Why the Tea Baggers are Wrong

I've had it up to my neck with the Tea Baggers.  What really scares me is the militance of them.  Democracy only works with civilized debate.  Yet, the Tea Bagger supporters often seem to have a visceral even violent message.  I've seen photos in the news of protesters carrying signs that say something like, "we left our bullets at home... this time."  This is a threat!  We should take it as nothing less.  By contrast, I have never known my fellow liberals to behave in such a threatening manner, even when they've been visceral with me for disagreeing with them.  Anyone who holds a sign saying, "we left our bullets at home... this time," or who thinks that revolution means mob rule is the barbarian at the gates of our democracy.

Their threatening demeanor is more than just individuals who have given way to unfounded anger.  It is part of a pattern of a certain type of militant, radical conservatism that is anti-American to the core.  Yet, for all that, I feel that, as a just man, I must strive to see their perspective.  My conclusion is that they're angry because they're doing the math wrong.  If they did the math right, they'd settle down.  Let me explain.

These Tea Baggers have a twisted view of America and what it means to be American.  What they're missing (or else consciously omitting) is a key part of the motive for the original Boston tea party.  That is "no taxation without representation".  They have the first part right, but are ignoring the second part.

The Boston tea party was a demonstration against the tyranny of King and Crown taxing colonists without representation.  Rather than benefitting from the Tea Tax, they aristocracy back in Mother Britain was benefitting and they, the colonists, had no legal recourse.  Great Britain was not, at that time, a democracy, after all, but a monarchy.  The entire point of the Boston tea party was that the people should decide democratically how taxation should work.

However, the Tea Baggers have twisted this concept into some idea that taxes are inherently bad.  The truth is that every political platform in America supports some form of taxation.  Without taxes, our police, our judges, our DA's and public defenders wouldn't get paid.  Without them, we'd have no justice system and America would be subjected to mob rule.  Without taxes, our soldiers wouldn't be supported to defend our nation.  Without taxes, our roads would crumble to dust.

Because of this, I refuse to call them what they call themselves.  They are anti tax.  The real Boston tea party was pro democracy.

Since I don't particularly see that the vast majority of Tea Baggers are independently wealthy, I must assume that the vast majority of them benefited from public education.  I would be willing to bet that many of them would be out on the street right now if it wasn't for Unemployment benefits.  They benefit from taxes as much as the rest of us do.

So, the idea that we shouldn't be taxed is absurd.  What troubles me, though, is that these people aren't just anti-tax, but anti-democracy.  Anyone who holds up threatening signs at rallies is anti-democracy.  I see this as a dangerous pattern of behavior that runs deeper than just a few individuals, just as a few bubbles on the surface of water can indicate that the water is about to boil.  If we wait to see all of them on the brink of violence, it will be too late.  We need to take action now.  I suggest that the best way to do this is through communication.  Many of these people may be victims of the poor education that, ironically, their platform will only worsen.  Many of them are ignorant of history and thus dooming all of us to repeat the mistakes of the past.

I'd also suggest that many conservatives have a huge misunderstanding about liberalism.  While I respect my conservative friends, I think that there's a tendency among conservatives to vilify liberals without understanding us.

First, I think most of us liberals believe in Equal Opportunity.[1]  This needs to be constantly worked toward or wealthy families will end up controlling everything.  It's the role of government to ensure Equal Opportunity.  Since it's moral to do what's best for everyone, it's moral to support Equal Opportunity for all.

This means having the best public education we can.  It means making sure that workers get adequate health care so that they can continue to work (and unemployed people who want to get back into the work force stay healthy so that they will be healthy when they rejoin the work force).  It means ensuring that children get great health care so that they can get a fair shot at success once they become adults.  It means having great public transportation so that people who can't afford cars can get to work.  It means paving our roads so that cars and buses alike can get to where they need to go.  It means having some sort of safety net for people who lose their jobs or who started out adult life in such terrible conditions that they can't get out of poverty.

This means government revenue and, yes, that, in turn, typically means taxes.  None of us like paying taxes, but it's our civic duty to pay them.  Because we want to avoid having taxes be a burden on the very poor whom our tax dollars are meant to help, we need to a get our tax dollars from somewhere else.  Since taxes are the price we pay for living in a society that at least promotes Equal Opportunity (and ideally actually has it), the wealthy and the corporations are taxed more than others.  This is partially to counteract the unfair advantage they have over people with less money, but it's also their civic duty to give back to society.

I'm happy to pay my taxes at a higher tax bracket than others, because I was born to middle class parents who were able to give me a better shot at success than poor parents would have.  I know that my tax dollars are going to support things like public schools that help everyone have the opportunity that I have.

It's a falsehood to think that there's any such thing as a "rugged individual".  The conservatives have a belief that people are successful on their own.  This is a false myth meant to rationalize their political views.  In fact, everybody who's successful in any way (and there are more ways to be successful than financially) is only successful because of help from society.  Maybe it's just the paved highways that the trucks that deliver their goods drive over or the police that keep gangsters from murdering them as "business" rivals, but everyone benefits.  And, anyone who was successful because of a private education rather than a public one, received that from their parents, so that only goes to prove my point even more strongly.  We're all in this together, and so it's the civic duty of the wealthy to support a society that fosters Equal Opportunity.

So, the liberal argument is that it's the responsibility of the government, and therefore of the People, to support Equal Opportunity in society so that society empowers everyone to be successful.  Equal Opportunity is therefore a moral imperative.

Now, many conservatives have also criticized liberals as somehow being "pro-bureaucracy".  Everybody hates bureaucracy and liberals are no exception.  That being said, obviously government agencies are needed to ensure Equal Opportunity by administrating public schools, public healthcare, and so forth (not to mention paving roads, running courts, etc).

Before we can understand why bureaucracy something that everybody agrees is a problem, though, we must understand its history.  It was originally put in place to avoid nepotism.  So, the original reason why bureaucrats are officious is fairness.

The problem is that this officiousness itself has become a new problem and the new problem needs a new solution.  Fortunately, liberals have one and it's a solution that many Democrat leaders have promoted, but it has gone mostly unnoticed by conservatives (at least it seems to me that it has).

Since we need government agencies in order to ensure Equal Opportunity, getting rid of them won't help (and it will lead us back to the bigger problem of nepotism).  Instead, the liberal solution is to change government agencies from a bureaucracy model to a customer service model.  Rather than being run by uniformly callous bureaucrats, these agencies can be run by uniformly helpful public service providers.  I myself have paid my own taxes directly through irs.gov for the past several years and they actually have a fairly helpful website.  Sure, much more needs to change, but, I see it mostly being conservatives who are stalling these changes by trying to limit funds to government agencies.  Properly funded, they can be revamped to be more and more helpful.

Also, privatization is a non-option.  Social programs all have moral charters, whereas for-profit corporations all have amoral profit as their only charter.  The wise investments in society that these agencies administer are moral in nature and need moral administration.[2]

The Tea Baggers actually have the exact opposite goals as those of the Boston tea party.  The Boston tea party was meant to promote democracy.  This epidemic of threats and nigh-violence ready to boil over is anti-democracy.

Morality begins with empathy.  With enough empathy, we can at least desire to do what's best for everyone.  With all of the power and wealth that the Unite States of America has, I believe we can get very close to accomplishing that goal.

---
[1] Yes, I know I'm being weird by capitalizing this phrase, but it's sacred to me and I think it deserves caps sort of like Nature, Liberty, God or Goddess.
[2] Yes, I realize that it may be hard to see agencies like the DMV as moral, but as I've said, they can be changed if conservatives will get out of the way and allow liberal leadership to change them.

Keep America Great

Donald Trump's website says, "Make America Great again."  Since when did America stop being great?  For those of you familiar with the science fiction TV series "Babylon 5", this quote is almost exactly what Ambassador Mollari said about his people, the Centauri, just before he got involved in a plot that put a tyrannical emperor on the throne, invaded the planets of another alien species (the Narns), enslaved them, tortured them and put those who resisted in death camps.  Trump's tagline reeks to me of Fascist, even Naziesque rhetoric to me.

I woke up this morning and realized, "wait a second, there are a lot of things wrong in America, but I never stopped loving America.  When did America stop being great?"  His tagline devilishly twists are perceptions to instill fear in us that somehow America is no longer great.  In fact, if anything, it's people like Trump we need to resist in order to protect American greatness.   His rhetoric is meant to reduce our self-esteem, and that worries me, because that's often the first move tyrants use to take over.   We need to swap out this negative slogan with a positive one:

Keep America great!

What I mean by this is that the founding values of America are under attack by exactly people like Donald Trump.  We need to defend our core values from him and people like him.

America has more problems than I can count.  I'm constantly embarrassed by our leaders and even by my fellow citizens, but I've always known that America has always been, and continues to be great.  This is not because of its rather nasty actions over the centuries, but rather because we, the People, still, for the most part, affirm the basic founding values that make me and many of us remain patriots.  That's why I'm calling on my fellow Americans to resist this sort of Fascist double speak.  Let me explain.

As I read about ISIL's terrors in the Middle East, I'm reminded that Europe was at one time much worse.  It's a piece of history rarely studied any more, but which should be top priority in our history classrooms.  From the mid 16th Century to the mid 18th Century (the mid 1500's to the mid 1700's), Europe was racked by some of the bloodiest and most terrifying warfare in human history.  Protestant countries warred with Catholic countries.  Protestants warred with Protestants.  Each side believed that its denomination was the "one, right, true and only way".  Each believed that its members were going to Heaven and that members of the other sides were going to Hell.  The victors burned the vanquished alive: the traditional punishment for so-called "heretics".  Does this sound like the west or like the Middle East?  The West we know today hadn't arrived yet.

