However, I also think that this is yet another reason we need an updated Constitution, because when our Founding Fathers said ‘you may not fuck with our guns AT ALL, bitch’, they weren’t talking about Glock-9s or AK-47s or Uzi 9 mm machine pistols. Gun ownership is a much more profoundly complex and fucked over thing these days. I’m not sure what the sane solution is (I don’t like the idea of government having all the damn guns, either) but letting everyone own any weapon they want is nuts here in the 21st Century. (On the other hand, taking away every weapon in the world, up to and including paring knives, as they have in Britain, is whacked out, too. Probably people should be allowed to own semi-automatic rifles, and even carry them, if they want to. You can’t conceal a semi-automatic rifle. And if you’re carrying one down the street, well, I suspect the local gendarmerie will commence intently surveilling your nutball ass PFQ.)

Anyway, I think our Constitution, en toto, sucks. It has some good ideas, mind you, but it’s a deeply flawed document and I could write a better one in an afternoon. And people should let me.

However, that’s not going to happen (and it’s just as well, because they’re not going to let ME write a new Constitution, and there are a lot of other whack jobs out there who want to write a new Constitution that would allow things like, I don’t know, every white male in the world to carry a grenade launcher, while requiring all non-whites to wear collars and work for sub-minimum wage as janitors or laundresses, and all white non-males to either be married or to have accepted legal concubine status by the age of 14).

So, since we’re still working with our current (deeply flawed) Constitution, let’s take a look at what it has to say about Church and State:

Which brings up my second point (secundus): Our courts have severely fucked over their interpretations of what the Constitution says. See above, where I talk about how badly the Constitutional prohibition against removing the individual’s right to bear arms has been snicker-snacked over the years. And now, well… I’ve heard all my life about the importance of the separation of Church and State (and I firmly believe it is important, even crucial, to sane government, that we keep as much religion out of it as possible). And when you hear about this, you always hear about the ‘Constitutional prohibition against government and religion’ or ‘the wall between State and Religion’.

Well, a few years ago, I finally got sick of hearing about the damned Constitution and I read the Constitution for myself (do you know, it’s kind of hard to find the text of the damned thing? I finally tracked it down online) and, well, the only thing it says about religion at all is the 16 frickin’ words I’ve quoted above.

That’s IT.

This huge enormous wall that liberal jurists have, over the years, insisted the Constitution requires being put up between State and Religion?

Nuh uh.

Not there.

Now, let me state this: as with the right to bear arms thing, which I believe the Constitution grants absolutely to all American citizens, I also think that in this particular area, where the Constitution tragically fails to provide, oh, several thousand or million words on exactly how much religion is not allowed to interfere with or influence civil government, it is horribly, horribly erroneous. Religion may have a purpose and a use (I personally don’t see one other than the care and feeding of shamans, and shamans should all go get jobs driving trucks or mowing lawns, as far as I’m concerned), but whatever purpose and use it has, they should be entirely separate from the purposes and uses and processes of modern civil governance. In fact, if I wrote a new Constitution, I wouldn’t need thousands or millions of words to outline the place of religion in government, I’d do it very simply, like ‘No legal governing structure under the authority of this Constitution may in any way acknowledge, indicate, demonstrate, or reflect any influence of any religion, religious belief, or other irrational or supernatural belief structure not scientifically demonstrable or verifiable, whatsoever’. I might need to fine tune that language a bit but it gets pretty much where I want to go; personally, I think if a political candidate even mentions his or her religion, or the religion of any of their opponents, they should be immediately disqualified (and probably flogged in public, too… can’t have enough public floggings for politicians and those who want to be politicians).

But we aren’t living on Utterly Sane Planet Darren, so we have to deal with the Constitution as it is, and the Constitution as it is doesn’t say a single goddam thing, no matter how I contort all logic, sense and proportion, about setting up religious plaques on publicly owned property.

