More Stuff People Say

Some more banalities and absurdities came to mind, so I thought I would do a sequel.


11. “The government is a business.”

The government is not a business. The government is not a business. In other words, the government is not a business. It is a government. It has a Treasury. It prints money. It has a GDP. The economy does not work like your family’s budget. When the money’s tight, you hit the breaks on spending. The country needs money in the economy. It needs people making and buying things. Everyone understands war is beneficial to the economy—because of the spending. Why does the understanding stop when war does?


12. “Guns don’t kill people, people kill people.”

Gun violence is a problem unique to the United States. It happens here. It is a national health problem, and it should be treated as such. The more guns in a society, the more gun deaths in that society. Conclusion: guns kill people.


13. “Terrorists are promised 72 virgins in the afterlife.”

This is Islamophobic nonsense. When Muslims die there are virgins with supposedly beautiful eyes (called houris) who keep you company. Paradise is a sensuous place in Islam. And women get them, too. The number 72 is debatable, depending on sources. Does the Quran say if you murder infidels, you get 72 prostitutes? Um, no. Besides, killing non-Muslims is forbidden in the Quran. “There is no compulsion in religion” (Quran 2:256).


14. “All lives matter.”

This is tribalism: Cops kill Black people. Black people speak up. The “Black Lives Matter” movement begins. Whites get sensitive and seek to change the subject by saying “All Lives Matter” (how adorable), thus making it about “people” and not about White people killing Black people. Instead of “All Lives Matter,” just say “I—and my White tribe—didn’t do anything wrong! We couldn’t have!” Yeah, just say that. And then proudly display your Thin Blue Line flag.


15. “Capitalism is the best system.”

The point is to improve systems, not to praise them. Capitalism is a system of political-economy. It has a violent, one could say horrifying, history. Has it produced impressive results like medical technology? Yes, but this does not outweigh the body count and misery. Capitalism is anti-democratic, concentrates power, and holds the worker in contempt. The firms we are told that represent the height of capitalist achievement despise it: Google, Amazon, Apple. They want nothing to do with a competitive free market. Nothing.


16. “People are naturally greedy.”

I have written about this. You can just read the book. It comes up on the blog quite a bit as well. If humans were [insert negative thing] we wouldn’t be here. We are naturally compassionate and share a universal moral core. This doesn’t mean we’re angels, but we’re not demons either. Just read the bloody book.


17. “That’s just your opinion.” / “It’s subjective.”

This popular protestation simply says, “We all have views, and yours is of no greater value!” This suggests that the playing field is level, we all know the same amount, and then we exchange opinions—all of which are of equal value. But is the world-class chef’s opinion of equal value with the college student who thinks chicken nuggets are the greatest thing? This is not to say that the student should stop liking chicken nuggets, only that the chef’s views are far more informed and therefore not equal to the student’s.


18. “I made something of myself!”

Why is it every time I hear this declaration, it’s an affluent White male? Right around 100 percent of the time. Does the Honduran woman who has three jobs work hard? I have never heard it over the noise made by White men. This does not mean the White make didn’t work hard; he just did not factor in the good fortune he enjoyed along the way. He didn’t spend his formative years in a refugee camp, for a start. Oh, and he’s White and male. The list is quite long.


19. “The poor are lazy and stupid; the rich are smart and work hard.”

Okay, people don’t say this one out loud, but they sure as hell think it. Affluence is by and large the byproduct of privilege. That is not to say the person didn’t work hard (see point 18), but they had a tail wind. The working poor likely did not enjoy such a tail wind, and the bills under those circumstances are nigh impossible to overcome. The economy is not configured to help the working poor; it is, however, quite friendly to the affluent. So, next time you congratulate yourself, do some accounting—the kind that makes one uncomfortable.


20. “The Democrats give all the money away.”

This is not-so-thinly veiled racism. It is also fiction. The Democrats do not tend to the needs of the working poor. They might support more aid programs than the GOP does, but they give money away?? Obama, who was labeled a socialist, was as Wall Street-friendly as they come. Did he give money away hand over fist to Black Americans? No. Do racists and conservatives get tired of being wrong?

Stuff People Say

 

I chose ten things people say a lot and are wrong. Though I have touched on some of these in the past, I wanted them all in one post. Enjoy.


1. “Everything happens for a reason.”

No, it doesn’t. I guess technically, yes. But when people say this, they are not speaking about biology or physics. They have something more cosmic in mind. God killed that little girl with leukemia to … why did he do that? The thinking tends to go one of two ways: (1) God is mysterious and we’ll never know, and (2) maybe God was teaching us a lesson. Both are juvenile.


2. “Those people have been fighting for thousands of years.”

This is what many people reflexively say about the Middle East. I guess it’s supposed to make one sound deep and sophisticated. They are neither. The tensions and violence in the Middle East are a modern phenomenon. Much of it has to do with European and US manipulation. And how many Arab states are at war with one another? Zero.


3. “There’s no black and white, just shades of gray.”

