These writing samples are excerpts from the twenty-four issues of Maine Before Dawn - Satire Free America, a monthly satirical e-magazine I published on line in 2000-2002

For those of you who have seen your children grow up, and get out on their own, you know there comes a time when an emptiness sets in and your world seems less important, and, more cruel at the same time. The other day during a snow storm, I joked with my wife, saying, "The kids will be coming home from school early today." The light-hearted comment, brought her to tears.

When I look at the world today, the seemingly common human theme of the cry for vengeance, the clawing competition, the less than well thought out science of unbridled greed, the lust for power, and desire for control over the physical world to the sure end of the destruction of it, the practice of medicine that threatens the health of all of us, the poorly thought out schemes of governance, justice, and the sheer lack of planning for the future, I have to wonder, What is it that we can teach our children? And, it is too late for that.

The world is a dangerous place, and there are those who call for the destruction of the west, and especially our republic, but they need not be in any hurry, our republic is fast self-destructing by fraud in our government, our business models, our lack of moral ethics and especially a total failure of understanding the reason for morality, which is the preservation of a place in the world for the progeny of all.

We all want our children to succeed, though anyone who has lost a child would shed a better light on what we all want, for they would, and do, seek the re-existence of theirs, if just to see them again in others, the tears, the wrenching, crushing, missing feeling lasts, and, lasts. Success is not so important as the diversity their existence supplies our own.

Taking a four year old and a six year old shopping, to the supermarket, can be trying, and my wife always predicated ours getting to go with the question, Will you behave and not wander? Of course they would, and they would try not to get lost in their wanderings about the market, sometimes, and upon being retrieved from their proscribed wanderings with sweet scoldings, they would file behind her doing the King Tut up and down the isles, almost mockingly, but more assuredly enjoying themselves at the market being four and six, and, out on the town with mom, again.

The commercial western world is like a supermarket, built to tempt the four and five year old in all of us at every turn of every isle. Oh! But just for their existence again, and, to find them again, and, again. Let's do the King Tut and create our own joy, my sweet heart. The kids will be coming home from school early today.

The editor, Maine Before Dawn

While the terrorist attacks were a shocker, fortunately the virulent patriotism that spread over our nation has subsided. And now we're faced with an even greater shock. America is a corrupt nation whose policies deserve the hatred of not only terrorists from abroad, but, terrorists from within our own country as well. The Boy Kings of the Election Results have hijacked the promise of our self government for their privileged club, subjugating every facet of what is admirable about our country to support a ruling class that has exempted itself from every law even as they labor the backs of every other citizen with ever more. This is just as true about Maine, as it is about our nation. There is a crushing recession going on, but, no one in government is willing either to accept the consequences of declining revenues, or do without more for even a single moment.

In the pit in New York City there is salvation to be found. NYC is an abomination, and, 110 story buildings are built only in a fools' empire. That fools' empire is the Empire of Representative Democracy and the Free Market, the failure of which is ultimately responsible for the rise of terrorism. The ideals of self government are lofty, but they are lofty ideals that have been corrupted beyond recognition, and even as our economies and world stature are being challenged, requiring us to adapt to survive, those whose duty it is to ensure our success are busy lining their pockets and getting even with their bully adversaries.

Terrorism my friends, is just like dirty tricks and negative campaigning, it goes with all the territory conquered by this fools' empire. The only defense is to adjust our government to suit the needs of a world vastly changed since our republic was founded.

The world is going to leave us behind in a heap of rubble if we don't change. The growing gap between rich and poor world-wide is not the result of Representative Democracy and the Free Market, but a result of the corruption of it.

In the Age of Information, venue is the key. We must provide a venue for grievances at every level before grievances escalate into terrorism, both at home, and for those who harbor ill-will and grievances abroad. Our courts are not, and have never been an equitable venue, but a corruption of the promise of it.

Terrorism works. BUT, providing a better venue at every level will work better.

You can disagree with me all you want, and when you're through disagreeing, and you're looking for a better answer to relieve the pain and suffering caused by continued and escalated war and terrorism, you will find the answer is still the same. Providing a better venue at every level will ease the problem so much so, your children and theirs will forget that terrorism and war ever existed.

