The big roads were safe then, or we thought they were. Many of us, the more adventurous, poured onto the highways, just going, moving, looking. We were devotees of the long-haul thumb, crossing and recrossing the continent, dropping into Mexico, whatever.

A camaraderie held. There were rules. On an onramp it was first come first served, no butting in line and anybody with his thumb out was taken as a friend, or at least friendly. “Hey, man, got any shit?” was a common question. This meant grass, pot, ganja, herb, and good manners was to share.

A theme of the age was that “Dope will get you through times of no money better than money will get you through times of no dope.” This makes more sense than might seem today.

It was wild to be alone in the sun and clarity of the southwestern deserts, trucks howling by, a blast of wind and shining of tires, and it was just you and the whole desert stretching in sand and cactus to the horizon. You might end up sleeping in an arroyo and if there was a gas station in sight there might be a bottle of Triple Jack.

The song that caught the era was Born to be Wild, Steppenwolf, and at my local biker bar in Mexico it still produces an electric shiver and a sadness for things gone. Someone once said, “The symphony ain’t been wrote that matches the lope of a Harley, potatopotatopotato.” Could be.

There were black holes that you could hitch into but not out of, where despite traffic or the lack of it you could spend days without getting a ride. One was in Canada–I swear it was called Wa Wa or something like that–that had a buddy of mine and I contemplating homesteading. On an obscure onramp in California someone had carved into the post of a stop sign, “Day 13. We killed John yesterday and ate him.”

Once in Berkeley, on Telegraph Road, Hill, Avenue, or whatever it is, a friend, a depressive Irishman, was in a phone booth calling back East. The connection was bad. “Plattsburgh. No, Platts–no, P as in psilocybin….” She understood him. Such were the times.

One afternoon after crossing the continent from DC my ride dropped me on on the Riverside exit in California. I was looking for my friend Jimmy Auld, who later killed himself by swimming out into the Rappahannock River at two a.m. in mid-January. But that’s another story. The day was sunny and I felt good after a long haul and in the distance I heard Carmina Burana.

That would be Jimmy. He was a music freak and had a Fisher tube-amp that he managed to carry with him everywhere.

So I reached the house on the main vein through town and there in the living room was Jimmy sitting on one of maybe five pink porcelain toilets, connected to nothing. Just there, in a sort of ring. I asked him why toilets.

“I stole them,” he said, clearly thinking this a reasonable explanation. It seemed he had worked in a hardware store.

“Oh,” I said. “But why toilets?”

“They watched everything else.”

It made as much sense as anything else in those years. It was an age of hunting and gathering.

One thing we all noticed on the road: The less a car cost, the more likely it was to pick you up. Caddies? Forget it. Thing was, people in old cars had probably been down on their luck. They knew what it was. So they pulled over. A crumbling ten-year-old pickup covered in Bondo and pop-rivets would usually stop.

Another thing we noticed was that in the South people were friendlier and more charitable. As you went from DC south, there was a sort of social thermocline at Fredericksburg, a sharp increase in warmth and courtesy. . You could feel that you somehow belonged in Fredericksburg. In the north, you were always just passing through, and usually under suspicion.

I once got dropped off in Boone, North Carolina, almost dead broke. Mountains loomed green and gorgeous and the towns thereabouts had the feel on having been there since at least the Civil War. I went into a local eatery, Dixie Lee’s of something with Dixie in its name I think, to spend my last buck on a coke. The owner could sort of see what was going on and she gave me a burger on the house and offered to let me wash dishes until I found something better. A construction worker, hearing this, put me up on his floor if I needed it. I did.

A lot of kids, late teens, early twenties, were in Brownian motions then, drifting from coast to coast, city to city. Since we seldom had anywhere to stay while in transit, we learned to forage for accomodation. One insight was that if you go ten feet off the sidewalks even in a crowded city, and lie down in tall grass, you no longer exist. In Waverly, New Jersey, hoping for a train south, I spend several nights in a clump of bushes not a yard from a sidewalk and maybe fifty feet from a Puerto Rican bar. Nobody Noticed.

One summer night in one year or another a friend and I–it was Jimmy Auld–had climbed into the Pot Yards–the Potomac Yards in Virginia just outside of DC–planning to hop a freight to New York. I say climbed: The yards were protected by one of those nine-feet-high chain-link fences with the Y-l’shaped out-leading barbed wire.

