IN THRALL TO A FOREIGN GOVERNMENT

When the Democrats sold the country on the idea that Trump had received large sums of money from the Russian government, and was committed to following Vladimir Putin’s orders in order to destroy America, it went viral. Millions of people, prepped by over a decade of anti-Putin propaganda and generations of anti-Russian propaganda, eagerly believed it, and many believe it still, even though it has been thoroughly disproved.

You’d think these people might be equally upset if it came to light that  most elected officials from not just one but both of our major political parties regularly take the form of bribery that has been legalized in this country under the name of “campaign contributions” from an organization that is basically a cutout for a foreign government, and will happily pass whatever legislation that foreign country wants, for its own benefit, regardless of whether the laws passed benefit the United States and its citizens.

The country is Israel, and the organization is AIPAC–the American-Israel Public Affairs Committee. Of course, it has no formal ties with the Israeli government, but it reliably does the Israeli government’s bidding, distributing its largess to legislators of both parties with the understanding–proved by its record–that those who disobey its wishes will lose not only the bribes AIPAC gives them (aka “campaign contributions”), but likely their Congressional seats, as many examples attest.

AIPAC has given millions to many legislators of both parties, but the supreme object of their generosity has been….Joe Biden. Our President has received over four million dollars from AIPAC over the course of his long career. That could even be a defense against the influence peddling charges over which the Republicans attempted to impeach him–a story I wish I had time to tell– “hey, Joe didn’t  need Hunter pimping for him–he got all his money from the Israel lobby!”

And Israel’s investment in the US government has paid off quite richly. In the 75 years between its independence and 2022, Israel received an estimated total of $318 billion dollars in US aid. Since the Hamas counterattack in October, Israel has received an estimated 47 billion dollars in military aid alone. Meanwhile, the US government “can’t afford” to forgive student loan debt, implement universal health care, provide low-income housing, or implement the changes and adaptations we are going to need to navigate the challenges of climate change and resource depletion.

“WHAT CAN I DO?”

Recently, I posted some photos of the house we have under construction on my Facebook page. Just in case you are unfamiliar with our situation, our uninsured, and uninsurable, country home burned down in 2013, and my wife and I have been in temporary situations ever since. She spent the first several years living with, and caring for, her parents, while I camped out here to keep the place occupied. We are close enough to town to be an attractive nuisance. I didn’t to arrive here from somewhere else and find out that some tweakers had burned down what was left of the house. “We was just havin’ us some fun!”

Just for the record, “camped out” does not mean I am living in a tent. I have been using a couple of outbuildings that were not designed to be residences. Don’t tell codes, OK? Anyway, my wife’s parents’ transition out of this life freed up enough wealth to enable us to finally undertake our rebuild. So far, it has taken about twice as long as we thought it would, and we are a ways from moving in, but I take pictures of the progress and share them on Facebook, where they generally get “likes” and comments from 30-40 people. Most of what I post on Facebook gets no likes or comments. Considering what I know of Facebook’s policies on sharing news articles, which were tightened considerably in 2017 after Bernie Sanders’ near upset win, and Trump’s upset win, were attributed to stories about them being shared on Facebook, I wonder if Facebook shows my posts to anybody, or is just giving me the illusion that I am sharing my hobby, keeping track of the state of the planet, with my friends. Since my home construction posts seem to be getting some traction, I expressed my concerns in the comment thread, writing:

So….this post has gotten 34 “likes, etc.” so far, while my other posts today, mostly links to articles about the looming possibility of World War Three, have attracted none. The Facebook algorithm has some pretty twisted priorities, IMFAO……

A friend replied: 

Martin Holsinger, nobody wants to think about WW3? It’s out of our hands. People just want to be happy for you.

And I wrote back:

Thanks for the kind thought, but “WW# is out of our hands” is just what the people gambling with our lives (which includes the management of fbk) want us to think. I refuse to be sedated, thank you.

To which he replied

 I’m not sedated. I’m concerned too but what do you suggest we do to put the power in the hands of the people. The deck seems to be stacked against us.

