The insanity . . .

. . . doth momentarily o'ertake me. I admit it. I'm *stuck*.

I hope my handful of regular readers may endeavour to forbear long and pretentious sentences on my part, which do result, not from any desire by my person to confound them, but rather happen to naturally arise, as the mists from an infidel bog, as consequent to what I currently find myself most deep engag'd in reading.

There's a big demonstration of some sort or other tomorrow. It's within walking distance and I think it pertains to global warming. Perhaps I'll talk the freindly next door Mexican into loaning me his F-250 to drive the two blocks so I can show up in style. Not that it's not a serious issue but it seems to have been rather coöpted by that certain Democratic Party candidate from 2000 whose investments in Occidental Petroleum rendered him utterly incapable of painting his most utterly unworthy opponent in oils, since apparently he'd rather lose a national election that divest himself of a single company's uniquely profitable stocks, whatever effect that company might have upon indigenous Uwa people.

At any rate, attending an "event" of almost any kind will do me good. I hear they're doing some creative things around the country. If I'm very lucky I'll have a conversation of two minutes duration with someone of not terribly unlike mind.

Got one last-ditch "good chance" job interview coming on Monday. If that's a wash then I am in a corner. But I do some of my best work from corners, so no worries.

Mostly I've been sitting at home reading library books and trying to get laundry done. I've gone out three or four times to the laundromat these last few days, only to find the triple-capacity washers I use already in use by such people as frighten me by their very sighting; and so I leave determined to go back the next day, each time. My best bet is to show up late at night, but I'm not keeping those hours, these days. Minor dilemma, but there you have it. You couldn't *pay* me to stick around laundromats. (I guess I've got that "Dragnet" episode permanently stuck in mind every time I look at the washers and dryers and find myself thinking "the bullet entered the wall at this angle, the murderer made off with 27 cents".)

One good thing about being a faggot: I've got clean clothes, even when the clothes that really *fit* aren't clean! I can wear the ones that only *almost* fit and pretend that I'm being "sexy" (when in fact I'm merely rather overstuffed). I'm squeakin' by. I'm wearing "bar clothes" for the first time in ages. I find myself frankly wondering whether I was more delusional or more malnourished when I wore them every day. I think it was a combination, but perhaps I'll never really know.

I seem to have misplaced my W2s. I know *exactly* where they *were*, and can only assume the cats took them to spite me. Judging from the looks they give me, I don't doubt it for an instant. I don't want to have to file for an extension, but that may be what I have to do.

Book recommendation time.

If anyone's wondering how it's possible that the Sunnis and Shiites seem to be at eachother's throats while claiming to be one united Umma in the face of a shared apostate enemy, well, the best thing I can recommend is to read something roughly parallel from our own history, to understand how human beings turn on eachother.

Yes, Virginia, even "civilized", English-language speaking Westerners (i.e., "white folks") once split up families and killed eachother viciously over arcane points of theology and ritual and jurisprudence that no one much gives a rat's ass about anymore. The trouble, these days, is you practically have to be raised Calvinist to know anything about it.

Hate to agree with the foppish and elitist State Senator Rod Adair in much of anything (not counting how impeccably he dresses and his *exquisitely* delicate sense of colour coordination, right down to his fountain pen ink), but here's something most people in this country *don't* know *near* enough about: the English Civil War.

Yes, England had a Civil War. (Perhaps you've heard of a poet by the name of John Milton, most widely known for a little haiku type thing he called "Paradise Lost" which most people have, perhaps, read *parts* of in school, *if* it was forced down their throats, but *never* in whole, *never* in context, and not otherwise, at all). To most people, if they've heard of Milton at all, he's just a self-righteous, puritanical bore.

In fact, Milton coined more new words in the modern English language than *any* other single person *ever*, though this far more substantial contribution to the language tends to be "lost" on almost everyone but linguists. He was around back during the English Civil War, at the same time that our language happened to be undergoing the irrevocable change from a collection of regional, spoken dialects to a single, more-or-less standardized print-written language. And if you think the internet is a "revolutionary" step in the development of language, then you have no clue what goes with transitioning from an oral culture to a print culture in one generation's time. (Just ask your nearest local native Americans what all this entails if you disbelieve me.)

You can read this very sentence, precisely because the Milton lived when he did, and wrote what he did, precisely at the time the English Civil War happened to be occurring. There is nothing "inevitable" about the English language, or any other language, as we use it.

So I do happen to know a thing or two about the English Civil War; and I took Senator Adair's lecturing in the spirit it was offered. So when I saw Diane Purkis' The English Civil War: Papists, Gentlewomen, Soldiers and Witchfinders in Birth of Modern Britain on the library shelves I simply *had to* pick it up and dive into it, headlong. Perhaps I owe special thanks to the Senator for reminding me that this matters. I fully expected to put it down after the first hundred or so pages, but I cannot. It is compelling, and I plan to read it through to the end in the days which follow.

Senator Adair seemed to me to recommend reading about the English Civil War for completely different reasons than I'm recommending it, and he didn't recommend any particular book(s) by title. His implication seemed to be that his colleagues in Senate Judiciary, which was considering SJR 5, the Impeachment Resolution, were rabble-rousing Parliamentarian Roundheads and that in supporting the Imeachment of G.W. Bush and R. Cheney were setting themselves up to relive some sort of Cromwellian Commonwealth nightmare and subsequently suffer a parallel Restoration.

