When I was close to deadline last month I was saddened to hear that Stephen Jay Gould had died. He was a big hero of mine, a paleontologist who ranked with Carl Sagan as a humanistic defender of science in the fundamentalist-controlled debates of our time. Who are we going to get to ponder the great cosmic mysteries of the Universe now? Questions like why was Bill Maher's Politically Incorrect cancelled? Oops, I guess that's a comic mystery, not a cosmic mystery. No matter, the question needs to be answered.

What, you thought Politically Incorrect was a serious show? I'm sure Bill would agree that the show was mostly comedy. How does "politainment" sound? News gathering and discussion is an important public trust in a democracy, but at least Maher's aware of that and didn't try to fool you into thinking that six or seven minutes of provocative banter between commercials was real political debate. We don't have enough of that; now there's nothing that can even masquerade as a progressive talk show on network TV anymore. Thank you ABC/Disney. The "if it bleeds, it leads" mentality of the news-for-profit industry (let's include the ink boys here) cheapens or ignores all kinds of important issues that deserve attention.

A couple weeks ago I traded IM's about this with a friend who loves to listen to Rush Limbaugh. Yes, I agree it's good that His Dittoness is occasionally critical of Bush. Occasionally I even like some of the things he says. Make that rarely. However, unlike Maher, Limbaugh doesn't admit that he's politainment. He's never had anyone who disagrees with him on his show; it's hardly a balanced view of the facts. Halfway through our session I said that Rush doesn't matter like he used to, that his high water mark was around ten years ago. My friend was appalled. He hotly said that Limbaugh has millions of listeners and the politicians pay attention to all his opinions. I have to admit that he still carries a lot of weight; I'll even admit that he's no longer a "big fat idiot." He's a slimmed down idiot. And I'll admit there are still lots of dittoheads out there, but when was the last time Rush really went out on a Limbaugh on any issue? That he actually did something other than press his audience's hot buttons about things like Hollywood's loose morals and fem-nazis? My friend got more shrill in Rush's defense and went on to say that the "forces of the Left" were rampant everywhere.

Whoa, hold on there Sparky. There really is no "Left" left. Even Bill Maher was hardly Left, apart from his views on stopping the drug war. To paraphrase Jeff Foxworthy, if you think advocating hybrid electric cars makes you a wild-eyed environmentalist, you may be a dittohead. With Maher's departure from the air, the political talk shows are now a who's-who of right-wing pundits.

What, you think because I'm not a dittohead, I'm Left? Get real. There's a lot of Right, there's a huge Middle and very little Left in this country. The dittoheads think there's a Left only because they have to look left to see everyone else. I'm certainly not in favor of tearing down the capitalist system. Mostly I just rant against greed and superstition, I'm not very Left at all. What we do have in this country is lots of interest groups. They care enough to donate to charities fighting drunk driving, to save the whales or to end teenage pregnancy, but at the end of the day they still buy the same groceries from the same supermarkets, drive on the same highways, and go home to a mortgage and above average kids, the same as everyone on their street. Traditionally the Left is composed of anarchists and workers-control-of-factories communists; we simply don't have many people like that in the United States in the 21st Century. Even organized labor, a traditional bastion of populist fervor, is hardly heard from these days and when it is, it's usually only demanding incremental increases in what it won long ago. It can't even organize the poor schlep workers of Wal-Mart, let alone help abused sweatshop workers in third world countries.