The rest of this post is my response to his very appropriate question. Since the original was written “on the fly,” this is an edited, expanded version of what i wrote to him. I spend a lot of  time voluntarily expressing my opinions, whether anybody wants to hear them, or thinks I’m worth listening to, or not, so I felt honored that somebody was actually asking me.  Here’s what I wrote:

RUSSIA HAS RIGGED ELECTION, MURDERS OPPOSITION LEADER, CLAMPS DOWN ON ABORTION!!!

Tucker Carlson’s interview with Vladimir Putin made quite a splash. The Russian President, while perhaps a bit verbose and detail-oriented for Westerners’ sound bite-addled ears, came across (to me, anyway) as much more reasonable, and well-informed, than the vast majority of American politicians.

While I’m out on the fringe politically, apparently I was not alone in my perception for once, and a lot of Americans were noticing the sharp contrast between Putin and our homegrown politicians. I think that prompted our intelligence community to decide that something needed to be done to overcome the possibility that a significant number of Americans might generate some good will towards Russia, and that such good will might become a socially acceptable position in this country. The first wave of Rcounteroffensive came in the form of various corporate news outlets running dismissive stories about the interview. Next thing you knew, US-supported “opposition leader” Alexei Navalny died in a Russian prison at the tender age of 48, and so of course the Ministry of Truth, through all its various media sock puppets, got to call Putin a “murderer.” Then Russia had an election, which our corporate press called “fixed,” since Putin polled about 86%,. Then, to ice the cake, a few Russian states, or “regions,” as they call them, decided that private clinics would no longer be able to perform abortions, so our media could trumpet “RUSSIA CLAMPS DOWN ON ABORTIONS!!!” THAT was sure to alarm any liberals who were still sitting on the fence!

But, when you look a little closer, these tropes don’t just start to come apart. They melt away.

First, let’s look at the Russian election, through the lens of US regime change instrument “The National Endowment for Democracy.” The NED has a polling organization inside Russia. After all, they need to have accurate information about what the Russian people think if they are going to try and influence it. It’s reassuring, in a weird sort of way, to find out that at least one agency in our government is not running purely on ideology, aka “wishful thinking”!

ON BEING A GOOD AMERICAN

My father was a World War II veteran. He was among the US troops who entered Germany in the closing months of the war, and he told me, and others, plenty of stories about his experiences. One in particular comes to mind at this point.

Many of the German people fled ahead of the Allied advance, and so it was that my father’s company got the luxury of billeting in the empty homes of some of those Germans. The home where my father  bedded down for a few nights was well-appointed, with an impressive library. My father didn’t speak German, but he recognized the names of Goethe and other well-known German writers and thinkers on its shelves. The homeowner was obviously a cultured intellectual. At the end of the street where this home was located, a footpath went through a well-tended forest, crossed a small creek on a footbridge, and led to….a concentration camp, its inmates still alive, albeit barely. Being one of the US soldiers who discovered this was perhaps the most shocking thing my father had ever experienced, or would ever experience. It was also shocking to him that the individual whose bed he was sleeping in (after months of sleeping on the ground) could live literally within a five minute walk of such a horror, and, apparently, simply accept it.

Something like what my father saw. These people are Russian POWs, not Jews, but the Nazis viewed Slavs as just as subhuman as Jews, so….

But then….what could this German have done? To protest would only have meant that he would have soon joined the population of the camp, at best, or simply be killed straightaway. So, perhaps, he kept his head down and hoped the nearby live horror show would end soon. My father’s anonymous, involuntary host was one of those people we ironically call “The good Germans,” the ones who knew, or said afterwards that they knew, that the genocide and oppression of the Nazi regime was wrong, but who felt powerless to oppose it. That’s what they said afterwards. When it was happening, perhaps they were swept up in the propaganda and the groupthink and gave tacit approval to ridding society of “undesirables.” That they did not like the Nazi regime, but felt powerless to stop it, would have been a thoroughly plausible claim–in the 1932 election, the Nazis only won about a third of the votes, and the combined socialist-communist vote total was higher than the Nazi total–which didn’t prevent the Nazis from bullying their way into power.

