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.

On vien de faire

Grandmom's backyard, sort of: Lorie and I are discussing gardening, trying to figure out what it's called when someone asks you to take care of their plants for them. "Plantsitting" doesn't occur to either of us as we start moving potted plants around the backyard, looking for where they go. There is the added complication of mistaking plants for birds and vice versa, seeing as how leaves and feathers are interchangeable, modular, like Tinkertoys. "Petsitting for plants!" I offer, but I know it's silly. We ask the person in the visitor center, but that person is either confused or bored by the inquiry.

Shortly thereafter, Roze continues the gardening theme by planting two rose bushes by the fence to the north of the house. She has definitely placed them where they go. We are then in her van with more gardening supplies in the back, and as we approach the house we drive past the landlady, who has a reputation as a sort of evil Disney matron: superior, suspicious, miserable. We hear her instructing a minion (her son?) to keep an eye on us, and as we turn into the drive, we hear incredulity: "What do they think they're doing?" Apparently we are now minions, too, and with gardening errands in hand we are perfectly authorized to drive the van into the property—but the landlady never recognizes the van, even though she sees it every day. So as we come to a stop, she's all up in the backseat, snapping at Roze. She doesn't seem to know me from the back of my head, and I refuse to turn when I say "Hi," attitudinously. She manages a formal, "How are you?" during which utterance I decide to effuse. I turn around and tell her "SPLENDID!" and keep a big, warm smile on my face while we get out of the van. I can't tell if she recognizes me, though we have met before.

Irrespective of the garden, I am alone in a darkened classroom, writing on the chalkboard, of which there are two, extending the lengths of the front and back walls. They are simultaneously chalkboards and corkboards. I am at the back of the room, scribbling, and occasionally moving push-pins around, apparently prepping a lesson for the instructor, whom I admire. But he doesn't show up tonight, and instead I encounter some folks in various contexts just outside the classroom door: there is, for instance, a bridegroom standing there at one point—he is perhaps Ryan Raz—surrounded by his groomspersons, and I ask him if there's anything I can do for him. To my chagrin there is not. Later—in the same space, except it's now a veranda overlooking various gorgeous natural landscapes—some interested parties in a documentary film project are discussing the upcoming work; I am obviously involved in this project primarily because two of the documentary's subjects present at this discussion are hot men in their mid to late 30s; and they are naked and they give every indication of intending to remain so forever.

In the school cafeteria, a friend called Sherry or some such asks me whom I'll be rooting for next season—at least I thought she said next season and I consider my response to an obvious baseball question. But then she starts naming football teams, so I explain I have zero interest in le zutball américain. Indeed, I explain, I've only ever been to one football game in my life, and that was an Eagles game where the Hammonton High School "Blue Devils" marching band—then regional champions or serious contenders every year—played at halftime.

So we have a flashback, which is narrated by an unspecified high school bandmate: she complains that, at said Eagles game certain band members were off, hitting their percussion cues horribly late and so forth. I wander off midstory to find a place to pee, though I can still hear her narration the whole time. I think to pee against the back of an industrial cooler, but the space between the base and the lid has some scary oozy horror movie things going on. So I go away.

I'm in a house considering animal conservation; so of course Lorie is here again—or perhaps I'm just standing in for her, approximating her reactions to certain news reports, which are either on a widescreen TV or a handheld tablet computer (or both). There's the usual talk of the lions, but I'm worried about the hippos, who are drying out in the recent drought. So I go find one, in the back bedroom, in a ditch of dried mud, and I pee on him. I know—it's not even in question—that this action is salubrious, not mean-spirited in any way. The urine soaks into his skin as quickly as it hits, and I realize he must have been near death with desiccation. I can see the symbiotic insects crawling around under his skin as he, revitalized, begins to stretch. His name is Shawn.

I go directly to the next room and do precisely the same for two other creatures sleeping next to each other in the bed. They are, I think, water buffalo.

Then I wake up. And goddamn, do I have to pee.

What just happened.

Prelude

When I was young, girls had penes. In my dreams they often still do. How this jibes with the fact that I consistently find chicks with dicks mildly alarming when they turn up in porn, I don't quite understand.

Fugue

I am weary of living in Squalor. I tell Paul, on the lawn just outside the open front door: I can't live like this. Like what? says he, and I indicate with a sweeping arm the avalanche of dirty laundry our housemates have left in looming piles everywhere. I tell him: I know you were upset about it before we went on vacation, but I'm upset about it now. That's it, I say. I'm putting everyone on notice. Claim it and stow it by next Saturday or it's trash. I go poking around some of the clutter. There are books on shelves along the staircase, some of which I know belong to Bob. These are piled with laundry, too.

At the top of the stairs I am in the long house, and these central second story rooms are my favorite rooms. In some sense they are mine, though I am not a regular occupant. I set about straightening and am faced with the choice: Make the beds or no? I recall recent Internet advice that making the bed every day helps dust mites propagate. I contemplate a system whereby thinnish top mattresses are daily removed and hung on the walls, so as to kill or discomfit the mites. The side room, in a place where there's no room for a side room, has beds under eaves; it both the playroom in the house in Folsom where I grew up and the guest room in the Paynes' house in Vermont.

