Better Than Insomnia

I'm not sure what to make of this. A blog post, maybe. But not a normal one.

See, for someone who's been accused of being creative all her life, I have the dumbest dreams ever. If there's a possibility of something interesting happening, like flying, or having sex with handsome strangers, I don't do it. In my dream I say "No thanks, you go ahead and fly, I'll just hop up and down a little." I say, "No thanks, sex sounds nice, but I need to get my laundry off the line before it rains." Invariably I stop short of something really satisfying, and instead do whatever I would ordinarily do in my ordinary but satisfying life.

And that's if I'm not trying to figure out how many Little Things go in a Big Thing. Or if I'm not missing my flight. Or if I'm not running around trying to find a clean, private toilet.

Sweet dreams aren't made of these.

So listen to this:

I dreamt there was a big mob in the street. Everyone was yelling. They'd heard there was going to be a hanging, and they were out for blood. The person who was going to be hanged was running for office, someone like Elizabeth Warren, although in my dream she looked like Maggie Smith. Donald Trump had told the crowd she was going to be hanged from the inside of a glass elevator shaft, and the mob was gathering around the building's parking lot to watch. Donald Trump was working the crowd. "Or maybe we won't hang her after all. Maybe..." He shrugged, put his palms up, milked the moment. The crowd roared. "Maybe we'll just let her drop a couple feet. A couple feet!" He's holding his tiny hands apart. "And then maybe we'll ask her a few questions. A few questions! I don't know! What do you think?" He shrugged again. The crowd screamed Hang her! Hang her!

I'm growing more and more horrified as I realize this thing is actually going to happen. I keep thinking there has to be a way to stop it, that things couldn't have gotten this far, that they can't really get away with this. I know the building. It's an apartment tower on my mail route, and I know which floor has the access to the elevator shaft. I punch a code to enter and race up six flights of stairs and fly down the hallway. When I open the door that leads to the elevator shaft, there's a pretty good crowd there too. Donald Trump is there. He is smirking and teasing and bobbing his head. People are laughing with him, but I don't get the sense that this crowd is all on his side--that maybe they are just cowed, afraid to intervene. I had in mind that I would yell out "No! We're not going to let you do this!" and all the good people would start hollering and stomping and get the gumption to rush the guards. They just need someone to break the spell. I'm waiting for the right moment.

Just then three men start leading Elizabeth Warren Maggie Smith toward the gibbet and she looks tense but dignified, like Marie Antoinette on the way to the Guillotine, and I about lose my mind. Instead of yelling, I lunge straight at Donald Trump and jump him and put my hands around his big squishy neck and throttle him for all I'm worth. He crumples to the floor and I'm kicking and strangling and stomping and he is soft and doughy like a bag of goo and can't defend himself at all, and every punch and kick lands, and I'm thinking, Well, this is it, I'm about to get shot or hauled off to prison or both, but it doesn't happen. Trump lies on the floor curled up like a fat, damaged larva and everyone stands and cheers, even the guards. And there are more and more of us cheering and we look down and the crowd in the parking lot is thinning fast, skulking away.

I really did dream that, all of that. And when I woke up, I really did think "I'd better not put this in a blog post, or I could get arrested." Because that's the kind of world we're living in today.

Or maybe it's the dream world.

Get Me Fig Leaf, Stat!

As it happens---I have no control over it--I'm more interested in looking at naked men than naked women. This concerned me back in the '70s when I thought it was important to be open to any experience, and I thought it was probably a character flaw that I didn't get the same feelings about girls that I did about boys. But after a while you grow up and realize your feelings are nothing more than your feelings, and you're better off being honest about them, and why not drink beer at ten o'clock in the morning? Ha ha! Oh wait, that's a different subject.

Anyhoo, nothing much has changed, and if I'd rather admire David Robinson from behind at the free throw line than watch an ice princess doing triple spatchcocks in flesh-colored Spandex, I've come to accept that about myself. I like the entire human lineup, basically, but I hew more to the masculine form. And not just because most men can pick me up like I'm a tortilla chip. Even so, it's not the genitals that attract me. In fact, I'm not even that interested in looking at the junk.