And that’s how it is for us here in America these days. Our government, elected by a minority of the voters, is aiding and abetting a gross genocide. It’s not down the street from us, but it’s right there on the phones so many of us carry with us everywhere, if we care to look. While you won’t get imprisoned for speaking out against the holocaust America is enabling in Gaza, your government won’t listen to you, and you might get fired, since our country’s upper (managerial) classes are the segment of the population most supportive of the Gaza genocide. Since the managerial class controls both of our major political parties, they both support Israel’s final solution to the Palestinian problem, making The Green Party’s Dr. Jill Stein, an extreme long shot in terms of electability, pretty much the only candidate in the race who is willing to call this ethnic cleansing what it is, and who wants to stop it.

Bernie Sanders, once the great mensch hope of the left, has sunk to the point where he says the US must act to end the “Gaza disaster,” but continues to pledge his support to the Biden administration. That’s about like saying you deplore sending Jews and Communists to “the camps,”  but you support Hitler for the way he’s rebuilt Germany.

SIT WITH IT

(Note: this is not, or not yet, part of a radio show, but it is certainly fundamental “deep green perspective” material. It was originally intended as a social media post, but it seems substantial enough to be worth  preserving here.)

Sit with it. Sit with the genocide. Sit with the threat of nuclear war, with governments becoming ever more repressive “in defense of liberty,” with the pandemics and epidemics, with the climate chaos, with the greed, power, and cruelty of those who have too much already and will never feel satiated, with the millions of refugees fleeing violence and hunger, with the increasingly shaky global supply chains that enable the comfortable way of life that we, the wealthy of the world, have taken for granted for so long. Sit with how hard it seems to be to change these things for the better, with how painful it is to accept things as they are.

But all that stuff and all those people out there are only a part of it.

I sit with my own failings and inadequacies, the way I don’t live up to my high ideals, the ways I let myself and my friends down, with my seeming powerlessness in the face of what looks like one gathering Gotterdammerung of a storm. I sit with the fact that, storm or no storm, I will almost certainly die in the next twenty-five years. I sit with all this because there is nowhere else to sit. This is what is, this is what and where I am, where we are, and there really is no way out but through, and the way through, whether it leads to sanity or extinction, begins with accepting this reality, with all its threats, crises, pain, and personal failures. There is nowhere to run to and escape any of it. Trying to ignore all or any of the factors, internal and external, will certainly make them worse. What we can control about all this is whether we are calm, clear-eyed, and compassionate. If anything can make a difference, it is that.

Oh, yeah—sit with the good stuff, too, with the beauty of this planet, with the miracle that there is life here at all, with the wisdom and compassion, the generosity, the love that so many people demonstrate daily in so many ways. Sit with everything you know of out there, all the things you’ve felt or done, that make you feel good. Sitting is not about falling into hell, nor is about rising into bliss. It is about finding balance in the middle..

The quote in the graphic mentions a teacher and a website I had never heard of before. It doesn’t really matter to whom the quote is attributed, because there are so many people who have said the same thing. It could have come from any Buddhist, Taoist, or Hindu teacher, any Christian, Muslim, or Jewish contemplative, from any indigenous shaman, from any secular therapist. That’s because this instruction, like the ability to understand mathematics and engage in extended, ecstatic lovemaking, is part of being human, part of everybody’s mind, discoverable by anyone who takes the time to look and learnable by anyone who is willing to apply themselves. Call it “self-realization,” call it “Christ Consciousness,” call it “Buddhahood.” It is our birthright. May enough of us claim that birthright to lift this world and all the beings in it out of this morass of delusion and danger, and into a saner, more honest and compassionate reality..

Much thanks to the social media friend who sent me this reminder and provoked these thoughts. That’s what friends are for!

music: Richard and Linda Thompson, “First Light”

 

OF SEX AND DEATH

I often read, and occasionally hear, a comment that goes something like this:

“Even though their foreign policy, economic policy, and environmental policies are not that great, it’s important to support the Democrats because they support women’s’ reproductive rights and the rights of LGBTQetc. people.”

