Oceania, Eurasia, and Eastasia

 Given that the Trump regime has been a joint venture with Russia since the first time around, and it's been even more obvious this time, any political figure or analysts asking whether he's concerned that the kidnapping of Venezuela's president, and stated plans to take over that country's oil fields will embolden Russia and China in their territory grabs is just framing a statement as a question.

Trump has an understanding with Putin. They've divvied up the world. Russia recently deployed intermediate range, nuclear capable missiles to Belarus, putting a gun to Europe's head. China's conducting military exercises off the coast of Taiwan. The deals have been made. Mind you, both China and Russia are assuming that the forces of ignorance and greed that have lifted Donald Trump to the status of most destructive president in American history will blunder so badly in their new playground that China and Russia will be able to close in from either side. The odds are in their favor.

At this point, China looks like the least worst as a global overlord. They're  repressive, sure. But Putin and Trump, and the powers aligned with them, are outright sadists. Trump and Putin and their devoted followers actively enjoy causing and watching pain and suffering. It's a major part of the strongman image. I don't welcome our Chinese overlords, I merely observe all the players and make a prediction. Domination by any or all of them will be much worse than bumbling toward some sort of global human understanding would have been. I just wanted to get a time and date stamp on my conjecture.

Trump has already threatened Cuba. Russia used to consider Cuba a tripwire, but I bet now they'd be willing to cut it loose to focus on getting more and more of the contiguous territory of the old USSR back together, and adding Western Europe as at least coerced allies.

Africa presents a problematic prize. South America gets mighty skinny as you go south. Neither Russia nor China would cross an ocean to fight you for it. But Africa is thick and broad and loaded with resources. It's difficult country to hold. A superpower could wield influence, but no outside force would be able to subdue any major percentage of it. China, Russia, and the country formerly known as the United States will continue to compete there, with the US off to the slowest start because of the stupidity, greed, and bigotry of the current regime, whether it's the part led by the senile 1980s real estate failure or the part led by Bible-thumping misogynists.

So: The Big Three have divided the world into general spheres of influence where each will let the other do pretty much anything. Global war will be threatened on a regular basis to keep ordinary citizens on edge expecting Armageddon. Small wars will bleed off young people who have no other job options. Or maybe conscription will return. If you survive your enlistment with all your body parts, and your mind intact, you might go on to finish out your career in the building trades, or trucking. If you're maimed in body and or spirit, die a beggar. No one asked you to be born. Ask not what your country can do for you. Ask what you can do for your country's wealthy leaders.

The homophobic and misogynistic words of George Carlin

Recently, I was severely castigated in a Facebook comment thread for using the term "boob" in the humorous exchange that had formed underneath a meme, posted by a woman, using this picture:

My initial comment was, "teenage boy designs own bedroom." This received lots of laugh emojis, including from the original poster. Then some guy posted that I had left out lots of other demographics that would also enjoy the visual effect depicted. In my response, I explained that I wasn't trying to exclude any other "boob fanciers," but brevity won out over complete detail. The original poster of the image then chastised me harshly for using the word, "boob."

I hate to offend anyone inadvertently. If I'm going to offend someone, I want it to be a carefully calculated maneuver that I might very well regret for the rest of my life, but was at least done with my feet shoulder width apart and the slap or jab delivered precisely. So I brooded. I reflected on my entire history with the term "boob" for breasts. Breasts, by the way, was the acceptable term I was directed to, after I edited the offending comment to what I thought was a humorously overly elaborate descriptor of the anatomical detail at issue.

My awareness of the wider world began in the 1960s. As a younger sibling of the counterculture, I was old enough to feel like almost a part of it, but too young actually to be one. I was part of that generation's trickle-down dilution of culture into cosplay, as happens with any generation's trend setters who have to see their hair styles and clothing go mainstream and end up on school kids and toddlers.  I was a hopelessly unhip dipshit, but I tried hard, which only made it worse. It never got better.

