Boys Night Out

Melissa, my wife, sometimes jokes that my allusions all seem to relate to one of three things: punk rock songs, Monty Python, or episodes of Star Trek (actually, I think she’s a little off base, as she never even mentions Stanley Kubrick films or my lengthy analogies to the game of tennis).

“I married such a nerd,” she’ll note.

In that vein, I remember an episode of “Star Trek: The Next Generation” when Picard left the ship for a little R&R, only to be embroiled down on the planet in some convoluted intrigue with the locals, which left him little time for any R or R. But by the end of the show, Picard realizes that this adventure was his R&R, and it was just what the doctor ordered.

Last weekend, I went into the city for my first night out since moving to the suburbs a couple months ago (not counting an indy rock show that I attended on my way home from Bible study one Wednesday). I met three buddies at the Globe Pub, where we drank pilsner beer and watched the Fire lose their MLS semifinal match to Real Salt Lake in a penalty shootout.

That was a bit of a downer, so after the game we walked around the corner to the Lincoln Restaurant, where the College of Complexes was holding court. In explanation for the uninitiated, the College of Complexes is a loose collection of misfits and outsiders who have been debating a wide range of topics of the day for the past 58 years, an organization which I believe has its roots in the public debates of Bughouse Square.

It was around 10PM, and the meeting began at 8PM, so we were a little late, but a waitress snuck us in through the back door of the “meeting hall”, essentially an annex of the restaurant where the College holds session each Saturday night.

The room was packed, but the four of us were able to find a spot at an unmanned bar in the back. Looking around, my first thought was that this is a room full of folks who aren’t getting any, unless by “any” you mean social security checks, either due to old age or the early retirement known as functional insanity.

The main presentation had been long concluded, as had the question and answer period, but we arrived in time for what is typically the best part of these gatherings, the rebuttal period where audience members get 5 minutes to respond to the presentation. From our perch on the barstools in back, we sipped our Weiss beers and absorbed the knowledge.

“I agree with tonight’s speakers: the New World Order is behind the war in Afghanistan,” said a relatively young guy at the podium. “They were behind 911; they are behind our wars; they are behind the chemtrails (this triggered giggles in the audience). Hey, the chemtrails are real, just look it up. I’ve got a list of websites right here if you’re interested. Just find me when this is over and get some education.”

A middle aged gent with black plastic glasses stood up to declare: “You ask why we are at war in Afghanistan. I’ll tell you why. It’s because we are at war with Islam, and for good reason (this was met with some guffaws and hissing from the crowd).”

A woman in her 30’s whose hard nipples, the business end of pendulous, sagging breasts, faced towards the floor at a 45 degree angle and were clearly visible through her shirt, got up to pronounce that she was “shocked and angered that anyone could say we were at war with Islam.” She said a bunch of other stuff, but I was too distracted to tell you what.

A young black guy, probably in his early 20’s, tried a softer approach, saying that his Christian faith teaches him that love is a better response than the urge for retribution and asked the dude in the black glasses to live by a more positive philosophy.

I was almost persuaded by the kindness in this kid’s demeanor and the reasonableness of his argument, but then another conservative old crank spieled off all the strategic reasons to have troops in Iraq and Afghanistan, noting as an aside the math and logic demonstrating that the World Trade Center towers were brought down by Muslim terrorists flying commercial aircraft into the buildings, and that the masterminds of said attacks have since admitted as much.

It didn’t look good for the conspiracy theorists and their left-wing sympathizers, as the eight original speakers stood up in their matching “Investigate 911” T-shirts to defend themselves. A couple of younger white guys, who I’d bet dollars-to-doughnuts were full-time political protestors and part-time Kinko’s employees, stumbled through more minutiae about chemtrails and the melting point of metal alloys used to construct skyscrapers, but they managed neither to convince nor entertain. The crowd grew restless. A young Muslim started solidly, stating that “Islam is a religion of peace”, but two minutes later he was talking about his visit to Pakistan and that it wouldn’t be long before bombs would be blowing shit up in this country, and the wistfulness which he had for said bombings pretty much refuted the main thesis of his argument. Like I said, it didn’t look good for the home team in this one. But then an old black dude approached the podium, leaned over the mic, and stood up for the dignity of the New Revolutionary.

