John Rember.COM RECENT WRITING ///HOME//////WORKS//////BIOGRAPHY & IMAGE GALLERY//////EVENTS//////RECENT WRITING/// Recent Published & Unpublished Essays Check out John’s monthly column, End Notes, in the Idaho Mountain Express newspaper (Ketchum, Idaho). Here’s the latest installment. Zombie Quotes and Notes (Idaho Mountain Express, September 3, 2008) Ill fares the land, to hastening ills a prey, Where wealth accumulates, and men decay. —Oliver Goldsmith, The Deserted Village (1770) Oliver Goldsmith has been decaying too long to be dug up for any of the Sunday morning talk shows. But if you could grind George Will or Pat Buchanan to a fine powder, and sprinkle it over Oliver Goldsmith’s grave, and thereby transform Goldsmith the dead poet into Goldsmith the talking-head network zombie, Sunday morning TV would get a lot more intelligent. (entire article) Consensus Psychosis (Idaho Mountain Express, August 6, 2008) The late British psychiatrist R.D. Laing made a career out of his idea that Western Civilization is a psychosis. He said you had to be crazy to even get out of bed in the morning in countries that routinely murder millions of human beings with carcinogenic products, zombie-like militaries, and pathological legal and medical practices. He said a diagnosis of mental illness is often the result of seeing things as they are instead of believing the consensual lies of our family or our culture. (entire article) You Crazy Optimist (Idaho Mountain Express, July 9, 2008) Two years ago I began this column, thinking The End of the World would always be fun. The web-postings of survivalists, religious wacko-bongos, free-market fundamentalists, and paranoid old farts would always provide something amusing to write about. And there wasn’t much chance their apocalyptic scenarios would come true. (entire article) Obama and the English Language (Idaho Mountain Express, June 11, 2008) One nice thing about Idaho is that you can commit acts of complete nihilism in the voting booth and it won’t mean the end of the world. For example, if Hillary Clinton had won the Democratic nomination, I was going to vote for Ralph Nader in November. (entire article) You Don’t Have To Be Crazy (Idaho Mountain Express, May 14, 2008) You can be sane and have a sense of humor and a little self-consciousness and still think that if this country were in a toaster, the smoke alarm would have gone off a long time ago. You can relax about Reverend Wright saying, “God Damn America,” over and over on Fox News because you understand that God took things into His Own Hands and damned America the day the Supreme Court appointed George Bush captain of our ship of state. And you can decide that issues of wolves and wilderness don’t matter because within fifty years, they will be trumped by human population growth, national bankruptcy, and the end of cheap energy. (entire article) Thanks for Nothing, Al Gore (Idaho Mountain Express, April 16, 2008) I had no idea so many people think the end of days is like, this year. But if you Google End of Civilization, you’ll get 791,000 entries, along with ads that say, “Looking for the End of Civilization? We can help!” (entire article) March Meltdown News (Idaho Mountain Express, March 19, 2008) Eliot Spitzer is no longer the governor of New York. A woman formerly known as Ashley Youmans met him in a D.C. hotel for an hour for $4300, a sum that makes you hope she donates a day’s proceeds to Habitat for Humanity, and builds a family a home. Youmans has magazine and film offers approaching $5 million, so she could become to Habitat for Humanity what Bill Gates is to malaria. (entire article) Why Republicans Should Fear McCain (Idaho Mountain Express, February 20, 2008) I spent much of the summer of 1972 at Robinson Bar Ranch, on the Salmon River below Stanley. A consortium of Boise oligarchs owned the place, and I was dating one of their daughters, a young woman of beauty, grace, and privilege. Robinson Bar was a welcoming place then, full of music and laughter, and at twenty-one I had my own share of beauty and grace. But I remember gazing at beautiful young wives playing with their children beneath the stilled rotors of corporate helicopters, and thinking that privilege was beyond me. I was wrong. That summer North Vietnam released a number of POWs. Within weeks, some of those POWs were brought to Robinson Bar. (entire article) Fish-Rulers (Idaho Mountain Express, January 23, 2008) We are finally in the last year of George W. Bush’s presidency. I’m mostly certain that on January 20th, 2009, we’ll be listening to the inaugural speech of a new president while the camera plays over the scornful smiles of the outgoing president and vice-president. (entire article) History as Prophesy (Idaho Mountain Express, December 26, 2007) Back when I could read fine print, I spent a winter reading the 1972 edition of The Columbia History of the World, authored by the Columbia University history faculty. I slogged through all 1165 pages of it. It was spring when I finished. I was glad the book hadn’t been published