Cheaters Don't Need To Pay Attention

In our attempts to make the world more and more idiot resistant we have come up against an unintended consequence. I do believe there are ways to recover from this life out of balance, but it will require some sacrifice and diligence on our part. We have innovated our way into a sophisticated system in which capital is thoroughly divorced from things that matter most, the means of production has sucked up into too few hands and with which we can placate the masses with nothing more than streams of electrons and products that can be produced for pennies and sold for dollars. The cheaters are still in charge of the system and they assure themselves that they will always have the upper hand. Their ace in the hole is that they think that we all need them to fake their way to the top and siphon out the lion's share of the wealth that is created from the sweat of the forgotten man's brow.

I started to realize just how much trouble we were in over thirty years ago. I was tired of the two or three guys who sat behind me cheating (copying from my answers) during tests, so I purposely answered the most ridiculous way I could think of. The teacher, noticing all of our tests were identical, called me aside and asked why I had cheated. I knew her and thought she knew me, so I told her of my ruse. I asked her if I could re-take the test in private and she agreed. When I aced the test, she gave the other boys a passing grade, but let my original test score stand. She told me that had I done my best, those cheaters would have found a way to get the best grade possible, instead, I helped them to fail and that was what was wrong. We are in the same position today. Those who have not paid attention to history or economics, mathematics or science are cheating, just like they did in grade school. The problem is that we let them and the bigger lies they tell, the more insane their logic, the more responsibility we trust them with. The recent addition to the slate of "presidential candidates", from Texas, is an excellent case in point. Never mind the economic and environmental facts, just forge ahead spouting outright lies and the news will cover you as if you are their darling. Now, because their weak minds have been titillated by the digital manifestation of his lies, they will parrot back the falsehoods and claim them to be true.

There are not scientists converting daily to the belief that climate changer is a myth. There is actually no better way to reduce pollution and climate destabilization and raising much needed money than from a carbon tax. It is customary to tax things we do not want more of. Perhaps what is needed is a raving lunatic tax or a bold faced lie tax. The slate of candidates would clean itself up if the tax was high enough.

Hardly a word is said in the public sphere that relates to the fact that a large portion of Northern Japan and the ocean around it will be inhospitable for humans for centuries thanks to splitting atoms for power. Even less is said about the fact that the green light that was originally given to nuclear energy was because of the need for weapons grade material that can only be made in nuclear reactors. The facts about nuclear energy are as chilling now as they have always been, but the cheaters never wanted us to know about the truth. Similarly, those who claim that US reserves of fuel will last for centuries are just dead wrong. To "harvest" the oil shale and tar sands that are touted as our energy salvation will require billions of kiloquads of energy being wasted in the fracking and extraction processes. Making energy this way is akin to carrying water from a well miles away in a bucket with a hole in it.


The banks cheated their way into such a deep hole that we all had to bail them out. Now we can see how willing they are to help us. Car companies as well fought tooth and nail to be allowed to continue doing the wrong thing, yet my car, a 1999 model gets fifty miles to the gallon. My intuition tells me that whenever we determine a necessary path to make the future better that we find no shortage of idiots who make themselves cheerleaders for doing nothing, or worse, continuing down the wrong path at full tilt. The very word "conservative" has been twisted and eviscerated by the religious right, their tea party offspring and the gun-totin' nationalists who claim that our paternalistic government will one day limit their freedoms to bear arms. The well-organized militia part of the constitution may as well not even be there. The cheats, liars and true terrorists only pay attention to things that make their quirky claims seem real.

I have seen little good come of commissions, committees and inquiries, focus groups, advisory councils and working groups so I am usually loathe to recommend them, but in this age of stupid people wresting the tiller of public opinion from their factual underpinnings of truth, justice and The American Way, perhaps it is time to have a sort of truth commission that allows public discourse to stay on topic, reflect the best information available and to prevent the public sphere from being contaminated with hearsay and innuendo. We can make some things up as we go along but the truth is not one of them.

