Our friend Kerry has contempt for Tim Robbins, because Tim Robbins speaks eloquently regarding freedom of expression, and then threatens a reporter for writing about his family. Then our friend Kerry indicates her approval of the American public threatening the French people with a boycott, because the French government said something Kerry and his buddies don't like.

I'm getting the impression that Kerry isn't a big supporter of freedom of speech. I mean, she doesn't seem to really mind Robbins threatening a journalist for writing something Robbins doesn't like... and she shouldn't, since she supports threatening the French for saying things she doesn't like.

But she's entirely correct when she says 'that's not the way things work over here'. The way things work over here is, we absolutely believe in freedom of speech (and various other civil rights) until you piss us off. Then we act like a bunch of whiney four year olds, do our best to delete the term ‘French’ from our lexicon of casual, everyday language and cultural references, and exert economic pressure on you to make sure you get the message: your freedom of speech ends where our affronted, mindless, rabid, right-wing uber-patriotism begins. You will either give America your full throated support, regardless of what you really think of our currently insane, illegal, immoral, and unethical invasion of a sovereign nation, or there will damned well be reprisals.

Oh, but wait. John Ashcroft has said that it’s okay to deny basic civil liberties to non-Americans. So fuck it. The French don’t have freedom of speech. Next time they say something bad about America, let’s bomb the hell out of them.

Abandoning angry rhetoric for the moment (although it feels so good): the way it’s supposed to work over here is that people get to speak out, to voice their opinions, on any subject they want, as long as it doesn’t cause anyone else any overt or imminent harm. Without governmental interference. Without economic reprisals. Without violent response or angry, vicious epithets. (Kerry, I should note, is a very civil blogger, and I haven't seen any angry epithets on her blog. But when you boycott someone's business because they said something that displeases you, you are acting to stifle free expression. And when you boycott the business of people who happen to be living in a country where their leader said something that displeases you, you are not only acting to stifle free expression, you are doing so in a really stupid and rather cruel manner. French wine exporters, and everyone else who works in that industry, did not say the United States should not invade a sovereign nation... and even if they did, so what? We're Americans. We're supposed to tolerate people saying stuff we don't like. That's the reason we're allowed to feel so goddam superior all the time.)

Is the US public obligated to value someone else’s freedom of expression over their own deeply treasured and long held personal values and beliefs? Are we obligated to continue to do business with people whose elected President has said things we find deeply offensive? Are we obligated to tolerate printed and spoken views that we ourselves deeply, deeply disagree with, and think are just plain goddam wrong, without making our deep objections known in the most vehement of possible ways, especially ways that transcend actual spoken response and become, effectively, economic reprisals with real consequences to the French working people?

Uh… duh… home of the brave, land of the free here… we hold these truths to be self evident, that all men were created equal, and endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights, among them being, Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness… I may not agree with what you say, but I will fight to the death for your right to say it…

I guess a buncha French guys must have said all that. The ‘God Bless America’ crowd certainly doesn’t seem to want to live by it, or even remember it.

This, by the way, isn’t particularly funny. Or trivial. The latest right wing toxicity regarding France, circulating on the Internet, is a big photograph of the Paris cityscape, with bomb explosions morphed onto the buildings. The caption is something like ‘BAGHDAD DOWN… NEXT WE LIBERATE PARIS’. (I get these things from the conservative fringe in my own family and among my family’s friends.) If I’d remembered I had a blog and should be reproducing really insane stuff like that here, I’d have saved it, but as it was, I deleted it.

But this isn’t funny. We’ve gone from ‘let’s give back the Statue of Liberty’ (appropriate, since we apparently no longer believe in liberty for the French, until they begin slavishly agreeing with us like good cheese eating surrender monkeys should) to images of a jetliner crashing into the Eiffel tower superimposed over Chirac calling Bush for help on the phone and Bush cursing him out and hanging up on him… to images of American planes bombing Paris.

American planes bombing Paris. For no reason. Except the French President said some stuff that really pisses us off…

Oh, wait. I forgot. We bomb the shit out of countries now when their Presidents say stuff that pisses us off. That’s, like, our foreign policy.

Okay, then.

