TO REFLECT IS HUMAN, TO SHINE IS DIVINE

America can be brutal, a little bit of Gitmo in all of us and waiting around every corner. This morning was a good example. It’s never fun being awoken at 6am by bangings on the door and bargings on in by what sound like Israeli storm troopers. It’s small consolation that it’s only (?!) the landlord, doing his job without proxy nor finesse. Such are the trials of renting, or rather sub-leasing, an apartment, borrowing a piece of the rock rather than buying it. That’s the problem with cheap hotels also, not the funkiness itself which can be lovable, but the funky attitudes of your neighbors, who can be self-centered and petty, no matter how politically correct. You can hardly blame the landlord being pissed at irregularities in his complexes, though the methods may be a bit heavy-handed. For all he knows I may be cooking up meth in the bathtub, our modern alternative to gin. There’s more than one way to beat Depression. Myself I feel like the junkie whose life revolves around that one all-consuming fix, whether good or bad, in this case my wife, something of a soup Nazi herself on bad days. If she has a bad day, then so do I; she’ll make sure of that. She’s perennially concerned that my minimalistic lifestyle vis a vis possessions, or lack thereof, is basically a smokescreen for the fact that I’m a loser and she’ll end up penniless and faceless. She may be right. Financial statements mean nothing to her. Actually I feel like my main accomplishment in life is that I’ve been at least marginally successful without becoming the victim of it all, possessed by my possessions. How do you explain that to a Buddhist? It should be easy. It’s not. Shacking up in Hollywood I feel literally like a kid with his first apartment. At my age that’s cool….

Right now might be a good time to thank you, my faithful readers, who heeded my call to subscribe, for what I promised would be a thrill-a-minute through the wacky ways of Thailand and assorted arcane geographic locations. How did I know that the visa papers for my wife would show up at the door in Thailand all of a sudden calling her to interview? A few short months later, here we are, far from Thailand and even farther from the open road and open skies of travel. Actually if you consider LA the 77^th province of Thailand, then I guess we aren’t so far away after all, for what that’s worth, on the surface probably not much. By reputation that’s all there is, surface. LA loses itself, or finds itself, in chockablock development, strip mall after car lot after weenie palace after homeless hovel, 1056 shades of nothingness all somehow blending itself into something quintessentially American and marketing itself to the world as ‘the dream.’ Go figure. So here I’m stuck in superficial LA, the epitome of everything I’ve ever held useless, all the while wishing it cared about me more than I cared about it. It’s a love/hate relationship you see, the fact that I’ve never been very successful here defining the logic by which I fail to see its benefit, that and the fact that it can be one goddawful lonely place. That’s what Tang’s here for. She thinks I’m here for her. After all Thailand gives superficiality a good name, or at least a better one. They love it here and in Las Vegas, the more mindless the better. So as we dig our heels in here, sketchy at best are my goals for this blog because there’s no mo’ Thailand in the immediate future nor more travel either. My God! I’m stuck! So far from God, so close to Mexico! I’ll find other writing projects. That’s why I started this blog anyway; I was doing so much travel and had no other current writing projects. So what do I do here now? If you wanted to hear ruminations on individual pasts and collective futures, you’d be reading the other blog. You’re not.

It’s funny, not this blog or the other one either, but the fact that this blog has more subscribers, mostly friends, but hardly any comment. My friends are like that. The other ‘time travel blog’ has more comment, especially whenever I talk about Guatemala. They’re different from Thailand’s fans. I don’t want a forum anyway, so illiterate is the general populace, and I wouldn’t have the heart to tell people to learn how to spell before sending in comments. So what do I do now, talk about Obama? If life is partially defined by those moments of epiphany when you realize ‘I’m not alone,’ then Barack’s ascension has yielded one. I was always skeptical of his halo effect, unsure whether it was naturally settling upon him every time he spoke or whether he was consciously invoking it, or whether like lightning on its way to the ground, a spark leaps up to greet it, a mutuality confirmable only in slow motion. I still don’t know, but others have also noticed. In the ‘Onion,’ an LA-based humor rag, it’s current headline reads, “Obama Practices Looking off into Future Pose,” going into detail about his 54-degree chin tilt, his 1.43cm eye aperture and his head rotated 37 degrees to the left. “When you look to the future, you look to the left.” It’s hilarious. Considering that my previous moments of epiphany with artistic media included the songs “Positively Fourth Street” by Bob Dylan and “Waiting ‘Round to Die” by Townes Van Zandt, I guess I’m mellowing out in my old age, though many people miss the close connection between horror and humor.

