Motley Moose – Archive

For those of us who lived in Bangor, Maine in 1984 when a 23 year old man named Charlie Howard was murdered and thrown into Kenduskeag Stream for the crime of being gay, today’s 89-57 vote by the Maine Legislature to legalize gay marriage has special meaning. Here is a photo of Charlie not long before he was killed. He was just a normal 23-year-old New England kid.

Rest in Peace, Mr. Charles Howard. As Jake Chambers said in Stephen King’s The Waste Lands, “Go on, there are other worlds than this.” Charlie, I hope you are well in the world you now live in.

(Charles O Howard memorial slab, now installed on the bridge he was thrown from.)

One of my pet peeves is umpteen articles which state that in year X or civilization Y, “the average life expectancy was only 45.”

The wording of these articles leads one to believe that few people in these periods or cultures lived past 40 or 45.

This is not true. Adult humans have always lived about as long as they do now, ie. 60, 70, 80, 90, 100.

These “average life expectancy” numbers are so low because they include the number of babies who die at or just after birth (infant mortality) and the number of children who die very early in their lives (before 5). Infant and early childhood mortality was much higher in earlier centuries and millennia for all races and ethnicities than today for all types of obvious reasons. Thus, by averaging in a much higher infant and early childhood mortality rate in these periods and cultures, you end up with a much lower ‘average life expectancy.’

The fallacy here is best illustrated with turtles. Turtles have extremely high mortality rates at birth and in the days and weeks soon after birth: well over 90 percent. But those few turtles who survive these first few weeks have life expectancies of 30, 50, 100, or 150 years. As with humans, a graph of turtle life expectancy is not linear. There is a massive mortality bottleneck in the first weeks and months of life and then life expectancy skyrockets.

Unfortunately, many people read these poorly worded assertions about the average life expectancy of “early man” or ‘indigenous, non-white culture X’ and interpret these statistics to mean that up until the 1800s, very few people anywhere lived past the age of 45. That’s not true.

Adult humans have always lived about as long as they do today.

The female snapping turtle in the photo above, from Mill Brook in Westbrook, Maine just below Highland Lake, is probably 20-40 years old and will probably live (barring getting run over by a car) for another 20 or 40 or even 60 years. Nobody knows if there is even an upper limit on the age of snapping turtles, except that it is probably like humans, around 120 years.

The budget item for “volcano monitoring equipment” ridiculed by Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal on the teevee last night is actually for all of the data collection equipment operated by the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS). Most important and numerous of these are stream gages.

The most underreported story of 2009 might be the calm, measured response to the promise of the new president from the wordsmiths at RedState:

Graphic by Brendan Keefe.

“When I was a child, I spoke as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things.”  First Corinthians 13:11.

“We remain a young nation, but in the words of Scripture, the time has come to set aside childish things.” President Barack Hussein Obama.

I love good sermons. I appreciate good sermons as high social art. Solo spoken oration is dying out. It still exists in its best sense as a sermon. When you give a sermon you’re casting your fate to the wind. There’s no middle ground. You either hit the bulls-eye or flail around hoping someone puts you out of your misery. As does the congregation. Giving a sermon takes cojones. It is not for the meek or the easily slighted. Most sermons suck.  

Today, an exasperated Republican Sen. John Cornyn of Texas begged Attorney General nominee Eric Holder, Jr. to agree that torturing children is kool and fun.

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HOLDER: I think your hypothetical assumes a premise that I’m not willing to concede.

CORNYN: I know you don’t like my hypothetical.

HOLDER: No, the hypothetical’s fine; the premise that underlies it I’m not willing to accept, and that is that waterboarding is the only way that I could get that information from those people.

CORNYN: Assume that it was.

HOLDER: [Laughs] Given the knowledge that I have about other techniques and what I’ve heard from retired admirals and generals and FBI agents, there are other ways in a timely fashion that you can get information out of people that is accurate and will produce useable intelligence. And so it’s hard for me to accept or to answer your hypothetical without accepting your premise. And in fact, I don’t think I can do that.

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Most frustrating for Sen. Cornyn is that he got his kryptonite-proof supermagickal logic from a fictional, comic-book teevee show with a name so short and bereft of letters that even former members of the Texas Supreme Court can remember it: “24.”

And who can argue with the total, undeniable truth of fiction? After all, in that Republican Classique of a bodice-ripper, The Fountainhead, forcible rape is a rilly kool first date !!!

In this daylight exchange without boiling oil pots being poured from Gargoyles’ mouths, Sen. “Jock” Cornyn demands that Uppity Mulatto Eric Holder, Jr. accept a premise no different from the Inquisition and the Klan (let us assume as fact that brutal torture is the only way to obtain the truth, even though it is fun to watch them beg and squirm in pain until they die).

And Cornyn is astounded that Comrade Holder will not accept the “Let’s Assume Burning Joan of Arc at The Stake Will Save The Children” as a valid argument in a U.S. Senate confirmation hearing for United States Attorney General.

Tres gauche !!! Mon dieu !!! Ou est mon pomme frites de freedom??

Cornyn so desperately wants Holder to concede there are some situations where it is okey dokey and kool for children* or their parents to be brutally tortured and for the torturers and accomplices to be considered noble and caring in doing so.

This is Deathconservatism in its essence. They want Tough Love legislated down to the length and stiffness of the cane. They want someone normal to assure them their bizarre, secret sadistic desire to see pain inflicted on helpless, imprisoned, shackled people is somehow gritty, brave and noble. They want to tell us that we are too weak to do what “needs” to be done. It’s the worship of the abusive dad rapping the buckled belt around his fist and saying, “I’m doing this for your own good. This will hurt me more than it hurts you.”

Talk about going to the Abuse Confessional Backwards. These folks are fetishizing a War Crimes Trial where the martyrs are the ones lighting the torches and administering the eye-gouging spikes.

Why do Republicans so badly want to torture human beings?

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*Cornyn’s argument necessarily implies that children of any age can and should be brutally tortured to obtain information. U.S. torture proponents in Congress and the Bush Administration have never excluded children of any age from their claims for justifiable torture and indefinite imprisonment. A 14 year old boy from Chad has been imprisoned incommunicado in the Guantanamo Gulag since 2002. He is now 21 and still incommunicado.

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I do not want to breathe poisonous air.

I do not want to drink foul water.

That does not make me an environmentalist.

That makes me a normal human being.

Don’t call me an environmentalist because I want to breathe clean air and drink clean water.

That’s like calling a boy who wants to read an “aggressive pro-reading radical.”

That’s like calling a girl who does not want to be raped a “hardcore anti-rape protester.”

That’s like calling a family who does not want to become human slaves “unyielding anti-slavery partisans.”

That’s like calling a starving baby an “anti-hunger activist.”

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Photo: 3,000 year old agate spear point from the Sebasticook River, Winslow, Maine. Found by Ricky Churchill of Manomet, Massachusetts after the removal of the Fort Halifax Dam. August, 2008.

I think this is the message Obama is sending pastor Rick Warren by inviting him to participate on stage in the inauguration.

And this is why I think the comparison to “what if Obama had a racist or anti-semite up there on stage” misses the point.

Nelson Mandela was a master of using white supremacists as stage props to dismantle white supremacy. His message was moderate or be marginalized. There is no try.