The bit gets lots of laughs, but here in White’s home state, it’s less and less funny—because we’ve been pretty stupid of late.

If that comes as news to you, let me bring you up to speed.

A little while back we re-elected a governor who refused to take part in a single debate. It was a preposterous antic that the majority of Texans stupidly overlooked. And stupid is the right word. Only a stupid electorate couldn’t have recognized the ploy for what it was: sheer shenanigans.

If you’re running for mayor of Lajitas and you’re a goat, you can get away with skipping campaign debates. But if you’re not a goat and you’re running for state governor, you can’t refuse to debate your opponents. It’s like calling yourself a cowboy but refusing to ride a horse.

At best, it was simply political calculation; at worst, it was cowardly chicanery. In either case, we were complicit.

We stupidly re-elected a stuffed haircut whose campaign highlight was gunning down an unarmed coyote. And if that wasn’t bad enough, his idiotic re-election success emboldened him to run for the highest office in the land.

Unfortunately for us and Governor Perry, you can’t win a presidential primary without participating in a debate. That dog may hunt in Texas, but it won’t hunt in other states where folks are a little brighter.

The 2012 Republican Primary was chockfull of ill-informed, asinine hopefuls, including Michelle Bachman, Rick Santorum and Herman Cain. But even in a field littered with that level of imbecilic company, our governor won the kewpie doll for top oaf.

It’s really no small accomplishment if you think about it.

Perry repeatedly distinguished himself as the candidate that was all hat, no cattle. He called Social Security a Ponzi Scheme.  He forgot one of the three federal agencies he claimed he’d cut if he was elected. He rambled incoherently about taxes and 16th century Founding Fathers and hugged a bottle of New Hampshire pancake syrup as if it was little Baby Jesus. He committed gaffe after gaffe and became the doltish darling of late night television comedy skits.

He made a fool of himself and us. But his muddled Republican Primary showing inescapably says more about us than him. We allowed him to serve a 4th term without subjecting him to a proper vetting process.

Honestly speaking, the most pathetic part of Perry’s flameout on a national stage isn’t that he made Texas look bad. It’s that—truth be told—he was truly and genuinely representative of Texans in general.

There’s no use in trying to run from it. If thinking was our strong suit, we wouldn’t be letting the natural gas industry turn North Texas land into a hazardous industrial “fracking” experiment that threatens existing and future water supplies. And if debating was something that came natural to us, we wouldn’t have stood dimly by while the Texas State Board of Education watered down our textbooks to foster a narrow-minded, conservative version of history.

The bad news is, we’ve been out to lunch. The lights were on, but very few folks were home.

The good news is, with all due respect to Ron White, “stupid” doesn’t have to be forever.

As famous, onscreen simpleton Forrest Gump once put it, “Stupid is as stupid does.”

If we stop acting stupidly, voting stupidly and/or standing stupidly by while ulteriorly-motived shysters whisk ludicrous bills-of-goods past us, make political footballs out of our differences and pull the dead coyote wool over our eyes in terms of what it means to be a real Texan, then we can step off the geo-political short-bus and take our place among smart states with real vision. Of the future and for the future.

A recall of Texas’ dumbest son would probably be too much to ask. But we definitely need a change of intelligentsia in the next governor’s race.

It wasn’t an earthquake or a Hemingway-esque tryst. It was simply a gathering of Dendraster excentricus.

Otherwise known as Pacific “sand dollars.”

Growing up, collecting sand dollars on the beach (during one of the few times I visited an ocean), I never quite grasped that they were actually something that had been alive. I didn’t realize that our preferred form of a sand dollar—bleached off-white—was actually a corpse.

I carried this misconception with me for most of my adult life. In fact, I was carrying it with me the morning of February 8, 2008 on a Pacific stretch of Nicaraguan beach.

My wife and I were walking along the ocean’s edge and I stepped into the shallow waves, just barely getting my ankles wet. As the surf came and went, I felt the sand shift under one foot and then the other. I was startled and I high-stepped up to dry land as fast as I could. I was mildly frightened.

Was I stepping on small crabs or some kind of shallow-water fish?

I had no idea. I hadn’t spent enough time near the ocean to know such things.

Later it was explained to me. I had basically walked over a grouping of sand dollars. They were alive and burrowing through the sand utilizing a surface cover of velvety spines. The ones that beachcombers collected in the mornings were actually dead sand dollars who got washed up too far on dry land and couldn’t make it back to the surf. Their velvet-spined surface had fallen way and they had skeletonized in the sun.

I recall this memory vividly now because of the Occupy movements around this country.

The earth is moving under our feet. The young and the young-at-heart are writhing and twisting and jerking beneath the weight of cataclysmic economic powers and rejecting the heretofore unassailable economic status quo.

Like so many of the rest of you, I’m something of a bleached white corpse. I washed up too far on the beach long ago and lost the way or the energy to regain the surf. But these occupy folks are still alive, still breathing real life, still living as if things could change, still hoping and dreaming.

Why aren’t you and I there with them?

Is it too late for us?

I follow their progress every night. I marvel at their ingenuity. I am humbled by their courage. I am proud of their passion.

Sure, there are some clowns in the crowd, but the core is informed, disciplined and solid—as good a people as we could ever aspire to be.

In the Sixties, most folks got it wrong about the Hippies. They rejected them outright as much for aesthetic reasons as ideological ones. And decades later they found themselves looking back and discovering that they had been on the wrong side of history.

The same thing will happen here. The Occupy movement is on the right side of history. The young and the young-at-heart are pointing us in the right direction. The powers that be—economic and otherwise—have abused us and the system we were asked to exist in. The powers that be were stupid and greedy and everyone knows it. And now those of us with fight left in our craws or courage left in our hearts are occupying, mobilizing, marching and protesting. It’s as exciting a human moment as most us will ever witness.

This is no time to admire the spectacle from afar or stare longingly from the sidelines. History is being made and our democracy is being refined. These Occupations are the best of us and the best of what’s left, after decades of having been whittled down by banal materialism, existential impotence and the resultant dreary resignation.

It’s not too late, even for human varieties of washed up Dendraster excentricus. Our voices can become a voice. We can be part of a living throe. We can make the earth move.

“Gas is much more harmful for the environment,” he added. “And, truth be told, lethal injection is a gateway drug.”

Many folks found it humorous, especially the “gateway” drug line.

I was less impressed. But it got me to thinking. Maybe conservatives (and Republicans by association) are more environmentally conscious than we realize.

The old electric chair didn’t actually conserve much energy, and electric shock torture of the order depicted in the Rambo movies was hardly environmentally responsible. But the Bush Administration’s utilization of water-boarding was clearly green. All it required was an old rag (reusable), a metal or wooden plank (also reusable) and several gallons of water and, even if you water-boarded a human being 183 times, it still comprised a diminutive carbon footprint. It was much more eco-friendly than electroshock interrogation.

And consider the yellow cake uranium prevarications that the Cheney branch of the Bush White House pushed to justify invading Iraq. Outright lies require much less manpower and paperwork than pursuing the truth. Think of how many trees Cheney spared.

Imagine the transportation costs the American taxpayers would have incurred if the Bush White House had allowed the CIA to do its job.

Looking back on it, the Bush Administration was much more conservationist than folks realized and the upcoming 2012 election cycle has Republicans taking note. They’re not wasting any energy coming up with new ideas. They’re simply recycling the old ones.

Republicans want a return to the lack of regulations that led to the Wall Street meltdown. They figure if less of us have jobs, less of us will need to drive to work. We’ll save billions in fuel costs and, if our cars remain parked in our driveways, there will be a substantial reduction in carbon emissions.

Republicans want to reinstate the U.S. Military’s Don’t Ask Don’t Tell policy. They realize it will significantly reduce the number of trained, qualified servicemen and women serving overseas and, with less qualified personnel in the ranks, there will be additional casualties. This will help mitigate the growing shortage of jobs that face the soldiers coming home from our wars.

Republicans want to restore the Bible in school curriculums. They know deferring to The Word instead of promoting contemporary theories cuts down on the number of textbooks required to educate our children. And with less textbooks and a de-emphasis on intellectual development, competent instructors will be easier to find and cheaper to hire. Sticking closer to the Holy Writ will spare untold swathes of forest and hiring less educated instructors will cut down on all the government funding that’s wasted on “higher” education.