So where does that leave us? Still looking for a theme for this blog I guess. Ads for single Thai girls still pop up, so I guess that’s a cosmological constant. Frankly I’m not sure why they’re such a hot commodity, given the generally pathetic level of their English and their suitors’ Thai language skills. Here’s a hint-- actually that’s a help, not a hindrance. They’re out of their minds. Fortunately they’re into their bodies. But others are getting into the game fast. Colombia’s got some girls on the market guaranteed to melt your hardened heart or money back. Just take your pick: doctor, lawyer, or architect; brunette, brunette or brunette; Cali, Bogota’ or a smaller city called Manizales that seems to have little else to distinguish itself. We’re not talking about funky TJ border-town behemoths cheaper-by-the-kilo, either, but some forty-five kilo cuties that could charm the pants off a diplomat. So where does this blog stand in the rankings now? Well, we’re averaging fifteen to twenty subscribers according to Feedburner (I don’t know why it should fluctuate, but it does) and somewhere in the lower 600,000’s in the Technorati ‘authority’ rankings (hey, we started in the lower nine millions), so that says something. If you Google the words ‘Thailand’ and ‘Timbuktu’ together, then I’ll still come up number one, for what that’s worth. Perhaps more importantly, these blogs do get picked up by other websites for use, kind of like a poor man’s syndicated column. You shop XYZ’s website for underwear and below there’s the first few lines of my blog selected by one of their, uh, selectors. If you like then you click and voila!, you’re back here with the guy in his over-the-pub compartment out by Heathrow with planes flying over and pretending it’s his own private 9-11 mini-moment. It might as well be LA.

So I’ll still do this blog when the inspiration strikes, though its goals are now murky. I’ll do the other already-written blog every day regardless. Sound sketchy? Lit’s a wide-open ballgame now, the publishing business following the lead of the recording industry, or lack thereof, MySpace-type sites for writers springing up like mushrooms in cow shit. When I can not only publish my own stuff, but get it listed and sold on Amazon made-to-order, why wait a year for a return to my query letter from some agent who’s overworked and underpaid already? There’s food for thought. Publishing companies themselves haven’t read new work in years. But in the meantime I think I’ll do a blog on world music. Though I’m not really qualified (who is?), I can certainly review the many shows scheduled for California Plaza here in LA this summer- including Seun Kuti, Tcheka, Son de Madera, and Ricardo Lemvo, one big world music festival scattered throughout the summer, and all for free. The opening show, ‘Miles from India,’ featuring the music of Miles Davis played by a combination of Jazz and Indian musicians, was incredible. Stay tuned. There’s more.

Overseas Siamese, not so Chinese

“Thai society is pretentious,” or so says my wife, a quote I remind her of periodically. All the little one-on-one-up-man-ships become rigidified into a vast social stratum of Creoles, half-breeds, and Interzone clones just dying to meet you, Anglicized and Westernized to order. Then there are everybody else, the regular folk that make up the vast country-side. And if citified Thais are pretentious enough in country, they take it to new extremes overseas. Unlike their Chinese and other Asian cousins overseas, they rush to assimilate at a speed that would make your head spin. But those regular folk are the Thai people that I like best, for at its best Thailand is a village, not a city. What does Bangkok really have to offer anyway? Most of the worst and little of the best that cities tend to offer in general. There’s plenty of traffic, pollution, and noise, but little of the art, science, and culture that define modern cities. It’s better than it used to be, what with the new sky train and underground train. At least now you can get around without hours in traffic, but that still begs the question, “Why?” Thai culture at the village and small town level is a thing of beauty, friendly beautiful and welcoming. Take this one step further to the tribal ‘Tai’ culture that still exists in Laos, Vietnam, Burma, and China (everywhere in SE Asia except Thailand), and the results are extraordinary. Tai ‘Dams’ (Black Tai), though maligned by their Lao cousins and exploited by their Vietnamese neighbors, are some of my favorite people in the world, a living link between modern Thailand and the tribal past that once dominated all of Southeast Asia. That tribalism is still to be found in the well-documented-and-touristed H’mongs and Yaos and Akhas and Lahus and Lisus centered on the five-country Mekong corridor where China, Vietnam, Laos, Burma, and Thailand almost meet and the lesser-known Bahnars, Gia Rais, and many other Chamic and Khmeric groups in the Annamite Highlands where Vietnam, Laos, and Kampuchea do meet. In the former the Tai Dam are radiant and even elegant in their self-styled traditional costumes, a cut above the others for whom they often mediate with the larger surrounding cultures, doing business and even governing within historical times. In them you can see direct antecedents with the culture that became modern Thailand, the Lao language being somewhat central and mutually intelligible to both.