We are this way because we are largely satisfied with the way things are currently working. That's right. In spite of the slow economy, we are still plenty fat in the good ole You-Es-Ay and we all love it that way. That's why we don't vote or get too bent out of shape by famine or atrocities in far-off places. The game's on the tube, the hot dogs are on the grill; life has no urgency past the next installment of Fear Factor. And we certainly don't want to change the system while there's still a chance of OUR winning big at the Wall Street Casino. Scandals involving Enron, Anderson, WorldCom and Martha Stewart have changed nothing; capitalists are still taking profit in any way they can. I'm actually in favor of how we're allowed to grow private capital by owning stock and build personal fortunes by entrepreneurship, but the system has been violated by the big players. Calling them capitalists glorifies them too much; they are klepto-capitalists. The economy needs limits, an authority who can step in the name of the public good, but try to find a pundit like Limbaugh who would admit that anymore. These criminal greedheads are ripping up every regulation they can in collusion with know-nothing elected officials. And then there's their craze for privatizing. Jim Hightower recently pointed out that in the name of efficiency greedheads have successfully talked many cities out of their municipal water systems, and too often the only "improvements" are leaky mains, undrinkable tap water and higher service rates. Some cities have since tried to win back their water, only to see the privateers use citizens' money, their own water fees, to bring lawyers into courts to thwart them.

And while all this is happening, what passes for political controversy in this country is a Federal court ruling that the phrase "under God" in the Pledge Of Allegiance is unconstitutional. Woof!

There's no cosmic mystery about where the original Pledge Of Allegiance came from--it was written in 1892 by Francis Bellamy. He was not authorized by the government to write it; he wrote it for a magazine thinking it'd be a good thing to inspire patriotism in young people. Moreover he was a Baptist preacher, who did not write the words "under God" after "one nation." Congress decided to add that phrase in 1954. You gotta laugh, the Pledge was written by a minister who didn't think to include "under God!" In fact Bellamy was asked to leave his church for delivering sermons with socialist leanings. Talk about your left-wing radicals!

But wait you say, surely our founders would've wanted "under God" in The Pledge! Not! Most of our Founding Fathers would have abhorred taking an oath of fealty to a piece of cloth in the first place. The right-wing pundits love to say the Founders were all God-fearing types who intended for the Church to have a hand in Government. They are flat wrong about that. The Founding Fathers were all different people with different ideas on religion and government; a unified bunch of devout fundamentalists they most definitely were not. Sure most of the founders went to church, but they certainly weren't all the same denomination and recognizing that, they made sure that different religions, even non-Christian ones, were allowed here. They also made sure that people without any religious affiliation were welcome too. One of them, Thomas Paine, wrote "The Age Of Reason" which was a frontal attack on religious superstition of all sorts. The man was a fire-breathing agnostic before the term was even invented.

All that being said, I think whoever brought that suit about the Pledge Of Allegiance is wasting everyone's time. Oh my goodness, his daughter heard the word "God" in the Pledge! Hell, I'm a card-carrying member of the ACLU and even I say, "BFD, get a life!" It wasn't like she was being forced into the back room with a pedophile priest or anything. Personally, I hate commercials for stupid action and horror movies, should I make a federal case of it? They intrude on my family's quiet TV-time serenity (you know, that prime time right after the kids play Smash Brothers on the Game Cube and just before we harangue them into brushing their teeth), but I'm not about to build a wall around myself or take the networks to court to keep these offences away from my kids. They will encounter a lot of distasteful things in life and they might as well develop a personal immune system rather than depending on someone else to enforce rigid standards.

Worse, a suit like this only nurtures the fundamentalists' persecution complex, giving them an excuse to claim that Christianity is under attack in this country. That's something they have backwards, it's Christianity that's attacking everything else. Forget about looking back in the rear-view mirror to godlier times, right now Christian belief is actually at an all-time high in America, but they want more.

Actually, the Christian pundits are right about the US being a Christian country, at least in the majority, but with so much superstition being sold in the name of Jesus, I don't think that's something to be very proud of. Recently Time magazine had a big write up on how millions of Americans think the Apocalypse is coming and featured a half dozen books that advance this load of Millennial Manure. As a nation we're obsessed. Actually I'm thankful this stuff is so pervasive these days. If it weren't for broadcast evangelists over-selling the Book of Revelation, I wouldn't have much to philosophize about in these columns. But for the record let's get another thing straight: Jesus did not write the Book Of Revelation; it was written a good sixty or seventy years after Jesus's crucifixion. In fact we don't have that much on who its author, "John," was or where his authority comes from, other than the fact that he claims Jesus appeared to him holding "seven stars" in his hands. Wow, stars! Jesus is really big now but boy he must've been really, Really, REALLY BIG back then! I mean astronomical units huge! Then John says Jesus further inspired him to write Revelation when "out of his mouth came a sharp two-edged sword."