I mean, it's weird. You've got all this smooth muscle going on and that lovely shoulder form and taut neck and those hairy forearms and the chiseled, um, stern, and then there are all these squishy bits flopping around amidships like a tiny mutiny going on. They've got no control over it at all. Can you even imagine that? I mean, maybe half of you can. It's like there's a whole puppet show going on in your crotch. The underpants are just the curtain. The main character has a face, but it's not a poker face. Nuh-uh. The supporting cast members are bobbing up and down like Muppets in the floodlights. It's nuts! Some of it is nuts.

Well, it's entertaining, but it's goofy. I do find it interesting, and it gets more interesting the closer you examine it--I've found--but that's like turning over a compost pile. You don't know if everything's going to be inert, or if something's going to be wiggling around in there.

But it's not really, if you don't mind my saying so, handsome.

I can well appreciate that men are nervous about what other people are going to think of their sporting equipment, but they shouldn't worry. No matter the proprietor, it's all sort of silly-looking, if endearingly vulnerable. I've got nothing against any of it, at least at the moment. But it's nothing I feel like I need to see.

Which brings us, as everything else does, to the current horrifying state of the world, to situations so appalling that I, like many of you, have had to cut back on my news diet just to keep from wanting to pin myself out for the vultures. We have to walk that fine line between keeping ourselves informed and contemplating slit wrists as a cure for insomnia. It's bleak. But it can get even worse. For the second time in four administrations, we are looking at the real threat that someone, somewhere will tell the press what the President's junk looks like. Lord, have mercy. The powers that be have always wanted to keep us ignorant. Please, please, don't let them stop now.

Going Over To The Dockside

The Dockside Restaurant is a modest pile of old timber surrounded by shine and money, and there are cheeseburgers in it, really good ones, the kind that isn't presented on a ciabatta roll with large food groups you can't wrap your teeth around--no. A nice squishy bun and a modest squishy burger, served with a side of potato chips and an RC. And lord only knows why the owners haven't sold out their precious footage in prime territory yet, but a lot of people are glad they haven't. You see an outfit like this, squatting like a turd in a field of gazelles, and you just find yourself rooting for it.

So it was fitting to discover that the Dockside's main claim to fame is its association with Oregon's own Tonya Harding. Or, more specifically, Tonya Harding's trash, not to be redundant. We loved Tonya Harding around here. She was a scrappy, hard-working figure skater with thighs that could snap a logger in two, and then pull an Applebee's off its foundation. She could leap into the air, spin three times, and part out a Trans-Am before hitting the ice again. She had rigid yellow hair and high bangs with enough engineering and product to fend off a tornado. She learned to skate in the Lloyd Center shopping mall, between the Cinnabon and Forever 21. And she was ours, all ours.

Also, she was not Nancy Kerrigan, a lanky, toothy beauty, and Tonya's chief rival on the ice. Nancy Kerrigan's dad was a welder and her circumstances growing up probably weren't much different than Tonya's, but we figured we knew a princess when we saw one, and that made us root for Tonya that much more. Tonya was more sturdy than beautiful. She was our Dockside.

So what's the Dockside connection? When Nancy Kerrigan was whacked in the knee by a large unintelligent fellow, the whole world immediately suspected Tonya was behind it. Our Tonya! But we knew her. We didn't suspect--we knew for a fact she was behind it. All the perps rounded up were related to Tonya in some way but she herself was held legally blameless, for lack of evidence. No matter: we were her fans and we knew what she was capable of, and we had faith in her too, knowing someone in this crew was going to do something massively stupid at some point, and then they did. She and her friends were heading to the transfer station with bags of trash and got within a mile of it and spied the Dumpster behind the Dockside, and they pulled over and hurled their trash in there, saving themselves the dump fee.

When the owner of the Dockside took trash out the next day, she saw the freeloaders' offending bags, and did what anyone would do: checked inside for clues to the miscreants. And there was an envelope with handwritten instructions for where to find Nancy Kerrigan and when and where she trained and an "X" where the treasure was and maybe a little "Kilroy was here" drawing. In Tonya's handwriting.

That's our girl.

We didn't like her in spite of it. We liked her because of it.

