Be good and play nice. Share your toys and don’t hurt the other children. There’s not much else you have to know to live in peace. Thanks, Mom.

Word comes out of Europe that one their more enduring hatreds is showing signs of a thaw. After a year of secret talks in Switzerland, the nations of Turkey and Armenia have agreed to normalize their relations. Well, not exactly normalize, since they have never in their histories exchanged diplomats, but actually having relations for the first time. While both sides entered these negotiations as “cautious” and “hopeful,” they have in fact agreed to exchange ambassadors. Just the fact they began speaking is pretty amazing. While no formal agreement is yet in place on many of their long standing disputes, the announcement of mutual recognition is huge news.

The enmity between Turks and Armenians dates back to the year 1071, nearly a millennia of “You suck! - No you do!” Nothing too unusual for that part of the world, what with Turkey being neighbors of the Balkans on one side and the Middle East on the Armenian border side, the twin poster boy regions for ancient hatreds. Most of the specific reasons for these various ethnic hatreds have been lost in the mists of time, but by no means diminished. The prevailing wisdom is: “Why let go of a good blood feud just because no one remembers what it was all about?” The only difference with the Turkey-Armenia feud is that Turkey provided a very real bad memory in the historically fairly recent years of 1915 to 1918 by slaughtering a million and a half Armenians and denying that it ever happened.

It will be interesting to see whether or not the Turks own up to this atrocious genocide or keep blaming it on the Armenians’ susceptibility to allergies, or whatever equally lame excuses they have been making since 1918. It will be equally interesting to see if the Armenians can rise above any nationalist longings for revenge against the Turks and will accept an admission of the atrocity and profound regrets. This is a unique opportunity for these two nations to show the world what is possible by talking to one another rather than mobilizing armies to settle their differences.

At this time in history when many wars of hatred and genocide rage on three continents and two archipelagos, Turkey and Armenia can help change the world, as well as their own hearts and all of ours, for the better. They need not become bosom buddies overnight, but by burying the hatchet in the ground rather than in their neighbors’ skulls, these two nations will send a ray of light to a dark world. The rest of us have to hope and pray that humanity prevails over inhumanity and we have one more small example to show us that someday, somehow, peace will be within our grasp.

No two snowmen are exactly alike.

So, what’s wrong with the Muslim world has been relayed to us by Paris Hilton. Yes, that Paris Hilton, and, no it was not delivered in a scholarly dissertation in case you were worried that this consummate portrayer of dumb blonde bimbohood left character. Rest easy, she has not. It seems the the producers of Ms. Hilton’s latest dopey reality TV show wanted to film segments of the show in Dubai. Dubai, being a wealthy oil sheikdom and one of the few such nations looking past the day when either the petroleum dries up or somebody in a white lab coat cries Eureka when they discover its replacement, has built themselves a state of the art film production studio, figuring that the infrastructure of modern nations includes such facilities. All well and good, and kudos to Dubai for being pretty normal in this assumption.

It’s not a groundbreaking development by any means, unless by ultra-strict Islamic standards, which are completely abnormal and contrary to human nature, so let’s not get all giddy about some nation doing what most other nations have always done, build the things they need in order to stay viable. The fact that most oil-rich sheikdoms would be completely unworkable minus the oil revenues is not lost on progressive (normal) minds in Dubai. But here’s the drawback, and a good capsule illustration of what’s wrong with these religion-dominated states. They want to be able to dictate what sort of films and TV shows are produced there, and censor any offending scenes. Which pretty much means that outside of producing Osama bin Laden videos these state of the art facilities will go unused.

Insisting that these rules are in place “to adhere to the region’s Islamic norms” they have rejected lucrative deals with Hollywood producers wishing to film parts of their movies in authentic desert settings. So, because this country operates under religious law they turn down pretty much the only money to be made from having so much sand covering most of their real estate. The religious nuts who make these laws mandate there be no alcohol consumption, immodest feminine attire, blasphemy, curse words and, in the final coup de grace to ever having a mainstream movie or TV show made there, “no dramatic displays of affection.”

