Why There is Concrete Hope Against the Resurgence of Plutocracy

The human race has never been in a better position of insight to usher in a new renaissance of civilization, and this place of strength has only secondarily to do with our technological prowess. There is no former age that can compete with us in terms of our scientifically and morally informed understanding of the equality of men and women and between the world's diverse peoples. Those who believe or act otherwise are expressing ignorance not authority. Previous ages have been handicapped, even stultified because such large proportions of the population were held in check, penury or slavery because of mistaken notions of racial, class or gender superiority. The Modern Age has repeatedly proved that chauvinistic notions are ridiculous falsehoods. Great contributions to literature, science, humanity, technology and medicine have been made by women, people of lowly economic origin, people of African or Asian origin. Geneticists can now trace our family tree and show we truly are just one race whose differences really are only skin deep. The intellects of women flourish where they are not socially repressed, or even despite persecution. The progressive insights established by philosophy, science and spirituality have made it impossible to fool people anymore into thinking they are somehow lesser beings or less deserving than others of a full rich life where they can make higher contributions born of their own minds and capable efforts. Our collective knowledge cannot be contained or snuffed out by any tyranny. It will shine through and finally blast away any barrier imposed by those who would have us return to medieval turmoil and subjugation. The internet is ensuring that ennobling truth and empowering knowledge is made globally accessible, and making it possible for the enlightened to communicate with and take strength from each other, weathering the cycles of adversity from those who would bring the shadows back to the world. Yes, there are those who are working very hard to unravel all the social and political achievements that arose from steadily improved human understanding in the Modern Age. Unfortunately for the tyrants, the jinni has been freed from the bottle of ignorance -- and what a good jinni it is! No matter how much the liberty of the common person is curtailed, no matter how many economic opportunities are squelched and stolen by the powerful, the average individual knows with a certainty akin to the faith in God of earlier times that he or she deserves better. There is no going back now, and there lies the hope.

So You Like Hunting and Fishing? -- You Better Become an Environmentalist

There are many people who like to hunt and fish -- Republicans, Democrats, Independents, Libertarians, and the politically indifferent. But the game they hunt and the squab they hook do not exist in separate safe compartments from the rest of the world. All wild animals require clean water -- that means unpolluted rivers, creeks, lakes and ponds. Wild land animals require the plentiful survival of native trees, native ground plants, and large stretches of such wild land, depending on how large the animal. You can't just suppose that you can go ahead and set up thousands of natural gas extraction operations all over our farmland, our state and national forests and parks, and not have the creatures at which you cast your line, aim your rifle and draw your bow be devastated by the effects of such ecological degradation. Benzine pollution from hydraulic fracking to extract natural gas from shale deposits kills wildlife, pollutes drinking water and gives cancer to humans. Fracking operations require many acres of forest and wild meadow land to be cleared, and when they've sucked everything out, they leave a polluted desert in their wake where invasive species can swarm in -- pernicious plants that our wildlife either cannot eat or from which they cannot obtain sufficient nutrition to survive. You see, everything is interconnected, whether you want to face that fact or not. If we ruin the home of our wildlife, there will be no more sporting recreation. More than that: we ruin a place for humans to live too.

Everything Buttoned Down But Ourselves

As one of the last wolves makes a desperate pilgrimage across the Pacific coastal states of America, perhaps to find a lost haven of its kindred, we hear the usual grunts and groans that betray the superficiality of our civilized society. The cattlemen make noises like this lonely creature is a veritable monster who will all by itself slaughter whole droves of their fattening cows. Others want to remove it "safely" from its marginal wilderness freedom and stick it in a zoo. What a convulsive uproar. Every neighborhood cringing at the Big Bad Wolf passing by their pretentiously-named gated communities and electrified-fence beef-factories. AGH! The common consensus between both sympathizers and antipaths is that this creature simply doesn't fit within the scheme of the urban-suburban-rurban three-ringed circus they call civilization. And they exclaim, "oh, it's so BIG!" Well, no bigger (and often no doubt smaller) than many of those breeds of dog many people raise for American Kennel Club shows, or to show off how tough these people think they are by walking down the sunny boulevards of lookism with a gargantuan hound on a leash. This poor wolf has no mate, no family, and coming from one of the most social species on the planet, it can't be too happy about this. People act like it is some sort of menace wandered out of a medieval bestiary, or as if it were a mammalian anachronism that simply doesn't go along with the decor of township planning! Actually, this creature can breed with the woof-woof in your living room, but lives on a regular staple of various rodents instead of doggie chow. All our dog breeds are descended of wolves. Such breeds as Malamutes, Huskies, Collies and German Shepherds have only a hair's breadth of separation from their wolfly origins. The shared, attentive, patient and playful nurturing they collectively give their young, the affectionate and durable bonds between mates and in same-gender friendships are obvious marks of their high intelligence. Adjustments of pecking order are always quickly resolved in their packs, because the species places a premium on cooperative communality and mutual nurturing, making peaceful relations the norm among adults. Remember when Ishi, "the Last Wild Indian" stepped out of the woodland shadows of California into the crowded confusion of the early 20th century? What will be the fate of the last wild wolf? Will we send it to obedience training school? I hope Mother Nature will not have to send us to obedience school!

