He’s a real nowhere man
Sitting in his nowhere land
Making all his nowhere plans
For nobody

Back when I was in 7th grade, the teacher asked the class if they could associate a song with a classmate. One of the Miss Popularity girls, someone who normally didn’t have much time for me, raised her hand and said my name, then said “Nowhere Man” (the 1965 Lennon/McCartney classic). The class got a laugh out of it. After they settled down, the teacher said “that’s true!”, getting another rise. I could have taken offense, but it was just too close to home. I had to smile. Yea, Miss Popularity had my number there.

Hey, but so what. That’s just what people like me do, few that we are in this world. We’re here for some odd reason. We actually wish that our “nowhere plans” would help all of you “somewhere” people. Once in a very blue moon, they actually do.

I hope that Miss Popularity and all her “somewhere” friends are having nice lives. As for me, it ain’t been easy dwelling all these years in a nowhere land surrounded by a somewhere world. But it’s my home. As Man From UNCLE agent Napolean Solo said at the end of “The Nowhere Affair” to a lady who just told him that she was nowhere: “then you are somewhere”. Cut to theme song.

THE WAR IN IRAQ, CONTINUED: And unfortunately, it does continue. During the 2004 Presidential Campaign, John Kerry said that Iraq was “the wrong war, in the wrong place, at the wrong time”. This was widely discussed in the blogosphere. The quote actually came from Army General Omar Bradley during the Korean War. The Chinese had just entered the war to help North Korea, and General McArthur wanted to declare war against China. In May, 1951, before the Senate Armed Services Committee, General Bradley said “Red China is not the powerful nation seeking to dominate the world. Frankly, in the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, this strategy would involve us in the wrong war, at the wrong place, at the wrong time, and with the wrong enemy.”

Amazingly, it still fits the present day situation. Sadaam Hussein was definitely an enemy. But he wasn’t the right enemy, just as “Red” China wasn’t. The Iraq invasion has used up a whole lot of American resources, and is still very uncertain of a positive outcome. If Mr. Bush gets lucky and a stable Arab democracy does emerge, then maybe it will have been worth it. But that’s still a 50-50 proposition.

I honestly think we have to look at the Middle East in terms of economics. How can we bring that part of the world into the world economy in a way that creates opportunity for the common man and woman? They used to do all right as traders, about a thousand years ago, because they were right on the land routes between Europe and the East (China, India). But then better ships came along and cut them out of the deal. They have their oil, but that just causes more problems because the wealth goes to a small set of princes and sheiks; everyone else stays poor. How do we get them into modern times? It seems impossible, but go back 30 or 40 years and it seemed impossible then that China and India would ever get into the economic mainstream. I don’t have an answer for the Middle East, but it seems to me that the ultimate answer will respond to the question of economics, not the question of military strategy.

NEW ORLEANS – BYE BYE PUBLIC HOUSING: I know a guy who does consulting work with public housing agencies, so I asked him was going to happen now in New Orleans, which once had a huge public housing system (with 19,995 units). He said that public housing is pretty much finished there. (GOP Congressman Richard Baker of Baton Rouge was overheard telling lobbyists: “We finally cleaned up public housing in New Orleans. We couldn’t do it, but God did.”) They will rebuild some senior citizens buildings and will use the land formerly occupied by family tenements for mixed use developments (e.g., some affordable apartments, some homeownership units, some retail stores). Most former tenants will get Section 8 certificates to subsidize their rent (up to a point) where ever they move to.

But the big conglomerations of units for low-income families won’t be brought back. A lot of the people who lived in them may not want to come back anyway (there was an article in the NY Times saying that a survey showed that up to 20% of the former population doesn’t plan to move back); they may find work in Texas or Baton Rouge. So, the new New Orleans will be a less poor city. Let’s just hope that the silver lining works both ways — i.e., that the poor who were scattered by Katrina will also find better lives where ever they wind up. Let’s hope that Mr. Bush makes good on the little detail of honestly helping them achieve that.

MISHEARD LYRICS: BAD MOON RISING. OK, so everyone knows that the refrain to the 1974 Creedence Clearwater Revival hit song “Bad Moon Rising” has been misinterpreted by countless of listeners as “There’s a Bathroom on the Right”. But I got another part of that song wrong: toward the middle, John Fogerty sings “I hear the voice of rage and ruin”. Given Fogerty’s famous slur, I used to hear something like “I hear the voice, the rain of ruin”.

