Flags

Much brouhaha in the United States right now over the Confederate flag — more properly the Battle Flag of the Army of Northern Virginia — and whether it should be flying over the statehouse in South Carolina, or anywhere for that matter. Walmart and Sears stopped selling them last week. In typically stale and unthinking reporting, successive journalists have described the debate as one that pits those who see the flag as a symbol of racism and oppression against those who see it as a symbol of history and heritage, as if it can’t be both.

Back when I taught American history I would sometimes get confronted by enormously self-assured students who told me that I had it wrong. The American Civil War wasn’t about slavery, it was about states’ rights. They learned this in high school. In a sense, they were correct. The Civil War was indeed about states' rights, of which the only one worth going to war over was the right to own slaves. The Union did not go to war in 1861 to free slaves, but the South most assured did go to war in order to keep them. If the Confederacy had won the war the institution would not have died in 1865.  Having lost the war, however, the former Confederate states mobilized politically to replace slavery with legal forms of racial discrimination that endured for over a century, and whose social and political legacy remains deeply entrenched. 

The “Confederate flag” is a symbol of all that, and its opponents are right to insist that it belongs in a museum, not over a statehouse, or in Walmart, or on a bumper sticker.

But how selective our righteous indignation can be. I wonder how many flags aren't symbols of cruelty and oppression for some group of people, or even very large groups of people? Certainly not Old Glory. Or the Union Jack. Or Japan's flag. Or the Republic of China’s. Shall we count bodies of the innocent? In reverse order from the list above, we would start with about 40 million.  

Amazon is no longer selling the Confederate Flag, either. Whew. Wouldn’t want that symbol of oppression to fall into the wrong hands. Buy one of these instead. 

Addendum: shortly after I posted this column, South Carolina took down its Confederate flags from the state legislature. I approve but, remember: when they de-Stalinized the Soviet Union, the point wasn't to confront the past. It was to bury it.

Addresses

My fellow Americans. I did not write these words. They were written for me by a team of professional speech-writers. They were tested before small focus groups ahead of time in order to determine their likely impact on the polls. The speech you are about to hear will be devoid of substantive content. Nothing that I will say will be surprising. Ninety percent of what I say could have been said by any of my predecessors in the past forty years. The speech will contain at least two dozen tiresome political cliches. I will pause for just a moment after delivering each of these so that members of Congress and others in attendance will know when to rise and applaud. You will notice that the Justices of the Supreme Court and the Joints Chiefs of Staff seldom will clap. This is their way of maintaining the ridiculous pretense that they are somehow apolitical, when in fact they are some of the most ideologically zealous people you will ever meet, and have been chosen in part precisely because of their ideological zealotry.

I will now insert a word of thanks to the brave men and women of our armed forces. Members of Congress, you will wish to be first on your feet to applaud for them. If you believe that it is not merely absurd but actually insidious and indeed even fascistic to valorize martial virtues over civilian ones, or if you think that it impedes badly needed argument about the conduct of America’s foreign and military policy, you should rise and applaud anyway. To do otherwise would be to commit an immediate act of political suicide, with implications not only for your own career but for your party.

In addition to offering a succession of banal statements written at approximately an eighth-grade reading level, I will also deploy a number of rhetorical cliches. These ring familiar to the ear, like a repetitious hit song, or the formula that drives your favourite Hollywood movies. They have been shown by the marketing and public relations firms that drive so much of our political culture to produce the most statistically favourable poll results. To that end, I will not and shall not just say “will not.”  I can not and will not just say “can not.”  I will also be referring to Americans as “folks” and will never say “taxpayers” without inserting “harding working” in front of it. I promise to make no literary references except to the Bible. My only historical references will be to the Founding Fathers, though I have been advised to downplay Thomas Jefferson.

I have invited guests today to hear the State of the Union Address. They are good people who have done good things for their communities. Some of them have saved peoples’ lives. You will be comforted to know that they have been carefully vetted to ensure that they haven’t done anything in the past that might embarrass me; they have also been selected in a precisely calculated manner so as ensure that their selection plays out favourably in terms of likely and probable voter support.

I wish to stress again that this speech will include no substantive content. For instance, I will not and shall not mention that we borrow money China in order to pay for ridiculously bloated armed forces that irrationally regard China as their greatest foe. And I can not and will not mention that a powerful lobby has somehow convinced millions of Americans that gun crime is unrelated to guns. Or that we alone do not use the metric system. Or that forty percent of you think the world is less than 10,000 years old and that this in turn explains why we are falling behind in scientific achievement relative to the rest of the world. 

Nonetheless, this content-free speech will be analyzed down to the last word by journalists, a very special breed of people paid to write and speak at great length on matters about which they have no professional expertise. They will judge the value of speech – and note once again, that it has none in particular – based on their pre-existing ideological predispositions. They will pay particular attention to the one or two times in this speech when I make a gracious remark about a member of Congress from another political party, like the guy sitting behind me. I can not – and shall not – reveal just how much I hate that guy’s guts. Instead, I will make a point about how great America is by observing that he came from humble origins. You may now applaud.  

Once again I’d like to thank the brave men and women of our armed forces for protecting our freedoms, even if it demonstrably true that our government in the conduct of its foreign and military policy has provided vital political, economic, and military aid to a litany of dictatorships while progressively encroaching on individual liberties at home. I’d also like to thank the hardworking taxpayers who make it possible for us to spend $1.5 trillion on a jet that we don't need and that doesn’t work while our urban infrastructure crumbles.

I do not believe in God but am required by poll evidence to conclude this speech by asking God to bless America, because despite the widely held view amongst the religious that their faith is under attack and in retreat, they constitute an overwhelming majority of the population.  So, God Bless the United States of America. He didn’t stop the Holocaust but maybe he’ll intervene on our behalf in this particular instance, and straighten out a health care system that costs two or three times as much per capita as ones that we deride as being "socialist."  Thank you and goodnight. Especially if you're one of the brave men and women of our armed forces.

Syllabi

Note: today's column is an actual syllabus that seems to have fallen through a crack between the universes. It comes from what appears to be a parallel dimension where lawyers and people who study pedagogy have not yet destroyed improved the education system.  I do not approve, of course, as indicated by my own ten page syllabi that leave absolutely nothing to chance. But my doppleganger in the parallel dimension seems to be somewhat more reckless than me. 



History 2000E:  History

______________

Professor or Dr. Graham Broad.  You may also call me Death, Destroyer of Worlds. 

Office Hours: When I’m in my office. Note that I am a professional historian. I’ve written books about it. Whole books. And I’ve read books about it. Lots of them. Come to see me. I can probably point you in the right direction. 

Office Phone: Phone currently is buried under books.

E-Mail:  No. 

Course Website: No. There are also no circus acts, no candy floss machines, foot massages, smoothies, or therapy pets. 

________________

Course Description:

In this course we will learn about history, including politics, war, religion, families, gender, childhood, ethnicity, migrations, art, literature, philosophy, music, drama, architecture, science, technology, the environment and geography, cuisine, and sports, and their relationship to the present.  Some people say that these things have “no value” in the “real world.” Those people are called ‘assholes.’ Avoid them.

Expectations and Outcomes: Oh, for God’s sake. What do you think they are? 

Grade Breakdown:  Learning: 100%

Required Books: There are a bunch of good books on this topic. Come see me in my office and I’ll recommend some.