Republicans want to limit the political conversation to their own tried and true talking points. Fox News affords them a captive audience that is practically intellectually catatonic and introducing new ideas or meaningful discussions simply disturb the sediment that insulates their base. Pigeon-holing the debate keeps their conservative environs intact and less vulnerable to de-stabilizing nature of newly introduced theses and the contaminating aspects of broader viewpoints.

And, finally, in perhaps the greatest conservationist and preservationist efforts Republicans have followed through with in decades, they’re working tirelessly to maintain and protect the plunder and privilege of the human subspecies known as the American wealthy.

Fearful that this potentially endangered strata of our citizenry is threatened by the menacing forces of cultural equilibrium and economic fair play, Republicans are organizing filibusters in the U.S. Senate and staging a do-nothing occupation of the U.S. House of Representatives.

Considered en masse, the Republican Party is obviously much greener than we realized.

Of course Republican greenness has more to do with bigotry, ignorance and corporate backers than Mother Nature. But you have to start somewhere.

They are clearly the oak that becomes an acorn.

Is civil strife a good indicator?

What about wide-scale despair or a prevalent lack of hope for the future?

In 2003, I spent some time in Cambodia. I crossed the border at Poi Pet and traveled up the main, red dirt highway to Siem Reap to visit Angkor Wat. It was one of the most uncomfortable journeys of my life.

I sat in the back seat of a cramped sedan and stared out the side windows. Every few hundred meters or so, on either side of the car, I saw warning signs indicating land mines. The hazard was communicated by a skull and crossbones symbol, and we passed hundreds if not thousands.

Cambodia is still dotted with six million land mines, remnants of the Vietnam War and the perilous reign of Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge. The red dirt highway was relatively safe, and the communities that lie along it could be navigated by established paths, cleared by trial and error. But if you left the established paths, you took your life (and limbs) in your own hands. One in every 200 Cambodians is an amputee.

The ratio is staggering. And when you roam through local markets or bazaars, it is not uncommon to see begging double and triple amputees, dragging themselves along by their remaining limbs on the grimy pavement between market stalls.

Cambodia is a tragic, unsettling place. And the misfortune there is compounded by abject poverty, desperation and exploitation. It is not a healthy place to live; but neither is my country, though for far different reasons.

According to a recent report published by the Center for Disease Control and Prevention, one out of every 300 U.S. adults attempted suicide in the past year. That’s 2700 a day, 100 per hour and almost two per minute. There were almost as many attempted suicides as abortions last year.

The two biggest reasons people attempt suicide are depression and psychosis. There are, of course, folks who harbor a sober, philosophical desire to die, whether to control their own destiny or alleviate suffering, but most are simply depressed or psychotic.

There’s obviously plenty to be depressed or sick about in this country. We’re not healthy. We’re knowingly and willfully self-destructive in terms of our diets, our sedimentary lifestyles and our environment. We’re obsessively fixated on youthfulness and resort to injections and implants and try crèmes and pills to stay looking young—anything to avoid the appearance of wisdom.

We toil away at non-vital vocations that turn us into listless automatons. We’re surrounded by technologies that allow us to communicate with everyone, but we rarely have anything reasonable or meaningful to say. Our nation and our species are going down the proverbial tubes and we have very little idea of what can be done about it.

We’re obviously depressed. But when one in every 300 members of a nation’s citizenry tries to kill themselves in a given year, it’s time to consider whether individual depression isn’t simply a symptom of collective psychosis.

One of the chief symptoms of psychosis is delusion. Victims harbor false beliefs that are persistent and organized and resistant to correction or logic.

Doesn’t that describe us perfectly?

We believe what we want to believe regardless of the facts. We deny evolutionary theory even though our understanding of our own biology is based on it. We deny climate change even though its effects are already changing our existence. We believe that America is a good place to live even though success in our society is based more on ruthlessness than responsibility, and real honesty, in general, is considered naïve. And we insist the United States is still a great nation even though it hasn’t been a positive force in the world for years.

Something is wrong with us.

We are depressed as a nation and psychotic as a people.

As the middle class—the chief bastion of normalcy and, arguably, decency, in our society—is slowly being amputated, our thought processes are confused. As our national glory fades, we talk now, mostly to ourselves. Our behavior is becoming strange and possibly dangerous, but we only absorb and process information that confirms our psychosis.

There needs to be intervention, but we protect our delusions with patriotic fervor. And we guard our dementia as if it were religion.

They were confounded by the redundant plains. They were disoriented by what seemed to them a landmark-less sea of grass.

As I recently turned off US Hwy 287 at Claude, Texas and got on County Road 1151, venturing due west towards Canyon, Texas and Palo Duro Canyon, I crossed what used to comprise one of these amazing plains. But instead of indigenous grasslands, most of the area is now farmland. The beginning and end of this quiet 30-mile stretch is dotted with occasional houses, metal churches and closed-down firework stands. The middle features wide expanses of shorn cotton fields and ember-like splashes of maize crops, some fenced, some not. There’s at least two ancient buffalo wallows along the way (if you know what you’re looking for) and now and again you’ll see a disenfranchised coyote sneak across the road in broad daylight; you’ll see three or four times that dead on the side of the road.

Every once and awhile, however, there’s a break in the crops and fences and you find yourself quizzically gazing out across a vast grassland, just like Coronado did.

It’s frightening to consider how quickly and utterly we’ve filled these wild expanses. Four hundred and seventy years ago, no one would have imagined it possible. But in the blink of an eye, really, we’ve done it. And sometimes we have the nerve to call it progress.

Out at Palo Duro, folks are building subdivisions practically right up to the canyons. Wild untamable places are turning out to be docile and wobbly in the path of human “civilization” and technology. The frontier that was first sliced up by fences is now scarred by highway asphalt, so we can gaze upon our plunder.

We have to have highways now, to see our country. We’ve lost the old ways, Indigenous, Spanish, settler and all the rest. And we can now visit most of Texas from the comfort of fully-enclosed, air-conditioned, rolling bio-domes, with power windows and GPS on board.

There are still a few spots where we can get lost, but they’re shrinking as fast as our water supply. Stretches in the Big Bend region come to mind; and the forests and thickets of the Piney Woods area. But I fear for them.

We like to talk about Texas as if we were proud of it and proud to be Texans. But some of the ways we’re exploiting our lands are nothing to be proud of. Andrews County out west of Big Spring now hosts a 1,338-acre dumping facility for low-grade nuclear waste. Thirty-six other states around the nation are currently invited to deposit their nuclear trash here, and the dump sits in the precarious vicinity of our massive, precious Ogallala Aquifer.

Some folks talk about Texas secession as if Texas could be a First World contender; but our politicians have allowed a billionaire from Dallas to turn a part of the state into a Third World dumping ground. Three true Texan scientists resigned from the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality rather than sign off on the nuclear dump’s licensing, but their protests were like three pebbles tossed into Lake Travis. They hardly made ripples. Especially compared to the flood of hundreds of thousands of lobbyist dollars that washed thru Austin to seal the deal.

We’re not just losing Texas in far-off, empty places either. Right here in our own backyard, the natural gas cartel has utilized billions of gallons of our limited water supply to fracture the crust we live on and their pumping processes’ toxic byproducts have been injected into disposal wells that are about as safe as the nuclear dump out past Big Spring.

There are now billboards all around town that herald the notion that the resultant natural gas harvest will last 100 years, but it’s a head-scratcher for any Texans that still have brains left to scratch.

One hundred years is nothing–except in terms of human encroachment.

There are hardly any great explorers left because there are hardly any great spaces.

Today, a Coronado wouldn’t bother with Texas, and who could blame him. We’re selling off our state and our state of being to the highest bidder. It is intensely sad.

It was a fair wage, a good wage. The average price for a new home was $50,000. The average price of new car was $4,500. Gas was 57 cents a gallon. A bottle of soda pop ran 35 cents, and you could get 5 or 10 cents back if you returned the bottle. Being as an electrician was a great way to make a living.

