on rioting in oppressed nations

Since the fall of the autocratic government in Tunisia, there have been uprisings in other states in and bordering the African continent. Pundits and politicians point to efforts of past presidents or to wars of aggression waged in the region to explain this sudden increase in democratic expression.
I, however, will suggest different causes. I will suggest that the oppressed masses in a country ruled by a ruthless and authoritarian dictator (Egypt) who is supported by the United States of America (for purposes of the shadowy and ill-defined goal of regional stability) rose up on their own, without foreign intervention, for three reasons:
1) They are sick of living under the iron boot of a ruthless dictator who oppresses his population with America's tacit blessing
2) They do not wish to be invaded in another illegal war of aggression waged by the US when the American government decides that support of said dictator has become politically or economically unsustainable
3) They have decided that since American forces are bogged down in wars initially begun for self-serving reasons (control of Iraqi oil, punishment of terrorist in Afghanistan), and since America shows no sign of removing those regimes that truly oppress their people (most notably Saudi Arabia), any progress toward an open and democratic society must come from the downtrodden populace itself.
An old maxim reads: Something given has no value.
The Iraqis do not see the value of their democratic institutions because they did not ask for them in the first place.
The Afghanis do not see the value of democratic institutions because the system they have been running since Alexander the Great passed through over two thousand years ago worked; they saw no need to change their ways in order to accommodate an upstart political philosophy.
These uprisings are not signs of democracy's success; they are signs that, via social networking websites, individuals can change their world.
The United States is resembling more a police state, a society of rigidly enforced controls and widespread homogenization. What will happen when the people here, the millions upon millions of individuals who every year are extruded from the anus of the capitalist machine to wallow in a cold pit of washed-out excrement, what will happen when they call for change? Will our government welcome their demands with open ears and mind, or will it send in the riot cops and water cannons?
Democracy fails largely because people are not intrinsically equal. Simply put, some people are better than others. The way our system is set up here in America, those citizens with better connections or a better jumping off point will have better lives filled with more Happiness and greater Safety than those people without the skills or contacts or capital needed to excel.
Have we developed in harmony with the goals enumerated in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution? Is our government providing for the general Welfare and creating for all her citizens a world of Safety and Happiness? Can we honestly say that we live in a democratic society and not one run by the interests of the military-industrial complex and the massive intelligence gathering and law-enforcement communities? If there were riots in American streets, our country would eventually become more democratic. If there were masses of protesters screaming for the repeal of the Patriot Act, that foul and unconstitutional piece of legislation would be repealed. If our citizens risked their lives to speak, perhaps our senators would not fight so ferociously to maintain low taxes for the wealthiest three percent of all citizens.
We can only hope.
We can only read our founding texts and demand liberty, equality, and justice for all.
Ultima Ratio Regum.
JP

an open letter to Gov. Rendell

Dear Governor Rendell of Pennsylvania.
I was very pleased to hear you use the "humans-have-been-doing-it-since-the-dawn-of-civilization" argument to justify expanding the gambling industry in Pennsylvania (a link). Yours is a valid argument based on sound scientific data, most notably the archaeological record (a link).
If all goes well with your efforts, humans in this fine state will be allowed to pursue two of the activities they have enjoyed since the dawn of time, most notably drinking alcohol (here) and games of chance.
Since you have used this argument to justify the expansion of gambling, the argument can now be used to justify the cultivation and consumption of cannabis, a practice that also dates to the dawn of recorded civilization (a link). The state of Pennsylvania is one of the largest volume drug dealers in the world, selling more alcohol, which is a drug, than nearly any other entity in the world (a link). Since the state is already in the business of selling drugs, it is logical to assume that it would allow its citizens (who are allowed to brew and self-distribute beer under license {a link}) to cultivate and self-distribute (under license) a fellow drug, cannabis, for their own consumption.
Access to alcohol is an ancient right of mankind.
Access to gambling is an ancient right of mankind.
Access to cannabis is an ancient right of mankind.
Please take steps to modernize the current cannabis laws (a link) so as to bring them into accord with the proud and ancient traditions that humans have been following for many thousands of years. Our society cannot afford its continued persecution of men and women enjoying this long-standing tradition.
Thank you for your time.
Sincerely,
John Paul Roggenkamp

