Hey, remember that joke I told last night? Well, whatever.

After I typed it in and posted it, I got to thinking . . . it could very easily have been a joke about George Washington, not just one that mentioned George Washington. So I wrote essentially the exact same joke, only with George himself at the center, and not merely a reference to set up the punchline. It definitely makes it a better George Washington joke, but does it make it a better joke?

Let’s find out, eh?

George Washington had the misfortune to grow up before there was ever such a thing as indoor plumbing. As such, he had to make use of an outhouse whenever nature called. As a young boy, George hated his family’s outhouse, and always dreaded having to go there. One day it began to rain. A light drizzle soon swelled into a downpour that rendered the hill behind the Washington home a slippery, muddy mess. Not seeing his father around to stop him, young George snuck outside and shoved the foul old outhouse down the hill. It slid down the mud and broke into a fetid pile of sticks at the bottom.

Soon after his father came in the house and asked George if he had been the one to push the outhouse down the hill. “Yes,” George admitted. “It was me.”

“All right, then,” said his father. “Come here and get your whipping.”

“But father,” George protested, “you didn’t punish me when I was honest about chopping down the cherry tree!”

“True,” said his father. “But then again, I wasn’t in the cherry tree at the time.”

Eh? Eh.

You would not believe how hard it is to find a good George Washington joke these days. I bet back ‘round the 1790s you would have found tons of them, just pamphlet after pamphlet of incredibly biting jabs at the father of our country. Nowadays, no such luck.

This, I shit you not, is the best George Washington joke I could find. And I’ve rewritten it a bit to make it sound a little better. Here we go:

There was a boy who lived out in the country, in a simple home without indoor plumbing. His father had constructed an outhouse in the back yard for his family to use when nature called, but after all these years it was an absolutely foul structure and the boy had grown to despise it. One day it began to rain, an unrelenting downpour that rendered the bank behind the house so muddy and slippery that it was almost impossible to climb up or down without slipping. On his way back home in the rain, the boy was so frustrated by the time he reached the top of the hill that he threw his shoulder angrily against the outhouse, sending the little shack sliding down to the bottom of the hill, where it crashed into a smelly heap.

Not long after the boy’s father came staggering into the house.  He demanded to know if it was his son who had pushed the outhouse down the hill.

“Yes,” the young man said, remembering the story of George Washington and the cherry tree his teacher had told him that very day.

“All right then,” said his father as he unbuckled his belt. “Come here and get your whipping.”

“What the hell?” the boy said, his mouth open in disbelief. “George Washington didn’t get in trouble when he chopped down the cherry tree!”

The boy’s father replied, “Yes, but George Washington’s father wasn’t in the cherry tree at the time.”

Yep.

Eight years ago, as most of the eastern United States was on its way to work or starting its day at school, two hijacked commercial airliners, American Airlines Flight 11 and United Airlines Flight 175, were flown into the towers of the World Trade Center in New York City. Less than an hour after the first plane hit the North Tower, another hijacked flight, American Airlines Flight 77, was deliberately crashed into the Pentagon, the seat of power of the United States military. Just after 10:00 a.m. yet another flight, United Airlines Flight 93, whose ultimate target was likely the White House or the U.S. Capitol, crashed into a field at the site of a former coal mine near Shanksville, Pennsylvania after the passengers, having learned of the previous three attacks, rebelled against their hijackers.

In total, 2,974 people were killed on September 11, 2001. It was the bloodiest single day on American soil since the Battle of Antietam had occurred on another September day in 1863.

Barack Obama, then a state senator in Illinois, wrote a brief statement that was published in the local newspaper for which he wrote a column, the Hyde Park Herald. Published eight days after the attacks, when most Americans were about equally divided between their grief and their fury, Obama’s commentary asked for justice, but also for reason and understanding. It read,

Even as I hope for some measure of peace and comfort to the bereaved families, I must also hope that we as a nation draw some measure of wisdom from this tragedy. Certain immediate lessons are clear, and we must act upon those lessons decisively. We need to step up security at our airports. We must reexamine the effectiveness of our intelligence networks. And we must be resolute in identifying the perpetrators of these heinous acts and dismantling their organizations of destruction.

We must also engage, however, in the more difficult task of understanding the sources of such madness. The essence of this tragedy, it seems to me, derives from a fundamental absence of empathy on the part of the attackers: an inability to imagine, or connect with, the humanity and suffering of others. Such a failure of empathy, such numbness to the pain of a child or the desperation of a parent, is not innate; nor, history tells us, is it unique to a particular culture, religion, or ethnicity. It may find expression in a particular brand of violence, and may be channeled by particular demagogues or fanatics. Most often, though, it grows out of a climate of poverty and ignorance, helplessness and despair.