What? Not only does that make it pretty much impossible to film a love story, but it illustrates a particularly demented attitude towards human relationships. Bad enough that these mullahs figure that God made a mistake creating women and it’s up to them to mask His deific errors, now no man is allowed to be portrayed actually embracing one of these flawed beings? If they prefer the company of teenaged boys, why don’t they just say so? Homosexuality is no sin, unless you declare it so, and they do. Might as well declare having freckles to be a sin for all the choice one has in the matter. But why do they insist on hiding what most people feel is one of the most beautiful of God’s creations, the female form?

These guys are just as bad as the Catholic Church’s Inquisitors when it comes to imposing their own severely psychotic views on the rest of society. And history tell us that the Inquisition didn’t work out all that well for anyone but the Inquisitors. Just like modern Islamic fascists, they treated their own people like dirt, thought God’s creations needed to be (literally) whipped into shape to correct His mistakes, and hated everybody. That’s what made them happy, if no else. No dramatic displays of affection? What else have we got if not one another, and shouldn’t displays of affection be encouraged by those concerned with the spiritual well-being of their own people? No wonder these religion police hate everybody and are in a state of constant war. Paris Hilton wisely opted out of generating money and worldwide publicity for such backward fools. Don’t look for the next Bollywood to spring up in Dubai anytime soon.

To have a friend, be a friend.

There’s a great old blues song called “The Same All Over” with the refrain declaring happily “It’s the same all over, there’s people everywhere you go!” Which is true as can be. Who of us in this world that aren’t hermits or lighthouse keepers isn’t surrounded by a sea of humanity, with most of them being pretty wonderful in their own way? Makes you wonder why nations can’t get along, especially if you live in a place like New York City where there are people from virtually every nation on the planet living cheek by jowl and getting along just fine. Once you meet and interact with someone, you find out that 99% of the time you’re dealing with a decent human being living life as best they can according to their own lights.

It’s hard to hate someone who is friendly and interesting and who’s kid goes to the same school and plays with your kid. They might think a bit different than you, eat different foods, wear different clothes and pray in a different building, but, bottom line, they just want to be safe and warm and keep their famlies protected, fed and happy. Same destination, different road. You might trade stories, have a couple of laughs, learn a little something about one another and find more in common than you figured. There’s lots of people around who are different in some way or another, yourself included, and the world goes around right on schedule, raining and shining on whoever is out and about.

So what’s the problem with nations? Why all the war, the conquest, the terror and genocide? Does being part of a tribe mean there’s some other tribe you need to hate? And if so, why? How many centuries does that crap have to go on? Hasn’t everybody met each other at this point, talked things over, maybe had a cup of coffee and traded stories? The origins of these hatreds are centuries old, and no one alive today can recall the war, the insult or the specific incident that triggered a centuries-long tradition of hating the guy across the border. Or sometimes within the same nation. That’s pretty awkward.

It’s also absurd, and a contradiction of every moral tradition and every code of ethics known to humanity. Not a one of them says it’s okay to act like an ignorant jerk towards our fellow man. It’s only in large groups that we get unruly and savage. One on one we do just fine. We remember our moral training in personal encounters and treat the other person with dignity and respect and expect the same in return. And, 9 times out of 10 you find you’re not talking to any sort of monster, but a person much like yourself, who loves his family, wants to do what’s right and get along with people. Most of us have no wish to harm anybody. Why would we?

But you get involved in the gang mentality and trouble starts. Gangs bring out the very worst in human nature; greed, violence and mindless hatred. Leaders of gangs are generally people you wouldn’t want to spend ten minutes with on a personal level, but you just might buy what they selling because they tell you all sorts of crazy things in a very convincing way. They might tell you that you deserve to be better off and that a certain other gang is actively preventing that. Which strikes you as odd since you know people from the other gang and they seem pretty okay. You even have couple of very close friends from that other gang.