Reading List: You give me one. I'll make suggestions. 

Description of Assignments: You’ll be required to read history, write about history, and talk about history – intelligently. 

Lectures: I will be giving lectures this year, though not that many. Show up or don’t. Whatever. I won’t be telling you entertaining stories about the past or giving you chronology that you easily could learn on your own. I will not be breaking the lecture into ten minute chunks like the pedagogists say, because my goal isn’t to make you dumber. I will not have a scroll of PowerPoint bullets on the screen behind me for you to transcribe because I don’t believe that the designers at Microsoft actually know or care about teaching or learning. I will not be making the same jokes I’ve made for the past five years or five decades, for that matter. I won’t be making learning “fun” at all, actually, because I’m not in the entertainment industry. Trust me when I say that this going to hurt quite a bit.

Policy on Attendance: There isn’t one. You’re allowed to fail. In fact, you don’t have to attend anything in life. If you want, you can lie in bed for weeks on end until you starve or die of dysentery. It's nice to have options. 

Late Policy: Punctuality is important, but If you need a bit of extra time to complete your assignments, just consult with me in advance and then do your best to get quality work done. But do not come to my office and lie to me.

Statement on Plagiarism. Ask yourself a question: do I feel lucky? 

Statement on the Use of Electronic Devices:  History lesson #1: incredible though it may seem, there was a time, long, long ago when it was considered not merely sensible but actually polite to listen to people who are talking to you. So, whatever. 

Student Code of Conduct: Don’t be a jerk. 

Essay Rubric. Um….seriously? You’ve made it to your fifteenth year of subsidized education and you need to be told what a good essay looks like? Read a book. I can recommend some. 

Frequently Asked Questions

I don’t like speaking in front of others, what should I do?  One option is to commit a terrible crime and be sentenced to solitary confinement for the rest of your life. 

I'm not good at writing. Any tips?  Sue your high school teachers. Also, read books.

How will this help me get a job? I dunno. How will your job stop you from being the kind of person who voted for Hitler?

I have anxiety. How can that be accommodated? Outside my office you’ll see a thing that dispenses numbers. Please take one. Then hand one out to everyone on the planet. Make sure to hand them out in refugee camps in the Middle East and Africa especially. Explain to the people in them that you have a lot reading to do.  Then invent a time machine, travel back in time to 1939 and then to 1914, and hand them out to everyone your age in university.  Remember to tell them that you are under a lot of pressure. 

Do you even care? Of course I do. If I didn’t care, I would make things easier for you. 

Any final thoughts? Start reading – now. Write clearly and carefully. Consult with me often. In class, pick a side and argue persuasively for it, and then the next day argue for the other side. Change your mind when you’re proven wrong – that’s what it means to be ‘objective.’ Hold yourself and your classmates and your professors to the highest standards. Call them out when they make mistakes. Loathe cliches. Detest pointless bureaucracy. Know when you're being condescended to. Refuse to fill out student evaluations of teaching. Tell the guy playing video games in front of you to close his laptop because it’s distracting everyone. Drink beer and wine long into the night and fight about what you learned that day but be up and ready for class the next morning without fail, every single time. Make friends – and enemies. Go to a play and an art opening and see visiting speakers in other disciplines. Get lost in the library. 

Do anything but be boring. 

Doom

Back in the day, I used to participate in message boards on AOL. We discussed history, politics, and whatnot. It was fun, you got to talk about your hobbies to people who actually cared, spar a bit over points of disagreement, and even occasionally become friends (or, indeed, enemies) of a sort with the other participants. Some list-serves – the kind that came to your e-mail box – followed. But my participation in such discussions fell off rapidly in graduate school, where there always seemed to be real people to argue with.

Nowadays, nearly every page on the Internet has a message board affixed to it, and some – like Facebook – are basically nothing but. Make no mistake: these boards do not exist in order to democratize the media or any of that nonsense. They exist to generate page views, information about viewership that can then be sold to potential advertisers. Over time, I found myself drawn to reading the comments in a "can’t look at it, can’t look away" sort of manner. Sometimes I even posted a comment of my own, and then felt like taking a shower afterwards. And so I decided to conduct an experiment. For about a year I partook in discussions on a variety of different pages. I posted, in all, six or seven hundred times (rarely more than twenty or thirty words at a time) and probably read ten times that number of posts. My intent: report my findings on Measure of Doubt when I eventually revived it.

I approached this with some rules. First, I’d use my real name, not a pseudonym. Second, I would never lie. Third, I would mainly respond by pointing out errors of fact and/or argumentative errors in the articles on which I was commenting and/or in the posts of others. Fourth, I would never resort to name calling or ad hominem of any kind. (Only once, near the end, did I break this rule. A poster suggested that he didn’t care if texting while driving endangered others – it’s a free country and he ought to be allowed to do it. I replied that we needn’t be worried in his case, as one needed friends in order to have anyone to send texts to in the first place. He replied, predictably, that he would be texting my mom. I said that, in that case, he ought to be careful, as texting on a flip-phone was hard enough, let alone while driving a late-model Datsun and when spelling isn’t your forte.  Ding, ding, ding: and the winnah by knockout...) Fifth, I decided that my natural tone would be ironic. The Rob Ford business gave me both motive and opportunity to really sharpen these skills, which had grown quite dull and rusty sheathed in their scabbard since about 2005. Sixth, when participating in a discussion that lasted more than three exchanges back-and-forth (and on some boards, like CNN, the messages poured in so fast – literally dozens would arrive every second on big stories – that no “discussion” was possible at all) I would always thank my interlocutor for chatting, no matter how badly it went.

After a few months of participating on various boards, I reached certain conclusions, some of which I believe, and some of which (marked with an *) other people believe. Here they are, in order.

1) Humanity is doomed. I have no words to describe how totally, viciously, and horrifically boned we are as a species. My odds-on favourite for possible outcomes at the moment is some sort of global nuclear holocaust resulting from environmental catastrophe, followed by the total collapse of civilization. The survivors on the political right will turn to cannibalism and burn the contents of our libraries and museums in a forlorn attempt to stave off freezing to death in the nuclear winter.  The survivors from the political left will say that civilization had it coming anyway and talk about the need for solidarity. Then they’ll get baked, try to (finally) make it past page five in Das Kapital, and plan for some sort of direct action tomorrow. 

2) People are horrible. They are ill-informed, irrational, bigoted, tribal, tasteless, tactless, petty, self-interested, self-absorbed, and just plain mean. No part of the political spectrum has a monopoly on stupid;  civility accrues nothing in your favour. My grandmother was right: people are garbage. Stay away from them.

3) No one works hard except for the person currently posting.* Everyone else is overpaid, underworked, and suckling at the bosom of the nanny state. Especially teachers. In addition, no one knows how to drive properly except for the person currently posting.

4) I have it on good authority that if it’s cold right now where you live, global warming is a hoax.

5) People who begin a sentence with a phrase such as “I’m not a racist, but...” are always racists. There are a lot of them.

6) Arguing with a Creationist about evolution is like arguing with a Big Mac about vegetarianism.  Too. Far. Gone.

7) Bush is Hitler.*

8) Obama is also Hitler.*

9) Stephen Harper is worse than Hitler.*

10) The only political leader ever who is not Hitler is Hitler. Mention Hitler anywhere and hordes will rush to his defense.