Don’t get me wrong. I think it’s a bad idea. I think it SHOULD be against the law. I think it’s horribly offensive to those who subscribe to other religions, and far more importantly, it’s horribly offensive to ME, a practicing agnostic. Worse, it’s kind of terrifying, in that it fosters, upholds, validates, enables, and reinforces an atmosphere in which Christians are obviously favored by the local tax-collecting authority structure, while anyone else who might well sneer haughtily at the weird notion that some guy actually got these laws from A Great Big Invisible Policeman In The Sky, is considered to be pretty much trash, no’ count, and not much good.

Nonetheless, I cannot see anywhere in the Constitution where it says that judges, or mayors, or Senators, or Presidents, or whoever, can’t do that if they want to. “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof;”. Sorry. Ain’t nothin’ in there about putting up plaques of the Ten Commandments in a court house or a public park. In fact, it would seem to me that if Congress passed a law prohibiting putting up such a plaque, you’d have to find that law unConstitutional, on the face of the text.

But, as I say, I have a solution to all this, and it has nothing to do with the ACLU, or the Constitution, or suing anyone, or any of that happy horseshit.

Here’s what those of us who don’t want to see religious articles enshrined on public land with our tax dollars should do:

Take up a collection coast to coast. Put out little collection jars in all the gas stations and convenience stores currently being run by Muslims, you’ll raise a few million bucks in a week or so. What are we going to spend the money on?

Granite plaques. The exact size and shape of the Ten Commandments plaques. One for each existing Ten Commandments plaque, in fact.

With various Islamic holy laws straight from the Koran inscribed on them.

In English and Arabic.

Surrounded by Islamic holy symbols.

When we have the plaques, well, we don’t need to ask anyone’s permission. Clearly, it is not against the law to put such items up on public property. We can just borrow someone’s truck, run out to the courthouse or park, and set these things up right next to the pertinent Ten Commandmants plaque in question.

Yes.

Oh MY yes.

I know. It’s just… astonishing… to even TRY to imagine the nationwide fits, seizures, aneurysms, colonic spasms, shrieks of outrage, and general gibbering hysterics that will ensue and erupt coast to coast shortly after the Islamic Holy Law Koran plaques appear, in every public place wherein a Ten Commandments plaque has already been erected and is being prominently displayed.

I mean, holy FUCK. Conservatives, patriots, right wing rednecks and John Birchers will shit themselves, and THEN go blind, and THEN roll around on the ground screeching like dry gulched prairie dogs, and THEN simply fucking EXPLODE, as they try to formulate something… ANYthing… any coherent, lucid, vaguely logical and even remotely consistent argument AT ALL… for exactly WHY you HAVE TO TAKE THAT OFFENSIVE INDECENT BLASPHEMOUS RAGHEAD HORSESHIT DOWN RIGHT NOW!!!!…

…that doesn’t apply just as much to those Ten Commandment plaques.

Eventually… probably quite quickly, in fact… some conservative mouth piece would propose, you know, a compromise… they’ll take down the Christian plaque, if the godless pagan towelhead idolator fuck-os… er… that is… the fine, esteemed, and respected members of the Muslim community… will take down that horrible goddam blasphemous… uh… that other piece of sculpture, as well.

That’s, honestly, all this controversy needs to settle it.

And, you know, it would be fun, too.

TOP TEN

While I’m on the subject, let me note that there are actually a great many more than ten commandments. And while I’m noting THAT, let me also note that even among the Big Ten, there is definitely evidence of some weird lizards living in God’s head.

For example, what is this deal with coveting? Everybody covets, dude. You want to forbid me from stealing my neighbor’s ass or fucking my neighbor’s wife, well… hmmm… come to think of it, you already covered that with ‘thou shalt not steal’ and ‘thou shalt not commit adultery’. God as Thought Policeman, or, worse, Moses and his self appointed deputies as Thought Policemen… no thank you. You stay outta my head, I’ll stay out of yours.

And, similarly, what’s up with honoring thy father and thy mother? I mean, what does that mean, exactly? Being nice to them? Not telling your friends about how your mom picks her nose and wipes it under the chair, and your dad really likes fart jokes? What?