Then, in the late 18th Century, a school of philosophy, called Enlightenment Philosophy, emerged.  While the individual philosophers in this movement varied from one another, the movement itself can be characterized by saying things that most of us now take for granted.  They pointed out that none of us knows the Truth well enough to judge others and that, therefore, we should have freedom of religion and a separation of Church and State.  They pointed out that cruel and unusual punishments are wrong, that the only rational and just way for the state to behave toward the accused is to presume that people are innocent until proven guilty.  They also believed that all human beings are equal.

If this sounds familiar, it's only because America was founded by revolutionaries who were part of the Enlightenment movement.  They founded America to serve a new purpose.  Rather than to serve the barbaric superstitions of judgmental religious denominations, it was to serve the goal of Liberty.  Under Lady Liberty, all religions are free.  In the Light of Her torch, everybody has the right to free expression.  In Her Light, everybody has the right to a fair trial and to be held innocent until proven guilty.  As opposed to the Divine Right of Kings concept of a pre-Enlightened past, which held that kings and lords were made superior to other people by God, we can now see clearly that all people are created equal.  These ideals not only form the founding values of America, but were held as values that transcend all political divisions and shine out to all of the peoples of the world.  The Enlightenment philosophers spoke of Human Rights.  These rights exist to all people.  They can be oppressed by tyrannical governments, but people still have them at some spiritual level.  So, it's not just citizens of America or the First World to whom these rights extend but to every person on the planet.  Any people or government that defies these rights defies a fundamental, universal Law and, in doing so, is tyrannical.  Our Founders encoded these inalienable rights into the U.S. Constitution as the Highest Law of the Land.

These values are why I'm a true patriot and I think it's why so many of my fellow liberals and fellow Americans are so loyal to our country, even when our leaders and fellow citizens embarrass us.  These values lead to the following social covenant which is set in stone.  Follow it and you're a good American, defy it and you're an anti-American, anti-Liberty tyrant.

What follows from this social covenant is uncompromisable and it is as follows:

• Freedom of religion, a separation of Church and State and a lack of national religion.  
• All religions are free to worship as they think best, provided that their worship is peaceable.
• The phrase "wall of separation of Church and State" comes from Thomas Jefferson's letter to the Danbury Baptists, in which he wrote, "I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature should [quoting the First Amendment] 'make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof', thus building a wall of separation between Church and State."  
• So, separation of Church and State is just a rephrasing of a part of the First Amendment that says that the government can't declare a national religion.  
• Separation of Church and State is part and parcel of freedom of religion.  If you allow, say, public schools to teach religious teachings, you allow the government to indoctrinate our children with a particular religion's teachings and you then have an N-run around freedom of religion.
• The Treaty of Tripoli, voted for unanimously by Congress in 1796 and signed into law by President John Adams (one of America's Founders) says, "the United States of America is in no way a Christian nation."  George Washington said the same thing in a letter responding to some Jews in Rhode Island who asked if it was alright to be Jewish.  If you have a national religion, you've again made an N-run around freedom of religion.  So, this is also part of the package.  
• So, let me reiterate this: Freedom of Religion, Separation of Church and State, and An Absence of National Religion all go together into one package deal.  Be against one and you're against all!
• What this means is that people need to be able to make their own decisions about ethics, the nature of the soul, interpretation of holy texts, etc.
• This impacts the issue of women's reproductive rights.
• Many religious conservatives work to oppress women's reproductive rights on the grounds that zygotes (fertilized eggs in the womb), blastocysts (microscopic bundles of multiplied cells) and fetuses have souls.  
• This is a religious argument!
• Anyone who believes in freedom of religion would defend the right of women to make their own determinations about when the soul enters and whether it's within the bounds of their own religion's ethics to terminate a pregnancy or else make a non-religious argument as to why terminating pregnancy should be illegal.
• Regardless of any other stance on this issue, we should keep religion out of it.
• The same holds true for numerous other issues, such as gay marriage.  The argument that "homosexuality is an abomination against God, because the Bible says so," is a religious argument!  It should be completely cast out of our political rhetoric for that reason.  Religion has no place in politics.
• Freedom of Expression
• Part of living in a civilized society means that we tolerate other people's expression, even when we disagree with it.  Just because someone says something we disagree with, doesn't mean that we get to lash out in anger at them, must less become violent toward them.  We can and should expect and demand the same of any other civilized person who believes in these rights.
• The Right to a Fair Trial
• This includes that people are innocent until proven guilty,
• Have the right to be accused of a crime.
• Have the right to an attorney.
• Have the right to keep their person and property from illegal search and seizure.
• Have the right to, even if found guilty, receive a punishment that is neither cruel nor unusual.
• Equal Opportunity
• If all people are created equal, it's a mandatory role of government that it ensures equal opportunity to all.  This means that some kid who just turned 18 in the hood should ideally have exactly the same opportunity as some rich kid whose parents have political connections.  Obviously, it's hard to achieve this in the real world, but we should at least strive toward that ideal.
• Unless any of us think that the two kids in the example above have even the same basic level of opportunity, we should conclude that it's the role of government to take active measures to ensure that the kid from the hood's opportunity level is raised to the level of the rich kid's.
• One thing this means is that every child in America should receive the best education that money can buy.
• If their parents are rich enough to send them to the best private schools and on to college and graduate school, great.
• However, for the bottom 99%, this means that the government needs to provide the best public education money can buy.
• While our government revenue could come in many forms, if this means tax money, so be it.  If this means that rich people and corporations pay higher taxes than poor people, that's the price they pay for living in a society in which we have equal opportunity.
• It's all of our civic duty to ensure equal opportunity for all.
• Another thing this means is that everybody should be kept healthy.
• Unless anyone thinks that a poor person without health insurance can keep themselves as healthy as a rich person with the best health insurance money can buy, this means that it's the duty of government to ensure that all people receive the best health insurance money can buy.
• Again, if this means tax dollars, so be it.
• If this means that the rich pay more for universal healthcare, that's the price they pay for living in a world with equal opportunity.
• All of this goes double for children, since they have no means of controlling the healthcare they receive growing up.  Children who received poor healthcare will start their adult lives with less opportunity than children who received good healthcare.
• Ensuring equal opportunity also means having really good public transportation so that people who can't yet afford cars can go to work on their own.  What does it matter if people can get jobs, if they can't get to them?  In order to level the playing field, poor people who are struggling to make it, but who don't have cars, need another way.  The government should empower them to get to work.
• While I hesitate to weigh in on affirmative action itself, I'll also note that equal opportunity must empower groups who have been oppressed.  We need some way of insuring that they have opportunity in spite of prejudice and systems in place that go against them.
• I want to make something totally clear here, because it's importan.  Equal opportunity, and everything that supports it, works perfectly well within a capitalist economy.  As such, it would merely serve to level a capitalist playing field.  
• Finally, this means that one of the top, if not the top economic priority of government should be jobs.  In order for people to have equal opportunity, they need access to jobs.  If there aren't enough jobs to go around, it makes it that much harder for people who were born poor to pull themselves up.  They could be as smart as the rich kids, but they'll be more likely to fail, because they'll have less access to jobs.
• This also includes small businesses.  Small businesses are one significant way that families make it.  However, many large corporations deliberately open branches in areas where they know they'll compete with small businesses in order to destroy them.  They then hire back the former small business owners at minimum wage.  Thus, it can seem things are good in terms of number of job, but not if people who once owned their own businesses have been reduced to working minimum wage for a large corporation.
• All People are Created Equal
• This includes men and women, whites and non-white, gays and straights, etc.  In other words, it encompasses all colors of the rainbow of humanity.  
• Prejudice and oppressive systems have kept certain groups of people down for far too long.  Those people need to be treated as equal to hetero, white, Christian men at every level including their levels of intelligence, capacity for excellence and morality.
• A Functioning Government
• Finally, in order for all of the above to work affectively, the government must function affectively.
• Any dissidents who try to shut down the government are anti-American tyrants!
• Obviously, there are multiple ways to accomplish these goals in our society and part of good citizenship in a democracy having an open dialog on how best to accomplish all of this.

All of this is under attack!

It has been for the last several decades and it has been by conservatives just like Donald Trump.'

Conservatives have pushed as hard as they can to put the Ten Commandments (which is a piece of religious scripture) in courts and public squares, to have prayer in our public schools and to legislate their religious beliefs on issues such as women's reproductive rights.  Another issue they've tried to legislate is gay marriage, based what their Bible says about it.  This violates freedom of religion and the wall of separation of Church and State.  It's the first step in imposing a national religion on everyone.

Religious conservatives have denied that separation of Church and State is a fundamental American value and have repeatedly and deliberately ignored and dishonored the clause in the First Amendment that says that Congress can't establish any religion.  They have even gone so far as to claim that America is somehow a "Christian country", in direct contradiction of many of our founders who said just the opposite and in direct defiance of the establishment clause of the First Amendment.

The George W. Bush administration threw suspected terrorists in Guantanamo Bay without a trial.  This denied them just about every portion of the foundational American concept of justice and a fair trial that I can think of.  It denied them the right to be accused of crimes.  It denied them the right to even have a trial.  It treated them as guilty until proven innocent.  It denied them due process of law.  It denied them the right to be represented by lawyers.  It denied them the right to a trial by jury.  By every measure, this is a denial of justice and a fair trial.  This act goes straight against an entire set of foundational American values.  It's un-American to the core!

The only defenses of this act that I've ever heard are that the people so imprisoned were not U.S. citizens and that it was necessary for the defense of our nation.  Both of these are empty arguments.  The Declaration of Independence speaks of "inalienable right".  The right to a fair trial is more than just the highest law in the land for our own people, it's a foundational value of America that applies to everybody on earth.  If you're against it, you're against America!  Guantanamo Bay is a gross human rights violation!

