Although I doubt any gun fanatic reads this blog, if you think you might be one, read the following characteristics.  Please note that I’m not talking about a gun enthusiast (simple hunter, skeet shooter, authentic target-range aficionado, etc.).  Again, if you don’t understand the difference between fanatic and enthusiast, read on.  For other people, some of the characteristics below might be amusing, others just plain sad…because there’s always truth in humor!

1) Go to a gun show and watch how a buyer picks up and caresses the weapon, whether he buys it or not.  If the gun seems to be just an extension of you-know-what, he’s a fanatic.  Don’t be surprised at the number of men you see doing this, even if their bathrooms aren’t loaded with porno pics.  Note that this doesn’t apply to women unless she has a particular kind of Freudian envy.  Or, she caresses the weapon while smiling at him.

2) If you’re out in the woods and run across a deer hunter—or any kind of hunter, for that matter—and he tries to convince you he needs an assault rifle to bring down his intended targets, you have a gun fanatic.  This definitely applies to women too.  By the way, what the hell are you doing in the woods during hunting season?  Hunters kill other people, even ones dressed in those loud orange clown suits they’re supposed to be wearing.  Without that suit, you’ll just look like game to them, even if the hunter you meet is like that sharpshooting GoDaddy CEO who’s out to kill an elephant.  Although most hunters, like Dick Cheney, can only hit the broad side of a judge, you can’t count on that!

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How appropriate!  It snowed in the Middle East.  If that’s not symbolic of the Arab spring turning to the Arab winter, I don’t know what is.  Even if we don’t have confidence in nuclear power, solar energy, or natural gas (especially fracking), it’s imperative that the U.S. become energy independent in order to avoid all the turmoil in that part of the world.  The longer I live, the more I believe that the Middle East is a hopeless case, a patient who is terminally ill and better off dead.  If R.I.P. has a political meaning, we should apply it to these troubled lands.  The world needs to move on.

Ben Ghazi showed that Libyans can’t control their own people—or al Qaeda has corrupted the political process.  We now find out that Mohamed Morsi, current President of Egypt and wannabe dictator, is on record saying three years ago that Israelis are “blood-suckers, who attack Palestinians” and “warmongers, the descendants of apes and pigs.”  Maybe he was just playing to his Islamic fundamentalist base, but this doesn’t bode well for future peace between Egypt and Israel.

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The massacre of twenty children and eight adults (teachers, the mother of the shooter, and the shooter) is a tragedy.  In other similar tragedies, gun enthusiasts have warned us about getting too emotional and tampering with a fundamental right guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution’s Second Amendment…so they say.  The NRA, well-heeled lobbyist organization that it is, often leads the charge.  “Not over my dead body….”  Yes, I’m emotional.  This time the stats are against the NRA.  Twenty children.  I repeat: twenty little, helpless, and defenseless children.

The “fundamental right” these right-wing gun nuts talk about is the “right to bear arms.”  The Second Amendment says:  “A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.”  That opening phrase is key:  “A well regulated Militia….”  The whole amendment has become twisted to the point where certain states have returned to the days of Dodge City and allow concealed carry “for protection,” meaning that people like George Zimmerman can shoot an unarmed black kid and claim self-defense.  It has become twisted to the point where anyone can go to a gun show and arm themselves better than SWAT members on a police force, as seen a few years back in an armed robbery in LA (a recent news report on ABC news quoted an FBI statistic: they performed background checks and registered more than 150,000 guns that were sold on Black Friday this year—c’mon people, that’s paranoid, perverse, and obscene!).

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Tuesday’s post was about the social singularity that appears in my books and is currently happening in the real world.  One aspect of this is fundamentalism in politics.  Whether human beings are by nature fundamentalist savages or not, it’s clear that fundamentalism across the world is bringing human rights and responsible government to their knees.  Let me elaborate.

The hope of the Arab Spring is being dashed against the rocks by the stormy waters of Muslim fundamentalism.  Mubarak might have been a psychotic sociopath (most dictators are), but he was secular and held the dark forces of Muslim extremism at bay.  The current Egyptian leader, clearly desiring the power of his predecessor, is the other extreme.  It’s obvious that he and his followers want another Muslim theocracy in Egypt.

