Growth vs. Gain

© 2009 G.N. Jacobs

A world without greed or money sounds tempting to those of us that play Bill Roulette every month waiting for the check or PayPal transfer to clear. When Gene Roddenberry dreamed up the Federation in 1964 for the upcoming pilot of Star Trek, he made a statement about his belief in the improvability of humanity. Greed, war, disease, racism, hatred and ignorance had largely been made into lessons from history books, until, of course, the intrepid crew discovers these concepts lurking among the stars.

Considering the times in which Roddenberry wrote; such optimism represents a plea for the sanity to make it through the next 40 years. That the world still more or less looks like the one that existed in 1964 is a tragedy best discussed in another rant, but we did, at least, avoid giving ourselves a Darwin Award during that time. But, for those of us that pay attention to the thought carried underneath the phasers, ship battles, green-skinned Orion slave girls and William Shatner’s over-emphatic delivery of his speeches, we have always asked how did the Federation become such a paradise?

We didn’t get much of an answer until Star Trek: The Next Generation. Roddenberry and the army of writers tasked with making the vision work on screen gave us two key pieces of technology that if made manifest really would change our understanding of economies. Behold an improved transporter and, wait for it, a matter replicator. For the three of us that have never whispered “Beam me up, Scotty” into our cell phones in hopes of dodging Johnson from Accounting, the transporter is a magic poof you are there device and the replicator is a magic I want stuff and it appears box in every cabin on the ship.

So how did these magic boxes change a capitalist society into the assumed perfection of a quasi-socialist society fueled not by money and gain, but personal growth? Well, both devices as a matter of physics represent near total control of the building blocks of the Universe, matter and energy. Such control eliminates the artificial scarcities that drive most economies. The transporter really screws the Teamsters out of jobs, because why put foodstuffs, computer parts or even yourself on a vehicle that may crash if you can just beam it there? The replicator replaces every factory that ever existed and with widespread distribution throughout the Federation completes the death of the transportation industry started by the transporter.

For dramatic reasons the writers limited the transporter to distances of only a planetary scale, as it is much more interesting to see battles between ships mixed with raygun fights between people then to have only one type of fight. For instance, Stargate SG-1 started out as a show with a long-range transporter metaphor with the star gate system, but still added starships by the fourth season. But, concessions to drama aside, planetary scale transporters still represents a sea change in how people get the food and stuff they need to live, eliminating the need for a gain based economy.

As I watched the Star Trek episodes, I did keep asking what motivates people to continue living vital and active lives once the need to work for money to pay for things is eliminated? Sure, I heard the blather about personal growth replacing personal gain and thought it a good idea most of the time, but I kept wondering about cases where the system might not work as well.

I asked questions like what about the person who just wants to stay in bed for a week and order room service? Would that person receive an unwelcome visit from the neighborhood job committee asking polite questions why the person chose a path that didn’t apparently lead to growth? True, a week under the covers is explainable as a mental health vacation, but a month or more is not. So, would that person be sent to a psychiatric facility? Probably.

Things began to fall into place for me answering these questions when a friend said to me, “whether it’s capitalism or Star Trek socialism, we need more laws because we don’t have better people.” So, I imagine a huge advertising campaign telling people to improve themselves as a way of driving reasons to get out of bed. Every profession in the Federation attracts members because those people really want those jobs, heeding Willie Nelson’s injunction to “let them be doctors and lawyers and such.”

This ethic of peaceful self-improvement seemed to work for the interesting jobs, but less so for the jobs that are done under capitalism because someone has to do them. Benjamin Sisko took his culinary skills learned at his father’s restaurant in New Orleans to the stars using his gumbo and jambalaya as diplomatic icebreakers during his Starfleet career. This is a personal growth application of the profession of cooking.

But, what about Denny’s cooks and waiters? Is it really personal growth when someone cooks the same plate of eggs for fifty people per hour with no variation? A restaurant like Sisko’s stays open because the chef puts individual touches on the food that are kept off the planetary replicator net to drive customers into the seats. The proprietor derives the satisfaction of pleasing his customers as would the servers; I trust that the service at such eateries is pleasant informative and talkative when the customers want such things. I hope that the people who just want to eat and go stay home and get their food from the replicator.

As a result, the Federation seems to be overrun with scientists, doctors, lawyers, writers, poets, artists and actors, but would naturally be devoid of the grunt work that can be delegated to robots. Who would sweep the streets of New York when robots can do that work better? But, supply and demand would still apply to these jobs. If everyone is a doctor how many doctors would fail to attract patients because there are too many doctors compared to the patient base. So if three out of four doctors sit on their hands in their offices, do they experience personal growth as doctors when they don’t see patients?

With the proliferation of Internet based communications venues, we are experiencing an explosion of artistic output that almost mimics how artists get along under the Federation. True, more people with talent are encouraged that they can self-publish books on Lulu.com, but so too are the people who shouldn’t write books. And there is no such thing as creating a book, video or picture without the concurrent need for someone to sit at a computer doing nothing else but planting links on the web.

The one difference between America and the Federation when it comes to the arts is that the Federation artists can still eat from the replicator after putting their books blindly into the public nets without a PR plan. Presumably, agents, editors and PR flacks will mutate into content promoters who justify their replicator rations by convincing the masses to download the art that they represent. Art that is not experienced by other people is useless and a waste of time.

Federation society has one huge outlet for all the people in the middle who are neither fish nor fowl: Starfleet. Joining the military/exploration force siphons off the people still looking for a fight, or those with odd skills that are less necessary on Earth or the major worlds of the Federation. Those looking for a fight become security officers and unusual skills like horse training become specialists sent to far-flung colony worlds where the full benefits of Federation technology haven’t yet reached.

Even more so than in America where military recruiting serves to empty ghettos and suburbs alike of their excess male population in return for skills, cash for school, adventure and meaning, Federation citizens really need Starfleet to liven up their day. No writer has said if Starfleet is an organization more like the People’s Liberation Army of China where millions serve, but few are really just soldiers. How bloated are the Starfleet ranks? No writer has dared to say.

Given the choice I would live in the Federation, but not under any real world socialist system. Having needs be met, but being left alone to do things that help society and myself is a fascinating prospect. I wouldn’t live under real world socialism, because those systems try to command equality without encouraging personal growth to replace the greed motive. Such places have long experience with this statement ‘if the bosses pretend to pay us, we’ll pretend to work.’

That leaves capitalism for now. I have to hit the social networks and leave links like pigeon droppings in the hope that someone pays attention and listens hopefully with some money. It doesn’t mean I’m not going to speak out against people who forget that personal gain is a poor substitute for personal growth, but again we need better people to make anything work.

Blood & Ink Promo Video

Words Are the Conflict (Part 1)

© 2009 G.N. Jacobs

At the end of the day, the conflict about gay marriages or unions comes down to the words we use. Progressives and moderates want to use the word marriage. Conservative Christians don’t. And so there is much conflict and carrying on cranky. The funny thing is, if both sides actually sit down and actually negotiate something we can come to a workable solution then our words would encapsulate the highly rational “Meet in the Middle” result as well. Sometimes, I think we like fighting more than we like rational solutions.

