The Collection

Dear Readers;

Well, there are only a few more stories and rants to go before Honest to God and Other Whoppers peters out. But this is far from the end. As this collection fades into the sunset, several new pages will appear. One is called Echoes of the Universe - a Meditation. This is a collection of some fifty-odd poems that plumb the depths of the human spirit in search of fulfilment. While they begin a bit dark and forlorn at the outset, they build in confidence and strength over time to the zenith of the achievable. This is a real departure for me, but I liked it. I hope you will too.

There are forty-nine chapters to the Lost Letters of Gerhard D. Epp which date back two-hundred years and were written in the far north of Eastern Siberia. It is an amazing odyssey of a man, shunned by his own comunity, who is thrown into an ancient prophecy of the Evenk people of the Yennisei River.

Both of these pages will appear within the next two or three weeks, along with a coninuation of Winnetou of course, and TruthSeeker, as well as the completion of the Arkadak Papers. I'll say no more except that I hope you will enjoy. Your comments on any of the posts are always welcome.

Victor Epp

Middle East Observations

Middle East Observations

By Victor Epp

And another thing - this whole Middle East crisis is a prime example of how pathetic mankind has become in what a friend of mine calls ritual hunting. It's almost as though an evolutionary curve is taking place right before our eyes. We don't even have to rely on the expertise of archaeologists to trace the rise and fall of civilizations, or the splitting off of one species from another. We can watch it all on CNN.

From the time of Biblical records to the present television frenzy the decline of the Arab civilizations in general and the Israelites and Philistines in particular is easily visible to the naked eye. Mind you, it's a little dangerous to generalize like that, but the divide between those nations and the rest of the world is blatantly obvious. Maybe the rest of the world is going to hell in a hand basket and the Middle Eastern nations are maintaining the status quo, but there is a definite rift between 'them' and 'us'.

See there are a few things - a few basics that we have to understand here. First off, there is no real Middle East Crisis. That's TV talk, probably invented by arms manufacturers to make us think different so they can improve their bottom line. I think they're in cahoots with OPEC anyway. It's really all an advertising scam to bolster the economy and re - elect some world leaders.

You think I'm kidding? I guess you would if you believed in horse feathers. But if you can smell the coffee, you're bound to smell something fishy in the sate of Denmark. Well heck, them Israelites and the Philistines have been going at it for years - thousands of years in fact. That's what they do. They kill each other. No, no, that's not accurate either. They kill each other's women and children and old people. Oh, every once in a while they pop off a politician or two, but that's an exception - purely accidental.

All this seems pretty barbarian to us who place a value on human life. But what is life really worth in the desert? The only things that grow there are figs and dates and camels. How much of that can you put up with in a lifetime of misery? Jeez, you can't even go for a stroll in the country without getting your mouth full of sand. So you can see it's not too hard to convince these suicide bombers to accept martyrdom so they can enter Paradise. To them it's sheer poetry. Somebody ought to remind them that the rewards for both poetry and martyrdom are all posthumous.

That's a bit of a generalization, mind. Not everyone thinks that way. The sheiks and oil barons don't. The political leaders certainly place a value on their own lives as well as that of their so-called enemies. Look at what happened when the Israelites had Arafat surrounded in his bunker the other day. Oh no, they didn't want to kill him, they said. Of course, Arafat knew that or he wouldn't have been caught there with his pants down. Instead he made a big show for the TV cameras about being ready to accept martyrdom. Yeah right and the Israelites didn't mean him any harm. They were just looking for terrorists. It was like a bad World Wrestling Federation script.

You only have to turn the clock back a few thousand years to Samson's time to see how things used to be done when these guys took this stuff seriously. Now there was an Israelite! It would behoove these milk-toast meadow muffin slingers to pay a little attention to their own history if they want to get a job done. Samson just never put up with a whole lot of this petty bickering. When he decided he wanted to own Gaza, he just ripped up his gate in Hebron, hauled it over on his own back - posts and all and staked his claim by plunking it right there in Gaza. When the Philistines gave him grief over it, he just picked up the jawbone of an ass and slew a thousand of the buggers. That was that.

Gawd, if I think of it today, there's enough asses around the G - 8, flapping their jaws and making noises that Samson could have used the jaws of just a few of them to lay waste to all the Arab countries, all the way to North Africa. Instead, these so called leaders today can hardly even negotiate a government, much less make any decisions. Man, where is Moses when you need him? Somebody sure has to come along and take them Israelites for a stroll in the desert for about forty years or so.

Well, you've got to give equal time to the other side too. I mean, them Philistines are in just as much of a mess. At least in Samson's time they were smart enough to figure out his weakness for Philistine women and sick Delilah on him. That pretty well calmed him down for a while. But you can't keep guys like that down forever. He was a stubborn, sing-minded SOB. In the end, you might say he was the first suicide bomber when he pulled the pillars of the temple down on himself and the whole Philistine nobility. At least he aimed his power at where it counted. See these old timers were pretty thorough when they did a job. There's something to be learned from that.