Why these are thought to provide security, I don’t know. A wiry stripling jumps as high as he can and grables the fence. The gaps provide a toe-hold. He then tests the outleaning Y-piece to be sure it will hold his weight, very carefully throws a leg over, and the other, leaving him inside the Y, and reverses the process down the other side. This might take thirty seconds.

The only sounds were the diesel yowl and the shuddering clangsbangbang of couples hitting each other.

Anyway, we hid under some bushies at the edge of the yards and watched the yard mules making a train to head North, where we wanted to go. The yard crews didn’t really care if you hopped trains, but it was better not to make them decide.

We heard but couldn’t see someone approaching. It was an old black guy–both “old” and “black” were obvious from his voice–with a couple of gallon jugs of water. We said hey, what’s up, nice night. Once it is clear that no one is threatening anyone, people in such circumstance feel pretty much at home with each other, or close enough.

It turned out that he had nowhere to live and was staying in a shelter of some sort that he had put together out of sight and had to go for drinking water. A hell of a way to end your life. Then as now America was killing large numbers of people in foreign countries and then, as now, I wondered why they couldn’t give this old fellow a few C-rations. He gave us some hints as to which trains stopped where. We said goodbye and he walked slowly away with his water. I don’t think his joints worked too welol. The diesels were still howling as mournfully as ever.

There was then in Austin a sort of outdoor beenhall called the Armadillo World Headquarters where various bands played, such as the Greezy Wheels. Austin was where corn-fed blond guys and gals met Haight Ashbury and engaged in joyous syncretism. The presence of the University of Texas did nothing to inhibit this. The result was a rich country-music scene fueled by forbidden substances. At places with names like the Soap Creek Saloon, with girls danced on the tables for the sheer fun of it while a beer-drinking contest raged about them A deeply conservative Texas was properly horrified.

At the Dillo, as it was called, as in Alice’s Restaurant, you could get anything you wanted. The freaks would holler, “Waiter, LSD,” and it would come in mugs.

Lone Star Draft

Today the roads are empty. I’m glad they weren’t when they weren’t.

Introducing The Fredian Occasional Latin Tour Guide!

Today, nothing shocking. You won’t need your fibrillator. Some not-too-coherent thoughts from south of the border:

In Guadalajara near the US Consulate there is the Estación de Lulio, an open walled restaurant, cafe and wine bar sort of place with unencrypted Wifi. Early on I could never remember the name and so began calling it the Libélua, or Dragonfly, and so it has remained for us. It is a hangout for students and people who want to do things with laptops or sit for a few hours over coffee or a glass of Merlot and read without being pressured to buy, buy, buy. An advantage is its being about a block from one of the city’s better bookstores, the Librería José Luis Martínez.

When Vi takes the CRV to Honda for its prescribed meals of grease and oil, she typically wanders around the the José Luis a bit, buys something to read, and ensconces herself for a few hours in the Libélula. I stay home and write lies and distortion.

She has a nerdy streak, last time acquiring Descartes’ Discurso del Método, something by Cicero and something else on Zen.

I think that reading philosophy is a sign of mental disorder. It seems to consist of very powerful minds spinning their wheels since they don’t really have anywhere to start. (“I think, therefore I am.” Oh. Rocks don’t think, therefore they aren’t. Or rocks are, therefore they think. I’d rather have a beer and watch old videos of Annette Funicello in a swim suit.)

Anyhow she is a scorched-earth reader, going through everything she can find by an author, Aristotle, the Pre-Socratics, the Apocrypha–-all of the Apocrypha. My head hurts at the idea. After my recent eye surgery we have been hanging out in the Libélula after check-ups. We could do worse. Like much of Mexico, the neighborhood has a pleasant European feel. This discovery should not cause heart attacks since Spain after all is in Europe.

I am not sure why anyone would want to look at the outside of a book store. It is a massive place of two storeys, and contains everything ever written. I swear it. Everything. Though almost nothing in English. I throw it in because visiting Americans, the conservative ones anyway, are astonished and perhaps disappointed by unfulfilled expectations. They expect a decent illiteracy, as is proper in Latin countries.

The Ion Horse, a few miles from us. It is the world’s first physics biker bar. Customers drink free. Only the particles are charged. Slightly out of focus, a common cndition on leaving the Horse.

