We love our Dogs

There are many hunters out there. There are many meat eaters. We seem to condone these behaviors quite largely as a society. We are never far from a fast food burger joint. We watch as our Vice President goes out on a good old animal killing spree and he can even shoot his friend while he’s at it. We just laugh. Hah, no big deal.

I’ve never been in a slaughterhouse, but I hear they aren’t the most pleasant places to be if you are a cow. Turkey’s, chicken’s, and game-hens don’t exactly live the lap of luxury as they await their imminent deaths in tiny little cages, dirty with their own filth. How about pigs? One of the smartest animals (some say they are as cognizant as 3 year old children), they are trapped in concentration camps precisely designed for their mass murder.

I eat meat. I legitimate it somehow. Tastes good. More filling. I accept this cruelty to animals, and I am complicit in it. We pen them, we murder them, and we eat them. Except for dogs, which have over the years gotten on our good side; to the point that we keep them in our homes, let them sleep in our beds, feed them special food, pet them, and adore them. In general we do.

Other people beat them, abuse them, and even fight them to the death with other dogs. Since his co-defendant rolled over, pleaded guilty, and has already come out and said that the star quarterback bank-rolled the whole dog-fighting operation, it is looking like Michael Vick is one of these people. Underperforming dogs were killed by brutal means, dogs were fought for money. Michael Vick is indicted by the feds, and can face up to five years in prison and up to $250,000 in fines; because he likes fighting dogs.

I’m a dog lover myself. They are great friends to us, generally. But how many dogs have been murdered in our country for being a bit too violent? Dogs have been killed in the name of the law innumerable times. If a dog acts too much like an animal, if it bites a child for example, we generally kill it. Isn’t there something funny about a person potentially being sent to jail for being cruel and inhuman to an animal, when we are cruel and inhuman to animals all the time? If Michael Vick is being punished, we should all be punished.

Dog fighting is not for me, I’d rather take a dog from it’s family, train it to act the way I want, to hold it’s bodily functions in check, to eat only when I let it, to fence it in boundaries with an electronic shock collar, to train it to retrieve dead birds for me. Dog fighting is not a common American pastime, but at least the dogs have a 50-50 chance in the fight, which is more than can be said of the prancing deer in the scope of a rifle with an 8 round clip. Punishing Michael Vick for his cruelty to animals is a sick symptom of our own hypocrisy.

Dogs have it damn good. When we have crushed every wild animal species into extinction, dogs will probably still be by our side, and the pigs, cows, chickens, and turkeys will still be in concentration camps, awaiting slaughter. We have trained Michael Vick to be a warrior. He is a football player after all, and we pay him millions of dollars to go out to battle on the field. If we want to eat meat, kill animals, build houses, cities, roads, and infrastructure which consequently kills and displaces animals, then who are we to say that Michael Vick can’t fight dogs, and kill them if they don’t perform the way he wants?

That Big Fake Indian Again

“What is History, but a fable agreed upon?” Napoleon asked that question; and the answer all these years later must still be something like “not much.” History is written by the winners, and these fables generally support the status quo.

1492, Columbus sailed the ocean blue, and discovered America. Here we have a little piece of history which has been taught in schools across America for all our lifetimes. The only problem is, in point of fact, it’s only half true. Columbus did sail the ocean blue, but there were people living on the land he found. According to white history, Columbus discovered something, but what about the history of the discovered, the ignored history? According to this version of history, and likely a more accurate interpretation of fact, Columbus and our ancestors who followed him were invaders, not discoverers. After all, if we acknowledge that we are all of us a human species, and therefore equal, we can’t very well have discovered a place where we, as human beings, were already living.

The Americas were conquered by Europeans; bit by bit, inch by inch, dead or displaced Indian by dead or displaced Indian. This is a fact that even fable cannot ignore, though it tries. Ward Churchill was just fired for retelling history: “fabrications, misrepresentations and plagiarism.” But how can a Native American studies professor teach the history of his trade if the content he is forced to adhere to is made up of fables of the winning team?