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Just before hurricane Sandy came roaring into NJ like a banshee on the loose, we went to see Ben Affleck’s Argo.  As usual, we arrived early to get good seats.  Another early arrival commented that a friend (or was it a relative?) refused to see the movie—she never watched violent movies, he said.  That started me thinking.

To paraphrase Tom Clancy, the problem with fiction is it has to seem real.  He’s talking about military thrillers, of course, but that statement is true about many fiction genres (probably not fantasy or paranormal).  It’s interesting that Argo is a movie based on true events surrounding the daring escape of six Americans from Iran during the hostage crisis.  A CIA agent, Tony Mendes, engineered the escape from the Canadian embassy.

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Among the world’s five great religions, Islam is the youngest.  It shows.  Buddhists, Christians, Hindus, and Jews have generally matured enough to get beyond fanatical and savage protests in reaction to perceived insults to their religion and they punish those who participate in such protests—not so Muslims.  People in the other religions shrug off the intolerance, turn their backs on it, and go on with their lives—not so Muslims.  If Islamic believers who have matured beyond fanatical responses still can’t control their savage and fanatical brethren, something is wrong.

A Muslim quoted in the NY Times yesterday said something like, “I respect Moses, Jesus, and the other prophets.  Why can’t the U.S. respect the Prophet Mohammed.”  This is an example of the myopic thinking of many Muslims, not just fanatics.  How dare they presume to dictate to me or anyone else how I feel about the prophets or anything else?  This kind of ignorance and arrogance is precisely what stands in the way of any solution for Middle East peace.  It’s like trying to reason with your five-year-old about world-shaking issues after he’s caught raiding the cookie jar.  You can’t have a mature discussion with people who are driven to deadly tantrums by their emotions.

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Religious belief has been a double-edged sword throughout the centuries.  Humanity seems to be mired in perpetual Crusades where one group of believers wants to beat the crap out of another group, and vice versa.  Warring crusaders are bad enough, but it’s even worse when those crusaders are using religion simply to take what others have by force and use the difference in beliefs as an excuse.  SOP:  Declare your enemies to be heretics in order to justify your butchering conquests.  Over the years, this often translates into ethnic hatreds that transcend any of the original reasons to go to war.

Religion as the justification for butchery often transcends religion v. religion, of course.  There is some indication that last Sunday’s attack on a Sikh temple was prompted by a white supremacist mistaking the Sikh religion for Islam, not that that would have justified his attack.  Fanaticism often is associated with people with low IQs—if a guy has a turban, he must be Muslim, right?—or with people who are easily manipulated by others, fanatics or not, who seek personal power and gain from the manipulation.

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The recent vote on censure against Syria torpedoed by China and Russia only emphasizes how ineffective the U.N. has become.  The last U.S. president to ask the U.N. to get behind him when going to war was Papa Bush (the Gulf War).  For Iraq, Baby Bush even changed a long standing U.S. tradition and launched a preemptive strike without allies’ or U.N. permission.  For Libya, Obama turned to NATO, not the U.N.

What’s happening in Syria is similar to but not the same as what happened in Libya before NATA intervened.  Gadhafi’s record as a brutal dictator had few equals.  Certainly Syria’s present ruler is not yet in his league, although father and son together come close.  Of course, this will all change if Assad makes good on his promise to use WMDs, mostly stockpiled biological and chemical weapons (his fledgling nuclear efforts were taken out by Israel—with help from the CIA?).  So far his threat is only directed towards “foreign invaders.”

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2012…a presidential election year…Memorial Day…a time for reflection….  At my age, I’ve lost friends and relatives, some from sickness, others from accidents, and still others in service to our country.  I value everyone that has served our country, from infantryperson to Peace Corps volunteer, infinitely more than the good old boys and girls sitting in the nation’s capital, those politicos who scheme and manipulate and put these volunteers in harm’s way.

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In this post, I’ll commit the cardinal sin of discussing religion and politics.  Maybe you never were invited to dinner where the host tells you, “Mr. and Mrs. X are also attending.  They are Y religion, so don’t discuss religion.  In fact, don’t discuss politics either.”  If you were, I don’t know about you, but it’s hard for me to sit down at a dinner table and avoid the topics of religion and politics, because most other Americans just can’t resist them.  Where European, Latin American, and many other countries are obsessed with just politics, people in the U.S. are often obsessed with both.  In fact, I venture to say that religion warps our politics in ways that are often as sad as they are humorous.

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