People sometimes ask me why I live here. Various reasons. One is that Mexico is stubbornly itself. It is not conformist, not homogenized, not designed at corporate and imposed on the whole country by remote accountants in Jersey or somewhere. Entering a pueblo you do not encounter a mall with JC Penney’s and Cracker Barrel and Ruby Tuesday’s and Taco Bell, the horrors that make America into one extended prolific center. Downtown in Guad there are McDonald’s, Burger Kings, maybe Dunkin Donuts, all the stations on the road to coronary occlusion. In towns the bars and eateries are one-off and entirely local, each with its own flavor. I like that. It keeps all places from being the same place.

The towns all have their plaza, usually with a church, but these are all different, idiosyncratic, though usually with a central kiosko–used a a bandstand during celebrations.

One afternoon Vi and I set forth with no destination in mind, just driving. The day was sunny but not hot, we had nothing pressing to do, so we drove along the lake to its western end, turned south, and set forth along country roads. Encountering signs to Concepión de Buenos Aires, or Concha la Pedora as its people call it among themselves, we followed them. The land thereabouts is open, with sparse vegetation in understated greens and browns that for some reason I like. It is not excessively manicured.

Concha is low and level, buildings of an older style, with the common layout There is in these towns a sense of time, of calm and permanence. A lot of water has passed under the bridge since 1517. You can feel it. Yet the kids peck at telephones, soccer plays on big screens, and the young listen to international bands on wifi. An odd mix.

We parked and walked. Few people were out, most being at work, chiefly in agriculture. The quiet contrasted with the bustle and traffic of Guadalajara. Concepción is untouched by expats. I may have been the only American to visit in a month, or many months.

Plaza, or part of it, at San Antonio Tlayacapan, near us.

From the arcade on one side of the plaza came music, José José, who might be called the Mexican Sinatra. On the other hand, Sinatra might be called the American José José. It was the only sound. We wandered over and found a small restaurant selling tacos and hamburgers. We sat.

The music came from the rocola, a jukebox, in one corner. The only customer sat at a table in front of it, a fellow of perhaps thirty, with his back to the world and a beer in front of him. He paid us no attention. The proprietor, as I took her to be, a brown woman in her mid-forties who looked tired, came to take our order, in my case a burger and a Corona, and chatted a bit. Where were we from? Ajijic, we said, on the lake. She knew it well and asked whether we liked it. Yes, I said, not mentioning that it now has the traffic of an LA freeway at rush hour and that the huge expat population has turned it into Mexico by Disney.

Half a dozen songs, and then again, the man with the beer rising each time to put more coins in the jukebox. We liked his taste. Finally we were about to pay and leave when the tired woman brought us another round of beers, courtesy of the feeder of the juke. We thanked him, spoke briefly of this and that, whereupon he went back to his beer. When strangers buy you a drink there is always danger that they want more company than one wants to supply, but not in this case. We finished the beers and rose. He came to shake hands with us and said Que les vaya bien, which is courteous, and we left.

America is obsessed by race. Mexico is not. If you look like a derelict you will not be permitted in elegant restaurants, but it is economic distaste. Being of one race, or close, Mexicans do not hate each other as we do, or spend all their time honking about racism. There is–not a color line, but a color blur with the lighter-skinned being at the top in prestige, but compared to the US it barely exists. It declines as more kids of darker complexion go to university and come out as doctors and engineers.

While the country is not a nomoculture, it is held together by a common Christianiy, practically interpreted (never mind the parts about adultery and fornication) so you don’t have to watch your neighborhoods when walking.

Americans come to Mexico sometimes thinking to see short, squatty Indians wearing funny clothes. There are still some of these, but usually they are old, and their kids, much taller, peck at cell phones.

I am not sure why people write columns. Partly from boredom, I suppose, or lack of anything better to do. Partly from exasperation. Yet partly from the hope that if enough people collectively become aware of problems, they might, just maybe, do something about them. I can’t believe this any longer. Today’s crimes, lunacies, and decays are too many, profitable, and intractable. We are racing out of control toward some as yet dimly limned catastrophe. Hang on and take the ride.

To begin with, America is no longer a country. It is a set of special interests occupying the same place: Corporations, races, ethnicities, faiths, ideologies, foreign agents pretending to be Americans, all at each other’s throats. No cure is possible.

Racial relations are a disaster. Blacks, fourteen percent of the country, are congenitally furious at whites. They neither assimilate nor want to. Whether they should doesn’t matter since it will not happen.

