One Nation Under A Giant Allegorical Painting

How does one best go about making the case for one's views on the position of personal faith and beliefs in regards to the political life of the nation? Well, one could write out reasoned opinions with references to historical facts and logical arguments, addressing with fully thought out responses any counter-positions people might assert in disagreement. Or you could make a giant allegorical painting of Jesus holding the constitution, with the US Presidents lined up behind him - yes, even the ones who were avowed deists and atheists - as the humble folks of 'real America' look on in awe, while various Liberals and secularists turn their faces away. Do read the accompanying explanatory notes because they're about halfway between hilarious and terrifying. Every touchstone and hobby horse of the Christofascist reactionary right is there; a working woman 'struggling to maintain her conservative values in the face of social change', a non-Christian immigrant seemingly shocked at 'where the source of America's greatness comes from', a mother with a 'Disabled Child' (disability not specified) and a pregnant woman who 'wants to keep her baby' (as if someone wants to force her to abort it?) There's a 'Liberal News Reporter' and 'Mr. Hollywood' representing the 'very apparent liberal slant with Hollywood'; a university professor clutching his Origin of Species and displaying his smug contempt for God by daring to sit in the presence of White Blonde Republican Jesus; and a supreme court judge 'holding his head in shame' at court decisions like Roe v. Wade and Marbury v. Madison which litter the Capitol steps (though Loving v. Virginia and Lawrence v. Texas are mysteriously absent). And of course, following them is the shrouded, red-eyed figure of Satan, the best friend the Church has ever had. What a convincing argument! Is this literally what evangelicals see when they picture American history in their shrunken little heads? It really is uncomfortably reminiscent of the way that history and pagan mythology were being twisted around by certain artists in Germany during a certain decadent, liberal era. Big hat tip to Red Tory for bringing this gem to my attention.

Operation Sterilization: Accomplished!

Today, my wife was in day surgery for laproscopic tubal ligation; in layman's terms, she had herself sterilized, blocking off her gametes at the source, in a bid to prevent any possibility of future pregnancy. I've thought hard about it, and the next time I see my doctor I intend to ask for a vasectomy to make double dog certain of it. Now, some might call us selfish for undertaking such a step, and it's true; a lot of our motives are selfish in nature - in fact I, of course, I consider mine to be entirely selfish at the root. First off, we refuse to burden our lives and our means with responsibility for a child. It's not that we hate children; on the contrary, we both believe that children are sacred embodiments of what I think of as 'Satan' - the vitality of the universe that strives to grow and multiply and evolve - and that children deserve all the support and nurturing and education that we as a society can give them, lest they grow up twisted and crippled and vile. We just don't want to have to be the ones to conceive and raise them. There are plenty of other people out there who are willing - eager, even - to take on that burden in our stead; and we wholeheartedly support them and wish them all the best. We also both have genetic problems which children would almost undoubtedly inherit some of - severe, deadly allergies, migraines and learning disabilities on her side; heart problems, arthritis, and mood disorders on mine - and while 'not wanting to burden a child with our genetics' is a good altruistic argument, I tend to think more in terms of my own empathetic pain at having to raise a disabled child, and the hardships and expense. I have vowed never to conceive a child until I could have it genetically engineered and cybernetically enhanced - a statement that tends to raise sniggers from those I vouchsafe it to, at least until I tell them about the eugenic programs and system of licensed state-sponored parenting creches (more to piss them off than anything else, though I fail to see how such a system could out-horrify our own world of parental tyranny, religious and state-sponsored brainwashing, inherited privilege, and genetic roulette). But I mean it 100% - I consider it cruel to bring a plain old Homo Sapiens into this world, heir not only to genetic 'abnormalities' but to genetic 'normalities' like less-than-genius-level intellect and lack of innate olympic-level athletic potential, let alone the complete inability to initiate a neurological-level link with technology, when the potential to create the enhanced neo-human is mere decades away at the outmost. Sterilization just seems like a logical step, one I've been contemplating for some time now, and this seems like the apropos moment.

My wife, on the other hand, decided on sterilization because she's scared to death that progressive reform in this country is going to be rolled back to the point where an abortion would no longer be a viable option in the case of an unwanted pregnancy. She literally has nightmares about living in The Handmaid's Tale. She wants to be free of the merest possibility that at some point in the future she could be compelled to bear and birth a child against her will; and I can hardly blame her. In studying recent history from an anarchist perspective, I've come to see the careful chipping away of rights and liberties I took for granted; but as I grew up I felt fairly secure in the idea that the sometimes slow and steady, sometimes rushed and turbulent march of liberal reform had laid a solid foundation of social progress on which we could stand firm. I believed that the battle was all for the freedoms of the future - that the freedoms of the past were somehow assured, cemented, that the fighting was over and done. Since 9/11 we've all come to see the naivete of that assumption; how the house of democracy is built on sand, and how easily the slightest shift in the tide can end up sweeping it away. But really, if there ever was bedrock down there, the christofascist korporatchiks we complacently allowed to take over our social institutions have been breaking it down since the time of Reagan if not before. It's getting to the point where one of the biggest wins the feminist movement has ever scored, the widespread recognition that a woman has the right to control what goes on inside her own body, is again under siege.