Here’s a long, thoughtful, nuanced response.

So…even though the Democrats’ foreign policy is supporting genocide in Gaza in the name of “supporting Israel,”

has killed six million people and plunged several once-functional countries in the Middle East into chaos in the name of a “war on terror,”

impoverished scores of nations through neoliberal financial chicanery in the name of “free market capitalism,”

even though”Bidenomic’s” claim that the economy is improving is a flim-flam job hiding the fact that the rich are getting richer and the poor (that’s most of us) are getting poorer,

even though the Biden administration is deliberately fueling a Middle East-wide war, making noises about a war with China, and is flirting heavily with starting a nuclear war in Ukraine. in the name of “defending the free world,” i.e., their right to be rich,

and is spending American tax dollars and indebting us far into the future to enrich the corporations and stockholders of the military industrial complex, rather than providing much-needed social and environmental services, all in the name of “defending our way of life,”

even though the Democrats are united with the Republicans in pursuing these unholy ends, with results that could have effects ranging from the end of human civilization to the end of life on this planet,

you are so fearful about losing your right to abortion and birth control, so fearful that you will be discriminated against for who/what turns you on or the fact that you might like to be a body with a chromosome configuration different from the one you were born with, you are so steered by that, that you will vote for the perpetrators of all these crimes, showing you are fine with the sacrifice of literally millions of people and the transformation of millions more from settled communities to refugees so you can have an abortion, access birth control, dress how you want to dress and.or do what you want to do in bed without fear of persecution. I sympathize, I assure you. But…

DEMS MUST KEEP THE UKRAINIAN ZOMBIE ALIVE–UNTIL NOVEMBER

I am always happy to be reminded that I am not the only one who sees the parallels between US support of Israel in its genocide in Gaza and US support for Ukraine and the genocide it was attempting to commit in Donbas before the Russians intervened to stop them. Veteran diplomat Craig Murray had this to say recently:

The genocide in Gaza – or more precisely the major NATO powers’ active and practical support for the genocide in Gaza – has forced me to re-evaluate my views on Ukraine in a manner more sympathetic to the Russian narrative.

In particular, I was complacent in my dismissive attitude to the argument that the Western powers would back ethnic cleansing and massacre in the Donbass by forces including some motivated by Nazi ideology.

The same powers who are funding and arming Ukraine are funding and arming a genocide by racial supremacist Israeli forces in Gaza. It is beyond argument that my belief in some kind of inherent decency in the Western political Establishment was naive.

I apologise.

This does not mean that I was wrong to call the Russian invasion of the Ukrainian state illegal. I am afraid it was. You see, the law is the law. It has only a tenuous connection to either morality or justice. A thing can be justified and morally right, but still illegal.

The proof of this is that we have an entire legal structure governing transactions which is designed to achieve massive concentration of wealth. In consequence, the world is predicted to have its first trillionaires inside the next five years, while millions of children go hungry.

That is plainly immoral. It is plainly unjust. But it is not only legal, it is the purpose of the system of law.

There’s a lot to unpack in that excerpt from his article. Murray’s “belief in some kind of inherent decency in the Western political Establishment” was, indeed,  extremely naive. I am surprised to find such naivete in a veteran diplomat, but I am grateful he possesses the degree of introspection and honesty that allowed him to see this and change his view.

How far back do the west’s willingness to “back genocide and ethnic cleansing,” and its tolerance for Nazi ideology, when it serves the right purposes, go? The history of western-sponsored ethnic cleansing goes way back, past Europe’s American genocide and the violent suppression of European paganism to the deeds of the Roman Empire, if not farther, but I’m going to leave that topic for another day, and focus on USNATO’s tolerance for Nazi ideology. That was first demonstrated in the aftermath of World War II, when the CIA, instead of helping round up Ukrainian Nazi collaborators, recruited them to help the US’s assault on the Soviet Union. “Assault” is definitely the operative word here–the Nazis had set up armed Ukrainian guerrillas in the course of their retreat from Russia, and the USCIA quickly took up the slack when Germany was no longer able to supply them. It took until 1953 for the Russians to put a stop to the overt rebellion, but the CIA kept on keepin’ on, setting up a front group to publish a newspaper for the Ukrainian diaspora, and keep spreading their fascist, racist, genuinely anti-Semitic views.