We will have to make sure, despite our rage, that any U.S. military action takes into account the lives of innocent civilians abroad. We will have to be unwavering in opposing bigotry or discrimination directed against neighbors and friends of Middle Eastern descent. Finally, we will have to devote far more attention to the monumental task of raising the hopes and prospects of embittered children across the globe—children not just in the Middle East, but also in Africa, Asia, Latin America, Eastern Europe and within our own shores.

(Reprinted in this July 21, 2008 article in The New Yorker.)

Few outside of Illinois knew who Barack Obama was at the time, so it was no surprise to anyone that the future president was not invited to join the nationally televised America: A Tribute to Heroes, a fundraising effort that aired live on September 21. It was a charity concert, featuring performances by Neil Young, Billy Joel, Stevie Wonder, U2, Wyclef Jean, and Alicia Keys among others, and brief spoken messages from celebrities like Tom Hanks, Robin Williams, Chris Rock, Clint Eastwood, and Muhammad Ali, who memorably pleaded with viewers not to blame the horrific attacks on the whole of Islam. “You know me as a man of truth,” he said, barely audible, trembling from the effects of Parkinson’s Disease. “This was not Islam. Islam is peace.”

The show opened with Bruce Springsteen singing, accompanied only by his harmonica and acoustic guitar, and a group of back-up singers containing a few members of the E Street Band. He sang “My City of Ruins,” a song he had written for a benefit aimed at revitalizing his hometown of Asbury Park, New Jersey held the previous Christmas. The song had never been recorded, and most of us had never heard it. Not knowing the song’s history, it seemed as though Springsteen had stepped out of the smoke and dust and written the best song anyone would ever write about September 11 through sheer force of will.

So it didn’t actually happen that way. He had an obscure song already written that happened to suit the occasion. It’s still the best song anyone’s ever written or recorded about 9/11. Below is video of that original live performance. One of my only personal 9/11 rituals to have survived these eight years intact is listening to this song. There’s a studio version he recorded for his album The Rising that came out in 2002, but it doesn’t stand up to this one. Hearing it, let alone seeing it, takes me right back to where I was. Which is good. I don’t ever want to forget. What a time. 
 

Forty years ago, just after 11:00 P.M. Eastern Time, the hatch of the lunar module Eagle swung open and a 38-year-old man from Ohio named Neil Armstrong backed on his hands and knees out onto a narrow metal shelf which he and his fellow astronauts referred to as “the porch.” With his crewmate Buzz Aldrin, a 39-year-old native of New Jersey, looking on from the cockpit to guide him, Armstrong eased himself off the porch onto a ladder that extended down one of the legs of his arachnoid spacecraft. He climbed to the bottom and stood on the landing pad. He practiced jumping back up to the bottom step of the ladder, to make sure he could return to the relative safety of the Eagle when he had to, then radioed to Mission Control, located a quarter of a million miles away in Houston, Texas, that he was about to step off the LM.

“That’s one small step for a man,” he said after that first step off the landing pad and into the lunar soil had been taken, “one giant leap for mankind.”

Not long after, Aldrin joined Armstrong on the surface. “Magnificent desolation,” he said as he looked around him.

“Isn’t that something?” said Armstrong.

These were the first two human beings to walk on the Moon. They, along with their crewmate Michael Collins, a 38-year-old American army brat born in Rome, Italy, who had remained in lunar orbit aboard the command module Columbia, had accomplished something humans from all parts of the Earth had dreamt about for untold generations, something toward which hundreds of thousands of men and women had worked tirelessly for the last decade, something even they (as the crew candidly admitted years later) occasionally feared might be impossible.

Besides being the second human being to set foot on the Moon, and writing a doctoral thesis that wound up being crucial to the orbital rendezvous techniques that made the manned lunar missions possible, and spending the last forty years serving as an unofficial ambassador/cheerleader for manned spaceflight, and still finding time to perform other acts of heroism such as punching Bart Sibrel right in his fucking face, Buzz Aldrin is also well known as the smartest of all the astronauts. Don’t believe me? Just ask him.

Oh, but I kid Buzz. I know rumor has it that NASA sent him to the Moon on Apollo 11 just to get rid of him for a week, but he is one smart son of a bitch, and has led one of the most remarkable and consequential lives in the history of our species.  So let him strut his stuff every now and then. Like he does in this editorial he wrote for the Washington Post a few days ago, where he takes the occasion of the 40^th anniversary of the first manned moon landing to break with NASA orthodoxy and push his vision for our next step into space:

On television and in movies, Star Trek showed what could be achieved when we dared to “boldly go where no man has gone before.” In real life, I’ve traveled that path, and I know that with the right goal and support from most Americans, we can boldly go, again.