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BUT MAYBE THE RAIN IS REALLY TO BLAME

NOTE: In the following entry, I will be discussing, in my generally ignorant, hopefully compassionate, probably soft headed New Age and liberal way, the issue of transsexuality. When I have to refer to transsexual individuals, I will generally do so through the use of the pronouns 'his/her' or 'he/she', or similar coinages. I don't do that to be cruel or insulting, and I wish there was a way to avoid the use of the phrase 'he/she', which has become a common abusive epithet aimed at transsexuals and transvestites. The reason I use these phrases is because I myself am uncertain how to define the sexuality of a person who is biologically of one gender, but psychologically of the other. It seems inappropriate of me to define sexuality entirely by physicality, or entirely by non-physicality. I can only say I am troubled on the behalf of, and deeply sympathetic to, those whose bodies and souls are divided on this essential matter, and am deeply grateful that my own gender identity is not dichotomous. I mean no offense and regret any that may be taken.

Last night's LAW & ORDER: SPECIAL VICTIMS UNIT was troubling... for a lot of reasons.

First, L&O:SVU, like most legal and cop shows, puts social issues on display distorted out of most resemblance to actual reality. In order to provide compelling melodrama, shows like this one, and NYPD Blue, and The Practice tend to seek out emotionally disturbing subject matter and then contrive some extreme contortion of the criminal justice system in order to wring the already explosive situation of every last drop of titillation and overwrought emotion possible.

Last night's episode, right out of the blocks, was utterly deceptive... it dealt with a transsexual who had been successfully passing as a woman, fooling his/her boyfriend and his family and friends completely, all the time hoping that pretty soon, he/she would be able to get 'the operation' and not have to ever tell anyone that 'she' had been unfortunate enough to be born into a male body.

The situation was, as they always are, horribly contrived and absurd, and it just got worse as the episode ran on. Legal screw up followed legal screw up, with a non-comedy of various errors and mishaps eventually leading to the emotionally wringing resolution... the transsexual, who was, to all appearances, a quite attractive woman, wound up being locked up Riker's Island Prison, and violently gang raped on his/her first day there.

I could go into a litany of the various wildly unlikely absurdities that led to our heart rending conclusion... the prosecutor who, although sympathetic, couldn't cut any sort of deal for a first offender who, it could credibly be argued, had acted in self defense and without murderous intent. The defense attorney who chose to turn his transssexual client into a martyr on trial rather than bargain credibly on his/her behalf to keep her out of a male maximum security prison. And the idiotic portrayal of the transsexual him/herself, who when offered the opportunity to go into protective custody for the course of his/her sentence, refused, when any sane person in his/her situation would simply have jumped at it (and any sane judge would have ordered it).

But all that pales before the essential duplicity at the very foundation of the episode: the transsexual character was portrayed by an attractive actress named Katherine Moennig, rather than, you know, an actual male attempting to pass as a woman.

It was, the writers and producers would argue, a necessary casting decision; the story hinged on the idea of a biological male who could persuasively pass as a woman to the point where he/she could deceive a boyfriend and his friends and family for months. I'd argue that finding an excessively good looking and petite male actor who could effectively cross dress (especially with the help of a skilled Hollywood make up department) should have been relatively easy, and would have been much more truthful... but that argument really doesn't matter. Anyone who expects 'truth' from a melodramatic TV show... whatever truth is... or even, for that matter, from so called 'reality TV'... is badly in need of a wisdom donation. And that's not my point here, either... although millions of people watching television and confusing the things they see there with some semblance of reality is a troubling issue, in and of itself.

If the episode had a point... and shows like this often don't... it was probably simply to show transsexuals in a sympathetic light, to dispel some common misassumptions about what a transsexual is (as distinct from a transvestite, who is someone who dresses in the clothing identified with the gender opposite their biology for purposes of sexual arousal), and the violent, insensate hatred that greets the true transsexual when they are revealed for what they are... as well as, of course, how pointless and stupid that violent hatred is, since the transsexual has no choice about what they are, and is already suffering profoundly simply through the egregious celestial mishap of being born into a body of the opposite gender from that they psychologically identify with.

Of course, that's all smoke; the real point of this episode is the same point as every episode of this show, and many others: to get ratings by presenting emotionally provocative and controversial issues in as titillating a manner as possible.