The editor, Maine Before Dawn

If we read history carefully, we'll find literacy arose from the requirements of religion to pass on what was then thought the most important teachings of previous generations. As late as when Johann Gutenberg published his printing press Bibles, this was still the case. We are at a similar juncture in history, now in the era of representative democracy. It is the clerics of political and economic ideology, embodied in the U.S. Constitution, that expression of the great experiment with representative democracy, and the teachings of Alexander Hamilton, the founder of American banking, that now largely control the presses, the press and the mind set with which Americans understand the world.

When religion felt threatened by the sect of science, both in the Judeo-Christian world and in the Islamic world there was a conflict of remarkable and similar consequence to heritage. The Islamic clerics shut down all scientific worship, and the Judeo-Christian clerics tried to do the same. In both worlds the threat of execution was waved about and even acted upon by clerics, because they felt the threat of a parallel and competing set of teachings that did not relate well to their own. The devoted followers of representative democracy and laisez faire economics have similarly resorted to violence in order to keep competing thought in check in our recent history. And, yes. There is a Cult of Constitutionalism in this country, just as there is a Cult of The Free Market. Each are held out in their own way as being the divinity for the future of mankind, and, all the prophets of competing religions are both shunned and exterminated when it is convenient.

The competing knowledge set that is rising fast is the Cult of the Social Sciences, those catechisms of the study of man that are yielding ever more important observations about the human condition, and, observations that are proving impossible to ignore for the criticisms they are leveling against the stalwarts of our American understanding of how the world best works.

With the world ever more complex, of course the distinctions are not as absolutely clear as they were in the past, and yet, still, we move at light speed today, television news 24/7 around the clock, and the Internet, where not only is news available all the time, it is possible to ask the question, "Does anyone know anything more?" to a world-wide audience and get a response within seconds from someone half a world away, or right down the street. The change is coming so fast in fact, the foot soldiers of representative democracy and the free market are being caught so flat-footed as the change sweeps over us, in a bizarre twist of the end of one historical epoch, and the beginning of another, we're being faced with anarchy declared by the establishment and not, as would be expected, by the insurgents.

That, after all is said and done, is what the historians will write about this era. That the change came so fast, and so sudden, the status quo attempted to scuttle civilization by declaring a war the equivalent of moral anarchy in an effort to root out the insurgent mind set. We are in danger of many things, but doubtless the most alarming is the loss of the political consciousness of an entire nation, and even the world. There once was a time when Americans knew better than to trust in government. Government by definition is amoral, for government is not a conscious entity. Good government only comes from constant vigilance.

My generation forcefully demanded peace, only to see this one demand war. Because change is so irrepressible however, trying to stop it, just ain't gonna work this time either folks. So, as we pass the mantle and the torch of mankind on to the next generation, we should find it within our greater wisdom mostly to warn in the strongest possible terms of the fools we have been. Government after all, that cognizably amorphous amoral entity of our collective need, even more so than children, should be seen, and not heard. The morality of mankind, as it is too easily spurred into action by disparate governments, is irreconcilably non-universal unless perceived in the simplest and least credible of terms. When any government screams, as ours has been for months, it is best likened to the sound of a screaming child. Most often, the noise is best left unheard.

The editor, Maine Before Dawn

I chose this topic this month knowing it would be difficult to write about, and more so to read. The sound of one hand clapping is an expression everyone has heard, evoking the lucid ideas of great thought as it does for the young. Sounds are mapped directly into the brain, where they do their work upon the subconscious most often. In the brain, words are not sound, though in poetry, it is difficult to separate the sounds from the words, or often to decipher the words from the sound.

The sound of a the sudden flight of a thousand birds, ducks, pigeons, blackbirds in migration, a great tree when falling in the woods after having been sawn, a great waterfall, the Niagara, or the wind of a tornado, like a great freight train, which even if we've never personally heard it, we know them all instinctively, what they are, their intrinsic value and their place in our world, our own small universe.

Fathers know the sound of a crying infant. Mothers do too. These are primordial sounds, like the last gasp of death, the first cry of life, the crack of a gavel, a gunshot, a canon blast, or men when they are angry, or, imposing their awful will, like the sounds of women chatting, and sea birds in flight before a distant gale. The sound of war being rallied, in a loatheful disdain for all humanity that shares not the thought.

