Take a deep breath folks, have a seat, bring a glass of wine, because this is going to be a big one.

Before I begin, you have prerequisite reading: The Empty Spaces, or, How Theatre Failed America, an essay from the Seattle Stranger by Mike Daisey.  You must read this before you continue.  Don’t worry, I can wait.

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Ready?  Okay.

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Apparently no one appreciates the Socratic Method anymore.  A snippit of conversation from Twitter:

brooksbayne: we did close it [it being WWII] successfully. that’s why u won’t find anyone arguing otherwise. learn from the successful models.

zornog: Do you think that the Iraq war has the same merit as WWII?

brooksbayne: i think the global war on terrorism has the same merit as wwII, of which iraq is part.

zornog: Okay, answer this question: When does the war on terrorism end?

brooksbayne: it ends when it ends.

zornog: And how will you know when it’s ended?

brooksbayne: as i said, it’s over when it’s over and not one day earlier.

zornog: Okay, so let’s say one day the War on Terrorism ends. Does that mean terrorism ends?

brooksbayne: u need to reread my last two tweets. i’ve been quite clear.

zornog: No, you haven’t. “It ends when it ends” is actually a very vague statement. I’ll ask again: when does the War on Terror end?

brooksbayne: it’s not vague. when a outcome is based on participation of disparate parties, it’s up to all. so, it ends when it ends, finally.

zornog: Vague vague vague. “It’s up to all”? To what? To win? How do you “win” a war on terror? Is a peace treaty signed?

brooksbayne: examine those questions within the context of my response. you’ll find ur answer there. it looks like ur close to getting it.

zornog: No, actually, I get more confused. You don’t understand my questions. My point is that the whole War on Terror is worthless

zornog: because it cannot be won. There is no way you can stop terrorism by fighting a war on it.

brooksbayne: says who?

zornog: Says me! I’ll ask again: HOW do you end the War on Terror? At what point is it considered “over”?

brooksbayne: forgive me for not putting much stock in ur opinion. the question has been answered. u simply don’t like the answer.

zornog: Are you kidding me? Are you actually being serious? You did NOT answer the question. “It ends when it ends” is not an answer!

zornog: Do you think leaders during WWII said “It ends when it ends?” No, they said, “It ends when we kill Hitler.” That’s a reason.

brooksbayne: lol, ur so close to getting it.

zornog: Then why don’t you just tell me, O great leader of the free world?

brooksbayne: ”give a man a fish, and he’ll eat for a day; teach a man to fish, and he’ll eat for a lifetime.”

zornog: Ohhh, so you think establishing democracies is going to end the War on Terror. Well, good luck with that.

brooksbayne: that’s not something i said or implied.

zornog: Then what? Christianity? What are you implying? Why are you being so vague?!

And he stopped replying at that point.  Leaving me with absolutely no answers whatsoever.

I was having a philosophical journey, if you will, with my friend Megan last night over Facebook chat, about sociopaths and America and all sorts of things. I wish Facebook saved chats but it doesn’t, so I don’t remember how we even got into the conversation. I do know that we talked about Dexter for a bit. Season 3 opener was great! I’m excited.

Anyway, I made some point to connect independence and sociopathy/antisocial disorders. My position went something like this: Americans breed their children to be insular and to not trust people. This is done not by words but by actions, which, I argue, are more important than words, and even more fundamentally, dictate behavior much more than words do, especially to children. In other words, you may tell your child to “love thy neighbor,” but if you do not act that way, a child will not know how to love thy neighbor. I think this a pretty solid argument. Social interaction isn’t instinctual; if it were, children wouldn’t be born completely helpless. A horse walks within minutes of its birth, because walking is crucial for its survival. Human babies, however, are born only to be sponges for information.

For most of the evolution of man past its monkeyhood (yes, humans were once monkeys; I don’t care what god you follow, it’s fact), we have banded together for security and survival. Forming social groups was essential to our brain, language, and social development. In other words, we are who we are because of others.

In America, however, things are changing. We are becoming increasingly distrustful of our fellow man. We lock our doors, bar our windows, teach our children not to talk to anyone on the playground, never talk to our neighbors, watch as hundreds of men, women, and children are shows in brutal and agonizing ways on news and television and movies. Dateline stories about child predators, strange Muslim people flying planes into our buildings, our own money going down the toilet because of corrupt businessmen … more and more, people are blaming other people for the downfall of our country.

And let’s not forget divorce. What better way to force a child to consider the benefits of independence than by severing the most important connection they can have: the connection of a loving father and mother.

This has been going on for fifty years, maybe more. Each new generation is being taught that people are bad and not to be trusted. And so as children grow up, they learn to be “independent” as a survival tactic. Ten thousand years of evolution now thrown away to serve the Solitary Person. Parents, grandparents, hell, even children are bypassed these days. In America, there is only You, and everyone else is a mystery.

