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Robin Sharpe and the Supreme Court of Canada

The Supreme Court Handles a Tough One

Is it possible to consider this issue, soberly, and intelligently?

You are probably familiar now with the Robin Sharpe case that is now before the Supreme Court of Canada.

Nobody is saying that Robin Sharpe is a nice man. Sharpe was arrested by the police in Vancouver for possession of child pornography, an offense punishable under the Criminal Code of Canada– Federal Law. Newspaper accounts are rather sketchy about the details of the arrest, but we know what it is that the law said was illegal: he had, in his possession, images and texts describing sexual acts involving children.

Sharpe did not argue that people should be allowed to create child pornography and sell and distribute it. Most people don’t care about the distinction, but I do. He did argue, in court, that the law as worded was too broad. He argued that the law appeared to make it a criminal offense to even think about having sex with children. The law certainly made it a criminal offense to record such thoughts on paper, even if nobody else ever reads them, or sees them. Robin Sharpe, and his lawyers, and the British Columbia Civil Liberties Union, believe that this part of the law restricts his freedom to think and imagine. It infringes on an individual’s right to have an unfettered imagination. It opens a Pandora’s box of interpretation and analysis that cannot possibly result in just actions by the police. It is not the business of the government, or anyone, to make thoughts illegal.

You have to think carefully about what the law is trying to prohibit here. It prohibits the expression, in any form, of specific imaginary experiences (as well as real experiences). In this case, we are talking about a man who likes to fantasize about having sex with very young boys. But the law is never specific. It doesn’t tell you in advance what kind of person to arrest. Conceivably, a girl having dreams about being molested by a teacher could be arrested for writing them down. Well, we know that we would never arrest such a person, would we? For one thing, in practice, we always assume that the girl, in this instance, is the victim, even if they are her fantasies.

The law, however, should never make assumptions. And the law doesn’t help us make the kind of distinctions that might be required: what is imagination? Who is the victim? What is a dream? What is poetry? What is documentation? What is fiction? What if the girl imagined herself as the teacher that was molesting her? There is a raft of issues that could complicate the process of deciding if possession of this particular document or image is a crime. Is there a way to ensure that all of these issues are addressed in a consistent, convincing manner, to ensure that the right person is always punished? In a society that can’t even agree on what the rules are for political secession?

Two lower British Columbia courts have ruled in favor of Sharpe. They have ruled that the law goes too far. They have argued that if the principle is allowed to stand, then it will also be legal to arrest people for thinking and writing other things. It is a bedrock principle of our legal system that all of our citizens have the right to hold personal opinions no matter how unpopular they are. You cannot disobey most laws, but you can criticize them all you want, and advocate for changes to them.

The problem with discussing the issue with anyone is that people find the very idea of child pornography so repugnant that they react very emotionally to the issue and quickly pronounce themselves in favor of any law, no matter how ill-considered, that makes child pornography illegal. The courts, of course, cannot afford to be so cavalier.

Ironically, some of the groups most enthusiastic about keeping the law are the ones who also constantly rant about getting the government off our backs. They claim the government plays an excessive role in our society, when they advocate for the poor, or homosexuals, or other minorities. In this instance, however, they want to give the government extraordinary latitude in dealing with a particular type of activity.

You may recall the hysteria surrounding allegations of Satanic Ritual Abuse in the 1980’s. Similar emotions were at play. The result was a massive “witch-hunt” of mind-boggling proportions, in which dozens of innocent men and women were imprisoned, and hundreds of innocent lives were destroyed. After a few years of sober, second thoughts, and a re-analysis of the way the investigations were conducted, almost all of these cases were tossed out of court. Just a few months ago, charges against Bob Kelly, who was at the centre of one of the most infamous of these cases (the Edenton “Little Rascals” case) were finally dropped. (In spite of the fact that superior courts consistently ruled that these investigations were almost criminally sloppy and ill-conceived, no one, to my knowledge, has apologized for destroying the lives of the innocent men and women caught up in these events.)

Why did these cases go forward in the first place? For the same reason many people wish to see the Supreme Court uphold the child pornography laws: because they hate child pornography and they are willing to make compromises in order to believe that we are actually doing something about it. These people, including the Reform Party, believe that if the Supreme Court upholds the lower court appeal decisions, then Parliament should invoke the “notwithstanding” clause of the Bill of Rights and enforce the law anyway.

But if the Supreme Court rules that it can be made illegal to possess images and texts that describe illegal acts, it will have established that, in principle, the government can arrest people for what they think and say, instead of only for what they do.

In fact, that principle is already at play in Canada in our hate laws. A person can be arrested for publishing documents that promote hatred or contempt for people based on their race, nationality, religious beliefs, or ethnic origin. Many people think that these are good laws too. I don’t. I despise racism, but I believe that freedom of expression is the very foundation of freedom and democracy and should never be compromised for any other principle. Without freedom of expression, we cannot even guarantee that discussions about the law, including the pornography laws, will be allowed to take place.

For the same reason, I abhor the language laws in Quebec. Yes, it would be a tragedy to see the French language in North America die. But it is a greater tragedy that people can be arrested for saying something in the wrong words. It is absurd. If French deserves to survive, it will survive for the right reasons. If not, we should mourn it’s passing.

Right now, most of us think we have a reasonably fair and just government. But if we didn’t, the government could use this case as a precedent to justify arresting people who disagree with them on other things.

It is always a challenge to persuade people that it is important to fight for the rights of people we don’t like. We’d rather, often, just bash them in the teeth. We are short-sighted and stupid sometimes. We forget that every time we chisel away at these rights even a little, we establish the conditions under which our own freedoms can eventually be suppressed.

The Supreme Court should uphold the appeals courts and invalidate the child pornography laws. Then Parliament should enact a new law that omits the offending portions. It’s really no big deal. The law can continue to make it illegal to create or sell or distribute child pornography. The police can still arrest molesters and abusers. No stores will be allowed to display, for sale, the forbidden items. We will still be able to read the Bible (which, under certain circumstances, could fit the definition of “pornography” that some would like to see enacted into law).

I don’t know if people imagine that this one particular part of the child pornography law goes very far in terms of prevention anyway. It doesn’t.

It merely allows the police to arrest people for thought crimes.

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Microsoft Word Still Sucks

Normally I sit down and collect details for this kind of rant, but I’m too enraged to do it right now.

The subject is Microsoft Office and Front Page 2000.