But now the rest of your gang is repeating what the leader said about the other gang and getting pretty testy about it. They’ve discovered huge gripes they didn’t know they had and are very thankful to the gang leader for setting them straight about who to hate and push around because they deserve nothing else. It starts with “They’re not one of us!” and in not all that much time turns into “They drink our babies’ blood!” The leader of the other gang is telling them the same things about your gang, lying little weasel that he is, and all of a sudden you’re not talking to your former friends from that gang.

You feel a little guilty about that since you know they are a couple of “the good ones” and would never drink your baby’s blood, but you don’t want your gang to punish you and call you a traitor to your gang. You never stop to wonder why you now think of them as “good ones’” since that means you accept the view that the rest of their gang is deserving of nothing less than being murdered in their beds with their entire families. You don’t even notice that you are no longer questioning that bit of your gang leader’s wisdom.

Then the leader of your gang announces that the other gang has done something unpardonable. You can’t be certain if that’s true or not since it seems pretty outrageous and out of character but he says it so often that the rest of gang is all up in arms and eager to retaliate so you figure it must be true with so many people believing it. Now you’re thinking “Who am I to doubt the leader of the gang? Everybody else knows he’s telling the truth. And to think that two of those rat bastards pretended to be my friend! Let’s start with them!”

And then something horrible happens, people die and get maimed and the other gang retaliates and your gang loses people and it goes back and forth and terrible carnage occurs, mothers bury children, families are torn apart and lives destroyed. Your gang is bloodied but unbowed and vows to visit the same terror upon the other gang and their mothers take a turn weeping over their children’s graves and sifting through the rubble of their own shattered lives. And this goes on for years until the horror is so widespread that everyone has buried a loved one, both gangs’ homes are devastated and people are profoundly traumatized and weary of the hate and the blood and the death.

And so, a little too late in the game, your humanity is rediscovered, your weapons laid aside and the horror and sickening grief at what you have done seizes you and fills you with shame and remorse. Only then does it occur to you to wonder how things ever got this way, how it reached the point of violence and bloodshed against another gang that was in reality decent people caught up in the same insanity as your gang and unable to stop themselves. And you wonder why you ever went along with your crazy leader and his lies, his insane hatred and his psychopathic blood lust, or why they went along with theirs.

So you scorn your leader and his wicked ideas, and blame him for the savagery. Perhaps one day your self-deception falls away and your eyes open. You come to realize that he did not perpetrate the carnage alone, could not do it alone. Then you ask yourself: “What did he unleash within me that made me so much less of a human being? I knew better! I had friends among those people! I loved them as I would any other cherished friend. I did not defend them. I did not sit them down with anyone from our gang and show them what good people they were. I did not insist that the members of my own gang live up to their goodness and their humanity and forget all this crazy talk about hatred and violence towards their fellow human beings. I did not warn them that they were acting shamefully, I embraced their shame! I did not follow my own goodness and my own humanity. Instead, I surrendered my ethics like a coward! And for what? There was no gain, no glory and no beauty, only death, suffering and pain that need not have happened. I did not speak out against the evil I saw growing like a cancer in our hearts. I did nothing to stop it when I could have.”

And so, humbled, you go back to doing what your mother taught you: Be good and play nice. It’s really as simple as that. And it’s the same all over, children taught by loving mothers to be good, to share and to love. These are the lessons our mothers assured we needed to learn in order to grow up. When you have a misunderstanding, to talk it over with the other person like adults. Get to know people, appreciate their differences, their insight, their existence in our shared world. Everyone has their own beauty and worth, and everyone is our brother and sister. It’s the same all over, there’s people everywhere you go. Treat them as you would have them treat you. There’s still no better idea than the Golden Rule. Now if we could only get nations to listen to Mom and grow up already we could really enjoy this world and this precious gift of life. Wage peace with a vengeance, with all your heart and soul.

The very farthest point in time is right now. Or rather, now. No wait, it’s really now. And so on. The only thing you can change is what is yet to be.