Then there was King David. Now there was a sneaky little bugger. He spent years building his cover as an innocent young shepherd - a naïve country boy, as it were. All the while he was wrestling bears and lions that were dumb enough to mess with his sheep. Then just when Goliath figures he has King Saul on the ropes, David steps up to the plate and deep sixes him with a rock. While he's at it, he also separates the giant from his head. That way there is no doubt as to his intentions. That's where the Philistines learned about throwing rocks like you see young boys do on TV today. They just didn't remember about the beheading part, which is why they are in such a sorry state today. I mean, give me a break. Throwing rocks is just your basic harassment. Beheading, now that's a real definitive statement. And when it comes to being sneaky, at least Delilah had some sex appeal to distract Samson. You tell me who'd like to climb into the sack with old Yasser Arafat. Oh my stars, it's worse than I thought.

Just what is this three or four or five thousand-year old spat all about? Real estate - they're yammering about a stinking piece of real estate. Can you believe that? I know some deals take longer to close than others, but really - I mean really, this is downright ridiculous! It's all because of a misunderstanding in the first place. They all get so uppity about ownership of the Holy Land when they didn't even bother to find out that it's a misnomer in the first place. Holy Land, indeed! The facts are that the first people who washed up on shore out of the Mediterranean were so excited when they saw it, one guy yelled, "Hooooooooooooleeeeeeeeeee - Land!" and they all swam for it in a desperate attempt to keep from drowning. First thing you know, them gum flappers had it turned around and were calling it the Holy Land. That's just how easy it is to get off on the wrong foot.

You laugh, but it keeps happening over and over - everywhere. Why do you think, for example, that George Dubya often looks so surprised as he reads his own speeches? Look at his 'Our Cause is Just' speech as a for instance. After the September eleventh tragedy, he had one of them Texas mads on. Big George is still grumpy over Saddam Hussein and tells George Dubya he's got to do something. Asked why, he'll only mumble 'just 'cause.' So he says to Rumsfeld to get the army together, get some guns and tanks and planes. Of course Rumsfeld wants to know the reason, and what is it? "Just 'cause," says George Dubya. Did you notice that inverted comma right in front of the word cause? That's no quotation mark. It's how they say because in Texas. Now, his speechwriters knew darn well that you couldn't get away with saying such things anywhere outside Texas, or maybe Alberta. So they rearranged his quotation to say, 'Our cause is just!' You could just see his eyes bug out when that came out of his own mouth in front of an international audience. There would have been the deuce to pay too if it hadn't gone over so big in the ratings. First thing you know he starts to believe it himself.

I only mention this in passing because the Arab countries are looking to this Texas politician to broker a deal between the Israelites and the Philistines - something that nobody has been able to do for at least five thousand years. There's some concern though with George Dubya's image as an honest broker. Ha - there they go again! If ever there was an oxymoron that's got to top them all, except maybe for 'good government'.

As I say, five thousand years and they still haven't figured out that this is a real estate deal. They're still busy appointing foxes to guard a hen house that doesn't exist. That's like going to the plumber for open-heart surgery. If they really wanted to get this over with, they'd hire some hotshot agent from Remax Real Estate to broker a proper condominium agreement and within six months everybody would be happy. That is to say, everybody would be happy except the arms manufacturers and dealers, the oil barons, the military and the politicians. They'd all be unemployed. It's in their interest to let everybody think that somebody actually owns the place.

It might come as a surprise that this miserable piece of sand and camel dung really belongs to the guy who made it, and you don't really want to get him ticked off. History is chock full of examples of what happens when you do that. I'll tell you what. These stiff-necked Israelites and the Philistines would be a whole lot wiser to form a joint task force and keep a sharp eye out for some old bearded guy building a really big boat in his front yard. When they see people rounding up animals two by two, they'll realize they should have tried better to get along and not be so busy messing with somebody else's property. But by then it'll be too late. That whole sub species of humanity will become extinct. I wonder if that's what happened to the Neanderthals. Maybe all these fancy explanations about how they died out are all poppycock. Maybe the authority having supreme jurisdiction just plain got fed up with the petty bickering over a piece of real estate and pulled the plug on them.

Well, basically, there it is in a nutshell. History has shown us the way things go - you know - cause and effect. By logical extension, we can predict the outcome for that species of mankind. The last thing we need is some Texas Yahoo with a 'just 'cause' attitude joining in that fight, or we'll all get sucked down the same black hole of civilization right along with them. You'd think CNN would have caught on to this by now. You know how those news guys like to speculate on just about anything somebody might do or say and pretend that it's news. Shoot, to be able to predict the future of evolution before it even happens - and right there on TV - that would put their ratings right through the roof.

It just goes to show that even CNN misses the odd opportunity. As for George Dubya, or any other American president, he's got his hands full of 'terrorists' right there on Wall Street. At least there, he knows what he's up against. As sorry a state as the middle east is, he's got to recognize that he's just a babe in the woods and has got no real business messing with that civilization.