nipples

Every time I look at my shirtless self in the mirror, I get slightly aroused by my nipples. For a moment I imagine they are the nipples of a woman. Within milliseconds, however, my neural processors kick in and my growing excitement is squelched by the sudden and painful realization that these nipples, my nipples, are not, unlike the teats of a dame, objects of sexual desire.
But are a man's nipples really any less sexually offensive than those of a woman? Leading men in all sorts of films display their nipples proudly and without fear of censorship or retribution. Sportsmen remove their shirts in victory, flaunting their largely useless but invariably pert little man-teats. It is fact that a male's nipples are a byproduct of the evolutionary conservation of resources, their development only halted by a sudden explosion of testosterone triggered by the genetic code. Until the fetus decides what it is supposed to be, it develops male and female in identical fashion.
Sometime, it gets confused, and makes hermaphrodites.
Very few men indeed can produce milk from their breasts, although most of the plumbing seems to be in place. What I am trying to say is that man-teats are just as repulsive to some and arousing to others as the nipples of women. So why are men allowed to remove their shirts in America without fear of immediate legal retribution and vociferous communal outrage? Should not women also have the right to go shirtless, displaying their fine and shapely nipples for all who care to look? In our current world, women are not allowed to show their breasts because they are mostly larger than those of men, and because, in certain situations, they produce milk. But when was the last time you witnessed, in contemporary cinema or sport (outside of porn, of course), a woman with leaking breasts? I would hazard to say you have not. But as soon as a tiny bit of tender female teat-flesh is exposed, a film goes from PG-13 to R, while when Dan Craig emerges from the ocean all glistening and moist, his nipples cutting holes in the wind, the crowd gasps and applauds approvingly.
Get over your hypocrisies, America, and release women's nipples from their exempted status. The ladies didn't fight for suffrage in order to wear shirts all the damn time.
Release your nipples, and join the fight for gender equality.
The time is now.

Ultima Ratio Regum.
JP  

a dearth of differences

  Leave your house and drive three days and tell me what you see.

  If you are in America, you will see town upon town, city upon city, places resembling each other in so many ways as to approach homogeneity. The shops are the same, as are the drugstores. The houses are carbon-copies of one another; when seen from the air, the grids in which they are arranged are indistinguishable from the grids of the next town over. Sure, the people are likely to vary slightly in appearance and dialect, but will they vary to any significant degree? The people speak a common tongue, they watch the same shows, they bemoan in common tones the state of their lives, yet they seem to have lost the courage to break out of their self-imposed little prisons.

  Did we developed in this way because our parents came to age in the industrialization and normalization period of the post-war era? Did we reach this point because our parents' parents grew up poor and toothless during the Great Depression? Do we allow this homogeneity to spread because it is the path of least resistance, a path that nine times out of ten leeches the color from our lives, a path that leaves us with a weak and faltering sense of personal identity?

  Get in where you fit in, the saying goes, a saying that exemplifies the citizen's drive toward a supposedly perfect cookie-cutter life. Then again, if people are happy being clones, they should by all means homogenize, and shed any vestigial characteristics that might allow them to be picked out of a crowd.

  Conditions in our larger cities still appear good. Here, myriad tongues are spoken, the races mix, new culture blooms, the senses are stimulated. It is to these places that the young and the creative flee. Out in the sticks, however, out in the bumfuck boondocks, the distillation of our culture into a few scant and puny rituals progresses apace (these rituals include watching football, souping up cars, going to parades, and shopping). While these rituals seem desirable to those advanced in age, or to families seeking a quiet nest from which to grow, the erosion of the cultural diversity, nay, of our very cultural identity, this erosion bodes ill for our fine nation.

  I am not sure if the President's call to shop and the rapid cultural homogenization that followed in the wake of Nine-Eleven have anything in common, or if they even belong in this same piece, but here it stands, immutable and preserved for all time in the digital medium. I lost a large amount of respect for the people of this country when, shortly after 11SEP2001, then President Bush said, "I encourage you all to go shopping more," and an unanimous silence was heard around the country as citizens dusted off their credit cards dutifully. It is the job of our nation's leaders to inspire us to serve our country, to create programs that would allow regular people to do irregular things in an effort to make this a better place; it is not their job to call upon us to spend money simply for the sake of spending money.

  So, before you reach for the remote, before you browse the endless aisles without a clear purchase in mind, before you settle down to business as usual, ask yourself if there is something you could be doing to make a better place out of the little space call home, and out of the larger space you call country.