Anybody remember the Trickle Down Theory of Economics? That was one of the dumber ideas to leak out of daft old Ronald Reagan’s empty skull, which was basically to give the wealthy so much money that they were bound to drop some so the rest of us could scramble after the crumbs like so many dogs under the king’s banquet table. The policy of cutting taxes to the wealthy and the big corporations and selling it as Trickle Down Economics was very instructive in several ways, the first being that the ruling elite pretty much thinks of the working classes as mangy hounds to be fed off their table scraps. Only problem was that the wealthy are pretty frugal in the table scrap department and very handy when it comes to keeping a death grip on all their dough.

Precious little ever trickled down, so the second instructive point is that the policy didn’t work at all. Unless of course you happened to be in the tiny minority of super wealthy people, in which case Trickle Down Economics worked out swimmingly, so long as you were able to ignore all those pesky mongrels with their big sad hungry eyes. You know, the other 99% of humanity wondering where the Trickle went. What Old Ronnie didn’t realize is that all the great fortunes ever amassed were made using the Trickle Up Theory, where the labor of the many performing their jobs diligently for a decent wage provided the ownership class with their wealth.

So, how did the ruling elite pay back the working Americans that made them so damned rich? Like any ingrate anywhere, they took all the credit for their success and declared themselves “self-made men” beholden to nobody for their princely lifestyles. They resented the people who made them and their companies wealthy and powerful and so decided to sell their jobs to the lowest bidder. Usually that meant relocating their operations to nations who paid their workers in currency worth less than soybeans and had no words in their language for phrases like “on-the-job safety,” “overtime,” “collective bargaining,” “profit sharing” or “pension.”

The result was the de-industrialization of America and a huge highly skilled pool of American workers left to twist slowly in the wind while Senators and CEOs collected big dough from the government not to grow alfalfa on their tennis courts, golf courses and horse paddocks. That is, those of them who didn’t get into Big Food, the corporatization of American farming that has forced hundreds of thousands of family farmers out of business and off the land, their land, that they had worked successfully for generations. This is a sort of Corporate Collectivization that is becoming as big a disaster as Stalin’s forced collectivization of the Soviet Union’s farms in the 1920s. Farming is now called Agribusiness, and the food we eat is less healthy than when Farmer Joe was in charge. Less tasty, too.

Corporations are all about expediency and quick profits, not what’s healthy or even all that sanitary. If they possibly could, the corporations would ship the  farms overseas too like they did the factories so they wouldn’t have to put up with the pesky USDA and their “standards” and Seal of Approval. Today’s modern manufacturers would scorn Henry Ford, who paid his workers better than his competitors because he not only wished to turn out an excellent product but wanted his workers to be well off enough to buy his cars. Whatever shortcomings Mr. Ford had, he built his cars in America and valued the resourceful and ingenious American worker as one of this nation’s greatest assets. His only protege among among modern capitalists is Bill Gates, a great many of who’s profit-sharing employees at Microsoft grew wealthy as the company prospered.

We live now in a nation that manufactures very little. This makes us a country vulnerable to international blackmail. In 1941, Japan figured would we sue for peace, or at worst demand a war indemnity from them for knocking out a huge chunk of our Pacific fleet at Pearl Harbor, their thinking being that it would be just too much trouble for America to fight a prolonged war. Our factories made sure that no one blackmailed the United States and in only 3 1/2 years our industrial might propelled our armed forces to victory over the two most formidable military powers ever assembled, all the while sending vast quantities of supplies and armaments to our Allies. For every soldier and sailor there were three or four skilled workers making sure they were clothed, fed, housed, armed and transported, including 4 million women who showed the world they could survive and thrive in any workplace.