My first guide into hipness was my cool cousin, who was the oldest child in her branch of the family. She knew the names of all the musicians who were calling out the failures of the establishment in poetry and song. She was a Wiccan and a pagan and dressed accordingly. She pierced my younger sister's ears old school, with a big needle, after numbing the earlobes with ice. It was a rite of passage that my sister endured with the bravery of any youngster on the verge of puberty, going through painful rituals to achieve another notch toward adult status. It wasn't old school then, it was common practice. She also guided me through my first purchase of blue jeans that weren't just little kid dungarees. And she tried to teach me, over the ensuing years, a few things about language and culture -- as she saw it -- regarding the mode average sexual relations between men and women. Among her stated preferences, she specifically stated that she thought that the word "breasts" was stuffy and stilted, that "tits" was unacceptably crude, and that "boobs" struck the perfect balance of informal and lighthearted.

In 1972, George Carlin presented the world with the list of seven words you can never say on television. They became a mantra. Shit, piss fuck, cunt, cocksucker, motherfucker, and tits. For a conscientious Profanitarian, shit, piss, fuck, and motherfucker remain. But cocksucker can be considered both homophobic, and hypocritical as an insult, if one possesses a penis and accepts the ministrations of a fellationist. And of course cunt and tits are crude references to female anatomy. To some philosophers, no man should utter any reference to female anatomy whatsoever, unless it's part of their duly trained and educated profession. We can spiral off some other time into the question of whether any man should ever be allowed into a profession or trade that requires any reference to female anatomy. But even within the strictures of the first proposition, that no man shall speak of female anatomy unless licensed to do so, most of us are unlicensed to do so.

Working in a bike shop, I do get presented with anatomical details relating to the part of the body that endures contact with a bicycle seat. In that context I do have to hear and use terms describing the female intimate anatomy. Most of those questions can be answered with generic solutions related to saddle shape and position, without ever mentioning the human parts in contact with it. On rare occasions someone will go into graphic, specific detail. In that case I guess I am granted a limited term, temporary license. Even so, I can get by without speaking of the forbidden, only prescribing remedies using the inanimate bicycle saddle and its position in three dimensions.

When one is limited in speech by social strictures, one must rehearse mentally. Otherwise, when called upon to speak of the forbidden topics in a licensed, public setting, one may blurt something offensive, or lose so much time choosing words that one appears incompetent.

The problem is most challenging for the male, the white male in particular. As the dominant players in the rise of civilization, we've grown accustomed to setting the standards to which all others must adhere. This is hardly to say that we represent a true meritocracy. It's merely a testament to the power that bullies have in shaping group behavior over a wider and wider area. White men and their allies will admonish everyone else not to be thin-skinned ninnies when it comes to enduring taunts and slang that owe their origins to hierarchical interpretations that put the white guy on top. The groups under this regime have responded with increasingly rebellious humor through the decades, leading now to increasing insistence on recognition. White men and their allies are pushing back. That doesn't make them right. But it would be a mistake to make them all wrong, too. Beyond the whiteness, men in general possess undesirable tendencies that are the source of their strength and the root of their evil. We, the male, can generally be discounted, but you still want to be absolutely sure that a white, male achievement was stolen from someone of another hue or gender before pissing on it.

Day by day one learns what you can say to whom. As I have striven always to limit my offensiveness only to those who should be offended, I fight a tendency to play with language for humorous value, and to seek audience approval in the form of laughs or appreciative feedback. In a perfect future, people will all, voluntarily and without a dystopian legal framework, just dress in gray and walk past each other quietly. If we have business to conduct, we will conduct it. Sex work will be legalized as a therapeutic service engaged in without emotion or particular excitement. People's own homes might be filled with color and emotive activity, but it stays inside the enclave. Nothing will be forbidden. The underground world can be as bright and wild as one wishes. Go drinking. Go dancing. Go find some fun and have it. But the public face will be gray block buildings, gray clothes, emotionless commerce. The default of interaction will be as sterile as one can be. Any departure from that accepts the terms and conditions that go with any assumption of risk.

We don't live in a single-issue world

As any election approaches, I get polling emails asking me to list my priorities for the country. What is most important to me? If I had to pick one or two things, what would they be?

Interesting intellectual exercise, but we don't live in a one-issue world.

Sometimes the poll will ask me to rank a long list of issues in numerical order from most important to least important. This is supposed to provide more detail and nuance, but that's another illusion. I never see a list that I can comfortably organize that way.

It's become a cliche that "everything is connected," but everything is connected. We can't solve one problem at a time. We can't half-solve a problem and call it good enough. Numerous philosophies have tried to blunt the human predilection for selfishness and violence. Not one of them has yet found the balance between permissible self interest and complete submission to the group. The philosophies read well. The basic principles usually include something like "do unto others as you would have them do unto you." But what if you're a masochist?