Microsoft has had a monopoly on office “suites” since they intentionally destroyed Word Perfect for Windows by finagling the settings on the links to the operating system so that Word Perfect crashed frequently. Word Perfect never recovered. (Does anyone still remember when Word Perfect had a huge margin on MS Word, in the DOS world?)

Office has a lot of nice functions, a fairly nice interface, and some intriguing capabilities. You can’t avoid using it because almost every office has standardized on it. Employees request it. And it does have some slick features.

But it has a number of very, very large annoyances, all of which serve to profit Microsoft at the users’ expense.

1. What kind of idiot wants to store all his documents in a directory called “my documents”? Well, an idiot. You get a computer. You don’t understand anything about directories or files. You create something in “Word”. Where is it? Where is my document? Oh! Eureka! It’s in “my documents”. How convenient. Convenient, of course, until you have about 200 documents and you need to sort them into logical directories.

And guess what– Microsoft is carrying this absurdity even further! I just noticed there are two new directories on my computer called “my photos” and “my web pages” and “my music”.

And, after reading Bill Gates’ personal web page, I now understand what the meaning is of “my” in those directory names: your files belong to Bill Gates.

2. I have a lot of documents. I store them in many directories. In order to find what I want quickly, I have a list of “favorites”, which narrows down the search considerably, and quickly. Then I installed Front Page 2000 and Internet Explorer. You know what these incomprehensibly stupid programs did? They added my internet bookmarks to my “favorites” list. Does Microsoft honestly think that I now want to keep all my files on web servers all over the globe? And just try to get rid of the extra “favorites” that refer to web sites like “Amazon” (just where I want to store my personal letters, of course). Does anyone know how to get rid of them?

3. I used to create a certain file in Excel and then save it and then import it into Front Page to convert it to a web page so I could adjust the décor, install some images, and fine tune it for my web page. Well, after installing Front Page 2000, whenever I open the file, it opens Excel! Look, you morons, I want to open it in Front Page, not Excel! You can’t even “import” it into Front Page. Are you people incredibly stupid or what?

4. We have an application in the office where I work that runs on Access 95. When we installed Access 97 (as part of Office 97) on our computers, the application could no longer run. So we tried to install Access 95, while leaving the rest of the Office suite alone. Access 95 killed off Access 97. For what reason, pray tell, can you not run both Access 95 and Access 97 on the same computer? Well, the obvious reason is Microsoft’s desire to bully you into upgrading everyone in your office to Office 97.

5. For that same application, we needed some kind of module from the Developer’s Tool Kit for Office 95, which cost about $1000. We bought it. We installed it. Then we found out the application will not work with Office 97. So we went looking for the Developer’s Toolkit for Office 97. Microsoft didn’t offer it anymore. Tell you what though– if you upgrade everyone in the office to Office 2000, you can buy some other combination of stupid modules for $2000 that might give you the same functionality. But then again, it might not. Nobody knows for sure. And just think: right at this very moment, Microsoft is probably hatching their next evil plan to make your life miserable until you buy some new, expensive Microsoft application, which only make your life even more miserable.

6. I invest a lot of work in templates. They save a lot of time, if you create web pages that essentially require similar formats and images. So where are the templates for Front Page? Where are they hiding? In a directory called “templates”? Damned if I know. Where are the Office 2000 templates now? Here’s a history of where templates used to go:

 

  • Word 6.0 c:\msoffice\msword\templates
  • Office 95 c:\msoffice\templates
  • Office 97a c:\program files\msoffice\templates
  • Office 97b c:\program files\Microsoft\office\templates
  • Office 2000 c:\program files\Microsoft\office\templates\??????

When I tried to find my Front Page templates, I ended up in a directory called:

..\..\..\windows\application data\Microsoft\chromehorse\images\rotw.jpg

Now the “chromehorse” and “rotw.jpg” are mine. They belong in c:\chromehorse. What is this file doing here? Why is Microsoft continually hiding stuff all over the place on my humungous hard drive, so it is almost impossible to figure out what files belong where and what they do? Well, it’s not some weird sort of complex system of preserving your data. In fact, this ‘system’ is designed to embed defaults into Windows that make you wholly and utterly dependent on the operating system (Microsoft) to manage your data. And the aim of all of this is to make it less and less conceivable or possible for you to use any product that doesn’t understand these secrets intimately. In other words, any product other than those made by Microsoft.

7. Do you use the power save functions of Windows? Then your system has probably crashed. It probably went into power save mode and wouldn’t “wake up”. It went into a coma. And guess what? If you shut off the power switch on the back of your computer so you can reboot, you might very well lock the system into a permanent coma. You might have to pull the battery off the motherboard to get it to wake up again. If they can’t make the power save functions work properly, why do they even bother to put them in?

8. Wow. Even as I was writing this, I discovered a new incredibly irritating “feature”. In order to get around the other idiotic defaults of Office 2000, I decided to import my favorite Front Page template into Word and save it as a Word template. Then I can use it to write my rants in Word and save them in HTML for transfer to my web page. But guess what? When I try to import the template, Office opens Front Page instead of Word, even when I try to open the document in Word!

Whoa nelly! I just found out where Microsoft is really storing my Office templates! It’s in:

c:\windows\application data\Microsoft\templates

So we can add this to the list.

And you can think about how efficient it is to keep moving your files around like that. It’s as if every six months, your company moved their head office to a different building in a different town, and hid all the office supplies in various new locations, and changed all your user names and passwords, and won’t tell you where the parking garage is.

Wow.

As for my templates….

I’m not sure where my templates are actually. There are some bizarre file names at the tail end of that directory, none of which tell me where my laboriously designed and crafted templates are.

So, never forget that Microsoft’s goal is to put a computer into every trailer in every trailer park in America. Never forget that customers can be broken down into three categories.

10% all smart people

44% all educated people and smart people

90% people who live in trailer parks and smart people and educated people

And Microsoft probably understands that 90% very well.

“Honey, where the hell are my documents?”

“You don’t have any documents, dear. You are illiterate.”

“Oh yeah. I forgot.”

By the way, Microsoft isn’t the only evil empire out there. Netscape stores your precious e-mails and bookmarks in a directory called:

c:\program files\communicator\users\mail

And your e-mail files are huge. Why? I don’t know. What are they storing in there? One of my email files is about 80 megabytes and contains about 500 messages. What on earth are they storing in there? Every address of every web page on the face of the earth in every message? Details of the merger with Warner Brothers?

Folks, it’s like TV. When TV started, in the 1950’s, we had some first-rate plays and dramas sponsored by Hallmark and other corporations looking for prestige.

Within ten years, we had “The Beverly Hillbillies”, “Green Acres”, “Mr. Ed”, “Petticoat Junction”, and “Gomer Pyle”.