Take that progressive tribal culture, militarily competent and in southward migration a thousand years ago away from advancing Han Chinese, mix with renegade Chinese themselves, either disaffected or Hindu/Buddhist religious or just opportunistic businessmen, put them in a cultural context dominated by the classic-era Khmers, and you have the origins of modern Siamese culture, only recently re-christened ‘Thai’ in back-formation homage to their cultural roots, both to unify a country composed of a not-so-Siamese north and northeast, and to send a clear message to the hordes of Chinese flooding into the country at the turn of last century following the Taiping and Boxer Rebellions in China. Fast-forward to the present and you’ve got a quirky modern culture, equal parts hot-and-spicy, sweet-and-sour, and pungent-curry, and that’s just the women. Overall you’ve got a vigorous hybrid of Chinese business acumen, agricultural bounty, and village friendliness, a culture with a decent standard of living not because of vast wealth but because of multiplicity of services. Every Thai has a second job and a handful of scams, however redundant and unimaginative. This keeps prices low but diversity limited. Thus Bangkok is little more than one mega-village, any culture of international note achieved largely by imitation of Western models if not by Westerners themselves. Just like the villages there is little or no centrality to the urban planning and infrastructure always comes last, in a constant struggle to keep up with development that must be retro-fitted hodge-podge. In a culture where conformity is prized above all else, this results in a city with reasonable costs, ample services, but little or no character, a city monstrous in size but a midget in culture.

Take that generic urban Thai culture and transplant it to America and you’ve got something that’s hardly recognizable as ‘Thai’, almost a perversion of the original. If chattiness is one of the most desirable of Thai qualities in-country, it suffers horribly overseas. Presumably part of a linguistic caste system of English-language ‘haves’ and ‘have-nots’, Thais in America seem to make a concerted effort to avoid speaking Thai except to intimates. While this is not unusual in Thailand, especially when Farangs are involved, in America it even applies to Thais themselves. This is sad, because language is the DNA of culture. Once you’ve lost it, you’ve lost your culture. Language was always intended to be something evoking magic and power, literally casting its ‘spell’ over the psychological landscape, but it was never intended to be a weapon. Overseas Thais jockey for position in a caste system of the soul, clinging to their nuclear families while largely ignoring their culture. This is ironic because Thailand itself enforces a nationalism second to none, even refusing to register a name that’s not on the list of acceptable Thai names. Not surprisingly many Thais, and all women, have nicknames, frequently similar to those of pets, not infrequently derived from English sources. In the US they rush to ‘become American’ without realizing that to transplant their doctrine of conformity into a culture of individuality is largely contradictory and difficult to accomplish. But this is very similar to the way that Chinese immigrants ‘become Thai’ in Thailand by simply learning the language and either marrying in or buying in. By the second or third generation, they’re ‘Thai’, if they stay that long. Many use Thailand as a marshalling yard to gather themselves a grubstake to move on to America. It’s not uncommon for a nuclear Thai family in the US to consist of grandparents whose first language is Chinese, parents whose first language is Thai, and children whose first language is English.

Chinese proper in America have a totally different history, dating back to the gold rush days in California, and enduring much hardship and discrimination in the process. This must encourage solidarity, because to this day Chinese maintain their names and languages and lineages in America. Chinese still preside over chop suey kitchens dating from the old West, especially along the old highways and rail routes. This is a dying breed of restaurant, because the food sucks. But they’re still counted back in China and presumably counted on. That may sound conspiratorial and paranoid, but no, it’s just good old fashioned racism, the history of our species, getting there ‘firstest with the mostest’. I can appreciate their maintenance of traditions culturally while deploring the racist separatism psychologically. To this day there are laws on the books in Arizona outlawing parking in front of an opium den. Fortunately you can park in front of a Thai restaurant, the last line of cultural self-defense for many Thais. For a long time in Thailand I likened my experience to the peeling back of layers on an onion. Only later did I realize that I was getting no deeper, that the surface just kept refreshing its screen in a self-healing safety of face. Thailand takes superficiality to a high art. What it sacrifices culturally, it gains back in economic progress I suppose. The Interzone clones that I tend to avoid are viewed by many foreigners as the apex of Thai culture. They fall in love with the interface and hybrid vigor resumes its path of evolution by economic selection. Thailand is a woman, looking for a husband to take on his name accordingly. For that it only takes a village, not a city.