You want “anti-Semitism”? Here’s the real deal, brought to you by the CIA, who saved his ass from the Russians and then supported his ass for the rest of his life.

Here’s another guy the CIA saved from the Russians. He called for “a final solution” to Ukraine’s “Pole, Muscovite, and Jew problem.” But that’s OK! He’s Ukraine’s official National Hero and they’ve made it illegal to criticize him–but that’s OK, too==he speaks for himself very well, I think!

THE RADICAL FARMERS’ REUNION

NOTE: Since I published the broadcast version of this story, I have revised and expanded it considerably.

Way back in the 1970’s, I thought I was going to spend my life taking care of the orchards, vineyards, and berry patches of the intentional, spiritual, communist community of which I was a member. You may have heard of it. We called it “The Farm.” Our basic material agreement was “from each, according to their ability, to each, according to their need, ” (although the abbot of the multistery [monastery for householders] hushed me when I put it that way, preferring to reference The Book of Acts, which says of the early Christians, “And all that believed held all things in common, and parted to each as they had need.”). (Hey, pretty much all our neighbors were born-again fundamentalist Christians, and the US as a whole is virulently Marxophobic.). Besides, the IRS recognizes the Book of Acts as the basis for a certain tax classification, but not the Communist Manifesto. Whether it sprang from theology or ideology, no money exchanged hands among us. We were living  the dream of the San Francisco Diggers: a society in which everything was free–except, of course, that we needed money to bring in things from the outside that we weren’t willing to do without–like toilet paper and gasoline—though there were times when the toilet paper supply got pretty skimpy, and we made do, or should I say doodoo, with the pages of books we considered “unspiritual.” Is using a book for toilet paper more disrespectful than burning it? I’m not even going to try to tackle that question.

The part I want to focus on right now is that there were around fifteen hundred of us at our peak, we were vegan, and we grew most of what we ate–not just garden veggies, but grains, beans, and some of our fruit, pretty much everything but cooking oil and cane sugar, which, as vegans, was our sweetener of choice. In the 70’s, stevia was still an obscure tropical plant. We had our own flour mill and our own soy dairy. Growing that much food took about seventy of us, mostly guys, hundreds of acres of land, and a whole lot of fossil-fuel powered farm equipment. One guy was the crew chief for most of the years we farmed collectively, and last year he got together with some other former crew members and organized a “Farming Crew Reunion” that convened the week before Thanksgiving. He’s now a relatively public figure due to his founding “The Farmer/Veteran Coalition,” which helps military veterans become farmers. That sounds to me like a pretty good practical version of “molding our swords into plowshares”–molding our sword-bearers into plowsharers, so to speak–so I’ll name him: Michael O’Gorman–that will also keep me from having to refer to him as “The Big Kahuna” or something like that through the rest of this report.

What follows is a kind of open letter to my fellow former farmers, partially reporting what I and others said there, partially my later comments on what I and others said, the current state of the organic farming and food sales business, and, in conclusion, how both our efforts back in the 70’s and the current state of things relate to our culture’s need to transition to a mostly local, mostly fossil-fuel free, more labor-intensive, more egalitarian form of agriculture and life in general.

The Farm’s farming crew in 1973. I’m probably in there somewhere. Did some of us really have photographable auras, or is that just sunlight shining through frizzy hair? Or a little of both?  Thanks to The Farm Archive for the photo.