 

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Banks and Lawyers and Pimps and Pushers

I am the chairperson of a committee organizing a public, non-profit event in Montreal in May, 2000. People are registering for this event from all over the world. One of the problems we have encountered is how to transfer money from one country to another, swiftly, efficiently, and painlessly.

You would think that with the world gone hog-wild with the internet and digital wireless communications and fiber-optic cables and mergers and the new world economy, that this would be a simple thing to do. Franz, in Germany, wants to send me $75 Canadian to pay for his registration. He logs onto the internet, right, and transfers the money from his account to our Event account. Done, right? Simple. Easy.

Well, if you’re not already rolling on the floor laughing your head off, you’ve probably never tried to accomplish a simple transaction like that before.

Franz did indeed send us his $75 dollars. He got some kind of money order (it’s in German so I’m not sure what you call it) and sent it to me. I took it to my local Bank of Montreal. They accepted it and told me it would take three weeks to clear. They also warned me that there would be surcharges. Well, I knew the Canadian bank vampires would get their fangs into it right after the German bank vampires, and I knew it would be outrageous and excessive, but, hey, you can’t fight every battle, so I merely smiled and nodded and went on my way.

A few weeks later, I got a call from the bank. A nice woman named Cindy said, “You don’t want to cash this money order.” I said, “Why not?” She said, “Because it will cost you $15.” I said, “well, I know that’s pretty bad, and it’s a rip-off, but we really don’t have much choice. At least, we still get $60.00 out of the deal.” She said, “No– you won’t get any money out of the deal. It cost $90.00 in bank fees to process the check.”

!!

Now, if you’ve read through some of my earlier rants, you already know how I feel generally about the banks. But this is a new low. For Franz to get his $75 from Germany to Canada is going to cost $90.00. This is something he could also have done with an envelope and a $1 stamp, and some cash. At least then, I would only have been hit with the exchange rate.

Vampires. They’re all vampires out there. It’s getting depressing. VISA handles some of our registrations. They take a cut of 2 or 3%. The Bank of Montreal kindly provides us with a free “Community Account” but they still take their share of the exchanges from U.S. to Canadian dollars. The American banks and European banks each take their cut. Every time money moves in our economy, the vampires at the banks get their fangs out.

Why? The banks know that you can’t sit there and watch them and add up the total amount of time it takes for them to actually handle your check. But I do know that bank employees are not paid a lot of money (only the managers are, but they don’t handle checks) and that a trained employee doesn’t take more than a minute or so to stamp a check and put it into a pile to be sent on to the next clearing house. And with all this globalization going on, of course, we’re supposed to see all the advantages of increased efficiencies and productivity.

And, of course, we all know that the banks are making record profits these days.

Of course the “efficiency” stuff, the rationale for mergers and the new global economy, is pure nonsense. The increased efficiency is really only in the way they squeeze the customers for more and more money by applying vague and arbitrary surcharges to every conceivable transaction.

Efficiency? I’ve been to the bank three times to deposit checks. The first teller took about 45 minutes– I am not exaggerating– to process about 20 checks in U.S., Canadian, and European coinage. The second teller was indeed efficient: about five minutes to do the same amount of work. The third teller was in the middle: about 30 minutes. She was completely confused. She had to get help. She did not know how to deposit a check from Texas. Two of the three tellers had insufficient training.

Efficiency? I went at 2:00 in the afternoon and there were about ten people in line, and only one or two tellers working. It was slow and inefficient.

Efficiency? Remember when the banks promised that they wouldn’t start hitting us up for surcharges when they started driving us all out of the lobbies and into the vestibules to use the banking machines? Surprise, surprise– a few months ago, the Bank of Montreal sent me a notice that they were now going to charge me .50 for every transaction on the ATM. Everyone else on the face of the earth uses computers to increase productivity and efficiency. But the banks– it must be costing them a fortune to be so efficient– that’s why they keep hitting us up with service charges!

The banks have a cooperative monopoly in this country. No single bank has a monopoly, of course, but neither do they really compete with each other. All of them hit you with the same basic service charges and other aggravations.

The solution is simple: the government should now require every employer to give employees the option of receiving their pay in cash. This is not as silly as it sounds. Why don’t they offer to pay you in cash now? Because it would cost them more to do it. But it seems pretty likely to me that if you took all the service charges and bank fees paid by any group of 50 or more employees, you could easily do it more cheaply than the banks.

The banks have the most incredible office towers in every major city. I wish God would grind them all into the dust.

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Self-Regulation and Snitch Lines

I just heard that Mike Harris is going to get rid of all those snitch-lines and allow people on welfare to determine for themselves just how much they need and how long they need it for.

You think he’s crazy? You think that people would actually lie about how much money they need from the province to take care of their children and put food on the table, and to pay for those rapidly escalating rents on those de-controlled apartments? Do you really think someone might just quit his job out of sheer, perverse laziness, and collect welfare instead? How can you think that about people?

Just kidding, of course. Everyone knows that most people are fundamentally dishonest and, given half a chance, will cheat, lie, and steal at every opportunity.

Except…

Well, you see, Mikey Harris wants to do precisely the above…. except, he doesn’t want to rely on the honesty and integrity of the poor. He wants to rely on the honesty and integrity of the rich, the owners and managers of big industrial concerns that might– just might– cut corners by dumping toxic wastes into the environment or polluting the air.

I’m not making this up. He wants to rely more on “self-regulation” and get rid of those unpleasant, annoying pollution inspectors and officials.

Was there ever a more toxic illustration of the real philosophy of the conservatives: two sets of laws and principles– one for the rich, and one for the poor.

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Attica

I just read that about 400 of the 800 victims of the ultra-violent repression of inmates at Attica State Prison in New York in 1971 will receive an $8 million settlement.

Well…. maybe $4 million.

I am not kidding: lawyers will take the other $4 million.

Bastards.

This is the American way of justice, circa 1970. A disproportionate number of blacks are sent to jail. They are allowed one shower a week and one roll of toilet paper a month. The prison is vastly over-crowded because the governor, Nelson Rockefeller, believes it would be unpopular, politically, to raise taxes to pay for more prisons (sound familiar?). The prisoners, driven to frustration, seize hostages and start a riot. The police, fortified with state troopers, attempt to regain control, killing 45 of the prisoners and seriously wounding 89.

Republican Governor Nelson Rockefeller gave the orders. Mr. Rockefeller, who ignored all the demands that the deep corruption among the prison guards and administration of Attica be addressed. For years, he did nothing. He sat on his hands. Then the prison exploded and he approved aggressive counter-measures.

