The War Comes Home

If it isn’t one thing with imperialism, it’s another.

This morning, while a licensed electrician was improvising his way through my circuit panel, he informed me that the aluminum wiring I have in my house tends to run hotter than copper wiring, run up an electric bill by up to 10% more than copper, burn out circuits and lights quicker than copper, and is a potential fire hazard.

I wondered “why would an electrician wire a house with aluminum wiring in the first place?”

The answer is that during the Vietnam War in the late ‘60’s and early ‘70’s (when my house was built), copper was being used for shell casings in ammunition, driving the price up. So because the Dulles brothers convinced President Eisenhower (and by proxy every Cold War president) of their “domino theory” that if one more country went Communist, every other country in the world would follow, I have substandard wiring in my house that keeps shorting out when I turn my goddamn oven on.

War.
Huh.

Good God y’all.
What is it good for?

Absolutely nothin’.

Say it again.

Crazy From The Heat

A news story I read this morning reported that "the last few decades of the 20th century were warmer than any comparable period in the last 400 years." Disturbing, yes, but put into its proper historical context, even more so.

That would make it warmer than its been since the seventeenth century, which gave us the witch hunts of Europe and New England. The "Burning Time," as it came to be known, targeted women and the poor in particular. Historians estimate tens to hundreds of thousands were killed, tortured and otherwise maligned in the name of cultural conformity based on weak interpretations of Christian doctrine.

The seventeenth century also brought the institutionalization of the slave trade, which made racial victims of, as historian Ira Berlin refers to them, the "many thousands gone." The slave trade was ultimately a necessity of a nascent consumer society which was more preoccupied with materialism than morality.

The seventeenth century also saw an unprecedented consolidation of wealth and power in the English imperial system, complete with poor laws against vagabondage and begging, and the institutionalization of torture and capital punishment as forms of state-sanctioned terror against those who dared to challenge the theft of the "common wealth."

Given this historical context, I am more against global warming than I ever have been, since I see many of the same patterns in the news headlines of today. The connection between temperature and social, political and economic repression may be a bit specious, but ultimately warrants a reconsideration of the always good advice to "chill out."

Jihad (Holy War)

Why, five years after the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, do reporters insist on qualifying the term "Jihad" with the tag "holy war" when they use it in their stories?

Firstly, interpreting the term Jihad as "holy war," is a gross oversimplification. Muslim scholars have written entire treatises on what Jihad means, and the term "war" as applied by corporate media types doesn't do as much to get at the complexity of the idea as it does to reaffirm the suspicion that all Muslims are pathologically insane. That aside, any American who doesn't know what the term means, even in oversimplified commercial terms, doesn't deserve to understand the point of the story. I seriously doubt that anyone reading or listening to a news story would have to go to the dictionary if the term "Jihad" appeared without an explanation that it means (or at least is implied by the writer to mean) "holy war."

So reporters, please, stop explaining what a Jihad is, or better yet, go more in depth about it. Parenthesizing the definition is no longer necessary. Thank you.