Bob Crespo

SUNDAY, NOV. 1, 9:30 AM, 4TH AVENUE AND 88TH ST. BROOKLYN. ROCK THE MARATHON WITH THE TASH BROTHERS AND BRING A DONATION OF NON-PERISHABLE FOOD TO FEED THE HUNGRY. MAJOR FUN!

Never ask your dog if your clothes match. Not only are they colorblind, but they’d never dream of hurting your feelings. Better to ask the cat, who has no such reservations.

No sense kidding ourselves anymore, this world has really gotten away from us. Why even pretend we know what’s going on anymore? Hell, we can’t even name half the countries anymore. What the hell is Kyrgyzstan? How exactly are you supposed to pronounce that? Is there a Kyrgyzr language, too? No one remembers anything remotely like that from Geography class. But it’s not only the explosion of new countries, it’s everything. Even baseball has lost its mind, playing the World Series right into November, the middle of football season. With blind umpires, no less.

You wonder why there’s even newspapers anymore. All they are these days are daily confirmations that the whole world has gone batty. Balloon boys? What? Suicide bombers killing their own kind? What’s the point? What happened to blowing up infidels? At least that gave a little rationale to the whole deal. Not a lot, but something you could try to wrap your head around. Then there’s the news that Sarah Palin is a bestselling author. Who knew she could even read? And then you see Glen Beck’s picture on the cover of Time Magazine. What, Jerry Lewis was busy that week?

Truly the time has come to just let it all hang out and go completely batshit crazy. In a world where the most famous people on earth are Paula Abdul, Muamar Ga-Daffy and the Geico lizard, it’s not like anyone’s going to notice. So maybe we should consider doing the following:

Call up your boss and tell him you won’t be in today because the weather report said there was an 80% chance of locusts.

Put on leotards, ballet slippers and a black turtleneck and organize a “Ballet Karaoke Night” at your local bowling alley lounge, dancing favorite selections from “Swan Lake” and “The Nutcracker.”

Wear one of those bluetooth ear pieces hooked up to a string and a paper cup, then shout into it all day long that your signal is weak.

Build a replica of the Statue of Liberty out of recycled Kitty Litter.

Auction one of your kidneys on e-Bay.

When waiting on line at the bank, announce that this is not a stickup.

Start a charity to save the pigeons.

Send a monthly bill to your friends for services rendered. Offer discount rates for nights and weekends.

Get several inflatable sex dolls to be your “posse,” and take them everywhere when your cheapskate friends refuse to pay up.

When asked to remove your shoes at the airport, take off your pants too.

Start building an ark on your front lawn and take applications from the neighbors for their pets.

Collect signatures on a petition to change the National Anthem to “Drop Kick Me, Jesus, Through The Goal Posts of Life.”

Tell your blind girlfriend you’ll understand if she wants to see other people.

Sing “99 Bottles of Beer on The Wall” all the way through every day on the subway, urging your fellow commuters to sing along. That ought to start everybody’s day in a jolly mood.

Organize a vacation trip to Rome that features sacking and looting.

Get a tattoo on each forearm saying “left” and “right.”

Offer your services on Craig’s list as an imaginary friend.

Install Lunar Power panels on your roof to generate electricity at night.

Sign up for Twitter, and send only one message 50 times a day: “Help!”

Wear a parachute on elevators and keep a hand on the rip chord, just in case.

Spray red paint on live minks and ermines.

Start a Phone Book Of The Month Club.

Send all your written communication in hieroglyphics of your own devising.

Open a diner that serves only parsley, cole slaw, pickles and ice water.

Start a campaign for the Olympic Games to include Extreme Hop Scotch.

Start thinking that maybe there is a way to turn Afghanistan into Idaho.

Climb Mount Rushmore to fulfill your lifelong ambition of carving the faces of the Olsen Twins onto it.

Go to a football game with your own referee’s whistle and a bunch of extra footballs to throw to the players when they drop the ball.

On casual Fridays, wear a loin cloth to the office.

When you go to open school night, demand that the teachers explain exactly why your little Billy isn’t learning to be as handsome as Brad Pitt. Do this even if you have no children.

Start e-mailing Nigerian princes that you’re willing to accept 5 million dollars American, no questions asked.