After the tear gas had cleared, the police reported to the complicit media that the prisoners had killed 10 hostages by slitting their throats, and that they had even castrated a man. The public was outraged. Of course the police are right to use the most brutal methods available. Of course the police were right to kill 30 prisoners.

Then the autopsies and the coroner’s reports came back. None of the victims had their throats slit. No one was castrated. All of the victims, including the hostages, died from bullets fired by State Troopers.

Yes, every single one of them.

Did you read this at the time it happened, if you can remember that long ago? I remember that long ago. I don’t remember reading about the coroner’s report back then. It was not something the media thought the public wanted to read.

The inmates were forced to strip and crawl, naked, through fields filled with broken glass. They were assaulted, beaten, abused, and terrorized by the angry police and guards. Why were the police angry? Possibly because they knew that their assault had been badly managed and messy and brutal. Because they had been shown to be incompetent and stupid.

It took 30 years— 30 years!– for the real victims of this outrage, the prisoners, to get compensation. And then what happens? Their lawyers walk off with half of the settlement.

I know a few lawyers. They get upset when they hear lawyer jokes. They say it’s not fair to tar everyone with the same brush. I suppose you could argue that not all professional athletes are greedy and not all television evangelists are liars and not all Amway distributors are suckers. In each case, though, it seems like the exception proves the rule.

On the other hand, you could simply argue that there are serious structural flaws in a legal system that essentially provides two version of “justice”: one for those with money, and quite another for those without. Why do lawyers always seem to walk away with the money in lawsuits like the Attica case? Because the only way the poor can afford a good lawyer is to sign an outrageous “contingency” agreement that gives most of the settlement money to the lawyers. Why? Because lawyers cost too much. The system needs to be drastically changed.

The police brutally violate the civil rights of 800 prisoners in Attica State Prison– who were protesting the inhumane living conditions in the prison– and the slug-like legal system takes 30 years to make a judgment, and then the lawyers jump in and grab all the money. The victims get almost nothing. The police pay no penalty. Nobody is fired. Nobody goes to jail. Just hand the money over to the lawyers.

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Janet DeVries: Where are you Now?

I wonder sometimes what happened to Janet DeVries.

The last time I saw her was in 1970, at grade 8 graduation. Then she went to one high school and I went to another.

That’s her picture below. I didn’t take many pictures before high school, so that’s about it– my only picture of Janet DeVries.

janet_sm.jpg (2912 bytes)

Janet, circa 1970. .

billg8_sm.jpg (2984 bytes)

And Me.
When I look at my graduation picture, and all the young, fresh little faces, I have a place in the cosmic geography for each of my friends. John Ellens was the farmer’s son, straight up, diligent. John Suk was impish, and compensated for his size with wit. Ria Brouwer was a bit straight-laced, but a go-getter, an organizer—always on a committee of some kind. . Diane was quiet and smart, and a bit sophisticated. Coreen was sweet and kind. And so on and so on. I knew them all in a way, though I didn’t really know them at all. I know where they are though, in the mythic land of my cosmological imagination. They have a place. They have a source, a destination, a style.

janet_sig.jpg (3069 bytes)

Janet’s signature.

But I didn’t really know Janet DeVries. She was different. She had a kind of cheerful self-sufficiency that I didn’t see in any other girl in that class. That’s not to say that the other girls couldn’t be cheerfully self-sufficient– just that I didn’t notice it.

I felt like I was smart and funny when I hung around with Janet, and a couple of other friends, and that good things were going to happen to me. We didn’t hang around all the time– that was part of what made it cool. And it didn’t seem like it was an “occasion” when we did hang around. We just seemed to “get along”. If you were a teacher and you were assembling groups for a class project and you were mixing boys and girls up, you could safely put Janet together with Bill, and probably add John Vandermaarl and Grace Prinzen, and you would have a group that would “get along”, would do the work, and could have a bit of fun at the same time.

It was not that usual, at that age, to have friends of the opposite sex. There was too much pressure to be one of the guys. It created suspicion to say that you liked girls. Besides, if you showed the slightest interest in a girl, it always invited humiliation, if she didn’t like you back. I always remembered that I felt “safe”, in that sense, around Janet and Grace, and I recently realized that she probably felt “safe” around me, and if she did, I’m glad.

We actually played spin the bottle a few times. We were on a walkathon once to raise money for the school gym. We stopped at an abandoned house on a country road. If I remember correctly, the group included Janet and myself, and Grace and John Ellens and John Vandermaarl. I feel sure there were others there, but I can’t remember. We were adventurous, but when you’re12 or 13, your worst nightmare is to be ridiculed in front of your peers. When the bottle spun around to Janet, she chose me, and when it spun to me, I chose her. I think we also both chose others, on different turns. It was okay.

I don’t really remember it all too clearly. It is possible that the entire event struck Janet completely differently. Maybe I didn’t even kiss her– maybe I only wished it later. I’m pretty sure she kissed me though. I’m pretty sure because I can still feel the tension in my gut– is somebody going to want to kiss me? I’m pretty sure because I don’t think there was ever a time in my life when the memory of being chosen at that particular moment, even for a casual kiss, didn’t matter to me.

grade8.jpg (9827 bytes)

Most of us were 13 in that class photo. Thirteen is an extremely interesting age. Boys and girls start to get interested in each other. You’re not sure what to do. You are experimenting and exploring. You don’t assume the worst about everybody else.

I look at the picture and think, geez, I was a baby then. But how far was I away from that most adult of enmeshments, marriage, and children, and full-time work, and that dull membrane of fiscal encumbrances—a mortgage?

Here’s the chart:

1970 Grade 8, the picture above
1971 Grade 9, high school.
1972 Grade 10
1973 Grade 11- got my driver’s license
1974 Grade 12
1975 Freshman year at college.
1976 Sophomore year.
1977 Trip to Europe, worked.
1978 Junior year.
1979 Graduated, married.

And that’s it. In less than 10 years, I was married.

From what to what? I don’t know. One minute, it seemed, I was a child, with no definite ideas about the world, but lots of dreams about traveling and having all kinds of exotic experiences. I wanted to be a writer when I was 13. I don’t make my living at it now, but I still write.

People don’t change as much as I thought most people think they do.

But I make my living managing personal computer systems and networks. They didn’t even exist when I was 13.