Tonya was banned from figure skating and carried on in a state of disgrace we find comfortable and familiar, and her legend lives on, as well as her place in our hearts. It might seem odd to cheer on a dim criminal with no principle beyond expediency, but resentment of the beautiful Nancy Kerrigans of the world can take you a long way. We're not looking for perfection. We're offended by it. The elites make us feel bad.

So don't say we haven't seen this kind of thing before. Donald Trump is just Tonya Harding with a nice 14-million-dollar bump from Daddy. He's always going to have his fans.

And We're All Out Of Sequels

I don't write about the President much. They say this whole business is comedy gold, easy to mine, and it's not even necessary to dig deep. I could just pick nuggets up off the surface. But I can't bring myself to do it. It's not funny, in the same way insomnia and depression aren't funny. The conditions themselves strip away the humor.

My habit is to make fun of ridiculous situations and people using hyperbole. I point out absurdities by inventing scenarios and dialogue that are just that much more ridiculous than reality. But I can't make up anything stupider than what has already been said or done. In fact, I have never known anyone stupider than this president a minority of us has installed in office. There may not be a dimmer soul. He's got ten neurons in his whole head and even if he could get them all firing at once, they'd still never run into each other. Did the president just say Mussolini was a stand-up guy and if he'd just gotten together with Harriet Tubman, who people are starting to notice big time, they could have straightened out that Norman Conquest, who was a total disaster by the way? Not yet? Three a.m. is coming right up.

I don't expect any improvement, any learning-on-the-job. We're not going to light up Wrigley Field by opening up the refrigerator door in the locker room. I'll reserve my venom for the majority pirate party that, in near unanimity, has decided that the problem with America is that the billionaires don't have enough money. They're making us bend over to scramble for nickels, and while we fight each other over them they're picking our pockets. They'll sell out their own grandchildren for profits, and yours too, but hey, yours? They're your responsibility. You feel so strongly about their future, you go buy everyone solar panels and bicycles with the money you save on not having health insurance, you whining freeloaders.

Meanwhile here we all are in the back seat, belted in tight, and the wind is whipping in our hair, we're going faster and faster, and suddenly we look up and realize Thelma and Louise are at the wheel. But it's not Thelma and Louise, not really. They're a whole lot smarter. And they know what they're up to. They're even holding out the possibility of a sequel. Whoever has his foot on the gas now doesn't have a clue. When the ground drops away, he's going to repeal Gravity. It'll be easy. Believe him.

Circle The Jerk: A Proposition

Picture a man. He's quite alone, but he's a circus barker, and he's calling in the crowd. He's introducing the acts, the clowns, the freaks: Muslims. Bad hombres. Inner-city types. A former opponent. The press. The crowd is cheering, and jeering, and pumping their fists. The man rides waves of adulation. He's a showman: he's got a roomful of plates, and he's keeping them spinning, easily, using a word and a wink, a deft insult, a shrug of dismissal. For the first time in a while, he's comfortable. He's at home.

Now pull back. View the same scene from above and pan out. In every direction, men and women are standing. Thousands. They are silent. They are carrying no signs. They are not marching. They are not chanting. They are standing still, with their backs to the circus barker. Their faces are uncovered, but the man will not see them. He is surrounded by people facing away. He is being rejected: much worse, for him, he is being ignored.

The man does not know what to do with this. He knows nothing about love, but requires admiration like oxygen. He will go where he can find it, or he will summon it to him. If he is surrounded by a thousand silent backs, he will try to prod his disciples into acts of provocation. He needs enemies to keep the plates spinning. He may even direct a military element--police, National Guard--to incite a confrontation. But if the thousands, in a ring around him, marshal the power of their own love and conviction and stand firm, in dignity, there will be nothing he can do. Nothing the entire world won't see.

This was the power of Freedom Marchers in Selma. This was the power of the Standing Man in Turkey. This was the power of the Women's March. It was in the people, millions of people, and it was in the peace. This was our tactic.

There are other tactics. Some cover their faces and dress in black and cause as much disruption as they can manage. They're exhilarated by their own violence in the same way the mob around the circus barker is. And they have an effect far out of proportion to their numbers, like a child screaming in a restaurant.