The sound of the first building falling September eleventh, heard through the TV set, or the glass of the second building was not something many of us had ever contemplated within the psyche of our instinct, but, the sound of the second building falling, the sound from within it, on the tenth floor, as it came down upon some, forever falling for the eternity of those many slow seconds upon those who were there, the folly, the air still in awe of the sound of an ending of personal worlds should inspire us all to contemplate the brevity of our lives, and the special beauty and wonder of all the other sounds we've heard elsewhere during our lives; the sounds of distant children laughing, playing, the crack in the voice of an elementary school teacher on her very first day teaching a class of gleeful but unruly third graders, the sound of a sporting event when great feats are being accomplished, and defeat, the sound of a hot air balloon, and its absence of sound, the sound of wind blowing through the white pine, and a young woman, a girl really, not quite a woman, calling her first love for the first time on the telephone, the sound of your own children, and your own wife, in labor, the sound of age approaching slowly, inextricably, cracking in your back, knees, neck, the sound of the first day of school, and the last, the sound of geese in an evening autumn sky, and of the sun rising brought up by the song birds of the morning, and of a blizzard howling through an opened and, then, unopened door, the moan of an unsettlingly disappointed crowd, the sound of a great factory, of great deals being made on trading floors, of carpenters hard at work, of a dog fight, and rain on a metal roof, a teenager's party, the sounds of an accomplished prank, and, politicians working a large crowd, a jet fighter breaking the sound barrier, the sound of glass breaking and your own heart, there, your own deep breathing, the lake's lapped shore, and the sound under water.

Sit still, and listen just to the sounds. You are not so young and your life for you will not last forever. Sit still and listen. Sit still, and, listen youthful and often youth-less fools. Listen well to the world's sounds during your life, and hear not just the utter foolishness man's words provide. When life is gone for any one, or for all, then, there will be nothing but to hear the sound of one hand clapping.

The editor, Maine Before Dawn

This past month I spent time reading Only One Earth, The Care and Maintenance of a Small Planet by Barbara Ward and Rene Dubos, a work along the lines of Rachael Carson's Silent Spring, touted as being "An unofficial report commissioned by the Secretary-General of the United Nations Conference on the Human Environment", and, as having been written with the "Assistance of a 152-Member Committee of Corresponding Consultants in 58 Countries". That, by any measure sure seems a lot of experts. We should be in good shape. But let's examine it. Written in 1971 this work is highly regarded within the popularist environmental movement.

While I've had to wear glasses since the ungainly intrusion of myopia into my life some ten years ago, this work gave me for the first time an odd sensation that I was snorkling and looking through a clouded face mask in some strange and long forgotten sixties undersea-scape as I read. My scholarly preference generally is reading older history texts, because they provide a glimpse of the past that can be easily unskewed from the prejudices of a writer whose parochial beliefs are further removed from my own than any a contemporary writer could offer. Often, from between the lines of these older texts appears a stark reality, one that perhaps wasn't apparent at the time it was written nor even intended by the author when he scribed his published ideas, fifty, a hundred or several hundred years ago.

Only One Earth was written in 1971, only thirty years ago. Still, through those years it has aged into a worthy read like fine wine, or perhaps more aptly like old furniture from the fifties and sixties, because it provides the reader with a glimpse of the truth, and a knowledge that cannot be gained from the writings of contemporary ecology activists who have aged with me, and have had ample opportunity to hone their choice of popular ideas into a slant that rings more true today, regardless of any real time-tested veracity or appreciated value of the inclinations they have for our society today.

Like Ward and Dubos, I too desire to save this small planet for my, and indeed all progeny of man and species alike. Having read this work however, and with the hind sight of thirty years of rapid growth of the ecology movement accompanied by an accelerated deterioration of our planet, what I've found is wrong with their common approach needs to be aired, if not screamed into the face of the adversity of experts and morons alike.