A race to the moon is a dead end. . . . And replaying the glory days of Apollo will not advance the cause of American space leadership or inspire the support and enthusiasm of the public and the next generation of space explorers.

Now, I am not suggesting that America abandon the moon entirely, only that it forgo a moon-focused race. . . . Let the lunar surface be the ultimate global commons while we focus on more distant and sustainable goals to revitalize our space program. Our next generation must think boldly in terms of a goal for the space program: Mars for America’s future. I am not suggesting a few visits to plant flags and do photo ops but a journey to make the first homestead in space: an American colony on a new world.

Now, it ain’t quite “Mars, bitches!” or “Red rocks!” but as slogans for a manned Mars-shot, “Mars for America’s Future” is pretty good. It sounds far-fetched now, but that’s only because there’s been no leadership. When John Kennedy asked the Mercury 7 not long after Alan Shepard’s first sub-orbital flight if they thought it was feasible to send them to the Moon and bring them back safely by the end of the decade, they were enthusiastic, but they also all naturally assumed he’d lost his mind. Eight years later, Armstrong and Aldrin were standing in the Sea of Tranquility. Back then the president came out publicly and set a clear, audacious, challenging goal. Compare that to the apathy of more recent presidents, who instead of “I believe this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal before this decade is out of landing a man on the Moon and returning him safely to the Earth” have given us such stirring visions as “maybe going back to the Moon in the next twenty or thirty years wouldn’t be such a terrible idea.”

Wow, sign me up.

After witnessing the liftoff of Apollo 11 forty years ago, Wernher von Braun, the scientist who had designed and supervised the construction of the Saturn V rocket, reportedly said, “Give me ten more years and ten billion more dollars and I’ll put a man on Mars.” We should have listened to him then. Doing it now is gonna cost way more than ten billion. But he had the right idea then, just as Buzz does now. It’s been forty years since we first traveled to the Moon, and almost thirty-seven since our most recent visit. Since then NASA and other space exploration agencies from all across the planet have done extraordinary things — the Pioneer and Voyager missions, the continued exploration of Mars and the rest of the inner solar system, the construction of the Hubble Space Telescope and the International Space Station — but no manned mission has ever left low Earth orbit.

Time to get moving.

Six and a half hours after the landing, at around 11 in the evening Eastern Time, Armstrong exited the spacecraft and climbed down and stood on the landing pad at the foot of the ladder. “Okay, I’m gonna step off the LEM now,” he told mission control. And as he hopped off the pad and onto the lunar surface itself he said, “That’s one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind.”

Aldrin joined him outside soon after and uttered his first words upon seeing the Moon with his own eyes: “Magnificent desolation.”

I’ll have more to say on Monday for the anniversary of the landing and the moonwalk, but for now check out this trio of videos from YouTube. The first is footage of the launch of the Saturn V rocket that carried the vessels and crew of Apollo 11 into space. The second is the actual lunar landing, following the Eagle from orbit to the surface. The last is Armstrong’s and Aldrin’s (and humanity’s) first steps on the moon. Be amazed.

And one more thing: This week NASA released a series of restored high definition videos of various parts of the Apollo 11 landing. They look absolutely stunning, way better picture quality than the ones I have embedded above. Check them out here. Be more amazed.

(Originally posted at The Gay-Atheist, but still hot and fresh for you.)

Earlier this week the Codex Sinaiticus Project, a joint venture of the British Library, the National Library of Russia, St. Catherine’s Monastery, and the Leipzig University Library, made the oldest known copy of the Christian Bible available digitally online. Images of the over 1,400 pages of the Codex were posted to the project’s website and can be viewed there if reading Greek Christian scripture written on crumbling animal skins is your idea of a good time.

The Codex Sinaiticus was discovered at a Greek monastery on Mount Sinai by a German Bible scholar in 1844, and subsequently stolen and divided up amongst the project’s four constituent institutions. It was written sometime in the mid-4^th century, and contains most of the Old Testament and a complete copy of the New. Along with the Codex Vaticanus, another copy of about the same age, it’s considered the most important Biblical manuscript known to exist, a vital “witness” to the accuracy of the modern text.

Yet I can’t help but notice a lot of empty space. Do the math. Better yet — I’ll do it for you. Because of how its text is divided, the earliest the Sinaiticus could have been written is 325 A.D. Most estimates put the birth of Jesus at around 4 B.C., making his death, if the popular accounts of his life can be trusted, at around 30 A.D. That means that the oldest intact copy of the Christian Bible was produced almost 300 years after the events it claims to record. And that’s under the best case scenario — the Sinaiticus could have been written as late as 360, adding another 35 years to the space between it and the actual life of Jesus.