Today, the average journeyman electrician still makes approximately $40,000 a year, but the average price for a new home is $100,000 and the typical price for a new car is $20,000. Gas is about $3 a gallon and soda pop is $1.75 a bottle. Working as an electrician is no longer a great way to make a living.

The wages for many of the blue-collar, middle-class jobs in construction, manufacturing, and the service industries haven’t changed much in the last 40 years, but the prices for what they build, produce and service have tripled and quadrupled.

Why does everything cost so much more even though the folks who are doing most of the actual work don’t make any more than they did 40 years ago?

Well, it’s obviously complicated. The price of the materials has risen along with cost of the fuel required to transport goods. Then there are higher insurance costs and, in some cases, pension plans. But a significant percentage of the increase of the costs of products, goods and services in general can be traced to folks who do very little if any of the actual work. I call them the CEO or MBA class.

While wages for so many of us have remained stagnant, theirs have increased by a thousand or even more. Where they used to earn 10 times what the average man or woman on the line or in the field used to earn, many of the fat cats now make hundreds of times what that worker earns. And their salaries continue to increase as they break up unions or ship our jobs overseas.

The well-heeled apologists for these new robber barons would have us believe that middle-class unions and blue-collar collective bargaining rights are the reason the price of everything except our wages has gone up—but the real reason is the class they serve. Corporations have to pay our executioners—I mean their executives—well. Their steely lack of conscience is invaluable. They keep boards of directors happy and don’t let common decency or antiquated notions of loyalty, shared struggle, or fair play get in the way of the bottom line.

It no longer pays to be a craftsman; it’s more important to be crafty. Pride in your work isn’t profitable; quantity trumps quality. Every Wal-Mart in America is a testament to middle-class expendability. Where there were once millions of mom-and-pop shops where the employees knew your name, there are now thousands of big-box shops where Mom and Pop earn minimum wage as “greeters.” The individual items we buy there are cheaper but our collective quality of life is also greatly cheapened.

Tomorrow, you and I will be earning the same or less while the CEO/MBA class steals more. Their kids will coast through the finest private schools and expensive universities while ours will be lucky to graduate from intentionally understaffed public schools and even luckier to struggle through the only colleges we can afford.

How long will the sparsely privileged meekly accept the world according to the agents of their own disfranchisement? How much longer can we afford to elect these upper-class lackeys? What’s it going to take to stop us from kissing the hands that slap us?

The Republicans of late have taken to accusing President Obama of class warfare. Can they not see that the middle class has been suffering in the trenches of class warfare for years?

Any CEO who makes hundreds of times more than the man or woman doing the real work has middle-class blood on his or her hands. Any CEO who allows manufacturing jobs to be shipped overseas is spilling blue-collar entrails. And every big-box store that monopolizes Middle America digs a thousand blue-collar graves.

Class warfare has been waged against the middle class for years. It’s time our assailants faced the consequences.

The school was going to make the Presidential speech available to students, but allow the partisan and/or bigoted parental crowd to shield their probably already-sheltered offspring from anything threatening the pale (as in white, conservative and “good”) worldview that they themselves espouse and do everything in their power to instill in their children.

The image of former President George W. Bush (looking dazed and meek) sitting in a classroom full of kids while the terrorists attacked on 9/11, came to mind. Had that school contacted all their pupils’ parents to make sure it was okay to let Bush into their school for a press op? How would those children and or parents have been treated if they had refused to give their Commander-in-Chief audience?

Do they have a Gitmo for children?

When I first got the notice that children’s middle school was taking precautions regarding President Obama’s speech, I wasn’t surprised. I simply viewed it as another step in the baneful ossification of the Republican electorate. Fox News doesn’t encourage an informed American worldview. Dissenting voices confuse things. Contradictory viewpoints are anathema.

It’s much easier to despise President Obama if you ignore him. It’s much easier say he’s not an American or a Christian if you don’t listen to him speak. It’s much easier to claim he’s a Muslim and a terrorist if you’ve never watched him try to communicate his thoughts.

As long as all you expose yourself or your kids to is the opinions and views expressed by Fox News (or Rush Limbaugh or Glenn Beck), it’s easy to maintain a conservative worldview because the indoctrination settles over you in layers, day after day, week after week. Eventually the sediment of close-mindedness ossifies and neither you nor your sheltered children have much of a chance of viewing President Obama as anything other than a dangerous interloper who must the enemy.

This kind of rigidity is not conducive to cognitive, much less intellectual development. Intelligence needs to be well-rounded, tested and, if possible, demonstrable. Single, slanted sources (as we now know from the lead up to the Iraq War) are not reliable or trustworthy.

If you don’t like President Obama, that’s your prerogative. I’m not a huge fan myself of late. If you don’t want to watch the address he makes to our children, fine. Ignore it. But don’t demand that your kids go to school or be at school with their eyes half-closed and their minds half open. They should be trusted to decide these things for themselves. We should love them enough to give them a chance.

My kids are too young to have sedimentary worldviews and I don’t want their minds or spirits fossilized before they’ve had a chance to be properly formed—by them—not me.

The problem with the “American conversation” these days is that we are not conversing. Too many people on both sides are simply talking to themselves or talking only amongst themselves.

This is the kind of atmosphere that usually makes it easier to lynch folks. This is the form of tunnel vision that created McCarthyism. This is the stunted thought process Nazi Germany was born of.

Closed minds and hearts may be more American than open minds and hearts these days. But they shouldn’t be. Especially when it comes to our children.

It reminds me of the old Eastern contemplation that asked “What is the sound of one hand clapping?”

Right now the sound of one hand clapping is Fox News.

Right now the sound of one hand clapping is either side of any issue only listening to what it has to say.

On February 18th, a 51-year-old L.A. County auditor named Rebecca Wells died in a cubicle at the California Department of Internal Services. Her demise wasn’t discovered until the following afternoon. No one approached her upright corpse until a relative called to report her missing.

In January 2009, Nebraska resident Mary Sue Merchant neglected to pay $234 in property taxes. The county she lived in sent a delinquency letter to her P.O. Box, but it was returned because she never responded. On December 1, 2010, the county sold her $160,000 home (complete with a recent model 4-door Chevy out front) for $20,000. When someone finally examined the property, they discovered Merchant’s dead body in the house with her dead dog nearby. Merchant had died of natural causes almost two years prior. Her dog had died of thirst shortly thereafter.

In early 2006, Long Island resident Vicenzo Ricardo sat down on his couch and turned on his television. Unlike his 200 million fellow American TV consumers however, Ricardo didn’t turn the TV off that evening or the next evening or the evening after that. Ricardo sat on his couch in front of the television for a year straight. His TV didn’t get turned off until mid-February of 2007, when a group of workers were dispatched to his address because freezing weather had caused his water pipes to burst.

Inside the workers found his well-preserved, mummified remains still propped up in TV viewing repose. His power had never been cut off.

For the first half of the 20th century, your average American knew their butcher, milkman, grocer, paper boy, banker, neighbors, etc. Their relationships weren’t virtual and their conversations weren’t electronic. They didn’t have each other at the push of a button that could just as easily have raised someone else at a different push of a button. They knew each other; they depended on each other. They were connected.

We’re simply linked.

And because of our lack of real human connections and dwindling, practical, face-to-face interpersonal relationships, too many of us live and die in unacknowledged isolation.

Metaphysically speaking, an unobserved event—like the deaths of Vickers, Wells, Merchant and Ricardo—has no perceivable effect, so an unobserved incident is identical to a non-event. If Vickers’ neighbor hadn’t decided to check on her, she’d still be mummifying. If Merchant’s house hadn’t have been sold out from underneath her, her and dog would still be lying in the dark. If Ricardo’s water pipes hadn’t burst, his TV might still be on as if he was still alive and soaking up the deceitful selling points and clever ad copy that shape the glittering unreality that thrives due to our disconnectedness.

Sometimes people just fall through the cracks. Sometimes it’s isolated individuals; sometimes it’s whole social and economic classes. The wealthy elites who run our country obviously don’t hear us falling. They’re so insulated from our struggles that our collapse has mostly been a non-event.