But we've got the numbers. And when we stand silently, facing away, we draw a bright line between ourselves and the mob, the military, the provocateurs.

Let's do it. Let's #circlethejerk.

The Half-Assedy Of Hope

I saw the results, and I said No. I wanted to stand, march, be in the company of those who were living this horror with me. This waking-up-in-the-night and this nausea and dread. To say No. No. No. No. No. It was important to be on record as saying No.

I've had second thoughts. Actually, just one tiny second thought. I saw a video once: an ex-convict was ministering to the incarcerated. He approached a man in the front row and brandished his fist. The man grabbed it. The minister pushed. The man pushed back. Hard. They were equals. Then the minister gave in, utterly. He let his fist subside. The man immediately quit pushing, and was astonished that he had. "This is your choice," the minister said. "You can push back, and that is what you want to do. But it's not your only option."

I'm not advocating surrender.  What I see is that people are persuadable. But they are never persuadable when presented with a fist. When we assure half the country that they're idiots and we alone hold the keys to the truth, half the country will push against our fist. We do the same thing. We're all dancing lewdly to the disco-beat of our own righteousness. It feels good, but we will never get where we want to be if we continue on this path. And where we want to be is too important to be sacrificed to our vanity.

I first thought about this when Obama spent so much time with the president-elect in the White House. It could have been a short visit. Lord knows, an awkward one, with the president in the same room with the man who pushed the birther lie about him for years and years. But President Obama is a wise and cool man. He has things he'd like to see accomplished. And scolding or snubbing the incoming president was not going to see them done. I like to imagine he was sympathetic. There's no reason to suspect otherwise: this is a man who puts himself in other people's shoes. Trump is in way over his head, and--at least right now--he knows it. He needs help, and I like to think Obama gave it to him. He laid out the complexities of the job, he sympathized, and he offered advice. First thing Trump said after that encounter was that he was looking forward to consulting with Obama in the future.

We know this guy.  If Obama had been at all condescending, he wouldn't have said that.

I like to think Obama gently let him in on some difficulties with abolishing the Affordable Care Act, with tearing up world treaties, with governing by dictat. I like to think he might even have suggested that there was more to this global-warming thing than a hoax by the Chinese, and that he might have a place in history if he led us in the right direction, and that he was in a unique position to do it. Trump might like a place in history.

Next thing I read is that Bernie Sanders offered his full support if Trump actually wanted to take on Wall Street. My friends on the left were outraged. Bernie had sorely disappointed them. Why? Because you must show your fist to the enemy! Then your enemy can push back. Now we're all pushing, and we get nowhere.

Except all Bernie said was he would support Trump if he wanted to take on Wall Street. What? Are we those people? Are we the ones who would obstruct Trump even if he manages to do something right, just to make sure he fails? I would like to imagine that Trump would be interested in collaborating with Bernie. He campaigned on similar issues. It would show him to be nobody's puppet. He might be in a rare position to get something accomplished, particularly if he gets credit for it. I suspect he'd like that.

Listen. Trump might have some blank spots on his slate right now. He hasn't thought that deeply about anything. He seems persuadable, at least a little. He's already demonstrated that by backing away from some of his campaign promises. Instead of supporting this, some on the left are hooting about it and reminding his supporters that they're chumps. He needs help, and right now he knows it. But he's also prickly. Tell him he's a moron, and he's not going to respond well.

If you subscribe to the Clicker Method of animal training, you always reward the behavior you want--even feints in its direction. And you fail to reward the behavior you don't want. That doesn't mean you punish the animal. Sometimes it means you just don't give it the attention it craves. It works for people, too. Your elderly mom calls every night to complain about everything? You don't tell her it can't be that bad. You don't tell her to perk up. You give her nothing, just let your voice trail off. Then when she says something more upbeat, you get all enthusiastic. Within a matter of days you've retrained your mom.