Every popular political movement has a beginning, middle and an end. At the top of such an endless list of such movements, as Americans, we possibly could begin with the temperance movement, as one strictly fitting this mold, a beginning, a middle, and an end, and, indeed an end where we ended up far worse off than we were prior to this movement having taken its grip upon the conscience of the nation. We could add to that list, the movement of western expansion, which ended in the Philippines and the bloody death of countless American soldiers. We could talk about the War on Poverty, even the Space Race. All of these movements have in common at their inception the capturing of favor within the American subconsciousness with altruistic ideas, followed by a plan-drawing phase, a purely mental exercise publically displayed to encourage a subtle and ever greater acceptance of the ideas espoused by a profitable gathering of a bureaucracy of experts, and, if all catches the imagination of a rather numb and dumb populace, these ideas are then reshaped in laws, laws to be implemented by a cadre of enforcement bureaucratic hacks who further screw up the aforementioned grandiose ideas, because they believed what the supposed experts told them, but even more so, because, like the bureaucracy of experts, the enforcement bureaucracy too is paid quite well to do these things. At some point it begins to seem as if the sole goal of all popularist movements is the money chase.

If we want to look at a grander scheme of this phenomenon of popular political movements, we can look to the French Revolution, the triumph of the Bolsheviks and to Mao on the Chinese mainland. In this world arena, these ideas have been so popular, they have in fact, in their respective eras, spread into world-wide popularist subconscious favor before waning past recognition or popular endorsement as the bureaucratic experts handed out orders for a cadre of bureaucratic enforcers. At the time of their respective popularist inceptions, many of the French, the Russian and the Chinese people no doubt had a feeling like Santa Claus was coming to town. As things settled down into the implementation and then enforcement phases of these popular movements however, most, if not all other than those within elite bureaucratic positions, felt the uneasy, queezy feeling one gets when driving and a policemen turns his blue light on behind you, or in some instances the feeling one must get just before the executioner releases the trap door below your feet, as a man condemned to hang the remainder of your life away in one last quick ka-thrumpk.

The cold hard truth is, human beings, and populations of human beings are not like light switches, or levers of any sort. They cannot be turned on, and, off at will. And neither can the bureaucracies human beings create by these popular movements. It's been often said, it's hard to start a revolution, but even harder to stop one, and even more difficult to determine where one will end up once it gets going with a head of steam. However. Popular political movements often destroy an already existent public conscience about whatever ill the popular movement is intent upon more thoroughly addressing, even exploiting. More often than not, popular political movements fail to replace the pre-existent public conscience with anything substantially useful or even potable in a world athirst for good ideas. The abstract ideals of popular movements have a tendency to sterilize conscience in their efforts to sanitize them. It is not too long after beginning the implementation phase, one begins to see the failings of popularism in any of its most current incarnations, noting that however meager the original perception and conscience might have been, at least it was a basis for a heritage of some very real understanding, one that quickly disintegrates in the face of popularist implementation and enforcement of their new and improved ideas.

That's what we have here, in Only One Earth a head of steam ready to take shape thirty years ago, and readying to wipe out the historical ecological conscience of individuals, industry, agriculture and forestry as it gathered momentum. We now have the odd pleasure of seeing the aftermath of what this green revolution and the green purge has done to our society, noting that the economies of these industries now only rely on complying with the law, arguing what the law means in court, or lobbying for exceptions to, or changes in the law. Few would doubt the ecology movement has not saved our small planet, though it certainly has created a burgeoning bureaucracy of so-called experts, who have an army of bureaucratic enforcers roaming the countryside looking for people and companies to persecute as the villains the popularist experts were talking about when they riled the people's indignation. Closely scrutinized, vengeance, the purest of human emotions, is a great motivator in all popular political movements.

Furthermore, and not surprisingly, the enforcers of this popularist movement roam those very areas of our country where the wilderness and the ecology of the planet is in the least danger, moreover, especially in the least danger of offending a large voting block, or where a chance confrontation with a company with the means to put up a real fight might happen. All the while avoiding the political pitfalls of stepping on the wrong toes, the ecologists are persecuting people and businesses of rural regions that by comparison have done a stellar job of protecting their environment prior to the ecology movement. It is especially notable the experts who indirectly direct the work of this green army of bureaucratic enforcers, live far away, and mostly in areas where the ecology of the planet is devoid of any life other than rats, cockroaches, pigeons, poodles and fish that live in aquariums of all sizes. In fact, the United Nations Building is in a particularly ecologically unsound area of the planet beside a dead ocean bay and bordering a concrete dead-zone of world renown. There are no salmon in the Hudson River Bay, and, absolutely no plan to protect them either, the people there are too busy exterminating vermin of many varieties other than the human kind.