11) But they’re “not racist.” They just want "white pride."*

12) Countries that aren’t the United States are permitted to kill, torture, and generally knock about pretty much anybody they want. Everybody gets a free pass because of what the United States did in Vietnam, to the natives, and because of slavery. Slow clap.*

13) Things used to be great. But now we have lost our values because of either a) immigrants or b) big corporations. Or both.*

14) Jesus is coming back soon. We’re not kidding this time.*

15) There is a cure for cancer, but they aren’t telling you what it is.*

16) There is also a cure for obesity, and the person posting knows what it is.*

17) Everything everywhere has been cured but they don’t want you to know.*

18) Educated people don’t know anything about the “real world.” They “can’t see the forest for the trees.”*   People who make this argument often have difficulty distinguishing between “your” and “you’re” and “it’s” and “its”. 

19) Misogyny is real. For proof, read the message boards on IMDB where they discuss Sex and the City and Girls.

20) The moderators of any particular message board are trying to silence at least one of the people currently posting, usually because the person they’re trying to silence is the only one exposing their lies.*  Such statements are often accompanied by metaphors about emperors not having any clothes on.

21)  Nobody hates Star Trek more than Star Trek fans. The principal holds true for obsessive fans of everything from other science fiction franchises to sports teams.

22) Except for Ayn Rand fans. Ayn Rand fans are the most rabidly indoctrinated sociopaths in recent history, with the possible exception of parents who rioted to get Cabbage Patch dolls for their children. They are probably the same people, I suspect.

24) Humanity is doomed. Mainly because of Ayn Rand fans.

Smallpox

In 1967, the year Sgt. Pepper came out, it killed two million people, more than were killed in the entire eighteen years of the Vietnam War.   

In 1948, the year it was founded, the World Health Organization estimated that smallpox was infecting fifty million people per year, and in some regions killing as many as a third of them, and leaving millions of survivors blind.
 
So smallpox killed more people in the twentieth century than the World Wars put together, two or three times over.

It had been with us since the beginning of civilization and perhaps longer. It made no distinction for rank or social station. It killed Ramses V, Pharaoh of ancient Egypt.  It may have killed Marcus Aurelius, the great Roman Emperor. It nearly killed Elizabeth I of England, fourteen hundred years later. It did kill Tsar Peter II of Russia in 1730, and the Emperor Komei of Japan in 1867, and the Emperor T’ung Chih of China in 1875. Abraham Lincoln contracted an unusually mild case after giving his famous Gettysburg Address. He survived, but not before passing it on to a White House servant, who did not.

The infected suffered fever, damage to their internal organs, and above all the hideous eruptions – the pox – that covered the body and burst. For hundreds of generations, millions were powerless before it. They prayed and died; died wondering why their gods had abandoned them and were punishing them.  When Europeans introduced it to the New World at the end of the 15th and beginning of the 16th century it tore through the indigenous people. Thousands of years of isolation from the rest of the human race had left them without so much as a shred of resistance to it; it shattered their social cohesion at exactly the historical moment when they needed it most to resist the invaders. They prayed and they died.

It killed and it killed, for ten thousand years or more. And then it was gone. Two million people in 1967. None at all ten years later, and not a single solitary human being since. Not one. It had been in decline in parts of the world for nearly two centuries, but had persisted in spite of progress for a long time, mainly because people – who are by nature not rational – superstitiously and irrationally feared the cure more than the disease. But in the end reason triumphed. And how was this ancient scourge, this killer among killers, this dread disease that the Aztecs called the Great Fire, finally overcome?

Not with prayer. Not by strengthening our immune system in "natural" ways with herbs or homeopathy. Not with chiropractics or chi kung.

No, they wiped it out, eradicated it from the face of the Earth, the good old-fashioned way.

With vaccination.

Surrender

“And the day after Christmas, the whole family gathered into the SUV and drove to the big box plaza, which was FAR, FAR away from the core of the city where nasty hipsters and EVEN people needing social assistance lived. Then they returned all the crap they didn’t want and snapped up things they did at bargain prices!  And ran their credit card balances UP and UP and UP! The end.”  

For immediate release:

The War on Christmas, one of the least effective military campaigns in the history of the world, has been lost. Anti-Christmas forces, having been reduced to a handful of deviants muttering something about the winter solstice and Jesus not having been born on the 25th of December, surrendered unconditionally, their efforts having been proven futile for the 50th year in a row. 

Once again this year, the Christmas season returned on November 1st (some localities waited until November 12th out of respect for those who gave their lives in the early battles to save Christmas) and stayed for its customary seven weeks. During this period, multicoloured lights appeared on trees and rooftops everywhere, alongside the visage of the Great Leader – who, you will recall, has children under perpetual surveillance to ensure their compliance with behavioural norms – and variations on the same dozen songs played incessantly from speakers in every public place in the Western hemisphere. A minority even went to “church”, but most, as is the custom of the past half-century, went to shopping malls and spent themselves into oblivion, despite the cluck-clucking from a handful of Christian conservatives, who represent the last bastion of anti-capitalist thought in our society. Meanwhile, televisions bombarded revelers with hours of familiar but repetitious entertainment, including Rudolf the Red Nosed Reindeer, The Charlie Brown Christmas, The Grinch Who Stole Christmas, and of course the annual mawkish, maudlin, mediocre and incomprehensible Dr. Who Christmas Special. As usual, the North American Aerospace Defense Command issued reports of the Dear Leader’s progress across the Northern Hemisphere on Christmas Eve, part of an ongoing disinformation campaign. On the day itself, "families" (groups of people associated on a biological basis but barely known to one another) gathered for stressful meals where they outwardly cooed over how very good everything tasted, but inwardly reflected that pretty much everything was overcooked and cold by the time everybody sat down to eat.
 
In other news, on a local street corner, one of the few surviving anti-Christmas cranks was heard to say,  “Political correctness has run amok. You used to be able to say 'Happy Holidays' and 'Seasons Greetings' to people without anybody getting offended. Now, if you don’t go around saying “Merry Christmas” they jump all over you." He has been evacuated to a nearby Toys ‘r’ Us where he will be required to listen to “Simply Having a Wonderful Christmastime” over and over until he is fit to rejoin society. 

-30-

Re-runs

Author's note: our regularly scheduled blog post has been replaced in our programming lineup by a special repeat broadcast of Measure of Doubt's most read and most requested column, Hell, a 666 word rumination of the topic of damnation from 2011.

Hell

A parable.

So, there ’s Gordon. In Hell. His crime? Religious dissent. On Earth, we call governments that punish religious dissenters totalitarian, but he has long since learned to let that go — eons of torture and burning tend to take your mind off of things.

Gordon is holding a tray and is in a long, long line in Hell’s Cafeteria. The air conditioning is on the fritz again, and it's hot as Hell. Over the speakers, they're playing Muzak arrangements of Barry Manilow ("Mandy", 24/7, for eternity) and they're serving fish-sticks, again, for the hundred-trillionth day in a row. As he approaches the counter Gordon notices a small sign, written in blood. His blood. "Tomorrow’s special: fish sticks." Bastards: they think of everything.

Time has no meaning here, but Gordon keeps a day-planner anyway, because he’s always been a planner sort of guy. For today, it says:

8 AM burning
9 AM drawing-and-quartering
10 AM hanging
11 AM dismemberment
12 PM lunch (poisoned)
1 PM the rack
2 PM root canal
3 PM drowning
4 PM re-runs of The Golden Girls
5 PM buried alive
6 PM beating
6:30 PM dinner (fish sticks - poisoned)
etc.