Open a Celebrity Stalking Service.

When running for president, participate in a debate on the issues between yourself and several of the leading sock puppets.

Look up that fifth dentist and ask him why he’s so damned disagreeable.

Go to Starbucks and order a regular coffee, black, no sugar.

There is no special virtue attached to what time you get out of bed. That only comes into play with how you behave when you are awake.

Spare us from leaders without dreams. For that matter, spare us from leaders with dreams of personal glory, which turn out to be nightmares for everybody else. Those dreams usually entail a whole bunch of us getting maimed and killed, and then erecting statues of the jackass who got us into that whole mess in the first place, so for as long as that statue stands we’re reminded that we were once the patsies of a murdering megalomaniac. How many more times are we going to get fooled by that dream again? No, we want real, honest to goodness dreamers leading this pack of ours, someone who dreams that things can be better. People like Washington, Lincoln and Kennedy, or even religious mystics like Christ, Gandhi or King. These were all people who told us we could do better, and challenged us to claim our full measure of humanity by living up to all that is good and decent within us.

Dreamers change the world as much as scientists and inventors. Christopher Columbus was a dreamer of the first magnitude, even though his dream of sailing west from Spain to India ran into a giant roadblock called North and South America, or The New World, as Europeans called it. His daring act of venturing into the vast unknown encouraged millions more to dream of what else might be, and the energy and unbridled industry of dreamers began transforming the world. Let’s take a look at some of the good dreams people have shared with us over the millennia, and a peek at how some dreams were derailed by the nightmare brigade portion of humanity. Let’s start with this guy:

The Dreamer – Jesus Christ: This ex-carpenter turned preacher had the best of dreams to offer humanity, a profound but simple message of love, tolerance, humility, peace and good will. He spread his message in a remote backwater of the Roman Empire for three years before being killed for his troubles. His followers spread the word.

The Nightmare – What became of Christianity: The followers of Christ proclaimed him Savior and formed a powerful organization called simply “The Church,” and then proceeded to completely ignore his message by gaining political power and demanding unquestioning obedience to their misreading of Christ’s words, treating Christians like so many dogs to be brought to heel, and those who followed other faiths as vermin to be exterminated. So successful were they in their Inquisitions and wars, the Church became the working model for Islam when it was their turn to “Spread The Word,” which they did at the point of a sword and came up with a bunch of new harsh rules and torture techniques in the service of a (?!?) loving God.

The Dreamers – Mohandes K. Gandhi and Martin Luther King: Called The Mahatma, Mohandes Gandhi was an Indian Hindu scholar and preacher who taught nonviolence, tolerance, love and understanding as the way to achieve human freedom from oppression. He inspired another religious man, the American Reverend Doctor Martin Luther King, Jr. who like Gandhi, achieved a degree of freedom for his people though determined nonviolence, and also like his philosophical  mentor, earned a bullet in the head for his visions.

The Nightmares: India and Pakistan today, once a single entity but now two overpopulated, nuclear-armed countries evenly divided between rich and abjectly poor at each other’s throats since Gandhi’s death, and both  torn from within by inequality and religious violence. For Dr. King, the nightmare was not only his death, but another generation of racial strife in an America long tortured by this issue.

The Dreamer – John Lennon: This fabulously successful musician and songwriter shared his dream of peace and love in the form of some unforgettable music backed up with outspoken activism, risking controversy and personal derision to consistently champion the better angels of humanity.

The Nightmare: Another dreamer cut down in his prime by a man with a gun in his hand and no love in his heart.

The Dreamers – Abraham Lincoln and John F. Kennedy: Two American presidents a hundred years apart who sought a more perfect union of these United States, one untainted by racial inequality and oppression. The second dreamer also had another dream, to put a man on the moon, a dream made true by others.

The Nightmare: Two more visionaries who didn’t live to see the fruits of their dreams, cut down by a couple of other guys with guns and nothing but hatred in their hearts

The Dreamer – Bob Marley: An obscure musician from an obscure former British Colony, the island nation of Jamaica in the Caribbean, this illegitimate son of a British Army Officer and a Jamaican mother became a true giant of music and peace. His deceptively simple songs of freedom, love and redemption are masterpieces of song writing craft, and his honesty, insight  and contagious joy made him a beloved world figure long after he was taken from us, and earned Reggae Music a valued position in popular music.