Ward Churchill has written more than 10 books, and published numerous peer reviewed scholarly articles which have garnered him critical acclaim in the Academic community. I’ve read quite a few, and must honestly say that the guy was pretty meticulous in citing his sources. He was saying far out things and it seemed to me as a reader that he tirelessly gave credit where credit was due, and as much as possible tried to let other sources help him along in his arguments. In all that written work, I’m sure there were fabrications, misrepresentations, and forgotten documentation, especially if the reviewers were comparing his work to accepted history, which by its nature is made up of fabrications, misrepresentations and probably some good plagiarism to boot. What Churchill did do, I’m sure, was try to give his students a more accurate picture of the truth than the one they had been provided by the biased western history that they’d been taught all their lives.

He was a professor of mine in College. The things he said were so foreign to me and flew so in the face of my whole conception of truth and reality as an American, that at first I battled him all the way; but I was forced by the weight of his work, and the logic of what he said, to come around and discover the limited nature of what I had come to accept as truth. He offered a new pair of glasses to students like me who were used to the classic American shades, which have always shown the conquerors of this land in a most favorable light. That new perspective may be why he was voted best professor again and again by the student body. In fact last year he was voted best professor again, but the school didn’t award him the prize because of the ongoing investigation into the accuracy of his work which had begun when an article he wrote, which likened some of the people in the World Trade Center to little Eichmanns, got picked up and turned into a story by the right wing media. I’m getting tired of this ridiculousness.

Ward Churchill is a passionate character, a big, wrinkly, smoky, grump of a man, who I wouldn’t defend if it wasn’t for the content of his work. He’s a prick. But he is an incredibly smart man, who sees things outside the box of the status quo, and who is rightly outraged at the wrongs this Country has perpetrated with impunity. He was probably the best professor I had in my college career. So what if he’s not that much of an Indian by blood quotient? We are all human, and should be allowed to call ourselves whatever we want. The Jerk was a white man born a poor black child for goodness sakes.

OK, we know that the people in the World Trade Center weren’t “little Eichmanns,” and if they were, they were really, really little. But what about the fact that there were CIA offices in the WTC which would have technically made it a legitimate military target? There are so many ways to look at one thing that the concept of “truth” is really a funny thing to try for. Truth is relative. The best truth is all we can look for as a people. What truth will best serve us as a species? That is the one we should be looking for.

The truth we are adhering to now is largely failing us. Just turn on CNN or FOX and you will most probably see some atrociousness of our American Country being defended, and made to look righteous. Where do I start, the Iraq War, Guantanamo, building a fence to divide our country from Mexico, the defense in our media of practices which destroy the environment and don’t encourage the use of alternative energies which would begin to help in the only “war” worth fighting (The War on Global Warming)?

We are the same as the fundamentalist terrorists who we call the enemy, they are telling lies as truth just as vehemently (often more so), and often more violently; but like us, they are also simply forgetting to look for the best truth for the human species. Thinking in terms of them and us is the problem, and we are just as guilty of it as they are. Too much of the collective consciousness in our country seems to be based in the idea that we are Americans before we are human beings. There can be no other explanation for what we are doing to peoples across the world. How could we legitimate doing those things to ourselves? If we decided to Shock and Awe Los Angeles as part of our response to 9/11, could we have pulled it off? We pulled it off in Baghdad, a city no more involved in executing the attack on the World Trade Center than Los Angeles was. In fact, there were likely more WMD’s in LA.

This firing of Ward is simply another symptom of an addiction to an out of date truth. Conservatives, who can’t stand the thought of thinking about reality in a different way, are trying to do to Academia what they are doing to our Constitution, tearing it apart so that people are controlled in what they can say and do. Access to the best information possible is being eliminated bit by bit. We need people like Ward Churchill in Academia because like Galileo he is willing to speak a different version of the truth. After being censured for heresy for saying that the earth was not the center of the solar system, Galileo was vindicated, his version of the truth became the best version of the truth by the best minds who followed him. I can only hope that in the not too distant future we can face the truth of our reality as Americans, and also as a human species. That means acknowledging the out-of-date truth we are working under. It means admitting our imperfections. We have been wrong, and wrong, and wrong again, we have perpetrated crimes against humanity. So long as we deny the truth, we are still wrong, and we will keep doing wrong because we are not acting out of truth. It does not have to be so.

