God is the real terrorist.

This is troubling me, because I feel the entire conversation is missing an essential point or perspective and I've been trying to figure out what that is.

Since that asshole with the creepy Beatrix Potter name shot up Planned Parenthood, liberal ideologues have been singing, solo and /ripieno/, the orthodox line about "homegrown Christian terrorism". And the conservatives... well, frankly, I have not consulted the rightist ideologues, but the leftist ones *assure* me the rightist ones are doing their usual softshoe grin hey look over there about how the "shooter" was a crazy person acting alone and ain't it just turrble what he done did I mention hey look over there?

Furthermore, everyone everywhere is referring to the incident as being "politically motivated"; fed and state LE both have been quoted as saying so. But but but. Two things: 1. Absent an already vast national-level conspiracy, Robert Lewis Dear WAS a crazy person acting alone; and 2. That politicians and the political process have been engaged for half a century in the fight over safe and legal abortion does not make this a political action. Yes, I absolutely mean that. This murtherer may have a coherent politics—as far as his likely pathological brain will allow—and it's a *fair* assumption he's not a big Obamahite; but this is not about his politics and has nothing to do with any politician who takes up either the attack or the defense of the legal practice of abortion. This is about... Well, remember (ye codgerscienti) those Hebrew National hot dog commercials? Here, have a look and then we'll continue.

Now I'm not trying to conflate what Jews think their deity wants with that Christians think theirs wants. Oh, no, wait, yes I am. It's the same fucking deity, doncha know: and the divisions between Jew and Christian and between Jew and Muslim and between Christian and Muslim—those divisions are only the widest and most visible of the chasms between WHAT DIFFERENT HUMANS BRAINS INSIST THE DEITY WANTS. It's as simple as that. The problem isn't political. It's theological.

Obama and many other liberal voices have taken up their ritual call-and-response:

MASS MURDERER: Bang bang bang!
SCHOLA: Gun control gun control gun control.

I'm not saying we *don't* need more sensible gun control (I frankly believe the state should take as many guns off the street as they can and make them extremely difficult to acquire). I'm saying that isn't the only problem in cases like this; it isn't even the most salient problem. This Dear asshole (heh) wasn't part of any sort of criminal conspiracy. (To call his act "terrorism" so dilates the definition of the word as to negate similar claims against people who, oh, I dunno, shoot Black Lives Matter protesters in the street; it insults the latter's cause and integrity to suggest their shooters are of the same class of felons as Robert Lewis Dear.)

It wasn't terrorism. It wasn't even primarily about violent defense of extremist political ideas; it was about violent defense of extremist theistic ideas.

Mass murder was and is the inevitable endpoint of a societal model that does nothing to police indoctrination into the belief in a deity that wants mass murder.

The argument needs no elaboration—this is the simplest and most elegant formulation: if "God" speaks truth to you, why does He lie to so many other people? Why wouldn't an omniscient and omnibenevolent god tell everybody the same truth in their brains?

We are a species strongly inclined to believe that ego—that the raw feed from brain into consciousness—includes a separate voice called "deity" whereby an external omniscient intelligence speaks its wishes. If that right there isn't the biggest recipe for disaster you've ever heard, you better start writing some fucking books about what you've heard.

Fight the real enemy.

Back in Newark for a little shopping

The layout of the Deer Park Tavern

 has changed

since my 1996 move from Newark to Washington.

Rather, it changed once and has stayed basically the same since. It currently has a sort of hemi-triskelion design at its heart, with three tavern rooms describing a 180-degree arc in front and, I suppose, the kitchen and storage and office space in the back. (Don't look at the above. That's reality. That's irrelevant.) Somehow the layout and architectural detail allow the revised Deer Park to be simultaneously authentic as the 19th-century public house and inn that it actually is, and hip—which is convenient inasmuch as it is sometimes a storefront in a mall. Second floor, by the Bamberger's.

The Park is an early stop on a combination carouse-and-retail therapy trip down and around Main Street in Newark, the course of which trip does not take us to Sam's Steakhouse, but Sam's is certainly there, over on Academy, gettin' the kiddies drunq. We pass but do not visit the mini-mall where Days of Knights used to be; and just east of there we browse through an incarnation of Barry Solan's Vidéo Américain. Even with everything hauled out of the highly suspect evidence locker of my memory, right now—wide awake, wracking my brain—I honestly cannot determine whether the layout, organization, staff, and my history of visiting this outlet are real or dreamspun. It is certainly not Barry's store in the Granary, nor the incarnation in the strip mall at Elkton and Apple Roads, now seemingly a ballet school. Is is possible Barry briefly had a storefront on Main Street where I'm "remembering" it? Possibly in the very spot in the mini-mall that DoKs vacated?

Details of our actual stops are lost (as are details of who "we" are apart from the ego) but well after the spree has come to a rest one other person—who may be John McDonald but may also be Itzhak Perlman—and I realize we forgot to buy a book. So we head back up Main Street, hoping any of the three bookstores there will be open. The first is not. While we're passing through the tire store we see the Kindly Old Asian Man (yes he's fucking Asian because I don't fucking know where he's fucking from except Asia so fuck you) who manages the second bookstore, and he tells us the third bookstore is open as well.

We head to the third shop; in the vast parking lot out front I put set my cigar down by the fountain, hoping it will still be there and lit when I retrieve it later. Inside, some college women are browsing the "new arrivals" or "popular" Barnes-and Noblish display nearest the entrance, talking about a wonderful new book that purports (purrports?) to be written by a cat imitating a human "voice" and advising "other" humans to be unduly solicitous of and generous toward their cats. "Science has foud that your cats need LOTS of treats" and so forth. This is so amusing I forget what I am looking at, or looking for.

Later, back "home" (someone else's) there's an impromptu singing session; and though I'm currently involved with a not-very-formal Wednesday night group, the only person I recognize around the dining table is Jason McCool—whose judgment I fear in completing a particular phrase that I manage to get through with breath to spare, but a little wobblingly. We are singing Gary Winans's ...les cèdres et chaque petite fleur... and I discover that someone, perhaps the composer, has devised a mold or latex form for freezing ice into a gizmo shaped vaguely like a set of dentures but with only a slight curve—like a violin bridge—so that when bowed from the first ice-tooth to the last it plays the tenor's cantabile two-measure/seven-note-long phrase on the word par-ti-cu-li-èr-e-ment (0:31 to 0:35 here). The tooth for "par", like a molar, is the widest, since it plays the longest note in the phrase; then a bicuspid, two incisors, and three more bicuspids. (Yeah, ok, it's not like real teeth.) I pick up somebody else's bow to try it out and knock over their fiddle in the process—but it falls silently onto plush carpet, no harm no foul. I bow the ice and manage to get the phrase out; but I am annoyed at how difficult it is to control the bow properly. I guess 1 year of violin lessons at age 12 or so hasn't lasted another 38.  Go figure.

And then it's today.