Little did I know that the phrase “rain of ruin” was used by President Harry Truman in a speech following the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, Japan in 1945. Truman said that if Japan didn’t immediately surrender, there would be a such an atomic rain on its land.

Maybe my misinterpreted line would have been more appropriate. Truman’s voice, and a bad mushroom cloud rising, indeed.

ON THE FENCE: A BLUES MEMORY. Here’s a spray paint tribute to the Blues Brothers, Jake and Elwood, which recently appeared on a fence along Route 3 in Clifton (NJ). The fence slats almost look like prison bars – which goes with their persona quite nicely. Rest in peace, Mr. Belushi. Glad to know that there are still people out there like me who remember those fun days.

MODERN POLITICS: FALL OF THE AMERICAN EMPIRE?: I’ve been studying the history of the Roman Empire lately (via a CD lecture series called “Rome and the Barbarians” from the Teaching Company). Modern conservatives sometimes say that Rome fell apart because it lost its virtue. After studying the Romans, I’d have to ask: just what virtue was that? The Roman Empire got where it did by mercilessly plundering its neighbors. In the end, they returned the favor. Yea, it’s true that in Rome’s early days, there was a large sense of voluntary citizen participation that was later replaced by big-government bureaucracy. But that civic participation was mostly limited to the rich and powerful. Commoners (“the plebes” and slaves) got stuck with the same crappy jobs throughout ancient Rome’s 900 years of history. And as to religion, and those like Judge Roy Moore of Alabama (a GOP rising star) who want to declare America as a Christian nation, remember that things just got worse and worse for Rome once they became a Christian nation (under Constantine in the early 4th Century).

It’s pretty clear to me that Rome locked itself into permanent decline by the middle of the 3rd Century. The Roman Legions were trying to battle newly-founded aggressive nations like the Goths and the Sassanid Persians on its eastern and northern frontiers, and yet they kept on leaving these frontiers behind before defeating their foes to participate in civil wars against other Roman Legions. What was that all about? Well, Rome never had a good system for selecting its Emperors, so when an Emperor died – or even before – the three major Roman army groups (the Rhine, the Danube, and the Eastern armies) would each select someone from amidst their own command structure as the next Emperor. That would mean lots of fighting, usually back in Italy, before everyone agreed on a new Emperor. In the mean time, the barbarian forces on the frontiers kept on invading, taking Roman cities and farmland. Then the big armies got back to the frontiers after cutting themselves to ribbons, and started from scratch against the external foes.

With 20/21st Century hindsight, it’s obvious that you can only do that for so long before your enemies are going to overcome you.

Here in the USA, we have a better system for selecting our Emperors (whoops, I mean Presidents). We keep the military out of it; we give our Presidents limited terms, and we have regularly scheduled public elections to select them. The writers of our Constitution were well aware of the Roman system — e.g., the set up of our Senate parallels the Roman Senate in many ways — but they were also aware of its faults. So they tweeked the model a bit based on their idealism about individual freedom and equality (up to a point; they certainly agreed with the Romans that slavery is an acceptable part of the system).

And yet I can’t help but wonder if internal warfare is going to be the downfall of our Empire, too.

We select our President and most of our leaders through a competition for votes between two political parties. That goes back pretty much to the founding of our nation in 1776; we’ve always had two big political amalgamations with somewhat differing philosophies and interests regarding how we do things in America. It’s worked out pretty well over the past 226 years. According to political historians, campaigns have never been well-informed civic debates; political parties always took cheap shots and threw mud at eachother in order to win. Winning has always been what it’s all about; only after you win do you think about how to best do the job. Despite that, the American public usually does the best it can with the choices presented to it, and the system has thus held together all this time.

Unfortunately, the nasty process of political battle has become highly amplified over the past 50 year by money and technology. Not only has radio, television and the Internet made the process more vivid to the average citizen; but psychologists and media specialists have studied the average citizen to learn how to best implant an impression or belief. Using these techniques, politicians can now do real damage. Campaigns have become blood sport. A couple of good 30-second TV ads can change the course of history. Thanks to a couple of elderly actors reading a script at a kitchen table, we haven’t made any progress in this country toward universal health insurance (i.e., the Harry and Louise ads against Clinton’s health insurance plan in 1994). And last year around this time, John Kerry’s campaign was sunk by a few impressive ads about swift boats.