He flips forward a few pages. More of the same, although on Thursday he has an hour of cardio-kickboxing. He makes a mental note to get that changed to burning.

Gordon looks up. Ahead of and behind him, queuing with their trays, are the teeming billions of the damned. They are of every race, ethnicity, social station, and period in human history. Some are warlords, murders, rapists, and thieves; some are adulterers, some are liars, some liked the new Star Wars movies better than the old ones. But the majority are quite ordinary people who never hurt anybody. The ones from Gordon’s time lived their lives, went to school, read a few books, watched TV, cooked meals, raised their families, drove their kids to soccer practice, gave some bucks to charity, some even went to church now and again, but, wouldn’t you know it, they were improperly religious and consigned to Hellfire for eternity. There are also countless millions of truly, deeply, sincerely devout followers of literally thousands of different faiths that turned out to be false, and even devout followers of the Right Religion who were guilty of theological or liturgical misconduct.

Gordon hears different things about what the Right Religion is, about what he should have believed or how he should have behaved. Some say faith in a certain prophet alone. Some say sacraments. Some say accepting that a particular iron-age book was the final and perfect revelation. Some say that there are four truths and an eightfold noble path, and they can’t quite figure out what this eternal damnation business has to do with them. Some even say there was nothing to be done – that the game was rigged from the get-go. There are all sorts of ideas. He even heard that the correct answer was a life led in conformance to the will of the Goddess Maat, which would explain why pretty much everybody except ancient Egyptians seem well represented here. Who knows? Inwardly, Gordon shrugs. What does it matter now? There’s no reprieve. There are billions of people here who knew in their hearts that they were right and then — poof — fire, brimstone, perpetual torture, fish sticks, and Barry Manilow. Sucks to be you. Forever and ever. Amen.

Anyway, directly ahead of Gordon in line is Adolf Hitler. But Gordon has been in hell for a million trillion billion years already— that’s zero percent of his sentence, incidentally — and his memories of Earth mostly have faded. So while Hitler seems somehow familiar, especially with his postage stamp of a moustache and swastika armband, Gordon can’t quite place him. He’s about to ask him if they’ve ever met when Hitler looks over his shoulder and decides to strike up a conversation first.

"Gootentag," Hitler says. "So: what are you in for?"
"Skepticism," Gordon replies. "And you?"

Texting

Something has changed. You’ve noticed it, too. Ten years ago, I was irritated that people were talking on their phones everywhere I went. Now they’re on their phones but not talking into them. It irritates me more. 

My classes used to be full with happy chattering when I entered. I would tap the podium to get things started, usually having to ask two or three times to begin. Now it’s dead quiet. Everyone’s texting. In the morning, people get on my building’s elevator, texting. Sometimes they don’t press the buttons or get off at the right floor.

Teenagers in malls, walking in groups, looking down, texting. People on exercise bikes at the gym, looking down, testing. Couples in restaurants, looking down, texting. Academics at conferences, looking down, texting. People in cars, looking down, texting. People. In cars. Looking down. Texting. One nearly killed me the other day as I was cycling to work. At the last second she looked up, slammed on her breaks and, of course, honked at me.

The good news is that I can die happy now anyway, because yesterday – I swear I am not making this up – I saw a guy walk into a tree while texting. It actually happened. I was eating my lunch on a bench and saw it coming. I should warn him, I thought. And then I thought, no. I wanna watch this. Then it happened. Wham. Tree. I clapped my hands with glee. He was okay. Just sort of looked around, embarrassed, then saw me sitting on the bench, staring right at him. We made eye contact. Understood one another perfectly. “Dude, you’re not going to tell anyone about this, right?” “Dude, I am going to tell everyone about this.”

So I had exactly one day to produce an entirely different blog than the one I had intended to post. And I know what you’re thinking. “This is so 2009.”  Yes, yes, yes, Broad. We know that “time saving” technologies don’t really save us time; we know it’s rude not to pay attention to the people you’re with (especially when they’re trying to teach you something); we know that the Internet is rewiring our brains and giving us shorter attention spans; we know that…uh…just a sec...

Anyway, enjoy all that. Because I don’t own a cell phone.  Well, I do. An old flip-phone that’s a hand-me down from my wife, who is newly equipped with an iPhone 5S. But I’m not sure where it is, and I don’t think I can send texts on it anyway, and I don’t really take it anywhere because it weighs as much as a hand grenade.

People gasp at this. No phone! “What will you do if there’s an emergency?” they ask. I dunno. Die, I guess. Or hope somebody else calls 911. Or texts 911. Or Tweets 911. Or at the very least records my death for posterity on Instagram or Youtube.

I can see it now. I have horrendous crash on my bike. A bystander whips out her iPhone.
“Siri, dial 911!”
“Searching the Internet for Nine West. There are five Nine West locations near you.”

And that will be my epitaph. “Made the supreme sacrifice so that others could have shoes at a discount.”

Commemoration

Today is the 12th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks on the United States, in which three thousand people perished in flame. Judging from the many hostile e-mails I received to my blog post about visiting La Cambe, many people will be spending a portion of the day in quiet commemoration of those nineteen terrorists who made the ultimate sacrifice for a cause they believed in. After all, they must say, in order to be consistent, who are we to say that what they did is wrong?

Q.E.D. 

Eating

Those of you who read comic books back in the 70s and 80s will remember those ads, written in the very best tradition of hyperbolic circus-show fanfare, that promised to transform you overnight into a master of the martial arts. Hidden secrets of the dark arts would be revealed; effortlessly you would be remade into a man both feared and respected. And girls would like you. What red-blooded twelve-year-old Spiderman reader could resist?

So one time I scraped together the requisite two bucks (cash – I crammed American quarters right into an envelop) and sent away.  What came back four-to-six weeks later was a little booklet, printed on cheap paper, made up of dark and grainy black and white pictures of attacks and defences. You know the kind. Panel “A” would depict the stupidest criminal in the world. He would do something dangerous like grab your shirt, and then, very helpfully, stand there waiting. Panel “B” would show your response, typically: chop him on the neck, poke him the eye, and kick him in the nuts. That was pretty much it. Grabs your wrist: chop him on the neck, poke him in the eye, kick him in the nuts. Grabs your throat: chop him on the neck, poke him the eye, kick him in the nuts. Asks for the time: chop him on the neck, poke him the eye, kick him in the nuts. I was ecstatic.  No wonder these deadly secrets had to be hidden away! Knowing them was like carrying a concealed weapon around. Go ahead, punk. Grab my shirt. Make my day. Your nuts have my name on them. Or your name. Whatever.
 
Anyway,  I'd forgotten all about this until recently, but lately those ads have come roaring back into my memory. Let me explain. Lately, I’ve become interested in fitness and nutrition. I’ll write more about this later, because I’ve found a very good gym and in the past year I’ve progressed from tub of lard to medium-size convenience pack of margarine instead, which is pretty good for me. I can do a pull-up. I have a six pack, too, although I had a couple last night so I’m down to four. Zing!

And, ooops. I’ve revealed something terrible about myself. I’ve consumed alcohol, which, according to innumerable nutrition websites, I’m never supposed to do.  You’ve probably seen the ad for websites of this kind. There’s a “five foods you should never eat” banner ad that has been chasing me around the Internet for months now. So earlier this week, with nothing on my plate except a pile of marking and a tenure application, I decided to Google “five foods you should never eat” and see what's up.