We are at an unusual intersection here. I don't have much hope. I deplore everything Trump claimed to stand for--but I'm not sure he was that invested in any of it. He was doing a reality show with himself as the star. He was giving the people what they craved. Yes, we must stand up for tolerance. Yes, we must stand up for civil rights, and our fellow citizens, and we must stand up for our beleaguered planet, every time we can. Yes, we must fight the evil ones among us who are encouraged by this man's mindless bluster.  Things don't look good, and we will have many opportunities to resist, to make our stand. But if, on any issue--say, he wants to replace Obamacare with single-payer--this guy gets a notion he wants to be a hero, I intend to let him.

Bedfellows

I don't know, guys, I don't know.

The good and beautiful people of my good and beautiful city are walking around like survivors in a blast zone. Strangers embrace. The detonation has happened and now the concussion and devastation will ripple on for a long time. I find I'm not interested in food. That's never good.

We can all see each other now. The really, really bad people are lit up like flares. They're celebrating in their white robes and waving their Confederate flags and terrorizing their fellow citizens in the street. Their unwitting partners--almost half the country--are not really bad people, probably. They're just full of shit.

I don't mean that in the normal disparaging way. I mean that a systematic propaganda apparatus has been cranking away for decades now, and its architects have concocted a poisonous stew of lies and distractions, and seasoned it with honey, and people have tipped their heads back and allowed the funnel to be placed in their mouths, and all that shit got pumped in. A party devoted only to increasing the wealth of the wealthy was rebranded as the champion of the middle class. A good, smart, hard-working woman was recast as a devil. Sound science became fantasy. Demonstrable falsehoods were propagated with glee. But folks on the left as well as the right sucked on that funnel and accepted the particular load of shit that was curated just for them. Truth is the first victim, but there are so many more. When you've been pumped full of shit, you actually begin to believe certain of your compatriots threaten you, when clearly those people have much more to fear from you.

Muslim citizens do not like to be mischaracterized as terrorists, nor Hispanics as criminals, and so too, Trump voters are outraged to be called racists and xenophobes. That's not who they are! That stuff is peripheral. They had other concerns. And you know what? They're probably telling the truth.

But the ability to filter out and discard as irrelevant the flagrant racism metastasizing all around them, and the demagogue at its epicenter, the Igniter-In-Chief, does not speak well of their capacity for empathy. To them I say: these are the people you have cast your lot with. To discount them is to reveal yourselves to be comfortably cocooned and unwilling to take a step outside your own experience and imagine someone else's: your neighbor now afraid to wear her head-scarf to the grocery store. The gay man now second-guessing his usual route home in the dark. The Latina betrayed by her own facial features and subject to derision and terror. The black man assumed to be a gangster, and subject to execution. This is what's happening in America today. We marginalize and dehumanize people who frighten us. Every single time we generalize about people, we're wrong. We're wrong, and we're lazy, and we're also less safe, if that is the point of the exercise. We are all far, far less safe now.



So what do we do? Deliberately, we do not have all the options embraced by some of our political foes: most of us are not armed. That's not the way we roll. One thing we do is band together for peace. We keep our eyes and ears open, and when any of us is under attack, we stand with that person. Literally. Physically. We stand together and we give each other strength. And we reject violence.

And we mobilize. There is so much to defend: our civil rights, our health care, our environment, our standing in the world. Everything we've ever cared about is under attack. Everything that actually does make America great is to be dismantled. It has not escaped us that international terrorists will take this opportunity to goad our new president, an insecure, easily-bruised, childish bully, into the all-out holy war they have yearned for. They've got their man, now. As bad as that is, we don't need an external enemy if we're rotting from within.

And with all that, there are even worse things.  We are many years too late to undo the damage we've already done to our planet. But we must keep things from getting worse. We have to at least try. We are out of time to waste. And we can't do it by pulling out the rest of the fossil fuel and burning it up. We have an international climate change agreement signed now--baby steps, far from adequate--but even at that, our new president wants to rip it up and drill, baby, drill. He wants to shovel ever more coal into the boiler of a runaway train. He is a simple, uninformed man: he thinks he's creating jobs. He wants to give us full employment--as grave diggers. When we're done we can all jump in.

We can't let him. We need to stand, march, and holler. We need to fill the streets with our good and beautiful selves and hold each other up. Someone talked about building a wall. We need to be that wall.

