooler.

Oh well. We love irony.

Why do you suppose apples are called that? Why aren't they called brullers? Bruller sounds like an English word. A bruller should be something. Why not an apple?

In 1955, when I was six, I solved this question by noting that "apple" is a reddish word, whereas bruller has a coffee color. Therefore "apple" would be more suitable for describing apples, which are far more often red than coffee colored. So we don't call apples brullers.

At that age I spent a considerable amount of time testing the hypothesis that if a baseball was thrown at the air hard enough it would bounce off. I also believed that if I ran fast enough air would support my feet and I could climb skyward for at least six or seven feet before I got tired.

Though I lived 35 miles from Boston at the time I was sure that I could, given time and enough sandwiches in a paper sack, walk almost anywhere in the world. The question was not could I walk to Paris, but how many days would it take. I guessed somewhere on the order of a week. I knew that if I walked due east I would run into the Atlantic Ocean, but the plan would be to sidestep that.

The year before I started grade school the Supreme Court banned the leading of prayers in public schools. However the news of their decision must not have made it from Washington, D. C. to Ayer, Massachusetts, in spite of the easy walk, because my grade school there required me to recite the Our Father thingie for two years.

I call it the Our Father thingie because at that point those were almost the only words I could make out of the whole thing. The teacher would say, "Everyone bow your heads and say the Lord's Prayer," and so everyone was mumbling into their shirtsleeves. I couldn't see their lips moving and it was almost impossible to follow along.

I do remember being able to make out the part about my cup running over and "give me my daily bread." These words had me worried. What cup are we talking about? What's in it? Why is it running (runnething) over? I pictured a boiling cup of potion like in a Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde movie. I didn't want to drink from a cup like that.

And since when do I have to beg for daily bread? What happened to full balanced meals? Don't I get dessert? What about give me my daily Mars bar?

I started school just one year after Eisenhower got the words "under God" added to the Pledge. Not all of my teachers accepted the change. My first grade teacher had us say it the "traditional way," i.e. without the addition. In my mind it went something like this: I plej a lejents to the flag, something, mumble, something,

for which it stands, invisible, with liberty and justice for all.

What, I wondered, was a lejent? And why was I plejing one?

I'm still not sure. And that's where I stand on the 9th Circuit Court's opinion.

OK, I'll clarify a little. What I'm saying is, let's use our schools more to teach kids things like where words come from and how big the world is, and less to indoctrinate them in religion or nationalism. The indoctrination doesn't work anyway.