Some people say that America is being split in two, into “red state” land and “blue state” land. There was always a bit of difference between the coastal regions and the interior, but the gap in values and beliefs now seems to be widening. And the high-voltage political process is what’s leading it. The big business of politics wants there to be a land where God, guns and no gay marriage are the order of the day, and a land where you get to choose the god(s) you worship and the sex of your partner, but not the size of your guns. Of course, each party would like more of the other party’s territory. But given that each party has roughly equivalent resources, the nation is getting torn down the middle. We put a whole lot of energy and resources into political fighting these days. Meanwhile, there are enemies (e.g. al Qaeda) and competitors (India, China) outside the gate, putting most of their energies into finding ways to hurt us or surpass us.

You would have thought that September 11 would have caused both the Democrats and Republicans to have toned the rhetoric down a bit and to have honestly faced facts, to have moved towards areas of agreement. But no; the “I Win / You Lose / That’s All That Matters” game goes on with growing intensity, as the 2004 Presidential campaign demonstrated. Ah, the old Roman Legions battling each other in central Italy in the 3rd Century would have been proud of us. They had another 200 years to go (although those were years of increasing weakness and decay). How much do we have?

THE RICH GET RICHER, THE POOR GET SOAKED: This past Tuesday, the US Census Bureau released a bunch of statistics regarding income and poverty levels in 2004. More people were poor in 2004 than in 2003, and thus the rate went up a bit (from 12.5 to 12.7 percent). The median household income (adjusted for inflation) was stuck where it’s been for the past 5 years. Another 800,000 workers were without health insurance. And at the same time, the overall American economy grew by a robust 3.8% in 2004, and gross national product per capita (adjusted for inflation) went up by 3.4%. So someone is getting richer. Guess who? The rich, of course. According to the Economic Policy Institute, the top 5 percent of households in America experienced real income gains, while the other 95% stayed flat or lost income. Take a guess who lost the most — yes, the bottom 20%.

On Thursday (Sept. 1), the New York Times ran an editorial summarizing these facts. That editorial noted that the top priorities of our President and Congress are to repeal the estate tax and cut taxes on investment income — two big favors for the rich. As to the poor and working class, Mr. Bush and his friends plan to cut student loans, Medicaid and food stamps. And even worse, in order to fight the homeland security wars and yet keep cutting taxes, they have reduced funding for infrastructure programs such as highways, mass transit, college aid, and research by the National Science Foundation.

The Times thus pulled an uncharacteristic emotional string to summarize its opinion about what our current leaders are up to: “They should be ashamed of themselves.”

Then of course, we had New Orleans as the big story this week. We now realize that Bush and the Republicans had cut funding to fix the levees. And when the levees broke early this week, they were in no hurry to send the troops in to quell the chaos that ensued. Is it possible that the pendulum of public consensus in America will soon reach a high point in terms of rugged individualism and laissez faire, and start swinging back towards communal investment and sharing? Is it possible that working families will finally see through the “lottery ticket” rationale, i.e. the notion that if we let the rich have their way there’s a chance that my family will soon join them? And will they thus stop voting against their economic interests (as Thomas Frank explains in his book “What’s The Matter With Kansas? How Conservatives Won The Heart of America”) ?

As to the Democrats — can they wake up and cease the moment with a program that emphasizes education, infrastructure investment, health care equality, leveling of opportunity and sustainable growth — and at the same time avoid their old-fashioned Bolshevik / labor union habits of plundering the rich, choking off world trade, and showering the masses with pork barrel favors? And can they stop antagonizing the red state people about gays and guns and old-time religion and creationist theories? (No, wait — maybe they shouldn’t give up the few things that they are right about; but they do need to make Enlightenment values look more like common sense.)

Do we stand at the beginning of a turn-around? Nah. The masses don’t read the Times or the Census income reports, and they’ll forget about New Orleans by the time the crisp breezes of autumn roll around. The Republican/Conservatives still have awfully good spin doctors and 30-second ad makers, and the Democrats still don’t know how to do anything but complain. We need an Abe Lincoln or a Franklin Roosevelt to step forward, but all we get are Clintons and Bushes. Two Bushes, and maybe two Clintons. I really have to wonder if it’s the beginning of the end for the era of American greatness.