I fear in the end the stories of Vickers, Wells, Merchant and Ricardo will be our stories and humanity’s story. Eventually, there will be a virus or super-bacteria or bomb or cataclysmic cosmic or climate event. We’ll die in front of our TVs or in cubicles or in traffic and no one will notice.

The machines that we’ve left on will eventually shut off. The mythologies we fought over will become little more than oily films on the surface of the ocean.

Nature’s observance of our passing will only be acknowledged in its sudden thrivings, its new abundances and the re-enfranchisement of its law-abiding citizens.

Yvette Vickers, Rebecca Wells, Mary Sue Merchant, and Vincenzo Ricardo are forebodings of what we as a culture and a species are dithering towards.

Motherhood is a wonderful thing, a noble venture and perhaps the most important task a human being can perform; but it’s not the only wonderful, noble or important achievement that women are capable of.

Birth control was a revolution and the resulting, newfound reproductive sovereignty gave women more freedom and yes, more choices. That is why I have always been pro-choice.

Regardless of how much religious zealots, pro-lifers or chauvinists of the old patriarchal order try to make abortion the central issue of the day or the next presidential election, it’s simply neither and, to be honest, it’s not even the most immoral or destructive abortive process that affects our daily lives.

A thought is a living thing. It begins as an infinitesimally small electrical impulse. Coordinating synapses. Connective neurons.

If it’s allowed to thrive, it can become a way of seeing, a path to knowledge or a means of survival. If it’s allowed to live and breathe in the life of the mind, it can become an idea or an ideal and perhaps even evolve into a revelation.

Today, unfortunately, too many critical thoughts are willfully terminated before they are begotten. Our minds are pregnant with perceptions and understanding, but too many of our conceptions don’t survive to fruition. Too many of our intellectual offspring never see the light of day.

They say an abortion of the reproductive variety is performed every 30 seconds in America. I suggest to you that an abortion of the intellectual variety is perpetrated a million times every 30 seconds.

I know what you’re thinking—you’re thinking I’m not going to pull this metaphor off. But at least you’re thinking. An intellectual concept is in play.

You and I are consummating a thought process, but you want to make sure the cerebration is healthy or acceptable to you before you allow it into your world. So be it.

Most opponents of reproductive abortion are religious. They believe reproductive abortion takes a life, prevents a life or generally interferes with God’s original commandment (the first instructions He ever gave us): “Be fruitful and multiply.”

Their claims may be correct or at least exhibit correctness, but their reasoning is stunted and hypocritical. Through conditioned naivete or mandated ignorance, the thought processes relative to this issue were aborted, lest progenitors be stuck with unwanted notions or demanding insights that they were not prepared to nurture.

Reproductive abortion does block and prevent a life and interfere with God’s first commandment. But anyone whose thought processes are not institutionally or piously aborted knows that birth control pills and condoms also block or prevent lives and interfere with God’s first instruction.

So if you’re on the pill or using condoms, sponges, diaphragms, etc., you can’t condemn abortion. All birth control measures are part and parcel of the same perceived sin. And, if we’re being honest, we shouldn’t be waiting till we’ve finished high school or college or until we’ve put a mortgage down on our first house either. God didn’t command us to just be fruitful when it was convenient.

The cognitive impulse you and I have pursued is now a growing thought process. Is it kicking yet?

If we can stave off our conditioned, critical thought-aborting tendencies towards ignorance, we can agree that birth control isn’t a bad thing. It can obviously be unpleasant and it may often be abused, but thought control is arguably worse.

We’ve been reproductively fruitful. The shape of our planet is a testament to that.

It’s time to be intellectually fruitful and multiply our critical thought processes, embrace independent cognition and nurture practicable, mortal insights instead of deferring to antiquated, default supernatural commandments.

Congratulations! We may just have created a new consciousness.

It comes in the early middle of the movie when the lone female “city slicker” asks her male counterparts why baseball is so important to them. Phil Berquist (played by Daniel Stern) responds: “When I was about eighteen and my dad and I couldn’t communicate about anything at all, we could still talk about baseball. Now that was real.”

The moment is at least mildly poignant, first, because it’s obvious Phil loved his father deeply and baseball provided them a “real” forum to communicate through. Second, because even though Phil and his dad loved each other, the only way they could relate was through the clichéd, statistical vernacular of a wholly inconsequential children’s game played by grown men.

Berquist’s statement—the pathetic nature of which is never really considered or expounded upon—is still ludicrously germane to any discussion of American manhood today because sports frame the American male psyche.

Generally speaking, sports define early male ego and often establish a basic though flawed criterion for prepubescent, pubescent and young adult male worthiness in terms of socialization, popularity and, yes, even procreation. Sports establish a cultural norm that men have a hard time giving up and/or trying not to live up to even years after they’re physically able to do so. That’s where collegiate and professional sports come in.

Collegiate and professional sports allow grown men to continue participating in the defining norm of their youth peripherally, passionately extolling the virtues of the spectacle and, on some level, competing vicariously though each generation that follows in their footsteps. This is why most elderly men know more about Mickey Mantle than McCarthyism. This is why most middle-aged men know more about Michael Jordan than the Iran-Contra Scandal.

Plainly put, professional and collegiate sports are a colossal drain on the American male (and female—but male in particular) attention span and they keep him from seriously focusing on dozens of events and developments that more directly and eminently affect his existence. And the little background and understanding that too many American men do have regarding these phenomena is largely gathered cursorily through slanted cable news or belligerent talk radio. It is a dire cultural and societal problem.

The Texas Rangers have a wildly successful ticket sales campaign that says “Get your Texas Rangers Tickets now and watch history being made.” Except history isn’t being made by the Texas Rangers, especially not in any real, relevant, or broadly meaningful respect. And it’s not being made by the Dallas Cowboys, the Dallas Mavericks, or anyone racing out at Texas Motor Speedway either.

Real history is not made by grown-ups who play children’s games or folks obsessed with Hot Wheels for adults. It’s made by serious people addressing serious problems. It’s made by protestors and visionaries. It’s made by leaders and inventors. It’s made by heroes and contrarians.

History is not reported in the sports pages and you won’t find it on a baseball diamond or football gridiron or under a basketball net.

That’s why American men, in particular, must be called out. Their self-indulgent, superficial dalliances with college and professional sports now start in August and preoccupy them all year round. Football. Nibs of hockey. Basketball. World Series. More football. Bowl games. Baseball training camps. March Madness, Baseball, NFL draft, more baseball, NFL training camps. Then tailgate and repeat.

If an insidious presence in this country had actually investigated, researched and formulated a long-term societal scheme to limit meaningful male participation in and broad awareness of the most profound cultural and political processes and events of our time (or any time), I’m not sure they could have come up with a better idea than American sports. They are now scheduled so perfectly that they keep a daunting percentage of the male population from ever having to think real hard about much else besides sports. They go from one season to another, following overlapping seasons concurrently. They buy season tickets. They join fantasy leagues. They keep statistics. They participate in office game and tournament pools. They bet with bookies. Their obsession with college and professional sports is so profound that college coaches make more money than tenured professors and professional children’s-game stars make more in one contest than good elementary, junior high or high school teachers make in an entire year (including summer school duty).

Think about that for a second. Isn’t it markedly unreal?

When sports are more real and more valuable to us than our children’s educations, aren’t we lost, gone astray and courting cultural disaster?

Isn’t about time we men put down our pom-poms? Don’t we have more important stats to keep track of? Shouldn’t we concern ourselves with more pressing issues?

History is being made these days, but mostly without our involvement and certainly without our consent. And the teams that are winning “most definitely” want to keep it that way.

He sits in bronzed repose on a park bench on the westerly side of the Trinity River, thumbing through a copy of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Why he’s depicted reading his own book, I don’t know. It’s probably just an over-conspicuous hint for scantily literate folks who pass by. Regardless, what I cherish about Twain’s presence at this specific geographic location is the simple irony of it.

Early in 1873, the New York Tribune asked Mark Twain what he thought about the annexation of Hawaii. In the January 9 edition, Twain wrote “We must annex these people,” sarcastically noting that we can give them “juries comprised of idiots,” introduce corporations that will “buy their legislatures like old clothes” and furnish them with Capitalists “who will do away with their old-time notions that stealing is not respectable.”