Just because we admit to conquering this land as criminals, destroying the environment unremittingly, killing our fellow men across borders, allowing ourselves to be taken over by giant corporations which are taking control of reality and ending life as we once knew it, does not mean we will be punished. We will be punished for not acknowledging the truth. Admitting our faults would allow the space to start doing something different. Until then, welcome to the status quo.

Discovery

Since the beginning of time there have been new discoveries by man. A few thousand years ago it may have been the discovery of an undiscovered edible berry. Or maybe the discovery of another tribe of people who you more than likely didn’t get along with because they believed in Lord Katatata and your tribe believed in the Magic Fairy. You probably fought, and you didn’t want to learn their language. Back in those days you may have discovered a few new sources of water or a few new hunting grounds in your lifetime.

Things are quite different now. It is remarkable how many discoveries there are in today’s world of 6 billion people. We get a new vacuum cleaner about every 5 minutes. We discover new drugs all the damn time, with new ailments to support them. We are still discovering new species of life here on the planet, but not as fast as we extinct them.

But there are a few discoveries over the last few hundred years which have really made a splash. In 1206, Al-Jazari designed a reciprocating piston engine. That was a big one. Down the road aways we got the industrial revolution. We found ourselves with planes, trains, and automobiles, with the extra special global warming bonus package. Have fun with electricity and burning fossil fuels, enjoy the world travel, and we’ll serve that up with your imminent demise on the side. The telephone: Big! Computers and the internet. Holy cow. Here we all are. In touch. Other than that we’ve just been fucking like crazy, and enjoying the landscaping of our overpopulation. We still starve the poor, kill people we disagree with, and act with a total disregard for reality, or with any degree of humility in relation to our place in the world.

We still act like God created the world for us. Can it be that we still haven’t discovered that it’s not true? We evolved here. We got really smart. We’ve discovered that we are made of the same stuff as the trees and the stars, and each other. We know we are one human species. We’ve gone pretty far out in space and we can’t seem to find another planet we can live on. Yet we still treat this one like a disposable piece of garbage, even though this garbage heap we live on, this beautiful mothership earth, will be the one who throws us out. It’s time for us to wake up to the discoveries which are relevant today.

Remember the canary. We used to bring a canary down into the mine with us, and if it died, we knew to get the hell out of there. What should we think in this present world where over 50 species go extinct every day to make room for more Wal-Marts and oil exploration? That’s like 50 canarys lying dead around us every day. Yet we just keep digging. We are all made up of the same matter, even as oil and Wal-Mart. We are all particles in this infinite universe. We are all connected.

We are smaller than we act, but we are bigger than we think. There is still room for spirituality, love, beauty, light, hope, truth, and justice, in a new paradigm of thought which can allow us to cease our ignorance and foolishness as a species. We can’t keep killing each other. It’s bad form. We can’t just call someone a terrorist and then think it’s OK to kill them or lock them up. We can’t just keep using this old technology which is filling the atmosphere with pollution which is really going to heat things up.

Let’s put the fire out under our ass before it kills us before we can. We know what corporations are doing in concert with governments around the world. They (and we) are paralyzing populations with dumb boxes, branding, sales, and greed; turning them (and ourselves) into perfect consumers, but terrible people. This is not OK. We should really change our ways. We’d be a lot happier if we did. If we stopped trying to be what they want us to be, “normal,” good Christian citizens, and decided to be ourselves, think how fun it would be, and what a better, freer, world we could create. We have to find that little beautiful spirit we all know we had when we were kids. That sparkly eyed dreamer, that little kid is you. We should celebrate ourselves and be free to be ourselves, and live to live great dreams, to be the caretakers of this planet which is our home. We can still dream. We can still act. There is still time. But we have to turn off the TV. We have to join forces with all those who want to see a better world, and we need to go out and convince the people who are still sleeping that they want it just as bad.

Big News

So the Doctors removed 5 polyps from GW Bush's ass, and he's safe and sound. They found the polyps during a colonoscopy. I just have one question. Why couldn't they find his head stuck up there somewhere? His head must be so far up his ass, that even a medical anal probe can't find it. The diagnosis for the country is not good.