American Indians Left Behind

The Indian Removal Act of 1830 began a series of formal, federally mandated and militarily enforced migrations of American Indian groups living East of the Mississippi. These were native peoples whom war, famine, disease and military treaties had not driven out. It was also a collapse of the political notion that Indians should be allowed to become citizens or belong to legal protectorates within the United States, if they adopted European cultural ways, including agriculture, commerce, permanent housing, religion and essential elements of European dress. Most people think of the "Five Civilized Tribes" and the Trail of Tears when they consider the onset of this era of complete racialization of the "Indian Question". In my home state of Ohio, many Indians and people of mixed Indian/European or Indian/African heritage chose not to board the riverboats that would bear them down the Ohio River, then the Mississippi, and finally into the Oklahoma (Indian) Territory. That these "renegades" were able to to do this in Ohio depended on several factors. For one, the state was still extremely rural and heavily wooded back then, so there were places to hide and escape the detection of military authorities. For another, the Quakers gave them asylum in their villages and collective farms, just as they did for runaway slaves. Then there is a third significant factor: these Ohio Indians were good neighbors within the local communities of the general white population. Such communities simply chose not to "rat them out". So these Indians remained scattered all over Ohio, despite even earlier peace treaties of receding boundaries in the state from wars their forebears had lost in the late 1700s and onward. They largely dressed like Europeans, but still preserved certain words, religious rituals, folklore, cuisine, hunting practices, special craft techniques for making tools and vessels, folktales, and decorative traditions and sensibilities from their native ancestors. They inhabit Ohio to this day. Some might call them "white" or "black" or even assume they are some other race by their superficial appearance, but what matters is their honest sense of connection to their American Indian heritage. When it gets right down to it, native cultural practices and values are more important than how much of the genetics survives in these people, who of course have had to intermarry with the people around them over the generations. Most of these people aren't thinking about trying to find a way to get a share of tribal money, or even independent tribal recognition from the Federal Government so that they can receive such monies. They are simply proud not to have to be ethnically covert or ashamed anymore of their heritage. These people have a respect for Nature and preserving and restoring Ohio's scenic beauty, ecological health and the native heritage of the region (including prehistoric earthworks and grave-sites). I myself have no American Indian heritage, but I respect and admire these survivors, these remnants, these descendants of those who stubbornly held on to whatever private homestead they could claim amidst their ancient tribal homeland. They have kept the spiritual flame alive for their brethren and sistren in Oklahoma. In any case, it seems inevitable that one day people of common values from all races and cultures will come together and heal this world.

How is Legitimate Authority Determined in a Democracy?

If law enforcement officers are faced with a conflict between two social groups, a democratic government dictates that the same law, the same interpretation of the law, and the same method of enforcing that law be applied to both parties. Conflict is inevitable in human society. Along with education and cooperation, social disagreement is one of the necessary components in the social engine of positive change. A culture would have to be static, moribund, in stagnation for there to be no societal conflict. There have always been groups who selfishly only look out for their own interests, to the sacrifice of the needs of others. Democracy was conceived to curtail this tendency in human society. Authority in a democracy rests with the entire citizenry, not with a plutocratic body. There is no "rabble" in a democracy -- that is a pejorative word used by autocratic thinkers who have no business governing America. Protest is a core patriotic institution of a democracy, and we have been doing it on this land mass since we were ruled by the British Empire. It has also been the seedbed of reform and improvement of life in this nation for over two centuries. To say that protest is an illegitimate act is to enable a controlling minority to monopolize political action. This is a transgression against the Constitution. If government is only effectively and consistently used to protect a narrow set of interests (e.g., economic parasitism), then it is not a democracy but the return of Medievalism, of hierarchical society, of unequal legal rights and privileges. This current derangement in American government is destroying the dream, the sacrifice, the hard work of our Founding Fathers and their ideological successors. Law enforcement officers confiscating books (like they were weapons or something) from peaceful protestors (who are fed up with the collusion between those corporations seeking omnipotence and members of government seeking pay-offs to give these corporations free passes to trounce the rights of ordinary citizens) is something I never would have thought could occur in a democracy. The impounding of books is what happened in Nazi Germany, is what happens in China to this day. It is disgusting. But the informing and transforming power of the printed word is feared by those who know they do wrong. Notice that the political forces making the police confiscate books are the same set of ones that are amplifying gun rights demanded by segments of society who typically care little for human rights. Ironic, huh? "We the People..." That's all of us right? Just checking...