The show was right about one thing: people hate transsexuals. It made me think of a time a few years ago, when I was on the bus coming back from downtown. There was a transsexual sitting on the bus, in the front seat. It took me a minute to realize it, but then it became pretty obvious... like most real world transsexuals, this particular person wasn't lucky enough to be able to really persuasively pass as a woman. He/she looked, in fact, like a fairly unattractive male, in make up and woman's clothing. He sat there, not making eye contact, obviously terrified... and I had to admire his/her obvious courage. Assuming I was looking at someone who was dressed the way they felt they really should be dressed, and not someone who was simply paying off a bet or something (I really don't know), the act of taking that public bus ride embodied a level of physical and moral bravery I simply don't have. I'll wear my Captain America sweatshirt to a peace march, just to see my fellow lefties stare at me in horror, sure. But that's about as brave as I get.

I tried to catch his/her eye and smile reassuringly at him/her (I was sitting on the parallel bench across the bus from this person). I don't know if he/she saw me. He/she sat quietly for several blocks, head down, obviously ready to flinch if necessary... and then, got up and got off.

Immediately the laughter and verbal abuse started flying around. One particular no-neck sitting two seats back from me smacked his lips and said "Boy oh boy I was doin' all I could not to get up and ask that bee YOO ti full woman for a date". This sally was met with raucous laughter by most of the other passengers on the bus. Then a woman rather shrilly said "It's disgusting. What if my kids were on the bus? They shouldn't be allowed." My immediate thought was 'no, lady, your kids probably shouldn't be allowed on the bus, if they're as brainless and intolerant as you are'... but, you know, I didn't say that. I know a lynch mob atmosphere when I smell one. You don't spit on the guy with the shotgun and the rope when he's making fun of the nigra/kike/spic/commie/faggot/girlie-boy that just left the room... not unless you want to get strung up with 'liberal egghead faglover' around your neck, anyway.

Another guy sitting across from me was braver than I was, though. Quietly, but in a voice that carried, he said "That individual paid their fare like the rest of us. As I recall..." He paused there, as if unsure what gender pronoun to use, and then, even more bravely, went on, "she did not insult or abuse anyone on the bus, or behave in any objectionable manner at all. I don't think it's necessary to ridicule someone simply for being different."

My stop was coming up, and encouraged by that, as I stood up, I looked at the only other sane person on the bus, and raised my voice to make sure the comment carried, and said, "Don't bother. Freedom of speech is wasted on idiots like them."

And then I got off, before, you know, they could get out the pitchforks and torches. I am, honestly, not very brave.

I remember another time. I was briefly dating a girl named Rebecca, who was much too young for me, and who had been part of the extreme sexual lifestyles scene for... well, for a lot longer than she had been of legal age, let's just put it that way. Rebecca was an interesting woman to date; she liked a lot of unusual things and knew a lot of really extraordinary people and she broadened my horizons quite a lot, even at the age of 39. (Mind you, after the time she took me along to buy pot with her because her source was a former lover... she seemed to have hundreds... and she wanted her current boyfriend in the room to inhibit him from getting affectionate, I decided I didn't need quite that much drama in my life. I mean, intellectually, I realized that Sipowicz and Simone weren't likely to come through the bedroom door and slap the handcuffs on me for facilitating a narcotics transaction, but, well... not physically brave. Just the idea that the cops might be lurking around, or even keeping this idiot under observation and noting down the license plate numbers and general descriptions of everyone who went in and out of his apartment, nearly had me pissing my pants.)

Anyway, Rebecca wanted me to meet a friend of hers who, like me, was into science fiction and fantasy and movies. I thought, what the hell, and I went to meet them. I forget this person's name, but it wasn't until I got there that Rebecca let me know that we were going to visit a transsexual who was deep into hormone therapy.

Charlotte... as I say, I can't remember his/her name, so that's what I'll call him/her... was a more typically unfortunate example of a gender dichotomous person... like the bus riding TS I'd seen, Charlotte was never going to make a particularly attractive woman, or even be physically persuasive as a woman. Charlotte was short and very overweight, with huge breasts, and unfortunately a very very male face that was never going to look particularly female. He/she seemed like a very nice person, although obviously (like most transsexuals) he/she had taken so much toxic shit off people all his/her life that they had become extremely shy and defensive because of it.

Rebecca later told me that Charlotte had had a wife, and kids, and none of them would talk to him/her any more; they simply couldn't handle the fact that their husband and father felt, deeply, that he/she was actually a woman, and had decided to finally stop fighting those feelings and overwhelming impulses and live a life more reflective of what he/she deeply felt was his/her true nature.

