4. Holy Wars

CAUTION: SMOKING MAY BE HARMFUL TO YOUR HEALTH

Meerschaum Pipe w/coral snake Made in early '80s
©2010

That pipe was made for an old fishing buddy in Wisconsin. He lived in a small town and he was angry about the people who drove too fast down his street. Well, I'd been listening to him for years and his answer to most problems ended with "Shoot the Bastards!" He had convinced town hall to hire him as a constable. I wondered how he was gonna do but he surprised me. He had to be certified and he took what he learned in the process very seriously. And his opinions changed. I did two more pipes for him to give to his police buddies.

IT ALWAYS AMAZES ME
How little respect Christians have for their Gods.

First these Christians pretend to be afraid of God. At the same time if they see any sort of slight of their God they rush to his defense. They take it as a given that it is their job to protect the creator of the universe from people who don't believe in him. If God really cared he'd do what he did at the Passover. Kill the bastards. He hasn't done it since, though. Humans have done his dirty work since the Exodus. When I was a young man I was sent off to Vietnam to "kill a commie for Christ." Well, it seems to me that if He could kill all the first born in Egypt, He could kill all the commies in Nam if He really wanted them dead. It was us who wanted God to outsource the job to us.

I remember graduating from high school in the mid '60s with Vietnam staring me in the face. No big deal. I had family in the military back to the Civil War at least. It was my turn. My dad was in the navy during WWII and he didn't have anything bad to say about it. Now it was my turn. I was a believer. Commies were atheists. They had to die. If we didn't kill 'em over there we'd hafta fight 'em over here. That's what it was like.

We're still fighting 'em , for jobs. The Vietnamese refugees who made it here are smart and hardworking, tough competition for lazy white union raised narcissists who didn't pay attention in school, us boomers. The Vietnamese refugees knew from experience with our military that there was lots of money being thrown away around here and they wanted some of it.

I still remember a bumper sticker from that era. "My Country Right or Wrong". I also remember the first time I saw that motto. It was written in German in wrought iron above the gate of a Nazi concentration camp. My favorite bumper sticker from those days was "Grumpy hippies smoke crab grass." But I digress.

I weighed my options. I had a connection in the local reserve band and I might have gotten into that but I decided a two year draftee life was better than the six years you had to do as a reservist. I checked out enlisting in the army band but that was a four year enlistment and I figured two years was plenty. I'd take my chances with the infantry. As it happened, the army at that time was about 90% support troops. I was a clerk in a place called Long Binh, the largest military installation in the world at that time. About a half hour drive from Saigon, the place had acres of just beer.

For more detail click A REMF IN NAM up top of the page.

It took me about two months to come to the conclusion that we weren't the good guys. Remember, us boomers grew up with The Lone Ranger. He shot silver bullets and never to kill, only disarm. We grew up with Victory. We were the good guys. I had come of age in The Golden Age of America.

'Course, I had also read CATCH 22 so I knew about a guy named Milo Minderbinder. (If you don't, google him). I knew he wasn't a good guy, yet there I was in Nam surrounded by vast herds of Milo Minderbinder clones. Apparently after WWII he had opened a business school.

Well, dammit, free enterprise shouldn't be free! If you drove around Saigon the streets were lined with vendors just like the midway at a county fair, all selling items from our supply depots. They weren't stolen by the vendors. They were stolen by American soldiers and sold to them. There were American officers playing the currency black market even though everyone knew Charlie ran that market to help them pay for the war. In late 1969 the Sergeant Major Of The Army and his cronies were busted for graft. That just scratched the surface of the tip of an iceberg of corruption. I'm convinced we played an active, supporting role in our own defeat.

Yet we were doing it all for God. We hated commies because they were atheists. Before I went to Nam my church handed us Vietnam bound boys steel jacketed New Testaments. We were going off to a holy war. If we put those little books near our hearts God would look after us. That is, if we looked after him by killing people who don't believe in him, plus a lot of people who just happened to be in the neighborhood. Collateral damage. Couldn't be helped. Charlie hid among them.

