Another Issue!
At last! The thing you’ve all been waiting for! Another Thumbsmudge! It’s been a few months,
but I have finally emerged from my notebooks with a lot of little scraps of paper taped together into
things that could be kite-tails or could be articles. I hope they turn out more article than kite.

Who vs. That
Respect people in your speech: use the right pronouns. I keep seeing phrases like “people that
don’t vote,” and “girls that like zucchini.” They’re wrong. When you use the pronoun “that”
to describe people, you reduce those people to objects. I don’t like zucchini, but girls who like
zucchini are still people, so “who” is the proper pronoun for them. Just Remember: People who,
Things that (or is it “which?”).

Color of the Week
-A guest column from Dharma
Yippytai-yay! The nation is no longer yellow! Okay, so orange isn't much of an improvement, but
at least it doesn't have the same connotations: yellow-bellied, yellow coward, yellow journalism.
There just aren't many "orange" insults.

But is anybody really WORRIED about the increased security level? Does it really mean anything
anymore? It seems like we haven't been in LOW security mode since September 11th, 2001.
That's kind of like always being on a diet... Oh, you're going to restrict my eating habits MORE?
Horrors! Well, maybe that's not really the best comparison, but you get what I mean.

John Ashcroft says the increased security is linked to the annual Hajj pilgrimage... a traditionally
LOW violence occasion. I can see terrorists using a normally peaceful event to inflict damage, but
in the past, it's been the United States that pulled surprise stunts on unusual days. Think Tet
offensive, D-Day, or Washington crossing the Potomac. With that in mind, I somehow think this
security alert is more about US planning an attack than THEM.

Can't wait to see what happens next... at least I don't have to worry about filling my newscasts for
a while.

Armageddon Cheerleaders
(A Theory) I don’t understand why so many good, churchgoing, Christians are clamoring for war with
Iraq. I thought the whole “blessed are the peacemakers” bit would carry more weight. Apparently,
Jesus only meant the beatitudes for cross-stitching projects. That or they’ve been reading it as
“pacemakers” all these years.

Maybe it’s because W uses evangelical themes to exploit the good Christian flock, but I think it’s
something deeper. These people might support the proposed war even if Clinton was behind it.

It has to do with the foundations of Christianity: The Scriptures. The Old Testament makes up the
bulk of the scriptures, and it deals solely with God’s Chosen People Israel; all the epic history,
ancient law, royal genealogies and divine slaughters belong to the Jewish part of the Scriptures.
Christians are more recent interlopers, and the New Testament—the part of Holy Scripture that
deals with Christianity, the part where salvation is finally opened up to us Gentiles—is a pretty slim
little add-on compared to the OT.

I figure there are a lot of Bible-study Christians out there who have come away feeling vaguely
second-class. Like maybe we were just an afterthought.

The OT is a big glorious saga, but the NT works on a more intimate scale: individual repentance,
private miracles, personal callings. Where Jesus breaks bread into more bread, Jehovah rained
manna from the skies. Where Jesus curses a fig tree and it withers, Yahweh cursed entire
multigenerational families and the earth swallowed them up. Where Jesus claims dominion over
the intangible Spiritual Kingdom, Jehovah as a pillar of fire led the Israelites into the Promised
Land, parted the Red Sea, stopped the flow of the Jordan, and toppled the walls of Jericho (with
Ai as a practice run). Our little bundle of Gospels and letters just doesn’t have that widescreen
Technicolor panoramic kind of scope.

So a lot of Christians—once they get bored with the soul searching and the repentance and the
Finding the Will of God in My Life workbooks—turn to the prophecies for excitement and a sense
of importance. They see, in the possible Middle East War, a chance for validation, a fulfillment of
prophecy that would tell the world they were Right, they were Important-- that they, too, were
Chosen.

They salivate at the thought of Megiddo awash in blood, and a new Temple rising on the smoking
ruins of the Dome of the Rock. Do they really think that because it is prophesied, it is something
to be hoped for? They wish, as Jonah wished, to see God destroy the people they condemn.
But God sent Jonah’s sorry ass to Nineveh to save those people, not destroy them.

Somehow, they are not satisfied with a Savior who teaches Mercy and Humility, who says
Judgment is reserved to God, who turns the other cheek and tells us to love our enemies. They
want vindication and glory. They want a bloodthirsty God to lead them victorious from the tedium
of their lives.

Totally None of Your Business
Congress actually did something right. Both the House and Senate have killed funding for the
proposed TIA program. Well, at least for now. It’s probably not dead yet, but I hope it goes the
way of TIPS.

The program aimed to create a gargantuan database of health, travel, e-mail, credit card, bank,
and other information to help “catch terrorists.” As if, once all that data made its way into their
hands, it would never be used for anything else, like, say, tracking down income tax cheating for
the IRS (did you report that $500 you made babysitting last year?) or any number of other things
the feds find it useful for.

I want to know how anybody ever thought that my amazon.com purchases, e-mails, and ob/gyn
records could help catch terrorists. I’ve heard people justify the measures on the grounds that
honest people have nothing to hide. It’s not about having anything to hide. I daresay my personal
info is pretty boring, but it’s still my personal information and it is none of their damn
business. My dentist is not hiding terrorists in my mouth. I’d have noticed.

Crackly Audio Tapes
Who’d have thought UBL would turn out to be a friend of W? I mean, it was starting to get pretty
embarrassing up there at the White House. Even casual newswatchers were noticing a certain
curious lack of connection between 9/11 and Iraq.

It worked for a while because the news networks don’t get a good story out of informational
lacunae. Nobody gets glued to his TV set for a breaking story about … something that isn’t there.
Give him a helicopter shot of a postal truck being chased through the streets of Miami by 150
patrol cars, though, and that’s news!

But I digress. Just as Rumsfeld was starting to fidget with his collar, the War Push was rescued
by UBL. In a grainy audio tape he expressed solidarity with his “brothers” the Iraqis. This, Colin
Powell says, is definite proof of a connection, or as the State Dept. says, they are “bound by a
common hatred.” I guess that’s good enough for the press.

But why does that suddenly make the case for a Middle East Conflagration? Was there ever
any doubt that UBL and Mr. Hussein shared a common hatred of the U.S.? And since when does
expressing solidarity with someone via cheap cassettes prove a definite link with them? If I make
a bad recording expressing my solidarity with Canadians in the face of the cruel arctic winter,
does that prove a connection between me and Canada?

And that’s assuming the tape is genuine. The Swiss institute which analyzed the last UBL
communiqué (and concluded it was faked), said they wouldn’t be working on the latest one at all.
The recording is so bad and UBL’s public broadcasts so rare that there’s no way to authenticate it.

I suppose in the end it doesn’t matter whether it’s actually UBL on the tape or not, or whether or
not there’s a connection between Al-Qaeda and Iraq. What matters is that the troops are
massed, and eventually someone will start shooting. And like Fort Sumter or the Maine, the
details will be lost to history.


Please don’t send me long explanations about the “necessity” of War with Iraq. I’m well aware that the real danger out
there—the one that reached out and bit us—is fundamentalist Islam. I don’t see why nobody in DC has the spine to say
so, and I don’t see how attacking Iraq (when Saudi Arabia is home base for the Wahabis) is going to solve that problem
instead of kicking off WWIII: the Nuclear Edition. Last time I checked, religious movements couldn’t be stopped by tanks
or missiles: “blood of the martyrs is the seed of the church” and all. But hey, what do I know?

Nobody else can be blamed for the contents of Thumbsmudge, so I guess I’m responsible. Send correspondence and
complaints to: Elleason@aol.com ………………….Lilith