Hawaii didn’t get annexed for another eighty-six years, but Twain’s satirical commentary was spot on then and is still spot on today..

Ill-informed by perfidious cable news channels and talk-radio cranks, we have become a nation of morons that is hardly capably of sober jurisprudence and increasingly undeserving of democracy. Corporations openly buy and sell our political representatives and unabashedly manipulate them through expensive political groupies (better known as lobbyists). And Capitalists—well, they obviously care more about making money than anything else, “dishonestly if they can and honestly if they must” (as Twain himself noted in the “The Revised Catechism”).

The Golden Rule is no longer “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” It’s Do unto others before they do unto you or Do unto others in ways that will benefit you. Ethics are for suckers and morals are for the poor (or what we refer to in the 21st century as the Middle Class).

Twain saw all this 138 years ago and wasn’t shy about calling folks out. And that’s why it’s ironic that he sits where he sits in Trinity Park.

You see, the east side of the Trinity River where Twain sits is the south-westernmost edge of the 76102 zip code; the 76102 zip code of downtown Fort Worth leads the entire nation in political contributions made by the oil and gas industry. There are a staggering 43,000 zip codes in the United States, and our bronzed Twain sits facing the boundary of one of the zip codes that most profoundly evidences the type of ridiculous status quo that he sarcastically insisted we should impose on the Hawaiians.

The oil and gas outfits in the 76102 have spent millions on local and national political hides and that’s why they get away with transforming kitchen sinks into flamethrowers, polluting our water supplies, fouling the air we breathe and “fracking” the ground beneath us so much that it’s actually causing minor earthquakes and tremors.

We have no idea or understanding of what the long-term effects of environmental and seismic onslaughts of this magnitude will lead to, but the short-term economic benefits of the local natural gas boom keep us agreeable to being done unto and dumb to the possible catastrophic future repercussions. In matters regarding the Barnett Shale, our politicians take care of their corporate patrons and we’re little more than collateral victims in a dangerous experiment in old-time Capitalism.

Twain would have viewed the oil and gas industries the same way he viewed the railroad corporations in the last part of the 19th century: treacherous, short-sighted miscreants who have no qualms about ignoring, going around or running over a community or its watchful citizens if they get between them and higher profit margins. And that’s what’s happened to us; we’ve been done unto in underhanded, cold-blooded ways that most of us don’t even begin to understand.

That’s why a seat next to Twain is my favorite spot in Fort Worth. Even though his mustachioed headpiece is made of hollow bronze, he’s still got more sense than too many of us.

Based on intelligence alone, then, does any man, woman, magnate or CEO deserve to make more than twice as much money as the average rest of us based on how smart they are?

Jamaican sprinter Usain Bolt shattered the world record in the 100-meter dash by running it in 9.58 seconds. The average working adult in America probably runs the 100 meters in 17-20 seconds and even the uncoordinated or mildly decrepit can probably manage it in 30 seconds. If Bolt can be used as an example of the highest level of coordination and speed that a human being can achieve, please note that his record-breaking time in the 100 meter dash probably isn’t even three time faster than ours.

Based on speed or coordination alone, then, does any man, woman or athlete deserve to make three times as much money as one of us based on how fast they move?

A week has 168 hours in it. The average work week is 40 hours. The practical maximum number of hours a person can work in a day for weeks and months at a time is probably 16 hours. But let’s say someone really motivated adds an extra eight hours to the 112-hour work week achieved at a 16-hour-a-day pace and consistently strings together 120-hour work weeks. Even if someone managed this incredible clip, he or she would only be working three times as much as one of us; so is there any way, based on the number of hours worked per week alone, anyone could deserve to make more than three times what the average worker makes in a week?

Some folks are stronger than others, to be sure; and some folks went to college. But the average professional football player isn’t three times stronger than your average man and, I’m sorry, but the average college student isn’t three times as educated as someone who just settled for a high school degree.

But let’s say—hypothetically speaking—that we stumbled up against the ultimate wage or salary earner. Let’s say he or she was two times smarter, three times faster, three times stronger, had a college degree and regularly worked 120 hours per week—even at that exaggerated pace and preposterous performance level, the basic math indicates that he or she would never deserve in excess of 162 times more than the average employee in the workplace. And yet we have corporate CEOs that earn five and ten times that.

Truth be told, our ultimate wage-earner does not exist and never will exist. And, arguably, there isn’t a human being on this planet who’s worth more than ten times the next, much less 100 times the next. Sorry, again, but no one is that special. And no one is that indispensable.

Conceding these suppositions, then, compels us to answer two unpleasant but unavoidable questions.

First, regardless of how smart someone is or how hard he or she works, what kind of human being honestly believes they are 100 times more deserving than another?

Second, what kind of human being is actually driven to become the kind of human being who—in good conscience—receives 100 times more than another?

The former epitomizes what is worst in us as a species. The latter diminishes any hope we have for the future of our species.

The planet’s resources are finite. The planet’s ecosystems are imbalanced. Most of the planet’s inhabitants are endangered. If our individual or collective definitions of success endanger other species or our own, jeopardize our habitats (specifically or generally) or deplete our natural resources, then we are not defining or achieving success. We are promulgating failure.

If the short-term “means” for a people’s way of life are Capitalism, Materialism and/or greed in general, the long-term “ends” are death, destruction and doom. It can’t be said any plainer. And we—as a culture and a species—pretend otherwise at our own rapidly approaching peril.

There’s nothing wrong with being successful unless success is meted out in increments of extravagance or superfluity. There’s nothing wrong with wanting to be successful unless you’re measuring your own success in terms of extravagance or superfluity.

Our species will not survive as a pampered class or preferred tax bracket. The only abundance we should be encouraging is that of this very awareness. And any enlightened society should begin gauging individual worth in terms of the acknowledgement of this awareness and the steps we take to thwart the power and control of wealth and the wealthy.

The first breast augmentation processes popped up (pardon the pun) in the late 19th century. In 1889, Austrian physician Robert Gersuny tried paraffin injections. In 1895, German physician Vincenz Czerny placed tissue from a benign growth on a patient’s back in a breast where he had removed a tumor to “avoid asymmetry.”

In the first half of the 20th century, the race for the perfect fake boobs heated up. Well-apportioned actresses like Lana Turner and Ava Gardner were lighting up the big screen and gracing the covers of all the big-name magazines. Women and their husbands wanted topographical equality and doctors were eager to lend their talents and pad their bank accounts. By the late 40s, physicians were augmenting breasts with glass balls, ground rubber, ivory, ox cartilage, Terylene wool, gutta-percha, Dicora, polyethylene chips, polyvinyl alcohol-formaldehyde polymer sponge, polymer sponge in a polyethylene sac, polyether foam sponge, polyethylene strips wound into a ball, teflon-silicone, polyester rubber, etc.

In 1950, New York doctor Jacques Maliniac tried a “flap-based” augmentation and rotated a woman’s chest wall tissue into her breast to increase volume. In the 1950s and early 1960s, approximately 50,000 women received silicone injections, but they led to dangerous granulomas and painful breast hardening.

In 1961, the first silicone breast implants were developed by Dr. Thomas Cronin and Dr. Frank Gerow, two plastic surgeons from Houston. They were made of a tear drop shaped rubber sac and filled with a thick, viscous silicone gel. They caught on in Hollywood first, because the price tag for the prosthetics was cost prohibitive. But, eventually, prices came down and they migrated back home.

Today, in most affluent areas in Texas, you can hardly stand in line at the supermarket or go watch your kids’ basketball games without being confronted by trophy topography, and it’s a little bit sad.

What happened to dancing with the ones that brung ya? Are the real things just not good enough for us anymore? And wasn’t there a revolution in the 1970s that involved women railing against sexual objectification?

Is there any greater embrace of sexual objectification than fake boobs?

In the end I guess my own gender is most to blame. Gratuitous breast images sell us material goods and anchor the marketing campaigns for some of our favorite entertainment mediums. Even as adults, middle-aged dads and graying solitary or married men, we still lead with or can be led by our loins. And the bearings of our existential compasses are too often affected by women’s breasts, real or fake.

