THE ROBERT W. WHITAKER ARCHIVE

I LOVE YOU, MAN | 2004-07-23

It has become fashionable for one man to say to another, "I love you, man."

That takes some getting used to for us old-timers, but not because we didn't always tell our male friends that we loved them. We just did it in a different way.

At our recovery club, we had an old guy who died recently, and everybody misses him enormously. He would rather have died than say, "I love you, man." But he said it all the time in his own way.

In fact, he had a separate-but-equal way of saying it.

When an old white buddy of his would come in, he would get around to looking at him for a minute and then say, "You know, you are the ugliest white man I ever saw in my life."

On the other hand, when an old black buddy came in he would usually look at him a minute and say, "You are the ugliest man of color that was ever born."

And what this meant was, "You don't mind me saying that because you know I think the world of you."

And he didn't discriminate against women either. He referred to them as "You old bag."

My brother will say, "Bob, comb your damned hair." I'm 63 years old and he is older, and he is the only person who has the right to say that. He's my brother.

It all means, "I love you, man."

I just like the old way better.

HUMANS MAY HAVE EVOLVED ON THE BEACH | 2005-08-28

Whales are the only animal for which we have a complete fossil record of its evolution from one species to another.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/sn/prehistoric_life/redesign.shtml

Whales were originally a furry hooved carnivore, no more at home in the water than a tiger. But the shorelineis where the food is. While all other hooved carnivores died out this one apparently ate fish that washedup, then began to go after them in the water.

Ambulocetus, the "walking whale," looked like a crocodile with fur. That is what the original hooved carnivore evolved into. There are thousands of skeletons of these animals that link them directly to whales. It must have mated and had its offsrping on land and it only swam in fresh water.

Then the ambulacaetus took several evolutionary steps. It adapted to salt water, it adapted to mating and having its offspring on land, and it grew a lot.

Actually later seagoing whales still had their two legs that were useless for anything but holding on while mating. And they all remained hunters long after they became ocean beings.

Eating krill came later, much later.

I have talked about the people who in America long before the Indians. The Indians, of course, killed them and took their lands. My theory of why their travel left few traces is not only time, but also because they probably followed the coastline. A people used to foraging the sea would not care so much about WHICH beach they were traveling across.

The one thing that is always changing historically is the coast. There are towns in England that were there in historical times and are now under sea. They found the dead at Pompeii after they figured out where the seacoast was in 69 BC and looked there for the people who were waiting for ships.

Earlier people had searched the present coaswt because they didn't know it had changed, even though St. Augustine's episcopal sea at Hippo is long since under water.

There is enormous evidence that man made a partial transition to sea life. Even the hairs on our backs are positioned for better swimming. Our lack of hair in general is an adaptation to sea life.

There is a very long list of things man has that are obvious adaptations to water.

Also, dolphins have a huge brain, bigger than ours. They too were once furry animals.

We need to look at ancient, very ancient shorelines to find this critical step in our own evolution. Science only accepted continental drift in my lifetime, so we are very backward in that respect.

IN THIS GRADUATE SEMINAR, DEGREES ARE TOLERATED | 2006-01-12

This article is part of a series generated by CL giving me hell, making me think, Derek's having a revelation as a result and my series of replies to all this mental activity.

In the piece below I happened to mention that a person with a degree is immunized from learning anything from anybody WITHOUT a degree.

This graduate seminar is for people who have OUTGROWN their college indoctrination. A college degree is not necessarily a minus -- I have one so I can't cast stones -- but you have to prove you can think DESPITE it.

All the log cabin crap aside, I honestly find that the average skilled working man with a good brain starts ahead in the race to qualify here.

At Mensa meetings, I hear, there are a lot of working people. There would be a lot more if working people actually thought of joining, but most of them don't know that Mensa is and don't care.

FYI: Mensa is an organization of people who score above 130 on an IQ test. It used to be higher, but that kept the dues payments down.

The fact that there are so many working people in Mensa, despite the fact that very few working people even know it exists, is often mentioned

But absolutely nobody says it might point up some flaw in our education system.

