Chapter Twelve

Under the Science section of this weeks Time magazine by Michael D. Lemonick
comes the news of a nearly intact male skull of A. afarensis who lived about
200,000 years after Lucy along with several arm bones from other males. "The
new fossils virtually clinch the view that A.afarensis is one species,
placing it more firmly than ever at the root of the human family tree. And
because the specimens are nearly a million years younger than the very
oldest A. afarensis bones, they argue that Lucy and her relatives were an
extraordinarily long-lived species".

Because of footprints and leg bones it is agreed that A. afarensis walked
upright. While she had a brain no bigger than a Chimps it was big enough to
fabricate the simple tools neccesary to survive an ice-age. Brain size is
also related to physical size. The African pygmy has a smaller brain than
the Zulu, but the Pygmy is physically smaller than the Zulu. Although
Neanderthal Man had a larger brain than Cro-Magnon. Artifacts indicate that
he was not as intelligent as Cro-Magnon. Neanderthal Man was huge compared
to Cro-Magnon. Certainly he had a larger brain. While true that brain size
is connected with intelligence. The total physical make-up must be
considered. A whale has a brain larger than a man himself but Carl Sagan
won't find any whales who have rocketed to the moon.

Darwin's own confusion on the "Descent of Man" was a result of missing the
"technological effect". In Darwin's time there was not enough
anthropological evidence for him to come to this conclusion. The long
history of A. afarensis without significant physical change was because he
had not yet reached the saturation of his holding capacity yet. This
happened as a result of his biological success. When it did, he began to
change physically and his brain size increased because he could not afford
stupidity in a struggle with other tribes who were as well armed as he was.
This resulted in homo-erectus, a tall hominid with a larger braincase.
Homo-erectus was a traveler and spread out to other continents. When he
reached the limits of his holding capacity, renewed warfare resulted in
Homo-neanderthalus and Cro-Magnon the precursors of Homo sapiens. The
increase in brain size continued until the invention of agriculture and the
advent of civilization. At this point it stopped because warfare changed.

This is my story and I am entitled to it. It certainly makes more sense than
any other theory I have heard. It takes in the evidence that is available
and is compatible with what we know of Man today. Much of what passes as
"human nature" today is in reality cultural training. To live in a family is
not human nature, it is chimp nature. Humans are not only family animals
they are tribal animals: they are social animals that have been conditioned
by millions of years of tribal life. There is no denying that ten-thousand
years of culture, that carried them through many different societal forms,
has influenced their behavior. The reality though; is that while Man, like
any other intelligent animal, can be trained, he has a basic (human) matrix
submerged beneath all this training. In conditions of societal breakdown,
Man will instinctively revert to his tribal past. This explains the gangs
and the tribal nature of warfare in Africa.

This underlying tribal instinctual matrix is the important part of my
message. It explains what has happened to the fine (old) institution of
marriage. Marriage depended on some pretty rigid moral and cultural tabu's
for any kind of success. Without an "alpha-male" the family is just not
possible. It exists today for "middle-class" people with an income large
enough to support it. The Gingrich-Clinton plan to eliminate fatherless
families in the interest of "welfare reform" can very well create a social
situation that has spawned revolution in past times. Historically an attack
on the lower classes has always presaged an attack on the middle classes.
When this happens . . . look out! The "cold war" not only was responsible
for Viet-Nam; it eliminated the trade union movement as a political force.
It brought down the standard of living of working people. It put the
military industrial complex in charge. While financial markets boomed, the
labor market went to hell. It destroyed the popular culture as murder and
mayhem took the place of art. It made obscene hypocrisy take the place of
honest statesmanship. It allowed the meddling in the affairs of other
nations. It caused the "Ugly American", and made international terrorism
possible. It made a military industrial complex become part of the national
life. It has allowed all kinds of crooked financial and banking schemes to
run amok, and it has left us with a five trillion dollar national debt.

It is apparent to anyone with a smattering of history that all of these
atrocities are leading directly to a crisis. The "mean streak" that allowed
Americans to be persuaded that their problems were the fault of a bunch of
dope addicted low-lifes who depended on welfare, brought Newt to power.
Further driving the victims of cold war union busting to revolt is not going
to better life for "the middle class". Newt works for the multinational
corporations and not for "the middle class". When he gets through with the
easy targets he will certainly turn on you. When the great depression hit my
mother and father both had good jobs. We had a large house and a
housekeeper. One of our housekeepers had been a debutante before the crash.
She used to let her father in the back door and feed him. He had been an
insurance company executive.