This, I say, breeds sociopathy. Antisociality is becoming the norm in America as people disconnect from society and connect to their computers. But that is a whole other blog for another day.

This antisocial disorder that pervades our society is the problem of our country. People don’t really care about foreign affairs other than making sure that Muslims don’t kills us and that we get their oil for our cars. Neighborhood Watches crumble as people stop giving a shit about the elderly couple at the end of the block. We’re all cooped up in our homes with a general distrust for everyone. And with the current economical crisis, it doesn’t look like it’s going to stop anytime soon.

I’m sorry, I seem to be rambling a bit, and that’s because I can’t remember exactly what I said last night, other than that Americans are sociopaths by the very nature of our independence, our severing ourselves from virtually everything. I think my next post will be about the ironic replacement of society via the internet, aka A bunch of sociopaths gathering together.

I would generally consider myself a moderate person, Aristotelian in that I believe too much excess or deficit is harmful to the body and psyche.  I spend a lot of my time trying to get the right amounts of everything, whether it be food, drink, or the right amount of reverb on a particular song.  Usually, then, when it comes to morality and ethics, I can be pretty moderate, with some exceptions.

Okay, my title is a bit harsh. Maybe the title should be “Things I Dislike” or “Things I Find a Double Standard In.” Or something with even worse grammar.

I bring this up because of a conversation I had at /orate, about meat and vegans and, you know, the general shit that gets discussed on an online message board because we’re all trying desperately to show how mature we are. It was in a thread about “Walls of Glass,” a slideshow of pigs and cows being butchered, from the moment they’re wrangled up and killed to the moment they’re hung up on racks. Now, of course, that kind of imagery is shocking and disturbing, and I’m an animal lover so it sucks to see animals being killed. But on the other hand, I like meat. I think it tastes good and I think it’s good for me, so I eat it. I’ve had plenty of arguments (most of them on the internet, go figure) about the morality of eating animals, so let’s just skip that and move to the heart of this post: why I dislike veganism.

People who practice veganism range from really cool people to downright assholes. This may not seem surprising, as that wide range of personality extends to the general populace — ah hell, what am I talking about? Let’s get down to brass tacks.

Vegans are setting a double standard, and it goes like this: if I am having a dinner party, and a vegan is coming, it is usually assumed that I must make something for the vegan to eat. So if we have steaks, then I gotta make some kind of non-steak dish for the vegan. This way the vegan won’t feel “left out” (and also won’t starve, I guess). This would be okay in my book if it were reciprocated, but it’s not. If a vegan has a dinner party, the vegan will make only vegan foods, and will not make “meat” foods. This is a double standard. In fact, if I go to a vegan’s house for a dinner party and, knowing that they won’t prepare any animal products, bring a steak to make myself, there’s a pretty good chance I’ll be chewed out because of it. Why? Because of the poor treatment of animals, blah blah etc. My point is this: that’s not fair. At every party I’ve been to where there is a vegan (and Heidi, if you’re reading this, know that I think you’re awesome but hear me out), the vegan will always get some “vegan food.” For example, if we’re eating pizza, there will be one regular pizza and one pizza without meat or cheese on it. No one else is going to eat that pizza. Only the vegan will eat that.

Which means the vegan gets their own food! A whole pizza to themselves, while I have to share a pizza with a bunch of partygoers who are now going to eat twice as much because they’re terrified of gnawing on a bunch of crust and tomato sauce. That’s not fair! And alternately, if I’m at the vegan’s party, I have to gnaw on that crust! I’m forced to!

“You’re not forced,” the vegans say. “You don’t have to eat.”

Well you don’t have to eat at my party! Take that!

Sometimes vegans, in order to placate the dirty meat-eaters, will use strange alchemy skills to change the taste of tofu into the taste of something like meat, only rubbier and not like meat at all. They say, “See, this tofu tastes like meat!” This leads me into my second point: vegans eating meat-tasting things that aren’t actually meat. This is a disgrace to veganism. Vegans, to me, are an ascetic people, who live by extreme and stringent rules. They’re monkish, in other words. If this is true, then wouldn’t eating something that tastes like meat betray their own morality? Wouldn’t it mean that they want to eat meat? I think that if you’re going to abide by such stringent rules, then you shouldn’t eat things that taste like meat, because that shows that you want to eat meat, which means that deep down in your tree-hugging heart, you have a taste for murder!

My solution for this issue is for vegans to bring their own food to the party. A lot of them do that already, and those vegans are nice people. Or they help pay for their vegan pizza. But alternately, you have to allow us meat eaters to bring food to your parties, and if that is meat, then by god it’s meat, and we’re going to eat it and love it.

And that’s what I think about that.