Now, I have friends who have agreed with that part, but told me that we "have" to do it, rights or no rights, in order to keep America safe.  I have two responses to that.

First, no we don't.  If the suspected terrorists really did it, why are we afraid of going to trial?  If our government can't prove that they did what they're accused of, maybe we got the wrong people.  The only way to tell for sure would be to take them out of Guantanamo Bay long enough put them on trial and find out.  What my conservative friends are supporting, whether they realize it or not, is burying the truth rather than revealing it.  Rather than being something that a government regime would do to keep us safe, it seems a lot more likely that it's something they'd do to make us think they're keeping us safe.

Secondly, there's something much more important than our security.  That's foundational American values.  If we put security before those values, we're undermining America, in which case, why defend it?  It's only when we put those values first that we have a country worth defending.

Conservatives have, for the last several decades, systematically attacked every social program designed to ensure equal opportunity.  They've attacked education, universal healthcare, worker's rights, public transportation, and gender, racial, religious and sexual orientation equality.  In every way, conservatives are fundamentally opposed to equal opportunity.

Finally, they've disrupted and blocked our government, keeping our elected officials from even being able create a budget, much less provide all of the functions that it's our government's role to perform.

American is great and what makes it great is its founding values.  As I see the Middle East playing out much the same story that Europe played out hundreds of years ago, I realize just how much it is a miracle that our nation still stands for these values as much as it does.  But, these values must be protected and we must start by protecting it from those politicians and political movements inside our nation who would tear them down.

Donald Trump's conservative rhetoric is meant to scare people into thinking that America has, at some core level, lost its greatness.  Worse, it's meant to trick people into thinking that some false, delusive "greatness" is what makes America great rather than our nation's true greatness.  What is this false greatness?  Perhaps it's directors and CEO's of corporations who try to crush the bottom 99% of the people beneath their heals so that they can keep most of America's wealth, rather than allowing equal opportunity.  Perhaps it's the military that, for so long, has been used as a tool to encourage tyranny and chaos in other parts of the world in order to keep these robber barons wealthy by lining their pockets with government contracts.  I have no doubt that, in an attempt to gain support, Donald Trump will appeal to the Christian extremists who are striving to destroy freedom of religion in America and replace democracy with theocracy.

Why does Donald Trump sound Fascist to me?  Because he's using his propaganda to make a slight of hand, hiding what makes America truly great, while waving around a false sense of greatness, ultimately tied up with richest people in America, who have often gotten rich through dishonesty and shady dealing.  Fascism is the most extreme end of the Conservative spectrum.  The very name means hard-coupling government with corporations.  But, understand that you should read "corporations" as the rich people who run them.  Somewhere along this path, it seems that Fascist regimes end up going to war to rape other countries of their resources, rather than gaining wealth honestly (however much they may preach about the virtues of honest business in their double speak).  It becomes a never-ending war march.

He and conservative politicians like him are the very people that we good Americans need to protect America from in order to keep it great.  It's tragic to watch Londo Mollari on "Babylon 5" start the Centauri people on a downward spiral toward degradation and ruin.  What Londo realizes too late is that the Centauri had always been great.  It's its wonderful culture and civilization, rather than its conquest and rape of other planets, that makes it great.  What we see in Fascist regimes is the true greatness of the nations they rule are discarded in favor of vacuous, and ultimately self-destructive fake values: greed dressed up as goodness.

I call on all Americans to keep America great by defying this conservative insurgency and reaffirming our age old American values of Liberty and civility, as I've outlined them above.

The Watchman's Report: A Layman's Review of Harper Lee's Novel, Part I

SPOILER ALERT (BUT NOT WHAT YOU THINK): THIS POST CONTAINS SPOILERS FOR THE NOVEL TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD, BY HARPER LEE.  IT DOES NOT CONTAIN SPOILERS FOR GO SET A WATCHMAN (AT LEAST NOT MUCH).

I recently read Harper Lee's novel Go Set a Watchman.  Like many of us, I loved reading her Pulitzer Prize winning novel To Kill a Mockingbird and, when I heard that her early novel had finally been published after all these decades, I rushed to the bookstore to get it.  When I read Mockingbird as a teenager, not only did it make me think deeply about issues of race, prejudice and justice, but it made the character of Atticus Finch one of my literary heroes.  In Mockingbird, in my reading, he's not only the father of the main character, whose nickname is Scout, and the defending lawyer of the black man falsely accused of raping a white woman, but a defender of justice in general, under which everyone, regardless of race, is equal.  He's a sole light of reason amid a racist, white-dominated South.  Go Set a Watchman presents a more complex and nuanced look at the subject of racism and white supremacy in the South.

In this blog post, and in another (which I hope to write later) I write a personal, layman's review of the novel.  I'm no literary critic; I just have a BA from a liberal arts college.  So I know about as much about literary criticism as the rest of you.  Since I don't want to spoil anything, I plan to write my review in two parts.  This first part will be a non-spoiler review that anyone who hasn't read the book can read (well... except for a few minor bits).  The second part will be one for people who have already read it and will start with a big spoiler alert.  I will expect my reader to have read To Kill a Mockingbird or at least to be okay with spoilers about it, since it's an American classic.

So, if you haven't read Go Set a Watchman, I encourage you to read it.  I have been unable to escape people telling me that there's some sort of controversy, but I've been purposely ignorant of the controversy, because I wanted to read the novel fresh and without prejudice.  After all, the last thing I'd want to do is treat Harper Lee the way Scout, Gem and Gil treated Boo Radley or most of Macomb County treated Tom Robinson in Mockingbird.

Reading Go Set a Watchman, I was confronted with some much deeper issues than I was in To Kill a Mockingbird.  It was strangely fateful, because, although Go Set a Watchman was actually written earlier than Mockingbird, though only recently published, I found it to be a more mature novel in many ways.  It's almost as if I wasn't ready for something like it in High School.  Now, with police brutality against black people, with black protestors being treated like sub-humans by police, with black  church shootings, black church burnings, the a Republican Congress refusing to renew the Voting Rights Act, and the Ku Klux Klan protesting South Carolina taking the KKK's hallowed flag down, Go Set a Watchman is really making me think--and understand racism and white supremacy in a deeper and darker way than I ever have before.

At the same time, I can see why others might have mixed feelings about the novel and, to some extent.  in fact, I have some mixed feelings as well. But, overall, I thought the book was real good.  I hope to say more about this in my next post.  Suffice it to say that, for me, my mixed feelings get resolved by realizing that Go Set a Watchman confronts the reader with multiple kinds of racism and, having sat with my mixed feelings, I think, in the end, they've arisen because it was hard for me to be confronted with some portions of this range.

Go Set a Watchman is set twenty years after Mockingbird, though it's not exactly a sequel to it.  Mockingbird is set in the 1930's.  Go Set a Watchman is set in the 1950's and almost (but not quite) has the story of Mockingbird in its past.  It would be a bit like, if the Tolkien estate allowed an earlier edition of Lord of the Rings to be published that was written from the perspective of the Right Honourable Samwise Gamgee, Mayor of Hobbiton 20 years after the War of the Rings and we find out that some of the characters did things a little bit differently.

Go Set a Watchman begins with Jean Louise Finch traveling home from Manhattan to the fictional Macomb County, Alabama at the age of 26.  20 years ago, when she was a tomboy with the nickname Scout, she witnessed her father, Atticus Finch, a prominent lawyer, defend a black man who was falsely accused of raping a white woman.  Now she's come home to spend time with her boyfriend Henry (Hank), whom Atticus has taken under his wing in his law practice.  She's trying to decide whether she wants to marry Hank.  She meets with her family, including Atticus and her aunt Alexandra, who admonishes her not to marry Henry because he is, in Alexandra's words, "red-necked white trash".  She also meets up with her eccentric uncle, Dr. Finch (Alexandra's brother), a retired doctor who lived outside of the South for a time before moving back to Macomb for retirement.

To put the novel in historical context, as the novel begins lots of political events have taken place in the twenty years since the trial. FDR's New Deal has come into affect, World War II has been won, and a bigger middle class is emerging.  Most recently, the Supreme Court has ruled on Brown vs. the Board of Education, the famous ruling hallowed by so many of us, that mandated racial integration of the schools in all 50 states and made the famous pronouncement that separate is not equal.

If you want to know what follows in Macomb County, you'll have to read the novel (and I encourage you to do so).

The novel is written not only with the excellence we'd expect of a Pulitzer Prize winning author (complete with vocabulary words I had to look up and literary allusions I had to hunt down), but with a biting satirical wit.  The novel is written almost entirely in the third person limited voice from Jean Louise's perspective.  Occasionally, the narrator seems to stray into the minds of other characters, but this may actually be Jean Louise's speculation about their minds, rather than their actual thoughts, which would bring the novel back, firmly, to a third person limited voice as opposed to an omniscient author.

It is also written in the cadence of Southern speech, and if you have a Southern friend (I used Valerie), ask them to read a portion out loud to you.  You'll hear Jean Louise's (and possibly Harper Lee's?) Alabama drawl and biting wit come right out of the pages.  The style gives the impression of a rather spunky young lady who still has much of the old tom boy in her finding ways to laugh at the Southern milieu to which she's returned.

The story is told through a comparison and contrast between the modern life of the sophisticated and free-thinking Jean Louise and flashbacks to her childhood as Scout, the tomboy.  Through both her present and past, the reader follows her realizations not only about the racism of the poor and unsophisticated Southerners in the 1930's and 40's, but the increasing and insidious white supremacy among the Southern elite of her own class.  Something's wrong.  Something's changed.  Well educated, upper middle class white people have fired their black servants with whom they once had close relationships.  Black folks are cold and hostile in contrast to the warm and friendly interactions she recollects from her childhood.

