Dear Little Bald Bastard,
  Where does the saying on the wagon come from?

- Middleton Construction

Dear Middleton,
  A little-known Sumerian text called Inkidinkidudipants, which loosely translates to “Up yours, Mesopotamia!” These ancient scrolls describe the creation of many things which later became indispensable to civilization, including both alcohol and wheeled carts. It also makes mention of a practice by Sumerian law enforcement officials, who would pull a large flat cart through the streets of the ancient Sumerian capital, rounding up citizens who had indulged in too much cheap, fermented cactus juice. As long as the offender was sober enough to climb in, he was allowed to clamber into the back of the cart and catch a ride home. If he was too blotto, the polizei would tie his wrists to the back of the cart and drag him to the edge of town to sober up under the blistering Sumerian sun.

Dear Little Bald Bastard,
  In 1,000 years, what will archaeologists who dig up Nike merchandise with the Michael Jordan logo think it means?
- Sarawesome

Dear Sarawesome,
  It’s hard to say what future researchers, rummaging through the remains of long-vanished early-millennial America, will make of the iconic spread-eagled silhouette. Will they recognize it as representative of superlative basketball talent turned into marketing gold? Or will they mistake it for a weirdly lumpy bird?

  The key seems to be whether or not some civilization ending event happens between now and our hypothetical dig. We live in a hyperrecorded, obsessively archived age; the Intertubes are clogged with pictures of every cat in the industrialized world. With the sheer volume of information being stored every second, and given a smooth ascent into a glorious, flying car-filled future, it’s hard to believe that any society sophisticated enough to make organized study of its predecessors wouldn’t be able to find some reference to explain a symbol that was, during our time, so ubiquitous.

  Then again, the logo could be uncovered on the other side of a catastrophe sufficiently horrible to destroy our delicate technological infrastructure. There are plenty of candidates; supervolcanoes, asteroid strikes, nuclear war and drug-resistant bacteria could all do the trick. It’s hard to know what a rebuilt civilization, without the benefit of our LOLcats, will think of us and our marketing tools. However, I can say with a fair degree of certainty that they’ll think those FCUK shirts are pretty fucking stupid.

  And let me say, for a sprightly lass of 6,010, you’re still looking great. Don’t worry about that slight equatorial bulge. It happens to all of us after our mid-5,000s.

Dear Little Bald Bastard,
  What’s the best thing about being a blind, stupid, bleeding-heart, unrealistic, Satanloving, hellbound, hippie liberal cockface?
- One Nation Under GOD

Dear One Nation,
  I’d say it was the sense of smug superiority, but I suppose there’s plenty of that at every point on the ideological spectrum. Self-righteous boobs of every political bent succumb to the temptation to cocoon themselves in the silky softness of like-minded opinion. Of course, affirmation addiction strikes non-political types as well. Without it, Michael Jackson might still have a nose and the Star Wars would likely have been Jar-Jar free.

  There are a lot of good things about being a liberal/progressive/lefty. Our girls are hotter. Our scientists don’t waste time trying to prove that an invisible sky man made it all from scratch. Our gene pool tends to be broader and more diverse. We’re allowed to acknowledge the cognitive dissonance that comes from a living in a country that listed equality as a sacred principle while simultaneously enshrining slavery in its founding document.

  On the whole though, the most awesome thing about being on the ideological left is the inevitable approbation of history. The progress of freedom and justice is a little like the stock market. In the short term, there are ups (Brown v. Board of Education) and downs (the USA PATRIOT Act). In the long term, it’s all upward momentum. Social taboos evaporate and political barriers to individual expression erode. The doomsayers who warned that suffrage for women would ruin us, and that interracial marriage would destroy the American family, are dismissed as misguided fools. The uptight moralists claiming that gay marriage will tie “traditional” marriage to a stake and beat it to death with pink-handled hammers will eventually get the same treatment. Say what you will about self-confidence and the courage of your convictions, but it’s awfully pleasant that history, and hindsight, keep proving us right. Er, correct.