A Story Worth Sharing

One of my library patrons late this summer witnessed a wonderful bit of animal behavior that any human being would consider a privilege to behold. A deer buck reared up, and raising his front legs he used his hooves to bend down (and hold down) a bough full of apples, while a doe and a couple of fawns came over and bit off the apples from the branches of the bough. When they were finished dining, the buck released the bough, which flipped back up, tree intact. Here we have a display of paternal sensibility in a male creature we normally associate only with virility and aggression. The patron who shared this account with me is a down-to-earth professional woman whom I have been acquainted with for years. One of the perks of being a public librarian is to hear such stories. Nature can never be overestimated. Unfortunately, both established science and established religion tend to underestimate our fellow creatures. For me as a person who keeps the scientific and the spiritual in harmony within my mental works, this is evidence that the kindness we humans are capable of is a spiritual gift with which all beings are endowed, both soulfully and genetically.

So You Think You Want to Have a Doomsday?

In the 1960s, John Lennon asked in rather savvy lyrics whether people really wanted a revolution, had they considered all the possible destructive effects of such an extreme resort to solving the world's problems? In the sixties, people were looking for positive social change, political reform, ecological restoration, broader economic enfranchisement, and spiritual liberation. Today, we have far too many people trapped by, sometimes even addicted to FEAR. Such people often have in either the back or forefront of their minds the End of the World, and what that means exactly is different from person to person. The psychological truth of this widespread contemporary obsession is that it is an unnatural wish that keeps them one notch above despair. Well, if it is a fantasy that people cling to like a potential future reality, why have they lost faith in humanity to save this world? Or, do they not want humanity to save this world? Do they dislike this world even on its best days? It is a rough place much of the time, and for most, unfortunately, very rough. But it is also full of beauty, love and moral achievement. There are a myriad ways ancient prophecies can be read, and the end of the world has been predicted countless times for literally millenia. In a certain sense, many worlds have been lost over time on this planet, if not the whole world. The Roman world collapsed in the 5th century CE through a deluge of illiterate war-mad barbarian invaders. The rich cosmopolitan world of Yiddish Civilization came to an end with the Nazi Holocaust. The noble Plains Indian pan-cultural society came to an end with the purposeful slaughter of literally millions of buffalo by European American riflemen seeking hide bounties. What became of the glorious Sumerian civilization of Mesopotamia, whose mere fraction of surviving legacies formed the seed of every subsequent civilization stretching from the Near East to the rocky shores of Ireland? What of the Inca and the Maya? The list could go on and on. What we know of these collapses is that they involved terrible suffering and irrevocable loss. And then the world moved on, hopefully wiser, though with a certain beauty forever lost. America has seen worlds within it come to an end. The United States saw its world-renowned working class economy, and the whole flourishing society and culture built upon it, destroyed in the 1980s and 1990s through deregulation of global trade and manufacturing arrangements. Right now we are seeing the dying off of the natural world, the biosphere, which if not checked and reversed will mean the end of us too, because we need the whole chain of living things to flourish to keep food on the table and the planet from turning into a wasteland. And then there is climate change, which could, if allowed to progress, turn us into a planet of ashes. But the doomsday-wishers tend not to look at the lengthy and painful process of world-ending in its scientific implications. Rather, they seek escape: God riding down from the clouds on a white horse, the evil punished, the innocent rewarded, a clean sweep of all they regard as filth and corruption. Yet if history is anything to go on, the Day of Doom should already have happened many times over. This age is no more or less sinful than previous ages, and there are some particularly terrible eras where Divine Wrath (in its ultimate sense) should have descended and restored Eden to the world. The biggest problem with the doomsday-wishers is that, aside from trying to get other people to believe as they do, they are otherwise mostly just waiting for it all to happen. Yet, do they realize that while they passively wait, the "devil's workshop" has been busily at work to try to seal the fate of the innocent? There are plenty of cable channels and websites and books trumpeting the Day of Doom in a thousand forms, stoking the passion for escapist, morbid, vengeful passivity. When worlds end, there are typically many more of the good people who suffer and disappear than the bad. The Book of Revelations allows for far too few to survive its own version of apocalyptic cleansing. I know of enough good and decent people in my own hometown (which is far from unique) that, if I apply a logical extrapolation across all the little and large towns upon the world, there must be literally millions of times more people spiritually worthy of salvation from global destruction than that bitter book of the Christian Testament allows for. So do you really want to sit by and let the parasites have the run of things? Will the angelic cavalry arrive in time? Have you considered that maybe we have a spiritual responsibility to try to prevent the end of the world?