I admit, I was kind of repulsed by Charlotte. I was kind of repulsed by that nameless, incredibly brave TS on the bus. They seemed to me to be physically unattractive, spiritually wounded people... freakish and bizarre, and, I suppose, somehow threatening to how I wanted to believe the world was. Not anyone I'd want to hang out with, play RPGs with, discuss Heinlein with, or watch a Bux game with.

I didn't hate them or want to do them violence, however. I am not, essentially, a violent person, although I have as many violent power fantasies as any other SF/comic book geek who has been an SF/comic book geek since early childhood.

I feel deeply, deeply sympathetic to these people. To feel, somewhere deep inside you, that you are the victim of some colossal cosmic mistake, or worse, practical joke... that your essential identity is completely different from the identity forced upon you by your biology, and by the rigid and unthinking cultural biases of everyone around you... that's gotta suck.

Again, I intend no offense with any of these probably pointless observations, and if you take any, I regret it.

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WHAT YOU THINK YOU KNOW THAT ISN'T SO

I'm an agnostic. Maybe I should have front loaded with that yesterday. I should definitely bring it up today, since the delightful, but regrettably right leaning, Emily Jones has very kindly posted a link to my blog on her own deservedly popular blog. Ever since then, I've had a lot of traffic here, and I suspect it's mostly from the conservative side of the blogosphere... and I can't imagine those folks are enjoying what they're reading.

Maybe it's a good thing my chat threads haven't been working all weekend. ::grin::

Anyway. If a lot of conservative footprints are tracking across my blog these days, I should definitely get up front on the agnosticism thing. Most conservatives I know are at least somewhat religious. In the basic dichotomy as to moral and ethical social theories, there are two fundamental bases for all morality. One is 'it's wrong if it hurts someone else unnecessarily'. The other is 'it's wrong if it offends God'. The first is the basis of secular humanism, a moral structure that does not require divine authority to define write and wrong, but that simply assumes that all human beings should be accorded certain amounts of dignity and respect as a fundamental moral and social principle. The other... the 'don't offend God' model... is a much older one, and is based in the concept that humans are unfit to create their own moral codes, or really judge each other, and we require God's guidance to do so at all appropriately.

I'm a liberal, a secular humanist, and, as noted, an agnostic. Just so we're all clear on that.

Now, a lot of people confuse agnosticism with atheism. I just recently had a woman respond to my personal ad by telling me that I clearly wasn't right for her, because, while she wasn't a Christian, she had deep spiritual beliefs, and I was an agnostic. I strongly suspect she mistakenly believed that meant I was an atheist... someone who firmly believes there is no higher power in the universe. And I'm not an atheist, atheists have an amount of faith in their basic religious tenet -- God does not exist -- that I personally am uncomfortable with.

Being an agnostic means I basically admit, I don't know. I don't know if there is a higher power. Or if there is, what shape it takes. Or what it wants me to do, or if it wants me to do anything. I don't rule out the hypothesis that there may be a God... without convincing evidence, I won't rule out any hypothesis. I try to keep my mind open. As James T. Kirk once said, "I like to think that there are always... possibilities."

Oh, yeah, I'm a geek, too. Get used to the pop culture SF & fantasy references. We do that a lot around here. :-)

The phrase 'agnostic' comes from the Greek root word agnostos, which translates as, unknown, or unknowable. And that's what I pretty much said before: I don't know. And I absolutely admit that I don't know, and I try to keep my mind open.

I don't know that God created the heavens and the earth and all things within and upon them in six days. On the other hand, I don't know He or She or It didn't.

I don't know if the Earth is a crumb of dirt on the back of a giant turtle, which is on the back of a larger turtle, which is on the back of an even larger turtle, going down to infinity. I will note, as my extremely liberal mother once noted to me when I was in sixth grade and studying Iroquois mythology and making fun of it, that the Iroquois creation mythology is no more ridiculous, when looked at dispassionately, than the creation myth of any religion, including Christianity. If all of humanity came from one breeding pair, Adam and Eve must have had one helluva lot of genetic diversity in their DNA. And let's not get into talking snakes.

I don't know if reincarnation actually happens or not. I will note that the other half of the planet... the one we don't live in... takes reincarnation for granted, but, hey, they could be wrong, too. I've read some interesting material that seems to indicate there is some evidence for reincarnation, but hey, what I read could be wrong or deliberately deceptive. I don't know.

I don't know if the dinosaurs ever walked the Earth. Maybe Satan/Ahriman/Pluto/Astarte/Loki created all those fossilized remains and buried them in various strata of the Earth a thousand years ago, to confuse me. I don't know.