Where do I stand? I’m a Christian that says “I practice the faith in Christ, but will not touch the religion of Christ with a pole of any length.” This touches on one of my favorite linguistic pet peeves that faith and religion should never be used as synonyms. I suggest looking the words up in Webster’s to see what I mean. I also really should defer this thread to another essay. Because I believe in the love taught by the faith in Christ, I had to oppose Proposition 8, a mean-spirited piece of legislation brought on by the religion of Christ.

How do I reconcile my faith with my political stance? Very carefully, as the joke goes. At the end of the day, if I say that the Christian Bible is my spiritual guide then I can’t just edit out the less savory parts that don’t like gays. I can’t remain blind to the fact that the Old Testament reacts to homosexuality as if gays carried cooties or, worse, the current H1N1 flu that currently has the world nervous. The New Testament eases up as befits a divinity that claims to be about love and there are plenty of built-in backdoor loopholes, but let’s face it, Jesus never directly said he supported homosexuality.

If I were to cut these parts out of my interpretation of the Bible, I couldn’t call myself a Christian of any kind, whether faithful or religious. Doing so would be much like President Obama throwing Rev. Wright under the bus for his politically inconvenient anti-American sentiments. The President rationally stated that he didn’t share those views, but couldn’t repudiate them because they are part of the national experience and must be dealt with as such. So too, I have to pull the balancing act of a spirituality that, at best, thinks of homosexuals as being in an imperfect position for a relationship with the Divine juxtaposed with a belief that Freedom and real Equal Opportunity are the only ways to live.

My solution to the conundrum of my faith making me quite squirrelly about homosexuality and my desire that all people get to form lasting monogamous relationships with the partner best suited to their needs as a firewall against America really going down the toilet is to use words very carefully. I believe in one class of partnership license for which all couples may apply. This license would not be called a marriage license, but a civil union license.

Here is the nature of the compromise: heterosexual couples give up the right to a marriage license and homosexual couples who are ready to be monogamous get equal protection under the law. Previous attempts at civil union and domestic partnership laws basically failed because even when the language of the legislation tries to give equal rights they are fundamentally unequal, because they are separate. This legal argument against “Separate But Equal” comes to us from Brown vs. Board of Education.

There is a beauty in this middle position that represents an adroit sidestepping of the primary stated goal of conservative Christians: that marriage remain “a holy union of a man and woman ordained by God in the time of Man’s innocence – blah, blah, blah.” If we, as a society, decide that marriage is such a holy concept, then why were we issuing marriage licenses in the first place? The First Amendment clearly states, “Congress shall make no law concerning the establishment of religion or the restriction of the free exercise thereof.” The logical result is that if we give a word a religious or faith-based definition then all forms of government that sign onto the Constitution simply are barred from regulating marriages. If we give the word a secular definition, then the rules change.

The problem is that we can’t give marriage a secular definition; because we know how hard conservative Christians fight and they sometimes win. Practical politics is very much about the saying “keep your friends close and your enemies closer.” Changing the name of the official licenses the government passes out accomplishes this with a simplicity as to be beautiful. We run the risk with every attempt to secularize government of the whacko end of Christianity taking their toys and going home. We have enough trouble with Muslim whackos stuck in the Fourteenth Century that we’re going to add to that with rogue Christian nuts?

Government must issue some sort of license. There are too many legal issues arising from the partnerships we form for the government not to issue documents. A partnership sends out tentacles into medical, inheritance, child raising, financial and criminal law. There needs to be a document that says who is married, coupled or united. This is primarily why the concept of Common Law Marriage is mostly on its way out, even though echoes still remain in our court decisions.

Should we extend these rights formerly encapsulated under marriage law to gays? I say yes. Despite the prejudices of the more ignorant conservatives, there is no science that says that gays are anything less than people with the same dreams and needs as the rest of us. We may question the wisdom of a gay couple raising children at a spiritual level touching on the concept of Yin-Yang, the perfect synthesis of male and female. But, no one has demonstrated that children of gay couples are any more or less screwed up than the rest of us. Children grow up existentially frustrated at their parents no matter what.

Perhaps conservatives are misreading the Yin-Yang idea, even though it is really strange to employ an oriental concept to a Western debate where there are Christians weighing in. The Yin-Yang symbol shows that everyone has small tendencies towards the other side incorporated into their personality. This says that a man has hidden female tendencies of emotionality, home building and inclusion and a woman has hidden traits of direct action, problem solving and forming hierarchical structures for the apportionment of responsibility and accountability. This says that a gay or lesbian couple will sort out who plays the male or female roles as needed and the kids will come out with the same general angst if said family eliminates abuse and derision.

We need to let gays form monogamous families for emotional stability. We have plenty of science that says that happily united couples live longer. This mostly comes from the heterosexual side of things. I have yet to hear of the same studies being applied to homosexual couples. But, I would assume the science will turn out to be valid when we get over our general shame at sex and actually do that study without rancor or prejudice. But, we also need to get them coupled up; they’re going to die otherwise. Whatever your sexual orientation, we have ample evidence that sluts and satyrs of all kinds open themselves up to diseases and the antibiotics don’t work so well these days.

The problem is that we don’t encourage gays to be monogamous. The Right to Life movement (ironically the same people as the Defense of Marriage people in most cases) only wanted to ban abortion without providing structures that encouraged adoption. Similarly, the marriage defenders use their preconceptions of gays as sexually profligate as condemnation, but refuse to allow gays who are ready for stability to become monogamous. A state-issued license seems to act as a talisman for stability. People can’t live without their talismans and symbols, but homosexuals can’t have them because they are bad and are going to Hell.

Are gays going to Hell? I don’t know. The New Testament has many loopholes on the subject. We have Jesus saying things akin to “it is best that a man and woman be married.” We also have the same being described as part man-part divinity saying, “some eunuchs are creations of God and some are made by Man.” Common interpretation of this Scripture can be expanded to include homosexuality. Were some gays made that way, because they were intended to focus on things that enhance the entire human experience, instead of raising children that nine out of ten of their neighbors do?

So according to this logic, are homosexuals bad because they appear to be following the dictates of their genetics? Is God so cruel as to give someone an unbeatable predisposition to something and then cast him or her into Hell for being what they were made to be? That is not how Jesus portrays himself in the New Testament. If it were, I would burn my Bible and do something else. But, as a Christian I still have those doubts and I don’t have to make everything work out neatly.

I am supported by C.S. Lewis, a great Christian revered by all of us that take the Bible seriously, in saying God will take care of those who believe truly. Writing in Mere Christianity, Lewis said that no matter what name you call God, Jesus will take care of you if you have faith in what you were taught to believe. He also stated that he supported two types of marriage, one for secular types who need documentation of the contract and something completely separate for Christians who want to live according to the Word of God.

This highly rational middle ground that also fiercely defends the separation of Church and State is perhaps too much for conservatives to bear. There is an appalling trend among adherents of conservative strains of most religions that they like the First Amendment when it applies in their favor, but not when it applies to people they don’t like. They hide behind their religion when someone proposes changing the society’s operating agreement, but then say nasty things about other groups.

We have the First Amendment because we know what theocracies do to minorities. We don’t even need the all up Death Match with Muslim whackos to see why we need tolerance of all faiths and religions. Baptists would probably screw with Catholics or Mormons, just because they could. And then the wheel turns and the parties change positions. We call this chaos a theological banana republic. So is it OK to do this to gays, who may or may not be pursuing their own valid path to God?

I have many bones to pick with the gay community at large that have nothing to do with whatever unions they form. We have too much Political Correctness as evidenced by the surprising list of books that are banned in our schools. Most people associate this process as originating in the gay community, though some of this thought control originates elsewhere. Instead of encouraging people to read everything, even the potentially offensive, we cut it out of the curriculum. I have no idea how much gays are really responsible for Political Correctness in an effort to find allies among other minorities. But, that is the perception. When combined with my natural doubts that I get from my faith about gays, I am not a perfect ally.

So this is my plan, write legislation that says: 1) the government will stop issuing marriage licenses. 2) the government will issue civil union licenses instead to couples made up of two consenting adult humans of any gender. 3) all marriage licenses already issued are grandfathered in as civil unions. 4) all legal precedent created under the old laws will remain in force concerning the new document class. 5) a religious or faith-based organization wishing to perform actual marriages according to their beliefs are not required to perform the ceremony for gays. 6) said couples going for a church wedding still have to present their civil union license to the pastor for the ceremony to be legal.

Do you think we could actually pass this sensible legislation and fight about what really matters, our piece of the faltering American economy? Or will we simply see our conservative Christians dig their heels in because gays are bad and they’re going to Hell? Will they fall back on the possibly spurious historical argument that the last time homosexuality became as accepted as it is today was the late Western Roman Empire after which the barbarians promptly ended that experiment with swords?

I read the fall of Rome as a general malaise of people not caring about defending themselves. I consider the gay issue to be secondary in this historical example. Would Caligula, Tiberius or Hadrian have been better emperors if they could have been honest about their proclivities? In the case of the first two, they were just sick people who remind me of this exchange from Shawshank Redemption – “Would it help if I explained I’m not homosexual?” “Neither are they, you have to be human first.” But, could Hadrian, the last emperor to expand Roman territory, have been more effective if he didn’t have to hide his relationship with Antinoous? We have no way to know.

So here’s the deal, both sides change the words they use to find a common ground. We let those that don’t agree opt out. Everyone goes home with the half a loaf victory so that they remain engaged with the American Experiment. Life goes on. Or is this just too rational for a country that wants to fight about the inconsequential?

An Open Letter to Sir Ian McKellan

© 2009 G.N. Jacobs

Dear Sir Ian:

First, I should apologize for being too cheap to pay IMDBpro.com or Whorepresents.com their blood from turnips fees to find your representation. This message really should have come in the mail or to a private email address that can be forwarded. Regardless, please take this as my polite request for you to either cease and desist or change the nature of your Leviticus 18:22 protest concerning hotel Bibles. As I am a Christian who takes matters of faith seriously, I have no other teeth here than a polite request written in, I hope, inescapable logic and devastating wit.

I appreciate that to a gay man it must hurt that the instruction book for the dominant spirituality in the English-speaking world has words that baldly put, don’t like homosexuals. I also take the fact that you only tear out the offending page out of the hotel Bible as a sign of room to negotiate. Clearly, you approve of most of the rest of the Scripture in some fashion.

I’m asking for this consideration here, because of the stated purpose of the hotel Bible of giving aid and comfort to Christians and sinners alike as they travel. Yes, this is a proselytizing and recruitment technique, but it is the least offensive method of spreading the Word. We have all had experience with odious Mormons and Jehovah’s Witnesses on our doorstep who still launch into their spiel even after you tell them 1) you are already a Christian, 2) you read the Bible regularly and 3) you go to church. They do this because you didn’t join their church.

However, the hotel Bible is like the TV with the porn channels and HBO. No one makes the room occupant engage in any of these activities. The management provides Bibles and porn because they don’t get to judge their guests.

I would submit to you that while the Bible is subject to interpretation explaining why Mormons and Witnesses show up at our door, the act of ripping out pages exceeds the concept of personal interpretation and becomes editing. The Bible doesn’t need anymore editing, as it is a 1,700-year-old document in its present form and was already edited to death at Nicea. People just need to read the thing and decide for themselves what they like.

You don’t like Leviticus 18:22. You are a gay man and no human being whose behavior quirks are no more offensive than opting out of “Be fruitful and multiply” should ever be called an abomination. But, the scribes that wrote Leviticus and the rest of the Torah did in fact call homosexuality an abomination. It is up to every person reading the Bible outside of this historical context to decide what God means now.

But, when you rip out the page from a public resource like a hotel Bible, you affect the ability of the guest using the room after you to interpret Scripture fairly. I believe that people should have all the facts, when deciding whether God and the Bible offer any help. Plenty of people reject Scripture after reading it. But, if bits are cut out, by various people making protests or mischief are any such decisions, Pro or Con, valid? I submit they are not.

I will put it in terms you’ll understand. In my initial anger at hearing about your protest, I wanted to fly to England, break into your house and tear out all the good bits from your Shakespeare collection. Can you imagine Richard 3^rd without the Winter of Discontent or Hamlet without asking What Powers are These? Would you agree to do Henry 5^th without St. Crispin’s Day? And how is that Julius Caesar minus Friends, Romans, Countrymen coming along?

Of course, after a few breaths, I don’t do such stupid things that only make disputes worse. I also enjoy Shakespeare as part of the same bloody and bloody good tradition that includes the Bible, so taking this out on your books would be like killing my own dog. Such things are just not done, ducky. And let’s be clear, I can’t afford the plane ticket. But, surely as one of the finer actors in the world, you must understand the power of words, even the ones we don’t like.

I realize that I’m asking the near equivalent to telling a Jew to relax upon finding a copy of Mein Kampf in the hotel night table. But, unlike Hitler’s monument to hate wrapped up in rambling and verbose writing, the Bible helps more than it hurts. You obviously agree here, you only tear out the one page.

We keep Mein Kampf and the even more ludicrous Protocols of the Elders of Zion in print because we do not legislate thought. We let everyone with a library card read and think for themselves. But do you really want to tell the sinner using the room after you that it’s not OK to know that in the original context 4,000 years ago Judeo-Christian tradition really had a problem with gays? Or have you considered the other parts of Leviticus that you are tossing with the offending Scripture that are on the same piece of paper due to the double-sided printing of most Bibles?

Leviticus 18:20, two verses earlier says, “Moreover thou shall not lie carnally with thy neighbor’s wife, to defile yourself with her.” What with all the times a husband came home with a shotgun to take care of business, I’d think even you’d agree that proscriptions against adultery bear repeated instruction. Depending on the printing, Leviticus 19 is either on the same page or the overleaf, in most Bibles. Some of the stuff here restates the Ten Commandments and puts in more good rules. Some highlights:

Leviticus 19:14 – “Thou shall not curse the deaf, nor put a stumbling block before the blind, but shall fear thy God: I am the Lord.”

Leviticus 19:29 – “Do not prostitute thy daughter to cause her to be a whore; lest the land fall to whoredom and the land become full of wickedness.”

Your protest deprives the next reader of these more commonly agreed upon moral rules, because the hotel never makes replacing Bibles a priority. I’m asking you to either stop ripping up Bibles or to pay for the ones that you do tear up. Otherwise, it is like tearing pages out of the phone book at the payphone, damaging a public resource.

Sincerely,

G.N. Jacobs

Wonder Woman: Bondage Slut?

© 2009 G.N. Jacobs

The biggest golden Easter egg in my comic book experience had to be learning that Charles Moulton, creator of Wonder Woman, and William Moulton Marsden, inventor of the polygraph, were one and the same man. A quick skim of Golden Age covers shows an almost fetishist approach to the character, or as a friend put it, “if I had a dollar for every time there was a cover or interior art of Wonder Woman being tied up with her own lasso, I could clean up my student loans.”

Marsden, writing under the pseudonym Charles Moulton, always claimed in interviews that Wonder Woman exists as a counterpoint to the roided up male superheroes that are still with us. Certainly, there is some truth to this as Wonder Woman has always talked and shamed most of her bad guys into seeing the error of her ways while Superman and Batman posed with ripped abs under spandex and directly applied force to most problems. But, Wonder Woman as a symbol of the best aspects of feminine power only goes so far and the girl did start out as a bondage slut.

Wonder Woman’s primary weapon is a golden lasso, a compulsion device to which she is not immune alternately called the Lasso of Truth or the Lasso of Submission. Bad guys tell the truth about their misdeeds and promise to surrender to the authorities when tied up in the lasso. But, in the Golden Age Wonder Woman spends almost as much time in the clutches of her rope as do the bad guys. Gee, how kinky is that?

Obviously, the lie detector man will give Diana, aka Wonder Woman, a truth-telling device. But, considering how much time she spends in her own tool while wearing a star-spangled one-piece bathing suit, was Dr. Marsden working out personal fetish issues or collective ones? We can argue both points.

On the personal side, Marsden wrote the comic book for a couple years before leaving to maintain his academic career. True, he worked with editor who guessed that boys would flip for the imagery, but Marsden could have quit on principle and decried the smut that went out under his name. This did not happen, so the good doctor, at the very least, imagined tying women up as part of the sex ritual.

But, there is a really good for the argument for the fetish being collective in nature. That same editor and the artist involved knew that young boys seeking power imagine tying up the girl next door as they go through puberty. These boys were the primary market for Golden Age comic books and illicit sex sells. Even I admit to bondage fantasies, though I like to take turns in mine so that everybody has fun. Psychologically, I always figured the reason to tie a girl up is to get her to sit still and listen while the boy explains how much he’s in love. Adding the Lasso of Truth element really gets the party going, like Truth or Dare.

When you factor in Wonder Woman’s back-story rooted in mythology, the original design of the character couldn’t be anything but a bondage slut. Wonder Woman is the daughter of Hippolyta, Queen of the Amazons. The Amazons had been moved to a special island away from men by the Greek gods in return for loyal service. The ladies were granted immortality while on the island to make up for not having men around to make new Amazons.

Hippolyta sculpts a statue of a little girl and asks the gods to make the daughter real. The goddesses Hera, Athena and Artemis (also called Diana) grant the request. Eventually, the grown up girl, Diana, is ordered by the Amazons to serve America against the Nazis, because the Amazons prefer to help slightly better men (Americans) versus absolutely evil pigs (Nazis). Enemy of my enemy is my friend is a truism everywhere.

Now, creating Diana as the Amazonian Crown Princess naturally leads to all manner of bondage metaphors and archetypes once we apply the concept of like mother, like daughter. Hippolyta, before gaining the lease to Paradise Island, aka Themiscyra, was no stranger to a man’s need to control his women. She married Theseus of Athens after he tied her up and stole her from the Amazons’ village.

The myth as written says Hippolyta accepted being Queen of Athens and then reverted after Theseus died. We like to believe that she loved her husband a little, even if he needed rope and the Stockholm syndrome to get his point across. The comic books added that the Amazon Queen had a – what the Hell was I thinking? – epiphany after leaving Athens motivating the move to the island.

Theseus creates a lot of fascination as a mythological hero when talking about bondage. The Amazon Queen was the graduation exercise for a serial woman stealer. The Hero of the Labyrinth who taught us to bring along string kidnapped Helen of Troy long before she earned her title. Helen’s brothers, the Gemini Twins, Castor and Pollux, rescued her and relented from killing Theseus because he was somewhere else on other business. So, the King of Athens succeeds the second time around.

Of course, when Diana hits the big bad city the normal course of her arc will be to face the same decisions as her mother, whether to make a partial submission to a man or to follow her namesake, the goddess Diana, as a chaste man-hater. Marsden tapped into these issues with every instance where Wonder Woman runs afoul of the lasso. Little boys and maybe even a few girls ate it up with a spoon, explaining the character’s survival.

Some aspects of Wonder Woman’s inability to control the Lasso of Truth have nothing to do with the overtly sexual and fetishistic metaphor of the Golden Age character. If we think of the lasso as analogous to King Arthur’s Excalibur then running afoul of your own weapon is a common rite of passage for a hero. Arthur becomes arrogant and, depending on the story version, either breaks the unbreakable Sword of Justice or suffers the indignity of seeing it delivered to his enemies.

This story motif is always about teaching the hero to respect the sword, book, lasso or superpowers as adjuncts to the brain that is the true weapon. Arthur repents and gets the sword back. Wonder Woman doesn’t stay in the lasso for long and triumphs. The Charmed witches pull together to cast spells without the Book of Shadows when a demon steals it. And Buffy Summers tricked a vampire into drinking Holy Water when her Watcher shot her up with muscle relaxants as a rite of passage. And to give these fears a real world edge, ask a police officer if he or she dreads being shot with his or her own gun.

However, leaving aside the Freudian concepts of phallic symbols when we discuss Arthur losing or breaking his sword, the frequency with which Wonder Woman ceded control of the Lasso of Truth to her enemies leads us back to the bondage metaphor. Arthur lost the sword only once. The Halliwell Sisters lost the Book of Shadows only 2 to 3 times in eight seasons and it was always an event. And Buffy and muscle relaxants were never in the same space ever again.

Golden Age Wonder Woman wasn’t just Dr. Marsden’s doing. He left to pursue his research once it became clear that the books’ editors wanted other voices writing Wonder Woman. The inheritors all kept up the Golden Age metaphors as much as possible because it sold. But, the modern Wonder Woman doesn’t lose the lasso nearly as much as she did during the Golden Age, what happened? Well, for starters, Dr. Frederic Wurtham went on a comic book witch-hunt in 1953 that scared the comics industry into self-censorship that also sharply ended the Golden Age.

The writers and artists had to come up with other ways to explore issues of femininity and masculinity without resorting to such overt themes. But, something else happened between the end of the Golden Age and the present form of the character that was equally as powerful, but talked about less than the comic book hearings. Women earned more equality and more women began openly writing comic books. While the character’s physique became far more like a Barbie doll, an impossibility to maintain when you figure real women eat, the character matured into a real woman less likely to respond to the stark issues of control presented by the bondage metaphor.

Just because Wonder Woman doesn’t overtly do bondage anymore doesn’t mean the fantasies, metaphors and archetypes aren’t still lurking under the surface. Theseus went after Hippolyta because she was the tough mountain to climb. Petruchio takes on Kate because he loves a challenge. And I’m still looking for the woman with whom we can take turns with the Lasso of Truth or even the silk ties attached to the headboard so everyone gets their fun. Supposedly these metaphors are supposed to help us understand ourselves and those we care about, so we stop worrying about who bit the Apple or drank the Kool-Aid first. All well and good, but Golden Age Wonder Woman is one busy bondage slut.

Corporate Churches

© 2009 G.N. Jacobs

When I get to talking about religion, I have always needed to qualify things and say that while I have faith in Christ my tolerance of church and other expressions of the religion of Christ is so low that I expect the excommunication visit from church elders any day now. The Catholic Church upped the ante on my revulsion of all things Church when they announced a new plan to make it easier for pissed off Anglicans to rejoin the “Holy Mother Church.” Actually, I’m laughing to cover up my deep resentment of the whole thing.

Anglicans and Catholics split in 1534 when Henry VIII of England didn’t get his way on a divorce decree from the Pope concerning Catherine of Aragon. The Pope played politics because the woman was connected to kingdoms more likely to march on Rome with an army to file the complaint. But, in Henry’s defense, there were no sons to establish a clear dynasty in England after the cousins from York and Lancaster had recently spent close to twenty years killing each other to be king.

Over time minor splits in dogma developed. Anglican priests can marry while Catholic priests can’t. But, they read the same Bible and share the same essays interpreting the Bible. But, both sides have spent almost 500 years playing up their differences as a way of solidifying the base of worshipers that leave 10-percent in the collection plate. The collection plate is everything to these large churches.

The Catholic plan allows for whole sections of the Anglican Communion to break off and rejoin Rome, while keeping their unique differences. The Anglicans have split down the middle over gay and women priests and the Catholics are practically salivating at the prospect of more butts in seats. Catholics have branded themselves as the conservative church, while the Anglicans’ brand is in transition. Speaking as an entrepreneur, it’s no surprise which brand is winning.

But, why do we have to talk about the various subsets of Christianity with the same language that we talk about corporations? When did spirituality become as debased as the dogfight between Coke and Pepsi? Well, judging from the 200 years or so of warfare that resulted, one answer is ten seconds after the ink dried on the parchment nailed to the door in Wittenberg. But, there was a quiet period where Catholics and Protestants pretended to like each other and discussed things calmly; now they’re scrapping for butts in seats with no idea if souls are being saved at all.

Catholics have always made it easy for other Christians to come home. They accept all baptisms from any mainstream denomination as having been given by a priest and skip down to the list of other things required for conversion. A person that wants to be Catholic walks into a church discusses things with the priest, gets baptized (if it hasn’t already been accomplished), takes communion and goes on with life.

This new plan is not about individual converts but whole congregations that will get to keep their married priests and other minor liturgical differences in a special ghetto for former Anglicans. However, to keep control of the Catholic Church, no married priest in any of these subsets will ever rise to bishop, archbishop or cardinal. We can’t have priests with wives upsetting the two thousand year old status quo now can we? Who would change churches just to be in a ghetto?

Has anyone asked what would Jesus do? How did a spiritual doctrine of a man also believed to be a facet of God walked around for three years, told us to be nice to each other and worship him, was nailed up to a tree and then cheated death three days later become something for only us and not them? How did it become OK to steal Christians from other churches to maintain the endowment fund? Will I have to fill out spiritual surveys so the managers of whatever church I happen to be in can improve service?

I imagine Jesus getting his moneychanger stick ready for such bald-faced commercial warfare masquerading as spiritual choices. Pious statements that “we are not fishing in the Anglicans’ pond” seem like lies. And all this because, the Anglican Communion can’t decide if it is a conservative church that believes that gays and women priests are assaults upon civilization or they should lighten up because Jesus loved everyone.

So what do I think about the issues splitting the Anglicans? Most of the doctrine in the New Testament about gays and the role of women that has divided the collective Body of Christ actually came from Paul, not Jesus. Mary Magdalene is thought in some interpretations to be an unacknowledged disciple and may well have been an excellent shepherdess to her flock, but for the opinions of Paul that relegated women to support staff. Jesus just forgave everyone.

One progressive argument says that the Bible is intended to be metaphorically true and that many writings are to be interpreted through the lens of the reader. Pork has been on the menu for centuries. Jesus never actually said pork is OK to eat and was never depicted in the Bible as eating a ham sandwich, but I suppose “I come not in rejection of the law, but rather in fulfillment of the law” goes a long way to create all kinds of interpretation loopholes.

Jesus spoke in the metaphor of Jews, while trying to expand his reach to Gentiles, meaning that there is a wide range of except in this case where the social metaphor has changed built into the system. Do you think that after a few thousand years of primitive society where men and women were fated by biology to different roles that we can lighten up now that everyone, regardless of gender, sits near an electronic box and processes information to let a woman lead prayers and conduct weddings? Hell, weddings conducted by traditional only men can do this job pastors still have the same fifty-fifty chance of a horrific crash and burn. The persistence of many pagan goddess traditions is fueled by the conservatives’ insistence that this is the way it has always been and will remain so until the end of time.

I have also come to believe that monogamous gays can and should be included in the Body of Christ. It is only fear and ignorance that equates gays with other more horrible sexual deviance. While I have a gut level dislike of homosexuality in the context of my own life, we all do fine with each other when our clothes are on. So why can’t a gay be a pastor or priest? Whose prayers are better? Who has the direct line to God?

Maybe we Christians need a model more like that of a military chaplain who are trained to stand in for the many disparate faiths, so we can open up the discussion. As it is, we live with corporate churches that care more about the money in the plate creating disgusting brand wars instead of helping people. We did it to ourselves.

Torching Books, Saving Books

© 2009 G.N. Jacobs

Ray Bradbury recently asked readers of the comic book adaptation of his Fahrenheit 451 to think about the one book in their life that they would memorize as a member of The Book People to preserve against the next Dark Age. Instantly, several books popped into my head, the list starting with Alexandre Dumas’ Three Musketeers and including Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings and Hobbit, The Bible, Koran, Bullfinch’s Mythology and a long list of splashy thrillers and science fiction potboilers. Suddenly, I realized that my list was too long for Bradbury’s question and I would be paralyzed into indecision. And then I had a contrary thought do we really need to preserve everything?

Don’t get me wrong, if the Louvre burns down and the Mona Lisa gets zapped I will cry for society that has invested so much mystery into a simple painting of a woman. I would personally cry more for the Titian presently displayed along the right wall of the Mona Lisa room halfway between the giant Wedding at Cana and the Mona Lisa. Great art should be preserved as much as possible, because it reminds us of our collected history and prevents us from excessively reinventing the wheel.

But, I will trade the last copy of The Three Musketeers to save a human being from a burning building. I might even do this for that great dog that only seems to exist in the movies, or at least my dog that under the rose-colored glasses of unconditional love seems like that perfect dog. Now we know what my priorities are, in order: life, health and freedom.

Why am I less stringent than other writers and artists about preserving the works of the past? I think it is because sometimes people really do need to reinvent the wheel as a way of making the human condition seem fresh and new again. Isaac Asimov built a blasé attitude into the Galactic Empire before the Foundations replaced them when the collapse came. People thought they knew all there was to know about everything, because there was a book in the Imperial Library on Earth. So they stopped doing archeological digs and the other types of fieldwork upon which much of our knowledge is based.

I describe an oxymoronic situation where we need to preserve our past, but not do it so stringently that we strangle the need to go, see and do for ourselves. Perhaps, the best society is the one that takes preservation seriously, but accepts leakage. Using my example of the Mona Lisa, we could survive if we only lost that smile, but kept everything else in the Louvre. We could not survive if we burned every book or painting on the planet at the same time.

However, I write fifty years after Bradbury wrote to exorcise his fears of censorship and resulting Dark Ages. I live in a world with more technology that can be hidden so that books may surface once more when people need them again. I didn’t see a single flash drive in either the book or movie for Fahrenheit 451. There is nothing stopping me from storing the books I care about in a geo-cache with an encrypted GPS location that only the initiated with passwords can access.

These are all tricks to get around the highly unlikely prospect that I will actually memorize a whole book. I have read the Bible cover to cover twice and Tolkien maybe six times in my life and I’m still only able to quote the high points. When I talk about these books to other people, I paraphrase.

What I’m getting at here is that the human oral tradition is still alive and well. We read a book, talk about it and the book changes slightly in the telling. The existence of the printed book corrects the telling because the person we talked to can look it up themselves. Without the book the story survives, but changes with the telling. That means some version of The Three Musketeers will survive the Dark Age, because people will always make up characters like D’Artagnan who need the guidance of their friends as they hit the big city for the first time. We will always have some version of the Odyssey where a man wants to go home and is beset by the angry gods. We would reinvent the concept of a God that makes itself human to share our pain and lead us back to God.

When we strike an appropriate middle ground on preservation, we get art that reflects back on the classics. When we don’t we reinvent the classics, because the psychological and spiritual archetypes that make up our soul do not change. Which is better for society? I suppose that depends on the context in which these changes happen. I don’t have an answer here.

Sometimes, losing something valuable acts as a challenge to artists of present and future generations. Paintings, books and sculptures periodically get lost all the time. Caravaggios are stolen and never surface for more than forty years. The Nazis have their own wing of Hell picked out for them for their crimes against history. The Taliban will join them for blowing up the Buddhas. We make great strides at scouring the hidden places of the Earth for that which may only be misplaced instead of lost. But, when something goes truly lost, today’s artists need to step up their game and replace the lost with something better.

But, I don’t want to write a paraphrased version of any of the books I like if I don’t have to. I have enough trouble getting my stories with vampires and reporters in them without having to take on recreating The Three Musketeers. Take art seriously, but not so seriously that we forget to live.

Polanski: Scapegoat or Scumbag?

© 2009 G.N. Jacobs

Swiss authorities arrested director Roman Polanski on his decades old rape and unlawful flight warrant. He’d been a fugitive so long that I’d come to view Polanski’s case as maybe one of the Seals of Revelations that didn’t make the editorial cut. I had thought the same about master terrorist Ivan Illych Sanchez, aka Carlos, and his fugitive status until the Sudan ratted him out to France in 1994. If Seals are breaking cash in the life insurance before things go broke.

All hyperbole about how weird it is to live in a world where Roman Polanski has been pinched, this case exposes mixed feelings. Is he a scumbag or scapegoat? Try both with plenty to go around for everyone and the media eats it up with a spoon.

On the scumbag side, Polanski raped a 13-year-old girl in 1977. He got the girl loaded and shagged her. He later pled guilty to these facts. Just because I liked Chinatown, Knife in the Water and Ninth Gate and still want to see Rosemary’s Baby, doesn’t mean that he didn’t make the girl cry and took away key parts of her childhood.

Polanski ran to France secure in the knowledge that France doesn’t extradite French citizens. He claims a now-dead California judge reneged on the plea bargain that would have saved most of his career. I even believe this part, because I’m not thrilled how the cops and prosecutors slouch every further into the Night of Long Knives. But, the scumbag still ran.

Presently, the media has subtly played Polanski up as a scapegoat. They cite his surviving the Holocaust in general and the Krakow ghetto specifically. If I read another article that discusses Polanski losing his mother to the Auschwitz gas chambers in tones that suggest that it’s OK to rape little girls, I really will scream. And for all the coverage that brings up the Manson killings, I figure Sharon Tate and her unborn son wait for Daddy in the Afterlife to bust on him for committing the kind of crime that is most injurious to a proper family life. So, it’s OK to rape girls because of a lifetime of grief? Did I miss a memo?

Really, I have far more venom for the enablers who gave Polanski his career in absentia. How many American studios paid to put stars and scripts on the plane, because it would be a Polanski Movie? I do have to shut up eventually because I have watched and enjoyed at least one Post-Exile film. But, France loves their artists.

A truly responsible studio would pressure Polanski to come back to California take the 3-5 years due a first offender rapist and then move on with his life and his next movie. If he’d done that in 1979, this mess would be over and we wouldn’t have to hear him whine about his unfinished latest movie. Oh well, responsible studio is an oxymoron.

He shoots everywhere in Europe. He makes most of his movies in English despite shooting in France; I would’ve thought that the French would reject him for not fully supporting their film industry. But, they love their artists. I just want to ask the French how much they would tolerate from the artists they admire. Would they defend the fictional Hannibal Lecter if he were a skilled painter and French citizen as well as an artist of Death?

If France wants to have a no extradition policy, they need to consider a law that makes French citizens liable in French courts for crimes committed anywhere in the world. I think Polanski’s victim would have appreciated France putting Polanski in jail for the same 3-5 years he would’ve gotten in California and walked away with closure. As it is, letting Polanski live comfortably is a major disrespect upon America that causes our drunk and stupid to propose burning down the Louvre and the Eiffel Tower. America is already making laws of this nature; those Blackwater freaks will do time in American prisons.

That being said, the scumbag is also a scapegoat and pawn in the ongoing international chess match. Polanski has a second house in Gstaad and goes back and forth all the time. His last complete movie was shot in Germany. Despite the European Union’s easing of borders, this is still a lot of passport checks Polanski has to pass and a lot of chances to make an arrest. How is it no one made the arrest until now?

Apparently, while the actual warrant has been current and active since 1978, the State Department has to request that an arrest be made and these requests are perishable. So Polanski probably had a lot of years where the U.S. put the paperwork on the back burner and didn’t file. The Swiss authorities have spent quite a bit of verbiage trying to convince people that this was the first time a valid arrest order and solid information about the suspect’s whereabouts were in the same place at the same time. The Swiss dig a deeper hole with each such assertion, not even their people buy it. Why now?

Recently, the IRS bent Swiss bank UBS over a rail and forced out a list of American clients with numbered accounts at the home office. This proved the first time ever that a foreign government has cracked Switzerland’s famous bank secrecy laws. Swiss citizens see the closeness of the Polanski arrest and the UBS debacle as one more example of a cowardly Swiss government giving too much to the Americans. They have the wrong perception.

The Swiss didn’t execute the Polanski warrant as yet another way to accommodate Americans. They threw the director under the bus as an offering to buy Swiss banks time to delay and obfuscate any further action on the part of the IRS. So far, the UBS case isn’t considered a precedent under Swiss law, because someone found a loophole that fit the specific circumstances. The second bank to cave will make the precedent and the Swiss are running scared.

I imagine many furious phone calls to America pleading to put a muzzle on the IRS that cite their cooperation on the Polanski matter. While I trust the Obama Administration may have made these hypothetical deals in good faith, we are talking about the IRS here. I can’t picture the one entity in the world dedicated to legal extortion giving up the money it smells in Swiss banks. We’ll see how long the IRS stays muzzled under this quid pro quo.

All this fuss for a felony few truly care about these days. Not even Polanski’s victim really wanted to see him hounded to the ends of the Earth for his crime. She wants very much to stop being Polanski’s victim still waiting for justice and just have the noise end. She has even taken the half-loaf victory of an undisclosed financial settlement with the director. Compared to O.J. Simpson, this is responsible behavior.

In the end, for California the case is about proving that warrants mean something, especially when the charges are serious like rape, murder and robbery. On these terms, I welcome the arrest. But, there is no escaping the political stench surrounding this case.

Rituals of Reconciliation

© 2009 G.N. Jacobs

We live in a strange era, the Time of the Beer in the Rose Garden. Two months after President Obama defused the racism mess from Henry Louis Gate’s arrest in his own house for nothing by serving beer to both sides, I’m starting to think that maybe the President should make such things a permanent feature of his time in office. Franklin Delano Roosevelt had his fireside chats, but President Obama hasn’t yet realized that he has blundered into a defining signature of his Presidency.

America needs reconciliation almost as much South Africa needed reconciliation; the disgraceful attacks on Obama that use the healthcare debate as a paper thin cover for the lingering racism in our society show that. I foresee a new SAT analogy: President Obama is to American Politics as Jackie Robinson is to baseball. Lord knows people who don’t want to change the status quo kicked both men around.

So far, the Obama Administration has lost some of their brilliance that got them elected in treating the Beer in the Garden as a one-time event. Sure, the black professor listened to the white cop when he explained that belligerence towards authority only leads to arrests. The white cop listened to the black professor repeat the mostly true litany of complaints about white racist cops treating black citizens like crap. They walked away feeling better for having talked about it if not actually solving things.

A real problem in our society is a feeling of entitlement that sometimes makes other problems like racism harder to handle. Society divides between those that work for what they have and those that expect things to come easy. At the moment, those two camps are heavily intertwined with the race situation. Many who want to earn their lives have been white and many who expect that racist white America will open up its largess and make things right for people who have not made themselves ready for those gifts have been black. The war of words has been nasty and we will need a meet in the middle reconciliation.

Reconciliation usual requires a ritual or ceremony something that young America is only just now learning from older societies. America practically has ADHD and so we’re not going to sit through the Japanese Tea Ceremony where the participants turn the cup three times, bow and basically don’t drink tea until the last minute. So it seems that Beer in the Garden is an acceptable substitute, but other possibilities include the barbecue tailgate party, meeting for coffee, and/or a football halftime show. I will put my foot down against going off into the woods and doing silly Iron John stuff, we need some dignity.

With the thinly disguised racism and vitriol directed at President Obama from many quarters, let’s see if we can work up a list of candidates for Beer in the Garden. We have Rep. Joe Wilson (R-SC) and President Jimmy Carter. Wilson showed his hand blurting you lie in congressional session. President Carter did us all a great service when as a former President and Nobel Laureate with nothing to prove and even less to lose laid it all on the line saying that much of the strife surrounding President Obama is racially motivated. Trust me, an 80-something white southern man knows racism when he sees it.

I was disappointed by the Obama Administrations official response to President Carter’s statement. They tried to distance themselves from Carter because the White House has to deal with these yahoos as professionals. However, this was not a situation that needed such distancing. The whole planet knows that there is a racist component to the vocal opposition and saying otherwise would be like Obama completely distancing himself from Reverend Wright, which never happened.

My statement would have been: “President Carter speaks based on the perspectives and experiences of his life. We will leave his statements in the hands of the marketplace of ideas and as such, the President and Administration have no further comment.”

The point is that President Obama is glad to have President Carter speak the Truth from Olympus that he can’t say himself. But, instead of a distancing statement a no comment encourages President Carter to keep saying the truth.

President Carter and Rep. Wilson should make for a great Beer in the Garden Two. Wilson won’t change his messed up views on healthcare, but maybe he’ll like the attention having beer with two presidents and remember his public civility. But, they’ll probably just talk about the Falcons, but that’s good too.

People have needed rituals for peace since the first time cavemen passed the funny loco weed around the fire. So whether, it is wine and cheese to mollify the French, coffee or tea when Muslims are present or some other process by which we break bread, speak and see what can be done, we need to dust off those rituals. And President Obama needs to be the one leading the ritual, because he is our chief.

Sometimes, parties to conflicts are so wrapped up in their hate of the other side and they will not accept an invitation to break bread, but the invitation needs to be made nonetheless. Part of the racism against Obama is expressed in nutbar theories like “Obama the Closet Muslim” or “Obama Born in Kenya.” The purveyors of these asinine theories are so wrapped up in their hate of America’s first black President that they will not come to dinner. So you make the invitation and move on, showing to the rest of America how completely unreasonable they are.

Certainly, Lou Dobbs of CNN will be great for Beer Garden Three. He’ll back off some once he talks with Obama. I just don’t know yet who should be the third party present. Sure, these events will get lots of coverage, which is the point. The President would be working on the problems of getting two people in the same room together to talk and create positive things for the White House Press Corps to report. A surprising case where being good people is good politics.

So why can’t this Administration be the Beer Garden Presidency? It’s a brilliant way to reengage the President with the public who sees him slowly become just another politician.

The Nature of Orders

© 2009 G.N. Jacobs

I wasn’t going to say anything further about the Obama Foreign Birth Conspiracy. My previous blog Obama the American covers the high points: several fruitless investigations and the absence of credible evidence, including the money trail to make the forgery possible. And then a federal judge threw out a military conscientious objector case grounded in the “birther” argument and I had to comment on subsidiary legal issues that mean that the plaintiff goes to Iraq regardless of President Obama’s status. The judge missed these arguments in his opinion, but didn’t need them.

U.S. District Court Judge Clay Land dismissed Army Captain Connie Rhodes’ petition to avoid deployment to Iraq citing an argument common to those of us that think the birthers are FOS: lack of evidence. The judge also reminded everyone that the plaintiff must prove the case, not the defendant. I loved Judge Land’s sound bite commenting on the evidence, “unlike in Alice in Wonderland saying something is so doesn’t make it so.”

However, I suspect that Judge Land is a talented civilian jurist who perhaps hadn’t looked at military law as laid out in the Uniform Code of Military Justice. The birthers argue that a deployment order to Iraq is unlawful because the President giving the order is a usurper. The military concept of lawful orders could be used to keep Captain Rhodes in service even if President Obama were born in Kenya.

Orly Taitz, the attorney of record and a leader of the Birther Movement, should never have filed a conscientious objector case based on this argument. He deserved the scorn, derision and slight regard received from Judge Land, because while the President is the ultimate authority in the military there are ways to parse out the concept of lawful orders to say that President Obama never ordered Captain Rhodes to Iraq and is improperly named as a party to the lawsuit. Not all lawful orders are primarily derived from the President.

The enlistment oath includes this phrase, “that I will obey the orders of the President of the United States and all officers appointed above me, according to regulations and the Uniform Code of Military Justice.” Officers have a different oath upon commissioning that only speaks to defending the Constitution and gives more leeway to refuse unlawful orders. But, all officers must enlist before they are commissioned and it would be interesting to hear from military law experts if the commissioning oath supersedes the enlistment oath or if they are both in effect at the same time. In actual practice, an officer must obey all lawful orders from all superiors in the chain of command just like the enlisted soldier, if the order supports the Constitution.

So, how is an order lawful if it isn’t derived from the President? This is where we apply the concept of Standard Operating Procedure. Old-time grunts used to joke that the Army is simple for privates: if it moves salute it and if it doesn’t move paint it. Another common standing order was, “if you drop your rifle you have less than two seconds to follow the weapon to the ground to assume the push up position.”

Does any President actually give such orders or are they the product of lieutenants and sergeants showing initiative? Soldiers who disobey base cleanliness and weapon safety orders are routinely sent to non-judicial punishment hearings. No joker trying to argue that the President’s suspect native son status allows him to violate standing orders would last long, because procedure exists for far longer than any single administration. You could say that an officer’s authority to enforce military law goes back to the enactment of the UCMJ during the Truman Administration or all the way back to the 18^th Century with the drafting of the original Articles of War and that no subsequent President actually gives routine orders.

If you want an example where an officer changed orders in the field during combat, I present for review General George S. Patton, Jr. When that egomaniac with the ivory-handled pistols landed in Sicily in July 1943, he promptly broke the agreed upon Allied plan that said Patton’s army was intended only to support the flank of Montgomery’s British army. Patton turned west for Palermo and then headed east for Messina along the island’s north coast. History recorded a furious road race that has been credited with shortening the campaign and the war, because more Germans were cut off from retreating to the Italian mainland.

The Allied command authority derived from the political leadership of all Allied nations, because of a decision to unify command into a single expeditionary force under General Eisenhower. So when Patton junked the Sicily plan, he technically violated orders from President Roosevelt and Prime Minister Churchill. General Patton wasn’t disciplined for violating orders.

The modifications worked and no officer has ever been prosecuted for changing orders in order to defeat more bad guys. Even if Patton’s gamble failed, he still gets off if he can legitimately claim “information not available to higher authority.” However, to all of the people below Patton in his food chain the General’s orders are as legally binding as the original plan approved by President Roosevelt and Prime Minister Churchill.

Captain Rhodes’ deployment orders didn’t come from the White House. They came from the Army Personnel Office in the Pentagon that is tasked with filling medical slots in Iraq, a routine matter that is never sent to the Oval Office. If Obama is ineligible to serve does that automatically make the war in Iraq illegal because an illegal commander is giving the orders? No, it doesn’t. True, the President couldn’t invade Mars, a new operation, but what about acting as caretaker for messes created by predecessors who did clearly meet the minimum qualifications for service?

President Bush started the Iraq war with Congressional authorization and the change of administrations didn’t force a reauthorization. The officer’s oath is only required once in a career assuming continuous service. Enlisted personnel give their oath only upon reenlistment, but it otherwise remains permanently in force. The Army didn’t have to repeat their oaths when President Truman replaced President Roosevelt during a war. If Truman had Obama’s problem, he couldn’t drop the bomb, but the orders to invade Japan had already been given.

Neither President Obama nor Congress reauthorized the Iraq mission in January, because the basic operational orders had been laid down during the previous administration in a document that included an open-ended commitment. So if President Obama doesn’t modify the Iraq mission in any way, you can argue that Iraq becomes Standard Operating Procedure humming in the background until someone decides we have what we want, we declare peace and go home. Technically, President Obama declaring peace would also be an illegal order, but who would actually disobey that order?

Captain Rhodes took money for medical school and has been tapped to be part of a caretaker operation in Iraq, so she is obligated to serve because the standing orders come from President Bush not President Obama. Rhodes had more of a case if she were going to Afghanistan, because the White House did order an expansion of that war. However, a Congress that unanimously believes President Obama’s native son status has given its approval with funding for the expansion. But, another argument says that an open-ended commitment means that there is much leeway for movement orders that the Oval Office will never see.

Lastly, Captain Rhodes’ argument relies on a vacuum in leadership, something specifically forbidden by the 25^th Amendment. Vice President Biden would be President because, regardless of Obama’s status, Mr. Biden represents the political party that won the election and everyone is pretty sure that he’s from Delaware. How would a President Biden deal with Iraq? If we apply “silence implies consent” then Biden would continue Obama’s strategy, because the Vice President has either remained silent or actively promoted war policies. A Biden Administration making the same decisions as an Obama Administration renders the court case moot, another way courts are able to shed cases this frivolous.

Of course, the judge can also just evaluate the evidence of the primary claim and throw the case out of court, because all the investigations in the world always seem to come up with a valid Hawaii birth certificate. My point: the spineless Captain, who really doesn’t want to have to pay for the tuition help we paid for with bodily risk in Iraq, would probably have to go even if President Obama really were born in Kenya. So, can we get these ultra-conservative, possibly racist birther people to drop this non-starter issue and rejoin the rest of the conservative whackos in spreading fear and lies about healthcare reform? At least, Judge Land strongly suggested that all defendants, including President Obama, should sue for court costs from the plaintiff. I want tickets for that trial.