Aristocracy Versus Humanity

Alexander the Great thought he was a god, but he still had to use the latrines like the rest of his common soldiers. There will always be people who have more or less wealth than others, but when those with wealth become single-minded about grabbing it out of the hands who have less, the question arises: how do they believe they deserve to have so much more than others that the rest of humanity suffers? The implicit justification must be that these super-wealthy must believe that they are above the rest of the humanity, that there is something "special" about them, that they are, in short, the "new aristocracy", a European concept our forefathers tried to eradicate when they began the American experiment in democracy. So let us take a look at the super-wealthy who are calling the shots these days. I would lay odds that they belong to homo sapiens like the rest of us -- i.e., that they are not descended from divine beings, much less are divine beings themselves. But maybe we should be clear about what a "god" or "deity" is. Gods or deities do not have mortal bodies. They are, by definition, ethereal. Their powers are natural, not obtained through sly litigation, market manipulation or graft. Now back to humans. Humans are mortal, they are flesh-bound animals, albeit of a very sophisticated sort. That means, no matter how wealthy a member of the human race is, that person still has to defecate, urinate, perspire, sleep, bathe, eat, breathe, pass gas, take in water, and exercise the body. If it is a rich woman, she must menstruate, just like the poorest woman. If it is a rich man, he must ejaculate just like the poorest man, in order to beget children. If the rich woman has given birth, she will lactate, just as the poorest woman will. The rich are as mortal as the poor, and subject to every disease or form of decay the poor are, including everything from the terror of cancer, the struggle to stave off obesity, or the aesthetic nuisance of hair loss. In a nudist camp, you would not be able to tell the difference between those camp-goers who were poor, rich or middle class (unless of course a person had been severely undernourished by financial privation). History has shown that the aristocracy has tried to cover its mortal pile of dung by making claims that they are somehow endowed with superior intellectual gifts, but history has also shown that some of the greatest nitwits who ever lived have sprung from among the wealthy. Now the neo-aristocrats might claim that they are different than the old aristocracy, because they won their place through well-deployed force and single-minded cleverness. But I have news for them: those methods are just how the old aristocracy came by and maintained its wealth and power (all pretensions of "blue blood" aside). As far as the poor and the middle class go, they have historically and to this day produced many of the most gifted innovators in every sphere of scientific, technological, artistic and intellectual endeavor, but if the super-wealthy make a desert of the world of opportunities for those beneath them, they will choke off this reservoir of talent (which is the majority of humanity). It has to be that the super-wealthy, being mere humans like the rest of us, are also capable of the normal human emotions of love, compassion, sentiment, regret, guilt. If only these people who act as though they are aristocrats amidst our wounded democracy could just apply those human feelings to their fellow human beings, whose only real difference from them is that they have less material wealth. Physical anthropologists and the Genome Project have established that all the branches of humanity that survive today are descended from a single human mother, whom they poetically call, "Eve". That means we are all genetic siblings. So let us stop breaking up the family with violence, intimidation and greed. It is a disgrace and it is unnatural. If there were intelligent races from other planets observing us, they would be appalled. On the other hand, if we can all recognize that every one of our fellow human beings deserves a decent existence, the rich would still be rich, just not super-rich. Then maybe we could finally eliminate the shame of poverty. Is there an economist in the house who might explain where there is any harm in that?

