New 7 Wonders

I’m a little disappointed that I haven’t visited any of the winners of the “new seven wonders of the manmade world” contest, although I have visited four of the permanent “finalists” — Angkor, the Statue of Liberty, the Eiffel Tower, and La Alhambra. Of all the wonders I’ve seen, Angkor would win my vote, but I fear that it suffered in the voting because it is probably one of the least visited, understood, or well-known. Still it is a first class marvel.

Nausea

This is by far the most nauseating news story I have read this year. Not disturbing. Not upsetting. Just nauseating. And it’s not even as though I think press stories like this distract from “bigger issues.” This is the issue — what it means to be human today. This is why the Sex Pistols wrote “God Save the Queen” exactly 30 years ago. Have we evolved at all? Moz says “no.” (Skip to verse three, about 1:30 in, if you’re not a Morrissey fan.) And as for the President . . .

Khalid Shaikh Mohammed’s confession

How can we trust anything that Khalid Shaikh Mohammed “confesses” to? After four years in what I can only imagine were hellish conditions; tortured, unfree, and deprived; almost certain that I would be found guilty for whatever crime that the U.S. government chose to accuse me of, I too would admit to anything my torturer, my captor threw at me, accused me of. Even the linked article mentions that Mohammed admitted to crimes the planning of which the U.S. government was unaware of. Perhaps it was because they were never planned? If I was assured by a jailor that I would be found guilty of planning the deadliest terrorist attack against history’s greatest superpower, and then was questioned about planned assassinations on U.S. president’s while having my toenails pulled out, I would probably make up some bullshit too. And confess to any other of high crimes and treasons while I was at it, just to make the pain stop (as Mohammed did). If you need any greater proof of how delusional our government might be, look no farther than the fact that they might accept this man’s tall tales.

This is why laws are passed to outlaw torture and guarantee the civil rights of even the most apparently despicable of human beings: because once you start to solicit “truth” through pain and deprivation, you come up with untruth — a world in which appearances must be assumed deceptive. Enlightened civil society is a sort of contract we all enter into in order to guarantee, to some extent, that waking life is not an illusion. As a Marxist, I certainly feel that we can improve on that contract, but I also see its brilliance and its necessary adoption such that we may avoid regression to an earlier state of human development or total annihilation of the human species — the American system’s chosen path.