The Nightmare: Other than surviving an assassination attempt and dying much too young of cancer, there has been no nightmare associated with Mr. Marley, and his songs, his goodness and universal message of equality, respect and love still ring true and clear.

The Dreamer – Lydnon Baines Johnson: The president who took over for the slain John Kennedy, he implemented the Civil Rights initiatives introduced by his predecessor, then went on to wage his War on Poverty and introduce The Great Society, social legislation that eliminated starvation in The United States overnight and began the process of enfranchising the disenfranchised.

The Nightmare: President Johnson became more and more obsessed with fighting the unwinnable and unjust Vietnam War, the most divisive conflict in American history and an issue that began tearing America apart at the seams from within, a trend that continues to this day. So dispirited was Johnson that he abandoned the presidency and any hopes of building on his Great Society dreams of financial equality for Americans of every background, a failure that has come home to roost in today’s America of haves and have-nots. Lyndon Johnson could have become one of our greatest dreamers and leaders, but the mindless pursuit of futile global warfare derailed a great and worthy dream.

The Dreamer – Barack Obama: The son of a Kenyan shepherd and a white American mother who raised him alone, Barack Obama has had a meteoric rise to become one of America’s youngest presidents and our first black president, collecting on the dividends of the dreams of Lincoln, Kennedy, King and Johnson. President Obama came to Washington with the dream of correcting the Us-Versus-Them political landscape that has been dividing America since the Vietnam War by reaching out to those whose political views differ from his own. He also dreamt of expanding the rights of American citizens to include the right to medical care, and to end the futile wars in Iraq and Afghanistan that threaten to derail American domestic issues and international prestige.

The Nightmare: Too soon to tell how all this will turn out after only 10 months in office, but so far the opposition has been industriously biting Obama’s outstretched hand of cooperation and unity. The two wars are still being waged and Obama has been sidetracked dealing with a Corporate Shadow Government that wants to continue to run the America solely for the benefit of wealthy individuals and corporations. This battle between who controls the American government, our lawfully elected officials or a self-appointed wealthy elite, is likely to define his presidency for the immediate future. If he doesn’t win that battle and regain control of the government for the American people, he will be able to implement few, if any, of his dreams, and the nation will be the poorer for it. Let’s root for the dreamers, that brand of human determined to leave this world a better place than the way they  found it. We desperately need to dream and we need our dreamers.

One of the best things about life is that so much of it is optional. No one can force you to watch synchronized swimming, eat tofu, or think about Canada.

What is the purpose of life? To live? Possibly. Anyone who claims to be in possession of any definitive answer to that one is either out of their mind, supremely arrogant or a religious nut who ignores his own faith’s teachings that much of creation and life is shrouded in mysteries beyond human understanding. And who can deny that such mysteries abound? The founding of religions is merely the reaction to, and the acknowledgment of, forces above and beyond our human senses. Faith is an attempt by mankind to make sense of the fierce and beautiful chaos of the natural universe, starting with our own tiny corner of Creation.

For millennia, our religious aspirations reached no further that our immediate surroundings and the stars visible to the naked eye, representing a miniscule slice of all that exists. Then we invented telescopes that informed us that we are somewhat less than The Crown of Creation. Even our unmanned probes into our Solar System and beyond are equivalent to exploring a spot on the couch an eighth of an inch away from where you are seated. Now our orbiting space telescopes are providing us with images of fantastic events and locations on so vast a scale that the human mind is staggered at the almost painfully beautiful complexity and unimaginable size of the Universe.

Which still leaves us all here on the third stone from a smallish star in a galaxy far, far away from everything. If and when humanity spreads out into the rest of the galaxy, we all know it will not be in the lifetimes of even our great-great-great-great grandchildren. So, that leaves us pretty much to our own devices back here on Planet Earth, to deal with each other as best we can. And truth be told, we haven’t been all that nice to one other, like forever. And being that we’re here for the foreseeable duration, maybe it’s time that we decided what is the purpose of life for humans. Leaving aside the unknowable mysteries of all of creation, people need to figure out some kind of game plan for this planet.