Spes Mea In Ratio Est - JPR

on the subtlety of fear

I am just come from the shores of the Old World, that stalwart mass whence many Americans trace their blood. I arrived still entrenched in the cold and calculating mindset in which I have spent many nights in the past seven years, a mindset of constant vigilance and persistent distrust for mister John Law. There I strode through the cobbled lanes of Amsterdam, that fine city on her Graachten, crop-dusting smoke, always changing locations, the senses trained for any sign of police, trapped in a latent and deep-seated modus operandi that had kept me (relatively) clear of the law for some time. Only slowly and via repeated conversation did I shed this fear and come to look on the cops as many Europeans do, as a bothersome but largely benevolent force tasked with assisting and serving the population.
Do we look on the police in these fine United States in the same way? Would you, as a pennyless beggar or down-on-his-luck fellow approach the cops and expect a sandwich and a warm place to sleep at night? Would you do as you pleased, pissing in the street and making a ruckus at all hours in a residential neighborhood, if you knew a police station were within the radius of a thrown stone? In the US, people do such things, but, ere long, they find themselves approached, questioned, or apprehended by the police. In Europe (at least in the larger cities), all these things are done regularly, in broadest day and darkest night, freely and without a second thought.
For lack of a less grand statement: What have we done to ourselves and to our country? Why have we acquiesced to injustices stemming from the Patriot Act and similar legislation designed to make us safer, sacrificing our liberty at the alter of a delusional sense of security? I am a sounding board in some ways, a shape-shifter who changes according to the immediate social surroundings, adjusting myself to the situation at hand, taking on the mores, hopes, and fears of those around me; and a few weeks into my stay, I realized that I had taken on the subtle fears of the greater American population, adjusted to the suspicions that pervade our land, acquiesced to the notion that the police are something to fear, that they have some sort of power over my state of mind, over my Happiness.
In this, I have erred grievously.
Again, I have erred grievously.
It is not for us to live in fear of the police, to hide our passions, to refrain from doing the things which give us joy or satisfaction, always keeping out a watchful eye for the uncouth, reporting to supposedly higher authorities that which we do not understand. My hat goes off to the brave men and women who wear their hair differently, who have tattoos, who dress in colorful thread, for those who are stared at when they walk down the street or followed through grocery stores.
We speak of freedom in this country, but I suspect that all this talking stems from the fact that we know, deep down, that our freedoms are being taken from us one by one, that we conform to the drugs society wants us to take so as not to draw attention, drugs that our states sell to us and allow to be sold, that this once free land is no longer that, but has become something altogether different.
I weep for my country, for these United States of America, for I have drunk of the nectar of a truly liberal society, and, having done and ingested and worn and said what I pleased, I have returned and seen with new eyes an increasingly militarized society, armed soldiers in train stations, police on every block, even the small towns riddled with cops, their gazes hard and menacing.
Is this the country our forefathers envisioned, a country marbled with fear of the unknown and of the unknowable (the true extent of a person's mind), a country that forces grandmothers from their wheelchairs to be frisked, a country where sickness (addiction) is treated as a crime, where the consumption of a freely-growing plant can land you behind bars?
We speak of our freedoms. We speak of the greatness of our country. And yet our prison are filled to capacity, our police officers have automatic weapons, and our new national past-time is, of all the lame and pointless things, shopping.
Recently, federal officers, agents representing the state, attempted to force me into confessing to a crime I did not commit. Although they did not use physical force (beyond detaining me for a short period of time), only methods of coercion and intimidation, I fear now that was my last straw, that point at which I had finally had enough, the point at which I am ready to leave these verdant shores in search of more liberal pastures. For when a Son of the American Revolution, a man with the shield of the American Union inked indelibly into his flesh, a 9-11 volunteer, when that man, after a brief repose to foreign lands, upon his return no longer feels at home in the country he loves and yearns for those distance places, it is at that time that his government has failed him, failed the very people for whom they are supposed to bring into existence Safety and Happiness (according to the Declaration of Independence, our society's bedraggled and ignored blueprint).
Shining Liberty has been cast out into the darkness; Restriction and Suspicion have taken her place at the nation's table.
In our modern America, we are not free in the sense of true liberty, no matter how much we try to convince ourselves to the contrary. We have allowed our government to fail us, and have made a mockery of our once fine society, preferring a torn umbrella of supposed security to the cleansing downpour of freedom.
Woe is unto the world, our nation is dying at the core.
May we find some way to save her. Hold out, fair Columbia, for all may not yet be lost.

Ultima Ratio Regum.
John Paul Roggenkamp