One Zero One One Zero Zero

A rich man

Spent forty-four billion dollars

To stop people from calling him names on a website.

101000111110100110101011100000000000.

 

Forty-four [2019-2023 CE]

The number of millions of people on this planet

Who have fallen into poverty in the last four years

While a new billionaire was created every 30 hours.

 

Forty-four [1969-2023 CE] 

The lowest total number of oil spills in US waters

In any given year of the last fifty-four.

Another hurricane rages on.

 

Forty-four [432 - 440 CE]

The number of Pope Sixtus III

Who spent oodles constructing churches while people starved

As popes did. And do.

 

Forty-four [1781 CE]

The number of Mexican settlers who founded Los Angeles,

The city of angels, where people are detained for simply existing,

And whose wealthy won't pay writers for their work.

 

Forty-four [1936 CE]

The number of days autoworkers were on strike

Against rich folks who oppressed them. 

A temporary victory.

 

Forty-four [1934-2021 CE]

The uniform number of Hank Aaron

Who couldn't stay with teammates in hotels due to his melanin level. 

May he rest in power.

 

Forty-four [2021-2023 CE]

The number of US states that have introduced bills

To restrict teaching about racism and sexism.

Because knowledge is power and the powerful can't have that.

 

Forty-four [1927 CE]

The number of innocents who died in the bombing of a school in Bath, Michigan. 

It quickly fell out of the news cycle and out of history books.

As these things do.

 

Forty-four

The atomic number of ruthenium

The number of sides on a tetracontakaitetragon

The number of candles in a Hanukkah box

The number for UK's telephone country code

The number in Vicks Formula for cough medicine 

The number of the Coast Guard's lifeboat

The number of the president the rich did not like

The name of Satan's nephew in Mark Twain's unfinished novel, The Mysterious Stranger, in which teenage boys witness witch trials, burnings, hangings, death, and mass hysteria at the hands of religious fanatics. 

 

Forty-four

A bullet romanticized as "Magnum"

How many has it killed?

Forty-four

The number of the Nazi Sturmgewehr assault rifle.

It's now made in America. 

Forty-four

The Psalm that says, "Yet for your sake we are killed all the day long;

We are regarded as sheep to be slaughtered."

 

Forty-four [1944 CE]

The year of D-Day; the year the Nazis were making their final stand

In the war that they started for power.

The good guys fought and won that war

As they fight in Ukraine, now.  

If good guys exist, at least.

Maybe they don't.

That rich man who paid the $44 billion 

Would have been happy if the Nazis won.

He has blamed Jews for the ruination of the website he destroyed himself

Like the Nazis blamed Jews for the destruction of the German economy

When the culprits were capitalism and ego.

He turned off the satellites he had given Ukraine

So they couldn't fight the Russian fascists. 

One rich man with all that power.

The power of life or death.

The binary god.

Forty-four [AD]

The year St. James the apostle was executed by Herod's grandson,

Who also died that year, because the rich perish, too.

We're all equal in death.

 

Forty-four [BC]

The year some Roman senators tried to save their republic

By assassinating their egomaniacal dictator

Whose family started a civil war after he died.

One rich family wrecking lives for power.

The empire eventually crumbled.

 

Forty-four

The verse in Matthew 24, which says, "So you also must be ready, because the Son of Man will come at an hour when you do not expect him."

Are you ready, greedy thieves? The Son of Man is all of us.

Beware the Ides of March.

 

Exhibit B

This reply right here is the encapsulation of neoprogressivism. It's all about regurgitating a narrative without thought (the other side of the MAGA coin.) The guy responding is Belgian. Belgium was created by taking territory from the French and the Dutch. It was created because of the stupidity of war and religion, and it basically is the reason we have the equally as stupid concept of modern borders. 

Unfortunately, rightwing extremist politics is taking over there as well, as the Dutch speaking Flemish think they are better than the French speaking Walloons. I guess 80 years without war isn't good for them. Coincidentally, 80 years is the length of the war that started the process of the creation of Belgium.

Yellow Flag

Let me tell you about how I came to own a bright yellow Hezbollah t-shirt.

I left DC one July day not knowing my life was about to change forever. I was a year into a job and airbound for Paris, and then to the Paris of the Middle East.

As we descended into this new-to-me city, I stared out at the blue honey of the Mediterranean wondering how it was possible for any place to be that beautiful. I had been starved of travel for a couple of years, and I was beside myself at the prospect of going to this mysterious city by my favorite sea.