They give their children strange names to differentiate them from whites, maintain a separate language sometimes called Ebonics–blacks in other countries learn to speak normally–and concentrate in huge all-black Sowetos: Philadelphia, Baltimore, Chicago, Newark, Trenton, Camden, Atlanta, Milwaukee, East St. Louis, New Orleans. And many others. Horrific crime and horrific schools produce each year a large cohort who, barely literate, will for fifty years be unable to fit into the economy or into white (or Hispanic) society. This will not change. If it were going to, it would have.

Hispanics, seventeen percent of the population, have a much higher likelihood of assimilating, and are doing so, but it will not happen overnight and will never be complete. They face intense hostility from much of the white population. Add Somalis, North Africans, Jews, Asians, and various Muslims and you have more than a third of the country. Their interests are their own interests. This cannot be changed.

Americans no longer have a shared identity, a common culture to hold them together. In 1950 America was overwhelmingly white, European, and Christian. How deeply one believed was not the point. Christianity was a matrix binding all, as Catholicism is in Latin America. Today Christianity is like marijuana–tolerated, barely legal, but better not to get caught. Whites are reviled by those of lesser capacity and, weirdly, by themselves. What do we now have in common? Almost nothing. This will not change before some strange looming denouement befalls us.

Government has changed irrevocably, and changes yet. It no longer consists of executive, judicial, and legislative branches. In practice the branches are now the Presidency, Wall Street, the corporations, AIPAC, and the media, with overlap and interlocking directors. Elections are play toys to occupy the public. The levers of governance are no longer accessible to the populace. Governments gain power. They do not give it up. This will not change.

“American” corporations no longer are. When Charlie Wilson said, “What’s good for General Motors is good for the USA,” it was. Today’s corporations are free-floating entities spread over the globe, putting down tentacles in countries of convenience and loyal only to their profits. They are too powerful to be reined in. The prime examples are offshoring and encouraged immigration from Latin America, but many others exist. This cannot be remedied: the corporations needing change own those who might change them.

Wild thought: Socialism is an economic system in which the means of production are owned by the government. Ours is a system in which the means of production own the government. Congressmen are commodities and Washington a Coke machine: insert your coins, choose your law, and pull the lever. Voila.

Demographics have consequences. Only whites and East Asians, mostly men, display talent for engineering, mathematics, scientific research, or organization on a large scale. Affirmative action does not put landers on Mars nor program computers. By now it must be obvious that racial gaps in achievement are intractable. Argument over causes changes nothing. The country depends increasingly on a declining number of white brains. The attacks on both whites and brains will continue.

The country crumbles politically. The Constitution has been interpreted into near impotence, a trend that continues. Congress has abdicated most of its important powers and become a passive bribery receptacle. Trump is close to being our first real dictator. At best you could say that America is an oligarchy with Hulk Trump fronting for the corporations in general, the military industry in particular, and the Israelis. At will he imposes sanctions, threatens war, turns much of the world into enemies, sends troops to Africa–Africa?–breaks treaties, discards environmental protections. None dare tell him no, in America or, as yet, abroad. America cannot be brought back.

Democracy, to the extent that it ever existed, doesn’t. Americans have no influence over what their children are taught, where Christmas carols can be sung, over war and peace, whether they can legally choose their neighbors, who they must hire. All of these things are dictated from far away. This cannot be changed. If you disagree, tell me how.

Social control intensifies. Saying the wrong things about blacks, Jews, feminists or homosexuals has in many places become a firing offense–very Soviet, this. The mainstream media, utterly dishonest, are committed mouthpieces for those who rule. This will not change. Who could change it?

The social media, also organs of government, censor us. The CEOs of Google and Facebook, unelected, both of them Jewish, control what almost the entire world is permitted to see. Is this not astonishing? Twitter is now in the same category, and all are censoring both covertly and actively. The silenced may win an occasional lawsuit, but the censoring will not stop., It will grow.

The times approach the oozing last years of Rome. We have mixed martial arts, football, boxing, and now legal bare-knuckle. The country throws national tantrums over who can use what bathrooms. Drug use is high from middle school up. A child who can use a keyboard can watch any conceivable sort of pornography. Twenty percent of America thinks the sun moves around the earth. In rotting societies sexual curiosities come forth. Northwestern University, I think it was, offers a course in sadomasochism. paralleling the dominance of a known torturess heading the CIA.