Many believers assert that their Bible, particularly the synoptic gospels of the New Testament, is the literal word of God. Evangelicals tell us that faith in its teachings is the only way to escape eternal damnation after death.  I’ve heard it described as God’s love letter to humanity. Leaving aside that it’s by far the most menacing and blood-soaked love letter I’ve ever read for the moment, it seems strange to me that God would treat his perfect and eternal revelation with such neglect for so many years. Even the most credulous Christian historians have admitted that the oldest portions of the Old Testament were not written until at least fifteen to twenty years after the crucifixion of Jesus, and none of those original texts are known to still exist. The gospels themselves, purported to contain the all-important literal words of God, weren’t written until at least thirty years after the fact, and are apparently largely plagiarized from each other and from an earlier source that has been lost to history. The celebrated Gospel of John, which contains some of the most quoted verses of the entire Bible, as well as several drastic contradictions of the three synoptic gospels, came last of all, at least sixty years after Jesus, more than enough time for most of the eyewitnesses to his ministry to have died.

Let’s assume there is a God and he is more or less as the adherents to Judaism and Christianity describe him. And let’s assume further that he decided to pass on his eternal word, knowledge and acceptance of which being essential to escaping permanent torture in hell, to humanity in the form of a book. Finally, let’s assume that the Bible as presented in the Codex Sinaiticus is that book. (This last one is a very necessary assumption, since there are almost as many versions of the Bible as there are ancient manuscripts. Nevermind the canon — the texts of the Old and New Testaments themselves weren’t finalized by church authorities until many centuries after the supposed events they describe.) Why, assuming all of this to be true, would God allow the lineage of his book to become so muddied? Why would God not take steps to record the words and deeds of Jesus and his apostles immediately, and see to it those original manuscripts were preserved for future generations? Hell, why not have Jesus write it all down himself? Wouldn’t that have been the best way to ensure his exact words were handed down after his death?

The last questions are the easiest to answer. Jesus didn’t write it all down himself because, like most humans of his generation, he couldn’t even write his own name, let alone an exact narrative of his life and ministry. He was illiterate. The gospels record him studying the scriptures, but if that’s true he probably studied them the same way everyone else did outside of the priesthood, by hearing and reciting them orally. But look at me taking cheap shots at Jesus like an asshole. The illiteracy of the Lord and Savior of mankind isn’t the point.

The Bible is solely the work of flawed, imperfect and sometimes careless human beings, not divinely inspired, and it’s blindingly obvious to anyone who cares to look — that is the point. Most Christians don’t hear about the history of their holy scriptures at church on Sunday. They are compelled to read their Bibles without ever being told where they came from or how they came to look like they do. The question never even occurs to most believers. As far as they’re concerned the first five books of the Old Testament came from the very hand of Moses, and the Gospel of Matthew was written by a man named Matthew who was a disciple of Jesus, and his words have been passed down unchanged from then to now.

There’s a reason for that. The divinity of the Bible can be disproved merely by reading it. Thomas Paine did it two hundred years ago and no one has refuted him yet. But knowing the whole history of the supposedly infallible word of God — seeing what a puzzle it is, with so many pieces missing — makes the case undeniable. Now to remind us here is the digitized Codex Sinaiticus, produced over three centuries after the fact, copied by multiple scribes from earlier texts, containing a canon that would be revised over a millennium later by a committee of men almost as backwards and ignorant as those who made it all up in the first place.

Today makes three years since I started this dirty little blog. I’ve posted 1,143 articles (counting this here one) and, with a little help here and there from the lovely and gracious Ashley, I’ve never missed a day. You see that, Ripken? I’m comin’ for your ass.

This last year the blog’s really seemed to catch on. I now have four or five regular readers, and I feel like fucking George Will whenever I think about that. I try to see myself as the George Will of infantile Star Trek comics. I had the opportunity to write about everything from movies to professional wrestling to the most momentous presidential campaign of my life.

Owing mostly to concerns over flexibility and cramping, I’ll keep the blowing of my own horn to a minimum. Below are my five favorite articles (with maybe one or two extras) from the third year of Steve Likes to Curse.

“People Physics” — I wrote this almost a year ago after attending a few of the Philosophy Sessions at the library in Smithsburg. It’s an analogy of politics to physics. In such analogies, individuals are usually compared to atoms, but I think a better comparison would be quantum particles. People aren’t nearly as predictable as atoms.

“History.” — This was written the day after Barack Obama was elected President of the United States. It’s my attempt to wax rhapsodic about my generation’s moon landing. There’s also a tip of the cap in here to John McCain, who was not well served by his party and the right-wing media, and who, despite his complicity in unleashing Sarah Palin on an unsuspecting public, I still respect. But John only gets like a paragraph. It’s mostly about Barack. And that’s only right. He won, after all.