I found it particularly poignant that the best of Macomb County have opinions on race that seem nuanced and intelligent and yet are deeply racist and white supremacist.  Throughout the novel, Lee presents us with an insight into what the well educated white Southern elite were saying about race issues behind closed doors.  Valerie has confirmed for me that Lee's portrayal is extremely accurate, because Valerie witnessed much the same thing first hand from her family (of which she is very much the black sheep) and her community in Birmingham, much as Jean Louise does in the novel.

The vision in the novel is frightening, even by today's standards.  Valerie says that she's convinced that, although much of the South today has greatly improved, the very same ideas that Jean Louise encounters are still alive and well in far too many portions of the South.  Worse, they are spreading!

Lee's vision is as sobering as it is scary.  It's difficult to confront it and easy to become enraged.  And, yet, I think that's exactly the point of the novel!  From my own experience, many of us non-Southerner liberals (at least we white ones) tend to think that race issues are better than they actually are.  We tend to want to think that it's the poorly educated people who are the primary racists.  After all, we see them among the KKK members who recently protested the removal of the Confederate flag from the South Carolina capital recently.  We certainly see their brand of racism in To Kill a Mockingbird.  Yet, in Go Set a Watchman, we see that education and privilege does not necessarily change one's views.  It's easy to point one's finger at the poor, angry white men who forms up lynch mobs.  It's more difficult to fathom the grim and banal evil of the genteel Southern gentlemen and ladies who stop the lynch mobs with one hand and pull the strings of white supremacy with the other.

Still, the novel is a product of its time, as is Jean Louise.  It can be a difficult novel to interpret at times.  While Jean Louise sees what is going on from the fresh eyes of a Southerner who's been living in New York and who has, presumably, been influenced by its cosmopolitan milieu so different from provincial Macomb County, it can be difficult to know whether some of the things she says to her fellow Southerners is meant to be taken at face value or to politely obscure her own opinions in order to get along with her fellows among Macomb's upper crust.

So much has changed in America since the writing of the novel that it can be hard to remember certain historical facts about the 50's.  For example, in many states, at that time, interracial marriage was not only socially condemned, but actually illegal.  Entertainment media did not even feel a need to have token non-white characters, much less black heroes like modern Will Smith movies.  People of color were seldom, if ever, depicted as middle class, much less as having positions of power and influence.  The black Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff from "West Wing", for example, would have been unfathomable.  Even as of the late 60's, the black/white kiss between Kirk and Uhura was scandalous, in spite of the fact that it was forced on them by aliens.  Now, in the reboot, we think nothing of the romantic intrigue between Uhura and Spock.

Reading it now, I can see how mixed feeling can come in.  I have my own mixed feelings.  However, I'd like to remind my reader of something.  As many of you know, To Kill a Mockingbird was banned in many parts of the South.  Valerie reports that she never read the book until she went to college in Kansas.  If To Kill a Mockingbird was censored, I think Harper Lee would surely have been lynched if Go Set a Watchman had been published back then.  It's also hard to tell exactly where Harper Lee stands on some issues.  Personally, I think she was a radical for her time, as testified by the visceral outrage she received from her fellow Southerners, and that she took a great risk even allowing Mockingbird to be published.  We must see Go Set a Watchman in this light.  More on this in my next post.  I can't explain why I think some people might have mixed feelings, or why I have mixed feelings to some extent, without spoiling the book for those who have not read it.

Although the title can have many meanings, I take it as an imperative.  It's an instruction to the reader.  Jean Louise, as Scout, could be the watchman of the title.  So could the book itself.  I take the novel as a report on a deep-seated, white supremacist racism of the Southern elite that most of us would otherwise not be privy to.

There's another theme to the novel: maturity.  Scout was a feisty little girl mucking around town.  Jean Louise is a young lady full of piss, vinegar, and ethical resolve.  Her journey is one of becoming more mature in a variety of ways.  It's made me more mature to follow her journey out of young adulthood.

So I think that Harper Lee has finally allowed us to see a more mature version of the childhood adventure of To Kill a Mockingbird.  While we followed Jem, Gil, and Scout in their adventures spying on the strange and reclusive Boo Radley and seeing Atticus defend a falsely accused black man in To Kill a Mockingbird, we have to take a deep breath and witness the full horror of the institution and invisible empire of white supremacy as it was ultimately supported by upper middle class white moderates in the 1950's South.

If you want to understand that piece of history, as shown unapologetically by a white Southern author who pulls no punches and has a unique insight into that world, please read Go Set a Watchman and make your own assessment.  I for one plan to take the title as an instruction and be on guard, because I firmly believe that the mentality portrayed is still alive and well and that it must be stopped.

The Keystone of White Supremacy

As I've been reading the new/old Harper Lee book, Go Set a Watchman, I'm realizing that, although I was raised as a liberal in the progressive San Francisco Bay Area, I've missed something very critical about racism in America, and in the South in particular.

While everyone around me, from my parents to my high school teachers who had us read books like To Kill a Mockingbird to other adults I got to know to peers I discussed these issues with, agree that racism is fundamentally wrong and should be stopped, all of these people also instilled in me the notion that prejudice is its keystone.  "Prejudice is caused by ignorance," was the monolithic message I was reared with.  "Even if it's willful ignorance, it's still ignorance," was the second part of that teaching from the liberal culture that raised me.

The idea seemed to be that white racists see other races in terms of stereotypes such as the "unruly blacks", the "greedy Jews" or the "lazy Mexicans" and that this is the keystone of the entire edifice of western racism.  Take that out, I was taught, and racism will crumble.

As I've been reading Go Set a Watchman, I realized that prejudice is part of it, but I no longer think it's the keystone.  To put it another way, a certain type of prejudice is at the center of it all, but it's taken me a more focused lens to see something my liberal culture seems to have missed.  What's missing from that model is that white supremacists don't just think that they're better than other races on a practical level.  They think that white people are fundamentally more moral!

Once I realized this, everything about race in America fell into place for me that had not been fully explained by the prejudice theory.  Fundamental to white racism is not only that people of color are fundamentally "less civilized" and "less disciplined" (and, in the twisted logic of these racists, therefore "less moral") than white people, but that white people have some sort of "responsibility" to civilize them and discipline them so that they can become as "moral" as white people.[1]

Understanding this makes perfect sense out of, say, the white supremacist reaction to Brown v Board of Education as well as to the reason why the Supreme Court actually had to say that separate is not equal.  If racism was focused on conscious hatred or purely practical oppression, the question would not come up.  White supremacists would simply be against any sort of education for people of color.  As it was at the time of that ruling (and still is in many quarters, I think), the goal of the white supremacists was to educate black children separately from white children on the basis that they "need to be taught" lessons in "civilized" behavior, discipline and "morality" that white children "didn't need" to be "taught" and that white children "need to be taught" not only skills that white supremacists want to withhold from people of color, but also some sort of esoterica, including white supremacy itself, however indirectly that teaching might come about.

Obviously, as an anti-racist, I find that whole concept frightening to the bone and completely immoral.  Since I know that people of all races are equal and that, biologically, there is no such thing as race in the first place, I support integrated education and am glad that as much change has come about as there has been, and I hope for more.  However, I'm now seeing that prejudice alone does not entirely explain the white supremacist reaction to that ruling specifically or segregated education in general.

The same moral superiority attitude explains police brutality against people of color.  If white police officers think of people of color as fundamentally less moral and more in need of discipline, it could explain why they'd feel justified in opening fire on, say, a black boy who mouthed off to them or possibly threw a punch at them.  Under an equality perspective, it seems obvious that the killing was way, way excessive.  In fact, that it's murder or something close to!  The cop had a gun, the kid didn't.  However, from a moral superiority perspective, a black boy mouthing off to or throwing a punch at a police officer is a boy who's "rotten to the core", in the eyes of a white supremacist cop.  Such a kid could be seen as a thorough disregard for white attempts to "civilize" black people and his death might be seen as the removal of a "rotten apple" that would "spoil the barrel".  (Of course, if that's a wide spread attitude in the police department of a given city, it may be very understandable that black people would disrespect law enforcement officers there.)

This white man's burden concept [2] would also explain why people of color are so frequently funneled into either (a) our military (b) our prisons or occasionally (c) universities, but only on sports scholarships.

The idea that a person of color could get a university education the same way a white person would may seem obvious to us non-racists, but doing so would be a threat to the white supremacist worldview.  However, a white supremacist might easily imagine a person of color being good at sports.  After all, one expects physical prowess from a class of people expected to perform manual labor.  Since it also takes discipline to be a good member of a sports team, excellence in sports could, in the eyes of white supremacists, signal that an athlete of color is ready to be rewarded by a higher education normally "reserved" (in the mind of the white supremacist) to white people.

The military will give people of color the discipline that the white supremacists think they "need", making them "good colored folks", in their eyes.  Beyond merely being an institution for war and defense, it is also an institution of profound discipline, in which soldiers are broken down, built up, taught to follow orders and so forth: in short, the military teaches people of color exactly the sorts of lessons white supremacists want them to be taught.  Whether or not the military itself, as an institution, is racist is beside the point.  In fact, all the better to hide white supremacist designs.  The bottom line is that, in their minds, I think, it accomplishes exactly the "white man's burden" with regard to the people of color who enter it.

Another option acceptable to white supremacists, I believe, is for people of color to remain working class.  That is, if they don't get into universities on sports scholarships or join the military, they could gain some amount of respect (though not equal respect) by serving white people as dutiful members of the working class.  Such people of color "know their place" in the eyes of white supremacists.

Finally, prison would be reserved for any person of color who did not choose one of the other options, as it would punish them for trying to gain a level of power, status and success on their own, and not under white tutelage.