Even as I respect Member Senator Adair's learning in this affair to such degree I stand with him to urge *all* to read about the English Civil War, and even more deeply respect his lone dissenting vote on the committee in face of outright hostile name-calling from the gallery (alas, none were quite so clever as to call him "cavalier" in the sense of the day); I can not bring myself to agree with him on the interpretation of particulars.

In my eyes, the good Senator seems driven by a downright positivistic determinism born only in the Cartesian centuries which followed the events which actually passed during the English Civil War.

As I see it there is but little doubt we live in divisive times, but I do not believe we labour under anything approaching the confusions of the British populace regarding the Divine Right of Kings as pertained at the time Charles I called the Short Parliament to Order -- 367 years ago to this very day.

Happy Short Parliament Day, everyone.

I would respectfully submit that the most highly esteemed Member Senator Adair labours under the illusion of subsequent historic interpretations, misreading the events of that day in light of subsequent developments, without recognizing that he does so. I do not question his conviction. In short: we seem to disagree.

Time will tell.

I recommend reading about the English Civil War because it is a *far* more crucial turning point in Western history than *either* the American or French Revolution, having established the underlying precedent (that Kings do not rule by Divine Right, specifically, and are but human) which *made* both revolutions, and all subsequent "theories of revolution" and revolutions themselves possible.

More importantly, regarding current events, and regardless of what are now largely academic theories of revolution and "movements": the tendency in *any* armed conflict seems to be to dehumanize the opponent subject, whether that subject be "Papists", "Communists", "Fascists", "Jews", "Islamo-fascists", or whatever seeming cleverness that past and future Kings, Führers, Presidents, or other leaders (born, self-declared, elected, appointed, or otherwise) might happen to devise in order to characterise the supposed "external" threat to be worth fighting to the death. It's simple "ingroup"/"outgroup" politics, however you slice it.

Broad generalizations that "no one's who's not Muslim can't start to understand the Sunni/Shiite split" may be meant well enough, defensively, and doubtless have more than a grain of truth, but frankly plays into Western dehumanizers' hands by rendering the monolithic "other" -- in this case, Arabic speaking Muslims -- incomprehensible in the eyes of those who *know* and *believe* themselves, deeply, to be completely "civilized" -- a distinction, which in turn, rests upon projection upon some presumptive and monolithically uncivilized "Other" -- howsoever defined. (Religion will usually do well enough, since religion and language are *quite* closely tied in *every* human culture.) It doesn't *have to* be Muslims, but you know what? They'll do: they speak that funny backwards-written language, therefore they must be "evil". It certainly doesn't hurt "our" cause that "their" language is only *very* distantly related to ours.

Something like that. I don't wonder that they think the same of us. We don't speak Arabic, they don't speak English. Therefore neither is "civilized" in the eyes of the other. That simple.

Dumb reason to go to war, but there you have it. Makes better sense than some reasons people have gone to war.

Meanwhile I challenge anyone born Muslim to explain Presbyterianism versus Episcopalianism to me. There *is* a difference, and it was once a big enough deal to shed blood and fight big set-piece battles over between people who spoke the same language from birth, and it's not *even* so "crucial" a difference as the split which emerged in Christendom between Catholics and Protestants during the Reformation.

Hell. I challenge most Presbyterians and Episcopalians to explain it. I bet 98% of 'em have no clue they were *ever* at eachothers' throats, historically. (I know there are exceptions who can explain it dispassionately, too.) This whole whoop-tee-doo over gay marriage within the World Anglican Communion, or the Presbyterian Church (USA), pardon my French, ain't shit. It's not *even* a blip on the screen.

And as for you happy-go-lucky Presbyterians: I beg of you to explain the difference between the "Southern" and "Northern" Presbyterian churches, and how the so-called "Presbyterian Church (USA)" came to exist in the first place. If I wanted to be *really* nasty, I'd ask you to explain where your congregations stood, say, in the 1920s.

We would do better to recognize the follies which divided us, as English speakers, *long* before we set out to colonize other lands. Doing so merely allowed us to *displace* our differences onto others, glossing over them, domestically, sparing our own blood and our families' blood.

In different ways, but for the same reason, self-preservation, we all bought into the lie of colonial power. To whatever degree most Presbyterians (Southern or Northern) and Episcopalians (High Church or Low) don't know that they ever more than politely disagreed over specificities of ritual and form, four centuries of foreign wars of aggression have proven ecumenically helpful, in forging a "them" against which so-called Christians can say it is "us versus them".

The blood of all those centuries is on our hands.

As far as I can tell, this clever little trick originated, or at least "gelled" dueing the Reformation. The Irish Catholics were, perhaps, the first "others" before we all launched out to try and conquer the whole world -- and like it or not, we were motivated by theology *long* before we could pretend to understood the concept of "resource wars" -- elites notwithstanding. (Saracen gold may be gold, after all, but I, for one, strongly suspect it's *not* the promises of plunder alone that motivated the lay populace to go out on crusade, but the prospect of overrunning the so-called "Holy Land".)

Thus it is that even contemporary resource wars have to be cast in atavistic terms as religious wars to those who fight them.

And yet again we've got a King fighting to regain Palestine.

It doesn't matter that Luther had legitimate grievances against the Pope, or that Henry VIII's reasons for creating the Church of England were completely specious. Those differences, which were, in their day, significant enough for us to kill eachother, have long since been downplayed as we set out on the dark-skinned world to slay them and "regain" the so-called "Holy Land".

All that matters is that somewhere between those truths we lost hold of who we were and had to find someone to fight against, together.

I'm not playing that game anymore. You might call me a "conscientious objector".

I urge you to do whatever your conscience drives you to.