“Holy Moses! — How the Story of God’s Greatest Prophet Demonstrates the Depravity of the Bible” — I like this one for two reasons. First, it’s me shooting my mouth off on one of my favorite topics: the horrific violence and bigotry and other assorted immorality to be found in the Holy Bible. Second, it led to a great conversation with a man named Woody, who read the article and engaged me in a friendly debate over Moses and the morality of the Christian god and all sorts of other stuff. Woody’s what I would call a good Christian, a guy who has not allowed his deep religious faith to rob him of his reason or his civility. Thanks again, Woody.

“Oh, how I’ve longed for the ping of the bat” — A completely factually inaccurate account of how aluminum baseball bats came to be used in high school and college ball, despite the fact that no professional league has ever used them. Well, not completely. The first intercollegiate baseball game was played in 1859 between Amherst and Williams College, and Amherst did win with a score of 73-32, but pretty much everything after that is totally made up. Except the names — hard as it may be to believe, there was in reality a baseball player named Heinie Zimmerman. There was also a real Harry Heilmann, who did win the 1925 A.L. batting title, though he didn’t do it swinging at Easton Magnum, and he didn’t bat .736 for the season. The bit about Jimmie Foxx winning the batting title in 1933 with a length of bamboo filled with concrete is 100% true, though.

“I HAVE taken the Limbaugh Challenge, dumbass” — This was specifically a response to an editorial by Andrew Klavan, though it deals in general with a charge I find particularly irritating from apologists for right-wing pundits like Limbaugh or Ann Coulter. Complaints and criticisms about a given writer or radio host are often answered by their defenders with “Oh yeah? Well, have you ever even read them/listened to them?” That presumption of ignorance really pisses me off.  As though it’s impossible that you might have a problem with Limbaugh or one of his imitators because you have listened to him, not because you’re just a parrot repeating something you read on Media Matters. Not only is it possible, I’m living proof that it actually happens. I’m critical of Rush Limbaugh because I’m familiar with him. I used to listen to him all the time, and I didn’t need anyone other than Rush to convince me of what a dishonest loud-mouth he is.

So there ya go. Honorable mentions go to “Batman vs. Glenn Beck” and “The story of my failed career in advertising” — the former being my favorite comic from the last year, and the latter being one of the most gleefully tasteless humor pieces I’ve ever done. This past year I also tried doing theme weeks for the first time, with Batman Week in July of ’08 to mark the theatrical release of The Dark Knight, and Star Trek Week this past May with the release of the new Star Trek film. Batman Week included “World’s Thickest”, the best Adventures of Superman comic I’ve yet done.

This article about the discharge of Lt. Dan Choi for violating the “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy is one I’m proud of, too, both because it’s a decent piece about a subject I’m passionate about, and because it was my first contribution to The Gay-Atheist, a terrific blog you should all be reading.

Thanks, everybody.

Americans are responsible for some of the greatest music ever produced by human minds and hands. We’re also a feverishly patriotic people. It’s a shame how seldom those two intersect. There’s been some good patriotic music made over the last two-hundred thirty-three years, but most of it unfortunately falls into the same category as Lee Greenwood’s insufferable “God Bless the U.S.A.,” or Neil Diamond’s maudlin and overwrought “Coming to America.” I still dig Sousa, though not as much as I did when I was going through my super-nationalist period as a child during the first Gulf War. And I like our national anthem fine, though my two favorite recordings of it are both instrumental-only (guess — the first one’s easy).

So far as popular music goes, there have only been two truly great patriotic songs to my mind. Each was performed most famously by a legendary singer and musician, and each comes from a great American musical tradition — one from folk, the other from the blues. And they’re both about the same subject, approached from opposite directions. The songs are “This Land is Your Land,” written and popularized by Woody Guthrie, and “This Land is Nobody’s Land,” by John Lee Hooker.

(Ashley will be shocked that I have left out Ray Charles’s immortal rendition of “America the Beautiful,” given how enthusiastically, heedlessly, shamelessly I sing along whenever I play it. It’s definitely a lot more fun to sing than “The Star-Spangled Banner,” but it’s a smidge too close to a hymn — and in more ways than just form — for my taste. The Ray Charles version is an example of a great artist making something brilliant and timeless out of lesser source material. That recording, that performance definitely deserves to be mentioned as one of the great patriotic American songs, but the song itself isn’t inherently great. So there. Did that sound enough like some defensive bullshit I just pulled out of my ass?)