Winging it, as we’ve been doing all along, sure hasn’t worked out all that well for the majority of humans. Our history has basically been a bloody mess, a fairly comprehensive guide to what went horribly wrong and what sort of behavior to avoid. Wars, slavery, genocide, starvation and the brutal exploitation of the many by the few are the major themes of human existence. That and mass starvation, which kills even more of us than our wars and murders. We still haven’t gotten that stuff out of our system, no matter how many religions we invent to tell us how wrong these things are, both to slay one another so earnestly and to do nothing while so many die from lack of food on a bountiful planet. Maybe it’s time for Plan B.

There have been countless people with an ambitious Plan A throughout history, but they always seem to have been designed to conquer, kill and enslave, and not a single one of them has ever succeeded in their stated aim of spreading their Plan A to every nation on earth. Most plans did not even outlive their planners. Just ask Alexander the Great and Adolph the Not-So-Great. The longest run any empire ever had was Rome, the better part of a thousand years, with most of those years marked by slaughter on a grand scale, pillaging, crippling taxation and mindless oppression. The portion of the world that was the Roman Empire didn’t miss them all that much when they finally went away.

Other rapacious empires came and went and still mankind had no plan, no vision of what these lives of ours are supposed to mean, with so many people understandably taking refuge in the faith that death would bring us a rewarding afterlife. Small wonder when most people’s lives were ones of endless drudgery broken up only by a series of terrifying catastrophes. Who wouldn’t look forward to death if misery, fear and degradation was what life is all about? And the sad fact is that so many of the religions that invented these comforting beliefs were huge perpetrators of the misery visited upon humanity while they lived their earthly lives. Talk about adding Inquisition to injury!

Can we change all this crazy nonsense? We’ve pretty much exhausted all the possibilities of bloodshed and mayhem, from traditional war to genocide to proxy wars to to biological warfare to conquest, slavery, human sacrifice and brutal oppression. Even the “new wrinkle” of suicide bombings is getting old, and has no more solved anyone’s problems that all the other rotten things we’ve done to each other since beyond memory. Anybody satisfied with the outcome of any of these things? Not at all, but like that concise definition of insanity, we keep doing the same things over and over again and expecting different results. Can we take a breather here, a little time out to think things through quietly, maybe take a tranquilizer and have a nice hot cup of tea?

We need a new definition of the meaning of our lives. We have to end our wars, declare them all a draw, with no winners to march the boulevards in grand victory parades and no losers to lick their wounds, bury their dead and plot their bloody revenge. Been there, done that, been there, done that, been there, done that… Time to rethink our thinking. Can we make a plan that includes all God’s children, however we think, or don’t think, of God? And speaking of God, can we allow everyone to worship as they please, but allow none of our religions a voice in running our civic affairs? Total separation of church and state.

Since no two religions completely agree, and most of them have a hell of a lot of blood on their hands, let them sit this one out as we try to come up with a new way to deal with one another in a way that pays no attention at all to whom the other guy prays, or doesn’t choose to pray. There are few things less relevant to ethical behavior than one’s religion, and few things more liable to arouse divisiveness and hatred. That’s no condemnation of anybody’s faith, merely a factual reading of history. What happened, happened, and the role that our various religions played in the bloody mess of history has been that of major players in the mayhem. When government and religion are intertwined, the results are always the direct opposite of what governments and religions are supposed to be about. This applies not only to events we read about in history books, this is current events. Read the papers.

So lets leave religion a private matter and come up with a set of ethics because it is the right thing to do, and also because it is in every person’s best interest. Before we enter school as very small children we know it is wrong to harm another person, wrong to lie or cheat or steal. We know greed  is bad and sharing is good. We know it is better to be nice to everyone and have good manners than to be surly and ill-tempered. We have been taught that generosity is better than greed and friendship is better than hostility. We learned that talking out our differences is better than coming to blows, and patience and understanding is better than anger and intolerance. We learned firsthand that love is the very best thing that people can share. We all learned these lessons as children and passed them along to our own children. We just didn’t act on these lessons very consistently.

So here’s Plan B: Let’s all behave like our mothers taught us to behave: Play nice and share. Be good to your brothers and sisters and don’t be selfish. Be the best boy or girl you can be and help others to do their best. When someone gets hurt, help them, when someone needs you, don’t turn your back. Don’t be a pest. If we apply these simple lessons we learned before we could read, this world would be a better place tomorrow. When you think about it, people really don’t have to formulate any grand new scheme to live better lives and get along a lot better with others in this world. We just have to listen to our mothers. They have life figured out pretty good. Let’s play nice.