In the Saturday May 31, 2008 edition of The Guardian, Ian McEwan has an interesting study of historic and modern apocalyptic movements [The Day Of Judgment]. Despite consistent failure by stodgy theologians and crazy cult leaders alike to accurately predict the end of civilization, new prophets and new warnings of our collective demise appear with an almost tedious regularity. McEwan’s piece examines the rise of modern fundamentalist doomsaying, and places it in context as only the latest stanza in a centuries-old epic poem of cultural solipsism and utterly useless prophecy.

We sometimes think of doomsday cults as a modern phenomenon, but they’re really just notes in the margins of an age-old script. A time of political or social turmoil, a charismatic leader, a vision of impending awfulness, and a bunch of disaffected followers so caught up in the ruckus that they do things the rest of us think of as unfathomably crazy. The biggest difference these days is that they’ve replaced slaughtering Jews with holing up in compounds, oiling their vast collections of firearms, and having sex with underage girls.

All of that was really an excuse to point out McEwan’s conclusion, which sensibly notes that salvation, for the faithful and the faithless alike, is going to come (if at all) from the same source. Specifically, from us.

The believers should know in their hearts by now that, even if they are right and there actually is a benign and watchful personal God, he is, as all the daily tragedies, all the dead children attest, a reluctant intervener. The rest of us, in the absence of any evidence to the contrary, know that it is highly improbable that there is anyone up there at all. Either way, in this case it hardly matters who is wrong - there will be no one to save us but ourselves.

Lift your head, unfold your hands and get of your knees. All of that stuff is about as useful as male nipples. Despite an untold multitude of fervent prayers, the levies collapsed in New Orleans, the Rwandan Hutus murdered almost a million Tutsis, and Fox cancelled Firefly. Changing things requires passion, commitment and (above all) hard work. Flinging urgent missives into the sky will not make one jot of difference.

Unless you’re trying to bring about your personal vision of the apocalypse. In that case, keep on praying.

In particular, I’m speaking of fire and police departments across the country. These programs leech off us, allowing the government to steal money from our hard-earned paychecks for the sole purpose of saving homes, businesses, and people from the carelessness of liberals who want no accountability for their actions. Instead, they want the government to swoop down and intervene whenever a few flames engulf their property or lives. It’s a slippery slope toward ever-increasing government control and interference in our lives.

We shouldn’t have to pay to save them from their laziness. They should be responsible for their own actions and protection.  The free market should dictate who is saved, when they are saved, and attach a fair price. It worked wonders for ancient Rome’s Marcus Crassus, and it worked after the great London fire of 1666, when homes certified by fire insurance companies got plaques indicating that they should be saved first. Homes without insurance didn’t get plaques, and the private fire brigades viewed them as so much kindling.

Public funds are growing scarce. Who wants to save the neighbor’s house when he’s constantly having annoying parties with loud music and an overgrown lawn which resembles an automobile hospital triage?  Not anyone with any sense.

We must not let this Red fascination with “common good” invade “common sense.” We should allow those places who refuse to pay for protective services to get what they deserve. The owners of potentially burning properties need to take personal responsibility to keep fires at bay.

The bleeding heart crowd loves to sell out our country to a communist idealism that is present within modern-day fire brigades and police departments. These publicly funded bureaucracies are too inefficient to deal with today’s modern crime and fire. Privatization is the only way to go. Let the so-called victims of fire, theft, or other acts of man or nature pay a fee for services rendered before they happen. That’s the way business works in our capitalist democracy; you pay for services, and the more you pay, the better the service. If you can’t pay for the service, then you lose, or you give your property as collateral.

It’s a simple plan, and it will save us from the Godless Communism that threatens our sovereignty. The Founding Fathers would never have agreed to anything related to the Common Good, I’m absolutely certain of it, and since being certain without reason is good enough for our President, it’s good enough for me.

Links:

• http://www.chicagofirepatrol.com/Chicago_Fire_Insurance_Patr.html

• http://rawstory.com/news/2007/As_public_firefighting_decays_billion_dollar_1210.html

• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crassus

• http://www.reason.org/ps152.html