WHAT WOULD JC DO?

The one ritual I have my family perform when we sit down to a meal is saying what we are thankful for that day. This month of course is the big thankfulness ritual and looking back over a tough year I see many things to be thankful about.

On a personal level, I'm most thankful I finally found a good day job. Yes, I do something else outside of the Closet. What, you thought I made money as a writer? Hah! I looked at the hundreds of job listings for "Column Writer, Philosophy," and when I applied the answers were always things like: "Not socially conscious enough," "Not politically correct" or "Too conservative." Well, that's the last time I tell them why we should drill in Alaska! Curse the liberal media establishment barons, their left wing bias and all their smug philosophers in cozy offices with high speed internet, hot espresso and buxom secretaries!

Okay, okay, I'll take a deep breath and calm down.

Anyway, I spent ten months this year on unemployment and I'm actually very thankful we live in a country where I could be out of work for so long and yet my family never missed a meal. I got by on a lick and a promise. Literally. Licking stamps on unemployment claims and borrowing money, promising to return it with interest. In primitive times, the magic of future return for a few words of promise would never have worked; such magic works now and I was able to both keep us in our home and have food on the table. It's amazing, we live in such a sea of affluence here; most Americans have never known a day of forced hunger.

Unfortunately it also turns us into mush. Suburban kids are pampered and protected so much, they're practically incapable of anything like real work and care only for material things. Last Thursday was Halloween; I overheard a father talking about taking his kid to a "Trunk or Treat." Instead of going door-to-door the parents would take their kids to the church parking lot and the kids would go from car-to-car getting treats. Sounds like a very responsible, safe way to go about it, right? So what was the dangerous neighborhood that this was planned for? Not gun-totin' South Central, but white bread, suburban Simi Valley, one of the safest cities in America. Who knows, maybe that's why they're so safe, but I can only think that fear must run very deep there.

Let's digress a moment and talk about trick-or-treat paranoia. The local Eye-Witless News loves to tell you to watch out for doctored treats every year. They train everyone to avoid suspicious home-made treats like apples in favor of pre-packaged manufactured candy, but what's really going on here? Let's suppose for a minute that you were some terribly bent person who put something in an apple and a kid gets hurt by it. Don't you think even a rookie cop fresh out of Police Academy 6 could figure out where you live? The kids know where they went begging; how many minutes would it take before the police were knocking on your door? Tampering with apples or treats of any kind would almost be like hanging out a "Please Send Me To Jail" sign. Such stories are urban legends, I've never heard of a real incident in years and I'm wondering about the validity of the stories I did hear way back when. So who has something to gain by promoting such rumors? TV stations, trying to gain viewers through fear, and candy manufacturers, trying to increase sales by getting people to mistrust homemade treats.

I don't want to wish for strife but we almost need to have a new Depression, just to provide some surcease from all this luxury and make people appreciate how good things are running. We have our underclass to be sure, but most of us? We're living in unparalleled good times in spite of all the fear that the media tries to sell us. My travails weren't all that bad. Now I have to keep my promises to pay everyone back of course, but the new job actually is better than the one I left, so I'm optimistic I can do that.

Also this month, I'm thankful Resident Bush hasn't started his new war. At least not yet. Strangely, once he won his vote in Congress, nobody's been talking about attacking Iraq all that much. Maybe he's waiting to see if his real goal, regaining control of Congress in the mid-term election, has been achieved by all his saber-rattling. Or maybe he actually wants the UN to make weapons inspections in Iraq so we don't have to kill a lot of people in Iraq. Yeah, right!

I'm also happy in this month of Thanksgiving that Jimmy Carter recently won the Nobel Peace Prize, bravo! If there is anybody I respect as a true Christian, it's Jimmy. Ever since he's left office he's dedicated his life to helping people, solving tough problems and dispelling conflict. Unlike most "Christians" that are in power.

It's obvious to me that Carter's core values are not shared by most politicians who enjoy the support of the Christian Right. Why are people so blindly lined up after these guys? They are not Christian. How in a "Christian" nation can we be so insulated from the needs of others? How can we be so bloodthirsty? Whatever happened to that hardest of all actions, turning the other cheek? I know it's an ideal but we seem to put these things on a shelf whenever it's expedient. We are so focused on preserving the good life that we lie, cheat and kill.

Perversely, some of their minions still find a way to gripe about Carter. In a recent Newsweek piece, George F. Will (a marvelous writer and shriveled husk of a human being) actually took Carter to task for going to North Korea trying to head off their nuke program eight years ago during the Clinton administration. What exactly would he have had Carter do?