Steve Gerber once mentioned a belief a few people used to claim to adhere to, that a cosmic entity named Fred had created the entire Earth, and everyone and everything in and on it, in the early 1920s. All evidence of any existence previous to that has been manufactured by Fred to hide the truth. I don't know that that's true. I doubt it a whole helluva lot... but it's the kind of thesis that, by its very nature, you cannot disprove. To state flatly that a Freddite is absolutely wrong requires a leap of faith, a jump into irrational insistence that you simply know how reality works to the extent that you know the Earth actually existed in 1919. Me, I was born in 1961, so I can't know that. And memory is highly subjective.

Being an agnostic is about admitting that you don't know. Personally, I think there is very little we can actually know about the world/reality we live in, and most of what we can know is very subjective. I know I love certain people, but that's a subjective feeling, so I feel safe in stating, with certainty, that I know I feel that way.

However, I do not know that, if I hold a hammer in my hand, extend my arm, and open my fingers, the hammer will fall to the floor. Now, I'd bet on it, pretty much any amount of money... it's always happened when I've done something similar before, and I see no reason it shouldn't happen again. Gravity seems to be a constant... but I don't know how gravity works. And I'm willing to accept that, since I don't know how gravity works (and as far as I know, no one else really does, either), it's possible it might stop working at some point, unpredictably. Or start working in a somewhat different way. I simply don't know. As I said, I'd bet on it... statistics are always impressive... but they teach us that the most wildly unlikely things do, inevitably, occur, if you wait long enough. If the hammer has been hitting the ground when people let go of it for a few thousand years now, we're due for an anomoly. Maybe it will just hang there in the air next time. I don't know. Religion isn't all about God. Religion is about that leap of faith... the willingness to jump beyond 'I don't know' to 'I do know, absolutely, certain basic truths, and I don't have to prove these basic truths because I know that they are true and I know it with such certainty that if you wanted to dissuade me, you would have to disprove them to me'.

Atheists are like this. If you wanted to prove to them God existed, you'd have one helluva row to hoe. In fact, I don't think it's possible. Atheists and agnostics alike enjoy talking about the 'invincible ignorance' of the fundamentally religious... how you can't shake a really devout religious person, because they can always answer "God did it" or "God wants it that way" or "God works in mysterious ways". But atheists have their own invincible ignorance. If God himself appeared in front of a really devout atheist, She or He or It could work all the miracles that She or He or It felt like, and SHeIt could not convince the atheist of anything except that SHeIt seemed to be some sort of entity who, apparently, had powers beyond the normally accepted human range. An atheist knows God doesn't exist. Therefore, that weird glowing being in front of them raising the dead and walking on water and turning water into wine cannot be God. It's irrefutable. Because they know God doesn't exist. That may be a clever hoaxster. Or they may have been hypnotized or drugged. Or SHeIt may be an advanced alien from another galaxy with an interesting sense of humor. But it isn't God, because the atheist knows that God doesn't exist, so it can't be.

As a side note, if I were confronted by a weird entity... or just, you know, George Burns... claiming to be God, I wouldn't take the 'show me a miracle' approach. That's how an engineer might think. I'm a scholar (well, I'm a geek, but we're all scholars) and something of a philosopher. I'd ask SHeIt for specific answers to specific questions. Tell me about the creation of the universe, God. What were you thinking when you did it? What's its purpose? Tell me about the origin of mankind... did we evolve from lower, more apelike ancestors, or did you just whomp us up full blown? Did you really blow up Sodom and Gomorrah? If so, don't you think that was a little homophobic on your part? Do you still find alternative lifestyles threatening? Have you thought of getting therapy? And, lastly, I'd ask 'God' to explain to me, you sonofabitch, why people who you know damned well are going to rape and torture kids are allowed to have kids... or, you know, walk around on my planet at all. And I'd evaluate SHeIt's answers, and go from there.

Once again... I don't believe in much of anything, if I have to take it on faith. I like evidence. As with the fabled Man from Missouri, you gotta show me. I do have a few things I take on faith, but I don't discuss them in detail because... well, I really don't know any details about them. I believe in an afterlife, but I don't know what it's like. I believe the universe is a created artifact, although I don't know who or what created it, or why. I believe there is some greater purpose to self awareness, but I don't know what it is. I believe these things because I feel life would be grim and depressing if I didn't believe them. But I don't know that my beliefs are true.