BUT A BIT OF GOOD NEWS: Earlier this year, on April 4, I made mention of a free computer program offered by Tom Meinen of Denver. The program is called RenameStar and it comes in handy for anyone with a digital camera or who otherwise has a lot of files to rename, as it lets you rename a big bunch of files very quickly and conveniently. Tom doesn’t seem to be getting rich off of it, even though it’s a darn good program — he’s still giving it away for free. But he does ask that in return for your using it, you do something good for somebody, even if it’s just a small thing – e.g. help serve a meal at a homeless shelter or go visit your aunt in the nursing home. That’s why he calls it “careware” (which some other software people are doing).

Anyway, Tom recently finished a new version of RenameStar, the 2.0 version. There’s even a Windows 98/ME version for us old timers. I installed it yesterday, and it’s quite nice; it has some really neat features that help you keep your computer files organized. So check RenameStar 2.0 out, and maybe consider kicking a few extra bucks into the New Orleans relief effort or something. The software site is www.renamestar.com. And you can find the Red Cross or the other relief agencies pretty easily. Even if the people at the top aren’t doing much to maintain America’s greatness anymore, stuff like this at the bottom might help save the day!

For what little it’s worth, I’m gonna say a few things about New Orleans. I’m not an expert on the place. I’ve never been there. Until this week, I didn’t know that it was below sea level. I didn’t know that it was jammed in between the Mississippi River and Lake Ponchartrain. I didn’t know that it was such a poor, African-American city (about 1 in 4 below the poverty income level). I didn’t know that about 1 in 5 didn’t have access to a vehicle. I didn’t know that it was so vulnerable to a hurricane. But the federal government did. So it’s kind of shocking to know that they didn’t have a plan to deal with what happened there this past week. A lot of people are blaming President Bush, and he certainly deserves some blame. But what about Presidents Clinton, Daddy Bush, Reagan, Carter, etc.? Why weren’t detailed evacuation and shelter plans made up back in their time against mass-flooding and societal breakdown in New Orleans?

New Orleans has experienced a massive infrastructure collapse, one that has vanquished civilized society. “The thin veneer of civilization has been scraped off”, as one British newspaper said. It all reminds me of those cheesy made-for-TV movies that you saw in late 1999 about the Y2K computer thing. Remember Y2K? Some people predicted that everything would shut down when the calendar rolled over to 1/1/00. Power, water supply, fuel, food supply, banks and medicine would disappear, and there would be riots, killings, looting, and general chaos. Well, in 2000 the USA was spared all of that, but 5 year later the poor people of New Orleans are experiencing it. What happened to the federal and local emergency plans that were supposedly ready had Y2K gone the other way? Or what about those pre-nuclear war evacuation plans for urban dwellers? How were they going to get people on buses and resettle them in small towns?

Some black politicians have said that the feds didn’t rush in when the levees started to fail on Monday night because of old fashioned racism and classism. According to these politicians, the fact that most of the victims are poor and black explains the federal government’s “wait and see” response. At first I passed those comments off as the usual exaggeration that every political leader engages in while trying to gain something for his or her voting clients. But now I wonder if maybe they’re correct.

(However, Mayor Nagin’s candor has been refreshing. While reaming out the feds, he also said that a lot of the criminal behavior is what you would expect when neighborhood junkies can’t get their fixes.)

This is America’s first good look at urban poverty since the 1992 Los Angeles riots. And it ain’t pretty. Some people, like Louisiana Governor Blanco, are implying that the poor brought it on themselves; they should have left when the hurricane warnings were issued last Saturday. Yea, well — when you’re poor, you often don’t have a car and you don’t have money to stay in a motel somewhere. If you leave for a shelter, whatever you leave behind in your home can get looted. Poor people usually don’t have insurance and don’t have savings to replace their appliances and furniture. Also, as the Superdome fiasco showed, you may not be treated very humanely if you do go to a shelter. As always, the rain certainly did fall hardest upon the poor. And it continues to fall.