Men are obviously pathetic for placing a premium on such things, and women are silly for caring so much about male premiums. Perhaps it’s simply our nature but, if so, it’s probably time for a little transcendence. Topographical transcendence.

It’s often said that everything is bigger in Texas and, 50 years ago, two Houston doctors developed prosthetics to make sure such was the case. But their invention was a mockery of the Lone Star quality of authenticity. And I’ll take authenticity over artificiality any day.

When you get right down to it, fake boobs are about as attractive as toupees. And I don’t know how folks are turned on by the former any more than the latter.

In 1900, Reverend and lumber mill owner, Burrell Cannon decided he’d been called by God to build a flying machine. He’d studied the Book of Ezekiel for years and was captivated by its description of an “aircraft” that featured “a wheel in the middle of a wheel” by which “living creatures were lifted up from the earth.” Cannon believed he could recreate the craft, so he sold his lumber mill in Pine and moved to Pittsburgh.

In Pittsburgh, he preached the Gospel and peddled his ideas for an aircraft designed straight from the Good Book. With the Almighty on his side, he sold $25,000 worth of stock and began construction.

Within two years, he completed a one-man, 26-foot flying machine that featured a light, tubular metal frame, an almost circular, fabric-covered flying-wing, a secondary lower wing and two pairs of wheels tucked below the wings. The outer wheels were eight feet in diameter and designed to taxi the craft up to take-off velocity; the inner wheels were paddle-operated and devised to drive the craft once it was aloft.

In mid-1902, one of Cannon’s employees piloted the craft on its maiden flight. According to eyewitness reports, it picked up speed, left the ground, drifted in the air and began vibrating violently before its undercarriage collided with a wooden fence post as it passed over. Later that year the craft was destroyed by a storm while sitting on a flatbed train car on its way to the St. Louis World’s Fair.

In the end, the Ezekiel Flying Machine was a marvel to behold, but Cannon’s engineering was more beholden to the Holy Writ than the laws of gravity. Adhering to the wheel within a wheel concept made the craft a faithful clunker that was too heavy and unwieldy for practical flight.

We make this mistake all the time, even today. Creationists believe that God made human beings out of the dust of the ground, fashioning our oldest female ancestor as an afterthought and from one of the first human male’s ribs. No sperm or egg. No DNA. No birth, infancy or adolescence. Just clay figurines animated and given a soul for good measure.

New or “Young” Earth theorists believe the Earth is no more than 7,000 to 10,000 years old and most of their data is based on counting up the generations in the Bible and adding them to the calculated number of generations since the Bible. No Homo erectus or Cro-Magnon steps in the process—just ready-made Homo sapiens that hit the ground begetting other Homo sapiens.

Both claims are more beholden to the Holy Writ than objective scientific analysis and they arguably require a suspension of critical thinking. For starters, the Bible was a latecomer on the scene. The Pyramid of Giza and the Epic of Gilgamesh predate it by millennia. Millions of folks were living in self-sustaining, fully-functioning communities long before Christ and Christianity ever appeared. And any serious student of the Bible and the history of the region knows that “Eden” narratives like the one found in Genesis and metaphors like the lord being a shepherd were borrowed from older cultures and pre-existing religions.

The Bible is an inspiring, poetic text but parts of it are hardly original and the parts that were original have been translated and re-interpreted more than once. Sacred, yes, holy, perhaps, but scientific—no.

If Reverend Cannon hadn’t been hamstrung by the Bible, Texas might have been first in flight (the controllable, steerable, safely-landing kind). If the basis for our children’s education was rooted in science instead of superstition, they might fare better against their overseas counterparts. If the Scriptures hadn’t have indicated that Christians were meant to “have dominion” over “every living thing that moveth upon the earth,” we probably wouldn’t have such an absurd sense of entitlement and perhaps it wouldn’t be so easy for us to continue marginalizing the rest of the natural world.

Religion isn’t a bad thing unless it’s applied badly.

Relying on religious beliefs to navigate gravity, education or science in general isn’t just a bad idea; it’s a bad application of faith.

As we stumble towards an uncertain future, do we really want to base our fate on faith?

Walker knows that two workers are not as perplexed and vulnerable as one. Walker knows that a shared plight heartens the downtrodden. Walker knows that to faithfully serve his primary constituency, he has to try to keep downtrodden folks apart. Walker understands that, in the real world, “Davids” on their own almost never succeed against “Goliaths,” but they have a chance if they band together. Walker realizes that the thing to crush, destroy and, yes, even bomb, is two, three or a hundred Davids standing shoulder to shoulder willing to challenge him and his ilk.

Walker knows this, but—like Mubarak—he’s too late. The Davids are winning this round, and the people who run things are going to lose. It’s a small step in a single state, but lots of Davids in lots of states are paying attention. And the fear of their collective will is going to send Walker and those who fancied him a rich man’s messiah scurrying back to their bunkers to regroup.

It won’t do them any good, of course, because—as Steinbeck put it (and I’m paraphrasing)—their wealth has frozen them forever into the “I” approach to things and forever cut them off from the collective sense of “we.” This is why they loathe unions; this is why they despise the Democratic Party.

The mere utterance of the phrase “We’re in this together” makes them dash to the bank and make sure their money is secure. And critics of “income inequality” make them buy more guns.

They are the American equivalent of royalty and their paranoia and rapaciousness rule our puppet government.

The adjective “atypical” means “not typical.” A condition, event or stance of “atypicality” does not mean “typicality” (or a “type”) does not exist or that the state of being “typical” is impossible. It simply means a condition, an event or a stance is characterized by “atypicality.” The same could be said of the adjectival term “apolitical.”

The adjective “atheist,” therefore, means “not theist.”And an “Atheist” is simply not a Theist.

Atheism, then, is simply an existence not characterized by—or, in most of our cases, susceptible to—Theism. The onus to prove whether or not God, Allah, Jehovah, Yahweh, Elohim, etc. exists is completely irrelevant. If God, Allah, Jehovah or Yahweh do exist, we’re not fans.

To demonstrate my point, let me give you an example involving God in the Christian sense from the Book of Genesis.

I will readily admit that I’m not the smartest person around, but I know this: if I put cookies in several different cookie jars and tell my kids that the cookies in one jar contain the knowledge of good and evil and that they can partake of the cookies in any jar in the pantry except the ones from the cookie jar of good and evil, then—even if I put that jar on the highest shelf—my children are eventually (if not immediately) going to reach for the cookies in the forbidden cookie jar.

Any good parent knows this.

What kind of parent would scold a child after purposefully setting a trap and then watching the child fall into it? What kind of parent would exile his children from his grace because they fell into the trap he set for them?

I may not be the smartest person in the world or the best parent but, in this particular respect, I’m arguably smarter than God. And I wouldn’t have done what He supposedly did to His children even if the staging and subsequent results achieved the desired effect.

The therapeutic entity (or pseudo-entity) that Christians refer to as the Divine Author is clearly something of a mixed bag. He reportedly made the sun, the moon and the stars, but had no grasp of human nature even though we were supposedly made in His image (and likeness). It doesn’t make sense. An omnipotent being would, well, be omnipotent.

If God was or is truly omnipotent, shame on Him. Omnipotence implies infallibility. Infallibility precludes causal error. That means God knew He was setting up Adam and Eve and manipulated them to fail and then punished them for failing.

The lesson to be taken from the exercise is that God expects blind, abject obedience. No more, no less. And if this was God’s plan for us all along, He shouldn’t have bothered with humanity at all.

Perhaps my thought processes border on incivility, but I believe that (1) no reasonable creator would require abject obedience of any organism, (2) no responsible creator would grant any single species ipso facto dominion over all others (any more than He would favor one people, place or faith over another) and (3) no relevant, competent creator would value rote reverence and voluntary meekness over thoughtful query and existential initiative.

This leaves us with two possibilities: (1) The entire concept of God is a giant fraud and may comprise the greatest lie ever told or (2) God is imperfect and possibly incompetent.

I would certainly never presume to speak for all Atheists, but I have to say this: if God exists, I’m not impressed and I don’t want Him on my side. His taste in “chosen” peoples and cultures is lacking and His intentions are suspect.

