January 19, 2004

Once, in a time between times, I had the good fortune to meet up with the unincarnated spirit of the Nazarene, who was working on perfecting his pincochle strategy. I asked him his opinion on the current state of the world.

"Oy," he said, tossing his cards down. "Don't get me started. I liked Herod's Temple, you know. It was big and impressive and it had style. Some pigeon-seller tries to rip me off in the courtyard flea market and I get pissed off, knock a couple tables over...so what? Next thing you know, it's two thousand years of mortified flesh and a dead guy hanging on a cross being mistaken for a god. They didn't even manage to write down any of my good material."

"What about the Qumran scrolls?" I asked him. "What about Mother Wisdom?"

"That?" He frowned for a moment, thinking. "That wasn't me, that was whatshisname..." he pointed. "That guy--the fat bald fellow with the flowers, over there at the cribbage table."

And so it goes. Again and again, as the past is consumed by the future, the same ideas roll around. Once they're grabbed ahold of by a critical mass of souls, they're throttled and wrung dry of any life whatsoever and then cast aside into the dust as spent husks. Generations die off, millennia scroll past, and the same idea gets the same treatment all over again. As individuals, we haven't come up with new ways of perceiving the world in the past 100,000 years or so...we've just gotten better at checking out what all the other brains are doing. "Nail a guy onto a tree and make a fetish of human sacrifice? Hmm...I mean, it's been done, hasn't it?" But drive a tank through somebody's Texas compound so that it goes up in spectacular flames on national television, or run a bulldozer over some poor sap's house in the West Bank, and you can use that same idea for a different purpose. Next thing you know some other dingbat's blowing up an office building in Oklahoma or a dance club in Bali. Someone's misery becomes someone else's motivation to make other people miserable.

No matter what the ideas are, the one human constant has always been the animosity of the True Believer towards the Unbeliever. It's a psychological need grounded in ontological perception: "I believe this. This is what makes 2+2=4. This is what makes gravity work, what makes the sun come up in the morning. It's what makes my bowels work properly, and it's what makes you wrong." It doesn't really matter whether the idea is about God's gift of land to the Israelites, Mohammed's authorship of the Koran, or the neccessity of wearing tinfoil hats to keep out the Government's mind-controlling television signals. At some point, everybody stops asking questions and starts believing.

And I, for one, am sick of the whole damn mess. If people spent half as much energy solving humanity's problems as they do just describing them and demonstrating their heartfelt concern by proving how corrupt everyone else is, we'd all be living in Paradise.