Weirdest among the Big 10, though, has to be this whole ‘thou shalt have no other gods before me’ deal. First, God comes right out with it there… ‘for I am a jealous god’. Well, dude, we got that… you’re also homicidal, genocidal, rather a tight ass, and deeply homophobic (we picked up on those vibes after Sodom and Gomorrah, thank you VERY much)… and all of this adds up, to me, at least, to ‘and WHY should we worship you again, you crazy cracked up motherfucker? WHY shouldn’t we all just, you know, make a big Exodus to the British Isles and worship, like, trees, and big stone pointy pillars, and stuff like that there?’

But, leaving aside all that, what I find weirdest about this is that modern day Christians do not seem to understand that this is, quite literally and unmistakably, a divine endorsement of polytheism by the Big Guy Himself. Oh, yes… Jahweh does not say ‘there are no other gods’ or ‘worship other gods and I’ll kick your scrofulous ass, Moses’… no, Adonei simply says ‘don’t make them more important than ME, or you’re bummin, dude’. And even four thousand years later, after a lot of different translations, this seems pretty clear… God says it his damn self, ‘for I am a jealous God’. Not ‘I am the only God, and, by the way, I’m kinda pissy about it, too’, but, ‘I am a jealous god’… indicating that he’s just one of many gods (and pretty strongly implying that there are other gods out there who aren’t anywhere near as big a baby as he is about exactly where they sit on the ol’ god bus, either).

See, in the church I was sentenced to attend for much of my adolescence (Mom turned into a hallelujah girl – Uncle Bob’s brilliant phrase -- for most of my teens, it’s embarrassing, we don’t talk about it much), it was believed that every single word of the Bible was the literal truth. This is a fairly common thing among fundamentalist Protestant sects like your hardcore Baptists and such. There is no interpretation of Scripture allowed, none of that wishy washy shit, no softening, no spin… if the Bible says God created the heavens and the Earth in six fricking days, then it was six fricking DAYS… regular days, 24 hours, 60 minutes per hour, none of this Inherit The Wind bullshit, no sir, it was six days and that’s IT.

If the Bible says there was a damn big boat with two of every creature on it, male and female, and it rained for 40 days and 40 nights, well, fuck it, there was a damned big boat and all the rest. (Anyone out there know anything about pre-Babylonian engineering, especially as it applies to deep water, long range vessels? No? How about animal husbandry? Want to even start doing the math on how big that boat would have to be to fit not only all the damn animals, but all the damn FOOD for the animals, for, a bare minimum, say, FIFTY days and nights, assuming the flood waters receded awful darned quick? What the HELL did Noah BUILD it out of? I don’t think we have an alloy or plastic or ceramic TODAY we could build a ship that big out of and have it actually float when fully loaded. Now want to sit down and think about FEEDING all those animals, and, well, cleaning up all those animals’ SHIT for, say, a year? No? Well, never mind then.)

But it doesn’t matter. The non-denominational Fundamentalist Bible Believing Church I did my time in every Sunday for pretty much my entire adolescence believed, absolutely and without exception or condition, if it said it in the Bible, then IT WAS TRUE. IT REALLY HAPPENED. NO IFS, ANDS, OR BUTS.

But, you know… this thing where God says ‘thou shalt have no other gods before me, for I am a jealous god’… I mean, the literal meaning of that is pretty clear, right? There ARE other gods, it’s just that OUR god (well, your god, maybe) wants to sit at the grown up table. He doesn’t even demand that he be allowed to sit at the HEAD of the table, just, you know, that no one ELSE gets to sit there if he doesn’t.

Yeah, yeah. Try to run that one past my step-grandfather. He’d have knocked you on your ass, thundered at you that you were going to HELL with ideas like that, and then, if no one else was watching, kicked you a couple times, too. Hell, I suspect if I went and read this blog entry aloud over his gravestone, he’d rear up out of the stony earth and throttle me like some special effect from a Brian DePalma film. My step grandfather was one scary dude.