This also explains the outrage of so many angry white people against the President.  It's not just that he's a Democrat and they're some flavor of conservative.  It's that he's a person of color.  Under egalatarianism, it seems obvious that he's a highly disciplined, moral, upstanding man.  Even if one disagrees with some or even most of his policies, one can still admire the man as a true statesman.  However, from a white supremacist perspective, him being President is the worst possible threat.  It's totally incompatible with their world view.  To them, having him in charge of America stops white man's burden in its tracks and turns what they see as the "natural" and "good" social order on its head, with a person of color in charge.  It doesn't matter whether he's Muslim or Christian, an American citizen or not.  I think all of those are just red herrings.  White supremacists are simply willing to use any means necessary to destroy him, whether through misinformation or through obstructing the normal operations of our government, by refusing to pass the budget.  They never treated President Clinton so terribly.  Why?  Because, even if they hated Clinton's politics, he was white.

As a man opposed to all of this and in favor of equality for all, it, of course, makes me angry to think about all of this.  However, emotions alone will not win the social and political battles that lie ahead of us egalitarians.  In order to win, we must understand the opposition.  Trying to make white supremacists less prejudice is fruitless.  That's why I say that generalized prejudice is not actually the keystone, here.  Take it out, and the edifice of white supremacy may be crippled, but it will still stand.  White supremacists will be blind to any attempt to prove that their being prejudicial.  Since their worldview is that they are morally superior to people of color, saying that it's a stereotype to, say, view black people as "listless", "amoral" or "wanton" will go in one ear and out the other, because the white supremacy keystone is moral superiority, not merely prejudice.

Now, it may seem impossible to dissuade white supremacists from their views and, for some of them, it may be.  For the dedicated, serious sorts of premeditated white supremacists: the leaders of the movement, I think it must be impossible to dissuade them.  However, I think that a lot of rank-and-file white supremacists never really gave it much thought.  They were just raised to be white supremacists and never thought any differently.

Those are the people whose minds I think we can change, but not merely by removing prejudice.  I think what will really change their minds will be to normalize the concept of moral equality among races.  For example, our storytelling media has done a great job, over the decades, of changing prejudices about people of color.  They often portray people of color as business leaders, lawyers, doctors, soldiers, police officers and so forth.  However, this attacks prejudice, but not necessarily a sense of moral superiority, because these people of color can still be immoral.  As long as they are, these portrayals can be dismissed by people raised to be white supremacists (the ones we want to target) as going against the "natural order".

But, what if we began to normalize the morality of people of color?  What if, say, storytelling media made a concerted effort to portray people of color as moral?  What if we began to point out moral deeds of people of color in the news?  If it became normal to see people of color as moral, as well as normal to see them contrary to stereotype, we might really start changing the minds of the rank-and-file white supremacists.  This is because they're victims too.  They've been indoctrinated with the idea of moral superiority and presenting them with something that clashes with that might just work to change their world view.  Of course, the premeditated white supremacists will still be out their pulling the strings of every white supremacist puppet they can manipulate to their ends, but we egalitarians just might be able to cut a few strings by normalizing morality among people of color.[3]

---
[1] Since I've been taught that prejudice is wrong, I'll note that, obviously, there's a spectrum of white supremacy in America.  What I'm talking about here is what I have come to see as being at the center of that bell curve, but I acknowledge that variants to the model I describe here do exist.
[2] "White man's burden" was, I believe, coined in the 19th Century as a colonialist term.
[3] There is already a lot of this, but there needs to be more, I think.

Should we Respect Conservative Christians?

This year at BayCon, a science fiction convention I frequently attend, there was a panel on why we should respect conservative Christians and how much disrespect there apparently is of them.  Well, to be fair to the presenters, I never actually went to that one.  I was at the con for pleasure, not to dive deep into a very serious and, I think, complicated debate.  Truth be told, just seeing that on the program turned my stomach.  I needed time to tease out my various thoughts and feelings before reacting.  I wish I had attended, now, because I'd be able to be more specific in this post toward responding to their specific complaints (which for all I know may well be valid).  The important thing is that it got me thinking about whether or not and to what extent we have an obligation to respect the conservative Christians.  So, this post represents my thoughts on the subject in general, as opposed to a reaction to anything any individuals said that I wasn't there to hear.  I hope my readers will take it as such.

In theory, I believe in respecting everybody.  In fact, I think that modern, enlightened, first world, democratic society is based on respect.  The Declaration of Independence says that we're all created equal.  This thought is the basis for much of first world society in modern times.  The implication of that statement is that we are all, essentially, deep down, worthy of respect as human beings.

A problem arises, however, when you have a group whose beliefs are fundamentally opposed to those basic principals.  If someone were to say that they fundamentally disagreed with freedom of speech, for example, and then got mad at anyone who was upset by that statement, I think most of us would have a great deal of trouble respecting such a person.

I see quite a lot of Christian extremists in America who are fundamentally opposed to freedom of religion and a separation of church and state.  These are foundational American values.  The first is a guaranteed right in our constitution.  The second is, in my reading, a re-phrase of the establishment clause of the First Amendment: "Congress shall make no law respecting the establishment of religion".  The term was coined by Thomas Jefferson, who pointed out that we must have that in order to have freedom of religion.  The two are inseparable: two parts of a whole.

A few years ago, I spoke with a friend of my father's who is a professor of the Sociology of religion with an expertise on American Christianity (please understand that this does not make him pro- or anti- Christian in any way -- that should be obvious, but I've had people assume that his academic interest in the subject implies some sort of adoption of its tenets, which, of course, it does not).  

He told me that from the founding of America all the way through the Twentieth Century, a separation of church and state was an accepted norm by all but the outliers of the bell curve.  It's really only in the Twenty First Century that we first see any mainstream adoption of any idea that separation of church and state might be at all optional.

So, we should all be really, really scared that anyone except the fringe is taking that idea at all seriously.  And, yet, I have friends who seem to have bought into this anti-American meme.  Listen!  For the last time! A separation of church and state is an absolute, essential, critical American value, a critical Enlightenment value and a fundamental human right.  It is non-optional!

Now that we've cleared that up, let me get to why respecting conservative Christians is so complicated.  While I'm sure there's a great deal of diversity among conservative Christians and it's unfair to anybody to assume that they fit a pattern just because they wear a label, there is a pattern that I see with conservative Christians that makes respecting them a problem.

The first part of this pattern is that they seem fundamentally opposed to a separation of church and state and freedom of religion.  Some of them are up front about this (scarily enough!) and others are more cryptic about it, but it's a definitely a pattern.

Take for example, the issue of women's reproductive rights.  We all know that the real reason a lot of conservative Christians are anti-reproductive rights is because they (a) believe in the soul, (b) believe that the soul comes into the "body" (I guess a microscopic zygote is a type of body) at the time of conception and (c) that God, through the medium of the Bible, has forbade us from ending pregnancies.  This is a religious argument for outlawing something!  It's opposed to freedom of religion.  And, yet, it's a pattern with conservative Christians that they typically want it legally enforced.  Now, I'm sure there are plenty of non-religious arguments on the anti-reproductive rights side, however this is clearly a religious argument.

Take for another example gay marriage.  The typical conservative Christian argument against it being legal is that homosexuality is an "abomination against God" and that it says that in the Bible.  Regardless of what the Bible actually says, the fact that such people are making a Biblical argument at all proves that they want gay marriage to be illegal for specifically religious reasons.

The same is true with outlawing stem cell research.  Here, the standard conservative Christian line is the same as the anti-reproductive rights line.  Again, it's a religious argument.  The same is true for their reasons for wanting to keep schools from teaching children to use condoms: they have a religious belief that pre-marital sex is immoral and have Biblical arguments for that.  So, what we have in that case is a defiance of separation of church and state.  Ditto for wanting school prayer.

What this means is that there is a pattern among conservative Christians of being fundamentally opposed to freedom of religion and a separation of church and state.  They want to force their religious opinions on the rest of us and force us to obey religious laws!

I find it very difficult to respect anyone who thinks that way, because they are fundamentally opposed to human rights, to the foundational values of modern democracy and fundamentally anti-American.

Then, there's another problem.  I'm fairly certain that a huge percentage of conservative Christians fundamentally disrespect and look down on the rest of us.  It's more than just that they think we've been lead astray by the Christian devil and that they're convinced we'll "burn in Hell".  It's clear that, at a deep level, many of them think that if someone's non-Christian they must somehow lack the discipline to be Christian, rather than assuming, as I think most of the rest of us do, that we just have different religious beliefs.  

In other words, while people of other religions who really think of us as equals realize that we all just have different beliefs and affirm our equality with them in the human quest for the truth, many, many conservative Christians specifically think that (a) they're fundamentally right and we're fundamentally wrong and (b) that the only reason why we don't believe what they believe that we just want something else to be true out of some sort of weakness or deficiency.

So, they fundamentally disrespect us.  And, yet, it seems, all too often, I hear conservative Christians expecting us to respect them.  What's more, "respect" can have different meanings.  It means something very different if I say, "children should respect their parents" versus if I say, "we should all respect each other."  The first implies a fundamentally unequal relationship.  The latter implies an equal one.

What really gets me, though, is that a lot of conservative Christians have horror stories about just what terrible, awful people they were before they "found Jesus", as in they were robbing liquor stores, raping women and addicted to crack before they finally "found Jesus".  I've done bad things in my life, but never anything that bad.  So, by any objective reasoning, I ought to be considered more disciplined than them and yet, I've seriously had mega church Christians tell me to my face that I'm non-Christian because of a lack of discipline.  Yeah right!

Here's what I'd say to any conservative Christian who is upset because she or he feels disrespected by non-Christians...