Watered Down Logic

I like water. It keeps me alive. I like living in Aspen. It’s full of really fantastic people, and a whole lot of schmoozy wallet peacocks, all of whom are harmless in their obviousness, and are easy enough to avoid on any deep level. Hunter Thompson called them greedheads, but I think their heads are small, how else to explain how much bling they need? Generally these people have a mansion, or are building one, “another middle school on Red Mountain,” as I recently heard someone describe what they look like under construction. Or maybe they live in Starwood, which has lately been slightly out of vogue, likely because of the acceleration of a Nazi-like glee for punishing perfectly good drunk drivers, even though they are driving on empty mountain roads at 2:00 am, harmless to most everyone but themselves, or other drunk drivers. Close proximity to town-Aspen has become supremely valuable and uber-cool, and so the distant Starwood has lost the star status it held in the 80's. Nowadays the greedheads want the town. The more in-town you are, the bigger the dollar sign on your forehead.

These people are harmlessly desperate for attention, just like the rest of us, but instead of trying to garner interest by having something interesting to say (or in my case just being slightly crazy), these people just buy 200,000 dollar cars and a leer jet. Generally, much enjoyment can be gleaned from watching them, and allowing them to kiss your ass while they despise you, and mutually demand that we “do something soon.” There is really nothing to this, other than that you both understand that you cannot have too many friends in this town, even ones that totally bewilder you, and you them.

But I really wanted to talk about water, ballet, and the Aspen Music School, officially sponsored by FIJI water. The Aspen Music School is an entity that a member of this community wants to be friendly with. It is better that way. Life is easier. People like you; yet people still get murdered all day in Darfur, where FIJI water is rare as the likelihood of a man landing on the moon in 1823, where the idea of potable tap-water for the general population is a distant dream.

In fact, as someone who grew up in this funny little mountain town, I really have to say that drinking FIJI water in Aspen is as ridiculous as drinking toilet water in Aspen (I have yet to try the latter, but I regret having drank my share of the former). We have the best damn mountain drinking water I’ve ever tasted here. I love our local tap water. I think there is a guy out there who actually bottles and sells it. They probably have a taste for the stuff in the Hamptons, or some other far away place full of rich people where it makes no sense to drink water from if you don’t live there. But from a greedhead perspective it does make sense that we drink FIJI water in Aspen. It is the crème de la crème of water. It comes all the way from Fiji after all, so it must be special. It comes from especially far away, that is for sure. Here we are in Aspen with a Canary Initiative to green our ways, everybody is buying a Prius and are guilting each other with footprint lingo. Water may be the most disgusting sign of the impending doom of consumer culture. We have perfectly good water to drink from our taps, and yet we choose to buy water from the store, and we rarely if ever consider the environmental impact of our purchases or the significance of our habit.

If we want to be special in Aspen, then we should stop doing something as stupid as drinking bottled water, especially since our wonderful tap water tastes so good. Isn’t the price tag on our town big enough to give the water from our taps a golden hue? At the music tent watching Al Gore speak tomorrow, I hope I don’t see anyone drinking FIJI water. If you care about our planet, then why would you drink water which has been packaged in one-time-use bottles, made of petroleum, then transported on giant ships which burn the nastiest fuel in the world, across the sea, and into a port city where it is loaded onto trucks and moved across our roadways burning nasty exhaust all the way? Why would we drink bottled water at all? We should send all the bottled water in this country to parts of Africa and the rest of the world where the people don’t even have tap water, let alone the privilege to drink it. The word on the street is loud and clear: bottled water is not cool.

Be Vigilant

Today, White House Press Secretary Tony Snow repeatedly said we need to be "vigilant" in the face of Al-Qaeda's quest to destroy us. He was addressing Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff's comment about his "gut-feeling" that we are under increased threat of terrorist attack here in the good old USA. One of the reasons he cited was that The Terrorists seem to like the summer. I can remember the last time we were attacked, and it was nearly 6 years ago. There would be many constipated American Citizens today if, after these long, war-crime-ful years, we were steadily vigilant.