God knows all. Time means nothing to him. He has 20/20 hindsight AND foresight. He knows ahead of time how things will work. He wrote the RULES for cryin' out loud. He knows that the real money was being made by the contractors. We planted that country with more ordnance than was dropped in all of WWII. Flying over it you saw craters to the horizon in all directions. That and mini guns that fired dense streams of bullets from cargo planes. At night you would see them intermittently from a distance, a long glowing, undulating snake that went from the ground to a point in space, followed by a long high pitched note. It could put a bullet in every square foot of a football field in seconds.

That's what we did for God, yet he still lost. By the time I'd been home for a couple of years my old church, along with many others, had changed it's mind and was now saying that Vietnam was an immoral war. Whoa! God is never wrong! Well, the churches just never admitted that they'd changed their minds. The truth is, there were so many church members against the war that they were afraid of losing $$. With friends like Christians, God doesn't need enemies.

Speaking of enemies, the people who can't live with the thought that their ancestry might include some chimpanzee like critters. You're saying that the rest of God's creation is somehow second rate, a minor league to a human major league? Yet you also insist that all humans are sinners, the only species of which that can be said. So, it a truly significant way we are BENEATH all the other fauna of planet Earth. Quite frankly, a puddle filled with algae is if more benefit to the planet than a lot of the people I've worked with over a lifetime. As for divine creation, I don't think the universe was created by someone in order to coerce a single species from a single planet to kiss his ass.

No. Belief in god requires a core belief that coercion is divine. It's more of a hardwired personality disorder, a symptom of paranoia. After spending millions of years clawing our way up from the middle of the food chain it's no wonder we're scared of the dark.

Next:

3. Now, for something fun

DISPLAY CABINET FOR DOLL COLLECTION
Built with Paul Wullbrandt in Hampton, Iowa in 1973, it is nearly eight feet tall. (2.4 m) The round stained glass window conceals a doll. The base is made from an old redwood stock watering tank. The seat is burned and brushed oak with rosemaling. The roof has cedar shakes ranging in size from playing cards to postage stamps.

2. This is now

MAMALUKE - A High Performance Racing Pipe in meerschaum
Blow thru the stem/drive shaft and smoke comes out the exhausts. Fan and exhausts are nickel plated brass. Bowl is below the air filter and carburetor. Six inches long (15 cm)

There once was a race of slaves known as Mamelukes. They were so good as slaves that they eventually supplanted their masters as the ruling class. Their Waterloo came when they got whipped by Napoleon. So I titled my little hand carved racing engine "Mamaluke". Look what we do to feed, house and maintain these internal combustion (I/C) slaves/masters.

THE IMPACT OF HUMANITY ON THE PLANET (cont.)

The time machine on our 6' earth is making it's way to today and all of a sudden you can see signs of human life. In the last 200 years human have truly rearranged the planet so much that you can see humanity at work without magnification. In fact, if you look at any sea coast anywhere you'll see vast city/suburb complexes connected to each other by tendrils of stone and metal and electricity.

Look at the east coast of North America. Since 1800 it has been developed to the point that it's one long city from New England to Florida. As you run your fingers along the coast you realize that the earth has crystalized. In sunlight it shines. There are major cities that are sharp to the touch, your fingers look like you've been crumpling up a sheet of sandpaper.Stick your nose down there. That's the smell of chemicals, some burning.

These urban complexes are surrounded with human waste so while we bury garbage in the ground we're digging up the materials to make more garbage. Hold your hand over a city and you feel heat. Doesn't heat mean infection? The east coast glows at night. From Massachusetts to Florida it humms. Bright spots show where cities are.

Everywhere you look there are those tendrils connecting everyone. Impulses race along them the same way blood flows through a vein. Whether it's stone, metal or electricity they cover the globe like webs.

There are now more machines on earth than people, all requiring power, all making heat. The number of 2 cycle engines alone is astronomical. They stink up the planet far worse than other polluters yet every one of them has a home, often as nothing more than a mechanical pet.