The destruction of our environment is not just an aesthetic question. It's become a matter of survival. But we can be personally odious in a pristine environment. We can be greedy, racist, misogynist, bigoted assholes who shoot each other over a petty insult. We can have a profit-driven system of health care services designed to enrich the management and stockholders of a few corporations. So maybe we solve the environmental threat to basic survival and still kill each other off in plenty of other ways. We can produce plenty of carcinogenic chemicals in carefully isolated areas and still maintain just enough natural environment to keep the planet's life support system basically functional. Sound good to you?

All human conflict comes back to well-documented items on the naughty list. We can chip away at those behaviors while the atmosphere rapidly becomes toxic with the untreated exhaust gases of industrial society. Maybe we will enjoy one glorious moment of global unity just before we asphyxiate.

It all seems overwhelming if you look at it all at once, but we've avoided looking at it at all for so long that we can't look away any longer. Immigration and refugee displacement is a problem because the places they live have been made uninhabitable by human policy decisions. Humans decided to make messes that drive other humans to seek safety elsewhere. Humans implement the policies. Humans justify their indifference and hostility to each other just to get from one day to the next.

Political reality is not reality. An elected official has to get into office by appealing to enough voters to get elected, and then fulfill the duties of office under a different set of pressures from ordinary citizens and from information that might not have been available to them before. Sometimes they just lie. Sometimes they are forced to change a position because circumstances change. Government is where the fantasy life of voters comes up against the thorny tangle of real problems. What gets a person elected and re-elected might nurture the fantasy life while letting the tangle grow out of control.

The Woman Haters

When I was about seven years old, living in a little residential neighborhood called Rogers Heights, in Annapolis, my friends and I played in the woods that abutted all of our back yards, on the other side of a rainbow-hued trickle that flowed eventually down to Weems Creek underneath the Rowe Boulevard bridge. This was around 1963.

Our group included at least one girl. She was just another grubby kid looking for frogs, like the rest of us. We gave no thought to gender in our loose group of poison ivy finders. Not much, anyway.

We never saw anyone in the woods that we hadn't brought with us, but the other kids would refer to an ominous group of older boys who called themselves The Woman Haters. We never actually saw any of them that I recall, but we did see a tree fort that the kids in the know said was their headquarters. A flag made out of an old cloth diaper hung limply from it in the windless summer air. Whatever design had been painted on it remained obscured in its folds. Feeling that we might be under surveillance from that eyrie of junior misogynists, we withdrew quietly to the safety of our yards. We had no fences, so the collective yard formed a long strip of field between our houses and the near bank of the stream.

The day that safety was violated by a BB gun sniper who shot me in the arm, everyone agreed that it was the work of The Woman Haters. Apparently they weren't too fond of anyone.

I never encountered anything like that when we moved to Newport, Rhode Island, and then to Thomaston, Maine. And when I returned to Maryland at age 11 to face an unending assault of other preadolescent stresses, we lived in a different neighborhood where enmity was much more pointed and personal.

I wonder now whether The Woman Haters existed, who was in the club, and what became of them as they grew older. But I don't waste any time wondering enough to investigate. We're all too old to matter anymore. If they made careers of misogyny, they've done their damage. If they didn't, their club name was just another stupid boy thing. I don't imagine they inherited it as a secret society, as old as the Knights Templar, and passed their lodge rituals on to new generations. I think they just liked to sit in their tree house and take pot shots at smaller kids. It was the sort of thing that never surprised smaller kids. We were the punching bags and continual irritant of older siblings and their friends.

I was not aware of woman-hating sentiments among my fellow bottle breakers and stone skippers. I never went through a phase where I "hated gurlz." I always rather liked them. Later, in adolescence and beyond, I was cruel to some of them, but never out of malice, only out of selfishness and self consciousness. That makes it no less hurtful, and, therefore, unforgivable, but they weren't the acts of a twisted man with deep-seated hostility. Just another insecure dork trying to fake out both the bullies and the objects of his desire.

Self consciousness is very different from self awareness. Self awareness puts you on solid ground to figure out how to be the person you want to be. Self consciousness never finds solid ground. For some of us, the tension between the two forces never ends.