The best kind of scientist to be is a mathematician. Who can argue with your theory that 2 plus 2 equals 4? No worries about being discredited by some smart aleck who theorizes that 2 and 2 is really 37. Either your numbers add up or they don’t, and you can sleep at night.

Ah, scientists, that wonderful, curious, superbly educated and intelligent subspecies of humanity. Where would we be without them? Probably still hunting and gathering, and industriously fighting over barren patches of real estate. Okay, so we’re still fighting over barren patches of real estate on a fairly regular basis, but that’s not the scientists’ fault.

They could probably even tell us why we keep up that crazy behavior, not that it would do them much good because we wouldn’t listen anyway, maybe even turn on them as we have so many times in the past, so they wisely leave that one alone. No sense giving us an opening to go all Catholic Church vs. Galileo on them, or Bush vs. Anything science-related.

Which is why most scientists stick to the physical world of objects and substances, where they have excelled in producing wonders the likes of which would have had our hunting and gathering ancestors falling on their knees to worship them. Either that or slaying them down to the last man, woman and boy wonder as fiendish apostates, depending on their mood.

So it’s a fine line trod by the scientists of this world, acting upon their inborn curiosity to seek answers to ancient riddles from a natural world reluctant to yield its secrets, while avoiding having their heads adorning a pike for their trouble. But human nature and curiosity are powerful forces, and the thirst for knowledge has never been quenched even when the powers that be made it their policy to kill the curious questioners on sight.

In spite of ourselves, humanity has come light years from our early history as stunted, filthy nomads and scavengers. For much of this species elevation we have our scientists to thank, from the first hunter who mounted a sharp stone on a long stick so we could kill dangerous animals from a safe distance to today’s breakers of the genetic code that makes humans human. Grazi.

The world we live in today is largely due to the incredible discovery that petroleum could provide power for just about anything and everything, and even the parts of it we couldn’t set on fire to make our engines go vroom could be made into plastics so we can possess formica, bubble wrap and GI Joe With The King Fu Grip action figures. Think how empty life would be without such amenities. Imagine not being able to pop our bubble wrap? The mind boggles at the potential emptiness.

And because our scientists unlocked the power of petroleum, science and technology joined hands like star-crossed lovers and dragged humanity along for the ride of our lives to the point where we have unlocked the atom, stood on the moon and can Twitter our friends all day long about the relative merits of waffles and pancakes!

And yet (there’s always an “and yet,” isn’t there?), the time for our love affair with petroleum is drawing to a close. Sad? Surely, since the black goo is basically the stuff that dreams are made of and the substance that got us this far along on our human journey.

We peruse the landscape of millions of vehicles and aircraft whizzing hither and yon, a hundred billion lights showing the way at night and a hundred thousand GI Joe With The Kung Fu Grip dolls smiling jauntily in garbage dumps, swimming in a sea of popped bubble wrap, never to rot away in a thousand human generations.

And we sigh.

How can we say goodbye to petroleum and it’s kissing cousins, coal and natural gas? We burnt these things and ignited a modern society the likes of which the world has never seen. How can we even consider extinguishing the flames of love and gratitude?

Well, sad to say, we don’t have much choice in the matter. It seems that the earth was not considerate enough provide an endless supply of the sticky stuff, and we are getting close to burning off the last of the remains of the giant reptiles and ferns that died so we may live so modernly. Not only that, it turns out that our salvation from backwardness has sown the seeds of our own doom if we are not careful.

All this burning of acrid goo has poisoned the planet that gave it to us, and the resulting fumes are hacking away at the atmosphere that allows us to survive on this rocky stone on the remote edge of a smallish galaxy somewhere, we’re not really sure, in a universe we don’t understand all that much. What to do, what to do?

Do we stop the burning of fossil fuels, shut down our engines of progress and turn out the lights? Do we curse the comforts we have and shun them as an evil betrayal by our lover, Petroleum? That wouldn’t do, would it? Petroleum has not been as faithless as some would have us believe. It has gotten us this far, and now it is time to cut the ties that bind.