The precise phrase returned 43,000 hits. I clicked on a few at random. The remarkable thing was how much these pages sounded like those 1970s martial arts ads.  “Nutrition secrets they don’t want you to know!” “Transform your body overnight with super fat-burning foods!” “Hidden information revealed!” "Earn respect and be sexy!"  Increasingly this involves hormones. (Hormones are big these days.) “Put your hormones into overdrive!” one ad for a nutrition system said.  One home-and-garden type website even presented “five foods your doctor doesn’t eat!” I’m not sure how they know Dr. Baker, but there you go.

I discovered quickly, however, that in this community of nutrition experts, boldly revealing the secrets of their profession to the me, personally, for the first time, there is no consensus about which five foods I shouldn’t eat. For example, Cosmo suggested the following:

Artificial sweeteners
Margarine
Soy Protein Isolate
Diet Foods
Frozen Meals

While another fitness and nutrition expert suggested strawberries, butter, white bread, processed meat, and orange juice. My confusion mounted. More clicking ensued, more foods followed. In fact, after  visiting about half a dozen sites I had a list of twenty-five different foods or kinds foods I should never eat. These included: white chocolate. White sugar. White rice.  Beer. White bread. White wine. Red wine. Brown bread. Canned tomatoes. Processed meats. Meat. Fried foods. Eggs. Microwave popcorn. Butter. Margarine. Vegetable oil. Olive oil. Table salt. Orange juice. Salad dressing. Strawberries. Peanut Butter. Non-organic produce. Soda.

Measure of Doubt has long insisted that it is not merely the second best blog of that name. It is also an indispensable public service. To that end, your noble author, heedless of mortal peril and thinking only of the well being of humankind, followed in the footsteps of many a hero (and super villain) and performed an unauthorized scientific experiment on himself.

In a single weekend, I ate eighteen of the five things you should never eat, some of them simultaneously. I ate strawberries, had processed deli meats on white bread and scooped peanut butter right from the (plastic) jar. I had fried eggs and ham on brown bread and washed it down with orange juice. I snacked on microwave popcorn and Coca Cola. I stir fried non-organic produce in vegetable oil and ate it over white rice. Above all I drank beer. Lots of it.

Result? Well, let’s put it this way. Visitation will be held between 2-4 and 7-9 this evening. Memorial donations can be made to the Canadian Armed Forces "Save the F-35" Fund.

Pah. I’m fine. Barely even burped. These are beginner “never eat” foods for posers.

By contrast, after having conducted MINUTES of research I have compiled my own list of five of MEGA DESTRUCTIVE CERTAIN DEATH FOODS that you should NEVER eat. Some of these will SHOCK you, because THEY have told you that these things are good for you. But they're NOT.  I reveal this here to YOU for the FIRST TIME.

Measure of Doubt’s "Five Foods You Should Really NEVER Eat"

People. Never eat people! The average American, for instance, contains over 500,000 calories – more than 30% of them from fat!  (People from places like Africa might have fewer calories from fat, but why take the chance?)

Ninja Throwing Stars. Ever wonder why you don’t see many Ninjas around?

Water. Not only is a water a chemical substance (never eat anything with chemical substances in it!), water can sometimes contain sharks, poisonous blowfish, and even Nazi U-Boats!

Glutten. I have no idea what this is. But don’t eat it, whatever you do.
 
Food.  Food is the number one cause of obesity and a choking hazard. Avoid temptation by not keeping it in the house.

Send $59.95 for the video. I will show you how to avoid the agony of food preparation and meals with family and friends. I'll reveal the hidden secret I used to lose 30 pounds in one night, just by sawing my own leg off!  And, as an added bonus, I’ll throw in the sixth food you should never eat, yours to not eat for free! (It’s black liquorice. Shudder.)

Anniversaries

Do you hear that? That ticking sound? Of course you do. That’s the sound of the clock running out on the human race, and it began winding down 69 years ago today.  On the 16th of July, 1945, at 05:29 local time, the world’s first nuclear weapons test occurred in the New Mexico desert. They called it “Trinity". That’s it there, in the corner, a few milliseconds after detonation. It’s probably the most written about of all the 2,084 or so known nuclear tests, and there are breathless descriptions all over the place about the size and power of the explosion, invariably capped off with Robert Oppenheimer’s now quite cliched reminiscence of how a passage from the Bhagavad Gita, “Now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds,” occurred to him at that moment.

In fact, the bomb was a baby as nuclear weapons went, and less than ten years later the Americans were testing nuclear weapons with quite literally a thousand times the explosive power. In the early 1960s the Soviets tested ones with two or three thousand times the power. For a couple of decades, in the 50s and 60s, both countries were popping them off in the atmosphere like kids with fireworks. In the early 1960s, a study found trace levels of Strontium-90, a rather nasty radioactive isotope that affixes itself to bones in the human body, in the teeth of every baby they could find who was born in 1963. Babies born in 1950 didn’t have that. That was one reason why some protesters gently suggested that if the superpowers wanted to screw with a planet maybe they should get their own. 
 
Admittedly, the Americans built the bomb in the first place for a good reason – they were afraid that Hitler’s Germany was building one, too (it was) and they dropped it on Japan to end a terrible war that the Japanese started and refused to end. But the nuclear arms race that followed the Soviet Union's first test in 1949 demonstrates the normalization of a genocidal mentality that gripped the leaders of the great powers in the postwar period. Around the time that I was contemplating just how much hair gel would be required to produce a satisfactory mullet every day (a lot, so I never did it), global nuclear arsenals peaked at around 60,000 deployed weapons, which was enough to kill, well, everybody. They called this “national defense”, but really it was a suicide pact that great powers made with their enemies. And everybody else, whether they wanted in on it or not.

Every culture has had apocalyptic myths, stories about the end of the world and how it will happen. But the nuclear age is different, in that we possess a certain means of making it happen, so over the years we have vested control of apocalyptic weaponry in the hands of wise men like Leonid Brezhnev and George W. Bush. The good news is that there are far fewer nuclear weapons in the world today than thirty years ago, and fewer still actively deployed. Serious strides towards nuclear disarmament in the great powers has taken place, despite the best efforts of Republicans. But there are still a lot left. Even a small, regional nuclear war would have devastating global consequences. Just a few hundred would probably suffice to kill a billion people or so, and their continued existence makes a mockery of so much intellectual activity in the community of military theorists and civilian defense experts. By all means, have your wargasm about your F-35s, protecting Canada’s high arctic from the incursion of obsolete Russian bombers. And if the war comes, they can knock those bombers down and then fly back to the radioactive pile of rubble left by ballistic missiles.

We’ll probably never go to war with Russia, of course. But the basic problem isn’t Russia, or China, or North Korea. The problem is that the nuclear genie can’t be put back in the bottle. Nuclear weapons are the technology of the mid-40s and early 50s, older than colour TVs and Elvis records. Sooner or later, any country that wants them can have them, so trying to enforce non-proliferation is a pipe-dream in the long term. Arms control can only delay their eventual use, while deterrence is just an utterly absurd delusion that strong countries are left at peace.   We were lucky to avoid a nuclear war in the 20th century. What will happen in the 21st? The 22nd? The 23rd? It is incredible to think that we can avoid eventual nuclear armageddon by the present means of trying to do so.  But there is a solution. It’s one everyone has to agree to, so people will say that it’s a phantasm. Well, okay: enjoy the fallout. It will be pretty, like snow at Christmas. Anyway, here’s the solution. You won’t like it, but I think it’s the only way we’re getting out of here alive. 