Here’s my letter:

MICHAEL HUDSON GIVES US THE BIG PICTURE

Michael Hudson is one of my favorite political/economic commentators. He recently did an interview with Ben Norton of The Geopolitical Economy Report in which he revealed what he considers the linkage between the war in Ukraine, the war in Palestine, and the war the US would like to start with China, although the details of that are far less clear. The most essential part is this:  What Israel has done to Gaza and the West Bank has a parallel in what Ukraine had been doing to the people of Donbas since 2014, and was about to escalate by several orders of magnitude when the Russians intervened. This wasn’t “ethnic tension” so much as it was a strategic application of pressure by the US/NATO. The threat to the people of Donbas did what it was supposed to do–it forced the Russians to either intervene or look impotent.

The parallel is that the torture of Gaza is intended to lure Iran and Hezbollah into war. The Western press has had great success in painting the Russian intervention in Ukraine as “aggression,” and would doubtless do the same if Iran did actually make a move, though my guess is that a lot fewer people would believe them, as we see happening about Gaza.

The Iranians, however, don’t have the overwhelming military[power that the Russians have and don’t share a common border with Israel or Palestine, so they are being more cautious. On the other hand, Israel is a very small country, and it would not be that difficult to bomb flat. Just how all this applies to the Taiwan-China situation has yet to be seen. but it’s worth noting that the big weapons sale bill Congress is currently cooking up includes appropriations for all three countries. I strongly recommend that you listen to or read the whole interview, but meanwhile here are some of my favorite parts:

HUDSON:….when England first passed the act saying there should be in Israel the Balfour Declaration, it was because Britain wanted to control the Near East and its oil supplies.

When Israel was formed in the United Nations, the first country to recognize it was Stalin and Russia, who thought that Russians were going to have a major influence over Israel. (my comment: If you didn’t know already, a big percentage of Israel’s population is formerly Russian Jews. For some reason, they prefer the climate in Tel Aviv to the climate in Sverdlovsk.)

And then after that, of course, when Truman came in, the military immediately saw that America was replacing England as the chief of the Near East. And that was even after the fight, the overthrow of the Mossadegh government in Iran in 1953.

So from the United States, it’s not Israel’s wagging the American tail, just the opposite. You mentioned that America is supporting Israel. I don’t think America is supporting Israel at all, nor do most Israelis, nor do most Democrats.

America is supporting Netanyahu. It’s supporting Likud, not Israel. The majority of Israelis, certainly the non-religious Israelis, the core population of Israel since its founding, is opposing Likud and its policies.

And so what really is happening is that to the United States, Netanyahu is the Israeli version of Zelensky in the Ukraine.

HOW REV. MARTIN LUTHER KING WOULD HAVE BEEN TREATED THESE DAYS

Note: due to weather and computer issues, there was no live show this month, but I wanted to post this in a timely fashion, since tomorrow is the holy day of the closest thing our country has seen to a major saint.

I think it’s pretty well known by now that the U.S. government was acutely uncomfortable about Rev. Martin Luther King, especially in the last few years of his life, when his investigation into the roots of our culture’s systemic mistreatment of the people our culture stole from their homelands in Africa led him to decide that it was time to confront the mad dog of militarism and its cold-hearted master, capitalism.

It is also well known that J. Edgar Hoover was using the FBI to search for and exploit weak spots through which King could be attacked and brought down, short of the (quite likely US government-sponsored) gunfire that would soon kill him.  I think this  is often portrayed as “Hoover’s thing,” as if he were merely a rogue force in a government that otherwise supported the civil rights struggle. He was not. Rev. King was being denounced by the New York Times and The Washington Post. President Johnson was refusing to meet with him any more and referring to him as “that damned (n-word) preacher.” Polls showed that only a quarter of African Americans, and less than ten percent of all Americans, supported King’s expansion of his objectives.

The weak spot Hoover found was that King, out of compassion, no doubt, had a hard time saying “no” to a great many women who wanted to let him know how much they appreciated him.The newspapers of the time declined to publicize Hoover’s “King sex tapes,” so Hoover sent the tapes to King’s family, along with an anonymous note suggesting that King commit suicide to avoid living with a damaged reputation, but that didn’t work, possibly because Coretta King already knew what her husband was doing.