The trajectory of my life felt quite chaotic, until 1979. Until marriage. When you get married, everything becomes kind of fixed. It goes like this:

  • flirtation
  • hanging around together
  • going to things together
  • showing up at parties together
  • getting serious.
  • getting more serious
  • marriage
  • apartment, used and borrowed furnishings
  • rented house: buying your first couch
  • baby.
  • purchased house: mortgage, furnishings, debt
  • bigger car
  • bigger house, more furniture, more toys

You might not like the word “trapped”. It has negative connotations, doesn’t it? But I don’t like it when people redefine words to suit their prejudices. The truth is, once you have children, it is almost impossible for a sane, reasonable person to change his life. You are “trapped”. You have to work to keep paying for the house and the car and the toys and the furniture. You can’t move to some other place unless you have a job there first, and a house. You can’t quit for a year to see if you’d like to take up mountain climbing or writing or belly dancing or something instead. You keep working. You work. You work. You get up every day and go to your job. You must have that check. Your friends would think you were despicable if you did anything else.

As someone pointed out, you seem to lose the ability to make new friends about the time you buy your first expensive piece of furniture.

You also realize that to get very, very good at something, you have to work at it for years and years. And you realize that you will never have the possibility of doing just that– dedicating yourself completely to the development of a particular set of skills. You just don’t have the time. You can’t stop your life and get off and do something else for a while and then get back on.

Your kids would like to believe that they are now the center of your lives. They are. It doesn’t mean that the rest of your life no longer exists.

You see all these other people doing stuff– working at something for years and years until they get really, really good at it– they are single.

I can see why some people panic when they hit their mid-forties. That’s when you really confront the fact that you have pretty well had all of the opportunities you are ever going to have in your life. It was all no big deal after all.

Janet, where are you now? If you’re out there somewhere and you ever stumble upon your picture on my page, forgive me for invading your privacy but, please drop me a line. I’d like to know what happened to you. I’d like to know if you’re married and have kids. I’d like to know if you’re happy.

March 2020:

You see what happens? I found another girl I liked a lot in high school 40 years ago on Facebook recently. I was glad to reconnect. We friended each other. Then she started posting despicable right-wing blather about how the “mainstream” media goes crazy when a white nationalist kills a lot of Muslims but plays down stories of Christians being killed by Muslims.

Well, you know where that is going.  I, sadly, dropped her from my “friends”.

March 2005:

When I wrote the original piece a few years ago, I was pretty glib about my memories of Janet, and our friendship, and how cool she was. When I read it over recently, I realized I was probably guilty of romanticizing, or projecting, or whatever it is we do when were are safely removed from our old narratives. We lie. We tell ourselves what we want to hear instead of what we really remember.

Which is not to say that the reality wasn’t as charming as my memory of it. It’s just that since I never saw or met Janet again after Grade 8, it is quite possible that she grew up to be something else. What I do remember clearly is that Janet was funny– she had a wit and a sense of humour. She was cute. She had dark hair and a great smile. She hung around with Grace Prinzen, whom I also liked. And I enjoy thinking about her because we will always think fondly of those who liked us, and whom we liked back.

 

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Survivor: Fake TV

Well, Survivor II is in full swing now. In case you missed it, a group of individuals are placed in a primitive, uncivilized location and forced to fend for themselves for three months or so while relying strictly on their wits, skills, and courage– and the generosity of the camera crew– to survive. Once a week, they have a “tribal council” meeting and vote one member out of the club. The last remaining member wins $1 million.

The movie is called “They Shoot Horses, Don’t They” based on a novel by Horace McCoy (1935) and filmed by Sydney Pollack in 1969 (starring Gig Young, Bruce Dern, Bonnie Bedelia, Michael Sarrazin and Jane Fonda).

What? How can that be?

The movie is about a dance marathon. During The Great Depression, various organizations, including radio stations, would host these crazy dance marathons to attract an audience, and, I suppose, to distract people from their problems. Couples or individuals would sign up and dance and dance and dance, non-stop, until only one couple was left on the floor. That couple won some money. The prize was never really very big, but it was the depression. People were desperate.

Gig Young, in one of the great roles of American cinema, plays the MC of this particular dance. His performance is dazzling. He is a mixture of Dick Clark, Billy Graham, and Satan, cajoling the dancers onwards, promising them extravagant rewards and fame, ruthlessly weeding out the half-hearted, the weak, and the indifferent. When a beautiful young girl offers to have sex with him on the understanding that he will help her win, he smiles slightly, takes the sex, but delivers nothing. The girl mistakenly believed some kind of obligation would exist, when she knew full well that she had no power to compel it.

Some medical care is provided for the dancers, but they are generally brutalized, ruthlessly weeded out, and cruelly disposed of when they give up.

When it becomes clear that not enough dancers are falling fast enough, they hold “sprints”. The dancers race around in a big circle, and the last couple is eliminated. During one of these sprints, a sailor (Red Buttons) has a heart attack and dies. His girl continues dragging him along and over the finish line ahead of one other couple. As medical personnel attend to him, Gig Young orders the band to play to distract the crowd– the party goes on. And now a word from our sponsor.

The similarities between “They Shoot Horses Don’t They” and “Survivor” are uncanny. Except that Jeff Probst is to Gig Young what Dean Jones was to Laurence Olivier. But the message is the same. Survivor is about our system, our society, and what makes you a winner or loser in the general scheme of things by which most of us live. As such, it is a remarkably amoral scheme. There are no rewards for virtue, honesty, or integrity.

The scheme of Survivor is sold to us as a contest in which the most talented and strongest are the likely winners. But it soon became clear that the most talented and strongest were the first to be voted off the island, and the most devious and manipulative dominated the proceedings. It is a tribute to the endless resourcefulness of our culture that this state of affairs was readily absorbed and adapted. Richard Hatch, the cleverest and most cunning of the contestants, quickly became a celebrity.

It is interesting that, while selling us the program as a test of survivor skills (even the name…), the producers didn’t have the guts to stay with the original concept for very long. First of all, emergency medical help was always readily available. Secondly, food had to be flown into the island on a regular basis in order to keep the contestant’s alive. Thirdly, scenes were regularly staged or re-enacted to improve on camera angles.

But most importantly, contestants were routinely manipulated in order to provide more conflict– and better television.  Left to their own devices, they were quite likely to have cooperated, something that could only be allowed in the worst nightmares of the sponsors.

But the most important element of phoniness in the whole thing is the rather bizarre ritual of voting someone off the island at the end of every episode, as if this process is analogous to some indispensable element of human society. Think of the possible alternative ways of determining a winner. A simple vote by all the contestants at the end of three months. A vote by the audience. A skills contest. Or they could even have split up the million among anyone who could survive one year without any outside help.