Some of the other Ten Commandments seem a little funky, too. Oh, ‘thou shalt not steal’ and ‘thou shalt not kill’ and ‘thou shalt not commit adultery’ are pretty good ones. (The last one is no fun at all, and there are a lot of horny housewives on the Internet who are apparently going STRAIGHT to Hell, but you know, I doubt they’d like Heaven much anyway, since I don’t think there’s a whole lotta fornication goin’ on there, either.) But what’s up with ‘thou shalt not bear false witness against they neighbor’?

I mean, seriously. It’s not the bearing false witness deal that’s got me going ‘hm’. ‘Bearing false witness’ is, as Heinlein notes somewhere or another, a particularly loathsome crime. But why ‘against your neighbor’? Is it okay if you do it to some guy from across town? As long as he doesn’t live on your block, it’s not a sin?

‘Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord in vain’ also has me rocking and rolling a little. I mean, what’s UP with that? We all know what we’ve been TOLD this means… it means, don’t swear. (Even the swear words that have nothing to do with God, this one gets stretched out to cover… no ‘fuck’, no ‘shit’, no ‘ass’ or ‘bitch’… even the most fundamentalist parents, priests, and pastors have a real talent for re-interpretation when it comes to infringing on the free speech guarantees of the young.)

And yet, well… maybe it’s just translated poorly. Maybe in the original Aramaic (or whatever) it actually said “don’t fucking SWEAR, dude”. But… ‘thou shalt not take the name of the Lord in vain’? I’m sorry, what the hell does that MEAN? What exactly is taking the name of the Lord, and is there some way you can do it so it’s not in vain? I’ll tell you, this one has me buffaloed. I suppose it really does mean what they say it means… you shouldn’t call on God for petty shit (like to damn someone who just cut you off in traffic, or to call his attention to this frickin’ malfunctioning piece of shit DVD player, or like that)… but… well… honestly, nobody does take the Lord’s name in vain, so seriously, what the fuck.

I mean, yes, I can’t get through an afternoon without a few good juicy ‘Jesus CHRIST’s and quite a few ‘fuck’s and ‘shit’s (hey, I’m a profane motherfucker, sue me), not to mention the ‘god DAMN it’s that fly around like frickin’ bumblebees in spring any time something goes remotely wrong in my minute to minute existence. But… hey… got a news flash for you… God’s name is not ‘God’. Nor was ‘Jesus Christ’ actually a name (it’s a title; ‘christ’ means ‘messiah’ or ‘promised one’ or ‘redeemer’, depending on your translation of the ancient Greek, and ‘Jesus’ is a reference to his divine status, specifically placed into the title by the Catholic Church a century or so after his putative crucifixion, after they finally finished arguing about it and decided that yes, he really had been divine, and not just an enlightened earthly teacher).

The being most Christians worship as ‘God’ has had a few names over the millenia, the most commonly known of which are Adonai, Jehovah, and Jahweh. And had the fellow we refer to as Jesus Christ ever actually existed (there’s no proof he ever did), his name would most likely have been something like ‘Joshua bar-David’ or ‘Yeshua bar-David’ or something like that. And I hate to tell all the Bible thumpers out there this, but I don’t know anyone who swears by Adonai or Jahweh or Yeshua bar-David.

I admit, I occasionally swear by Allah, Jupiter, Hecate, Horus, , Anubis, Yog-Sothoth, Baal, Marduk, or Bast, but that’s just because I’m weird and I don’t want to leave anyone out; if I’m getting Dark Side points for blasphemy, then I want to cover the bases, goddamit.

And I could talk about how weird the whole ‘thou shalt not have any graven images’ thing is, but I think I’ve worked this pretty well into the ground by now, so let’s just leave it with, the Ten Commandments, like nearly any irrational superstitious artifact, don’t make anywhere near as much sense as their modern day adherents want them to, and if they did, they wouldn’t be applied they way my pastor always said they should be, either.

Actually, to that extent, they’re a lot like the Constitution…

SNAKES... WHY DID IT HAVE TO BE SNAKES...?