New Orleans will be back. It’s too big a tourist franchise to be abandoned. There’s still money to be made. But the question is, when it gets rebuilt, what role will the poor be allowed to play in the “New New Orleans”? The hotels and hospitals and restaurants and shipping ports will still need low-wage workers once they get going again. But will the re-designers of New Orleans let them live there? And what about the non-working poor, i.e. the welfare mothers (technically, parents on “temporary assistance”), and the people (mostly guys) getting by on General Assistance, SSI, Veterans benefits, intermittent jobs, and some crime on the side (e.g., small drug sales or house break-ins)? They often live in public housing and in run-down private apartments being rented out dirt cheap so as to make a few more bucks before they burn down or collapse.

Will New Orleans have any more such housing? As House Speaker Dennis Hassert asked (without directly asking it), should New Orleans have such housing and such people? I.e., maybe the poorest of the poor should be kept in more stable circumstances. But who IS going to take them if New Orleans won’t take them back? Are they just going to drift about like hobos in the 1930s, or form tent cities on the outskirts? New Orleans is about to become an incredible social experiment, not unlike the South during the years following the Civil War. Let’s hope that we somehow do a bit better with reconstruction this time.

MYTHOLOGY, NEW AND OLD: I never got hooked on the whole Lance Armstrong thing. In fact, I didn’t even know who Lance Armstrong was until a few months ago, when I heard he was about to retire. But since then I’ve gotten up-to-date on Mr. Armstrong and the wave of admiration that he has stirred here in the good old USofA. Obviously, I don’t pay much attention to cycling. The last time I gave it any thought was in 1980 when I saw “Breaking Away” (good movie). Oh, and maybe when I’m driving here in town and come upon a bunch of local guys in tight uniforms and aero helmets pretending to be Team Cinzano, making me crawl behind them as they huff and puff their way up the hill.

Mr. Armstrong touched upon our nation’s penchant for resurrection stories. As with Jesus Christ, Lance Armstrong came back from the dead. But to Americanize the myth, Mr. Armstrong took on the snobby French and beat them. Again and again!

But now those agnostic French have struck back. They took out their frozen urine samples and found something called EPO, which is both a banned performance enhancer and a medicine for cancer patients. So far Mr. Armstrong is denying that he took EPO, but I can’t help but believe that he did. However, I don’t think that he took an illegal enhancer in the same way that so many other athletes did (and probably still do). I believe that it was a quiet medical decision between Mr. Armstrong and his doctors, and not a quest to set new records of athletic endurance. I think that his doctors said something like this: “Lance, the Lord has been good to you, but you’re still not the same guy as before you got the cancer; I can’t stop you from pushing a bike over 2,000 miles of hills and dales, but just to make sure that it doesn’t hurt you and that you finish OK, why don’t we give your system a little boost, just to even things out a bit”.

If that’s the case, then I have no problem with Mr. Armstrong keeping all his medals. But as far as the American Myth goes, the dream is over. Cancer is the horrid shadow of inevitable death, the thing we can do nothing about; if I remember my Joseph Campbell right, Lance Armstrong has assumed the role of the hero who got up and vanquished the unconquerable foe. But if my imaginary doctor is correct and Lance Armstrong is not the same as a guy who never had cancer, then our worst fears remain. And that explains the ruckus and the denial that the French “B Sample” test results have caused.

THE ORIGINAL RESURRECTION MYTH: Lance Armstrong is the new resurrectional myth maker, and Jesus of Nazareth is the old one. As I’ve discussed here before, I have come to believe that the academians are correct in describing Jesus as another in a long line of Jewish apocalypticists from the time of the Greek and Roman occupation of Palestine. But in their academic world view, the big professors miss something essential about Jesus, something that explains why so many people profess Jesus as the Son of God who was raised from the dead. It’s because Jesus said to his followers that he was Son of God (“Son of Man”, more accurately) and that he would come back from the dead! Because Jesus said it, his disciples wanted to believe it; he was obviously a very charismatic figure.

Jesus came to believe that he, as a Jew, was amidst God’s chosen people; but moreover, as a man of intense spirituality in a time of crisis, Jesus also came to believe that he was the chosen of the chosen. The Jews of the time had a myth about God appointing a “Son of Man” who would come along in the clouds and set up God’s Kingdom right there in the Holy Land, along the far eastern shores of the Mediterranean. For proof, read the Book of Daniel. Jesus decided that the time had come and God had given him the mission of readying himself — and anyone who would listen — for the carrying out of THE BIG CHANGE. When Jesus was handed over to Pilate during that fateful Passover celebration, he probably figured that everything was right on track; just as his body was dying on the Roman cross in the cruel afternoon sun, God would start the BIG EVENT.