That was from... Oh, sorry about that! You look kind of--quizzical. I'll wait a moment for your eyebrows to unknit.

That quote about the sword was from Revelation 1:16. So this verse can only mean that Jesus became a sword swallower in God's heavenly circus, right? Hey, don't go throwing stuff at me! This is what happens when you insist on reading this stuff LITERALLY! Seriously, why else would a sword come out of his mouth? What is any thinking person supposed to make of a line like that? At least I admit I have no idea what John was really talking about. Yeah verily, people have been trying to make sense of his apocalypse for 1900 years now, pasting his murky images onto their current events and of course finding perfect matches every time. Think about it. In the 14th and 15th centuries Europe lost about a third of its population to the Black Death. One out of every three people! I'm sure lots of people thought they heard the hoofbeats of John's Four Horsemen back then. In late 18th century Europe any preacher that wasn't French was probably calling Napoleon the Anti-Christ as he went conquering. They probably said 666 was Napoleon's height in centimeters, somehow fulfilling the prophecy in spite of the fact that it wasn't on his forehead. 20th Century readers of Revelation must have looked at Hitler, Stalin or Kaiser Wilhelm and in turn matched them to Revelation too. Isn't it amazing how they reached the same conclusion every time, that the end of the world is right around the corner? Frankly our current events - a terrorist bombing, the Pakistan-India conflict, even the Gulf War - fit Revelation far less well than events in decades like those.

Who needs the Four Horsemen anyway? You want a real end-of-the-world nightmare scenario? Think forward 80 years or so when there's twelve billion more people on the planet and we've run out of oil. Maybe we'll finally have a left wing made up anarchists and marching workers when they can't grow enough food any more.

That's a possibility, not a prophecy. If we're smart it doesn't have to be that way, but if old Global Warming Bush and his successors don't stop acting like dittoheads soon, we'll consume ourselves into a very bad corner that even John couldn't dream up.

Where's some reason and logic when you need it? That's why I mourn the loss of Stephen Jay Gould, who weighed the facts and presented elegant ideas for how the world has come to be as we know it, and yet was never too proud to reexamine his theories in light of new facts. Like Tom Paine, Gould was not impressed with circular arguments based on ancient authors and yet was still in awe of the majesty and beauty of our world. But no, his passing must be evidence of divine displeasure! Obviously Gould pulled away the curtains on the little man in the corner one too many times; the Big Guy in the sky had to cancel him, right? Yeah sure, we're all "under God." I expect lightning bolts to hit the judges of the 9th Circuit Court any second now.

At least the Big Mouse only cancelled Bill Maher's show and not Bill himself. I know we'll be hearing more from him. That gives me hope that we'll be able to rise above this and solve some of our other comic mysteries. Like why is Mary Worth still in the Sunday comics? Who reads it? I bet it's not really a comic at all and contains coded messages for some secret organization of old ladies.

I think I'm on to something here. I'm going back into the Closet right now to run some correlation matrixes between terrorist activities and the color of Mary's dresses for a start; I'll report back to you later. Meanwhile go see someone about those eyebrow cramps. Thanks for reading and remember, a two-edged sword literally cuts both ways. Until next month the Closet is closed.

(C) 2002 - Rusty Pipes

Official Disclaimer: The publisher and editors of Cosmik Debris Magazine direct you to pay no attention to the crazed philosopher and his silly rantings. Mary Worth is a fine comic. You like Mary Worth. You like Mary Worth. Remember enjoying Mary Worth. Remember the oddly soothing sensation associated with reading Mary Worth. Pay particular attention to the dialog involving the difficulties with the pancake recipe in the next installment and continue to IGNORE THE PHILOSOPHER. You like Mary Worth. It is a fine comic. That is all.