The Heathen Science Monitor

May 1, 2008    No copyright. Reproduce and distribute freely. E mail: heathensciencemonitor@yahoo.com

Heard you missed us. Well, we’re back:

Heathen Science Monitor returns after 20 years

The Heathen Science Monitor was founded in Minneapolis in 1982 by Shirley Youxjeste, Johnny Hazard, and Mark Cyst. Ronald Reagan (how we hated, and still hate, even to see or write his name) reigned during the whole six years of the HSM’s existence. Now, he’s McCain’s hero—and Obama’s.

Still playing the Lesser of Three Evils game?

(Non-sexist, non-racist, non-ageist photos of the contestants not available) 

By Shirley Youxjeste, Discreet Affairs Editor
If you’re one of our friends who tend to blame those who didn’t vote for Gore or Kerry in 2000 or 2004 for the atrocities of the Bush regime, please read this before we send you directly to heaven. (As heathens, we can’t send you to hell, but we’re sure you’ll enjoy the company of Reagan and Falwell in the Christian paradise.  We’re happy to see that Bill Clinton’s legacy is finally being questioned by some liberals, but we lament that many  are  supporting  Obama—the same product in a different package.

Here’s a summary of the positions of the three remaining major party presidential candidates:

John McCain: Pledges to keep U.S. forces in Iraq for 100 years.
Hillary Clinton: Says that if Iran attacked Israel, “we would be able to totally obliterate them.” During part of her “35 years in public service,” was a corporate lawyer in Arkansas. Reflecting on those times later,  and defending herself against accusations stemming from the Whitewater scandal, she said: “How can you be a lawyer if you don’t represent banks?” Refuses to say she would pull U.S. troops out of Iraq within the next five years.

Barack Obama: Said  recently that he admires George Herbert Walker Bush and would include him in his administration. Admires particularly his role in “the end of the cold war,” that is, in making U.S. hegemony more absolute and, amazingly, in the first war against Iraq. We can imagine, then, that he also admires Bush for his role in the attacks during his administration and those of Reagan-Bush against Panama, Grenada, and Nicaragua. Obama distanced himself from Jeremiah Wright, one of the few straight-talking U.S. Christians. To criticize his pastor, he resorted to a blind defense of U.S. foreign policy, past and present: How dare anyone criticize this great country? Additionally, Obama has always voted for war funding and says he’ll pull troops out of Iraq some day—but only to send them to Afghanistan (another violent U.S. military outrage that he initially supported and still defends).

(Ready to stop playing the Lesser of Three Evils game? See page two.)

 (Our cartoonist is in rehab again; in this space, feel free to visualize Bush, Bush, and Pope Nazinger I engaging in acts that lead to orgasm and death.)

Okay, heathens! You’ve convinced me. I won’t play the Lesser of Three Evils game any more! But what are the alternatives?

Electoral alternatives:

1. In the late seventies, we went to the University of Minnesota to listen to a reformist consumer advocate talk about how to fight nuclear power within the system, not by protesting. This guy was respectable, but was the most conservative activist we could imagine going to listen to. His name was Ralph Nader and now, according to our liberal friends, he’s the second coming of Stalin and Robespierre. We voted for him in 1996, 2000, and 2004,  and respect his Ibsenian adherence to principles, but this year have another preference.
   
   
2. At the onset of the first gulf war, a young woman in the Georgia state legislature, the first black woman elected to that body, rose to speak against the war. She was vilified by her colleagues, as was Julian Bond more than 20 years earlier in those same chambers when he spoke against the Vietnam War. The woman in question, Cynthia McKinney, was later elected to the U.S. Congress where, twice, she was defeated in re-election bids by Republicans, right-wing Democrats, and pro-Israel groups. (She was one of six congress members who voted against a bill blaming Palestinians for a massacre carried out against them.) She left the Democratic Party last year and is the presidential nominee of the Reconstruction Party and the likely nominee of the Green Party. We’re talking about soul brothers, soul sisters, dixie chicks, and tree-huggers (not to mention just plain heathens) getting together and turning things over. McKinney is the only candidate who sees Latin American social movements as a source of inspiration for those of us who fight from within the U.S. against what Martin Luther King called “the number one purveyer  of violence in the world, my own government.”

Non-electoral alternatives:

1. Civil disobedience: Look to the U.S. in the 1960s, look to India in the 1940s, look to Mexico today. It’s time to put out bodies to the gears and oppose the most evil regime in the world today. You don’t have to go far. If so many people are really against the war on Iraq, let’s do something about it. Take over avenues, congresses, stock exchanges, highways. The enormous power that Bush exercises is nothing compared to the potential power that we have. We just have to use it.
   
   
2. Not-so-civil disobedience:
   
   

 a. Remember what Thomas Jefferson said:“Whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or abolish it…

b. Read this poem published in 1949 by Gwendolyn Brooks:
FIRST FIGHT. THEN FIDDLE.
First fight. Then fiddle. Ply the slipping string
With feathery sorcery; muzzle the note
With hurting love; the music that they wrote
Bewitch, bewilder. Qualify to sing
Threadwise. Devise no salt, no hempen thing
For the dear instrument to bear. Devote
The bows to silks and honey. Be remote
A while from malice and from murdering.
But first to arms, to armor. Carry hate
In front of you and harmony behind.
Be deaf to music and to beauty blind.
Win war. Rise bloody, maybe not too late
For having first to civilize a space
Wherein to play your violin wiith grace

Reader survey: Dean Zimmerman, Sara Olson, Leonard Peltier, Mumia Abu Jamal in prison. Henry Kissinger free. Why? Send your response or any other comments to heathensciencemonitor@yahoo.com .