Did any of these Trickle Down billionaires ever think of that when they were busily outsourcing our good jobs and vital production capacity, pocketing the huge difference in labor costs and allowing the highly trained and skilled American workers who made them wealthy to wither on the vine? There is no one trained to step into their shoes to confront a national emergency, and damned few factories anyway. China sure won’t retool her factories overnight to help us in the event of another large scale war. Will we have to hurl data and software at the enemy? Or will any large war of necessity become a nuclear war in a world where a lot of nations have nuclear weapons? Even without that cataclysmic turn of events, a nation without factories is a nation subject to the whims of other countries, who can either withhold goods or jack up the prices to force this nation to change our policies to suit their agenda. Sort of like we do now for oil, but on a broader scale.

A nation that can’t even manufacture its own underwear doesn’t have much leverage. A nation without factories has a dwindling supply of good jobs. A nation with a gutted steel industry is a nation with a dangerously short memory. Such a nation quickly becomes a country of haves and have-nots, with the have-nots waiting for crumbs from the haves to trickle down and getting mightily pissed off, number one for being forced to be in the position of supplicant instead of the proud and independent fair trader of skills for decent wages, and number two, because jackshit is trickling down from on high. We made them rich, and now they’re done with us.

When the economy tanked because the people in charge of all the money decided it would be great sport to cheat and steal on top of being really rich, American workers took another huge hit while the billionaires got trillion dollar government bailouts, not to create or preserve jobs for American workers but to save their own greedy asses. What is our new President “Change You Can Believe In” Obama doing to change anything other than the nameplate on the desk at the White House? The buck doesn’t even stop there anymore, but goes directly to bail out some mega-wealthy patrician boob who couldn’t even run the fabulously successful business that was placed in his care. All these clods were asked to do was not to kill the golden goose, just feed it and take good care of it. In other words, just don’t fuck things up!

They decided they knew better and put on lobster bibs, sharpened their knives and cooked the damned goose instead, figuring you are what you eat and now I’m golden too!, the smug jackasses. Damned few of them went to jail and fewer still lost their jobs over what was one of the biggest criminal fuckups ever. By and large, the exact same arrogant corporate princes are still in charge of all the money and acting resentful as hell that anyone would blame them for their financial debacle. Well, who the hell else should we blame but the people in charge of the money when the money disappears?

Nobody’s dog ate it, no gremlins snuck into the vault and turned it into jellybeans. The people running the economy screwed up the economy big time and they want us to chalk it up as just one of those things? More like another one of those things, like the stripping of America’s industrial capacity. Now they’re stripping our financial capability. It’s only a matter of time before one of these jerkoffs says “let them eat cake” and people start storming their castles with torches and pitchforks. Providing of course, they trickle some cake down to us first. We’re not holding our breath and our patience wears exceedingly thin with the incessant trickle down wreckage of a great nation by its decadent elite.

No one is allowed to make any rules they cannot follow themselves. No sense being a complete jackass. What’s good for the goose…

A recent poll revealed that New Yorkers feel that our state legislature is the most corrupt in the nation, which is really saying something when you consider all the stiff competition in this 50 team league. We’ve also got an appointed Governor that inherited the job from his predecessor who was forced to resign due to outrageous hypocrisy. It wasn’t so much the hookers that bothered people with Governor Eliot Spitzer, that’s his own business, but the fact that he had largely built his career attacking the prostitution industry and demonizing its clients. So his Lieutenant Governor David Patterson got the job, a decent enough guy but dumb as a sack of Sarah Palins.

Next year is election time and even his own party is urging Patterson not to seek the nomination lest the governorship fall into Republican hands. His response was to call his opponents racists, and perhaps he’s right if you count discrimination against the incompetent as racist. Then one even dumber lady from the Assembly upped the idiot ante by attacking Governor Patterson for his blindness, saying he is ineffective because he can’t Twitter. So stupid and crazy is this woman that you half expected her to ask just how Patterson knew he was black since he cannot see. So Albany, always a rich repository of corruption, greed, malice and buffoonery, somehow just got worse and it’s anyone’s guess who will be our next governor.