Has the Confederacy Won the War?

The recurrent lunacy of uncertain economic times is proverbial. I see more Confederate States of America flags flying, and not at historical reenactment events. Ironically, I am seeing them flying at private domiciles by roadways in UNION STATES! Outside historical events, films and monuments, this flag ("the Stars and Bars") takes on a whole new context. For African Americans, it is the equivalent of flying a Nazi flag, and this holds true for most European Americans for which it is a reminder of the fault-line that was created in our Republic when we did not give freedom and citizenship to slaves when we won independence from the British Empire. There are now people wearing confederate flag t-shirts that say, "if this offends you, you better go back to your history books". Well, if you do, you find that it does indeed represent the collective desire of a group of seceding states to defend the institution of slavery. An historian pointed out to me that the protest lodged with the Union Government by the rebelling states was that Federal Law had not been properly enforced with regard to the Fugitive Slave Act. In fact, state and municipal laws were trumping it, and law enforcement officials were supporting the abolitionists. The Unionist states knew that slavery was simply not Constitutional, and were not going to support a Federal Law that was a slap in the face of true democracy. So, for those who think it was about "states rights", sorry guys! If there had been no slaves, there simply would have been no "War Between the States". Take away the slave economy as a factor, and you change the whole picture. You create a fantasy history, a bedtime story of a "Never-Never-Land". So why are these people, most especially people living in states that fought for the Union, flying these flags in a non-historical context? Well, a little investigation shows these Neo-Confederates have been misled by manipulative politicians who have convinced them that all their hardships are due to the Federal Government. That the Federal Government has been front and center in historically providing monetary, medical, educational and housing assistance for the poor, their children, the underemployed, the vulnerably aged, seems to have somehow been blotted out by those political master-manipulators tapping into the "Lost Cause" myth. It is a pernicious fairytale, and this sort of misinformation leads people to vote against their own interests, effectively victimizing themselves. You know it's a shell game when these politicians tell you on the one hand that "this a matter for states to decide", and then when it comes time for the states to address the issue, they say "oh, this is a federal matter!" This is a complete "pass the buck" abdication of political responsibility. So if you're going to run the Confederate Emblem up the old flagpole in your front yard beside the flowerbeds, or wear it on a bold t-shirt at the grocery store, why don't you think about going back to the history books yourself and rediscover what democracy has meant to your fellow Americans, men and women, of all creeds and colors, for the past 235 years in these United States.

Is there an "Us" Anymore in America?

A former president has made a well-intentioned appeal to the Occupy Wall Street/99-Percenter movements, asking them to patiently remember that we live, after all, in a capitalist society, and that "we" (ostensibly the poor, the middle class, and the rich) need to all learn to work together. But this is the sort of reminder that should be exclusively given to Wall Street. What such peacemakers need to be reminded of is that the American people have a right to be angry and to peacefully gather and express that righteous anger -- otherwise we wouldn't be even worthy of the name of "citizens of a democracy". The Wall Street Gamblers are the ones who are behaving like the rest of us don't matter. "We" and "Us" were intended in the former president's speech to signify a much needed collective unity that our country was formerly famous for in better days. The problem has been that the wealthy have shown no loyalty to America as a country of fellow citizens, fellow Americans. Their loyalty is to international profiteering over patriotic investment in our own motherland. We may live in a capitalist society, but when those who control the capital disregard democracy and their necessary economic responsibility as members of a democracy to the people of our country, the Certified Professional Capitalists lose their moral validity and cultural authority. Come on folks, if capitalism is not subordinated to our democratic institutions we lose our freedom. In such a case, we are merely living under just another form of economic tyranny. Literally breaking open the skulls of peaceful protesters with nightsticks and special crowd-control "hand-grenades" are fundamentally not the acts of a democracy. Capitalism at any price? For the sake of "unity", must we toss out our once proud hallmark for a democratic economy whose beacon of hope once brought millions to our shores fleeing feudal tyrannies? This Great Recession is an artificial crisis. The rich won't invest in the gainful employment of our nation, and they won't pay taxes. And now they piously ask us to be "patriotic" and accept "austerity measures"? Ripping out lampposts and plunging city streets and neighborhoods into darkness will invite a rampant level of crime and reduce us to a level of primitive survival the likes of which Western Civilization has not witnessed since the Dark Ages. Our bridges collapse and our paved roads revert to dirt, while the rich take off from the helipads on the roofs of their ridiculously overbuilt mansions to take a personal copter over to the airport or the yacht. They certainly don't need public infrastructure! Public transportation development through electric high-speed trains is hamstrung because the wealthy would rather violently fracture the very foundation of the ground upon which we both live and convey ourselves (instigating thousands of unprecedented earthquakes), in order to extract natural gas and sell it to foreign nations at a nifty profit. They would rather invest in boom-bust nonrenewable energies that further drive up global warming, rather than to build the embankments and steel tracks needed to bear a new network of green-energy passenger trains (which obviously require stable ground). Where is the "We" and the "Us" in all this? Why are the ones being left out getting this talking to? Why don't those who want harmony between the social classes take those arrogant men in the thousand-dollar suits by the ear and remind them where they came from!