Yes, this is my favorite room of the house—and I tell JoJo as much—even though it's now on the ground floor and on the end of the house, with a single window in the middle of the back wall. There is a train going by; except maybe we're on it. And there must have been a door there in the wall, because now we're out on the lawn, on the corner, near the school bus stop, and I'm chatting with Sharon, in a very pleasant and quiet dusk, about the film festival we're about to go to. The festival is in Brooklyn, which reminds me, Aren't we in Brooklyn now? Yes, Sharon says. It may no longer be the long house, but this house is certainly in Brooklyn.

The bus comes. Neither Sharon nor I has ridden this line before, and Sharon asks the driver questions, holding up transit. A young hipster woman offers aloud the advice that we "Figure it out, people." Sharon figures it out and we board, only now we're in a taxi, four across the back seat: Sharon, I, Hipster Woman, Hipster Woman's companion, who happens to be Hipster Man. She is short, cute, ruddy, hair in a bob, Henry Blake fishing cap. Peppermint Patty, I think, but nobody asked me. (In retrospect, she might have been a long-lost acquaintance from the Fruity Pebbles gang in Newark.)

I am in that mindspace where I could be truly annoyed at her "Figure it out, people" or just pretend annoyed. I say, I hope that wait wasn't too long for you. She responds with what I perceive as elaborately fake singsong niceness: No, it wasn't. I respond, I'm so sorry!—matching her intonation exactly, mockingly. She laughs and says, I said it wasn't. I know that's what she said, but I was just being a bitch. I say to her, Oh, I thought you were just being a bitch. She laughs. We're keeping it light. We're sitting smoosh next to each other but we're a million miles apart but we're keeping it light. Like you do.

We talk about the film fest. Are you a fan of the films of Jim Jarmusch? I ask her. Are you kidding? she says: In the last three hours I've become one! She mentions that she and her companion saw a film at the fest the other day featuring a woman in a tiny bikini; apparently its tininess was something to behold. I recall having heard a radio announcer mentioning something very similar, and offer that this must be The Tiny Bikini Film Festival. But of course it was probably just one film that they both saw. Or maybe she heard the same radio broadcast and never saw the film at all. And maybe the radio man was making shit up as well.

Although the taxibus never dropped us off, we're in a diner now in the bustling city, and the counter guy, who is possibly Chris Pratt, is speaking into a contraption that he intends as a microphone, but it's really a funky old camera. Or maybe a pizzelle iron. In either case, he amuses as intended. There are funky contraptions hung about the walls of the diner; it's hipster heaven. There are also a couple floor-model Victrolas (Victrolae?). I wonder that the Victrolas aren't just useless things to be in the way, since there are no records about, but apparently some of the staff enjoy putting round things that are not records on the turntable and playing them. This, I am assured, allows them to here short-wave radio from under the sea.

The hipster chick, still by my side at the counter of the diner, tells me that the server, Doug, "...is smarter than you. Doug is smarter than me. Doug is smarter than everyone we know." Everyone knows that Chris Pratt is a goofus, but I believe her. Hell, I've never known what "smart" means.

At this point I have to pee. So I pee. And then, Don't Ask Me Why, the big silhouette grasshopper vomits Maalox instead of tobacco juice. It sets up like cement within seconds. Shortly thereafter, my friend, who is part Queen Latifah as Big Mama and part LaWanda Page as Aunt Esther—they intersect at the hat—chases some bullies away. She's always been good to me.

And on that Frostian note...

I've always felt the whole "personal/civic responsibility" bugbear is something of a straw man. Sure, the case for increased activism makes itself; but when we're talking about the elected, it's more to the point to accuse both parties of acting openly and vigorously against the interests of the American people than to accuse them of failing to take responsibility for those actions; the latter is an afterthought. Besides, the alternative shown here, blaming the other party, is exactly the kind of drama our televisions have trained us to expect. How are we surprised?

This kind of commentary further lets our gubmint off the hook by acting as if they are blind followers of trend or fashion themselves. They are not. The decision to side with Capital and corporatism is not an idle "Oh well, might as well back the stinking rich horse" choice you make over lemonade; it's a decades-long program to dupe the overwhelming majority of citizens (i.e., the stupid ones). And it's been swimmingly successful.

I'm never one to shirk the decrying of humans as fucking idiots; but you gotta admit, the evil scheme was choice: Take all the neocon goals and themes—trickle-down fairydust; demonization of the most vulnerable populations (bootstraps, baby!); deregulation; corporate welfare; civil rights as anti-American values (no, seriously! up is down!); and the inevitably pernicious influence of a liberal education—and inextricably link all these in the propaganda machine to the two things about which the peasantry will feel most violently protective: GOD and GUNS.

(1) God says this and god says that and god sees you in the voting booth and god will bring you coal this Christmas—er, I meant send you to hell to suffer unspeakable torment for all eternity, my bad—if you so much as utter the phrase "women's reproductive rights".

(2) In the Great American Dream, "Get off your land or I will shoot you" has evolved slightly to "Get off my land or I will shoot you"—but not an inch ferre.

I saw it coming at age 15, observing my grandmother's pavlovian response to the suddenly political messaging of her fuckstick televangelists. Even my parents—half-hearted "let's sleep in on Sunday" evangelicals at that point—bought the hype to some extent. Years later, my formerly anti-establishment dad embraced W.'s "regular guy" anti-intellectual, pro-gun bullshit loudly and proudly.

And what do you know? The terrorists have won.

Robert Frost in Interzone #418

"My little horse must think me queer
Because of what I do with steer."

Tractor Porn #418

Quinn Christopher Jaxon