Anniversary Shmanniversary

It's been one fabulous year since we launched Rinderpest.com. In that year a lot has happened. We've changed the format from a site featuring recipes and pictures of kitties to a 'blogs only' site, and we've written tons and tons of articles and blog entries; many of them worth reading.

But I want to give a personal shout out to the men and women who've made this site such a wonderful morning coffee companion. I also want to say "hey" to the writers.

In recognition of a year gone, and to signify that I am lazy and don't have any new material, I'm going to re-post my first ever Rinderpest.com piece for your enjoyment, or to start a girly slap fight in the streets. Either will please me more than any of you could ever know.

So here it is. Enjoy:

I Hate Free Speech

Sometimes I'm able to quiet the voices in my head long enough to think productively about various things. It's rare, but occasionally on a rainy Sunday afternoon, or when I'm sitting in traffic, or when I've had too much cough syrup, I'm able to shut out the cacophony in my brain and concentrate on topics other than poker, hot wings, and naked breasts - well, other than poker and hot wings anyway. And on those occasions, I find that my capacity to wonder is matched only by my capacity to metabolize caffeine.

Lately, I've had the opportunity to wonder about many things. Along with the cosmic forces that allow Paris Hilton to still be on television, in movies, and on bad homemade porn videos, I've been wondering about free speech. Don't get me wrong, I think Paris Hilton has a timeless quality - in a Max Headroom sort of way - but her complete and utter insignificance contrasts nicely the very significant nature of free speech. And since this is my first item on what will no doubt become the best website on the Internet (or at least the best website named for a bovine virus), I've taken a closer look at free speech, and discovered that I hate it.

I hate free speech.

Don't worry, I'm not going to analyze court cases or give you a lecture in first amendment politics or anything like that. I don't want to lose you to a game of Grand Theft Auto or have you leave for freakyfarmanimals.com just yet. My goal is more to entertain you than to have you slap yourself in the face with your own feet. Instead, I want to massage the fringes of the issue - while doing as little research as possible - and look at it in another way.

So what is free speech?

The ancient Greeks are often cited as originators of modern civilization. Many believe that Greek society is directly responsible for the way we live today. The poet Shelley said, "We are all Greeks. Our laws, our literature, our religion, our arts have their roots in Greece." It's also interesting to note that many of today's popular actors have their roots in Grease. John Travolta, Stockard Channing, and the illustrious Didi Conn among them.

By the way, is "Grease" the word, or is "Mum" the word? I'm curious, because I've heard it both ways.

Anyway, we're talking about ancient Greece. And in many respects, our societal mores fall in line with the philosophies of that era.

Unfortunately, however, Greek philosophy was often just that: philosophy. Many of the issues that the thinkers of the day contemplated made for great discussion, and ensured that slacker graduate students in Birkenstocks would have a college course to teach for centuries to come, but rarely were they ever put into practice. On an academic level, the Greeks favored things like free speech, but in practice, there was a definite snag. Speaking against established religion for example, could result in a hemlock cocktail, or worse yet, a confrontation with one of those crazy gods that were always having sex with Greek babes in the form of some animal. Free speech it seems, even in those days, came with a price.

On the other side of the globe, as early as 200 BC, the Chinese conducted state affairs based on the ideas of Confucius. Confucian thinking regarded order and stability as essential to morality, and as a result, China did not develop an idea of rights that were inherent and natural to the individual as had arisen in Western Europe. So even amid the order and stability of their society, individuals were not guaranteed any liberty to speak their minds openly. Actually, the Chinese were initially allowed to speak their minds openly, but after an hour, people always got the urge to hear more, and that quickly grew tiresome.

But what of the modern Western world?

We've all heard the expression, "You can't yell 'FIRE' in a crowded movie theater". And this is true. Because, if you do yell 'FIRE' in a crowded movie theater, you might cause a panic. There could very well be a mad rush for the exits — even if it's not a Ben Stiller film. In the melee, people could be trampled down onto a very gross, sticky floor, and eight dollar sodas could be spilled, not to mention a tub of popcorn with enough butter to take a few years off your life. If you cause something like this, you might have to go away for a while. Or at the very least, there's a chance you'll have to pay a hefty fine. Either way, it's obvious that speech of that nature is anything but free.

But what if you yell 'MOVIE' in a crowded firehouse, as the joke goes? Or what if you yell 'FIRE' in a movie theater that's not so crowded? Or what if you yell 'EAT ME, YOU FUNDAMENTALIST MORONS' at the Republican National Convention?

Well, I haven't done any practical research, but I'd wager you could be taken away for those types of sentiments as well.

So it appears as though we have a bit of a misnomer when it comes to free speech (or at least I do). And it's this misnomer that lies at the heart of my hatred of it.