Pacifism. 

Sequels

Invariably are a disappointment, the last refuge of the creatively dead. Some are worse than that even – more like forms of vandalism against our hopes and dreams. Lucky for me that Measure of Doubt never embodied anyone’s hopes and dreams, so there’s no chance of that.

But I do take a certain sense of pride in the first one hundred. I work in a profession where writing badly on obscure topics published in journals that nobody reads is considered the gold standard of excellence (if you don’t believe me, try making your way through an issue of the Canadian Historical Review some time – seriously, I dare you) so the blog served as an important outlet for me, and I look back on the one hundred with some satisfaction. I worry about sullying it with another fourteen or so, spread out over two-and-a-half years, gradually petering out.  On the other hand, I have a great deal to complain about, not least of all because Christmas is just over six months away...

Another hundred, shall we? Look for the first one tomorrow.

Silence

One of the many, many irritants in my life is the music they play near the elevators in my apartment building. The radio station (yes, they still have those) that I am forced to listen to for a few minutes every morning describes itself as “the home of the best rock of the 70s and 80s”, by which they mean some of the worst music in the history of the world. I can do without “Highway to Hell” at any time. I certainly don’t need to hear it at 7:45 AM. Yesterday it was “Hotel California.” At 7:30 in the morning. I felt like I was the person in the song. If I were an aging hippy, and lived in a van, and were brain damaged from too many drugs, I might want to listen to the Eagles at 7:30 in the morning. But I’m not. So I don’t.

Some mornings, I catch the station between songs. But this only makes things worse, when the disk jockeys (yes, they still have those, too) are bantering. This station has three of them. You know the types: the one who always seems to be suppressing a laugh at his own joke; the one with the barking voice who sounds like he’s going to tell you that this FRIDAY, at the METRODOME, the first hundred FAMILIES to see MONSTER TRUCKS get a FREE 12-GAUGE; and then there’s the hapless female, who makes inane sexual innuendos at her own expense. She serves no other purpose on the show. When I get to Hell that’s what will be awaiting me. An eternity of listening to FM Whatever-Whatever, Home of the Hits.

In the winter, my morning ritual involves a short walk to the corner of the downtown intersection to catch a bus. I used to stop at Starbucks for an espresso, but the long lines, the fact that, after a while, I caught myself translating my own order into Italian (“doppio espresso”), and their diurnal selection of music just became too much.  The musical selection usually involved the latest CD by another in a litany of minimalist folk-rock females of modest talent who will one day be featured during a weepy montage sequence at the end of an episode of Grey’s Anatomy.  In Starbucks, you get the added bonus of listening to the counter-staff (who are supposed to be making your espresso) talking about the music. (“This is Morgana Wheatfield. She is, like, so cool. She’s, like, such a great poet.”)  People who work at Tim’s prefer the Eagles, I think.

Out the door, espresso in hand. Standing at the corner, waiting for my bus. My city has located all of its social services in the core. There are arguments for and against this, and for good historical reasons I get quite uneasy at the suggestion from some of my city’s quite clueless public officials that all such services and the people who use them should be “relocated to the east.”  Anyway, the very core of the city is a haven for small-time drug dealers. They’re there all day long, and everybody knows it. In an effort to get them to move, the owners of the building set up speakers and started playing classical music at quite a loud volume. The hope was that this would be so unendurable to the dealers that they would leave. This hasn’t worked but I suspect that, in six months or so, London will have the most erudite and cultured criminal element anywhere.

And then the bus arrives. I sit between two people wearing iPods and playing them at such a volume that I can hear every note. And usually the music sounds something like: “WAAGGHAH! AAAARAGHA! WOOOOO! BAY-BEE! WAAAAGHAHAGH!” and the people listening to it nod their heads and play drums on their knees while I’m trying to read a book. Add to that the following fact:  my city’s busses talk. Insert blasphemy of your choice here. Can I say it again? My city’s busses talk. The busses. Talk.  They announce the next stops. This is one thing on a subway, where the stops are blocks apart. It’s another on a bus, where they are fifty feet apart.

Silence. Please? May I have a moment without an endless cacophony of noise? Well, yes. Because then I get to class. It used to be, only a few years ago, that when I wanted to start lecturing I would have to tap the podium for some time to bring my students’ chattering to a close so that I could begin the process of crushing their youthful enthusiasm for learning. (“I'm teaching you to think critically. Now memorize this lecture: it's on the exam.”)

So, what has changed? Well, now when I enter the lecture hall there is silence. Because my students aren’t talking to one another. They’re “talking” to people who aren’t there. They’re sending text messages on a device that used to be used for speaking.  (Some day there will be a class-action lawsuit against Blackberry and others by the all the people who got arthritis by the time they were forty because of the thousands of hours they spent typing with their thumbs. Mark my words. It will happen.) And they almost never stop, just like the people who get on the elevator in my building in the morning, who start texting in the ten-foot walk between their apartment door and the elevator. Like the people on the bus, texting where a decade ago they might have been reading a book. Like the woman out walking her dog the other day, texting while she was walking, who strayed onto my side of the path while my bicycle and I were barreling down onto her.  I nearly hit her.  Like the grown man, texting behind the wheel of his SUV, who nearly hit me while I was crossing an intersection. Like the boring couples I see in restaurants, texting while sitting directly across the table from one another. Like increasing numbers of colleagues at meetings. Well, they might have a point there.

But why, really? What is so important? Well, nothing, of course. We have no evidence that students are smarter or businesses more efficient or people happier because we can now all "talk" to everyone all the time. On the contrary. What is important is that our brains want it and want it all the time. Our brains evolved to do simple things. Find a nut. Get an endorphin hit. Find a berry. Get an endorphin hit. Trap a small rodent. Get an endorphin hit. Now it’s: get an e-mail. Endorphins. Get a text. Endorphins. Send a text. Endorphins. These behaviours are a literally addictive byproduct of a behavioural process that evolved for other purposes. And it’s just one more thing that’s making people dumber. Every minute they spend sending messages they don’t need to send is another they could have been doing something meaningful with the ever-decreasing number of minutes that they have left.

Students sometimes ask me, “What can I do to get ahead?” By this, I assume they mean, “What can I do to get ahead of my classmates?” It’s a fair question, because it’s a dog-eat-dog world where they’re going to be competing for smaller numbers of good jobs with increasing numbers of highly credentialed classmates. My advice? Leave the laptop at home and get a cell phone for emergencies only. Then encourage your classmates to get the newest Blackberry and bring their laptops to school. I predict a twenty-point spread in grades at the end of a twelve-month period. Try it and see if I’m not right.

Addendum, June 13th. Just finished reading a very good and profoundly startling book, Nicholas Carr's The Shallows in which the author argues that our cognitive equipment simply can't handle the amount of stimulus I talked about in this column and the last. The exigencies of modern life require mastery over a range of skills, but really learning something important requires concerted effort and concentration on one thing (or a small number of things) at a time. Modern communications technology, however, practically demands and usually receives shallow and superficial spurts of attention. It is making us stupider. In fact, I took time out from marking to write this paragraph. And you, presumably, took time out from something else to read it.