What might have happened is that the group would have pulled together, built a society that works for them, and learned the value of cooperation and sharing. But hey, even Sesame Street has advertising nowadays.

On the other hand, they might have broken down into competing factions, started bickering, and ended up killing each other.

What is clear in “They Shoot Horses, Don’t They” is that the entire contest is rigged. The participants are urged to believe that, “in this great country of ours”, the rules are fair, the rewards are just, and anyone can win. The belief in this system is what propels people to join the marathons, and what provides the owners of the marathons with their wealth. The climax of the story is when the contestants find out that the cost of all of their “expenses” (food, water, bedding) are deducted from their winnings. Not only are they exploited and cheated– they are obliged to finance the very means by which they are exploited and cheated!

In the same way the Capital Gains Deduction takes money out of the revenue stream and hands it over to the rich, so that middle-class taxpayers– who can’t afford personal accountants, and can’t make the huge investments that are eligible for capital gains exemptions– are essentially funding the very system by which they are cheated.

The weekly tribal council idea is propaganda for the right wing. There are only so many goodies to go around, and the best way to distribute things is to have a system that rewards the greediest and most ruthless among us, and punishes the nice. It’s George Bush Jr.’s tax cut in the flesh.

But I’ll bet the producers of Survivor didn’t consciously think that they were providing the right wing with free advertising. I’ll bet they just thought that a bunch of people cooperating and helping each other would be pretty boring to most viewers. And as much as I despise them, they got the viewers, and the headlines, and the talk shows, and the book deals.

They are the real survivors.

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Bush League

Facts you need to know about George Walker Bush Jr., the next president of the United States.

Mr. Bush is a member of the Republican Party, which advocates strong families, personal responsibility, free enterprise, and a strong military.

He has raised $58 million so far for the 2000 presidential campaign. His only serious opponent at the moment is Senator John McCain, a likable war-hero whose key platform is campaign finance reform. Well, I suppose you could consider Mr. Forbes as a candidate too. Like Mr. Bush, he has lots of money, but he doesn’t have very much charisma. I don’t think he has much of a chance.

McCain has raised about 1/10th of what George W. Bush has raised. The story is that he cannot win, no matter how much people like him, because you just can’t beat $58 million dollars. If this is true, then we are essentially admitting that the Republican nomination for president is almost entirely about money. That’s not completely bad– you have to have some measurable prospect of success in order to raise money. And the candidates that have lots of their own money to spend, like Ross Perot and Forbes, haven’t actually done very well. Still, it makes you wonder.

George W. Bush has raised his $58 million from people who don’t expect any special favours in return. Nothing at all. Right.

Former Chancellor of Germany, Helmut Kohl, is in big, big trouble right now because he accepted about $1 million from unidentified donors. The German people are outraged and the Christian Democratic Party is at its lowest point in the polls in fifty years. They think he might have pedaled some influence in exchange for that $1 million.

How can they possibly be so cynical and suspicious?

In 1979, George W. Bush– he of the “self-reliance” principle– created Arbusto Energy all by himself, with money from family and friends in high places, including Lewis Lehrman, the Rite-Aid drugstores chairman, and William Draper III who was later appointed by President Reagan to the Export Import Bank, and, the famous and slick James Baker III. George W. Bush, by then a seasoned pro, then ran for Congress, and lost badly to a Democrat. Then his business nearly went bankrupt, but a good friend of the family helped arrange a $1 million investment from Philip Uzielli.

Bush smartly merged his company with a partnership called Spectrum 7, thanks to a couple of old Yale buddies. This venture also collapsed. Then a company called Harken Energy Corporation bought Spectrum 7 and gave Bush a seat on the board and $120,000 a year as a “consultant”.

Then Bush moved to Washington to help manage his father’s successful campaign against Michael Dukakis. He got to meet a lot of rich, influential people. Very nice for him.

In 1989, Bush was invited to join a partnership that was purchasing the Texas Rangers baseball team. Though he owned a measly 2% of the team, Bush was the most visible of the owners, attending every home game. The reported purchase price of the team was $86 million, but nobody seems to be able to explain how they arrived at that figure, since the total amount paid by the new owners is no where near it.

While Bush was attending ball games (and his father was president), Harken Energy continued to flounder and lost $40 million. Just when it was ready to die, the Emirate of Bahrain came to the rescue with big bucks.

The Emirate of Bahrain. I guess he just happened to be passing through Texas that day and spotted a great investment opportunity, right?

Why would some Arab oil Emirate half a world away come and rescue a tiny little Texas drilling company? Well, did it help that the U.S. State Department and the American ambassador to Bahrain (one of those big party donors who gets rewarded with a plum post, Charles Hostler) were good friends of George Bush Sr., President of the United States of America?

After making a good dollar on his investment in Harken, Bush sold his shares, by coincidence, just before Iraq invaded Kuwait (driving down the share values of every oil company dealing in the Gulf). Amazing good luck there, George. The Securities and Exchange Commission thought the timing was a little too fortuitous and investigated.

If you own shares of a company and you are also one of the executives of that company, as George W. Bush Jr. was, then it is very illegal to sell off your shares on the basis of information you have received which is not generally available to the other stockholders. You have essentially cheated the other shareholders by dumping the consequential losses entirely on their shoulders.

Now, do you honestly think they might have found a case of “insider trading” involving the President’s own son? Do you?

Then, in 1990, Mr. Bush decided that his team needed a new ballpark. Following standard procedure in the U.S. (but not, apparently, in Canada), he threatened to move the team to a different town, unless the city of Dallas built him a stadium for almost nothing and turned over 270 acres of valuable real estate. Hm. Do I hear the phrase “self-reliance” echoing in the distance? Surely Mr. Bush was not, like some indolent welfare cheat, prospering through government largesse?

The mayor said, “yes, sir, Mr. Son of the President” and forked over the taxpayer’s dough. He even had a recalcitrant owner’s property condemned by the city so the baseball team could pay less than half it’s assessed value. The family sued and were awarded $4 million. Harper’s Magazine described the jury as “outraged”. But, hell, come election time, that’s only 12 votes.