This is part of “the truth is in the middle” nonsense. There are Democrats and there are Republicans—and the truth is in the middle? The halfway point between wrong and wrong is wrong. CNN and Fox? The halfway point between crap news and crap news is crap news. Sometimes things are black and white.


4. “Possession is nine-tenths of the law.”

This is not a law. This is not anything. Yet, people love to say it. Again, it’s supposed to make them sound deep and sophisticated. There is a similar principle in ancient Roman law; and early Scotland comes up a lot. But if I steal your watch, and then I wear that watch, it is not automatically my watch.


5. “America is a republic, not a democracy.”

[sigh] I hear this one a lot. A republic is a form of government where representatives govern for the citizenry. A democracy is a form of government where the power of governance resides with the people—with the demos, meaning “people.” The United States is best characterized as a democratic republic. The either-or is misleading. When I hear this, it’s like the person expects dramatic music to accompany their announcement. More depth and sophistication.


6. “Colonialism improved Africa (etc.).”

It. did. not. Colonialism spelled hardship, death, and misery for millions of people—and not just in Africa. The European powers deployed soldiers, projected economic power, killed, and tortured people. In the Belgian Congo alone, as many as ten million dead. All the while, the colonized were spoken of as animals. Read Aime Cesaire or Frantz Fanon. Read something, just stop saying this.


7. “Religion started all the major wars.”

Even the wars that were explicitly about or inspired by religion—the Crusades, the Wars of Religion—were about power politics. I struggle to think of a war that was a legitimate theological dispute. This piece of nonsense is a way of condemning religion; it would be better if people condemned ignorance instead. 


8. “If you love your freedom, thank a vet.”

I have family who are vets. This one is not about the military. I have defended the military for years and how they have been mistreated time and again. The United States has been attacked twice in its history: (1) in 1814 by the British and (2) 2001 by al-Qaida. We spend about a trillion dollars a year on defense for what exactly? And the “thank a vet” message has more to do with Lockheed Martin and less to do with the rank and file.


9. “The Bible has been translated so many times.”

Wrong-o. The Bible has been translated once maybe twice. It was written in Greek, Aramaic, and ancient Hebrew. It was then translated into Latin. Then it was translated into English using the original languages and the Latin translations. So, once and in some cases twice. How many people were involved in its writing? Now that’s a lot.


10. “Tomatoes are a fruit.”

They are vegetables. Not fruit. “Fruits” and “vegetables” are culinary concepts. Biologists and botanists do not deal in fruits and vegetables. Plus, cucumbers, zucchini, pumpkins, bell peppers, okra, and egg plants are all fruit?? And strawberries are not?

Josie Long

 Josie Long is an English comic of some renown. This is a 2013 show she did entitled “Cara Josephine.”

The show is charming, very funny, and delightfully odd. I take in a lot of stand-up, but this one is remarkable. No one is doing what Long did in this show. I believe she’s still at it—and if she ever comes to Chicago, I will be going. I hope the club has handicap access.

People have asked me on numerous occasions: “Greg, do you think you’ll ever get married?”

I have two stock replies to this question:

Stock answer #1: “No.”

Stock answer #2: “Why on earth would I do that to myself? The number of times I have seen a married couple and thought to myself ‘That looks nice; I feel like I’m missing out’ is zero. Most times I shudder and think ‘Better you than me.’ The horror."

However, if I ever crossed paths with someone like Josie Long, y’know ... I’d consider it.

EPISODE 23: ADAM SMITH

I talk about my man, Adam Smith. And briefly, Alice Cooper. And … yeah, that’s it.

 

The Death Penalty

Christa Pike’s case has been in the news quite a bit. Everyone seems to be talking about her “botched” execution. Many of the discussions seem to revolve around better ways to execute someone. Much less energy is spent on whether we should be executing human beings in the first place.

The DOD put another log on the fire. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth has said the firing-squad execution of Nidal Hasan will be livestreamed. Hasan, a former Army major, was behind the Fort Hood murders in 2009. Execution by firing squad has not taken place in the United States in a century.

I taught the death penalty for years, until I switched the segment to the prison system in general. I felt that once you understand the prison system, you basically have a grip on capital punishment.

What I learned in those years is that there are zero valid arguments in support of the death penalty. Zero. They are either wrong or amount to revenge and blood lust.

Here are three:

• The death penalty deters crime.

Wrong. There are no criminological data suggesting crime goes down in areas where the death penalty is used. According to Amnesty International, US states that have the death penalty have higher rates of crime than those that do not have it.

• The death penalty is cheaper.

Wrong. Capital cases are more expensive than non-capital cases. Legal costs, jury selection, specialized incarceration, and appeals all add up to costing the tax payer 2.5 to 5 times the cost, reports the Death Penalty Information Center.

• The death penalty is justice.