Schooling has declined badly. Genuine education is now regarded as an elitist imposition by dead white men. The young do not recognize the extent of the deterioration as they have known nothing else. Over twenty years ago I went into a middle school in Arlington, Virginia, an upscale white suburb of Washington, and saw a student’s project honoring Italian contributions to science. Below a photo of Fermi it spoke of his work in “Nucler Phisicts.” In letters six inches high. Uncorrected. The academic content, if so it can be called, of instruction is heavy, heavy, heavy, on social-justice propaganda. This cannot be changed.

Would you dare say anything racially incorrect to your daughter who might tell her teacher? We are approaching what might be called the Soviet Union by Disney.

Universities for the most part are no better. We suffer from an odd sort of civilizational autoimmune disease, eating ourselves. Shakespeare is racist, Mozart elitist, grammar a means of oppression. Two and a half millennia of Western civilization, forgotten by a sea of gilded peasants with no retirement plans. Monkeys chattering over the ruins of a forgotten society. Once the chain of culture is broken, it cannot easily be restored. Anyway, a literate population might cause trouble. We will not have one.

By now I suppose that everybody and his dog knows (well, actually, I haven’t asked my dog) that the New York Times has hired, and defended, one Sarah Jeong, an avowedly racist, sexist, mouthy, and apparently kinky twitess as tech writer. “Kinky” is the polite term for people who enjoy cruelty. Which, she says, she does. Anyhow, among her eructations:

“Dumbass f****** white people marking up the internet like dogs pissing on fire hydrants.”

And:

“Oh man it’s kind of sick how much joy I get out of being cruel to old white men.”

Wow! What are her rates, I wonder? Does guttersnipe language cost more? She is right, though, it is at least kind of sick. And astonishing that the Times would be so candid about its politics by hiring her. Even David Duke has never said that he wanted to hurt blacks. Sez me, the foul-mouthed little monster doesn’t need a job. She needs a psychiatrist or an internship with Gina Haspel. Or a spanking.

Ever genteel, Sarah also opined, “White men are bullshit.” The latter is boilerplate Left, the normal yowling of the sexually disturbed and racially hostile. Sarah is not exactly an argument for diversity and makes white nationalism look reasonable.

If in my newspapering days I had written, “Gook women are bullshit”–unlikely since, when I lived in various Asian countries, I really liked the women, as white men usually do–I would have been fired. The Times is perfectly happy with her though. Different rules for different people.

But suppose that she had said, “black men are bullshit,” or that she “enjoyed hurting old Jewish men” (presumably not a career-enhancing move at a Jewish paper). She would have been hove out the door on her delicate round sit-down, thump, the door perhaps not having been opened beforehand Which would make sense. When you live in a country where everyone hates everybody else like poison, arguably a newspaper should not publish name-callinglikely to inflame the hatreds for no reason. Or, worse, take sides with some groups against others. Which the Times did: Enjoying the suffering of whites is fine.

So why did the Times, the national school marm, bloated with goodness, give her a pass? Me, I figure it’s because she is a protected twofer, a feminist, and “of color.” (Every time I see that phrase, I want to load my Strunk and White with hollow point and let fly, but never mind.) I guess that if she were found to be grinding white orphans into dog food, the Times would say something about her legacy of colonialism and how getting a job at the Times showed discrimination against women and that she was oppressed and making a political statement and anyway it was only a few orphans. Well, unless they were orphans of color. That would be genocide.

I believe I might say to her as follows regarding old white men:, which I happen to be one of:

Now see here, Sweet Potato. I’ve got nothing against bile and bitchiness and bad manners and ill-breeding, though I suspect they could be cured by application of a baseball bat. Maybe you should see somebody about this. Sort of, you know, therapy. I understand that we can’t all be ladies (though I get the impression that a lot of men in New York are), and feminists traditionally have the the appeal of the underside of a theater seat. This is usual and as the Good Lord intended. I cannot complain. What bothers me, Sweet Pea, is your lack of gratitude.

Look around you, Thistle Down. Take your time. Get some binoculars and look out the window. Unscrew the lid on your computer, if you can find a screwdriver with the instructions on the handle. Contemplate at leisure. Reflect. And tell me:

Do you see anything invented by a Korean feminist?

Now, Buckwheat, I don’t want to seem other than gallant and gracious. That’s just how I am. Urbane and mannered. No one can doubt it. So I would never suggest–even think of suggesting–that old white men have provided everything that keeps you fed and comfortable while you piss and moan.