What does it mean to be vigilant? Does it mean we should report any Muslim looking person we see to the nearest authorities? Is that vigilance? I think it just means "be scared." We tend to consume more when we are afraid; and if we know one thing here in America, it's that a good American is a consuming American. If their behavior is any indication, what with this preemptive war on, our lovely Cuban torture base, and the lies that are told in Washington to keep anything close to an open, honest leadership alive, our government seems to be lacking in guts and feelings. As for me, unless you can give me something more productive to do with my "vigilance" than sitting around being scared of the increased risk of attack, I think I'd rather the leadership kept their gut-feelings to themselves. Then again, having this story in the news these last two days sure did help out the markets. The DOW reached a record high today. It seems the big corporations and investors believe in the American citizens ability to be vigilant; vigilant consumers R-US.

Realistic Optimism

The United States is an amazing country. The most powerful country which has ever existed on this strange earth, with all its strange inhabitants, is an interesting place to live. It is sometimes frustrating how odd we are, and how slow we are to catch up to the closest thing to reality that the small but expanding minds of man can understand.

There are a plethora of signposts which say “Hey Powerful People, Get Real, Change Course Now!” We’ve entered into a preemptive war. We’ve stayed in it even though there is every reason to get out, the most important one being that we should not have been there in the first place; and how can we make a wrong right by continuing to do it? In the face of logic and science, many of us still choose to believe that some God is out there pulling the strings, punishing or rewarding us.

We are a confused bunch of earthlings, busy as can be, screwing things up. We are polluting the earth as if we’re in hurry, we are crushing other species as if we are worried that they take up too much space, we are still killing each other as if we don’t believe that the rest of our species are our brothers and sisters.

Yet I have some faith left in this funny huge country of ours, just as I have faith in our species to collectively figure out that we can easily do better than we are doing, and allowing to be done.

On television today, during a speech by our little Bush of a President, CNN stated: “we are sorry to interrupt this broadcast to bring you this breaking story; [blah blah blah]… Oakland airport shuts down because an unidentified man ran down an exit ramp [how scary].” I was discouraged. When we can’t even concentrate on what our idiot of a President is saying long enough to criticize it, how are we ever going to start doing better?

I turned on CNN again this evening, and watching them tear the President’s speech apart, watching them articulate how ridiculous this war is getting, made me thank the Lord [in this case Anderson Cooper]. Here is the great thing about our [so called] democracy: we can always change our mind. The speed of our communication can only help us. Even though it takes “press pound to leave a numeric page, press 2 to talk to a psychiatrist, press 3 if you know what to do after the beep” just to leave a message with a cell phone rigged to make you use more minutes, you can still share information fast with your circle of friends and family; even more so with the internet.

Our media has the power to change the course of history. Even though they played a huge role in getting us into war in Iraq (just remember Wolf Blitzer taking us on the play by play through the “threat of WMD in Iraq,” and then through the Shock and Awe campaign), here they are now trumping up the peoples support to get out of there. I remember a few years ago when most people I talked to were at least sympathetic of us going to war in Iraq; they would get into arguments with me about it. If we were a better country we would not have gone into this illegitimate war in the beginning. A healthier media, more interested in spreading truth, than generating revenue, would have reminded us at the time that even if Iraq had WMD, and lots of them, we had no right to go to war with them. They would have told us the truth that the country was not all that bad off under Saddam. They would have told us how unwelcoming he was to terrorist groups, and how little interest he would have had in ever attacking America. We were Bushwhacked, sure, but we were also misled by a media who was blinded by the $$$ signs attached to the revenue a war could generate for them and their shareholders. But by the nature of their greed, they now have to give us what we want, more anti-war rhetoric, because we are tired of spending so much money on a losing battle, and lots of Paris Hilton, because we are stupid.

It is too bad we are going to end up leaving Iraq in such tatters. But if it does end up a terrorist strong hold, and as Bush puts it “a base out of which THEY will attack us,” who can we really blame but ourselves? We deserve it. After all, we declared war on a country which had never attacked us (bad form any way you look at it). It could be that some of our other far-less-than-innocent ignorances are contributing to our misbehavior. Learning from our mistakes could lead to recovery. It may be that the dumber we get, the closer we are to getting smart.