Local Rules
for release 12-13-07
Nashville
by Lightning Rod
Local rules always prevail. This lesson was taught to me by Babe. one of my mentors in criminal society, I was seventeen and Babe was about thirty with salt and pepper gray hair. He wore sharkskin suits and drove his purple Caddy with his knees while he smoked and drank beer with his hands.
"Local rules," he would say, "you always play by local rules." When you go into a pool hall and you are playing Eight Ball, some places want the 1 ball to go into the left side pocket and the 15 to go in the right side pocket, otherwise it counts as a scratch. Some places want the 1 in the right side and the 15 in the left. Some places don't care. But you always play by local rules.
In Tennessee, in order to buy beer or spirits EVERYONE must present ID. In most places, my white mustache and gray hair is all the proof of majority that I need, but in Tennessee you need an official State picture ID. So ladies, forget being flattered because they card you when you are 40+. They do it to everybody. Local rules.
In Iraq we have a strange case of local rules. It seems that if you are a private contractor like Halliburton, working for the US government, neither US nor Iraqi laws apply to you. You can kill the locals or rape your fellow contractors with impunity. According to Jamie Leigh Jones, a Texas woman who is filling suit against Halliburton for being gang raped by fellow employees and imprisoned in a shipping container in Iraq. this is exactly what is happening. Because of the subtleties of our occupation laws the rapists likely will face no prosecution for this crime. Local rules.
The United States has suffered many recent black eyes in the world because we persistently fail to observe local rules. Our imperial arrogance has developed to the point where we think that our way of life and our customs and our system of government are so much better, so far superior that we are astonished when local rules assert themselves, when people prefer their traditional customs and values to ours.
History has shown that pop music and blue jeans are a much better means of winning hearts and minds than force of arms. What I mean is that if we think our culture is that far superior to any other culture, then we should practice what we preach and let our culture compete in the free market of ideas rather than try to enforce our values at the point of a gun. Let's have some respect for local rules.
I must point out a slight flaw in my argument here. It goes back as far as the perennial conflict in our country over State vs. Federal rights. If we always respected the integrity of local rules, then we would still have segregation and poll taxes in the South and polygamy in Utah. At some point local rules should be overridden by more just and general rules. But this is an intramural exception that applies to our country, our own national local rules. It shouldn't apply to the rest of the world.
The Poet's Eyes notices that it is much harder to respect local rules when the 'locals' happen to possess something that you want. Something like oil. Then all the rules go out the window.
The English believe he comes of their English stock,
A Jew to the Jew he seems, a Russ to the Russ, usual and near,
removed from none.
Whoever he looks at in the traveler's coffee-house claims him,
The Italian or Frenchman is sure, the German is sure, the Spaniard
is sure, and the island Cuban is sure,
---Whitman, from Song of the Answerer