Certainly free speech exists. There are those little morsels of communication that don't cost us anything. But, the speech that is free is in reality, not the speech we normally think of as noteworthy. In fact, it's usually mundane and often irrelevant. For example, if I said, "It's raining in Seattle," there would be no detectable residual cost, and I would have to conclude that such a phrase falls under the category of actual free speech. But saying that it's raining in Seattle doesn't introduce any new and possibly subversive ideas. It doesn't stand in favor or against any movement or ideology. It doesn't shine a light on any wrongs being committed. It doesn't do anything except demonstrate clearly that I'm a loser who watches the Weather Channel way too much.

Every type of speech that we normally deem noteworthy has some residual cost tied to it. If I tell you, "Rinderpest.com is a shit website", you automatically see me as a bumbling fool, and it costs me your friendship, your opinion of me as a genius, and your willingness to put up with my gaseous disposition.

And if I stand up and say, "I've got a bomb strapped to my ass and I'm headed for the White House," even if I don't and I'm not, that bit of speech will cost me heavy fines, jail time, and most demeaning of all, a possible mention on The View.

We are allowed to say things, but those things are not always free.

So, the Greeks and other ancient civilizations at least thought about free speech, and we in the modern West like to think that we are born with the right to free speech, but the short of it is, we've been phrasing it wrong all these years. We don't have free speech per se. What we do have is the freedom to speak. And freedom to speak doesn't necessarily equal free speech.

Once we make that distinction, it's easy to see that the speech itself falls into one of three categories:

1. Free speech - that which is mundane and boring (i.e. "It's raining in Seattle")



2. Costly speech - that which costs the speaker at least something (i.e. "Rinderpest.com is a shit website", which would cost good standing in the community, damage to ones reputation, or maybe a swift kick in the nuts)



3. Very expensive speech - that which we have been conditioned to think of as free speech (i.e. "The senate and the Oval Office is comprised of idiots and jag offs", "A woman's body is her own", "Fur is murder", or "Reality TV sucks", which could cost dissention among ones allies, severe damage to ones reputation, jail time, death, or several swift kicks in the nuts)

Everything noteworthy comes with a price, whether the price is enormous or hardly noticeable. In some form or fashion, some things cost to say.

So where does that leave us?

It leaves us smack-dab at the doorstep of Economics.

Cost/Benefit Analysis is an economics tool used for evaluating quantitatively whether to follow a course of action. In other words, will the benefit of an action be worth its cost. But everyday we apply that simple technique to our words as well. Cost/benefit analysis helps us decide if it's worth it to utter an item of very expensive speech.

For example, we're free to tell our boss his or her breath smells like Corn Nuts and feet, but it might very well cost us our jobs. Fortunately, most of us come out of adolescence equipped with a natural censoring device that filters speech that may be too costly, and we deploy that filter to a degree necessary for the situation. So instead of saying, "God damn, did something die in your mouth?" we might keep our lips sealed and simply offer El Jefe a stick of gum or some sulfuric acid with which to gargle, thereby not incurring the price for saying what we're thinking.

Still, the things that don't cost anything to say are marginally interesting at best. They are just not very engaging. And sadly, the majority of our speaking and listening lives are filled with volumes of this type of free speech. And that's why I hate it. It's one thing for me to engage in free speech. I have enough chaos in my head to balance it out and to keep me entertained. But if you're going to open your cake hole and force me to listen to the sounds coming out of it, those sounds better damn well represent something expensive. I don't really care to hear anything free from the likes of you (unless you're that brunette I saw at the beach last weekend, in which case you can say, or do, anything to me that you want).

I am declaring myself a staunch supporter of costly speech. And I'm talking about the very costly, most expensive speech you can imagine. The more expensive it is, the better.

So just take a moment and think about that while I go say something about the Corn Nuts and feet I have to smell everyday.

By the way, just in case, do you guys know anyone hiring?

Theory is Just an Evolution

I spent the past weekend in Kansas City, Kansas . . . Okay, that's not true exactly. I actually spent the weekend mostly in Kansas City, Missouri, but I stayed in Kansas, and got to see some of that part of the heartland for the first time.

My first observation upon arrival was that I was more confused about the two Kansas Cities than I thought I was. The entire metropolitan area spans two states in a hodgepodge of apparent drunken city planning. It's as if Mel Gibson and David Hasselhoff were playing with Legos and Lincoln Logs, and the result was the two Kansas Cities. To me, the entire layout is needlessly confusing. But that in itself adds to the charm. Well, it pretty much is the charm, but you get the idea.

