Fairfax, VA, USA. A columnist must be mentally nimble, a lover of naked rugby, agile without constraint. Editors must be viewed as a necessary evil but one that in an ideal world would be seldom needed.

We are, after all and unlike Shakespeare, all too human and the frequency of my unblotted manuscripts ranges from seldom to somewhere south of infinity. I am nothing if not an irrational number.


The ornament of beauty is suspect, however, and most often limited to the writer’s eyes alone — a crow that flies in heaven's sweetest air so to speak. I do not appear to be a crow, even at my most rapturous.

I am, if nothing else, an agile tester of boundaries with little concern for culturally approved processes or religious or political philosophies (assuming there is a discernible difference between the three). Democracy, after all, is a series of independent responsibilities, not a collective group hug.

If you love wealth more than liberty, the tranquility of servitude better than the animating contest of freedom, depart from us in peace. We ask not your counsel nor your arms. Crouch down and lick the hand that feeds you. May your chains rest lightly upon you and may posterity forget that you were our countrymen.

— Samuel Adams

Yeah, what he said.

I would the targets of my affection stand on their own two feet, responding with rational discourse in lieu of obscenity and personal invective. I fear that my hope is beyond the realm of human probabilities. We seldom approach a subject fully reasoned sans our deep seated assumptions.

Shooting fish in a barrel is seldom much fun even if I make my reader laugh in the process. But you can’t drive your point home unless there are ducks on the pond. [N1]

I try to chose my ducks with care but people who need to believe odd, untrue things don't often react well when presented with evidence against their beliefs. As my Rhetoric professor, Doctor Marc Bertanasco taught me decades ago at Sacramento State, if you examine the validity of someone’s core assumptions, the ones they seldom examine themselves, their response might be quite violent.

We do not like to have our deep rooted basic assumptions challenged:

• All men are created equal.
  
  
• Capitalism is evil.
  
  
• God exists.
  
  
• God does not exist.
  
  
• Penises are more valuable than vaginas
  
  
• Men and women are interchangeable

If I touch upon any of these presumptive beliefs, I am almost sure to kick off a firestorm of expert anger on the blogs and our article comment section. If nothing else, challenging false beliefs often causes people who hold them, consciously or unconsciously, to double down. Often the emotional price of discarding a core belief is greater than the price of being shown to be wrong or foolish in front of others.

Here are few foolish true believers for your amusement. If you find yourself offended, perhaps you should admit to your assumptions going in and examine them more closely.

9-11 Truthers

9-11 Truthers insist that the United States was not attacked by Al Qaeda. That would be too simple, too unpredictable, too threatening to their need for national and personal invulnerability from the world around them.

So rather than accept the reality of what happened on 9-11, Truthers posit a vast government conspiracy that enable an attack on the United States. Sometimes George W. Bush is the devil, sometimes Bill Clinton depending on from which side of the political spectrum the Truther is coming.

They insist that the Pentagon was attacked by a missile, not an airplane. I have no idea why that makes Truthers happy.

I was there, close to the point of attack. I saw the fireball and the smoke cloud rising from the impact. I heard and felt the explosion. I smelled and tasted the burning jet fuel mixed with the ashes of human flesh. I saw the few remaining parts of the broken airplane.

But people believe what they want to believe and, if they are big enough fools, there is little you can do to change what seems to be a core belief.

Trig Birthers

A close relative of the 9-11 Truthers are the Trig Birthers, most of whom seem to be liberal leftists. Trig Birthers start with the assumption that former Alaska governor Sarah Palin should not be elected to the Presidency (or any higher office for that matter), that what emerge from her womb should make the rest of us nervous enough to not to vote for her. [N2]

From that assumption, it is a short walk down the wild side to believe that Sarah Palin really wasn’t pregnant in 2007 and 2008 and did not give birth to her son Trig three years ago. The true Trig Birthers seem to believe that Palin’s pregnancy was a charade designed to shield her daughter Bristol from the public horrors of teenage pregnancy.

Conveniently ignoring that Bristol’s pregnancy culminated in a live, full term birth eight months after her brother Trig was born.

Most of the Trig Birthers seem to be boys and men for whom lady parts are still a mystery to be feared.

Obama Birthers

The Trig Birthers on the left are nicely balanced by the Obama Birthers on the right. So deep are their core assumptions, I doubt that even the President producing a certified copy of his full birth record is enough to kill the irrational belief that Barak Obama was born in a country other than the United States.