As governor, Bush appointed a gentleman named Tom Hicks, an investment broker, to the Board of Regents of the University of Texas. This gave Hicks access to the University’s endowment fund which was worth about $13 billion. Isn’t that amazing? That’s a lot of money for a university to have. This money was generated by oil found on property that had been donated to the University many, many years ago. It belonged to the taxpayers of the State of Texas. Mr. Bush wanted to make sure that those taxpayers got good value out of their investments, I guess. But Mr. Bush and Mr. Hicks didn’t seem to like the fact that the fund was administered in such a way that the public could actually check up on what the administrators were doing with it. Very inconvenient. So what Governor Bush did was pass legislation transferring control of a lot of that money to a body called UTIMCO, which, unlike the Board of Regents, was shielded from public accountability by different rules and regulations. In addition, Honest George appointed other generous donors to the Republican party to the Board of Regents. It was all quite cozy and “legal”.

Hicks used his position with UTIMCO to obtain information about companies that were interested in obtaining investments from the Regents’ fund. The same information, you should know, is very, very useful to a company like Hicks, Muse, which manages leveraged buy-outs for a percentage. Very, very useful. Suddenly, University money began pouring into companies managed or controlled by Hicks, and by Republican loyalists, former White House staffers under Nixon and Reagan, and friends of George Bush Jr. By a coincidence, Hicks, Muse began to also do a lot of business with many of these companies.

Meanwhile, George’s dad, George senior, got himself a posh post-presidential job with a company called Carlyle, which pays him large sums of money, usually in the form of stock, for making speeches at events sponsored by itself.

Finally, Mr. Hicks decided that he too was a baseball fan. He bought the Texas Rangers for three times the price that Bush and his partners had paid for it. Three times! And, surprise, surprise, George W. must have bought some more shares: he now had a 12% stake. But wait– he didn’t actually “buy” those shares. What? With his own money? Are you kidding?! His partners in the team gave him the shares. For nothing! Boy, these are generous people! Of course, they might have been expressing gratitude for all the hard work George did, persuading the Mayor of Dallas and the governor, Ann Richards, to build the team a stadium under terms that do kindness to the word “sweetheart”. Or maybe it was in gratitude for his encouragement and support of Mr. Hicks’ activities at the University of Texas. Who knows?

This is the man who wants to “restore” integrity and decency to the White House. Reminds me of Nixon’s oft-quoted promise to get crime off the streets of America.

The odd thing about Bush is how utterly brazen he is. His entire life has been about nothing other than using other people’s money to accumulate personal wealth. Even so, he never hit the big time until he finally got his hands on the public purse.

He didn’t do anything useful as governor (just as his father never did anything particularly useful as president). He has no vision, no great plan, no interesting policies. He doesn’t even pretend to, really. He merely dispatches correct slogans and party mantras and grooves on the adoration.

Nixon was equally “conservative”, in that bizarre credentialist sort of way that provides the currency of political debate in the U.S. But, ironically, he was far more interested in political issues and policy and strategy than George Jr. is. By gosh, you could even say that Nixon had a twisted way of holding the welfare of the nation dear to his heart. You can’t say the same thing about Bush. It just doesn’t show.

Bush Jr. is about as calculating and cynical as they come. I can’t figure out why he’s running. I think he just wants to add “president of the United States” to his resume, and then get on with the post-presidential jackpot of honorary chairmanships and board appointments.

McCain, like Nixon, has some kind of vision about things. He’s a bit of a pragmatist, and a bit foolish at times. I like him more than Bush because at least he has some idea of the real purpose of a politician.

Bush is constantly touted by the media as being from an old “patrician” family, a phrase that nicely implies respectability and dignity. Let’s consider the family:

  • George Sr. was the most undistinguished president of the century, with the possible exception of Gerald Ford, who, at least, was never elected.
  • Prescott Bush, George Sr.’s brother, was an advisor to a very shady Tokyo investment firm that may have been involved in money-laundering.
  • Neil Bush, George Jr.’s brother, was a director of the Silverado Savings and Loan, which failed, and which involved him in a conflict of interest for which he was fined by SEC.
  • Jeb Bush, governor of Florida, was allegedly involved in the arrangements for a bad loan that caused another Savings and Loan company to fail.

Prediction: if elected, Bush’s administration will be the most corrupt since Taft. Bush will bring in a staff that will make Haldeman, Ehrlichman, and Colson look like boy scouts. These guys will know that their time is limited, so they will make the best of their 15 minutes of fame: there will be graft and pillaging on a grand scale. The George W. Bush administration will collapse after three years in scandal and disarray. The next administration after that will finally introduce substantial changes to the campaign finance rules.

[notes: 2011-12 — I forgot one thing– it’s only corruption if it isn’t normal operating procedure; what Bush did was make corruption (eg. Cheney’s secret meetings with the oil industry, outsourcing military supplies and operations, deregulation, tax cuts for the rich) routine government procedure, which meant there was no entity to “scandalize” this behaviour.

And, of course, nobody foresaw 9/11, which contributed mightily to Bush’s re-election in 2004.

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Napster Hamster

Is Napster the Death of the Music Industry?

If you are not familiar with a program called the Napster, these are the salient facts:

The Napster creates a sub-network of users on the internet. Anyone who is logged on and running the program can become part of the network. When you join, the Napster scans a directory on your hard drive for MP3 files (you specify this directory when you set the program up). It then makes a catalog of these files available to all the other users of Napster on-line at that moment. While it’s doing that, you can use the search function of Napster to scan the MP3 files on every other user’s hard drive. When you find something you like, you click on it and download it to your machine.

The music industry is dead.

As I ran the Napster and did a search for some Tom Waits, I remembered something I read a while ago about the music industry going after some university servers that were carrying a lot of “illegal” MP3 files. The representatives of the RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America –or Vampires Anonymous) went to the administrators of these universities and forced them to delete the MP3 files and take action against the students who posted the files.

The “action” consisted, generally, of a very stern warning.

The RIAA had some mild recourse in this situation: there was a physical server upon which the files resided and from which they could be deleted.

But there are no servers for Napster. Or rather— there are thousands of servers. They appear, and then they disappear, when the user logs off. They could be in Anchorage or Vancouver or Minsk or London or Bogota or Moscow.

At the time I logged on, there were 1500 servers and 200,000 songs on line.

There is no way that the RIAA is ever going to be able to shut down such a network. There is no way the police can possibly track down and arrest all of those users. There is no way the government is going to impose protocols or software encryption programs on the internet to prevent the distribution of music. No one will accept it. No one even accepts that the government can tax the internet. There is a deep consensus out there– in government and academia and business– that the internet cannot be regulated and no one should even attempt it. Even if you could try to shut down all the servers in the U.S., traffic can be simply routed overseas.