One more entry on the Blog Page That Wouldn't Die...

I hadn't mentioned it because these things never work out, but for the past week I've been e-corresponding with a very nice woman named Yvonne who actually sent an email to my now inactive Yahoo ad (inactive, but still posted). We exchanged photos and she's quite good looking (and, oddly, doesn't mind how I look) and she's smart and wanted to meet me and there were even tentative indications that we might be fairly sexually compatible (I don't talk about this stuff in too much detail with prospective dates because it puts too much weight of expectation on the actual meeting, but, as I say, there'd been a little and it had sounded promising).

So, you know, naturally, I've just been waiting and wondering exactly what the hell was WRONG with this picture, and, well, today, after, I don't know, six or seven emails, she finally drops the Bomb:

She's, like, the President of the Florida Insane People Who Adore All Reptiles Society.

Okay, that's not what they call it. But. She is the President, or Chief Recruiter, or Dark Lord of the Sith, or something, of some group of... er... charmingly different, non mainstream folks who enjoy cuddling cold blooded creatures. And she collects turtles, and gekko lizards, and... er... yes... pythons.

Not, you know, Monty.

There are no words in English that I know of, and I doubt in any other human tongue, to properly convey the unlikelihood of me ever even so much as frickin' dropping BY the home of someone who, you know, has PYTHONS in there somewhere.

I mean, holy shit.

Now, I want to say something here, and Yvonne, if you're reading this, I don't mean to hurt your feelings. But. Honestly. I think this one was on you to communicate. Seriously. You've been whacked out of your gourd on the snake thing for at least 22 years, you mentioned. So you have to kinda know that, well, you are rather unusual, and that most people in the world are going to regard you as being several fritters short of an actual... thing... someone would make out of a lot of fritters, which you would not have enough of.

Now, I'm not saying I regard you that way, because, well, hey, I read Alan Moore comics, you read snuggle up with things that like to eat large mammals... um... okay, well, maybe you're a little nuts, sure. But still. Big world. And I'm a little nuts myself.

Nonetheless, what I'm saying here is, I don't think it's impingent on ME to put 'no goddam SNAKE RAISERS' in my profile. People who cannot STAND snakes, like me, are, well, I hate to use the word because I normally just hate to use the word, but... NORMAL.

Personally, I think YOU, dear, should have, rather sooner in the correspondence, told me this thing about you that, I'm thinking, you HAD to know there was a significant likelihood was going to be an issue.

I mean, don't try to tell me that your dates have never, on occasion, turned pale, given little unmanly shrieks of terror, and then flung themselves out the nearest egress, be it door or window, at the first sight of your trusty undulating serpentine companions?

AN. EE. WAY. This is my life. Meet a chick who gives every appearance of liking me in the blogosphere, who by some miracle turns out to be local, get up my nerve to ask her out, and get burned to the waterline because, guess what? She's nuts! Meet another chick who is smart and good looking and who really does like me and want to go out with me and... guess what? When she watches JURASSIC PARK she roots for the velociraptors!

Yes. Other people have it worse. I know.

Well. Intellectually, I do, anyway.

Oh, I don't mind the fact that Mom, and Mel, and Erica, and any other chick, and probably most of the guys, too, who read this blog, are laughing their asses off at me right now. But... first person who posts a 'oh, give the snake lady a chance' comment is gonna get textually DECKED.

Don't test me on this.

RULES OF THE ROAD

In one of his many invaluable essays on life in Hollywood, Mark Evanier described his first meeting with legendary TV comic and icon Milton Berle. Upon being introduced to Uncle Miltie and shaking hands with him, Mark, who is a pretty witty guy, blurted out without even thinking about it, “Wow, I didn’t recognize you in men’s clothing”. According to Mark, this soured Uncle Miltie on him from that point forward, because Mark had broken Rule Number One When Hanging With Milton Berle, namely, Never Be Funnier Than Milton Berle.

I’m reminded of that anecdote now.

