In a World Gone Nuts

I'm not always enamored of yoga people. Some of them sometimes seem obsessed and given to monomania. But at the very least, you'll never see an American yogi or yogini sitting down to a big platter of greasy pork ribs and a side of fries.

I'm not always crazy about hanging out with Unitarians, because so many of them seem to want to put everything anybody says through the PC-o-meter. Plus a lot of them are atheists, and some, like my late mother, are born-again atheists. But I'd rather hang out with a born-again atheist than somebody like my mom's niece, who kept trying to give her the old "Come to Jesus" pitch as mom lay on her death bed struggling mightily against the reaper.

I sometimes feel an intense dislike of Democrats, but "Who ya gonna call?" (as the song asks) when you find yourself in a room, or a city, or a world inhabited by nutjob fundies, greedhead plutocrats and anti-tax whiners, hypocrites, liars, and morons?

And by the same token, I'm not always delighted by what I read in the New York Times, but it's going to have to do. And on balance, there's more to admire in the worst of the New York Times than you'll ever see on Fox News, even if all of Fox's anchors came equipped with electrified admirability machines.

That's why I was extremely happy to read in today's Times that one of their Pulitzer-winning reporters, David Rohde, has escaped from Taliban captivity in Afghanistan where he'd been held prisoner by those fundamentalist losers since November. I felt proud when I reflected on the simple truth that Western concepts of free speech, open debate, and the rule of evidence obtained via the senses are superior to backward, repressive, fearful, medieval notions of revealed truth, which suck. Big time.

Rohde, by all accounts a humble and hard-working guy, isn't just any reporter.

Mr. Rohde joined The Times 12 years ago after winning a Pulitzer Prize in international reporting in 1996 for documenting the massacre of Bosnian Muslims in Srebrenica...

Mr. Rohde was part of The Times’s reporting team that won a Pulitzer Prize this spring for coverage of Afghanistan and Pakistan last year.

Mr. Rohde told his wife, Kristen Mulvihill, that (Afghani local reporter Tahir) Ludin joined him in climbing over the wall of a compound where they were being held in the North Waziristan region of Pakistan. They made their way to a nearby Pakistani Frontier Corps base and on Saturday they were flown to the American military base in Bagram, Afghanistan.

Do yourself a favor and read the whole thing. It's an exciting yarn, and inspirational for anyone who knows enough to realize that there is such a thing as truth, that two plus two always equals four, and that the people who try to fuck with freedom of thought and conceal the evidence, whether they be American Christian Republicans or Afghani theocratic Muslims, are sooner or later going to eat dirt.