I would never say that. My mother taught me to be considerate to women, or approximations. But in a minor vein–a capillary, so to speak–I will note that if it weren’t for us old white men, vile though we be, and patriarchal, and probably cannibals, you and the sisterhood would be in grass huts, picking lice out of each other’s hair.

You are welcome.

Further, Moonflower, if I were a curmudgeon–which I assuredly am not–I might say rude, uncouth things such as that you seem to be a confection of mass-market drivel, elegant as a truss ad, and could be replaced by a DO-loop .This is true, but I won’t say it. It wouldn’t be gentlemanly.

But just out of curiosity: Have you ever flushed a toilet in plumbing that was not designed, built, and maintained by men? Been in a building that wasn’t built by men? Yes, yes, we guys are a sorry lot, and dim, and sinners all, but when your car makes a funny sort of, you know, chinalank and then a grinding noise, and the light on the thingamajig starts flashing, who do you take it too? Gloria Steinem?

Just asking.

What I think, Maple Syrup, is live and let live. There’s a place in this big world for everybody. This may be a design flaw, but it is what we have. Since consistency is a virtue, the New York Times would seem about right for you. Soul mates, sort of. Still, since you are a tech writer, I wonder what, without the inventions of men, mostly white, you would have to write about? Buffalo hides? Pointed sticks?

But here we come to deep philosophical waters, specifically relations between the sexes. The truth is that most men like women. You may find this offensive, but I assure you that it is true. I hope you will not hold this affection against us. Our mothers were women. Also our sisters, wives, grandmothers, daughters and girlfriends. We even have female friends. We think women are peaches, often being smart and funny and feminine–I’m sure the Times has an online dictionary–and really good at neat stuff like biochemiswtry. There are no substitutes. Most women are slightly crazy, yes, but then they don’t get into bar fights.

So, Marmalade, when we run tinto what seems to be a woman but with the personality of a menopausing rattlesnake, we are taken aback. It jangles our neves because it isn’t what we are used to, or weren’t until recently, and we don’t know what to do. Remedial drowning comes to mind. Often, though, we are not near a body of water. (Why am I thinking of the East River?)

Tell you what, Sugar Beet, I just don’t know what to think. I live in Mexico, which is sexually dimorphic, so you can understand my confusion in the US. Here women manage to do things without becoming venomous. Up North, I guess, this would be a whole new idea. Mexicanas go into law, medicine, dentistry in volume–it is hard to find a male dentist, here assuming one had a reason for looking–and nobody seems to give a damn.

These women are civil, (try the dictionary again), good at what they do, and of exceedingly muted crocodilian impulses. (My theory is that Mexicans have never interbred with reptiles and so do not act like them. No year of the Dragon and all that.) When a Mexican woman becomes a doctor, she thinks she is a Mexican doctor. She is not full of snot and bile and racial animosity and misandry and kinky urges. You, Sweet Pea, are. That the New York Times fronts for you says something about how far gone the US is.

Recently I wrote a column about the theory of Intelligent Design, which holds that that life, both in its origins and its changes over time, are the result of design instead of chance. Several hundred comments and emails arrived, more than I could read. This was not surprising as there seems to be considerable public interest in the question, while a virulent political correctness prevents discussion in most forums. In particular the major media prevent mention of Intelligent Design except in derogatory terms.

Interesting to me at any rate was that the tone of response was much more civil and thoughtful than it was say, a decade ago.

A fair few respondents quoted the Bible. I wondered why the Bible and not the Koran or Bhagavad Gita. The Bible seems to me the chaotic literature of a barbaric tribe and characterized by morally unpleasant stories. Why it is thought to have any relevance to abiogenesis is not clear to me.

Some readers, quoting Carl Sagan, said approximately, “Fred, an extraordinary claim requires extraordinary evidence to support it.” I don’t disagree. The claim that ocean water will in time produce Manhattan seems to me sufficiently extraordinary to require extraordinary evidence. So far, there is none. Evolutionists have not shown that sea water can produce any life at all, much less the New York Philharmonic.

Other readers insist that Intelligent Design is not scientific. If not, so what? The question should be not whether it is scientific but whether it is true. What an ideological group calling themselves scientists believe is not a valid test of truth. When I was in the eighth grade, I watched Crusader Rabbit on television. This is not science, yet it is true.