Still, in the easily re-focused and easily swayed minds of most, something needs to be done about the ecology of the planet. What is possible though? I'll address that later, but let's first examine what has been done in the thirty years since Only One Earth was published. The two questions to address here are: 1) Has all the money spent on studies performed by the bureaucracy of experts yielded any significant improvement in our planetary condition? And, 2) With the necessarily limited tools at their disposal does the attendant bureaucracy of enforcers have any possibility of remedying the problems identified by these experts?

To the first question, concerning the work of experts, it is not too easily discerned that their major contribution has been made identifying what they presaged as problems, and not resolving them by any measure. Indeed, they would tell us, "We're experts paid to identify problems, not resolve them. The job of remedying problems falls upon the shoulders of the enforcement bureaucracy."

The enforcement bureaucracy would similarly explain, "We're just paid to enforce the law, over which we have no control. We're incapable of resolving any of the real problems, because our hands are tied. We can neither enforce against everyone, because of political considerations, or ignore our enforcement duties when called upon to deploy them against otherwise innocent individuals, many for whom we feel great compassion, but still, the law is the law."

Such is the conundrum, and, the Damocles Sword, of popular political movements. They create amoral, immortal and most often heinous and socially and economically ill-affordable bureaucracies that end up digging the hole for their respective popularist beliefs as well as mankind ever deeper. Most importantly to our sorry lesson here, we should add, human beings can only tolerate so much government before government is forced to resign itself to failure on this or that political front, however popular it may have been at one time. This is true because while the bureaucracy of experts may itself be corrupt, a great boondoggle of dearly-paid-for and far-too-often-quoted ideas, when the enforcement bureaucracy takes shape, the corruption seen there is far too much for the average human being to sit still for, because the enforcement bureaucracy actually comes out into the field and rubs, true to human nature, more often the wrong way, shoulders with the citizenry.

We would of course be fortunate however, if some of the ideas of the ecology movement have rubbed off favorably onto the collective public mind and conscience. A general raising of public awareness over and above the public ire, has hopefully changed some attitudes, and conduct. If it is enough to offset the education concerning what is valuable and vulnerable in the environment, an education that has been given to terrorists and thieves alike, we can only hope. Only time will tell here, but with as many enemies as the Green Army has made, a lot of disgruntled individuals are probably out looking to trash the planet right now. And, we all know what Saddam Hussein did with the oil wells in Kuwait, and why.

Let me make a separate conclusion here though. Environmental improvement will be accomplished by one factor only. How we treat the environment will depend upon exactly how much we value human life, every human life, now and in the future. Unfortunately, despite this all too typically popular political movement, one perhaps set into full swing by the book, Only One Earth, as well as other books published by other experts, we have to conclude the experts have done little to sway public wants and desires, or to inform the public of the danger of their wants and desires. This movement just as quickly, and just as humanly has lost sight of any sense of danger, and instead seems intent upon focusing upon what offends and pleases its devotees most. They dislike lung-clogging cigarettes, but, they like big new SUVs and scented candles. They like forests, but not the stumps that hold them up. They dislike sprawl, remarkably, in the name of a special beauty that should be preserved for those people who want to live within the sprawl. They like herbal medicines, pierced body parts, brightly dyed hair and the freedom of the brain-frying cell phone. It's a popular political movement alright.