Globalization Reconsidered

America is a hard subject to talk about, because though I may be a warm-weather expatriate, I’m not an ex-patriot. I defend America against cheap shots all the time. If you want to take your shots with me in hearing distance, it’ll cost ya’. Mostly though I don’t want to make light of a tragic situation, but I’m more often accused of being ‘too heavy’ than ‘too lite’, so I’ll forge on. In my wildest dreams I’d like to shine some light on an increasingly tragic situation. Since my creative MO tends to be to put something heavy in a light format, please don’t misunderstand. My heart goes out to all those affected by the most recent mass murder on a college campus, as it went out to all those who went before, as it goes out to all those affected by the tragedies of Iraq, as it goes out to anyone who has ever been the victim of a death for anything other than ‘natural causes.’ I mean my heart really goes out. I mean my heart really really really goes out, to the point that I’m not sure if there’s anything left. I let my ‘virtual heart,’ a hypothetical entity constructed of memory and algorithms, cover most of the mundane tasks just to protect the real thing for emergencies. Marriage will do that to you. Some of the most intense love I’ve ever felt was when I was single with no prospects nor any desired, intensified through non-fulfillment I suppose. I could find love in a child’s smile, a kitten’s purr, or under a rock. “If tears could turn turbines… ,” but I’ve said all that before. The American golden rule, “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you,” that’s sex. The Chinese equivalent, “Don’t do unto others what you don’t want them to do unto you, that’s marriage.

So the body count of American mass murder victims and Islamic suicide bomber victims would seem to be in about a psychological dead heat, if not a statistical one, so maybe it’s time to ask just what the Hell is going on. Is this as much a part of our modern era as video-on-demand, universal wi-fi and low-carb diets? Have we come this far forward only to collapse in upon ourselves for lack of a compass to show us a better way? It’s not just Imperial America, nor Islamistan. It’s the whole world, nations and cultures becoming caricatures of themselves, either for lack of imagination or better options. Call it cultural drift. For example, when or where could you go in Latin America and not see political demonstrations, blocked roads, mass marches, or tin-horn dictators, both left and right, making fancy speeches that accomplish absolutely nothing? I’ve traveled in Latin America for thirty years and that has only increased with the increased freedom to do so. What has changed is the emergence of a middle class due largely to closer economic and political cooperation with the US, where many of their citizens have been and continue to go. I’m sorry if that’s not politically correct; I call them as I see them. All the labor strikes and political manifestaciones accomplish little.

Asia, where such things are generally proscribed by law or tradition, has surged far ahead economically from far behind a century ago. They’ve got other problems, though. When or where could you go in East Asia and not find stifling individual conformity, monopolistic greed, obsession with status and prestige, and educated women unwilling to look beyond the kitchen and the bedroom for self-fulfillment? None of that’s going away any time soon. The first thing ex-premier Thaksin did as premier of Thailand was to propose a law that would put all his competitors out of business. Nice guy. His political disciples were just re-elected while he celebrated in Hong Kong. When or where could you go in South Asia and not find a racist caste system, assembly-line prostitution, crushing poverty, and systematic social injustice? Though the caste system was abolished by the Indian constitution, it persists. Most temple prostitution was ended by the British during their rule, though it is rumored to still exist in the south. Literacy in India now hovers around fifty percent with women in lopsided disparity. Many historically have opted for Islam, where there is at least some caste-less dignity, especially for the darker-skinned people.

When or where would you go in the Arab or Muslim world and not find the subjugation of women, restricted personal freedoms, religious hypocrisy, and near enslavement of the lowest classes? This shows no improvement with the rise of religious fundamentalism. Saudi Arabia finally outlawed slavery in 1962, though Mauritania didn’t get around to it until 1980, and it is rumored to still exist. Though politically sensitive to discuss, much of the current problems in Darfur and Chad relate to the ongoing ‘Arabization’ of the Sudan and Sahel which tends to further reduce the status of African blacks, even when Muslim. It also reflects traditional rivalries between herders and planters. As elsewhere in Africa and other parts of the world and other historical times, herders tend to dominate their sedentary agricultural subjects, in some cases adopting the culture of the ruled, the better to rule them. When or where could you go in sub-Saharan Africa and not find the world’s worst poverty, a double-digit AIDS rate, and political corruption that creates and sustains the worst problems? Options are not much of an option when you’ve got a life expectancy about equal to that of a gorilla in captivity. Hit songs in Nigeria tell about duping Western suckers in the numerous scams that long pre-date the Internet.