But the big event never came. Therefore, it’s no surprise that some of the early followers remembered Jesus crying out from the cross, “My God, why have you forsaken me?” The standard Christian mythological interpretation is that these words were a foil meant to emphasize the sweetness of the resurrection that followed. But I think that they were actually remembered in despair by the disciples. Many scholars doubt that any of Jesus’ followers were standing near by throughout the crucifixion event, since they would also be picked up by the Romans and be killed. But these words may well have reflected their own dismay and disappointment about Jesus being wrong. The sun had set that evening and the Kingdom had not arrived.

Something obviously happened later on to restore the disciples’ faith that Jesus and the BIG EVENT were delayed but were still on the way. Jesus was not wrong; his timing was just a little bit off. Without that faith-restoring thing (whatever it was), there wouldn’t be any Christianity today. I’m not saying that a miracle actually occurred. It could have been a case of mistaken identity, or a bout of meditative exuberance as Paul seems to have had on the road to Damascus (described in Corinthians).

OK, so where am I going with all of this? Well, what I’m asking here is this: what do we do when we finally get past the myths, when the masks of wishful thinking finally come off? How do we look at death and life and find hope, after we admit that Lance Armstrong did have a banned performance enhancer in him, and that Jesus of Nazarteh died without bringing on God’s Kingdom and that he stayed dead, just like everyone before him and since? (And let’s not even get started about the Buddha and Mohammed). I think that there is a way to do it, and that it involves wisdom and maturity. Hey, it’s never too late to keep on growing up. But it’s a huge challenge, and I’m not at all sure that I’ll ever live up to it.

If a plant cannot live according to its nature, it dies; and so a human soul.

I think that Thoreau was on to something in that quote. I think it touches on the biggest source of anguish for the human race. People are like plants. When planted in the right soil, plants flourish. When planted in the wrong soil, they barely grow, turn yellow, and probably die before their time. Or perhaps the wrong soil will make a plant grow too fast and become an obnoxious weed. What might normally be an appropriate defense mechanism, like a thorn or a pointy edge, becomes aggressive and offensive. So too with people. Find the right community with the right values and interests, and a human being will likewise flourish. Be surrounded by people who really aren’t like you, who just don’t see the good in you, and you shrivel (or grow too strong and aggressive).

People are different from plants in that we are all so different. With plants, all petunias do well in one set of soil and climate and terrain; all pine trees do well in another. But with humans, every member of the species is different. I would do well in one set of circumstances, but my brother, who shares a lot of my own genes, does well in entirely different circumstances (and we both do poorly in the other one’s appropriate environment).

I honestly believe that everyone would be a “good person” if they were just brought up and remained rooted in the environment that was meant for them. Everyone would be moral and virtuous and highly accomplished in some field. Everybody would make a positive contribution to the greater good within his or her own lifetime. But in reality, very few people turn out this way. People get depressed, get nasty, commit crimes, get greedy, get materialistic, get fixated on achievement and power and ego, etc. We either wither or turn to weeds. Stalin and Hitler are prime examples of weeds. People who commit suicide or destroy themselves with drugs or alcohol are prime examples of witherers. And there’s a whole lot of quiet desperation in between those extremes.

I honestly believe that everyone is inherently good, and given the right environment would be good at something (as well as becoming good to others). I believe that God sets our “default” switches on “GOOD”. But then God randomly scatters our seeds, so that the chances of winding up with the right kind of soil and the right climate are fairly slim. Well, so much for the Intelligent Design argument!

Perhaps Nature has its reasons for making us all so different and not always placing us to best advantage. Perhaps it’s good that a person who had the natural talent to be a great violinist becomes a warehouse laborer and engages in spousal violence. Perhaps it’s good that a person who should have been an athlete becomes a drunken third rate lawyer. Perhaps it’s good that a great scientist tries to survive as a bit-part actor and is hospitalized for clinical depression. Perhaps it’s good that someone who would have made a wonderful parent becomes a priest who abuses children. Maybe it’s best for the survival of the species that a wide range of (mostly unused) talents are available most everywhere, so that if conditions suddenly change, someone will be able to adapt to it (and have children and keep the species alive).

Imagine if there were dinosaurs that were built for cold weather and lived miserably in the warm, swampy weather of the Jurassic Era. Eventually they would have had their day, and we still might have had dinosaurs today.

