2006

At bottom, you see, we are not Homo sapiens as all. Our core is madness. The prime directive is murder. What Darwin was too polite to say, my friends, is that we came to rule the earth not because we were the smartest, or even the meanest, but because we have always been the craziest, most murderous motherfuckers in the jungle. And that is what the Pulse exposed five days ago.

The name Mary Jo Quinn was written neatly in faded blue marker on the front of the scrapbook, its gray edges frayed with age and wear, as though it had been handled often. Such a memento was a strange thing to find in a used bookstore, especially when one considered its contents. I__ discovered the handmade tome buried on the bottom shelf on the back wall of a little musty-smelling shop in the tiny resort town of Copper Harbor. This picturesque community is the gateway to Isle Royale National Park, an island in the western quarter of Lake Superior that beckoned to hikers, kayakers and canoers. Copper Harbor is the northern-most bastion of civilization in Michigan on a crooked finger of land called the Keweenaw Peninsula. Its remote, pristine shoreline provided an excellent respite from a hellacious year for my best friend from high school and me on a late September weekend.

It is only rather recently that science has begun to make peace with its magical roots. Until a few decades ago, it was common for histories of science either to commence decorously with Copernicus's heliocentric theory or to laud the rationalism of Aristotelian antiquity and then to leap across the Middle Ages as an age of ignorance and superstition. One could, with care and diligence, find occasional things to praise in the works of Avicenna, William of Ockham, Albertus Magnus, and Roger Bacon, but these sparse gems had to be thoroughly dusted down and scraped clean of unsightly accretions before being inserted into the corners of a frame fashioned in a much later period.

Peasants brought up on a tradition of superstitious magic could hardly be expected to distinguish between such ostensibly Christian rituals and the mumbled incantations of the local wizard. And so, to the discomfort of the priests, many came to regard elements of Christian devotion as simple magical spells. The Latin Mass was, after all, incomprehensible to the common people, so it already had the aspect of an occult formula. It came to be seen, like magic, as an essentially mechanical rite through which absolution was achieved by observing the correct procedures. In that case, there was no real need for faith.

Now what is the will of God? That's the big question. You can't say the will of God is to disrespect your fellow man. You can't say the will of God is to disrespect His creations, and you can't say the will of God is to disrespect the planet that you live on. You can say you're anything [any religion], but if your disrespect comes in any of those three categories, you're not anything, you're whack. I think the principles of religion start from there. Then you get into man's interpretation and bookology.

Of course all such conclusions about appropriate actions against the rich and powerful are based on a fundamental flaw: This is us, and that is them. This crucial principle, deeply embedded in Western culture, suffices to undermine even the most precise analogy and the most impeccable reasoning.

No matter who you were in sixteenth-century Europe, you could be sure of two things: you would be lucky to reach fifty years of age, and you could expect a life of discomfort and pain. Old age tires the body by thirty-five, Erasmus lamented, but half the population did not live beyond the age of twenty. There were doctors and there was medicine, but there does not seem to have been a great deal of healing. Anyone who could afford to seek a doctor's aid did so eagerly, but the doctor was as likely to maim or kill as to cure. His potions were usually noxious and sometimes fatal__ut they could not have been as terrible and traumatic as the contemporary surgical methods. The surgeon and the Inquisitor differed only in their motivation: otherwise, their batteries of knives, saws, and tongs for slicing, piercing, burning, and amputating were barely distinguishable. Without any anesthetic other than strong liquor, an operation was as bad as the torments of hell.

A so-called antimony war had been waged between French [Galenist] physicians and [alchemical, Paracelsian] iatrochemists since the beginning of the seventeenth century. What it lacked in bloodletting, this war made up for in bile.

That night I slept badly, thrashing about in my bed, not quite asleep and not quite awake. At times I had the feeling there was someone else in my bedroom who was talking to me, but of course I could not deal with this perception in any realistic way, since I was half-asleep and half-awake, and thus, for all practical purposes, I was out of my mind.

The United States is like one big jail for Black people, because we're locked into a mentality and a mindset that limits our potential. It has us against us.

I don't like the way our community throws the word around like it's water, because it's a derogatory term. A lot of times people come up to me and say, "What's up my nigger?" I'll respond, "Nah, wait a minute. What?" "Oh, oh, what's up my brother?" Sometimes you have to check people, because if it gets loose with us then white people will start to use it. I know a bunch of white people that started to get lax so I had to check them. Some black people were afraid to check them because they thought it was cool. You can never turn that word around and make it cool Nigger is just derogatory, it's wrong, and it's a fucked up term. It's not a word of love, Yo, what's up my nigger?" Fuck that. You can't turn the word puss around. Go around and say, "What's up pussy" to a brother. He'll try to kill you. "What's up dickhead?" You can't turn that around, so you can't turn nigger around as hard as you try.

Before continuing further, it is important to gain an understanding of how democracy is perceived by the ordinary people of the Middle East. Democracy, as a secular entity, is unlikely t be favorably received by the vast majority of Middle Easterners who are devout followers of the Islamic faith. Traditionally, there is tension among the Muslim countries with respect to the establishment of a democratic form of government. On the one hand, there are those who believe that democratic rule can co-exist with the religious nature of the Middle Easter societies; however, on the other hand there are those who believe that the tribal structure of the Middle Eastern countries may not be suitable for democratic rule as too many factions will emerge. The result will be a "fractured" society that cannot effectively unite and there is also the risk that this could impact the cohesion produced by the Muslim faith. Although concerns exist, for the most part, the spirit of democracy, or self rule, is viewed as a positive endeavor so long as it builds up the country and sustains the religious base versus devaluing religion and creating instability. Creating this balance will be the challenge as most Western democracies have attempted to maintain a separation of church and state. What this suggests is that as democracy grows in the Middle East, it is not necessarily going to evolve upon a Western template__t will have its own shape or form coupled with stronger religious ties.

Given the religious nature of the Middle Eastern culture, how might a Middle Eastern democracy [be] structured? Will there be three or four branches of government? Should a religious branch be added to the executive, legislative and judicial branches to ensure that Islamic beliefs and law are followed? A simple answer might be yes, but that is probably not the best means. Ideally, the legislative, executive and judicial bodies should all take Islamic beliefs into consideration when carrying out their duties. As such, there should be no need for a separate religious branch. However, to codify the major tenets of the Islamic faith, they should be represented in the constitution or similar document. This does not mean a theocracy will be established, rather it means that a democracy will be established built upon Islamic beliefs.

METAPHYSICAL LECTURE 1It has been said that after undergoing certain ordeals _ whether ecstatic or abysmal _ we should be obliged to change our names, as we are no longer who we once were. Instead the opposite rule is applied: our names linger long after anything resembling what we were, or thought we were, has disappeared entirely. Not that there was ever much to begin with _ only a few questionable memories and impulses drifting about like snowflakes in a gray and endless winter. But each soon floats down and settles into a cold and nameless void.