Thirty years after Only One Earth was written, more than a clean environment, most Americans still desire flowing gowns for their wives and daughters, straighter teeth and better grades for all their children, pit bulls and regardless of the cost in human suffering, splendid diamonds for their sweethearts. You see, there is a dearth of experts here. It's the myopic human condition, the Only One Attitude blindspot, the Hey! You only live once! condition that Ward, Dubos and the ecology movement, the ecology experts and the ecology enforcement bureaucracy will never be able to address, a condition and attitude for which the ecology movement has done more than its share of making things worse, adding much to the deadly knowledge-brew manufactured by a plethora of history and culture chefs, all of them double and trebly replete with the same condescending know-it-all attitudes they learned from the exhortations of a long and sorry history of many-many bureaucracies of experts that have arisen throughout our most assuredly brief non-simian history... If all the spewed languid drivel was not just so many words, so absurdly many abstract visions, and so much egocentric vanity claiming a limelight with little relation to the reality of our human condition, it should not then be so obfuscately impossible to dissuade men from placing a diamond ring upon the fingers of their beloved sweethearts, knowing it is the best reason another man might take to kill her or dismember the same hand upon which they place such an already horridly filthy and bloodied thing.

Changing views and minds lastingly and completely is the stuff of real social engineering and only hopefully the growth of a real humanity out of the epoch of baboons and howler monkeys wherein we reside today. Accomplishing a growth towards humanity is not nearly as easy a task as creating yet another level of government feigning political sovereignty, and morality, built upon a cloistered view of short lived fears and aspirations of Utopian nightmares or fantasies, whims and desires, outrage or fancy, and always paid for trebly at a very high social cost. Each government is pre-destined to expire and become ineffective by the innumerable acts of its sure and inevitable corruption by bureautification. But I digress, surely, our dreams, our economies and our popularist political movements are all built upon the blood and shortened lives of innocent victims everywhere, so why not a diamond to express our love? Hey! You only live once! Maybe for an anniversary, you and your sweetheart could visit Sierra Leone and thank one of the amputees there for the rock on your sweetheart's finger, a rock that stated your love and devotion to her? If you can get a plane flight, a passport, and the world is still habitable.

As for the inane new planetary order recommended by the bureaucracy of ecology experts, done so somehow believing we could pledge our allegiance to a global government, a planetary coalition of insurgents eagerly readied to take up the fight for yet another popularist political movement in order to reap the same contrarywise rewards all governments seek, and a government these experts in this political movement, the Green Party, have naively advocated as a socialist style central planning agency created to control the environment and all its economic implications... Get real. Show me a single government anywhere in the world that is worthy of my trust first. Show me a single government anywhere that is not made up of merely a cadre of criminals whose most dire focus is not theft, privilege and a wholly sadistic power over other men, their wives and their children. Take a look around the globe stupid, and start right in Washington D.C.

Now, on the other hand, the one without the diamond on it, for the past thirty years others have been providing the Third World lots of guns and millions upon millions of rounds of ammunition, ship loads of crates of hand grenades and enough land mines to mine an entire continent because this has been the recommendation of another well-paid bureaucracy of popularist experts. These expert recommendations are still being implemented by yet another well-paid enforcement bureaucracy, all in the name of doing the likewise-evangelical work of yet another popular political movement, bringing the ever-popular democracy to the Third World. Indeed these two movements, the environmental movement and the democracy movement, seem to go hand in hand, since the second I mention here will probably achieve the desired ecological effect quicker, that of saving the planet from man. And indeed, this concurrent political strategy is being repeatedly deployed in the under-developed nations around the world all-the-while also being touted as intended to save the small planet, for democracy, a small planet upon which every man struggles to exist despite all our governmental corruption and the very mad lunacy inherent to political, regulatory and military power. Et tu Brute?

There is a dearth of experts. They seem to have all fallen blindly into the same vast hole. It is not a hole dug by men. It is a hole dug by government, by the greed and blind ambition of those who make up the well-paid bureaucracies of experts and enforcement alike, every one taking more from the environment of our humanity than can be sustained. Diamonds, after all, are a girl's best friend, if you can afford them with your conscience, diamonds, a clean environment, and, democracy without the smell of thousands of rotting human corpses floating in every river would be really-really popular. Though, no matter how one might lose them, I still suppose it would be pretty nice to have hands too, if all the popular governments of the world will just leave us alone and allow us to keep them. Even without a ring on any finger, hands would be a truly wonderful thing to have.

The editor, Maine Before Dawn

--------------------------------------------------------------------