As soon as I left the smokiness of the Beirut airport and felt the outside air that was as wet as the sea, I knew I was in another world. I was INSIDE the news. I would be there for two weeks of meetings, with one weekend between them to see the proverbial sites. I met with various dignitaries, from the US ambassador and the country head of USAID to the Lebanese minister of economy and the Lebanese Obama, Minister of Interior Ziad Baroud. The first meeting was in a bar where I witnessed young people hold actual hope for Lebanon, for Ziad's electoral reforms had been substantial. The second was in the massive palatial office inside the Ministry of Interior itself, where he looked tiny behind the biggest desk I have ever seen in my life. In the end, he WAS tiny, and he ended up having to resign due to political bullshit, thus effectively ending a period of relative stability in a country where stability was a luxury.

But that was later.

I had that weekend to myself. On Sunday, I took what passes for public transportation from Beirut to Baalbek, one of the most preserved Roman ruins sites in the world. (That trip is a story itself. Suffice it to say that the Lebanese I met thought I was insane for undertaking it.) A fully standing temple to Bacchus stands on the site, sans roof but with most everything else intact. At the complex's exit sits one of the oddest places I have ever encountered - a Hezbollah gift shop.

You see, Baalbek is controlled by those Party of God fascists who fly a yellow flag with a violent green rifle on it. Because the site and the adjoining city are situated in the Bekaa Valley, being in Baalbek gives them access to fertile land to grow their drug crops. That's how they buy their weapons, in a nutshell.

Like every other religious group on this very stupid planet, they are absolute hypocrites -  growing drugs, making money off a temple to an ancient wine god, and controlling the distribution of alcohol they allow for us tourist infidels near the site.

No, I did not buy the t-shirt in their gift shop. I had a hard enough time justifying the admission fees.

After I had been climbing through the ruins for a few hours, I decided to have a snack and an Almaza beer across the street. While contemplating what it must have been like to be a pilgrim traveling to this temple complex in its full splendor, the scrawniest man I have ever seen came up to my table in the hopes of earning anything for a scrap of food. The man was clearly starving. I gave him what was left on the table and bought one of the bright yellow shirts from him. It was $5.

Lebanon is a microcosm of global inequality. Beirut is home to glittering skyscrapers built by billionaires and playgrounds for wealthy Gulfies to express their religious hypocrisy in drunken, drug-induced, whoring stupors. At the same time, you have neighborhoods like Dahieh (if it still exists after Israeli bombings), the Akkar region in the north, and pockets like around Baalbek scattered throughout the country that are some of the poorest on the planet. Desperate people tend to cling to whatever person or group tells them that they will save them. That's why Hezbollah exists. That's why the PLO existed and why Hamas exists now. That doesn't make it right; it's just the miserable state of human nature.

Let me be perfectly clear: I HATE Hezbollah. I HATE fascism in all its forms. What Hezbollah has done to the Lebanese people is akin to what Hitler did to the Germans. It was Hezbollah that destroyed that period of stability. It was Hezbollah that brought Israeli bombs. This world is better off without Hassan Nasrallah in it, though innocent people shouldn't have been murdered to end his life.

It's Hezbollah that keeps its followers mired in poverty.

I still have that t-shirt buried in a box in a closet. It's beneath a flag of the Christian fascist party of Lebanon, the Phalange, one of the two parties responsible for starting the 15 year war in Lebanon. I pulled that one down from a light pole, disgusted that it turned up in my neighborhood when I was living in Beirut a half a year later.

Why do I keep these symbols of hate, I wonder. They are no different than a swastika or a confederate flag or a MAGA hat. They all represent ideologies of hate for The Other.

I think I keep the t-shirt to remember that man, to remind me that people don't always consciously choose hate, that sometimes they are drowning and clinging to any life raft they can, even if that raft is sinking itself and will take them down with it. Yellow is the perfect color for those people. Hate is for cowards.

As for the flag, it reminds me of what people can do when they encounter hate. Rip the damn flag down. Don't just put up with it.

That's what we have to do in the coming darkness, no matter the danger to ourselves.

Blue

Let me tell you about the color of the European sky.

I noticed it almost immediately the first time I set foot on European soil. Before then I'd never been further north than Michigan, which starts nearly at the same latitude as the Mediterranean Sea. The scatter of sunlight appeared as the deepest blue I had ever had the good fortune to see, and to this day I make a note of it every time I'm in Europe.

It was under the spring version of this sky when I walked through one of the gates of Hell. Birds were celebrating the rebirth of the northern hemisphere with song. Flowers sprung up in every corner and crack in a sidewalk. The day was so clear that there wasn't even a haze over the mountains in the distance.