“I remember Vietnam, when pappy raped me in the ass,” he began. “I remember Iraq, when pappy raped me in the ass. I remember Tuskegee, when pappy raped me in the ass. And now, here we are in Afghanistan, and pappy’s raping me in the ass again. I gotta tell you, I’m tired of gettin’ raped in the ass.”

It was the most fun that I’ve had in awhile. I laughed my ass off, it riled me up, and on my drive home I entertained myself with a series of exuberant interior monologues, a couple of which I will elucidate for you now.

The first relates to Islam being a religion of peace, a platitude you hear a lot these days. I know it’s a real downer for a lot of folks, but I think we must be willing to dive into some pretty deep waters if we are even going to attempt to understand what it means for 1.3 billion people on this planet to call themselves “Muslim”. Maybe a lot of them are only culturally Muslim, sort of like my dad and many in his generation were culturally Christian. Maybe, like my own generation, their children will slide into the secular melting pot, in which there are no religious beliefs to interfere with being a good consumer, where the vestiges of their forefathers gets ameliorated by a safe, accommodating pragmatism. I know this is the vision with which most of the prosperous parts of our country and our planet have comforted themselves.

But what about those several hundred million Muslims who actually believe in the tenants of their faith? Let’s start with the most elemental of these beliefs, namely that Mohammed was a prophet who brought us the final revelation of God, and that the manifest destiny of Mohammed’s revelation is for Islam to rule the world, at which point there will be ushered in an era of universal peace and submission to the will of God. Without this belief in the manifest destiny of their religion, Islam loses much of its potency; it’s like Christianity without the Resurrection or Judaism without the part about being the chosen people of God.

Anyone who has made even a cursory exploration into the faith understands this. The problem is that most of our cultural elite, from educators to politicians, believe that the ultimate goal is to make the world’s religions more ecumenical, filing off their rough edges until they become safe, if not all together irrelevant. So they conveniently ignore prima facie evidence that most practicing Muslims believe in the ends if not the means of Al Qaeda.

My second thought is about how the new revolutionaries, if that is what you call these conspiracy theorists, are playing into the hands of the old right. Last year, on a trip to L.A., I debated the merits of the current wave of political conspiracies with my friend John. I defended their enthusiasms, if not their logic or evidence. But John argued that the shaky basis of their theories was precisely the point, as a truthteller without the truth on his side is nothing more than a sideshow, a distraction that facilitates the twisted powers who were behind the rise of the latter Bush Administration, who still lurk in the shadows, looking to resume pilfering the country and undermining its laws.

So John, if you are reading this, let me acknowledge that, after closer examination of these folks, I think that you’re right. As you pointed out to me, it’s no wonder that a show like “Coast to Coast”, whose bread and butter are conspiracies ranging from the government cover-up of UFO’s to the secret history of the Fed, comes to you courtesy of the same broadcast network that brings you Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck. Most of these conspiracy theorists, while anti-establishment, are carrying the water of the Right, because by focusing on chimeras like death camps and chemtrails, they distract from the real public betrayals right under our nose.

What this country needs are acts of radical moderation, not self-absorbed radicalism. The laissez-faire capitalists who spearheaded the deregulation of the banking industry want you to forget that this deregulation caused the current economic crisis. Every citizen more concerned with the lingering influence of the Rothschilds than the more recent malfeasance managed by Greenspan and company is a victory for the folks who put this country’s economy at risk. In a parallel vein, the Republican Party is more than happy to have you fret about chemtrails, as it distracts attention from their gutting of consumer protections and environmental laws over the past 25 years and the very real harm this has caused. From Bush’s “Healthy Forest Initiative” to the billionaires who bring you Rush Limbaugh and Fox News, their Orwellian Newspeak and its poisoning of the American mind is the greatest crime of this new century, and the sad fact is that we probably ain’t seen nothing yet.

These are the things that I’ve been thinking about since coming back from my little Saturday night out with the boys. I know that my life would be less complicated and more titillating if we were the kind of guys who thought about nothing but sports and titties (whereas these two subjects take up no more than a strong plurality of our time), but much like Captain Picard in that Star Trek episode, I got the kind of night out that suits my nerdy and unequivocally combative brain.