For the uninitiated, let me see if I can sum it up:

There's a Kansas City, Kansas, and just across the river, where the Missouri River meets the Kansas River, there's a Kansas City, Missouri. Kansas City, Kansas is the third largest city in Kansas, and is the county seat of Wyandotte County. Kansas City, Missouri is the largest city in Jackson County, but the suburb of Independence is actually the county seat of Jackson. Kansas City, Missouri is also the largest city in Missouri, although St. Louis, which sits at the confluence of the Missouri and Mississippi Rivers, has a larger metropolitan area. Kansas City, Missouri is the center of the 26th largest metropolitan statistical area in the United States. In the Midwest, Kansas City, Missouri is the 7th largest city (sitting statistically between Cleveland, Ohio and Omaha, Nebraska) with a population of 441,545. Combined with Kansas City, Kansas, however, the population is 588,411. And the entire metropolitan area (in both Missouri and Kansas) is approximately 2,015,282.

Did you get all that?

Yeah, it kinda gave me a headache, too

Anyway, once I got past the needless confusion of having two cities with the same name right next to each other, I went in search of interesting people. In particular, I wanted to see if I could find the type of person we've all read about; the type of person who would teach Intelligent Design (ID) as science in public schools.

You might remember that ID was recently deemed to be simply a trumped up version of Creationism by the Supreme Court. It basically says that the universe is too complicated for men to understand, so a super intelligent being must have created it. ID dismisses every shred of wonderful scientific discovery man has ever made about the world around us in favor of a "god did it" explanation.

Now, I know it's possible Kansas has gotten a bad wrap because of a handful of yokels that happened to rise to positions of prominence. And I know that Missouri hasn't been defamed in the same way that their neighbors in Kansas have. Hell, I even know that there are a great many over-churched, ID people right here in my home state of Texas. But you've got to figure that a sizable portion of the population has to fit the un-enlightened, conservative mold in Kansas for the state board of education to be in the news regarding a creationism controversy as late as November of last year. I just wanted to see if I could find any of them.

Turns out I could. And it didn't take me long.

They are everywhere. There is no shortage of ultra-conservative, right wing Christians in Kansas. I had no trouble finding folks willing and able to converse about subjects that ranged anywhere from the King James Bible to Republican politics to the Living Bible. Oh and some of them are fond of country music, too.

But you know what? I think I understand them a little better now that I've been there, now that I've met them face to face. I mean, I still don't think they are right by any stretch of the imagination. I don't think that because the average person doesn't understand every detail of the workings of our universe that an all-powerful contractor built the thing. (By the way, if there is a creator, he has to be a contractor. Who else would have taken 25 billion years and still not be finished?) But when I got them in my figurative crosshairs, I noticed some things about them, and I now think I understand their mindset a little better.

For the most part, folks in Kansas (indeed the entire Midwest) are well fed and hardy. They are wholesome --- in a physical sense. They are people of the land; milk fed; corn fed. They are sturdy Christian folk. Not just a handful of them, but all of them. It's as if Pat Boone and Sandra Dee were playing The Sims, and the result was the Midwest. This is a collection of people who have a breeding population big enough to avoid the pitfalls of inbreeding, and who, so far, live in a predominantly whitebread area of the country. They are sturdy white people, encapsulated in a protective shell of sameness. There is no one different from them anywhere around. There is no truly down-and-out portion of the population. There is no advanced intelligentsia. There are no real vagrants or homeless. There is no political vanguard or social elite. The sick and mentally ill are whisked away and hidden. Geographically, they're not even all the way west, or all the way east. They're Midwest. They are right in the middle. They are the very definition of ordinary.

In short, these people don't believe in evolution because they don't see evolution.

They don't see the survival of the fittest that takes place in the bigger cities every day and poor rural areas. They don't see the mutations in their offspring, because they are all the same, and their environment is unchanging. They're not cynical and pissed off, so they don't stop to think. They don't notice that the church is shining them on. They don't consider that the Bible could be wrong.

It takes differences and hardships to make people think about what's going on around them. It takes at least one new experience to trigger the curiosity necessary to begin to explore and to question. Aside from the occasional tornado or drought, folks in the Midwest only ever see the sun rise and the sun set and the winter turn to spring and the summer to fall. They live a median existence.

But it must be a nice existence. It would certainly seem so. I don't want to use the trite expression that ignorance is bliss, because these folks are most certainly not ignorant. They are well informed about many things the rest of us are oblivious to. How many of us could raise a crop or work on a dairy farm? Probably not many.

Still, given the number of them acquainted with life on the farm, it's odd that so many of them can't or won't recognize a pile of bullshit when it's right in front of them. Oh wait . . . Did I just refer to ID as bullshit. Sorry, that's a mistake. I should have referred to it as Grade A bullshit.

But you know, I don't mean to criticize too harshly. I honestly did enjoy my time in Kansas, and I would go back again and recommend everyone visit at some point. It truly is a nice place to be. The points in this post are just observations I made. I can't possibly understand the workings of an entire society. Hell, I had a hard time with two cities named Kansas City being right next to each other. So I don't claim to be right.

Don't read too much into all this. After all, it's just a theory.