The beauty of that moment made standing on the site of one of the greatest atrocities humankind has ever known seem like just a plot to a horror movie. But as I walked through Satan's gate past the railroad tracks that carried more than a million human beings to their deaths, as I entered the rooms with the hard wooden bunks that had been the site of tortured sleep, as I looked up at the showerheads that had carried not water but deadly gas, as I kneeled by the ovens that had turned that cerulean sky to ash, I understood the evil that human beings can carry inside them. I cried.

I was 22 years old. The place was Auschwitz.

It wasn't even the first concentration camp I had visited. I had been to Dachau in Munich, where I saw the "work makes you free" slogan for the first time, and to Terezenstadt in Prague, which served as the "model" camp to lie to the world about what these camps really were. It was a place where they used human beings - many of them children - as living propaganda. But seeing Auschwitz was on another level.

And for what? Ethnicity. Race. Religion. Sexuality. Political ideology. Disability. Immigration status. The same categories of human being a candidate for President of the United States has been inciting certain Americans to hate.

The Nazi concentration camp system started out as a mass deportation system. It ended up murdering millions of human beings.

God, I hope America didn't choose this path today. It CAN happen here. It IS happening here. We don't live outside of history.

Phone Call

As I touch my pocket computer to send to my television by invisible waves a baseball game happening in a ballpark 509 miles from where I sit (I know exactly, because I looked it up on the GPS that comes from a satellite in SPACE,) I am thinking about the phone call I had today with my friend in Lebanon, a country that is 5,826 miles across an ocean, one that I have traversed countless times in a big metal room we call "airplane," a vehicle that has brought me to five continents and countless countries where I have met many people who would become my friends. 

He owns a tiny pub in a university district in Beirut. It is the very definition of a dive bar, with little lighting, no refrigerator (he has a giant cooler for beer), and the occassional cockroach that you learn to ignore. I spent countless hours there drinking Almaza beer, learning about life in Lebanon, meeting new people, and playing darts. He and a handful of others were the first to open bars in the neighborhood after the 15 year "civil war" in Lebanon, which was really just World War III fought on a tiny, beautiful piece of land next to the blue honey of the Mediterranean. It was a war between Lebanese, but also a war between Lebanese and Palestians, Lebanese and Israelis, Israelis and Palestians, Israelis and Syrians, Syrians and Lebanese, Americans and Soviets, Americans and Iranians, Iranians and Israelis...you get the point.

He has three rules in his bar: no politics, no religion, and no kissing. (LOL on that last one - he has a lot of college kids coming in.) Very rarely did I ever see the rules broken, because young Lebanese are fed up with sectarianism and just want to live their lives in peace. 

Now he has no business at all thanks to the atrocities happening to the south of Lebanon in the so-called Holy Land, because most of the foreign customers have left the country (Beirut is full of NGO workers, foreign correspondents, and businesspeople from Western and the Gulf states,) as well as many Lebanese nationals, who have a large diaspora spread across the globe because assholes won't stop fighting in their part of the world. The Lebanese economy had already basically collapsed before the genocide in Gaza; now it is...I don't even know how to describe it. Lebanese have been literally robbing banks to get their own money out for a couple of years. Now there isn't even money to rob. My friend is broke. I don't know how he is going to keep his bar open.

We live in this amazing world where we can watch a baseball game from a machine we carry in our pockets, talk to anyone on the planet at any time, and book flights so we can visit them anywhere and meet new people from different countries and different backgrounds, but instead of marveling at the world around us, people choose to divide themselves by "beliefs" and kill each other over what amounts to ancient fairytales that have been manipulated by politicians over millennia to control the masses.  

That my own country and so many people in it support a genocide is shameful. That college students are getting beaten by cops and faculty are facing termination for opposing genocide is fascism. Shame on those cheerleading mass murder, especially the so-called Christians, who are really rooting for the aggressors because their lives are so miserable they want an Apocalypse to end them, and they think forcing the fullfillment of a warped interpretation of an ancient prophecy will bring it.

Despite rightwing politicians trying to impose their Christian sharia laws they think their religion supports, in the Bible, Jesus only had a few rules, all of which are not difficult to follow but which are broken by American politico-Christians every day. Feed the hungry. Clothe the naked. Shelter the homeless. Treat foreigners as one of you. Turn the other cheek. And do unto others as you would have done unto you. 

A hell of a lot of people want to be abused and murdered, apparently.