1. Do you believe in freedom of religion and a separation of church and state?  If so, how does that affect issues like reproductive rights, prayer in school, gay marriage, etc?  Are you prepared to affirm that women should have the right to figure out their religious convictions about ending a pregnancy on their own or do you think the government should force Christian doctrine on them? Do you think gays and Lesbians have a right to figure out their own religious convictions about whether it's alright for them to get married on their own, or do you think the government has some responsibility to force the conservative Christian answer on them?
2. Do you respect non-Christians?  Do you really respect non-Christians?  Do you honestly affirm that we're all just searching for the truth and that you think conservative Christianity is right but that you realize that other people have come to other conclusions and that that's all okay?  Or, do you think that you know better than we do and have some sort of right to shake your finger at all of us?
3. When you say "respect", do you mean hierarchical respect, as in you think that we should look up to you?  Or, do you mean egalitarian respect, as in we should all respect each other as sisters and brothers?

If you are in any way opposed to freedom of religion or a separation of church and state (which, as I've said, is really same thing), you're fundamentally un-American and anti-democracy. If you fundamentally disrespect non-Christians or if what you mean by "respect" is that you expect people to look up to you, then you are really fundamentally opposed to the Enlightenment conviction that all human beings are fundamentally worthy of respect.   If you mean the egalitarian type of respect, but you refuse to respect us while expecting us to respect you, you're a hypocrite.  So, in any of those circumstance, I see no reason why I should respect you (except that I have my own reasoning on the matter, as we'll see).

If, on the other hand, you affirm freedom of religion and separation of church and state, you respect non-Christians and what you mean by wanting "respect" is the egalitarian kind of respect, I think I already respect you.  My respect for you falls under my conviction that everyone has the right to freedom of religion and a separation of church and state.  This is one reason why conservative Christians really should affirm these values, rather than opposing them.  By affirming them, you put yourselves on the moral high ground with the rest of us and can, thereby, honestly expect to be respected as exercising your rights.  By opposing them, you also oppose your own rights, as well.

So, I'm really not sure what the problem is.  If you basically respect me and affirm my rights, I already respect you and affirm yours.  If you are fundamentally disrespectful of me and oppose my rights, then you're backing me into a corner from which I must fight you. 

Now, I do believe in holding out respect to people, even when I don't feel that it's reciprocated and part of me wonders if it's warranted.  I try to respect the person, the soul, the essence of who a person is and understand that maybe their disrespect of me comes from some deep-rooted disrespect that others have aimed at them and that, deep down, disrespectful people often have trouble respecting themselves.

However, I do feel called to fight against the kind of disrespectful, anti-rights, anti-American, anti-democracy conservative Christian with my speech, with my writing and in every other peaceable way that citizens of a free society must.  I call upon all of my fellow citizens, not only of America, but of the world and of the Cosmos to do the same.  I call upon conservative Christians to join us in that cause.

Confederate Treason

Ever since the early years of this century, I've worried that there's a sort of cold civil war going on.  I remember a time when I had Republican friends I got along with and could have civilized debates with.  I have fond memories of debating the issues of the day in high school with my Republican friend Doug Herman.  Regardless of politics, Doug and I were always friends.

I've always seen democracy in the U.S. and the rest of the first world as being something civilized, in which the citizens can openly discuss the issues of the day with courtesy and respect.  Freedom of speech, freedom of the press, the right of due process and even freedom of religion and a separation of church and state are all critical human rights that are necessary for democracy to be functional.  Every citizen has a right and even a duty to both express their opinions and respect the rights of others to theirs.  Every citizen has an obligation to keep religion firmly separate from politics, lest we begin to legislate religious beliefs and thereby violate freedom of religion.  The government cannot imprison people without due process of law and without accusing them of crimes and giving them a fair trial by a jury of their peers.  If it could, it would be all too easy to take political prisoners.

These are more than just American rights.  The Declaration of Independence says that we are all, "endowed by [our] Creator with... inalienable rights."  That is to say that these rights are as things should be.  They exist to stop tyranny are are necessary for preserving democracy.  This concept is called human rights or natural rights.  What this means is that everybody on earth actually has these rights.  If governments keep them from the people, those governments are oppressing their citizens' rights.  For example, last I checked, the Saudi Arabian government does not preserve freedom of religion.  But the important thing to understand is that Saudi Arabs, like all human beings, have a right to freedom of religion.  It's just that their government oppresses those rights.

However, in this century, I've seen conservatives violate all the forms of civility that are vital to healthy democracy.  George W. Bush imprisoned suspected terrorists indefinitely in Guantanamo Bay without due process in a trial by a jury of their peers.  This violated (and is in many cases still violating) their human rights to a fair trial.  If they're guilty, a trial should be able to prove that.  If a trial fails to prove their guilt, they should be presumed innocent and set free.  This is more than just an affront to these prisoners.  It's an affront to human rights, which are vital to a functional democratic society.

Twenty-First Century conservatives have done everything they can to tear down what Thomas Jefferson called the "wall of separation between church and state" (the quote that coined the term).  Our Constitution says, "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion."  That means that we cannot have government sponsored religiosity of any kind.  Displaying the ten commandments on public property, such as court houses, is one step toward establishing religion.

What's more, freedom of religion cannot function without a separation of church and state.  If we have prayer in public schools, the ten commandments displayed in court houses, and presidents talking about Jesus in their speeches (which George W. Bush did), the message is that this is a Christian country.

It is not, has never been, and, God willing, never will be.  To make America a Christian nation, would be to establish a religion.  Moreover, we all have a human right to separation of church and state.  All this mixing of state and church is a violation of our human rights!

When our leaders come onto TV to debate the issues of the day, I never see them debate in a civilized or respectful way anymore.  The conservatives interrupt, verbally attack and talk down to liberals and moderates who disagree with them.  While this isn't a violation of freedom of speech, exactly, it's a cultural step toward creating the very dysfunction, for our democratic society, against which freedom of speech is meant to protect.

The poorly named "tea party" brought our government to a halt several times by refusing to pass the budget.  This is fundamentally opposed to the democratic process.  They have accused the President, without any evidence whatsoever, much less proof, of being born outside of the U.S. (in spite of him producing his birth certificate) and of being a Muslim (he's actually a Christian).  When George W. Bush was in office, they wouldn't stand for anyone even questioning President Bush.  Polite questioning is healthy.  However, the "tea party" people likened the President first to the Joker from Batman and then to Adolf Hitler: both totally uncalled-for comparisons.  They've treated our President with less respect than most people treat their dogs.  It's not only thoroughly barbaric, it's anti-democratic and unworthy of American citizenry.  Civility, as I've said, is necessary to healthy democratic discourse.

Now, we see white police officers shooting black kids down in the street like dogs. When blacks protest, we see totally inappropriate and uncalled-for violent responses. Most recently, we've seen innocent black people shot down in their own church.

The Fox Propaganda Network has tried to frame this as anti-Christian.  Wrong!  White supremacists typically identify as Christian themselves.  The various KKK organizations identify as Protestant.  Have people forgotten that the oppressors burned black churches during the Civil Rights movement?  While these killings may well be un-Christian, the victims were targeted because they're black, not because they're Christian!

For a long time, I've wondered what's going on.  There's something at work here that runs deeper than mere political beliefs.  Many Twenty-First Century conservatives are clearly far from interested in healthy democratic debate.  Instead, they're on the war path.

A few days ago, Valerie posted to Facebook a link to the best article I've ever read on the Tea Party, the bad old boys of the South and the Confederacy.  Suddenly the light bulb went off in my head.  Here's the link:

http://weeklysift.com/2014/08/11/not-a-tea-party-a-confederate-party/

The author makes a strong case for the so-called "Tea Party" being the Confederate Party.  He exposes a pattern that is behind this cold civil war.  The Confederacy never died!  It didn't end with the Civil War.  It continued to fight by keeping ex-slaves on the plantations to work for next to nothing.  When blacks tried to take their rights as free people and vote, the Confederatists kept them down, first with Jim Crow laws and, if that didn't work, lynchings.

The Ku Klux Klan has been described as a gang, but it is so much more insidious than that.  It's a terrorist organization, and integrated into the Southern establishment.  It has sheriffs and mayors among its members.  Now, I'm not saying that every Southern leader is a white supremacist hater.  I'm only saying that the white supremacist Confederates have their tentacles throughout Southern politics and power. 

The author, Doug Muder, points out something, too.  These Confederates don't play by the civilized rules of democracy that the rest of us play by.  Part of the deception is that different parts of the Confederate Party do different work and part of it is that they seem to follow democratic avenues, when in fact they take the path of least resistance.  We may see conservative politicians from the Confederate Party try to stop this piece of legislation, introduce that piece or make speeches about why we should do one thing and not another.  Then, we see seemingly unrelated Confederates attempting to assassinate the President's character.  We then see on TV that white police officers have shot and killed unarmed black kids who were running away and hear their defense that they somehow "needed" to to protect themselves.  Then, at another time, we hear of whites murdering innocent black people.

At first glance, these seem to be isolated incidents.  It seems as if there's a spectrum from civility to barbarity among these incidents and the people who perpetrate them.  However, after reading Muder's article, I realized that it's all one big system.

Now, some of my readers will retort that what I'm saying sounds like "conspiracy theory", but bear with me.  It also must have seemed like this during Reconstruction, during the age of Jim Crow laws and during the Civil Rights movement.  One side of this beast had a civilized facade, while the other side was lynching blacks and burning their churches.

Am I saying that all of these people, from the conservative politician to the white supremicist murderer, are actually in literal communication?  No.  It's worse than that.  I am saying that there's an insidious culture of racism that breeds these seemingly disparate acts.  There's, moreover, a social system continuing to wage the Civil War that many of the members of this Confederate Party are a part of.  And I think it's highly likely that many of the politicians secretly want police to "put black folk in their place" or even want black church-goers to be terrorized in their places of worship.