And while we're on the subject of nukes in North Korea, have you heard the deafening silence from the current administration on the subject? Why aren't Dubya and Cheney fulminating and threatening invasion like they are for Iraq? Maybe they don't fear North Korea for some reason. Could it be because the Bushies see them as just Communist and not MUSLIM? Sure, maybe the Koreans did renege on their promise to Carter and build a nuclear program. After all, Kim Il Sung died soon after Carter's visit, but George Will makes it sound like Jimmy was personally charged with being the watchdog over them and was now undeserving of the Peace Prize. Hey George, he's only one guy! He was there to open doors; the nuclear football was dropped by others. Maybe if Bill hadn't chased so many skirts, we wouldn't have nukes there! You know, I bet a lot of people would buy that one, George, why don't you try writing it up? And how about I write one up describing how months of impeachment proceedings allowed North Korea to start a nuclear program? Makes about as much sense.

Gee, maybe I was applying for the wrong position when I got laid off last year. I should have been looking for Armchair Pundit jobs like George Will's! It sure is easy to complain about public figures from the sidelines; guess I should have tried for a cushy job like that.

Carter's probably the last guy who'd waste time complaining about others' shortcomings. He was the first Born Again President but he also proved that the Presidency is no place for a true nice-guy Christian. All the ones since have claimed to be born-again church-going believers, but I can't really believe them. Especially in the case of George Bush Senior, a former CIA Director who supervised God-only-knows how many black operations. As Vice President under Reagan he winked at Ollie North and his buddies as the Contras killed 60,000 or so in Nicaragua. Actually I think he did a whole lot more than wink but Fawn Hall was far too efficient at shredding to prove anything. As President his lack of concern about collateral damage was a little more obvious when he killed 2000 or so innocent Panamanians to get Manuel Noriega. Then, to beat back Saddam Hussein he bombed targets full of civilians all over Iraq, killing hundreds, probably thousands in addition to maybe 200,000 Iraqi soldiers. Yep, right Christian of you, George.

And now there's Dubya in the White House, a "compassionate conservative" who started out by executing record numbers of prisoners in Texas, and is currently working to equal his dad's record for inadvertent death in military operations. So far he's racked up at least a couple thousand innocents in Afghanistan, but who's counting? Not the media certainly. Just saying you are a compassionate conservative doesn't make you compassionate, Dubya. Your actions speak volumes.

I'm sure Dubya's a nice enough guy when it comes to his own family, but for the good of everyone we need a much wider and much longer term view of things. Who does our Resident really make all his decisions for anyway? Is it all humanity or just Americans? Maybe it's just Republicans, or the Born Again, or perhaps it's his rich friends. It certainly doesn't seem to be the coming generations that are going to have to clean up after us.

Who do we see as one of us? Who are we loyal to? Who is other? Is it even possible for humans to identify with such a large group as humanity in general when we are all blessed (or cursed) with individual intelligence? It's strange, we praise our individuality in unjust situations where the righteous man bucks the current and takes matters into his own hands, and yet we also long for a unified mentality were everyone works perfectly with one another, where society functions as smoothly and unquestioningly as a colony of ants.

Orson Scott Card often writes about the societal interactions that divide us, especially in the engrossing series of books he started with Ender's Game. He not only delved deeply into human interaction but invented other races that are organized quite differently, especially the Buggers who have no individual identity because their race's intelligence is centralized. In Card's books the Hive is at first malevolent and we are at war, but eventually we come to an understanding with it. Likewise I think we can eventually come to an understanding with the Muslim world. After all, for forty years of the Cold War it seemed like we were going to be perpetual antagonists with the USSR, and then one day we all decided to stop playing that game.

What would JC do to stop our current games? I'm sure he doesn't have all the answers but at least charity and non-violence are Christian ideals Jimmy Carter seems to try to live by.

If only we could function like the flocks of birds who have no leader but wheel and rotate together like a single unit. And of course they show thankfulness in all their songs. Maybe that would be better than a steady diet of hymns and dogma.

You know, much as I am thankful to be working again, I think I got the wrong job. It's obvious I should be writing an ornithology column. I'll start looking for something like that first thing tomorrow, because right now I have to go back into the closet and get ready to go out and see a movie. I think it's supposed to be a sequel to Barbershop, but it must be in a beauty shop this time because it's something called Dye Another Day. I wonder if it will be anything like Hairspray?

Anyway, thanks for reading and until next month the Closet is closed.

(C) 2002 - Rusty Pipes

Official Disclaimer: The editors of Cosmik Debris magazine would like to say that as bastions of the liberal media we would like our buxom secretaries now, please, and we promise to be thankful for them... Oh, and of course Rusty's opinions are his own, even though we agree with him.