Note what James said that his lovely young wife plans to do to honor me:
Dani has fallen in love with you. She has not stopped talking about you since Saturday night and wants to buy a dog and name it "B.W.," in your honor. Do you have this effect on all women?
- James
Since the dog will be named for a man, I assume it will be male.
So there will be another son of a bitch named Bob Whitaker.
That seems appropriate.
I assume that when civil rights leaders get to Hell their first concern is about the seating arrangements.
When they are talking about getting on Southern city bus the way Rosa Parks did in 1955, the first thing they would notice would be that blacks sat in back and whites sat in front.
Actually what you would notice is that you noticed very little in the bus. Inside the bus was hotter than outside the bus, and it was HOT outside. The way we coped with that was by going into various states of hypnosis.
We spent the summer in a daze. The extreme heat weighed on us and made us semiconscious. There was no relief.
When we went inside a house there was an exhaust fan going and we were out of the sun and we were covered with sweat. It felt cool.
But I have tried that when the air conditioner goes off in recent years, and it is NOT cool.
Waiting for the bus you just stood or sat there, wrapped in your hypnosis. But what I also remember is that, when I got on the bus, it felt like suddenly walkinginto a wool blanket. Those tin cans absorbed all the sun's heat and you were sitting in them.
I always thought I loved to swim. We used to go to a pond to swim every day in the summer. But when I moved into air-conditioned highrises that had swimming pools, I never went there.
Swimming was the only relief there was from the heat, day and night.
One problem other old Southerners will remember was getting in the car after swimming. Back then the seats were covered in plastic, plastic that had been directly in the sunlight during the cople of hours you were in the pond. As we came back to the car we always forgot that, though we were wet and cool, the world was still very hot.
"OUCH!" We almost invariably, every day, sat down on the auto seat without remembering, and we got burned. Our backs were actually red from the half second it took us to lean back against them in our bathing suits with our backs uncovered and jumping up.
Another thing I had reason to remember later had to do with being on the streets in South America. The buses down there used the same unleaded gasoline we used in the 1950s. When you are walking along and a bus goes by the smell is, well, distinctive. In fact, you get a semi-high from the gasoline, the kind that gasonline-smellers get.
That is another addiction a lot of people get hooked on and finally die of, smelling gasoline.
But we didn't notice it because we were used to hypnosis.
And there is also cold hypnosis.
Our drugged-out generation may spend more time conscious than anyone before.
Meerkat Manor was one of those programs everybody knew about. It was popular. But it was not unique. Many books and documentaries have been written about the rigid class systems and border wars of all social animals. This was just one of the better ones.
The real lesson of Meerkat Manor, though, is precisely that. In the 1960s Meerkat Manor would have caused a revolution. Back then it was assumed that birds sing only to attract mates, that social systems were totally absent in the natural world.
Therefore Rousseau and Marx and the libertarians assumed that all human social systems, all class divisions, all wars, all divisions between different people, are entirely the result of which system we adapt.
In other words, which Book we build our society around.
As usual, the real lesson here is so basic no one gets it. Every social and political and economic ideology which existed in 1960 should have disappeared without a trace, like the Humor Theory of Galen did in nineteenth century.
But not a single iota has changed. Everybody debates the same old crap. Marx is still a Great Philosopher.
Let's take a look at one aspect of Meerkat Manor, the struggle for the all-important top meerkat in this matriarchal society. When the old leader died of snake bite, who would take power? We could make a number of guesses, since the old leader was so powerful that she had bred a troop of over fifty.
In meerkat society, the stronger the leader, the bigger the group becomes. With Flower's death, the troop split into sections, a lead in each.
Another possibility would have been that Flower had bred one of her many offspring that was her equal
But the real lesson here is that we all know what could NOT happen.
What could NOT happen was that the overwhelming majority of the meerkats, who were kept sterile since only the leader was allowed to have offspring, would rise up and take over.
This is the critical point, so no one sees it.
Social animals do not have revolutions.
In nature every revolt is just like what REALLY happened with Communism everywhere. The dissatisfied lionesses might join an intruding male in killing their present mate if they have grown tired of him. Then the new male takes over.
A Communist "Revolution" immediately produces a new ruling class which effectively owns all the property and uses most of it for themselves or their projects. What people do not realize is that, due to our nature, it can't come out any other way.
Instead of looking at what we now know about animal and human nature, every system that collapses is declared by its proponents to have been somehow "imperfect."
Mommy Professor will tell you that Socialism would work, that Marx was Great Genius. The rulers of the Soviet Empire and Cambodia just "got it wrong."
You've hears that from the left a hundred times.
Every form of Wordism we have today was written when it was assumed that natural social animals had no property, no territory, no class system, all of which we now assume is impossible even in a society made up of meerkats with brains measured in milligrams.
But the instant we begin to discuss social systems, we go back to a way of thinking a person would be ashamed to take to a discussion of Meerkat Manor.
There was a minimum of five million Jews in the Roman Empire. Most of them spoke only Greek and their scriptures were in Greek. That infrastructure became the Christian Church.
The entire Christian doctrine about Jews is based on the idea that almost all Roman Jews were in Israel, spoke Aramaic, and had their scriptures in Hebrew. Then, says the official doctrine, the Jews were driven out of Israel in the first century AD when the Temple was destroyed and have been wanderers ever since, waiting for the Return to the Holy Land of their Fathers.
Meanwhile back on earth a tenth of the Roman Jews were in Israel. They were not driven out. There was no Diaspora.
None of this bothers the psychopaths who make up most of the professional Christian clergy.