"Conspiracy theory" has become a buzzword, in the propaganda sense of the term.  A buzzword is a technique involving a term that can have two different meanings (A and B) in which propagandists use the term to mean A in the hopes that people will think they mean B, where B is a conclusion that will further the political goals of the progandists.

Thus, "conspiracy theory" could mean two different things.  One is obviously dubious suggestions of conspiracy, like UFO coverups.  The other is highly plausible conspiracies.  Remember that the Ku Klux Klan is a conspiracy that we definitely know is very real.  In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if the term "conspiracy theory" was being deliberately used as a buzzword by these Confederates specifically to gaslight liberals who want to shed light on what's really happening with the white supremacists in this country.

Everyone who was involved in the Civil Rights movement, back in the day, tells me that the conspiracy against blacks was very real.  The Jim Crow laws, the police stopping blacks from voting in the south, the disinformation campaigns, the lynchings and the church burnings were all part of one, underground, political system.  In fact, Valerie, who was raised among those people, tells me much the same thing.

The scary thing about Muder's article is that Muder points out the Conferates only start with seemingly democratic political means to their ends when they think those will work.  When those fail, they get more an more barbaric.  Political discourse gives way to propaganda, disinformation and disrespect of any dissenters.  These give way to threats.  (He showed pictures of "tea party" or what he calls Confederate Party protesters with signs saying things like, "We came unarmed (this time).")  The threats eventually give way to violence (such as police brutality) and white terrorism (such as church murders).  It's all part of one, many-tentacled demon of hatred.

The Confederate Party has never really respected the democratic process.  It only uses it cynically, if it thinks it can get what it wants with it.  It will protect the status quo at all costs.  It is hell bent on stopping universal health care, good public school systems, a safety net for the poor, and so forth, at all costs, civility and democratic values be damned.  It will willingly throw suspects in prison without trial or shoot them down in the street (particularly if they're non-white).  And, the worst part is that it's being exported out of the South. 

Now, there are plenty of conservatives who are separate from this Confederate Party.  We've seen dissent between the so-called "tea party" and non-"tea party" Republicans.  There are plenty of Southerners who are non-Confederates, too.  It's a mentality, a culture, a system and, at its worst, an underground, undemocratic, tyrannical government.

Muder points out that the telltale sign of Confederate Party members is that they'll want to tell people how they think South was the victim in the Civil War when nobody asked.  Muder asks how that's relevant to today?  Why would they try to convince people of that?  The only reason could be that it's important to them.  And why is it important to them, because they know their secret: they're real politics is that they're still fighting the Civil War.

They'll tell us that the Civil War was fought over tariffs as opposed to slavery.  I used to get caught up in this idea, mainly because, as a good citizen, I try to see other people's points of view, even if my first reaction is to disagree.  I used to think that such people were sincerely engaging in democratic, public discourse, so when I'd see them say those things on TV or read about it in the news, I'd tend to do my civic duty and listen.  I'd tend to attempt to apply logic to their statements.  For awhile, I bought into the idea that tariffs might have been at least as significant as slavery in the causes of the Civil War.

But, I realized something today.  Neither slavery nor tariffs were the causes of the Civil War.  Both were certainly causes for tension between the North and South prior to the Civil War.  I suspect the real truth is that some Northerners were abolitionists and some were Industrial Revolution moguls who wanted to exploit the South.  What I realized today, though, is that neither was the actual cause of the Civil War.  President Lincoln was opposed to fighting a civil war, before war broke out.  The war started when Confederate forces fired on Fort Sumpter in 1861.

The Civil War has been described by many as a failure of our democracy and of just the sort of thing our Constitution was made to avoid.  The cause of the Civil War was Confederate barbarism.  The South (for the exception of West Virginia and, at least officially, Kentucky) started out trying to use the democratic process.  When that failed, they seceded.  When the Union said they couldn't do that, they went for their guns.  Sound familiar?  It's the same pattern that I see going on today.

Now, certainly, Sherman's march to the sea was one of the great atrocities of modern warfare, but Southerners have repeatedly used that to complain that their ancestors fought the war honorably while the Union fought dishonorably.  However, this belies the fact that the Confederate states failed to work within the democractic process.  They were dishonorable politically before the Union was ever dishonorable militarily.

And, as for tariffs, yes, that was an issue.  However, does anybody really think the South would have given up its slaves if the North hadn't forced them to?  If anybody does, I'd ask them, why didn't the South give up their slaves decades earlier?  I've heard some people say, "well, that was before the cotton gin was invented.  The invention of the cotton gin meant the South was no longer dependent on slave labor?"  Really?  Is that supposed to be some sort of justification of slavery?  Slavery is never justified under any circumstances!  There's no sort of lack of technology that justifies it.

Getting back to current events, South Carolina State Representative Lee Bright compared taking down the Confederate flag from the state capital building to a "Stalinist purge".  Why would anyone think that?  The only flag any American patriot should endorse flying over a state capital apart from the state flag (and perhaps the flag of the capitol city, if such a flag exists) is the American flag.

Do we ever hear of modern Germans saying that it's alright to fly the Nazi flag as a "piece of history"?  No!  Why?  Because, Germans are extremely remorseful for the Holocaust and want to make sure it never happens again.  Do we ever hear Germans saying, "well, the U.S. fought dishonorably in World War II"?  Of course not.  Why would they?  They know what a tyrant Hitler was.

The Confederate South started the Civil War with treason.  The Confederate flag is a traitor's flag and the only place it belongs in America is in a Civil War museum.  Why would Representative Bright think that taking down the Confederate flag would be like a "Stalinist purge"?  The only reason I can think of is that Bright is a Confederate and that flag represents the underground government, to which he has pledged his true allegiance.  Far from being a "Stalinist purge", taking down the treasonous flag would be an act of patriotism to America.

Now, if any of my Southern friends are offended by this post, remember several things.  First, I don't mean you.  If you're not a Confederate, I haven't said anything against you.  Secondly, if you're a patriotic American, what's the problem?  If you're offended by what I've said about the Civil War, what I'd ask is: why do you care?  The Civil War 150 years ago.  I'm not interested in the original Confederacy.

I call for the South to disavow modern Confederates and to stop whining about the Civil War.  Let it remain in history books, museums and Civil War reenactments, but, apart from that, let it go.  The North may have imposed tariffs and carpet-baggers on the South, but the South imposed slavery on blacks.  Meanwhile, Charles Dickens was extremely embarrassed when he visited America and was served by slaves.

So, for what it's worth, if it so happens that any of my Yankee ancestors were the tariff imposing / carpet-bagging kind of Yankees rather than the abolitionist type, because I'm a civilized citizen of a democracy, and in the interest of diplomacy, I apologize on their behalf.  In return, apologize on behalf of any of your ancestors who were slave owners.  Now that we've apologized, let's move on!

I call on all Americans to be extremely worried about the modern Confederate Party.  Know that, rather than being gentile, civilized fellow citizens, they are anti-democracy barbarians who will go for their guns once they don't get their way.  I don't know what the answer is, but I hope that we all exercise our freedoms of speech and the press and our rights to petition the government for redress of grievances and to peaceably assemble to try to communicate amongst our non-treasonous fellow Americans and find a solution.

---

[1] Well, I still do, but far less than I used to and it seems far more improbable these days.
[2] Well, by "Confederate Party", I mean people who identify as tea party, but I'm using Muder's term for them.


Fixing Elves in Old "Basic" Dungeons and Dragons

I just figured out something that would have been really cool, if I had figured it out about 20 years ago.  Warning: what I'm going to say in this blog will be totally useless to anybody who's not interested in playing Dungeons and Dragons with a completely obsolete set of rules.  However, if you're into that, or you're just nostalgic for the bad old days when the rules of the game were just random, without any sense of fairness, read on.

Back in the old days, I used to play the old version of Dungeons and Dragons.  These days, the game is owned by Wizards of the Coast (the makers of Magic the Gathering), which, in turn, is owned by Hasbro.  However, way back when, Dungeons and Dragons was sold by a company, founded by the game's creators, called TSR.

In fact few people realize this but, pre-WotC, there were actually two separate games: Dungeons and Dragons (D&D) and Advanced Dungeons and Dragons (AD&D).  This was due to some copyright issues.  Dungeons and Dragons is what many AD&D players erroneously called "Basic" Dungeons and Dragons, because the first boxed set for Dungeons and Dragons was called the Dungeons and Dragons Basic Set.  What few ADD players realized was that there were also four other boxed sets that went along with this: the Expert Set, the Companion Set, the Master Set and the Immortals Set.

Many AD&D players were under the mistaken impression that the Basic Set was intended as an introductory version of ADD.  That is, they falsely assumed that if ADD was "Advanced", this "Basic Set" was the basic version that it was advanced in comparison to.  In fact, it was not.  It was a introductory set, but for the Dungeons and Dragons game (which, as I've said was actually a separate game for copyright reasons).  The Expert, Companion, Master and Immortal boxed sets progressively built on the rules for Dungeons and Dragons, for which the "Basic Set" was basic.

The Basic, Expert, Companion and Master sets were later compiled into a book called the Dungeons and Dragons Rules Cyclopedia.  Taken as a whole, the rules were actually fairly complex, at least as complex as those for AD&D and quite different, too.  For example, like ADD, they had druids, but the way you became a druid was by becoming a 9th level cleric first and then changing your class to druid.  That is, a druid was actually a specialized cleric, more than a separate class and could actually cast both cleric and druid spells.