In February of 2008, private member's bill C-484, the so-called 'unborn victims of crime act', was introduced before the Canadian federal parliament. The bill would have treated a crime resulting in the miscarriage of a fetus as a murder, implicitly granting unthinking and unfeeling proto-humans, which have no identity or possibility of survival outside the confines of a mother's womb, the status of 'person' under the law with the implied right to life. The bill was voted down, but the very fact that the notion can be entertained - especially in the text of a weasel-worded wedge bill like this - is chilling to someone who grew up in an era when access to abortion on demand was considered by many to be an implication of basic civil rights. In December of 2008, a Conservative MP claiming to represent an 'all-party pro-life coalition' continued to make noises about 'reopening the abortion debate' in Canada. He was slapped down pretty quickly; what's going on in liberal Canada doesn't hold a candle to the US, where (as a quick example) the Oklahoma legislature recently passed a law that requires women seeking abortions to allow their personal information to be publicly posted on the internet (cue the lynch mobs). Still, if such an attitude is being openly voiced in the country's Parliament you can damn well bet it's echoed at every level of society. And it doesn't just extend to abortion. To convince her doctors to 'permit' her to undergo an entirely safe and uncomplicated medical procedure that would by her own choice eliminate her capability to reproduce, my wife had to literally threaten to do the job herself with a kitchen knife and a copy of Gray's Anatomy - her exact words. She's been on the waiting list since before I even met her, so the blessed event was cause for celebration indeed. It's a pure contempt for women, for the notion that women can run their own lives and make decisions about their own families, that runs through every institution of society, from the way that women are treated in the workplace - distinctly different brands of oppression for childless women, working mothers, and stay-at-home moms re-entering the workforce - to the structure of maternity leave laws and social services, from oft-proposed and oft-aborted plans for universal socialized daycares to the constant socially-reinforced message that a woman is worthless if her primary occupation is not that of den-mother and walking incubator. And just as we concentrate on the battles ahead, the fifth column sneaks up behind with new avenues of attack on the seemingly simple notion that a woman's body belongs to her, not to the government. So it is with great pride and relief that I brought my wife home today, cramped with pangs of abdominal pain, woozy and puking from general anesthetic, and absolutely radiant at the prospect of never again having to worry about a broken condom at the exact wrong time. I love you, my Tarja, and I look forward to a long and happy life growing old and childless with you.

Anarchy in Action: Time Banking

I just recently came upon the idea of Time Banking. This is so simple and beautiful, you'll want to kick yourself in the head for not thinking it up. Each member offers certain services for which they would be willing to donate their time to other members. This can be literally anything, from professional quality work to walking someone's dog. Whenever they perform a service for another time bank member, they earn a credit or 'time dollar' that can then be used toward 'hiring' another member willing to do something you want.

This could go a long way toward alleviating my fundamental unease with the concept of volunteering, and I see a lot of potential in the idea. The primary goal of TimeBanks USA is to foster community relationships by bringing neighbours closer together, but has already had success in helping social services organizations to more effectively help others help themselves and each other. I would love to see this new kind of 'currency', built on reciprocity and labour-value rather than on price and capital economics, to flourish and remove more and more of our lives from the domination of capital. By allying non-profit orgs with a time bank and allowing members to supplement their balances through volunteering in the community, a truly powerful economic force could potentially be unleashed; especially if a way can be fount to value goods as well as services in terms of time dollars instead of exchange currency.

That's right, I'm back in action, and rarin' to go for the new year. Months of pre- and post-wedding jitters have somewhat sapped my wellspring of continual rage at the hypocrisies and irrationalities of the world we live in, but by golly I do feel myself getting angry all over again! So I'm looking forward to a fresh start here in 2010, and hopefully a few of you out there are still interested in my peculiar brand of verbal projectile vomiting and would care to stick with me.

Veganism and moral 'superiority'

This NYT article contains a lot of scientific points that underscore something I've intuitively believed for a long time: the line between 'plants' and 'animals', in terms of sentience and intelligence, is not as clear cut as might seem immediately apparent. This is a large part of why it pisses me off when vegetarians get on a high horse about their choice not to consume the flesh of animals. Not only are plants living creatures; the ones we eat, by and large, have been stripped of a lot of their natural defenses by millennia of selective breeding designed to increase their tastiness, nutritional content, and cultivability; to make them more docile and suited to human needs. That's the whole reason we have to treat them with pesticides and fertilizers in the first place. If meat animals slaughtered for human consumption add up to a hundred Auschwitzes every day, how much more terrible is our agricultural holocaust?

One might respond that plants are different because plants feel no pain. How the fuck do you know? It is my contention that pain and suffering is a fundamental part of being a living thing, and was present in some form since the first glob of proto-RNA rose from the primordial slime. We can't hear the screams of the vegetables, but that hardly means they're not screaming:

Some of the compounds that plants generate in response to insect mastication — their feedback, you might say — are volatile chemicals that serve as cries for help. Such airborne alarm calls have been shown to attract both large predatory insects like dragon flies, which delight in caterpillar meat, and tiny parasitic insects, which can infect a caterpillar and destroy it from within.

Enemies of the plant’s enemies are not the only ones to tune into the emergency broadcast. “Some of these cues, some of these volatiles that are released when a focal plant is damaged,” said Richard Karban of the University of California, Davis, “cause other plants of the same species, or even of another species, to likewise become more resistant to herbivores.”

Yes, it’s best to nip trouble in the bud.

Think about that the next time you bite into a crisp leaf of lettuce.

Faced with such realities, the only realistic choices are to starve while you wait for science to perfect lab-grown nutrient packs, or to give in and admit that life feeds on life. I will never question anyone's choice to eat or not eat anything whatsoever, save perhaps on the grounds of nutritional adequacy. But the next time some vegan gets high and holy with me about feeding on suffering and death, I'll ask them how they imagine that broccoli feels as its stalk is sliced from its root.