Humans are geniuses when it comes to developing mechanical slaves. Machines have been taught do such basic things as holding our buildings up. "Brick and Mortar" is obsolete. You can add electricity to that now. We mechanize slave labor and then extract fossil energy to feed it. Look in any city's yellow pages and you'll find machine builders. You see their work on cable television shows that show the machinery in operation. Somebody builds those machines. Strange breed, those slave builders but at least they supply us with guilt free slave labor. In the old antebellum south, the greatest fear was of slave rebellion. Machines don't rebel. They might refuse to work bur we aren't seriously worried they're gonna attack us in our sleep. The mechanical slaves pose other problems more easily ignored.

My MAMELUKE pipe is built for show, but there are plenty of real people who do put engines on display like works of art. Engines carve places in history. Ask any "Indy" fan over the age of 60 if the word "Offy" has any meaning and they'll get a little misty eyed. The Offenhauser racing engine was THE engine in the old days.

There are even different cults worshipping various types of I/C engines. They're called fans. Remember, fan is short for fanatic. If you add up all racing fans around the world you find a significant fraction of humanity is interested in motor sports. Whether it's stock or drag, formula one or sprint car, go cart or motorcycle the engines are at the heart of the sport and it's the power that captivates us. It means that everyman can be a superman behind the wheel and all you need is a heavy foot. It's real heady stuff to those vast hordes of us who never will have any real power even in our own homes. The fans may worship the driver, but it's the driver's business to master that wild beast of an engine. It's also one of the few remaining blood sports, less and less so, but the threat remains. The real carnage is among the slaves. I love to see body parts strewn on the track as long as they're quarter panels and hoods n' other car parts

So where are we? The time machine on our little 6' earth has made it to today. The atmosphere is now in permafog. We have an aura we never had before. It's not our breath or too many volcanos that's stinkin' up the joint, it's our slaves . I hope for a day when the I/C engine has a place only in the museum and the only question will be "Why'd we live with it for so long?"

Because we're human and it was so easy to ignore the unpaid costs. This is our natural state. We play ourselves to death like a good dog playing fetch. We do what we want, to hell with tomorrow. Our legacy? What will future archeologists say about our litter? Great Pyramids it aint. Mostly it will be garbage. Vast landfills oozing methane.

Our monumental architecture? Shopping malls and skyscrapers. They're also our temple complexes.The Mall of America is an Acropolis of the true American religion: Consumerism. It has come to this, globally, during the life of the USA. We live in a country with tremendous resources that was handed over, intact, by the indigents to new comers all of whom wanted a chance to live like the aristocrats back home that they hated so much. They still come for that, but less and less.

We are what we are because of things that happened thousands of years ago. Every one of us is descended from a long line of survivors. Up until 100 years ago it was common to wake up in January in the northern US and have to chip the ice off the wash basin in the morning. Life was hard.

There were even times in human history when the human gene pool was reduced by natural calamities such as earthquakes and at one least super volcano 70,000 + years ago when there were perhaps only thousands of human survivors worldwide. What do those survivors have in common? Smartest? Quickest? If surviving means eating your neighbor then you better be quickest. You can be sure it was a harem society where some bad ass got all the babes. We're all descended from him. As much as we to think we're advanced, emotionally we carry the same baggage our ancestors did. Monkeys like to think they're so superior too. It turns out that what's normal life amongst the chimpanzees is codependence amongst humans.

It could be that our legacy to the planet will be a continuous thin layer of plastic bags over the whole planet.

Next: Pure fun

1. That was then

Arty, the wood wizard
The staff is Sumac with an optional lit crystal for guiding people through mines.
Each new post will feature something I've made.


I've always been interested in history. First it was the adventure. Pirates, soldiers, explorers, statesmen. As I got older I found myself looking for the answer to "Why?" we are the way we are. It's all about personalities, or rather, personality disorders. I plan to interview some of the people I have met in my long lifetime.
I also think I'm funny, something I inherited from my father who entertained people his entire life with his music and sense of humor. So look for unique insights laced with some of my funniest stuff. ENJOY!
For those who want to hear my wife and me play piano duets just write to me at pipedreams@me.com and write "Brahms" or "Sousa" in the subject line. I'll send it by return email.