Recent experiences at Electrolite being pretty much entirely similar if not completely identical to my previous experiences at Uppity-Negro.com and TampaTantrum.com, I thought I’d take the time to extrapolate whatever wisdom there is to find in the whole mess. Here’s The Deal, as far as I can see:

If you want to make friends and influence people when you head out onto the blogging trail, at least, as regards your posting comments on other people’s blogs, you MUST NOT:

Rule E comes mostly out of my experiences with Aaron Hawkin’s Uppity-Negro blog. He gets a lot of female posters and like any of us male geeks would be in that admirable position, he is thoroughly whipped by them. If a new reader comes along and does anything whatsoever to offend the babes on Aaron’s blog, that new reader can expect a cold shoulder from Aaron roughly the size of the Greenland glacier. I don’t really blame Aaron for this; for a male geek, positive female attention is a jewel beyond price, and if I ever had any women posting to my blog who weren’t related to me by marriage, I’d most likely dance and sing like a puppet on a string when they cracked the lash, too.

I should add to this that I’ve learned, from Electrolite, that one Must Not Be Whimsical, Oblique, or Overly Geeky When Posting To A Big Important Political Marketplace of Ideas Type Blog, because those guys just have no time for Theodore Marley Brooks or Cornelus van Lunt references, regardless of how amusing or entertaining you and some others may find them.

Now, I am posting this to point out that while these may be the universal Rules of the Road on other blogs (and as far as I can see, they are, indeed, pretty much universal) you can ignore them here. I don’t care if you:

Oh, and I like geeky references and would just adore whimsical, cleverly elliptical posts to my comment threads, although I suspect I’d get annoyed if someone started posting a whole lot of Harry Potter-speak here, just for one example.

If there is a universal rule on this blog, it is quite simply, Do Not Be A Bigger Asshole Than The Blogger. In fact, if you can avoid it (and most of my small number of regular posters avoid it with style and panache) Don’t Be An Asshole At All. I am quite a big enough asshole myself to supply all the assholiness necessary for any blog, and I will continue to keep this blog well furnished with stupid remarks, doltish mistakes, whiney rationalizations, and defensive recriminations by the ton lot, there can be no doubt. You need bring none of your own asshole nature with you, I have plenty and am always willing to share.

THE INEVITABLE DISCLAIMER

By generally accepted social standards, I'm not a likable guy. I'm not saying that to get cheap reassurances. It's simply the truth. I regard many social conventions in radically different ways than most people do, I have many many controversial opinions, and I tend to state them pretty forthrightly. This is not a formula for popularity in any social continuum I've ever experienced.

In my prior blogs, I took the fairly standard attitude: if you don't like my opinions or my blog, don't read the fucking thing.

Having given that some more thought, though, I'm not going to say that this time around, because I've realized that what this is basically saying is, 'if you don't like what I have to say, tough, I don't want to hear it, don't even bother to tell me, just go away'.

And that's actually a pretty worthless attitude. It's basically saying, 'I don't want to hear anything except unconditional agreement and approval'. And that's nonsense. This is still a free country... for a little while longer, anyway... and if you really feel you just gotta send me a flame, or post one on my comment threads (assuming they actually work, which I cannot in any way guarantee) then by all means, knock yourself out.

Unless your flame is exceptionally cogent, witty, or stylish, though, I will most likely ignore it. You do have a right to say anything you want (although I'm not sure that's a right when you're doing it in my comment threads, but hey, you can certainly send all the emails you want). However, I have an equal right not to read anything I don't feel like reading... and I'm really quick with the delete key... as various angry folks have found in the past, when they decided they just had to do their absolute level best to make me as miserable as possible.

So, if you don't like my opinions, feel free to say so. However, if I find absolutely nothing worthwhile in your commentary, I will almost certainly not respond to it in any way.

Stupidity, ignorance, intolerance... these things are only worth my time and attention if they're entertaining. So unless you can be stupid, ignorant, and/or intolerant with enough wit, style, and/or panache to amuse me... try to be smart, informed, and broad minded when you write me.