My mission, then, as an Atheist, is not to prove or disprove His existence to His followers. It’s simply to discourage and dissuade them from trying to define, limit or marginalize my existence any more than they already have. And this applies to Muslims and Jews as well.

It’s typical to believe that life on this planet began with a desert god; and it’s typical to think the world will end according to a desert religion. But the intellectual landscape for some of us is not so barren. That’s what makes us atypical.

Thus spake Henry Miller on the first page of his first book, Tropic of Cancer, in 1934—no doubt one of the reasons it was banned from publication in the United States until 1961. Miller was a square wheel and not the kind of influence a country trying to get things rolling after a Great Depression wanted folks being exposed to. The book was deemed pornographic as well, but the social criticism was more risqué than the gratuitous sex.

Today, as we continue to work our way out of the Great Recession, many of Miller’s Cancer sentiments still ring true as we mark the 50th anniversary of its appearance on our shores. Materialism is unwise. Over-consumption is destructive. And the most recent incarnation of American Capitalism is simply a diagonally slit wrist that we’re watching bleed out.

Deep down, we all know this, but we can’t seem to muster the craw or the courage to square our wheels. It makes me think back to a time and place in my life when people tried.

It was Austin, Texas in the early 1990s and I lived on my friend Jerry’s couch in a duplex in Hyde Park for nine months. I kept odd jobs and odder hours, usually scheduled around manic chess marathons and bleary-eyed, late-night philosophical volleys. The debates always started with a lob, but three hours later we were both trying to maintain serve with obscure, paraphrased excerpts from Nietzche or clever parries from Kierkegaard, Camus, or Sartre.

Jerry had an uncanny knowledge of local happy hours at restaurants that offered free finger foods for the thirsty souls that frequented their establishments to imbibe alcohol. So we would show up, buy one beer each and then just eat; it was a nice dinner 2-3 days a week.

When the hinges of our toilet seat broke off, we simply hung the lid on the bathroom door. Using our water closet involved placing the lid on the toilet bowl and balancing yourself.

I barely had a pot to piss in, and it was one of the happiest times in my life. I didn’t have a mortgage or car payments or credit cards. I wasn’t prostituting myself in some pathetic, cubicled slog and I wasn’t a stock-optioned salary-slave with no place to go but up the arse of a corporate colossus slinking after ill-begotten profit margins.

I was free. I could loaf. And I could sit still and think.

Richard Linklater’s Slacker touched on the phenomena, but conveyed the weirder aspects of the process more than the wisdom. In fact, the movie reinforced the stereotype that a “slacker” was a young adult whose existence was characterized by apathy, lack of ambition and general aimlessness. The derogatory connotations masked the profounder aspects of what was really happening. We weren’t apathetic or lazy or aimless; we just had serious reservations about the catalogue of ways people demeaned themselves for money.

Austin in the early 1990s was a place where “Atlases” came to shrug. Moms and dads across the state were sending their kids off to UT or Southwest Texas State for vocational training, but some of stuff in some of the books was leaving an impression. And a significant number of students theretofore scheduled to become normal, traditionally successful yuppies were garnering (1) levels of awareness that were counterproductive, (2) penchants for self-examination that were downright dangerous, and (3) a contrarian vein that approached anarchy.

Resignation, obsequiousness and utter convention were out. Herman Hesse’s Steppenwolf had observed that to think was to undermine and, with our educations in hand, that’s exactly what we did. We didn’t have much practice and our non-conformist leanings were almost unanimously discouraged by real “grown-ups,” but once we thought for ourselves for a summery instant we realized the entire phony system wasn’t worth engaging in, struggling for or reducing ourselves to. So we stayed in Austin and held out as long as we could (but not nearly long enough).

I bring this up because my happy “shrug” in Austin comes to mind a lot lately, especially when I see Tea Partiers hold up signs that say “Who is John Galt?” For the record, I like Ayn Rand, but she made a mistake in Atlas Shrugged when she assumed that talented folks and great innovators would automatically be capitalists. Rand had too much reverence for the “system” and naively suggested that capitalist Atlases might shrug, but that’s never been the case–because they always benefited too much from the “system.” Rand might as well have titled the book Robber-Barron Shrugged or Industrialist Shrugged or When Corporations Shrug.

History clearly suggests that the “shruggers” were never members of the upper capitalist caste. They were hardscrabble types, common people, beset-upon folks that refused to surrender to the robber-barons, industrialists, and corporatists who solemnly and repeatedly endeavored to relegate them to capitalism’s dirty, secret byproduct: a powerless heap of the collaterally damaged and chronically disenfranchised (also known as the middle and lower classes).

So take notes, Ayn. A union work stoppage is John Galt. A strain of talented college graduates refusing to become cogs in a soul-crushing, environment-ravaging corporate machine is John Galt. And collection of Egyptian protestors speaking truth to power in Tahir Square is also John Galt.

America is in trouble because we don’t believe in it anymore. And we shouldn’t. But not because our president is black or because our government is too big or we pay too many taxes. It’s because we no longer operate under the precept of collective self-interest. We have self-interest down to a science and regard self-indulgence as the fulfillment of the American Dream. But “collective” no longer has a place in the equation because it’s an unpleasantness that the have-mores and the have-mosts pay legions of lawmakers and lobbyists to help them avoid. Then they enthusiastically hail unrestrained, unregulated free markets as the amazing cure-all for our times and utilize their government-sanctioned privileges to remove the 3rd, 4th, 5th, 6th and 7th wrung on every ten foot stretch of the socio-economic ladder so that we are systemically and perpetually beholden to them if we are inclined to climb.

The ladder is still navigable if you’re connected, related, incredibly lucky or prepared to jump real high when they tell you to—but if you question their authority or resent their entitlement, you’re an extremist, a radical or an insurrectionist who must be quashed.

As I think Henry Miller would have colorfully noted, unrestrained capitalism, corporatism, materialism and our destructive way of life in general are not too big to fail and we’re not so small that we won’t survive when they do.

The have-mores and the have-mosts who control everything in this country are a conglomerate version of Hosni Mubarak. Different crime scene, different M.O., but same criminality. And obligatorily shouldering their burden simply makes us enablers.

So become a square wheel. Slack a little. Take some time and think.

The mortgage, the car and the flat-screen can wait.

There’s always surrender. But it should be a last resort. Not our chief priority.

In thousands of high school, college and even pro locker rooms around the country, it is written. During hundreds of thousands of half-time speeches, motivational speaking seminars and out-of-town sales conventions, it is repeated. It defines American sports. It rationalizes American Capitalism. It’s a dangerous lie perpetrated by the shortsighted, the ignorant and the morally suspect.

I played high school and college sports. I understand that in a sweaty, adrenaline-pumped, brainwashed locker room setting, this quote makes a certain sense. But people take these mantras out into the world and live by them and justify scrupulousness with them.

“Winning is the only thing” justifies gathering exceptional players at well-to-do high schools by hook or by crook. “Winning is the only thing” justifies paying future Heisman Trophy winners (or their parents) to play for your school. “Winning is the only thing” justifies future Super Bowl champions illegally filming opposing teams’ defensive play-calling signals to ensure wins.

In the last several years we’ve seen sterling examples of all three. “Sterling” as in trophies. And the unscrupulous winning parties went largely unpunished, so the mantra was affirmed.

Oh, there have been a few hitches, most of the high-profile cases involving women. Tonya Harding obviously took the mantra over the top. Marion Jones ran her way into the record books juiced up on this credo and it backfired horribly. And arguably, unfairly.

Mark McGwire and Barry Bonds hardly share her disgrace. And Alex Rodriguez is still playing.

Tour de France winner Floyd Landis took a spill in 2006, but, for the most part, winning is still the only thing and campaigns to challenge this sentiment haven’t received much traction.

One of my conservative uncles used to say that dollar signs were the only way to rack up points on the scoreboard of life, and I vehemently disagreed. But winning was the only thing for BP on the Deepwater Horizon oil rig, and they were so anxious for another big score that they ignored failed pressure tests and skipped or skirted numerous safety precautions. Winning was also the only thing for big health insurance companies when they automatically challenged every medical claim they could to avoid losing revenue. And winning is the only thing that keeps natural gas magnates from coming clean about the current and long-term impacts of the “fracking” method of gas extraction, the induced seismicity it’s led to and the toxins it introduces into our water supplies.