Guthrie’s song is great because it does what most other patriotic songs do — celebrate the size and natural beauty of the land belonging to the United States — and also because it does what few others even attempt — it claims ownership of that land for everyone. Check out that famous refrain that closes every verse: “This land was made for you and me.” It’s all-inclusive. He’s not singing “This land, America, is made for you and me, Americans.” He’s singing “this land is made for you and me,” whoever we are. He’s obviously talking about the United States, since he mentions California, New York, the Redwood Forest and the “Gulf Stream waters” of the Atlantic Ocean by name in the first verse. But that’s just where he’s singing from. He could be singing to anybody — native, immigrant, male, female, black, white, whatever. No matter who you are, no matter where you come from, this land with its golden valleys and waving wheat fields and diamond deserts can be your land. That frames the appeal of America directly and poetically, and puts it beyond petty politics. Nevermind all the self-serving bullshit about the “eternal principles” upon which we were founded, or how this is “the greatest country God ever gave man.” Guthrie boils the American dream down to its essence: whoever you are, this can be your country. It’s an ideal we don’t always live up to, but it’s still a great ideal.

The other song many of you may be less familiar with. It was released on John Lee Hooker’s first volume of The Real Folk Blues series from Chess Records. It makes the same point as “This Land is Your Land,” but in a much darker, sadder, more cynical way. Where Guthrie’s song is a jubilant sing-along that claims the wide space of America for everyone who wants it, Hooker’s declares that it can’t actually belong to anybody. “This land is no one’s land,” he sings over the measured noodling of his electric guitar. It’s not a denial of private property rights (that’s actually in Guthrie’s song, in a seldom sung verse). It’s something much deeper. To Hooker all claims of ownership over the land are meaningless because, ultimately, there’s only one thing we’re all going to need it for: “This land is your buryin’ ground.” It’s darker, more pessimistic, like a mirror-image of Guthrie’s song.  But Hooker goes on to state outright the question that Guthrie only implies: “Why are we fighting over this land?” Whether it belongs to all of us or to none of us, it’s an excellent question. Woody Guthrie reportedly wrote “This Land is Your Land” because he was sick of hearing Kate Smith sing “God Bless America” on the radio during World War II. When John Lee Hooker released “This Land is Nobody’s Land” in 1966, race riots were breaking out in cities across the country, and the militant black power movement was gaining steam. Put lines like “God made this land / Everybody equal / Why are they fighting over their buryin’ ground?” in that context, and you’ve got not just a great song about America, but one of the most powerful and penetrating sociopolitical statements of the century.

Both songs bring to mind the famous words of a letter to President Franklin Pierce, popularly attributed to Chief Seattle of the Duwamish and Suquamish Indians of Puget Sound, but more likely made up long after the fact by Dr. Henry Smith, who claimed to merely have translated the chief’s original words. Regardless of who wrote them, they’re worth remembering:

How can you buy or sell the sky — the warmth of the land? The idea is strange to us. Yet we do not own the freshness of the air or the sparkle of the water. . . . Every part of this earth is sacred to my people.

So should it be to all of us. This land, our home, was here long before there was a United States, long before there were any governments, long before the human species or any of its ancestors walked the earth. It will be here long after our country, our laws, our traditions, our artifacts, and every other trace of us has been washed away. And eventually, in the immensity of time, it will disappear as well. Then it won’t matter who the land belonged to.

Now, here in our brief moment in the sun, we should take a moment in between the hot dogs and the fireworks to appreciate the home we’re so fortunate to have, the beautiful land that belongs to all of us, and none of us, that is here for us to share. We should enjoy it, and respect it, and rejoice for it, while we — and it — are still here.

As most of you know, and as my patient sweetheart has long lamented, I’m a fan of pro wrestling. Ask some of your average fans who was the most important pro wrestler ever and you’ll likely wind up with a toss-up between Ric Flair and Hulk Hogan. A few of the kids might throw in a nomination for Steve Austin or The Rock, and a real old timer might suggest Gorgeous George or Lou Thesz, depending on his taste. But if you ask me (and for the sake of expediency I’m assuming you did), there was someone who was way more important than all of those guys, a man who was not only the greatest box office star of his era, but also a key figure in completing the transition of professional wrestling from legitimate sport to the staged, theatrical product we see today. His parents named him Robert Friedrich, but he was best known as Ed “Strangler” Lewis. He was born in the little Wisconsin town of Nekoosa on this date in 1891.

He started wrestling at age 14, taking his ring name from Evan “Strangler” Lewis. That first Strangler was a Wisconsin boy too, born in the even tinier town of Ridgeway in 1860, and the first widely recognized American Heavyweight Champion. That title ceased to exist two years after young Ed began his career, after it was unified with the World Heavyweight Title by Frank Gotch. Back at the turn of the 20^th century pro wrestling was still more sport than show business. Wrestlers would occasionally agree to lose matches ahead of time, and opponents cooperating with each other to make a more entertaining match certainly wasn’t unheard of, but the truly successful wrestlers were all genuine tough guys, and most of the headliners considered working a match (“work” being the vernacular for a match where the outcome is predetermined) beneath them. When Frank Gotch defeated George Hackenschmidt for the World Title in 1908 the bout lasted two hours and ended when Hackenschmidt, fearing Gotch was about to break his leg, surrendered.