When and if the postponed business cycle hits us again it is going to be a
dandy. We are going to have to have people who think. Intellectuals are lost
in the Alice in Wonderland nuthouse we have today. They had better be
prepared. They will be needed again. Not for some Marxist, class struggle,
dream world, but to organize the human tribe. This is a goal that has five
million years going for it. It will have to be a tribe that uses it's totem
gene in the sports arena. It will have to be led by dualists who are not
locked into some quick-fix ideology. Relations between human beings without
war: relations between human beings that are truly human and not based on
property will have to be the guiding principle of the future. How can we get
consensus among so many people? Internet just might do it.

My vision of primitive tribal structure results from a postulation of
situations that would be most advantageous in a society of hunter-food
gatherers. This is our nature. If this is the case; man under civilization
has been living under social conditions that were at variance with his true
nature. Now when technology has taken a quantum leap and it becomes
neccesary to consider new social forms, it would seem that research of our
basic genetic reality is necessary. To try and compress the new social
liberties back into the old "family" mold is a waste of time. It would seem
that our inventiveness could be turned to solutions of the present human
condition that would bring us into line with the reality of what we are.
Social change has ever lagged behind technological advance. Technological
advance today is progressing at such a speed that we can no longer afford
the reactive and legalistic snails pace that characterized our social progress.

Institutions that have served us well should not be thoughtlessly discarded.
Still they must be streamlined to fit the social reality of the day. It is
part of totemism to venerate the tribal "white elephant." An institution
must be held to empirical judgement. Government must be "reinvented" as
vice-president Gore has been doing. Patriotism must be a patriotism that
works. We have many white elephants that can be summarily dismantled. The
biggest and the most pernicious is an electoral system that demands a
candidate forfeit his ethics in order to get in the running.

I worked for a friend of mine to get him on the city council. One day I was
in his place of business when a land developer representative handed him a
check. He proudly showed it to me. He accepted it as part of the game. No
ordinary person can run for office without selling his integrity even at the
level of city council. The higher the office . . . the more money. The more
money the more corruption. Bill Clinton was not born with a silver spoon in
his mouth. There is no way that he could have gotten to be president without
taking money from sources that considered him an investment. The real
scandal is not the Whitewater fishing expedition. It is the specter of Ron
Brown hovering at Clinton's shoulder. This prince of lobbyists is now
Secretary of Commerce. The super rich like the Kennedys can afford to avoid
the lobbyist but if they show too much integrity their life is in danger.

Getting to be a senator is like marrying a rich woman. it seems like an easy
way but soon you find out that you are her property. I have had many shots
at marrying money in my life. The first one I fell for came to my apartment
at two in the morning and said that she could not live without me. She was
beautiful and wealthy. She took me home with her and bought me a new
"California Special" Mustang and gave me the gold key. She was making plans
for a society wedding but would not let me out of her sight. It was not in
my nature to take orders from anybody except during wartime so one day I
left the gold key on the kitchen table . . . jumped into my old truck and
took off.

It takes me a while to learn anything but the second rich female I moved in
with was worse. We have to find some way of putting our tribal council
together without forcing its members to marry a rich woman, or have dinner
with a rich lobbyist. This might have sufficed in the good old days but with
a population that has cable T.V. and computers with modems it is going to
put our birds in their gilded cages under more stress than they will be able
to take. Election reform is the answer but even that will not work unless
lobbying is outlawed.

Other white elephants include the Pentagon and a whole panoply of
"intelligence" agencies that pose a greater danger to the American people
than an armed attack. The Russian KGB general agreed with the necessity for
a two-faceted 'intelligence" position favored by our own spooks. Gathering
information is one thing but "covert" action is something else. They have
been allowed to conduct war without letting anyone know about it. They are
active assassins and will carelessly kill anyone that they perceive as
standing in their way. They are under little supervision because the
congressional oversight committees bow to their "superior" grasp of things.
They are funded in secret, own businesses in secret, and are bleeding the
tribe to death. They get us into messes like Iran by making policy on their
own. They even conned the executive branch to violate the constitution, and
if Oliver North wasn't a fast hand with a shredder we would probably know
more about their peregrinations. They are more of a threat to Americans than
any foreign government could be.