Wrong. The death penalty is revenge, plain and simple. The thinking goes: you have committed a crime so heinous that you have made it clear you should be removed from society. So the response to murder is murder? That, and the families of the victims want closure. “Closure” here means satisfaction. They want the perpetrator to experience fear and death. This is not justice. Justice is treating people like human beings and, yes, maybe removing them from society so they cannot harm others—but to get them care.

Another issue concerning the death penalty—and this applies to the prison system in general—is that it is racist and classist. Some 40 percent of those sentenced to death are Black (1977-present). Black men, however, make up 6.5 percent of the population. And those on death row are typically poor, to the tune of 95 percent of them. The numbers are clear: the death penalty applies more to brown and poor people than anyone else. And again, this can be said of the entire prison system. It is basically a storage facility for people we don’t like.

Plum Suit

 

I gotta say, I look pretty snazzy in my new plum suit. I sent this photo to some close peeps, and my father’s wife—who maintains it’s aubergine, not plum—responded to the photo with an egg plant emoji. “Oh dear.” I then urged her son (my step-brother) to explain to her what an egg plant emoji means. Hilarity ensued.

Rebellion

I was wrong for so many years: for basically the entirety of the 1990s, I had an immature, unsophisticated sense of what rebellion was all about. It’s embarrassing now, but I spent my fair share of time at punk and industrial shows. I wore a biker jacket. Long hair for a time. Lived in bars. You get the idea.

I was taken with various symbols of defiance: Keith Richards, Jack Kerouac, Tom Waits, and Hunter S. Thompson. These were my go-to references—especially Kerouac. I was taken in by the aesthetic put on display by these men. It all felt a bit rebellious, which was very attractive to me. They all offered, in their own way, a middle finger to the Establishment. They didn’t adhere to orthodoxy or convention or established standards. 

Punk, too, was rebellious. I discovered the Dead Kennedys in my teens. Lead singer Jello Biafra’s lyrics turned my suburban upbringing upside-down. The DK’s were … well, rebellious. They took a hammer to the vase of conformity.

Then it turned out the Ramones were Republicans, Johnny Rotten was an aging clown, and my beloved Jello Biafra also became a caricature of himself. Punk’s mask fell off. It was not rebellious at all. It was artistically rebellious at the time, sure. But actually rebellious? It was a mode of dress—one that was highly uniform and consistent. Conformist?

By this time I had started to grow up. The year was 2002—age 29, mind you. I ceased to care about all that stuff. I began reading human rights reports. My attention was instead centered on unnecessary human suffering, the mechanics of power, and the writings of Noam Chomsky.

Many “heroes” became buffoons, gave up the hard living, or were dead (Kerouac died a pitiful drunk in 1969, Thompson died a cartoon of himself). Now don’t get me wrong, there is nothing wrong with hanging up the booze and the smokes (Waits and Richards are both clean living). Nelson Algren was never a hard drinker; he did, however, spend time in bars talking to the defeated and the downtrodden.

And I’m a bit incredulous about the whole hard-living myth anyway. Thompson was seriously well read and wrote a ton; one cannot do that and be, um, compromised. Richards spent an enormous amount of time in the studio and on stage.

They did engage in unwholesome behavior, for sure; but I think much of it is more legendary than anything. We love talking about it. We relish the thought of people having fun, being famous, and getting drunk or acting crazy all the time. We delight in lives we cannot live.

An example of this is Prince. I saw an interview with one of his sound engineers after he died. I think it was Susan Rogers. At any rate, she said that women did show up to the studio a few times. But Prince would start working, and the ladies would get bored and leave. Not quite the lifestyle we hear about.

It’s the mystique of these people. The image is a seductive one. I fell for it: the chimera, the illusion.

Chomsky taught me what a rebel actually is. It’s a person who is not afraid to apply the same standards to his or her own country. It’s a person who asks, How am I contributing to this problem? It’s a defender of the underdog.

Rebelliousness is thinking or behavior that actually runs counter to power’s narrow interests. Monitoring and speaking out about the banks, the Defense contractors, US foreign policy—this all indicates a truly rebellious orientation. 

The centers of power do not want people becoming better educated and talking about what they have learned. And they do not want us caring about one another. Power benefits when people are divided and alienated. Power benefits when people are distracted.

In the 1990s I was distracted. I was preoccupied with the image, the mystique, the pose, the posturing, the persona, the affectation of rebelliousness. There is nothing rebellious about drinking, or smoking, or loud music, or tattoos, or various modes of dress. None of these perturbs power one bit. They are merely activities.

Rebellion is fighting for justice, speaking out for those who cannot defend themselves, and standing up to power. Socrates was put to death because he was a threat. Bars and loud music and hard drinking and black leather do not pose a threat. Power does not care about you engaging in these activities. The FBI has never infiltrated a group based on their record collections.

The 1990s are in a deep hole under much dirt. Rock-n-roll is a balloon that has lost half of its air. The post-WWII concept of “cool” no longer has cultural currency; it is a goner. I for one, am less distracted. I have literally and figuratively sobered up. I desperately hope the culture joins me. Many defenseless, voiceless people need us to actually be rebellious.