Europe may offer the most hope these days, given their self-reinvention as a unit, if indeed that succeeds after two disastrous World Wars, seventy years of Communism and subsequent ‘ethnic cleansing’ that has left scars that will not heal any time soon. Northern Europe leads the world in political liberalism, social justice, and economic well-being, largely made possible by low population densities, high education levels, and lack of social divisions, but that’s not the half of it. The South and East are still locked in a medieval past of Machiavellian morality and Mafia-like institutions. Where would you go in the former Communist heartland and not find archaic industries, environmental degradation, massive unemployment, and political instability? Women are the biggest export these days except in a Soviet Union and Central Asia lucky enough to have significant oil deposits. If America is any different from the rest it may only be in the fact that you can find some of almost all the other pluses and minuses in one single country. The Pacific Northwest is as politically, environmentally and socially liberal as anywhere in the world though, like Scandinavia, short on ethnicity. The South has yet to rid itself totally of the same instincts that fostered slavery. The Rust Belt has environmental degradation and high unemployment to boot. Wall Street is second to none in corporate greed, nor Microsoft slack in its love of the Monopoly board.

Isn’t the danger of globalization the homogenization of culture and loss of traditions? If that means loss of prejudice, intolerance, degeneracy, and injustice, then it seems like we could use some of that if there were some reasonable standards of what to expect. Generic development is probably not a bad start, if socially and environmentally enlightened. Ironically America and Islam share some of the most dubious traits- religious fundamentalism, violence, and oil-based politics. At least America can still put a little ‘fun’ into fundamentalism; it goes down better with a little lead guitar. Those Muslims got no sense of humor. Maybe people will get so depressed that they will stop reproducing. That might be a blessing in disguise. Lower populations could likely solve all of our problems except one, racism. That’ll take some creative inter-breeding. Sounds good to me. We all started out as one people before the diaspora. Why not re-shuffle the deck?

Sic Transit America, Schizoid and Free

Pardon the triple entendres, but those who know about these things say we triple Geminis are like that, chewing up and spitting out words the way others eat chips and dips. While the rest of you are slicing and dicing cucumbers with your HSN miracle chopper, we toss and mix metaphors into alphabet soups and salads that are sometimes hard to digest. I myself know little of astrological apocrypha, except that the Thai system and the European system are essentially the same, except with dates offset about three weeks. This would seem to undermine the credibility of the whole system since dates are supposedly the crucial determinant of the astrologically inherited traits. This is not to be confused with the Buddhist Triple Gem/Three Jewels of sangha (religious community), dharma, and Buddha, which I know a little bit about but again not much. Jainism, the other religion evolved in India from the native Hinduism, also has Three Jewels, but they’re different, right knowledge, right faith, and right action. I know that because I researched some Jainism after I picked up an interesting book in the Atlanta airport a few days ago called ‘Letter to a Christian Nation’ by Sam Harris, whose qualifications I’m not certain of. I literally picked it up, at no cost, off the seat, where someone had left it, probably a Christian expecting further vindication of his faith. He didn’t get it. In it Mr. Harris does exactly what he accuses “Christians like yourself” of doing, “cherry-picking the Bible… to justify every impulse...”.

In the book, which I doubt I’ll finish, he proceeds to excoriate the three-thousand-year-old Old Testament for not being modern and politically correct, specifically in its defense of slavery. Should it have also correctly predicted the rise and fall of cigarette smoking and the increased tolerance of homosexuality? But those are still controversial issues, aren’t they? He makes no mention of the fact that the Jews themselves were long enslaved, hence opinion-worthy, nor that classical Athens was the original slave society, dyed in the wool, lofty notions of freedom and democracy developed in the leisure time allowed by double-digit slavery. Rome was founded on the same principles, only gradually supplanted by the slightly more modern notion of colonialism. I don’t mean to shift the blame, either to Greece or Harris, only to make the point that slavery really wasn’t such a big deal back then, more like the answer to the question, “So now what do we do with the prisoners?” The system only became morally repugnant when slaving became an end in itself and better options became available. In Asia not that long ago people sold themselves into slavery to pay off their debts. Variations on this theme still exist. Are Judeo-Christian motives suspect because they didn’t correctly predict the tides of history? But he goes even further, labeling America, and America alone, a ‘lumbering, bellicose, dim-witted giant.’ However true that may be, I hope he doesn’t exempt himself from the criticism. He probably does, since the whole treatise is directed ‘in-your-face’ style at ‘you Christians,’ only slightly mitigated by the fact that the occasional reference equally castigates Muslims, while allowing that we should know better since we’re a developed nation. Maybe we should and maybe we shouldn’t.