Apparently, Hoover couldn’t find anybody involved who was willing to complain about this aspect of Dr. King. What Hoover, or his successor, might do with a King-like figure these days is to hire some women to bed Dr. King and then claim that he abused and raped them, or perhaps claim King took advantage of the power imbalance between them. It wouldn’t matter that other women might protest that that was not their experience with him. This growing chorus of accusations that Dr. King was a sexual predator would get him banned from Facebook, while supporters who tried to share stories in his defense would find their stories, and their entire presence, being soft-censored. Youtube might demonetize him, or banish him entirely, and Google would certainly make anything good about him hard to find. Presto! Martin Luther King is as fringe as Russell Brand!

Those are all tactics that law enforcement and those media platforms are already using on dissidents. Julian Assange was originally confined to the Ecuadorian Embassy due to phony rape charges, which were also used to degrade his reputation, along with other false claims about him, charges that were endlessly trumpeted by corporate media, while they suppressed the works of all those who presented the facts that disproved those charges. Eliot Spitzer is  clearly not so anti-establishment as Assange, but the guy who was making a name for himself as “the sheriff of Wall Street” had his sexual preferences headlined by the same media that refused to feature Hunter Biden’s laptop “because it was Russian propaganda.” (Which it was not.) They brought Spitzer down.

I am not denying that there are men who use their control over women, or their ability to offer a quid pro quo, (as employers, for example) to bed women who would not otherwise have opened themselves to the man in question. That’s wrong, and my guess is it makes for bad sex. But sometimes, the enthusiasm is mutual. That’s where trying to create an either/or legal scheme to stop this kind of exploitation gets tricky.

So…what is it about Rev. King, Eliot Spitzer, and a host of other charismatic men, many of whom have been “busted”? Why do they end up boinking so many women? And why are women, apparently, all too willing to give themselves to somebody who is clearly not going to be their lifetime mate? And why, after having engaged with a charismatic guy, do women sometimes become bitter because the encounter didn’t lead to a life together? I think the answer lies deep in our primate roots.

There are two different primate mating styles. In some primate species, males and females mate as partners, and co-operate in raising their offspring. In other species, there is a strong sense of hierarchy, and the females mostly mate with the male at the top of the hierarchy. They don’t expect him to pair off with them or help raise their babies. Females favored by the highest-status male rise in the female status hierarchy. That’s what’s in it for them. Humans, neurobiologist Robert Sapolsky has observed, are the only primate species that practices both mating styles, which occasionally leads to misunderstanding and disappointment. In other words, we have been a society composed of both kinds of monkeys since around the time we came down out of the trees and lost most of our body hair.

I think we need to accept that, as psychologist Eliot Aronson put it, “Humans are not rational animals, we are rationalizing animals. We like to make sense to ourselves.” To put that another way, our bodies sometimes have minds of their own, and the brain in our heads will perform all kinds of mental flip-flops to create reasons why our bodies are doing what they want to do, with no regard to our very recently thought-up notions of propriety. Sexually speaking, we are extremely prone to not “behaving ourselves,” and I think the world would be a better place if we acknowledge that, and stop expecting that we, and our heroines and heroes, must adhere to some conceptual standard. This is not to say “anything goes.” It’s more like “anything consensual goes.”

As things stand, enough people have strong opinions about what other people should, or should not, be doing, so that corporate media/the government can jerk them around emotionally with tales of scandalous behavior. It’s kind of a societal version of Mr. Trump’s notorious statement, “Grab ’em by the (short hairs) and they’ll do whatever you want.” However, the prudes are, it seems, shrinking in number, while the ranks of the tolerant are growing. It’s just another of those neck and neck races to the finish line that all seem to be intensifying at once these days.

So thank you, Dr. King, for being such a gentleman that the FBI couldn’t find anybody willing to complain about you, and could only resort to recordings in which your praises were being sung. It’s just another way in which you set an example we can all aspire to.

music: Buffy Ste. Marie, “Until It’s Time For You To Go.”

Mothers of Invention:  “Motherly Love”

Joan Osborne “My RIght Hand Man“