in 2072, after a lot more wars, refugee migrations, currency collapses and epidemics. (entire article) Another Star Trek Episode (Idaho Mountain Express, November 28, 2007) Ever since Dennis Kucinich told us about the UFO he saw at Shirley MacLaine’s house, I’ve figured he didn’t just see it, he arrived in it. Any presidential candidate who advocates universal government-funded health care, wants immediate withdrawal of U.S. forces from Iraq, promises college tuition for everybody, argues for ending the Patriot Act and the death penalty and the war on drugs—where’s this guy from? Andromeda? The Delta Sector? Is he Neelix’s little brother? (entire article) Channeling Jimmy (Idaho Mountain Express, October 31, 2007) It’s weird to be Jimmy Carter. Especially on Halloween. Especially on Halloween in Ketchum, Idaho, where they’ve moved Halloween back four days. When you walk down Main Street, people yell at you from the mouths of bars: “Hey, stupid. Halloween was four days ago. You missed it.” The good news is that they invite you in for a beer and tell you that even though you missed Halloween, your costume is pretty good. (entire article) Countdown to 2012 (Idaho Mountain Express, October 3, 2007) The Maya, whose civilization collapsed 1200 years ago, were obsessed with time. Their calendar makes ours look like a Mickey Mouse watch with a bad mainspring, even if it does lack Columbus Day, Fourth of July, Christmas, and Easter. (entire article) A Drought of Biblical Proportions (Idaho Mountain Express, September 5, 2007) The Sahara Desert was once forests and rivers and lakes, grass-filled savannahs and vast herds of animals. Then the rain ceased to fall. The landscape caught fire. People and animals died or moved to where there were real clouds that dropped real rain, and to where the rivers still flowed. (entire article) Handling Headlines (Idaho Mountain Express, August 8, 2007) Earlier this month, I taught a fiction workshop at a conference in Joseph, Oregon. My workshop was titled “Handling the Headlines.” How can fiction exist, I asked, in a world that is weirder than anything you can make up? How can realism exist in a world that is surreal? (entire article) Sociopaths and Reptile Brains (Idaho Mountain Express, July 11, 2007) The definitive document of our Republic is no longer the Constitution. It’s the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, the DSM-IV. Our separation of church and state has become the separation of reality and state.(entire article) Entropy Is the Plan, the Plan is God (Idaho Mountain Express, May 16, 2007) Lately I’ve been thinking that entropy is God. It’s a reasonable thing to think during the Bush Administration, because even though entropy sounds innocent enough—it’s a term from classical physics referring to energy loss in any mechanical process—in real life it means the ultimate triumph of waste, rot, corruption, and death. The engine of the universe turns organization into chaos. More and more energy does less and less work.(entire article) Survivalism in High Places (Idaho Mountain Express, March 21, 2007) I once worked with a psychology professor whose husband was a survivalist. He had assembled an arsenal in their basement and built a reinforced concrete bomb-shelter in their backyard. In the event of nuclear war, engineered plague, or civil collapse, his plan was to get the family into the shelter for a year or two, and come out to a new and cleansed and uncrowded world. (entire article) Letter to W (Idaho Mountain Express, February 21, 2007) George: If I were a fundamentalist Christian like you, I would be more worried about the halftime show at this years’ Superbowl than I was about Janet Jackson’s exposed nipple a few years back. Because this time the image burned into millions of viewers’ frontal lobes wasn’t a bit of Borg-modified flesh. Instead, cast upon a billowing shroud was a back-lit image of Satan, complete with his two most famous appendages, only one of which was his tail. (entire article) This Information Could Save Your Life (Idaho Mountain Express, January 24, 2007) Don’t believe what you read on the Internet. Especially if it begins, THIS INFORMATION COULD SAVE YOUR LIFE AND FREEDOM. More especially if it continues, “What is going on? Something very sinister is going on. Polls reveal that over 90% of the American people believe the government is keeping UFO knowledge from the public. But why?” (entire article) Wars and Rumors of War (Idaho Mountain Express, December 27, 2006) We missed a Second Coming on December 17. Jesus was supposed to arrive in Puerto Rico, in a televised event witnessed by billions. Jesus didn’t show. It was just as well, because another Internet prediction had Jesus returning in 2006, but only after a head-on collision between Earth and a 14.4 mile-long asteroid. (entire article) ...and the Beast You Rode In On (Idaho Mountain Express, November 22, 2006) It was a good month for the End Times. In Iran, banks of uranium-enriching centrifuges were whirling merrily away. In North Korea, patriotic reactor fuel