Still, we are human beings, and we have brains; our credo is “it doesn’t have to be like this”. If we could focus ourselves on the problem of finding the best place for each of us (not in terms of weather or soil conditions, but in terms of social factors and communal values), then I think there would be a whole lot less unhappiness and a whole lot more good behavior amidst the human race. I really think that is a prerequisite for the elimination of war and starvation and poverty and wealthy families living in gated communities. Perhaps it’s a bit utopian, but I say we should work on the question of finding the right place for everyone. If it could somehow be done, or even partly done, then more people would feel like human beings; and more and more people would then actually live like caring human beings!

Here’s a moment of summertime bliss out on the steps (to my apartment). The guy next door is seen having a smoke with his 2 year old son near by. It’s just another humid, grey-and-green summer day in suburban New Jersey.

I got involved in a somewhat interesting project at work this past week. About two years ago we got some federal grant money to post a few anti-gun violence ads out in the high-crime neighborhoods. Being a prosecutor’s office, no one really thought it would do much good, so no one did much about it after we got the money. Well, to be honest, the community outreach people did put some ideas together and talked with some media sources. But the clock was ticking and it was apparent that we weren’t going to spend the money in time and would have to give it back. Since I’m responsible to watch out for stuff like that, and since giving money back gets the big boss upset, I decided to jump in and get things moving. Not that I really believe that a few billboards and bus posters reminding people that guns kill innocent children are going to save any lives out there on the mean streets. I’m simply trying to keep my job, need the money.

So I started making calls to the in-house graphics guy, to the purchasing office guy, to the billboard company lady, to the bus ad company lady, etc. We finally put a half-way decent looking ad together and are now in the procurement phase; the billboards should go up right after Labor Day. One person I had to talk to was a Ms. Pickens, who works with the educational agency that has the rights to the background image (a child’s face with the letters “Don’t Shoot, I want to grow up”; it originally came from Cease Fire Chicago). Anyway, while talking to Ms. Pickens, I had one of my usual stupid thoughts: just for a laugh, I would ask her if she was related to Slim Pickens. Yep, Slim Pickens, the movie actor who played the B-52 pilot in Dr. Strangelove. Luckily, discretion got the better of me and I didn’t say anything about the late, great Slim Pickens. As a result, Ms. Pickens gave us permission to use the image.

But the thought of Slim Pickens and Dr. Strangelove gave me a laugh, as it brought back a nice little memory. Ironic, you might think, that a movie about an accidental war which set off a nuclear holocaust would make me laugh. But that’s just me. It reminded me of the time, say about 20 years ago, when I was out in a forest somewhere in northern Virginia with my friend Loyd and his wife Eve. We were cutting and gathering dead trees for their wintertime firewood supply (we actually had a permit to do that). Well, we came across a tree near the road that looked pretty dead, so Loyd got out the chain saw and started attacking the trunk. I was standing pretty close by; as Loyd got near the tipping point he stopped and advised me to get back a ways, as the tree would soon be coming down. I gave him a puzzled look not unlike the expression that our President wears so frequently these days. He then put the saw down, turned towards me and said “despite your Doctor Strangelovian fantasies, you don’t ride it down!”

OK, to get the joke you have to have seen Doctor Strangelove. Back in my time, you absolutely had to see that movie; an end-of-the-world nuclear war with Russia was a real possibility, and Stanley Kubrick wanted to show us just how easily it could get started. Today, nukes are still a threat, but it probably ain’t gonna be Russia that sets the next one off in anger. Anyone under 35 today probably doesn’t remember that classic scene towards the end of Strangelove where Slim Pickens puts on his cowboy hat, goes down into the bomb bay, mounts an H-bomb like a bronco, then gets dropped out of the plane somewhere over Siberia, waving his hat and hooting like a Texas cowboy. (Little did we know that Kubrick was predicting the outcome of the 2000 Presidential election). And they probably don’t know that James Earl Jones, with his deep, evil voice, was in this film long before there even was a Darth Vader!

Oh well — so much for those good memories from the bad old days. And thanks to you, Ms. Pickens, for reminding me of Loyd, and for giving me permission to try to make the bad new days just a little bit less bad. Those billboards that the feds are paying for probably won’t do much good. But as with good old Slim and his H-bomb, we might as well go down trying.