See, the upside of petroleum is that the progress it has provided us thus far has given us the ability to seek its replacement. While many humans are reluctant to move on and peevishly declare any alternative to be an impossibility, those same sort of humans at one time denied the possibility of all that we have achieved by burning petroleum.

Like Charles Duell, the U.S. Commissioner of Patents, who urged the president to abolish the Patent Office since “Everything that can be invented has been invented.” In 1899. Wonder what that worthy gentleman said when Orville and Wilbur Wright opened the Aviation Age 4 years later.

That was was not the first or last innovation breathlessly described this way by many a booming baritone announcer: “And they said it couldn’t be done!” Well, it was done, and we’re not finished doing amazing things. Scientist, engineers and inventors amaze us all the time.

It would be pretty cool if one of them could astound us once again with a lusty cry of “Eureka!” and the announcement that a clean source of energy is now ours. Would it be too much to hope for a renewable one? Maybe one that smells like cinnamon, too? Okay, that’s a little nuts. Lavender would be just fine.

There’s lots of people looking into lots of alternative energy sources, like wind, solar and tidal energy, but so far none of them packs the hefty punch of petroleum for the incredible amounts of energy it takes to run human society. We need one with plenty of of oomph.

Some scientists tell us our dwindling energy supply is a dire emergency. Other scientists say all this burning of petroleum, coal and natural gas is a worse emergency, one that will warm our planet, melt all the ice and make the place decidedly unpleasant for humans. Then there are those who study black holes in outer space, not worried about very much at all.

Who to believe? What to panic over first? We already bought all those low-energy light bulbs, which we now find out are laced with mercury, so we don’t know what to think anymore, what with most of us not being scientists, but bright enough to realize that the Age of Petroleum is in its last days. We all know that pollution is bad for us, global warming is bad for us, and resorting to mercury-filled light bulbs to save some of our dwindling energy resources feels like a desperate move.

And then we remember something that our government did back in the 1960s when President Kennedy had this brain storm that we should put a man the moon. Everyone knew it would take more doing that just saying so to get a guy out of the atmosphere and sashaying around the moon, so a plan was made. A pretty complex and gigantic plan that entailed enlisting all kinds of scientists, engineers, technicians and aviators working together like a bunch of beavers trying to dam the Amazon.

Giant facilities were erected; laboratories, hangars, flight simulators, huge launching pads and a new thing called a Space Port. Thousands of brilliant minds were commissioned by the United States to work together towards a common goal, to land a man on the moon and, just as importantly, bring him back safely to tell the tale. And in eight years, they did it, then did it a few more times for good measure.

A lot of people wondered what good that whole thing was, that is until the byproducts of this effort revolutionized modern life with silicon chips, computers, cell phones and coaxial cables, to say nothing of velcro and Tang. The miniaturization required to fit a lot of gizmos into a small space capsule inadvertently launched the Information Age as well as all those space rockets.

So perhaps the government can do this again, commission the best and the brightest to put their heads together on a grand project, not to put more guys on the moon but instead to find a source of clean energy, one that might even send guys to Mars one day. The moon landing effort was called The Appolo Program, a damned cool name, but hey, that was the 60’s, when lots of cool stuff happened. The Beatles, Hendrix, Motown, Janis, etc…

With or without a cool name or a catchy soundtrack, the Clean Energy Program (boring name!) could be the next great leap after the Industrial Revolution and the Information Age. Who knows what side effects could come out it too, really neat stuff that will make our iPods seem like bulky Victrolas?

Put a bunch of scientists in a room, or a laboratory, and tell them what is the goal, then let them think and work. Don’t bother them too much or tell them what to do, just let them do their thing. Maybe it will take longer that eight years, maybe a generation or more, maybe less. Who knows? But it’s either that or the black hole of petroleum, and we all know where that train is headed.

One day these scientists will come up with a solution, and clean energy will be found. Then they will get their ultimate reward at the unveiling of their discovery, when some baritone master of ceremonies, in his best manly booming tones, announces to the world: “And they said it couldn’t be done!”

Revolution is fine as long as you have an idea of what will replace what you overthrow. No sense burning your uncomfortable clothes and only then discover that all there is to wear is burlap. Think ahead, make plans.