And that, essentially, is what this particularly long and probably unbelievably boring blog entry is all about: the rational, social necessity, it seems to me, to be willing to admit that you don't know that what you believe is true, and it might not be.

In philosophical terms, we'd call this the subjective/objective dichotomy. Some people absolutely insist that there is no such thing... that their beliefs about reality (which are subjective) are, in fact, absolute truth (objective fact). The problem with this attitude is, those people all insist that any differing beliefs about reality are simply, flatly, false or wrong or non-factual.

This is, essentially, the basis of pretty much all human conflict... when one person or tribe's subjective view of reality is in some way threatened by a contrasting, incompatible subjective reality held by another person or tribe... and neither side of the conflict is willing to admit to the possibility that their particular view of reality might not be objective fact.

And now I have a few anecdotes to illustrate this, and then I'll post this, and get back to watching my NYPD Blue Season 1 DVD set. I used to know an astonishingly intelligent and widely read guy named Dick Pero. When I first met Dick, he was, in addition to being incredibly smart and learned on nearly every subject (which is to say, I never hit on a subject, or saw anyone else hit on a subject, that Dick could not converse on knowledgeably, eloquently, and at any length and in any detail his listener might desire) also very open minded. He used to regale me with various anecdotes about paranormal phenomenon and the occult and he had some really fascinating theories about what the nature of reality might be like and why certain odd things seem to happen and, well... he was a fun guy to hang around with.

Dick also was a near hypnotic storyteller. He had an excellent speaking voice, a great vocabulary, and the ability to explain very difficult abstract concepts so that nearly anyone could, at least briefly, comprehend them. I didn't run into him all that often, and later on, our chance meetings became fewer and fewer... but up until the last year or so I knew Dick, I always really enjoyed interacting with him.

However, at some point over the ten year span I lived in Syracuse and knew Dick, something changed for him. I don't know what it was. But as time went on, he became more and more intellectually inflexible. The guy who had once told me a seemingly endless series of personal anecdotes about strange things that had happened to him over his adulthood working in various scientific labs that seemed to indicate that what we generally thought of as 'physical laws' only worked, well, most of the time, and if you really measured a lot of things really carefully, you'd have to conclude that a lot of 'physical laws' didn't quite always work the same way all the time... had turned into someone else. Someone much less open minded. Someone who... well, let me tell you a couple of anecdotes:

This took place during one of the last times I ever showed up at a Syracuse University Cinemas movie presentation. I was a member of the Cinema Board from 1979 (when I first got to SU) until around... hmmm... probably 1987, or so (I'm guessing)... but once the people who had been members when I first joined all graduated and moved on, the group largely changed. The Board had been full of fairly wild, chaotic, deranged and, well, outright bizarre people when I first joined... Steve Puchalski, John McDaid, Dick himself, a couple of guys named Rich whose last names I can't remember (but one of them dated the same girl as I did for a little while, and he and I and Dick went to my very first SF con in Albany together, but I cannot remember his last name), Mike Schaeffer, and all the really crazy people from what would become my own subclique of close college friends... Scott MacLeod, Kurt Busiek, Jeff Webb, Ann Huntington, Janice Westlake, Brent Burford, Rob Morrison... utterly unique and demented individuals all, who were a joy to hang around with watching Prisoner all night festivals or just Midnight Madnesses of Doc Savage: Man of Bronze until 4 in the morning. But after a while, the vast bulk of those guys were gone, and the kids coming in were 80s kids. They looked a lot more like something stamped out of cookie cutters than the kids I'd gone to high school and college with prior to that. They didn't like weird movies. They seemed disturbingly well balanced and healthy. To be brutally honest, they bored the shit out of me.

But Dick, who wasn't a student, still showed up occasionally, and so did I, for a while. (The newer kids on the Board never had any vague clue how to deal with us, but both of us could point to past Cinema Board Movie Schedule Posters at reviews for movies that we had written, so they had to accept that yes, we were Board members, just, you know, old, really weird ones.) And at one of those movies, Dick and I had the following conversation out in the lobby, taking tickets:

"Darren," Dick said, kind of smugly, because I'd been going on and on and on about some strange thing I'd been reading about UFOs, or something else Dick, the latter day, much more inflexible Dick, simply knew was rubbish, "extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence."

I just gaped at him. "What the hell are you talking about?" I demanded. "Evidence is evidence." I was kinda naive back then.