At any rate, guess who smells blood in the water here? None other than the self-proclaimed America’s Mayor, the less-than-honorable Rudolph Giuliani. This is a man who’s career was made by the 9/11 attacks even though he did nothing but make matters worse by insisting that his emergency command post be located inside one of the fallen towers. He did so even after the 1993 bomb attack on the World Trade Center prompted all his advisors to insist that this was a huge mistake and would leave the city command structure vulnerable in case of another attack. Which is why he was stumbling aimlessly around downtown that morning dodging debris and directing exactly nothing while abler men implemented an incredibly effective rescue operation. They saved lives and gave their own. We buried many leaders afterward.

Yet somehow the worst day in New York’s history became the best day of his life. Rudy Giuliani was on the verge of leaving office a failed mayor, scorned for his autocratic, dictatorial rule and roundly condemned for betraying his wife and young children so callously and publicly. His carefully projected image of championing the common man and cherishing family values was a farce meant for lesser mortals to embrace while he did the opposite, like many a famous dictator. Unlike his apparent role model, he didn’t make the trains run on time, but he did claim to have restored law and order and prosperity to New York City. The reality was that he ruined many small businesses while kissing big corporate butt.

His idea of law and order was to lock a great deal of petty offenders like turnstile jumpers and beer drinkers behind bars, a heinous policy against our poorest citizens that continues to this day. His blustery pronouncements about crime were a huge contributing factor to a mindset in America that has led to the incarceration of 2.2 million Americans, the largest prison population in the world by some 700,000 citizens. This unconscionably huge prison population was built largely by cynical politicians like Giuliani using blatant scare tactics to get themselves elected, selling themselves as the new sheriff in town.

How much easier it is to lock people away than attack social problems and make progress as a nation, the way America was originally designed to do. Of these 2.2 million prisoners, relatively few of them are actual hardened criminals who deserve long prison sentences. To the Giulianis of this world, prison is the solution to complex social issues, as cruel and mean spirited an approach to leadership as can be imagined, and a surefire method of making things worse. How many young lives have been broken and corrupted forever so that megalomanic politicians too stupid or lazy to lead can claim to be effective leaders? For years Giuliani was the head of that hideous pack.

There was no infraction too small to avoid serious jail time in his eight years as Mayor of New York City, and no powerless pauper was safe from his unrelenting police sweeps. The only thing that prevented him from being a full blown dictator was the fact that this is America and that he lacks any personal courage, as evidenced by his aimless panicky flight on the morning of 9/11 while others tended to the grim business at hand unflinchingly. The fiction that he healed this city afterward is patently absurd. New York is a tough town. We rallied to the side of our own and healed despite, not because of this tired buffoon.

That he went on to great wealth and fame as “America’s Mayor” is a sad joke that most New Yorkers just don’t get. It wasn’t funny for eight years and it wasn’t funny on a September morning in 2001. Now he wants to govern our state. Great, not only is Albany a cesspool but now the smelliest of all New Yorkers wants to run it. That would pretty much guarantee that the corruption and inertia will continue while Rudy concentrates on his image, probably pushing for legislation that will condemn even more poor people to our overcrowded prisons. As far as doing the nuts and bolts hard work to tackle the state’s many pressing problems, forget it. For Rudy Giuliani, if it’s not about him, it’s not about to happen. And if he ruins lives and leaves fixing New York’s problems for the next guy, well, that’s the price to be paid for granting us the benefit of his exalted presence.

America is not the nation of criminals and bums that he and his kind think it is. America is a good nation of good people, generous, courageous and hard working. We deserve better leadership and better state governments. The cowards and psychopaths who dispose of people because they are inconvenient, or because their very existence reminds them of their own failings as leaders need to go away. These clowns spread fear, then ride in on a white horse promising to save us from that fear by any means necessary, constitutional or otherwise. No, thanks. Been there, done that, have the overcrowded prisons, high unemployment, homeless families and empty treasuries to prove it. We cannot afford to follow blowhard ideologues any longer. They always harm the many for the benefit of the few and always leave a huge mess behind. Let’s tell Rudy to stay on his America’s Mayor World Tour and keep the hell out of New York. He’s done quite enough.