The influence of Wall Street in Washington through our dependence on private
banking is another bleached behemoth that we can do without. Wall street is
a very shaky institution. It has carried the American people to the depths
of poverty more than once. The same Time Magazine issue that brought the
news of the discovery of A. aferensis carried an article titled "Risky
business on Wall Street." The article by John Greenwald starts out . . . "An
old poker joke goes like this. If you look around the table and can't spot
the sucker, the sucker is probably you. It goes into how Wall Street has
gone from junk bonds to "derivatives". Financially they function like some
giant unseen asteroid . . . they influence the markets movements with a
powerful and dimly understood gravitational pull. And if they wobble out of
orbit, they could conceivably come crashing into the sphere of day-to-day
investments with cataclysmic effects."

The sucker in this poker game is not only the investor but every taxpayer in
the land. Every one with a dollar in the bank is at the mercy of these
"Quants" and "Techies" as their money is being used in a poker game of
deuces treys and one-eyed jacks wild. Bailing out Savings and Loans is going
to be child's play compared to bailing out a financial market that has
self-destructed. Government organizations that tie us to these jungle
denizens are taking a beating like Orange County in California who invested
the common-wealth in derivatives and are now broke. This was a rich area
peopled with Republicans. San Diego took a hit too but not that bad. One of
the worst crimes a caretaker in trust of other peoples money can do is mix
his money with the customers. Our government commits this abomination every
day. With treasury bonds in the hands of the "Fed" (a private bank) we are
put in the position of backing the play of drunken gamblers.

The Wall Street jungle can be free to play their Darwinian games, but our
tribe should have no involvement. This is a duality that must be respected.
The tribe must not become prisoner to the jungle. This happened in nineteen
twenty nine. The common tribesman was left stranded, broke, unemployed and
governed by Republicans. The Republican of today still thinks Roosevelt was
a turncoat because he used tribal money to save the American tribesman and
reseeded the burned out jungle to boot. Tribal money must not be mixed with
jungle money in the first place. Its source must be the legitimate one of
landlord to the tribal property . . . a custodianship for God of our natural
resources.

The perception that a government can intrude into what a person puts into
his body is blind stupidity. This is one area where the tribesman will not
conform. We should have learned it from our unhappy experience with the
Volstead Act. The prohibition against narcotics is a violation of privacy
and makes lawbreakers of ordinary people. Like the beer barons of the
twenties today's dope criminals are the creation of misguided legislators of
morality. The war on drugs has been lost because it was a Vietnam type
adventure in the first place, This is another snow white pachyderm that we
can do without.

Sin taxes are an underhanded way to illegalize the sale of unhealthy
substances. As they raise to the point where they are prohibitive and the
users cannot afford them, smiles light up the faces of the dope smugglers
and criminals. A $3.50 a pack tax on cigarettes has caused a situation where
three out of every five cigarettes smoked in Quebec are contraband. The
Canadian government is losing an estimated four and a half billion in tax
revenue. Cigarettes have become cheaper and more readily available to
Canadian youth. They are sold by the same people who sell illegal whiskey,
dope and guns.

Elephants are fine in the jungle but they have no business in the tribal
kraal. Vietnam today has given up the Communist idea of destroying the
jungle. Its leadership is now dedicated to making the ordinary tribesman
rich. The last essay in this same edition of Time makes this point. The
article said "authoritarianism thrives." Any authoritarianism dedicated to
making the ordinary guy rich can't be all that bad. The authoritarianism of
the jungle that continues a "rich get richer and poor get poorer" policy in
the United States is worse. The United States is not a paragon of "human
rights." Your human rights depend to a great degree on how good a lawyer you
hire. I am sure that as the Eastern countries continue to raise the standard
of living of their members that democracy will win out. Let us hope that it
is a democracy without the majority living below the poverty line.

The human right to have as many babies as one wants has been abridged in
China. Considering that one fifth of the world population is Chinese . . .
the Chinese government position is entirely rational. Overpopulation is
going to have to be addressed by Western governments also. There are a lot
of human rights that are going to be violated. The human right to flood the
ecology with non-bio-degradable plastic trash is going to have to be
abridged. The human right to sex and violence in our culture can not
continue to be tolerated. The human right of a politician to sell his vote
to the highest bidder. The human right to deny medical care. There is a
whole lot of American human rights we can do without.

I have exercised my human right to free speech and been blacklisted all my
life for it. Political democracy does not amount to much when the man you
vote for does the bidding of a lobbyist. It is odd that the same people who
are indignant about Chinese human rights see nothing wrong with Americans
sleeping in the streets.

Sorry for the tirade but the old rabble-rouser gets carried away. It is a
mistake to agitate the already agitated. Just remember though that when a
politician buys you a drink and says "Heres mud in your eye," he is talking
about real mud.