The Lost Promise of Bronze Age Crete

The ancient Minoans are one of the most enigmatic cultures of the World of Antiquity, exceeded perhaps only by the Etruscans. We need to be clear whom we are talking about. The Minoans were the aboriginal peoples of the Island of Crete, who had a language distinct from that of their Greek neighbors with whom they shared the Aegean Sea. They had their own written language, uninformatively referred to by scholars as "Linear A", which is still untranslated. What remains are their buildings and frescoes and references to them in the written records of their trading partners, the ancient Egyptians. What we know of them from their later Greek conquerors (who submerged their culture as successfully as the Romans did their predecessors, the Etruscans) is seen through the distorted lens of prejudiced myth, with such tales as that of King Minos and his monstrous son, the Minotaur. For the Egyptians they were reliable trading partners, who brought to the ports of the Nile Delta not only the finished products of Crete itself, but also the raw materials and artful trade goods the Cretans obtained from Mycenaean Greece and the barbarian reaches of the illiterate Balkan tribes. The archaeological evidence is extraordinary in its implications by how the Minoans differed from all other cultures of the time. They possessed no military architecture. There are no accounts by their literate Eastern Mediterranean neighbors, the Hittites, Greeks, Lydians, Phrygians, Phoenicians or Egyptians that they ever made war upon anyone. Their frescoes and objets d'arte possess no martial symbolism. In fact, their scenes depict elegant features and creatures of nature, acts of recreational athleticism, and figures and expressions of dignified and unsuppressed womanhood. There is now geological and structural evidence that the cataclysmic volcanic eruption of the island of Thera to their north (today's Santorini), generated massive tidal waves that devastated their coastal cities and wrecked the merchant fleet that harnessed their successful international economy. In their disordered societal condition during the aftermath of the tsunami, Mycenaean raiders descended upon their defenseless ruins of habitation and plundered and pillaged what remained. From there on, Minoan culture ceases to be expressed in the archaeological record, and is replaced by the artifacts and writing typical of the Mycenaean Greeks. Crete ever after became a Greek island, and its martial Greek overlords figure in Homer's war-epic, The Iliad. Today, urbane scholars like to downplay any form of idealism of the Minoan culture, finding it impossible that such a society of peace could likely have existed. They assume that one day, when they finally discover the key to translating Linear A that they will discover their cynical expectations proven: perhaps a dark revelation of inventory catalogs detailing military materiel and accoutrements. Yet if they truly were a warlike race, they would not have been able to resist displaying their love of martial prowess in art, which simply does not bear this out. Warlike cultures also tend to minimize the role of women, but the beautiful murals and sculptures of female members of their society do not betray this attitude in any form. Their warlike neighbors in North Africa, Asia Minor and the Levant were not bashful about recording their wars with other peoples, so why would they have neglected to mention any piratical attacks they had repelled from the Minoans? No, the Minoans appear always to have been peaceful traders before their island was settled by the Greeks. Could the apparent social equality between men and women reflected in their art have something to do with the balance of peace and successful trade they maintained for literally thousands of years during the Early Bronze Age? What both history and contemporary anthropology have both taught us is that the more warlike and violent a society, the lower the position women hold in society. The naysayers can declaim all they want, but their cynical speculations carry as little weight in the objective mind as the neighing of goats. In fact, the archaeological evidence has to be completely ignored if one wants to posit that the Minoans were just like everyone else. So let us not allow the "urbane" scholars of minimalist interpretation to blot out the legacy the Minoans have left for us: the hope of a society that has cultural vigor, the sexes on an even par, long-term economic stability -- and no war.