In 1914 Ed Lewis hired former wrestler Billy Sandow as his manager. It proved a successful partnership, with Lewis winning the first of his five (or seven, depending how you count) World Heavyweight Championships in 1920. Around this time Lewis and Sandow brought former carnival wrestler Toots Mondt aboard as a trainer and sparring partner. Mondt saw the dwindling attendance at wrestling events and devised a solution, something to stoke the public’s waning interest in the sport. Together, Mondt, Sandow and Lewis developed what Mondt called “Slam-Bang Western Style Wrestling.” Matches now took place in boxing-style rings, had time limits, and included outlandish moves like body slams, suplexes and judo throws, and whips into the ropes instead of the more realistic mat-based style that had dominated pro wrestling since the mid-19^th century.

Since I don’t feel like writing about politics or this or that nerdy pursuit today, and since I’m too lazy to work on the comics for my forthcoming Now That’s Quality Cheese entry on MacGyver, I thought I’d take a gander at the Wikipedia page for today and see what jumped out at me. Turns out there were some interesting people born on this date in history. Here’s a little about three of them.

Today would have been the 121^st birthday of Bartolomeo Vanzetti. He was born this date in 1888, in Villafalletto, Cuneo, Italy. Most of us know his name because we dimly remember hearing it in high school, always preceded by “Sacco and”. Both men came to the United States in 1908. In April 1920 they allegedly murdered two men during a robbery in Braintree, Massachusetts. In 1927 they were both executed for the crime. Today, over eighty years since their execution, whether or not Sacco and Vanzetti actually committed the crimes for which they were executed is almost beside the point. They were not only immigrants, they were members of a group of militant anarchists who had committed several acts of terrorism and advocated violence as a legitimate means of resisting an unjust government. The juries for their two trials were highly prejudiced, their lawyers apparently weren’t that great, and as a result we still have no idea whether Sacco and Vanzetti were guilty or not. Books have been written arguing both sides. One thing we do know: guilty or innocent, the justice system failed Sacco and Vanzetti. Their executions sparked worldwide protests, and fifty years later Massachusetts Governor Michael Dukakis officially apologized, for all the good that did.

Today is the 50^th birthday of former pro wrestler Magnum T.A., real name Terry Allen. Before a car accident ended his career in 1986, he was on his way to being a pretty big deal. He made his name working for Jim Crockett Promotions, the most nationally visible territory of the NWA in the 1980s, the home territory of Ric Flair and the Four Horsemen, Dusty Rhodes, Nikita Koloff, the Road Warriors, the Midnight Express, you get the idea. Besides being a decent wrestler, he was also good buddies with Dusty Rhodes, who booked the territory. Were it not for the car accident, Magnum would have been one of the brightest stars in the 1980s wrestling boom. As it happened, he still had a pretty great career. His feuds with Nikita Koloff and Ric Flair are well regarded today, and his “I Quit” steel cage match with Tully Blanchard at Starrcade ‘85 is as brutal a bloodbath as you’d ever want to watch. It ends with Magnum busting apart a wooden chair and spiking one of the broken legs into Tully’s bleeding forehead, while Tully shrieks in agony at the top of his lungs. Pretty sadistic, and enough to make even the most jaded CZW mark turn his head.

Finally, today’s also the 50^th birthday of Hugh Laurie, the best actor on television. Why he has not been buried in Emmys for his lead role in House these last five years I do not know. Before starring as Dr. House, he was writing and acting in British comedy alongside such luminaries as Rowan Atkinson, Robbie Coltrane, and his old buddy from Cambridge, Stephen Fry. And, as all of us who saw his episode of Inside the Actors Studio know, he plays a mean piano and ain’t such a bad singer, either. And he was this close (you should see my fingers, they’re, like, almost touching) to playing Perry White in Superman Returns. He had to bow out because of his shooting schedule on House, which is too bad, ‘cause he’d make an awesome Mr. White (though Frank Langella did just fine, thank you very much). Is there anything about Hugh Laurie not to like? Yes; he’s a motorcycle enthusiast. But shit, nobody’s perfect.

There were also two deaths on this date that caught my attention. The first is John Wayne, one of the great stars in the history of cinema (and generally underrated as an actor, I think), who died thirty years ago today. Roger Ebert wrote a nice remembrance of the Duke a few days ago on his blog. You should give it a read.