rods were giving up precious atoms of plutonium for the Glorious Leader. In Israel, the Temple Mount movement was getting ready to tear down mosques and lay the cornerstone for the Third Temple, thereby ensuring the arrival of the Messiah by Christmas. And the Watchtower Lady showed up at my door. (entire article) With Apologies to the Pygmies (Idaho Mountain Express, October 21, 2006) I’ve walked for miles and my feet are hurtin’. It’s a temporary condition, caused by walking on concrete in Washington, D.C. I went there to read to an Albertson College alumni group, but took the opportunity to look around. (entire article) Idaho—The CIEDRA State, and other small tragedies (Boise Weekly, October 4, 2006) In 1968, a professor of human ecology named Garrett Hardin published an essay titled The Tragedy of the Commons. Hardin showed how humans, acting in their own self-interest, would inevitably wreck any resource held in common with other humans. Sharing, in spite of what we all learned in kindergarten, would result in the destruction of wilderness or clean water or forests or fish stocks, simply because these things don’t grow with population and in the absence of constraint, an individual who takes more than his share benefits more than the individual who doesn’t. (entire article) Buffalo Bill, Come Back! (Idaho Mountain Express, September 6, 2006) The House of Yahweh, a Texas cult headed by a guy named Yisrayl Hawkins, says nuclear war will begin near the Euphrates River on September 12, 2006. As per Revelation, a third of humankind will perish. Surviving won¹t be a picnic, either. (entire article) Burning Willows (High Desert Journal, Fall 2005) My neighbor hates the sagebrush in her pasture. Bad news for her, because sagebrush grows well in her pasture, easily sprouting and rooting in the decomposed granite sand that covers most of her 17 acres. But good news for her, too, because there’s a missionary glee to her effort. (entire article) WMDs and Wilderness (Sandpoint Reader, October 20, 2005) Weapons of Mass Destruction in America’s wild places? Hardly, although I’ve finally reached the point where nothing the Bush Administration does surprises me. If Karl Rove has decided to turn our archipelago of wild areas into storage depots for nuclear weapons, weapons-grade smallpox, and our just-in-case remaining stocks of nerve gas, well, you read it here first. But that’s not what I’m talking about. My version of WMD stands for Working Mother, Desperate, and it’s not the presence of single mothers in wilderness areas that worries me, it’s their absence. (entire article) One More Paving Stone on the Road to Hell (Sandpoint Reader, September 1, 2005) I’m a believer in the Law of Unintended Consequences. Loosely defined, that’s when you try to accomplish something and what you didn’t anticipate becomes way more important than what you did. We’re about to have a lesson in unintended consequences due to Congressman Mike Simpson’s Central Idaho Economic Development and Recreation Act [CIEDRA]. (entire article) Guests (Sandpoint Reader, August 11, 2005) Summer is the season of guests here in Sawtooth Valley. Guests of the Idaho Fish and Game Department, who look like Cabela’s poster-children, stand on the banks of the Salmon River, and flip flies at hatchery rainbow. Guests of the Idaho Highway Department roar by on whole squadrons of unmuffled motorcycles. Whitewater guests bob up and down on late-season riffles below... (entire article) Writing and Nothingness... (Lecture, Pacific University MFA residency, June 2005) I’ll try to begin with a past-life regression. In this case, the past life is one of my own that happened in the year 1955, in Hailey, Idaho. Hailey is famous in literary circles as the birthplace of Ezra Pound, who was a founder of the poetic movement known as imagism, and... (entire article) Escape from the Ivory Tower (Albertson College of Idaho Coyote, May 18, 2005) It has been a year since I left the halls of Albertson College, saying good-bye to stacks of composition papers, faculty assemblies, classrooms echoing with cell-phone melodies, and a salary. (entire article) Rat Habitat (Sandpoint Reader, February 24, 2005) I’ve just finished Jared Diamond’s big book, Collapse, which is about civilizations and the reasons they fall to pieces and die, along with most of the people in them. Diamond looks at—among others—the Maya, Easter Islanders, Greenland Vikings, the Anasazi, and contemporary Rwandans and Australians and Montanans for examples of humans destabilizing their environments and wrecking their own futures. (entire article) Keeping Death at Bay (Albertson College of Idaho Coyote, January 21, 2005) I had just finished—for the fourth or fifth time—Ernest Becker’s psychoanalytic Denial of Death when news came that the Coyote Culture was doing an illness theme. In other years I would have written about trying to grade papers with a nose running like a faucet, or the sore throat that comes with the first week of standing at the blackboard explaining apostrophe rules. ... (entire article)