"No," Dick explained, more or less patiently. "Look. If you come inside and say 'it's raining', and I look up and see your hair is wet, fine. That's an ordinary claim. I can take your wet hair as enough evidence that your statement is true. However, if you come in and say 'there's a unicorn in the garden..." He paused, and smiled his annoying, Fu Manchu smile. "Well, that's an extraordinary claim. It requires extraordinary evidence."

I thought about that for a second (I don't think fast, never have, apparently, never will). Then I said to him, very deliberately, "Dick... first. If you're any kind of scientist, and whether it's raining outside or not is of any importance to you, then you absolutely can't accept my hair being wet as any evidence it's raining. I might have stood under a sprinkler and then lied to you. You have to get up and look out the window." I paused, took a deep breath, and then plunged on: "However. If I come in and say 'there's a unicorn in the garden', you'll laugh at me. You won't even put down your book. You know unicorns don't exist, so you know I can't be right. If I show you a Polaroid, you'll sneer and say it's trick photography. If I bring in a witness, you'll claim we're playing a joke on you. If I bring in three more witnesses, you'll call it a conspiracy, and if we all pass polygraph tests, then it's a mass delusion. But what you won't do... what you will never do... is get up and look out the damned window."

And we changed the subject, because obviously, there was just no talking to me. On certain subjects, anyway. I think we talked about Watchmen after that.

Sometime later, I ran into Dick at University Square Mall, which is a much smaller, shabbier place than you'd think from that rather grandiloquent name. As always, I was delighted to see Dick (it never really sunk in to me, emotionally, that he was no longer the fascinating guy he'd once been and I was always initially happy to see him when I ran across him). We talked about this and that, and then, as I am wont to do when I run into Dick, I brought up something that once would have launched him into a wonderful and fascinating discourse, but that this time around... well, see for yourself:

I'd brought up an upcoming Psychic Fair, wondering aloud if any of the 'psychics' there would be, you know, actually gifted in some way, or if they'd all be charlatans. (I don't doubt that most 'psychics' are con men using sleight of hand and various tricks to simulate paranormal phenomena. I just don't necessarily believe that means all genuine psychic phenomena is impossible.)

Dick replied, shaking his head at my gullibility, "Darren, there has never been any credible, reliable evidence that any psychic phenomena has ever actually existed."

I was outraged at this, and sputtered something incoherent that probably had the words "Rhine" and "Duke University" and, I don't know, various other well cited sources from the paranormal literature in there somewhere.

Dick looked avuncular, and then he stated, quite sincerely, "Darren, any time anyone has done an experiment which resulted in data that seemed to indicate the presence of psychic phenomena... when they've studied those experiments later, they've learned that the controls weren't tight enough." (I don't know who he meant by 'they'... The Amazing Randi and Martin Gardner and those other fine religious zealots at CSICOP -- the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal, that is -- I guess.)

Dick paused, and then went on, with a gentle smile, "And any time the controls are tight enough... the data... disappears."

Once again, I stared at him incredulously. This time, I literally could not believe my ears... that my personal Old Guru Dude, my veritable Yoda in human, goateed, balding, leather jacketed form, was spewing such obvious and idiotic nonsense with such a fatuous expression on his face.

But as I said, I don't think quickly. And this was Dick speaking. So I thought things through very carefully for several seconds (a lengthy period, in synapse-firing time).

Then I said: "Dick, do you realize you've just defined a perfect tautology? If there's any evidence you don't like, the controls, by definition, weren't tight enough? And when the controls are tight enough, you can tell they're tight enough because there isn't any evidence you don't like?"

Dick actually looked annoyed with me for a second, after I said that. And then we went on our separate ways, and if we ever talked again after that, it wasn't about the paranormal, and I don't remember the occasion.

And the Late, Great Jeff Webb often used to say profoundly wise things, at the most wildly unpredictable moments. I've always remembered one thing he once said, when Scott MacLeod was going on and on about how he was absolutely convinced that if I started a particular project (inking some Xeroxes of a comic he and Kurt Busiek had done in high school), I would never, ever finish it.

Jeff responded to that, "Scott, just because you're convinced... doesn't mean you're right ."

Now, I'd like to point out here that I eventually finished inking every single Xeroxed page that Kurt and Scott gave me. And that's true. But it's only true because Kurt was swayed by Scott's impassioned arguments, and they didn't give me ant pages. And if they had, Scott would probably have been proved right. But still...