When I was flunking our of high school the teachers were very grateful to me. Each year there were what was something called the National High School Cooperative Exams which we all took. The NHSCE were limited to a few schools, among them Columbia High School which I attended.

The National High School Cooperative Exams compared students in courses nationwide in what they KNEW about the subjects they were studying. Southern teachers always preached the doctrined that Southern education was hopelessly inferior to Northern teaching in general, but they wanted THEIR OWN students to do well on those exams.

I never got less the ninety-fifth percentile in the national rankings of what I knew about the subjects I was taking. I broke nienty-nine percent a number of times. This made my teachers look good to the Northern teachers they worshipped.

My teachers expressed their gratitude to me more than once, which was good of them.

But they kept giving me C's and D's in those same courses.

It never OCURRED to them that since I knoew the subject there might be a problem with their grading methods.

I might add that such a thought not only never occurred to them. It never occurred to them that it SHOULD occur to them.

It turned out that the University of South Carolina, because of the number of veterans who had never been to school, had a unique rule. Then as now, South Carolina had the highest percentage of military veterans of any state in the Union.

So if you took the National Comprehensive College Examinations, which are now called the SAT's, and you scored in the top quarter of the NATIONAL rankings, you could enter the University of South Carolina if you had never SEEN a school before.

TIME magazine had an article back then about a young female dancer who entered our USC at age fourteen.

To repeat, the University of South Carolina was the ONLY college in America that had that loophole, and I am sure it has been closed since.

So, since I was flunking out of high school, that exam was my only recourse. My brother had entered USC at the age of fifteen. If he had gone to summer school he would have been still been fourteen.

I took the exam at age sixteen.

Not only did I make in the top quarter of the national ratings of high school gradautes in the exame, people who were at least two years older than I was, I outdid many of the straight A students.

I know this because when I registered and went to the Dean of Students for his signature, he actually raved about the high level I had scored.

Just as my high school teachers had done.

If I had not been in the benighted state of South Carolina, I would have been one of those people who flunked out of high school and who qualify for Mensa.

So if you DO have a college degree, you are welcome here. But only if you prove you've outgrown the damned thing.

OBSERVATION | 1999-03-06

The United States is nearer a nuclear war today than it has been since the Cuban Crisis of 1962.

Russia today is somewhat like Japan in 1941. Back then, the Japanese Army was actually operating on its own. We tend to think of Imperial Japan as a centralized dictatorship, like Nazi Germany or Fascist Italy. But, in actual fact, the Japanese Army was fighting in China and taking other actions on its own. To a large extent, the Army dragged Japan into its increasing confrontation with the United States.

That piece of history is important to us today. We are dealing with a Russia that still has nuclear power, but it is no longer Soviet Russia, where the central government is in absolute control. Yeltsin is old and sick, and his government is not in real control of its nuclear weapons.

Russia is humiliated and its generals are furious. Our attacks on Serbia, which Russians regard as a fellow Slavic state being humiliated by the United States, has infuriated even Yeltsin. One can only imagine how upset the Russian military men are. Yeltsin has actually threatened the US over Serbia. This is a first for him, one which has been largely ignored here.

This brings up another factor which makes this situation especially serious.

That is the fact that we took the USSR seriously, but we do not take Russia seriously. That could lead us to take steps which would lead into nuclear war, steps we would never have taken in the face of Soviet threats.

Before anyone reassures themselves that Russian nukes are not what they used to be, remember that we have no defense at all against missiles. Russian has numerous missiles for each American target. They may be slow, many may be inaccurate, but there is no defense against them.

The horror and revolutions and slaughter that constitute the history of the twentieth century began at Sarajevo. Sarajevo was in what was then Serbia and later became part of Yugoslavia. In 1914, an Archduke was shot there, and all of Europe got into the act and World War I began. Serbia, and later Yugoslavia, were part of the Balkans, the southeastern part of Europe, east of Italy. The Balkans is an area all sane people know not to get into.

Now the United States is in there.

This century could end in a nuclear massacre springing from the same stupidity, and in the same place.