Listen.

Psst! Hey! I'm over here!

Not you, Donald. I know you can't see me. Don't need to talk about anyone's pussy for me to know that. We all know what you think of us. That's our superpower: you can't see us, but we can see you. You're a deeply insecure old fool, of only average intelligence and little education, who needs a lot of attention, and you elevate yourself by assuming you have nothing in common, even humanity, with anyone else. You further subscribe to the preposterous notion that wealth, no matter how it is accumulated, is proof of virtue. You're a boob.

I'm waving at the rest of you, right behind Donald. You guys have spent way too much time in your little clubhouse. But we can see you, even if you can't see us. We can see you, too, Speaker Ryan, even as you rise to our defense, scolding Donald and declaring that we women should be "championed and revered."

Oh, I swann, Mr. Ryan! Thank you! That's me, up there in the stands, in my pretty velvet gown, gazing in adoration as you arrive on your muscular stallion, your long lance in your hand! Now please help me down from this high seat you put me on and give me a little of your time. I'd like a word.

This is such a simple idea: I don't know why it's so hard to understand. But here it is: I'm not that much different from you. Believe me, it hurts me more to say it than for you to hear it. Even though I am female, this unknowable Other, I am a human being who was born and is going to die. That's a mortal frame around us we share, and it's more important than the bits we don't share. And I can tell when someone is looking right through me without seeing me. If you say you revere me, I know you have no idea who I am.

Some club. You know what you people are missing? Empathy. A plain and simple willingness to see other humans as the humans they are. The ability to accept that another's experience is neither the same as yours, nor ultimately that much different. Empathy means you should be able to imagine what it might be like to be a Muslim in a country that increasingly isolates and threatens you. Or an African-American who is repeatedly pulled over and searched for driving a crappy car, or a really nice car. Or a Syrian fleeing his only home with his bloodied children only to find there is no other home for him. Or an ordinary woman reflexively strategizing how to get home without being assaulted. Do some of us frighten you, or repel you, or bore you? That's a sign you need to listen harder. It takes practice. The more you are able to imagine yourself in someone else's skin, the more justice there will be in this world, and the closer we will be to achieving peace..

I don't want a champion. I'll be fine. There are some big things you could help me with: you could dismantle the for-profit health insurance industry. You could dismantle the for-itself wealth industry. You could change the tax system so that our shared burdens are borne fairly. You could recognize that economic growth is unsustainable and that the earth's resources are finite. You could put people and planet over profit.

But you won't. I can see you. I'll see you in November.

The Mirror Test

I brought up the Left-Gaze Bias in the last post. Evidently, we humans look at each other most avidly on the left side as we're facing each other (the gazee's right side). That's where we have learned to read each other's emotions, because that's where they leak out, propelled by our emotional left brains. But this bias also has implications when it comes to looking in the mirror. When we look at ourselves in the mirror, we look at the left side the most. It's just force of habit. Ideally, you should be well enough attuned to your own emotions that you don't need to check out your right eyeball to find out what they are. But the problem is that the mirror has the sides flipped, so we're no longer looking at the tell-tale side, the side that everyone else looks at. That means we tend not to like photographs of ourselves, because they're all backwards and the eye we're used to looking at is on the wrong side. When I see a photo of myself, I instantly notice the gigantic mole on my right eyebrow, which looks unusually prominent because I'm usually looking at the other side in the mirror. This means when other people look at my face, they're looking at my mole. And they can read my emotions. My primary emotion is "shit. You're looking at my mole."

This is not a problem with all animals. Flatfish start out looking like regular fish with an eye on either side of their skinny vertical bodies and then one of their eyes begins to migrate over the top of their head and joins up with the other one, and they flop over ninety degrees and drift to the bottom of the sea and gaze up with both eyes now on the top side. When all is said and done, it doesn't look right. It's never even. If young flatfish ever do try to look at each other's right side, next time they meet they might find the entire side has shlorped over to the left side. This would be fatally disconcerting, in a social sense, and so it is assumed that flatfish are not well developed emotionally.