If science deals with the reproducible, then paleontology is not science, as neither is the chance creation of life, which has not proved reproducible. If science must make predictions, then physiology is not science, being entirely descriptive. If science is the study of the quantifiable, then evolution isn’t. What is the unit of selective pressure?

Much of evolutionary theory assumes what is to be proved. Many readers did just this.

Consider the spontaneous generation of life from seawater. Do we know of what the primeval seas consisted? Know, as distinct from think, suspect, theorize, wish, or desperately hope.

No, we do not. Remember that chemical reactions, assuredly including organic and biochemical, depend crucially of such things as a pH, temperature, concentrations, radiation, half-lives of intermediate, and presence or absence of other compounds that may or may not inhibit desired reactions.

If we do not know what seas existed, do we at least know what sorts of sea would be necessary for the spontaneous appearance? Again, know. We do not. The question is made more difficult since we do not know just what it is that we think evolved. The event has not been reproduced in the laboratory or even convincingly demonstrated on paper.

You see: Life evolved because the necessary conditions existed. We know the necessary conditons existed, because life evolved. Uh….

Readers asked, “If life was designed, who designed the Designer?”

Consider the following three questions: “Who designed the Designer?” From a five-year-old, “But Mommy, where did God come from?” From a freshman in a dorm room, “What came before the Big Bang?”

These questions are equivalent. Designer, God, or Bang, the human mind cannot handle questions of ultimate origins. No matter to what we attribute life or the universe, the question of what came before will remain unanswered. This is as true of evolutionism as it is of Intelligent Design. The solution sometimes offered, that the universe is eternal and has neither beginning nor end, can equally be applied to Designer, Yahweh, or Shiva.

A problem afflicting evolutionism all through the living world, which I am not sure I conveyed clearly, is that of multiple simultaneous mutations, sometimes called irreducible complexity. These refer to complicated systems which cannot work at all unless all parts appear simultaneously. When the individual parts have no value, which is usually the case, there is no reason for them to stay in the gene pool.

Consider the horn of the rhinoceros. At the forlorn level of National Geographic or NPR, there is nothing mysterious here. The horn obviously evolved so that the rhino could defend itself against lions. (“So that” raises questions of purpose, which run through evolutionism, but we will here let it drop.) All right, that makes sense. Except that it doesn’t.

The Wikipedia will tell you that the horn is not of bone, but of keratin, and thus evolved from hair. Well, who could doubt it–but just how did this happen? Did a mutation occur that caused hair to clump together into a hard substance? Would one mutation do this? Why laterally centered on the forehead instead of, say, on a hind leg? After the hair-stick’’em-together mutation did another occur to make the hard patch a cleanly limited ovoid? Next, was there a grow-really-fast mutation to make the hard patch get longer, or long at all, accompanied by a grow-faster-in-middle mutation to make it pointed–at which time finally, it would be ready for poking lions. So what kept it in the gene pool all that time when it had as yet no function.kl?(Actually the horn is more complex, and therefore even less likely.)

To judge by my mail, I suspect that many people, thanks to popular television, think of mutations as major changes that just happen, such perhaps as the rhino’s horn appearing all at once . In fact mutations are changes in the nucleotide sequence of DNA that may produce a new protein. The mathematical likelihood of getting multiple mutations that just happen to engender a complex result is essentially zero. The mathematics is clear but not easily explained to a television audience, no matter how intelligent.

In many years of of writing columns, I have learned that the tenacity of attachment to emotionally important ideas is nearly infinite. This is as true of evolutionists as it is of Christians, the politically ardent, or the rabidly patriotic. Things that do not fit the belief are just ignored, forbidden, or explained away by wishful thinking.

Consider evolution and male homosexuality. This condition would seem to have very strong selective pressures against it. You do not increase your rate of reproduction by not reproducing. While some homosexuals have children, they do so at a rate far, far below that of normal men. The condition should have long since gone out of existence. Yet homosexuals are still with us, apparently no less commonly than in Greek and Roman times.

This is not a trivial matter.for evolutionism. If no reason can be found, then there exists a clear case of anti-Darwinian descent. To avoid this, evolutionists say that a virus causes homosexuality. There is no evidence for this. People do not have a slight fever and turn into homosexuals. Such a virus has not been found. Evolutionists just know that it exists because if it didn’t, homosexuals could not exist. Here again, the theory is taken for granted and the existence of supporting causes imagined.