Rhinoceroses

A funny thing: about three years ago I arrived at work to discover that somebody had put a rhinoceros in my classroom. Nobody told me it was going to be there. I didn’t ask for it, either. I just showed up one day and there it was. It’s an enormously disruptive beast, and I spend a lot of time trying to cajole it into a corner. Believe me, I’ve complained. But whenever I do, I get told, “Well, Broad. Get with the times. We all have rhinoceroses in the classroom now. Adjust your teaching style. Deal with it. Work it into your lectures.”  Some say the problem is me.  “Maybe if you were more interesting, students would pay less attention to the rhinoceros.”  Relax. Deal with it. Adapt. Make the flying leap into Rhinoceros Age.

Actually, none of that happened. Instead, somebody decided it would be a great idea to install wireless Internet instead. Now half of the two-thirds of the students who show up for my lectures have something else to do while I’m trying to talk to them. Is that lecture about the Holocaust getting you down? Never fear – here’s a video of a panda bear sneezing. Update your Facebook status. Multiplayer Call of Duty awaits.

Well, we all used to fade out sometimes, didn’t we? I recall doodling and making to-do lists the odd time, and fighting to remain conscious against the sonorous drone of a handful of sonorous droners. But that’s not really the point. Good lecturers can compete with everyday classroom distractions. I personally can blow the student paper or an idle game of hangman out of the water, any day of the week. What I can’t do is compete with Youtube, Facebook, and Call of Duty. If I could do that, I’d create a website called grahambroad.com, upload my lecturers, and be a multi-billionaire by the end of the year. They’d make a movie about me, with George Clooney in the starring role. We’ll call it The Asocial Network. But I can’t compete with those things, and for a simple reason: I’m not in the entertainment industry.

A few weeks ago, I had a “eureka” moment while a student was giving a presentation. I should haul out my laptop and phone and start surfing the web and texting while this student is talking, I thought. And then, when the student appeals his grade on the grounds that I wasn’t paying attention, I’ll tell the Powers That Be, “Well - that student should have just incorporated my web surfing and texting into his presentation.”  Nonsense, isn’t it? And yet another example of the double standard (or perhaps lack of standards): we profess to be preparing our students for their professional lives, but we permit them to behave in ways that would be considered highly unprofessional if we were to do it.

Oh, puh-leeze, I can heard the digerati saying. This discussion is so 2007. This generation of students “lives on the Internet” and they communicate by texting. You can’t ask them to stop. 

Oh, yes we can.  Can we all say it together, like at an Obama rally? Yes. We. Can. We ask students to do things they don’t want to do all the time, like write essays, take tests, and read books. Or does anyone think that, if it weren’t for university, they’d be quizzing each other on Plato’s Republic and writing papers about it?

Okay, I admit it. I’m getting on. I blinked and suddenly I was middle-aged fogey. “That lecture was sick!” one of my students said after class a few weeks back. Only later did I learn that “sick” means “good.” And I was just getting used to “bad” being “good.” Now it turns out its bad again.

So let me put the question another way. What have we wrought? PowerPoint. WebCT. E-mail that effectively renders our office door open 24/7. Wired classrooms. Digital databases. WikiLearning. Educational podcasts. Flat-panel displays mounted on nearly every square inch of empty wall space. Tweeting to students, sometimes from the front of the lecture hall. Clickers. And for all that, for all those billions of dollars and millions of labour hours expended, do we have so much as a tiny, tattered, threadbare shred of evidence that our students are smarter than they used to be? Are their essays better researched or written? Are their exams more accurate? Are they more literate? More articulate? Better able to critically assess what they read and learn? And if they are not — and I have searched the pedagogical literature in vain for evidence that they are — then why is the rhinoceros in my classroom?

Apocalypse

Okay, everybody good? Whew. Dodged that one.

Well, in fairness, it wasn’t supposed to be the End of the World per se. According to Harold Camping and his followers, about 200 million people were supposed to have been saved, and the rest of us left to await the actual end of the world, which will occur in October. But there was supposed to have been a monumental earthquake. And 200 million people disappearing. And all manner of apocalyptic whatnot.

Okay. Avoid cliches, students. But sometimes they’re inevitable. This is shooting fish in a barrel. But there is a larger point that this minor, media-inflated incident raises. Predictions of apocalypse come and go. Many authorities in the field of Biblical Exegesis agree that Jesus himself was (historically) an apocalyptic preacher who (scripturally) predicted that the End would occur within the lifetime of his own followers. We could go on and on, covering a truly staggering number of failed predictions, from those made by some very noble Roman Christians trying to understand the catastrophes of the world around them in a pre-scientific age, to the seediest of money-grubbing American evangelicals such as the late Jerry Falwell, who in 1999 predicted that the Big Wrap Party would occur “within a decade” based upon his “reading” of recent events in the Middle East.

I’m an historian. Reflecting upon the past and attempting to rescue wisdom from it is the essence of what I do. Just yesterday, I bought new translations of Herodotus and Thucydides in preparation for an academic suicide mission I'm embarking on this fall, and last week I turned the last page on Karen Armstrong’s engaging The Bible: A Biography, part of the excellent “Books That Shook the World” series. But it’s one thing to search for meaning, guidance, and wisdom in old books (or very old bronze-age books).  It’s another to thing to organize one’s life around one particular reading of them. Camping, his followers, and people of their ilk live in a small, shriveled, self-centered, mean, miserly, intellectually constipated world.  In a world full of causes worthy of pursuing, they decided to devote their lives to preparing for an apocalypse that didn’t even happen.

It is now 12:02 AM in Apia, Samoa, which means it’s May 22nd everywhere, and not everybody is good. Yesterday, about 20,000 people starved to death. Some people console themselves by believing that they are in a “better place” now. Harold Camping and people like him believe they are in Hell, eternally to be punished unless they died in a (proper) state of grace. Am I mocking Camping and his ilk for their religious beliefs? To quote one of the great figures of American politics of the modern era, you betcha.  Me, I’m always willing to listen, at least for a while, to what people have to say. But there must be fairness in any such relationship. Proselytize, and I should be permitted to argue without fear. Threaten, and I will defend myself.  And if you tell me that I’m going to Hell, I get to tell you to precede me there. 

Update: May 24th:  Harold Camping has emerged unraptured. To his thousands of followers who quit their jobs and spent their life savings spreading his message, he offered the following: God has decided to do the rapture and the end-of-the-world thing in one fell swoop, October 21st. The remarkable thing is how many of his followers are standing by him. As always, the problem isn't the ability to absorb information. It's the ability to think.

Rapture

Well, so far, so good.

As Measure of Doubt reported back in January, months before the Johnny-Come-Lately second-stringers at The New York Times and on CNN did, a small group of very vocal fundamentalists centered around an evangelical preacher named Harold Camping and his Family Radio Network are saying that today’s the day. Pack your things, ‘cause Jesus is Coming Back.

It’s currently 2:44 AM, May 22nd, on Christmas Island, which is the world’s farthest forward dry-land Time Zone. No Rapture has been reported there. They skated through the whole of May 21st with nary an Apocalypse in sight.

Well, it’s only 1:51 AM in Apia, Samoa. So if we’re taking Coordinated Universal Time into consideration (and what is this blasphemy of time being different in different places, anyway?) He has another 22 hours to show up.  Maybe we haven’t dodged that bullet yet. I’m drinking beer and running up the credit cards for the rest of the day, just in case.