The one thing about D&D that many players (of either game -- since many people started with the D&D Basic Set and then switched to AD&D, falsely believing it to be the "advanced" version, as I've said) will remember with dread is the infamous elf class.  That's right, they didn't have races in D&D.  They only had classes.  Elves, dwarves, halflings (and actually quite a few others that ADD never had, if you include the rules from Gazetteers) were actually separate classes.

Most of these race classes were fairly balanced.  Dwarves were like fighters who could also find traps, and had a lot of other underground abilities.  Halflings were like fighters, but had special hiding abilities.  (They didn't have gnomes -- that was AD&D.)  But, elves were just obscenely unfair classes, because they were just demonstrably better than all the other classes, particularly fighters and magic-users.

Elves could fight as well as fighters, wear full armor and cast magic user spells.  So, they were basically like AD&D First Edition fighter/magic-users.  Actually, those were even more obscene.  Elves in D&D had one thing that made them not quite as insanely powerful.  They only got up to 5th level spells (out of 9 spell levels).  Still, up until that point, they were basically better than either fighters or magic-users of the same level.  Magic-users beyond that point became more powerful at spell-casting, true, but fighters didn't really get much better than elves at fighting.  As I said... obscenely unfair.

The result was that every player always wanted to play elves!  Not only that, but elves were so powerful that they were hard for the Dungeon Master (DM) to challenge.  For those of you not in the know, the DM is the non-player who creates the scenarios for the players to take their characters through.  This role has been taken over by computers in computer RPGs.  (Though it's a lot more fun with a real live person!)

One reason elves were such a nightmare in the rules is that magic-user spells include a ton of fighting spells, including the infamous fireballs and lightning bolts that do many times as much damage as a single sword slice in an entire area (a 40' diameter ball in first case and a long line in the second).

Without elves in the picture, everything was fair.  Fighters couldn't do the sort of mass damage to monsters that you'd need modern explosives for, but magic-users couldn't fight at all well and could be killed very easily.  They also weren't allowed to wear any armor or use any but the weakest weapons.  Fighters could wear any armor and use any weapons.  Also, magic-users had a limited supply of spells, whereas fighters were good at fighting all the time.  So, you had a choice: take on monsters one on one, but be hard to kill and be good at fighting constantly or be able to blow up whole bunches of monsters and do massive damage from a distance, but only a certain number of times and be a weak, vulnerable character otherwise.

Add in elves, and you basically have no reason to play either of the other two classes.  You have a heavily armored, sword swinging, arrow shooting combat machine who can also blow up bad guys with giant balls and rays.  It's sort of like adding something to Rock, Paper, Scissors that takes Rock, Paper and Scissors.  It ruins the game!  Why ever use Rock, Paper or Scissors when you can just use that?

Back in the old days, I actually was one of the few people out there who played Dungeons and Dragons (as opposed to AD&D) with the actual full set of rules (expanded with the Expert, Companion, Master and Immortals sets).  I used to agonize about what to do about elves.  The problem vexed me.   I had various solutions, but none of them satisfied me.

One was to do what AD&D did in their second edition, which was to say that fighter/magic-users (which you'll recall was sort of the AD&D equivalent of elves, power-wise).  In AD&D second edition, some game designer came up with the brilliant idea that fighter/magic-users can use any weapon, but can't wear armor.  This, at least, reclaimed the fighter as a valuable class and made it tougher to be a fighter/magic-user.

I experimented with doing the same for elves and I liked the idea because it fit more my image of elves: shifting through the forest, adept with bow and arrow and casting magic spells, but not putting on chain mail or suits of armor and fighting with swords or lances.

However, it still had the problem that, up to a point anyway, magic-users were still worse than elves.  They could cast the same spells, but fight more poorly, had less hit points and couldn't wield good weapons.  Elves could still blast away bad guys with ballistic magic.

I had other ideas on how to "fix" elves too, like make them gain magic spells at half the rate of magic users.  That way, they'd still have magic, but just gain it more slowly.  However, none of my solutions ever really gained acceptance with my players and, to be honest, none of them really felt right.  My players complained, rightly I think, that all of my solutions either made elves too weak or didn't really solve the problem.  The only real solution was to ban elves all together.  Doing so created a really nicely balanced game, unlike AD&D, which, back in those days, was much worse about fairness.

AD&D seemed to have no sense of fairness whatsoever, particularly in its first edition.  Cavaliers, rangers and paladins could do just about everything fighters could do only better.  Druids were at least as powerful as magic-users, except that they could fight better, use better weapons, got to wear some armor and had better hit points. 

D&D was actually a pretty good, well balanced, fair game, except for the one glaring crazy part about elves.  But, oh what a big part that was!

Now, all of this is ancient history.  Wizards of the Coast bought TSR.  They killed the Dungeons and Dragons product, renamed Advanced Dungeons and Dragons to simply Dungeons and Dragons (just to confuse everybody) and fixed much of the craziness of the rules in AD&D that had driven people like me to play D&D (sans elves) in the first place.  Back then, if I had only figured out a way to fix elves, old D&D would have been a great game.

Well, tonight, I'm not sure why my brain did this, but it suddenly spit out the answer.  I haven't played in years, you understand.  But, apparently, some part of my brain didn't know that and has been churning around on finding an answer all this time, because it just came up with one and I really like it!  I just wish the answer was needed.

Remember that I said that in D&D there was a druid class that you can't access unless you're a cleric who becomes 9th level?  They didn't introduce this until the Companion set, so it's a bit obscure.  However, old D&D actually did have druid spells (though they're a bit different from AD&D druid spells).  These spells are much less combat oriented and more nature oriented.

The answer to how to fix elves seems so obvious that I can't believe I didn't think of it before.  Just change three rules with regard to elves.  First, instead of the rule that elves can cast magic-user spells, just change that so elves can cast druid spells.  Most of these would help characters solve problems in the game (by doing things like summoning animals to be spies for you or surrounding your party with mist so you can't be seen) rather than actually make you better at fighting monsters.

The one truly devastating druid spell in old D&D was the infamous Lightning Strike.  However, it was much milder than the AD&D spell by the same name.  As with the AD&D spell, it can only be used in stormy weather and only outdoors.  Unlike the AD&D spell, it can only call down one lightning strike every 10 minutes (every turn) and most combats are over in well under that amount of time.  Also, it only has a 20 foot radius and it only ever does exactly 8d6 (eight six-sided dice) of damage.  This would make it more damaging than a fireball or lightning bolt only for characters of levels 5-7 (since both of those infamous magic-user spells do a d6 per level of caster).  So, it would be true that, if elves could cast druid spells instead of magic-user spells, they'd have one spell that could do massive damage, but it would be over 1/4 the area of affect of a fireball (40' diameter) and wouldn't grow to such obscene levels of damage at higher caster levels.  Also, it couldn't be done indoors or without stormy weather.  So, it would be of limited use.

The second rule change would be to give elves the same armor requirements as druids: non-metal armor only.  This would be similar, but not identical to, the AD&D second edition fix of keeping fighter/magic-users from wearing any armor.

These two changes would already make elves unique but not better than any other character class.  They'd be as good at fighting as a fighter, but with inferior armor.  They wouldn't be able to cast magic-user spells at all, reclaiming magic-users as really great at what they do, as long as they don't get hit.  Druids would still out-cast elves, because druids in old D&D can cast both cleric and druid spells.  But, elves could cast druid spells at lower levels than druids (who can't access druid spells until 9th level).  At the same time, druids would be able to cast druid spells beyond 5th level spells, an elves would not.  So, the elf class wouldn't be better in any way than any other class.

What's more, they'd fit more my image of elves.  They wouldn't thunder around in heavy, clanging armor, but limit themselves to light non-metal armor, which seems more in keeping with flitting through the trees.  Their magic would be nature magic.  I mean, it never made sense to me that elves would be shooting fireballs and lightning bolts and invading orcs.  They'd burn down the forest!

The final rule tweak would be to change the experience point matrix for elves so that they'd use the magic-user experience chart.  Elves gain experience (and therefore levels) the slowest of any other character class.  Making these tweaks in their power would make this slow level progression a little unfair.  Magic-users are the next slowest, but only slightly slower than fighters.  Having elves use this faster experience progression would give them a fair level progression, given their change in power.  I think the magic-user experience chart is right, because elves would remain fairly powerful and versatile compared to other classes.  So, we'd want to slow their progression down a little bit, but not as much as before.

But, none of this matters, because the old Dungeons and Dragons game is a dead game from a bygone era that has long since been replaced several times over by a subsidiary of Hasbro.

Why is my brain thinking of all this now?  Who knows.  I'd like to think that I'm so smart that my brain doesn't quit figuring out solutions to problems, even years later, but it's also at least as probable that it's just late at night and I'm thinking meaningless thoughts that no longer have value to anyone, in all probability.

Then again, there may be devotees of the now defunked Dungeons and Dragons game that so many folks called "Basic D&D".  So, maybe they'll get something out of it.  Personally, what I get out of it is the satisfaction that I've finally solved the problem.

As an aside, it may be interesting to note that the Immortals boxed set was actually one of the best rule sets (IMHO) that TSR ever put out for either game.  It actually had rules for playing gods (yes, you read that right) and they actually did gods right.  Mortals couldn't kill them at all and gods really were as powerful as we'd expect them to be (unlike the crazy AD&D gods, who were things like 25th level fighter / 20th level magic users with 150 hit points!  Yeah right!)  The best part was that becoming a god was so insanely difficult that half the fun was becoming one in the first place.

Okay, signing off now and admitting that it's late and I'm rambling.  I'm having fun though, and I hope my readers had fun reading this blog.  I figure every few months we should all put out completely meaningless, but, hopefully, entertaining blog posts like this one. 

I'll write a meaningful blog next time.  Really!

Good night!