The second is DeForest Kelley, the best actor in the cast of the original Star Trek. He died ten years ago today. Before landing the role of Dr. Leonard McCoy, Kelley worked steadily on TV and in the movies, including as an Earp brother in Gunfight at the O.K. Corral. Of the members of the original Trek cast, he seems to have been the most beloved by his colleagues. I think he would have liked Karl Urban’s take on Dr. McCoy in this year’s Star Trek film. Urban’s performance was the most obvious homage to his predecessor, and so deft that at times it was like having DeForest Kelley with us again. No wonder I liked the movie so much.

As I write this (though probably not as you read it — it’s getting late) it’s June 6. On this date in 1945 over 150,000 Americans, Britons, and Canadians, members of the Allied Expeditionary Force, stormed the coast of Normandy to begin the liberation of Nazi-dominated Europe. It was the largest amphibious invasion ever attempted, and the men who participated in it — thousands of whom were killed, many before they were even able to step off of their landing craft onto the beaches — saved the world.

They saved the world.

It’s a shame that our species considers huge numbers of us killing each other to be so necessary to saving the world, but there doesn’t seem to be any getting around it.

D-Day was a pivotal moment in human history. When you think about it, there haven’t been too many of those. Taming fire, inventing the wheel, learning to speak to one another — those are pretty important moments, assuming you can pin them down to a single day. The first moon landing — that was a big one (and that anniversary’s coming up, too!). There are lots more, but D-Day’s got to be on that list. It was a pretty big day. And it wasn’t all that long ago, relatively speaking.

Sixty-five years have gone by since then. That’s almost 24,000 days. They haven’t all been good days. Not by a long shot. A few have been better for some than for others. But I know this: millions and millions and millions have lived without the weight of fascism pressing down on their chests because of what those 150,000 did on the coast of France on June 6, 1945. If you’ve read this blog for any length of time, you know I’m no flag-waver. But I think D-Day transcended nationalism. It wasn’t an American accomplishment, or a British one, or a French one. It was something for which we, the children and grandchildren of the men storming those beaches, can all be grateful.

If that’s not saving the world, I don’t know what you call it.

Something jumped out at me the other day as I watched Christopher Hitchens being interviewed by Brian Lamb on C-SPAN’s Q&A. Lamb asked Hitchens about waterboarding, whether or not he considered it torture. Among the many pundits who continue to weigh in on the issue, Hitchens is uniquely qualified, since he has actually been waterboarded. He called it torture. Then he said something very interesting: “The United States has always said of any regime that used it on an American that it is torture.”

No shit?  Turns out Hitchens was right: following World War II, the U.S. played a central role in prosecuting Japanese soldiers for war crimes, including using what they called the “water cure” on Allied prisoners of war. In one such case Seitaro Hata, Yukio Asano, Takeo Kita, and Hideji Nakamura, all members of or contractors to the Japanese Imperial Army, were convicted of waterboarding four American P.O.W’s and sentenced to twenty years of confinement and hard labor.

And lest you think the Bush-era reversal of the ban on waterboarding was just typical “it’s okay when we do it” hypocrisy, there are also several incidents where Americans have been convicted of using waterboarding on prisoners and punished. In 1898 the United States took possession of the Philippines following the Spanish-American War. American troops were soon in conflict with Philippine nationalists, and accounts of cruelty and mistreatment of prisoners at the hands of the Americans were soon widespread. The occupation of the Philippines became something of a national scandal, leading to public outcry and congressional inquiries. Eventually Army Major Edwin Glenn was court-martialed and convicted of “resort[ing] to torture with a view to extort a confession,” though Major Glenn’s punishment consisted only of a one-month suspension and a $50 fine.

Okay, so an American soldier getting a slap on the wrist for waterboarding a Filipino prisoner isn’t exactly the unequivocal rebuke of the technique that I would like to be able to point to in this debate. Luckily, that ain’t all I got. There’s also the case of James Parker, Sheriff of San Jacinto County, Texas.

In 1983 Parker and three of his deputies were convicted on multiple counts of using waterboarding to elicit confessions from prisoners. At sentencing the judge called Parker and his fellow defendants “a bunch of thugs,” and said that “the operation down there would embarrass the dictator of a country.” Sheriff Parker was ordered to serve 10 years in prison, the maximum sentence allowed, and fined $12,000.

The issue seems clear to me. Throughout our history, up until the current decade, waterboarding has always been a form of torture, a punishable crime, no matter who does it, be they members of an enemy army, or one of our own soldiers, or an American law enforcement officer. It has always been a crime, it ought to be, and a free and humane nation of the sort we claim to be should never do it. President Obama, Christopher Hitchens, and law professor and former Judge Advocate General Evan Wallach (who wrote the Washington Post article and the more in-depth report which I used as a source here) are right, and those who continue to justify waterboarding and piss and moan about American agents not using it anymore are wrong.