THE IMPACT OF HUMANITY ON THE EARTH
As seen by a 5000 year old man

Much has been made of it and many believe there's nothing to it. The planet is too big to be affected by us tiny little humans. Yes, we are tiny. Compared to the earth we're the size of a microscopic growth like yeast. Yeast eats sugar and if it lives in a sea of sugar it will eat till it dies of alcohol poisoning. That's wine.

As a species we are consuming the planet we live on. And we give off waste products. Take the Great Pyramids. They are the waste by product of divinely inspired architecture. They were put up as human ant hills to satisfy the ego requirements of ancient narcissists and to employ the excess population that the Nile valley could support. They were needed when they were built, but aside from the fact that they represent so much work so long ago they are not needed today. Nice but not necessary. Monuments to getting it wrong.

So many human endeavors involve building things, a practice whereby humans extract substances from the planet, alter them somehow, and rearrange them in mostly straight lines. First we built mounds, then pyramids, great walls, finally vast cities. As our numbers grew and our techniques improved we built taller and taller with glass and steel.

Imagine if you will that the earth is only 6' (1.82 m) in diameter. We've seen it that small many times going to and from the moon. You can walk up to it, feel it with your hand, smell it. Right next to it is a time machine that can instantly take the planet back to any time in the past. Set the dial for 5000 years ago. I chose 5000 years ago because the change from oral to written record keeping was well under way by that time. Some of the old oral legends made it through the switchover, Moses and Noah top among them. Even Jesus. His story was not written down until years after the fact. If he was alive today he'd have written the entire New Testament himself.

Now set the time machine on auto time lapse so the earth ages those last 5000 years in an hour. Now let's go looking for signs of human beings. You'll need a powerful magnifying glass. Luckily we know where to look. The "fertile crescent" and the Nile valley are among the earliest civilization sites. They both grew a lot of food and brewed a lot of beer. It was worth protecting those sources so it was worth owning them.

And who owned them? Self proclaimed divinity. We know by now, of course, that all of that ancient religion was a load of crap, beautiful but all wrong. But look what wonders were left by them. Yes, and I love it but it's still litter. Right now we can find it with a powerful magnifying glass but only by looking for natural features and working out what we're seeing. Run you finger over the area and you'd just barely feel anything.

The time machine is working it's way forward. You can can see tiny little cities grow up in Greece and Asia Minor. Soon there is a city in Italy that you can feel and smell. Run your finger over it and it's like a tiny scab that you could easily scratch off. Stick your nose down there. Oooh. Much of that smell is waste, of course, but some of it was death. Every amphitheater in the Roman empire was surrounded with an aromatic type of pine tree to deal with the stench. Besides everything else, the amphitheaters stink like a slaughter house. And at the end of every day of public carnage all the prostitutes would gather around the arena and do their best business working the departing crowd. The Romans were the first to inlay the earth with stone roads to connect their cities.

But I digress. At the same time half a world away a long lesion is appearing in Asia. You can see it more than feel it but it adds a man made feature to an otherwise wild landscape. An insane man named China erected it as a billboard to show the world how much he owned of it. We're left to live with the litter resulting from his personality disorder.

Look over there in central America. More pyramids, some on top of mountains. Few and far between but we can be sure there's a ruling priestly class involved. Anytime a society has any surplus a breed of people appears who think they should have the excess while not adding anything to the common wealth. They do this by claiming to be powerful angry deities or representing them. Still, it's fascinating litter. So different from Europe, Asia and Africa yet so similar. All with the same motivation, the same need to cause monumental buildings so someone would be remembered.

The Romans were fully modern men. They wrote their own lives for us to read. Their cities survived the empire and grew into some large cities. Aside from the black death the population increased continually, yet it is still hard to find them on our 6' world. The time machine is just approaching 500 years ago and you still have to search for all but the biggest cities and even they are just tiny pinpoints when seen with a powerful magnifying glass.

200 years ago things were still as they had been since the beginning. You can look for a long time and still see no sign of human life on our 6' earth.

That was then,