It should be noted, however, that Republican opponents as well as liberal activists have repeatedly challenged John McCain to produce a birth certificate showing he was born a U. S. citizen. [N3] McCain has long taken to carrying his birth paperwork around with him. Senator Barry Goldwater, who was born 1909 in the Arizona Territory, was repeatedly questioned about his citizenship. [N4]

Apparently Birther Belief is contagious and capability of quick mutation when the emotional need arises.

Capitalism is a Great Evil

And Republicans are the Devil Incarnate.

For many on the left, it is a given that Capitalism is a great evil that must be abolished. The belief ranks right up there with Human Life is Sacred and All Cultures are Equally Valid.

No discussion allowed. Capitalism benefits no one. Everything the Republicans do is Evil.

The anti-capitalists have traded a religious belief in a Christian Devil for a secular fervor and belief in a Republican Capitalist Devil. Death to Capitalism and the Republican Party!

And whatever you do as a columnist, don’t suggest that the Republicans have ever done any good at all since winning the Civil War, saving The Union, and passing the New Birth of Freedom Amendments to the Constitution of the United States.

America was founded as a Christian Nation

No matter what the founding fathers had to say about religion and their beliefs, no matter what they may have written on the subject, it is an article of faith to many Christian Evangelicals that the Founding Fathers intended to found a Christian Nation.

Forget about the First Amendment to the U. S. Constitution

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof;

Forgot about Thomas Jefferson eliminating parts of the Christian New Testament he thought did not actually happen and assembling his own

In extracting the pure principles which he taught, we should have to strip off the artificial vestments in which they have been muffled by priests, who have travestied them into various forms, as instruments of riches and power to themselves. We must dismiss the Platonists and Plotinists, the Stagyrites and Gamalielites, the Eclectics, the Gnostics and Scholastics, their essences and emanations, their logos and demiurges, aeons and daemons, male and female, with a long train of … or, shall I say at once, of nonsense. [N5]

God is in the White House and Jesus is our President.

Do I have to tell you that presenting facts to the contrary does not and never will change their core beliefs and assumptions. The fear that the removal of one screw will cause their elaborately constructed tower of belief to crumble is far too strong.

They would rather deny historical reality and documentation than question their core beliefs. If you question those beliefs, they will attack you in a religious fervor much like the anti-Republican left.

The human animal is nothing if not predictable in its knee jerk reaction to what we perceive as a personal challenge.

Transsexuals pretend to change their sex

The male dominated shrinkocracy of therapists, untrained if not functionally unacquainted with science or Transsexuality, is fond of talking about how transsexuals change their sex.

They need to believe this fervently. They are men. They focus on male penises and love to talk about male to female transsexuals removing theirs. [N6] After all, from a man’s point of view, only a person who is mentally and logically challenged would not want a penis.

Conveniently writing off half the human population — as they have for ten thousand years.

The truth of course, one that calls into question both the efficacy and the basic validity of the male dominated shrinkocracy, is that men and women born transsexual do not change the sex of their birth. We correct the misalignment of our neurobiological wiring, physical genitalia, and other secondary sexual characteristics to bring them all into agreement with the sexual identity with which we were born.

I have known that I was female since I was two or three. That my body suggested something other than who I was is something I corrected as soon as I was able and the medical techniques and procedures were developed sufficiently to reasonably perform the required surgery.

I would have had surgery at 11 or 12 if I had had ways and means.

But the men who postulate about big ideas do not like to think about living without their penises. So they talk about changing sex all the time and the male structured therapies that might best prevail to deal with it.

And not threaten their penises.

They hold these core beliefs with religious fervor against all questions, foreign and domestic.

Like the Truthers.

Like the Birthers.

Like the Anti-Capitalist-Anti-Republicans.

Like the Christian Nation Evangelicals.

As Samuel Adams also said

The liberties of our country, the freedoms of our civil Constitution are worth defending at all hazards; it is our duty to defend them against all attacks. We have received them as a fair inheritance from our worthy ancestors. They purchased them for us with toil and danger and expense of treasure and blood. It will bring a mark of everlasting infamy on the present generation — enlightened as it is — if we should suffer them to be wrested from us by violence without a struggle, or to be cheated out of them by the artifices of designing men.

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