While laughing in Christians’ faces for wanting to believe in ‘intelligent design’, he makes no mention of the fact that all the most prominent physicists of our era not only believe(d) in God but anxiously scour the heavens looking for radio signals that would be proof of what? Intelligent what? A good Darwinist wouldn’t, nor would I frankly. The chances are about one in… how many planets are there out there? There may not be creationism in Evolution, but there may very well be some creativity. Can you really explain the difference between humans and chimps with only a two percent difference of some thirty thousand genes? I was taught that a good theory could be used for prediction. Tautologies like ‘survival of the fittest to survive’ may explain much of history beautifully, but predict little or nothing. Genetic drift and generalized neoteny may predict much, however incrementally, but that’s not Darwinism. He further attempts to diminish Christianity by comparing it to the superior doctrine of Jainism, a minor if articulate Hindu reform movement that today numbers some four million. That’s like comparing Buddhism to Sufism, or Islam to Unitarianism. Harris allows no feathering of edges- if Jesus was not divine, then Christianity is bunk. Is this enlightening? If someone can read the Sermon on the Mount and feel nothing resembling inspiration at some of the finest words and ideas ever written or spoken, as original as they are universal, as valid today as they were two thousand years ago, then I truly feel sorry for that person.

‘Conspiracy people’ go much farther than Harris in their indictment of America, but their arguments tend to more circular and un-provable. That’s the beauty of it. While indicting George and Prescott Bush and the entire Bush Brothers Band and every bird in every Bush going back to the Crusades for every evil from the hypothetical but invisible New World Order to the price of gas in Flagstaff, then they proclaimed in 2004 without the slightest trace of self-consciousness that, “we need four more years of Bush.” You need it, bro’; you need it more than me. I sense rising unemployment in conspiracy circles with a Democratic victory. So the whole world hates us and now we even hate ourselves. America is sick, very sick, mentally ill, to be exact. The fact that others may also be is little or no consolation. The fact that there seems to be no concern about it is even less so. Where is the clamor and outrage at the copy-cat mass murders of college students by college students? When Charles Whitman climbed the tower at UT Austin and proceeded with his slaughter some decades ago (immortalized in Kinky Friedman’s ‘Rumor of a Tumor’) it was a big deal. It should be a big deal! Mass murder is not normal! Ignoring high gas prices is one thing. Mass murder is another. Remember the first time gas prices jumped up over fifty cents a gallon in 1973 and laws were passed reducing speed limits to 55mph? Those laws persisted into the 90’s if I remember correctly. Nobody talks about that now with gas over three bucks a gallon, and it’s more than twice that in Europe. It’s the same with gun laws. Gun control used to at least be discussed, for God’s sake! But that was back when ‘liberal’ was not a dirty word, even though the same word used to apply to those same name-calling Republicans back when the freedom in question was free enterprise.

When those planes hit those towers, they must’ve been aiming straight for our psyche. Starting before that but given new impetus, we have truly lost our way as a nation. America is being ripped apart at the seams, not the divisions between states or regions, races or genders, but the divisions within each and every one of us. America’s future is uncertain. That’s not uncommon for a teenager in the throes and throws of growing pains, used to being the bully on the playing field, now reduced to threatening to take its ball and go home, and hearing the other kids cheer. The only defense of our militarism is that we’re naively trying to make things better in Iraq and Afghanistan, however misguided. It’s only a coincidence that we most frequently stick our big noses in where oil is at stake. So we lose ourselves in music and movies, bored with our lives and our wives, dreaming of fame and wilder sex. Hip-hop artists are among the richest entertainers in the world, while singing about their life on the streets. Our precious freedoms and way of life are reduced to the freedom to pursue wealth and conspicuous consumption. We have the finest health care system that money can buy and a level of obesity that would make a fry-bread-eater blush. There are no easy answers in a consumer society, because it’s not likely to be found in a box or a capsule. It’s more likely to be found in a book or a long walk or a long talk with your spouse, or maybe even a little religion, either ol’ time or New Age will do. You gotta’ believe in something, something else.