Haloween #2 With A Bullet

Now, it has been a few years since my favorite holy day surpassed Easter as the second largest holiday based on consumer spending, but here at The Otherfish Wrap it has been noted that major media outlets have no qualms about reporting twenty or even thirty year old information as "news". At first it seemed unsavory to rehash old information and present it as news, but the more we thought about it, the more we realized that people rarely pay attention to information that makes a difference in our lives, or forget it once it is heard, so we forgive the major media players for their untimely coverage. Now we must humbly ask that you do the same for us. Fact is, several years ago, The Otherfish Wrap was still a dormant fanzine. So, please allow us to turn the wheel of time back to a time when some of the best news we have heard in a while came to light.

In our consumer culture, people often judge things by how much money they generate. Halloween, on one level, is just one more thing that has commodities associated with it. When it surpassed Easter as the number two holiday, pagans were elated. Because the Christians co-opted so many of our holy days, the thought of Hallows Eve making such a strong showing was both comforting and exhilerating. Now don't read too much into this, because the gaudy and skull infested celebration that passes for Halloween has about as much to do with the pagan calendar & pagan values as Christmas has to do with the rebirth of the Sun. In our day, we have lost sight of many of our traditions because it is economically expedient to have us just buy things without asking why. The fact that the veil between our world and the other is thinnest at this time makes no difference to the majority here in the U.S. but to ancient people it was a time of ancestor appreciation and recapitulation. Celebrations included the give away, revelry and the release of self in honor of greater forces that we wished to invite back into our lives and psyches.

We all know the power of costuming in creating characters. Who wouldn't want to be a superhero, princess, witch, or zombie? Heck, it seems that any and all manner of beings come to life on this night, many of which we fantasize about all year long. When I was a child, I was Captain Hook to my sister's Tinker Bell, The Tin Man to my sister's Dorothy. The heartless, or villainous characters are, for some, the most fun to try on because they are the most different from our normal selves. For many years now I have transformed myself into Jacob Marley's Ghost for Halloween. You may know him as the famous character from A Christmas Carol who says the immortal line, "I wear the chain I forged in life." For him, each link was a chance that he had to help someone else, that he passed up in his diligent quest for wealth. Each of us bears the burden of the opportunities overlooked, friends not made, promises not kept, and ignorance based in pursuit of money, so in this way I remind myself and hopefully others to make the best choices we can in our daily lives, being the best we can be day in and day out, in honor and respect of our fellow humans. Jacob Marley knew that we all deserve it, he just learned a little too late!

The repressed or neglected part of ourselves is free to take center stage on this holy day. Inexplicably, we are drawn to these dark recesses of self, looking for release from our ego-induced captivity. Who hasn't felt the release of putting on a mask, channeling if you will, the disembodied spirit of some one or some thing else? As you may have seen, this is the one night that folks can mix humor with seriousness, desire with abhorrence, and beauty with disgust. For many, this night of the living dead, or fright night is looked forward to much more than Christmas or for that matter, their Birthdays! Pagan rites serve deep human needs. That's why the conquerors used so many of our sacred sites, virtually all of our equipment, so many of our rites, and nearly all of our practices to dominate and subjugate us. Bell, Book and Candle to name just a few. The fact that Halloween may one day surpass Christmas as the biggest holiday makes some quiver with fear, while others quiver with expectation. I for one am of the latter camp.

It is a bit ironic that the number three holiday is Easter. For pagans, Oestara may be the rite most clearly stolen from us by the Christians. It is one of the only Christian holy days that is based on the moon cycle, and it is all about the fecundity of the earth being coaxed out of hibernation by the returning Sun. The fertility symbols associated with it are the egg and the rabbit, one, the essence of reproduction, the other one of the most prolific creatures known to humans. I'm sorry for lecturing, but the time has come for us to reestablish ties with our ancestors, to get in line with earth centered approaches to our lives and to begin again with a new perspective, recreating relationships with people, profits and our planet.

A wise friend told me once that the environmental crisis would be over when folks from Florida eat oranges and drink their juice rather than eating apples and drinking apple juice and folks from around here (the Western Great Lakes Region)enjoy the apple and drink it's juice rather than that of the orange. Appreciating what abounds where we are is the first step in bio-regionalism. Interestingly enough, most of the costumes that you see out on this night will be fashioned from whatever we have on hand. Why else would bobbing for apples, or oranges, be so popular? How else to explain the great traditions of the season? We use what we have in new ways and create something bigger and more profound than we ever though possible in our daily slumber.