I’ll check in tomorrow, when it is definitively May 22nd, 2011, everywhere, to see if y’all have come back. Or if I’ve been Left Behind.

In the meantime, consider the innovative business opportunities being pursued by the Damned.

http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2011/05/18/atheists-offer-to-rescue-christians-pets-after-judgment-day/

Charlie

The catastrophe that befell Japan late last week came on the very anniversary of another: the March 1945 bombing of Tokyo, in which perhaps 100,000 people perished by fire. I had intended the raid to be the subject of this week’s column — complete with a sober assessment of the realities of wartime Japanese imperialism — but when the earthquake, tsunami and now, it appears, partial meltdown of at least two nuclear reactors occurred in the past three days, I recalled something George Orwell said during the London Blitz: that there was much to criticize about England and its history, but now was not the best time to do it.

As of now, the official death toll in Japan is approaching two thousand and many thousands more are missing. The horrific images of the tsunami sweeping remorselessly over towns and fields, devastating everything in its path would, one would think, be enough to move even the most cold hearted reactionary to tears. But a quick perusal of message boards on CNN and Youtube suggests that a great many people are positively busting at the seams to sign up the next time the Brown Shirts role around. A small sample, shall we? (Brace yourself.)

xstongue
Theres a meltdown going on in America, can you news people focus on that instead of other countries news, we need to think about U.S. FOR A CHANGE....

primerib
What goes around comes around nips! Remember, Pearl Harbor, nips? Yeah....

BIG RED 1
Hasnt been that long ago old Tojo and his slaant eye folks were trying to killl all us Americans. They killed a whole lot of our grandparents. Please think before you start praising these people. BY THE WAY . . . THE BIG RED 1 WAS THE HONORED FIRTS ARMORED DIVISION. AMERICAN HEROES.

THEY DESERVE TO BE HIT BY QUAKE AND TSUNAMI,THEY ARE VERRY CRUEL AND HEARTHLESS,I HOPE THAT THEY WILL BE HIT AGAIN (JAPAN,JAPANESE) BY MUCH MORE POWERFULL MAGNITUDE 11 QUAKE AND TSUNAMI 100 METERS HIGH,,FUCK YOU ALL JAPANESE PEOPLE,GO TO HELL!!!
TheCityhunter08 1 hour ago

Who cares about the Japs and their bastard kids!!! They all deserve to die and the ones that r still alive need to melt from those reactors! Whoever does not die, we need to Nuke them to rid these Japs from the world. Justice for Pearl Harbor Baby!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
notre2010 4 hours ago

And so forth. Need I even get into the immense number of replies that contained the words “God” and “Jesus” “wrath” “revelation” “end times”, etc? Oh, what the heck:

i dont know much about japan but our preacher says they must have done many bad things for God to smite them in this manner. he says that many Japanese are atheists it is no wonder God would eventually take notice this should be a warning to all unbelievers. i pray for the japan people and that they will accept Jesus Christ.
ptl8888 7 hours ago

saudisRbest
Until Japan becomes an Islamic nation, it will continue to experience the wrath of Allah

We are living in a time of history like no other. We are living right at the very end of time. We are that last generation. Every time that God has brought judgment, he has warned the believers (1 Thess 5: 1-5). God is warning the entire human race that the Rapture of the true believers is going to occur on May 21, 2011. That will be followed by what the Bible calls the Day of Judgment after which, on October 21, 2011 God Himself will destroy this entire cosmos. (more info at familyradio,com 
horseandhisrider 5 hours ago

As Jesus approached the boat where the disciples were, Peter said, "Lord, if it's really you, tell me to come to you, walking on water." Jesus said, "Yes, come." Peter than walked toward Jesus on the water, but started to sink when he was frightened by the large waves. "Save me, Lord!" He shouted. Jesus grabbed him. "You have so little faith..."
racenuke 8 hours ago

this is only the start of it, earthquaqe, tsunami, earth axis change, vulcan eruption, nuclear plant explosion, and more too come :( the peple are greedy and fill they pockets with money, but what cann you doo with money now ? man kind doesent concentrate on the future :( the power and welth drives us twords selfdestructin :( 2012.12.21 is aproching :( god take care of all japanese victims who didnt hade a chance. PEACE

Now, stay with me. A very large number of postings argued that the real truth is being concealed by the main-steam media, with its corporate (or socialist, take your pick) agenda. In response to a terrifying Youtube video, one poster commented:

In a world full of lies few seem to know the truth. And the truth is simple - this video is fake.
Antikrew 1 hour ago

While others grafted their own social concerns onto the catastrophe since the corporate fat-cats who pull the news-anchors' strings wouldn’t:

glennsky
These are the Great Revenge of WHALES' AND DOLPHINS' HOME. Don't forget THE COVE movie. If Japan won't stop killing these animals there will be another GREAT REVENGE AHEAD.

And don't get me started with the numerologists, who found all sorts of associations using variations on the date of the earthquake and other catastrophic events. For example:

If you add 9/11/01 and 3/11/11 you get 12/22/12!

December 22nd, 2011 being the supposed date of the end of the world. Or, rather, the day after. But never mind.

One idea that many, many posters alleged (try Googling it) is that the earthquake was the result of secret military testing, probably the HAARP program. Officially, this unclassified program involves research of the ionosphere, but, as everyone in the tinfoil hat brigade knows, HAARP is responsible for the earthquakes in Haiti, New Zealand, and now off the coast of Japan, as part of an evil experiment being conducted by the CIA. I'm not sure why they're doing it. Just because they're evil, I guess.

Luckily, the world’s celebrities took to Twitter to solve this whole earthquake business — whatever its real cause — overnight. For example, in British Columbia, the cast and crew of the forthcoming Twilight movie were relocated a little further inland as a precaution, as elevated sea-levels might pose a mild risk to the west coast when the waves arrived in a few hours’ time. Thinking fast, an actress from the film Tweeted that, if this was to be her last Tweet, she wanted her family, friends, and fans to know that she loves them. Confronted apparently, with the paranoia, self-absorption, and absurdity of this shout-out — did she really want what she apparently thought might be her last message to be a Tweet? — she replied, in another Tweet, that she was just “speaking her peace.” No doubt this gave her piece of mind. Or peace of mind. Like, whatever, LOL. Who has time for correct spelling when the cold, steely embrace of Death itself is closing in?

Well, at least the news of the earthquake did something that even the emerging civil war in Libya could not: keep the most appalling and most boring of Hollywood stars – Charlie Sheen — off the front page. For two or three weeks the antics of this raving conspiracy theorist, who starred in two overblown Oliver Stone epics in the 1980s and nothing of worth since, made headlines everywhere. But, no wonder. Read the message boards. He has a potential audience of millions who think just like him. He’s the most famous Internet troll in the world, and gaining greater and greater fame not for the quality of his mind but for having completely lost it.

Some day, I fear, all of this internet chatter will make fodder for a thousand PhD dissertations about the collapse of Western Civilization. They will tell the story of how the healthiest, wealthiest, most educated people in the history of the world decided to make a howling wasteland out of a garden, and all because of their incapacity to stop and think.

Incidentally, one very popular HAARP conspiracy video making the rounds on Youtube is narrated by one Martin Sheen. I admonish my students not to use cliches, but here it seems inevitable.

The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree.