"Tell old Pharoah, Let my people go."--American Negro Spiritual

While I'm sure somewhere right now there's a religo-fascist fundamentalist Christian preacher attempting to cast this latest group of nominees for the stupid white man hall of fame as some type of neo-Babylonian Captivity, let me just say this in reference to those missionaries cum child smugglers: You got no less than you deserved.

For those living under a rock for the past week or so, a story out of Port-au-Prince last week came to the fore in which it was disclosed that ten white American missionaries had been jailed in Haiti for attempting to cross the border into the Dominican Republic with a busload of 33 Haitian children, all victims of the recent earthquake. Initially, major news outlets north of the Caribbean described the children as 'orphans,' but as more tidbits filter up from the tragedy stricken nation, it is becoming clear that a number of them were anything but. Truth be told, at least 22 of the 33 had living parents, but the Christian confidence men dangled the carrot of 'better life elsewhere' in front of them.

Further, this was not the first time Laura Silsby, the head Pied Piper of Hamelin in charge, and zealous henchmen attempted such actions. And, despite claims by she and her cohorts that they believed all their paperwork was in order (they actually received permission to cross the border from the DR), Dominican authorities reportedly warned them that they needed additional permission from the Haitian government. I am of the mind that Silsby knew she didn't have the proper authorization and that her subordinates probably knew it as well.

In any event, this is all strangely reminiscent of another incident I recall from my high school days some 16 years ago. Back in 1994, some insolent little son of a diplomat twit was arrested for vandalism in Singapore. Subsequently convicted and sentenced to caning, termed barbaric by a good number of my classmates at the time, the talk was that then president Bill Clinton should entreat on his behalf. In discussions with my fellow pupils, most were shocked to discover that my response amounted to the following, 'Well, if I could give the guy charged with executing the sentence one piece of advice, it'd be the same advice my baseball coach gives me every time I step in the batter's box, "Swing hard in case you hit it."' Not that I agreed then, or do now for that matter, with corporal punishment, but the little turd broke the law. If you can't do the time, don't do the crime and all that. My attitude hasn't changed all that much.

All of that being said, the core of the matter is that this is not only one further demonstration of contempt for both law and social mores which the Religious Right is possessed of, but also demonstrative of a certain culture of arrogance and hypocrisy. To find instances exemplary of the first assertion is easy; one need look no further than fundamentalist's tendency towards homicidal mania or their appearance at the funerals of service men and women with tact laden protest signs exclaiming things like 'God hates fags' or the ever popular 'Thank God for dead soldiers.'

Personally, I like the argument that Donald Faison made on the Wanda Sykes Show last Saturday night to address the latter of the above assertions. Suppose some missionaries came to the US from El Salvador and tried to smuggle a bunch of white kids across the border to a better life in Mexico. The American people would be apoplectic, and rightfully so. In fact, wars have been started for less. I couldn't agree more, and would personally add my own observation concerning the height of arrogance and assuredness in their own cultural superiority to which the religious right have now climbed. So confident in their own sanctity are these people that they've now claimed kidnapping as a divine right. My only hope is that they're left to rot in a Haitian jail cell for the next 15 to 20. Maybe that will teach them a lesson, but I doubt it.

And don't even get me started on the Jehovah's Witnesses that banged on my door to interrupt me writing this very post...

"Now go away, or I will be forced to taunt you a second time!"--Monty Python and the Holy Grail

So I was sitting around last night wondering what I was going to write today when the ingrown hair that is the MMR (measles-mumps-rubella) vaccine-autism link reared its querulous head on the nightly news. Only this time, it wasn't some New Age fuzzhead talking vast medical community conspiracy. Instead, it was a story about how The Lancet, the British medical journal which in 1998 produced the keystone study over the arch that is the argument against the MMR vaccine, had issued a retraction of said study.

To quote Surendra Kumar of Britain's General Medical Council in reference to Dr. Andrew Wakefield, who headed the study back in 1998, he was "dishonest," "irresponsible," and "contrary to the clinical interests" of children.

Through the mist and shade of long term memory came a conversation I had with an uncommonly intellectually malleable friend of mine a few years back. He had recently had a son, and at 18 months old his boy was nearing the requisite age for reception of the MMR vaccine. Apparently, however, his mother (a woman of such staggering intellectual accomplishments such as becoming a follower of Maharishi Mahesh Yogi because The Beatles told her to, as well as achieving the vertigo inducing pinnacle of medical training known as a dental hygenist's certification) insisted that the MMR caused autism. Despite my best efforts, I had neither the expertise nor the familiarity with the research to change his mind. Suffice to say the conversation ended with me saying simply, 'Well, good luck getting him into public schools.'

In the ensuing years since, I have had the good fortune to read such elucidating works as Michael Shermer's Why People Believe Wierd Things. Therein Shermer discusses a study oft cited, but never detailed, by the anti-MMR vaccine donkies in which the sagely researchers basically asked parents of autistic children when their progeny first displayed symptoms and when they received the MMR vaccine. And then, you guessed it, passed this off as a causal relationship due to the chronological proximity of the two events. It all sounded to myself and Mikey S. like a post hoc ergo propter hoc logical fallacy of the highest order, and we'd be right, and that's all without saying anything of the unscientific monkeyshines being played with the lives of innocents.

Frankly, yesterday's news had me wondering what then could possibly convince these yahoos that there was no link between the MMR vaccine and autism. I'd love to believe that the story would be the final nail in the coffin of this debate, but a casual look around will reveal the scads of stubborn lemmings willing to believe in everything from ghosts to the God the Huckster explanation for the fossil record to the lost continent of Atlantis.

Why is it so hard to believe that it's a gumbo addiction or effed up genes which caused their kids' predicaments? Probably because it would mean that on some psycho-emotional level they would have to accept that the Western medicine isn't the boogeyman these people think it is and culpability for their children's problems is alot closer to home. In other words, they'd have to blame themselves.

Oh well. Won't stop me from saying, 'Boo-yah! In your face you Birkenstock shod rubes!'

"Are you restless like me?"--Tom Gabel

As I sit, chilled and moistened by a Northern California atmosphere engorged with the dampness of a late January evening, the metronomic ticking of a cheap wall clock my only soundtrack, I become vaguely aware of something deep seeded. Quietly seething, I reflect on something buried within my Id: a certain repressed ebullition, a subsumed magma seeking a passage through the Earth's tectonic plates.

Names like Haymarket, Watts, El Mozote, Bogside, and Rosewood come and go, reminding me of a political phlacidity. They echo off the insides of this body, still aching from an anesthetic made of India pale ale and Irish wiskey imbibed some two days ago. That anesthesia, which at the time seemed, and in ways still does seem, so necessary to annihilate this sense of economic and political eunuchism stewed in a pot under which burns the fire of a past that I am far less than comfortable with.

Hence, an effluence of verbage which I flush out a pipe, leading only to an endless cybernetic ocean in a vain, narcissistic attempt at personal validation. In other words: Anti.