“Winning is the only thing” is what led to the nefarious whisper campaigns that Karl Rove generated to knock off John McCain in the Republican Presidential Primary of 2000. “Winning is the only thing” led to the shocking cover-up of the friendly-fire death of former NFL star Pat Tillman in 2004.

“Winning is the only thing” is also what led to the ludicrous legal rationale for “corporate personhood.” By “winning” the rights afforded under the law to natural persons for corporations, corporate entities established themselves as “super players” who—by the sheer fact of their numbers (human and monetary, but mostly monetary)—normal players or citizens couldn’t compete with in the democratic process. And now the winning edge of “corporate persons” is felt in every election cycle when corporate donations determine our leadership and on a daily basis when corporate-controlled lobbyists—democratic representation on steroids—determine our “rules” or laws and “reffing” or governance.

So let’s set the record straight.

Winning isn’t anything if it’s the only thing.

If you and I aren’t lining up on a level playing field, no one really wins.

If the refs are in either of our pockets, the game isn’t worth playing.

And if one of us is juiced up on performance-enhancing drugs or profit-enhancing legalese, the scoreboard is a disgrace.

How long will we continue to embarrass ourselves? How long will conquests and wealth continue to justify cheating, inequality and kleptocracy?

How long will our hopes for the future continue to take a back seat to destructive victories?

What the GOP needs is a mandate. Without collapsing buildings in the background, terror alerts, gays to bash or brain-dead citizens to convene over and save in the middle of the night, Republicans just don’t have much mojo.

The good news is they seem a little saner. The bad news is conservative sanity is unpopular with their core constituency. But don’t fret. I have a suggestion.

For the last year or so, I’ve heard Republicans catalogue, exaggerate and fabricate the horrors of socialism. And I’ve listened to them complain and moan about the counter-productiveness of organized labor and how the bail-out of the auto industry wouldn’t have been necessary if not for the greedy unions and how public pension funds wouldn’t be approaching insolvency if it weren’t for those no-good unions, etc., etc. Republicans don’t like unions. Unions redistribute wealth.

Back in the day, organized labor negotiated for safe work places, forced the creation of child labor laws and secured higher wages, eight hour work days, vacations and medical and retirement benefits. Unions practically created the middle class, but they have been a thorn in the side of the prosperous and propertied from the very beginning. Now Republicans plan to use our current economic straits to vilify unions and reduce their influence, but what they need is an opening act.

On February 6, North Texas will be the perfect backdrop for a bold Republican stance. On that date, Arlington will host what may turn out to be the biggest exhibition of organized labor in U.S. history. One hundred and six Commie-red union men (from Green Bay and Pittsburgh) will be flying in to ply their wares in helmets and pads at Cowboy Stadium in Super Bowl 45, and most of the nation will be watching.

Right now, as we speak, the NFL owners and the NFL Players Association are on a collision course for a March lock-out. In fact, the NFL Players Association features a countdown to the lock-out on its website. The owners say they’re making less money. The players say attendance and revenues are up.

Meanwhile, NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell has formed an NFL Political Action Committee and contributed $600,000 to government officials to get them to help in the fight against unions and the NFL Players Association in particular. The NFL has also created a $900 million dollar fund to tide the poor, struggling owners over while the battle rages.

At this point there are tens of thousands of Republicans who have unknowingly purchased tickets, parking passes, stadium suites, etc. to this un-American, unionized event and no doubt want to clear their names.

How could they have known they’d be cheering organized labor? How could they have known that they were subsidizing the NFL’s union shop?

The Super Bowl offers local Republicans an opportunity to show the world what they stand for. As faithful conservatives, they can’t support or attend the Super Bowl because it’s an embarrassing spectacle of Marxist ideology in their own back yard. As local champions of the free market they must stand up for their principles and stick to their guns.

On the night of this travesty, Republicans could just stay home. Empty stands would definitely send a message. But think of the glory and renown they could achieve if they actually went to the stadium and picketed the NFL Players Association in full view.

Wouldn’t that send a stronger message?

Or what if they showed up at the stadium en force and burned their tickets and parking passes in the tailgating area. This would demonstrate their resolve. This would restore their mojo.

No Republican in good conscience can go to or watch Super Bowl 45. Record attendance and TV ratings will prove the players union’s point. If you’re a Republican or a conservative, you can’t be a party to this concession. It would make you a shameless hypocrite.

Show us you’re not Republicans in name only. Stay home for what you believe in or torch your tickets.

This is just the beginning. Professional basketball, baseball and hockey will be next.

The U.S. trains paramilitary forces to fight war against American enemies. Trained forces fight U.S. enemies, but later change sides or comprise a different and often greater menace. U.S. forces find themselves fighting combatants that they themselves trained.

Take a guess at what country I’m talking about.

Afghanistan?

Good guess. Try again.

Iraq?

Not as good a guess as Afghanistan, but not bad.

The Afghans were our surrogate soldiers against Russia in the early 1980s. We armed them and trained them as best we could. We even instructed a young Muslim Jihadist named Osama Bin Laden.

We also supplied and trained some of Saddam Hussein’s forces in their late-80′s campaigns against Iran and, when we went over there for the first Gulf War, we faced some of the very same weaponry we’d provided them just a few years earlier. But that was a long time ago.

The success of the late Bush Administration surge in Iraq had nothing to with anybody we trained. It was primarily achieved by paying enemy combatants to stay home and keep carnage on the down-low so things could settle down and we could look good in the press.

The most recent example of Uncle Sam turning our half-earned tax dollars into attack animals that turn on their handlers isn’t happening in the Middle East or the Money-Pit on Terror. It’s happening right here in North America, and some of our southern border states have a front row seat.

The core of the Zetas, a drug-muscle splinter group that used to do the dirty work for the Gulf Cartel, was trained in special ops, counter-narcotic ops, counter-insurgency, light to heavy weapons proficiency and covert communications at Ft. Bragg, North Carolina, by the U.S. 7th Special Forces group in the mid to late 1990s. They worked for the Mexican Armed Forces for awhile, but the good guys didn’t pay enough, so they switched sides. Then they decided they could run things better than the Gulf Cartel and now they’re the scariest border presence in the Mexican drug war. Whole towns exist without law enforcement. Whole cities are afraid to go out after dark.

The Zetas don’t spare women and children; the Zetas don’t even spare pregnant women.

Boy, we sure know how to pick ‘em. When is Uncle Sam going to stop using psychopaths as errand boys? Shouldn’t we finally admit that Uncle Sam is something of a psychopath?

Hold those thoughts.

What if we simply met with our former trainees in the Zetas and offered to pay them to kick back with Tecates at the beach in Matamoros or Veracruz? It worked in Iraq.

Even better, what if we recalibrated their American-trained, psychopathic blood lust to once again work in our favor.

Right now the drug trade across the US-Mexican border is considered to be worth $20-$40 billion and the Zetas don’t have a big piece of it. Illegal immigrants are bringing unwanted attention to border drug channels and our efforts to stop them have been about as effective as the Army Corps of Engineers’ levees in New Orleans. The “gringo’s little helper” trade has to cross our southern border, so why don’t we simply enlist the Zetas to police both flows of traffic?

A serious contingent of their operation is our baby. Why not bring it into the fold and kill two birds with one stone. The Zetas want more of a foothold in the narcotics market and we don’t like their friends and neighbors sneaking over to have babies and steal our jobs. If the Zetas controlled the border, they could get our drugs to us with less expense and headache and we could start getting baked for a song. And their fellow countrymen would remember their handiwork on the Mexican side of the Rio Grande Valley and be too terrified to cross them, much less the border, especially if the Zetas started stitching their skinned faces on soccer balls or placing the heads of woman and children on pikes at all the border crossings.

Heck, we could even make the Zetas a government-subsidized branch of Blackwater (a.k.a. Xe Services, LLC) and then their ruthlessness would be legitimized.

God Bless American ingenuity.