In some social situations, this mirror business causes problems. Many times when people take photos of themselves to use in, say, social networking sites, they snap a photo in the mirror. This is one of the

reasons people complain that the person they met on line does not look at all like his picture. When Heather goes to meet that cute boy Jason she met on line and is disappointed in him in person, it might be because Jason had taken a picture of himself in the mirror. Also he's forty-seven years old with soiled pants.

Mirrors have been used by scientists to gauge self-awareness among many species, including humans. In the typical mirror test, a bit of schmutz is dabbed on the animal in a spot it could see only by looking in the mirror. If he reaches out to the schmutz on himself, he is said to pass the mirror test. That is, he recognizes that the image in the mirror is him. The human child undergoes a predictable pattern of responses to a mirror. At up to a year, the child sees the reflection as another possible playmate. Self-admiring begins at one year, followed by avoidance behaviors, which go away and do not resurface until menopause.

Not too many other animals pass the mirror test, but among them are all the great apes. Lesser primates have been shown to be significantly less narcissistic. Pigs can use a mirror to find food, but because they really do not give a rat's ass how they look or how much schmutz they have on them, human scientists have assumed a lack of self-recognition. Cows are not expected to develop self-recognition until they evolve fingers. Results with rutting elk and mirrors are inconclusive, but seem likely to result in seven years of bad luck.

This field of mirror research is still new, and the science about Donald Trump is unsettled. He is said to do his own hair, which leads some researchers to conclude he has a mirror, and others to conclude he couldn't possibly.

The Sainthood Express

There's controversy brewing over the impending beatification of John Paul II. It's too speedy, they say. He's only been gone six years, and you can't even get on a stamp until you're ten years cold. J.P. may have been adorable in his beanie and red shoes, but he's just not dead enough for sainthood.

I don't know how dead you have to be. In fact the entire business of generating saints is a mystery to me. It seems like the sort of thing that God should be in charge of, if anybody. Anything that's done by committee here on the sphere doesn't seem like it would be that valuable to the deceased. It's hard for me to visualize the holy candidate looking down with his fingers crossed--I assume down, and I assume crossed--like any other Hall Of Fame hopeful. He has to be beyond such concerns now, and after all, while alive, he got to be pope, and you'd have to be Donald Trump to think you're more important than that.

Some people have been critical on the grounds that numerous personnel who are expected to weigh in on his fitness for sainthood owe their jobs to him and can't be expected to be impartial. It's a scurrilous charge, implying they offered him the ultimate golden parachute to land a position. "Put me in as Bishop of Los Angeles, and I'll totally vote for you for saint," they'd say. I'm cynical, but even I doubt it.

There's only one pope at a time. Oh, there are fake furry ones with big hats, but everyone knows the real one is the one in Rome. I don't know why he gets called a pope and a pontiff as though there were a distinction. You don't hear anyone calling a moose a mastiff, or not more than once. Anyway, even if they're infallible, which I might be wrong about, they don't all make the grade for sainthood. You're supposed to perform a miracle, which by definition is something involving blood and suffering and visual disturbances that cannot be adequately explained. Menstruating girls with migraines would be a lock if these things were fair.

Other objections pertain to John Paul himself. Evidently he was way too involved in ecumenical affairs to go for the glory. He famously organized a peace prayer for people of all faiths and that is no way, sir, to promote Catholicism. No, the flock is supposed to be increased by keeping the club doors shut and the condoms off. But John Paul II wasn't that kind of guy. He had the big tent philosophy, threw his arms open to all, Poles and Italians, capitalists and communists, pedophiles and children, the whole family of man. With the little women doing the cooking and cleaning.

Somewhere in my Lutheran past I recall being informed that we were all saints, and that's what was meant by the Communion Of Saints--us. Even as a child I thought that devalued the brand. I didn't feel like a saint and I knew darn well Mr. Oldham wasn't, as he fumbled for communion under my choir robes. I don't think it's a good idea to dispense flattery like that. You spend enough time telling all the kids that they're smart or athletic or talented or saintly, you just lose your own credibility. Then the kids grow up to be bored, dissatisfied, aimless, unholy, and too cynical to vote, and that's why gay marriage isn't yet the law of the land. It's the Lutherans' fault, not the Catholics'.