There is no way that anyone will be able to prevent people from rapidly distributing “illegal” copies of any recorded work whatsoever, and that will soon include video. There is no way to convince these people that they should not do it. For one thing, many of them don’t care about right or wrong when it comes to copyright. For another thing, many of these people are mighty sick and tired of the music industry gouging them on the price of CDs and Hollywood gouging them on the price of movie tickets.

And, finally, some of these people are aware of how the music industry and Hollywood gouges and cheats their own artists.

It’s all good free enterprise, you know. For all the talk about morality and values and ethics, the United States promotes the idea of free enterprise capitalism above all else. Is it really such a large step from Microsoft’s or AOL’s marketing practices to stealing music and video? Come on…. Microsoft has been robbing people for years by negotiating deals with vendors that require them to pay for a copy of Windows for every computer they sell regardless of whether or not the purchaser wants it. That is “theft” by any other name. What has the Department of Justice done? So far, a big fat nothing.

It might be possible, in the future, for the music industry to encode CD’s in such a way that they cannot be copied. Well, no they can’t. First of all, that would only last a few weeks, at best, because the hacker community would quickly find a way to defeat the encryption that is used. Secondly, people will not want to buy CD’s that cannot be copied. Thirdly, no form of encryption will actually prevent someone from playing the CD– of course–and as long as it can be played, it will never be too difficult to convert it to an MP3 file.

Consider that the music industry has already won a major concession from the government. In the future (if not already), all blank tapes and CD’s are going to be “taxed” to return some of the “lost” royalties to the music industry. Think about this. Blank tapes and CD’s. Precisely at the moment when the media has become irrelevant, the government proposes to tax it!

The Napster doesn’t require a tape or a CD. All it requires is some hard drive space.

I’ve been saying for years that the music industry will never be able to sustain it’s current marketing strategy in the face of new computer technologies. The Napster, and similar programs that are sure to come along, might well be the last nail in the coffin.

Good bye Sony. Good bye Warner Brothers. Good bye EMI and Deutsch Gramophone.

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Hate the Sin; Hate the Sinner

Did you ever hear a person say “hate the sin, love the sinner”?

That’s right. Usually just before he whacks the sinner in the teeth.

Some Christian leaders in the U.S. said it about Bill Clinton. Yes, they love Bill Clinton the man, and they forgive him, as a man. But as President, he has to pay. He should be impeached.

This strikes me as a little strange. This is their interpretation of Christ’s commandment to his followers that they must be prepared to forgive people, seventy-seven times, or seven times seventy-seven times, if necessary. Jerry Falwell says that Jesus didn’t mean that you should let people get away with things. If a person strikes you on the cheek, you forgive him, of course. Then you whack him on his cheek, to teach him a lesson. This “turn the other cheek” business? Allegorical, I guess. A mere illustration—not to be taken seriously.

But Falwell is mistaken. Jesus did not mean, “forgive those who harm you, but make sure they are punished”. When Jesus said, “forgive”, he meant, forget about punishing them. Forget revenge. Forget “just deserts”. It’s as plain as day. Read it. Read the gospel. This is not an abstraction. It is not a symbol. It is not an option. If you are a Christian, you must forgive.

At the time of Christ’s ministry, there were no prisons for punishment, as we have today. The “penitentiary” is a modern invention. And it is a bizarre invention. It is a complete failure. The U.S. keeps building more and more of them as fast as they can—like McDonalds—but people keep committing more and more crimes.

The purpose of the Roman prison in Jesus’ time was to secure the evil-doer until justice could be done. Nobody was sent to prison as punishment. If you did something really, really bad, you would be executed. If you did something moderately bad, you had to make it up to the person you had wronged. You would be held in prison– fed by your family, hopefully– until you made up for what you had done. And if you were the personal enemy of a person with power—you might be held there until you died, or you might be exiled to some remote island. Nobody was sentenced to a “term” in prison. There was no such thing.

So when Jesus said to forgive those who wrong you, it meant something. It meant that a person in jail for robbing you would go free– because you no longer demanded restitution.

Jesus pointed out that forgiving our friends and being kind to those who are kind to us is not remarkable behaviour. However, forgiving our enemies and being kind to those who hate us is.

That’s a pretty tough demand. Almost as tough as asking people to give all that they own to the poor. Did Jesus mean it? I don’t know. We like to say that when the bible condemns fornicators to hell-fire and damnation, it really means it. When it asks us to give to the poor until it hurts us– it’s only being figurative. And these people– Falwell and Robertson and their ilk–tell you that the bible is meant to be taken literally– word for word.

Some people would argue, well, how could you run a society that way? People would rob you with impunity! They would do drugs. They would pirate software. They would rip those tags off their mattresses!

These people are mistaken. They assume that everyone will forgive, but nobody will be forgiven. Imagine for one minute a society in which everyone really lived according to Christ’s teachings. Imagine that everyone forgave each other. Imagine that everyone sold everything they had and gave the money to the poor. Imagine that everyone acted towards each other with goodwill and kindness and love. Do you still think, in this kind of society, that theft and murder and robbery would be a problem?

If our society took Christ’s approach to sin, everything would be different. Poverty, in which most crime is rooted, could not exist in a society that actually shared its wealth with the needy. Corporations would not close their plants in industrialized areas and move them to Mexico or Thailand. Cities would not have allowed their downtown areas to decay. Schools would be well-funded. Medical care would be provided to everyone equally. Drug addicts would be treated instead of incarcerated.

Ah—but we don’t live in that kind of society. But isn’t that the point? We tell our children not to emulate society, in the way that they fornicate and do drugs and watch perverted movies and listen to perverted music. But when it comes to forgiveness and compassion and love for your neighbor, we act just like everybody else. We’re out there joining the tail-gate parties at the prisons on execution night. We’re out there filing lawsuits seeking damages and laying charges and putting in alarm systems and buying guns. We’re out there demanding more prisons and harsher sentences.

Jesus also tells his followers to love their enemies. I guess Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson must regard Bill Clinton as a friend, because they certainly don’t love him.

If you asked Jerry Falwell, he would probably say, yes, by golly, I do love Bill Clinton, as a Christian, of course. He would be lying. He knows it. You know it. And I know it. The whole world knows that Jerry Falwell despises Bill Clinton. According to Salon Magazine, Jerry Falwell helped finance and distribute a 1994 video called “The Clinton Chronicles” which made numerous wildly unsupported allegations against the Clintons, including that they were involved in drug-dealing in Arkansas, and that they may have murdered Vince Foster.

Some days I am tempted to take at face value the polls that say that something like 70% of Americans are Christians. Other days, I believe that the actual number of people who sincerely try to live according to God’s word is very, very, very small.

Maybe about 10.