The Planet Of The Baldwins

Monrovia, California

July 11, 2014

Well, I just re-read that last posting, and it reads a bit like a mediocre commencement speech, which of course wasn't my intention.  It was a fragment of an idea I'd been gnawing at for some time and just couldn't quite finish the right way.  But what the hell, it's only a blog, a mere step above a Facebook posting or a tweet.  At least I didn't tell you what I did over the 4th of July weekend or post a selfie taken at a restaurant or a photo of a cat or dog doing something cute.  By the way, though, do you remember that picture of the evolution of man from knuckle-dragging tree-dweller to upright homo sapiens?  I've always wanted to do a version of that using the Baldwin brothers as the primates.  I'd put Stephen first, behind Daniel and William as they became less simian in appearance, with Alec representing modern evolved man (to the extent that anyone from Long Island can be considered as such).

But the bone on which I wish to gnaw today isn't that, exactly.  It's the genre of science fiction.  I'm specifically referring to stories set in the future as differentiated from mytho-fantasy (like the Tolkien-inspired tales of the imaginary past, glorifying monarchy and feudalism, filled with statuesque Viking-like warriors and women with heaving bosoms wearing leather breastplates).  Nor am I referring to anything having to do with vampires or zombies.  Lots of people love science fiction.  I suppose they figure it's a way to imagine something that hasn't happened yet.  But it really isn't, especially when it's about a dystopian or post-apocalyptic future, which most of science fiction is.  It's really a way of expressing fears about the present as differentiated from the more stable and safer past.  Essentially it's nostalgia, one of my favorite betes noire. Rarely if ever do good things happen in science fiction. You're supposed to think the story's about the future, but what's really going on with most science fiction is that the author is pissed off with things as they are, and wishes to push the present to its worst logical conclusion.  And of course what's behind that motive is a longing for things to be as they once were.  Naturally there are some exceptions to this rule, including the very intelligent works of Douglas Adams, which make fun of the limiting agendas under which most sci-fi writers labor while also making fun of the bureaucratic present.  But most of the genre is just as I've described it.  It may begin with a premise based on some current scientific breakthrough, such as nuclear fission or advanced robotics or gene splicing, but what happens is pretty much always the same, that is, that things get quickly out of hand and go freakishly bad, or they're already that way because, in the time between the author's present and the date when the story is set, something cataclysmic happened.  Nuclear war is a biggie, but there's also alien invasions and the latest worldwide source of fear, climate change.  So the story is usually either dismal or scary of both, and almost always carries the same implicit warning:  "Be careful of progress!  It can go too far too fast, and we won't be able to handle it!"

So what's wrong with such a warning? you may ask.  Shouldn't we be at least a little afraid of progress?  Shouldn't we be worried about the future?  The answer is, simply, no.  Not because bad stuff isn't happening all around us even as we speak.  And not because bad stuff isn't likely to happen in the future, perhaps as the result of what we're doing now.  It does, and it will, without a doubt.  But we have never heeded our own warnings in the past, and we aren't likely to begin doing so anytime soon.  The advantages of progress simply outweigh its disadvantages, and so it continues.  This isn't really conscious on our part; it's biological.  Any there's no point in worrying, since although things will most definitely change, they will do so in ways we cannot possibly anticipate right now.  We've never been good at anticipating the consequences of our actions.  What we're much better at is making adjustments once the damage has been done.  That's how we roll as a species.  Change is the only constant.  So relax and enjoy the ride.
 
The situation on which the sci-fi author bases his or her vision of the future is essentially just the present writ larger or more frightening or transferred onto another planet.  Which is why science fiction becomes almost instantly dated, and as a result, silly.  Just watch any old sci-fi movie from the 1950s, or an episode of Twilight Zone.  The space ships have primitive dials and gizmos from what is now pre-modern air travel, superimposed on some unimaginable cataclysmic event in the future.  Even the stories that try to break out of the box a little have to use the information and technology at hand when they're written, so that in Star Trek, for instance, people dress a little like people actually dressed in the late 60s, wearing tunics that make them look like they could be swinging with Hugh Hefner at the Playboy mansion.  Oh, and pointed ears and sideburns, for whatever that signifies.  And of course the women are always buxom and always wear tight-fitting and revealing costumes.  Some things never change.  Ultimately the impetus for most science fiction is the mindset of the adolescent male, resulting in combat-filled jerk-off fantasies.  (Oh wait...that describes pretty much all entertainment, doesn't it?)

Another bit of silliness is the fact that most (though not all) science fiction movies and stories are not set far enough into the future to prevent them from outstripping their own days of reckoning, so to speak.  "The year is 2023, and bioengineering and robotics have relegated humans to the status of helpless subordinates to the monsters of science."   Or "The year is 1999 and pollution and overpopulation have overtaken the cities, causing the government to scoop people up and turn them into food." Or "The year is 1984, and Stalinism has attained its apotheosis."

Yet another aspect of science fiction I find to be ridiculous is the whole subject of travel to or from other planets and galaxies.  Space is quite simply too large to make this practicable.  Are we alone in the universe?  Of course not, but assuming there are beings out there who resemble us, as well as ones that differ from us, we won't be encountering them even if they can travel many eons at the speed of light.  Just too damn far to go for too little in return.  If they're smart enough to travel this far they're smart enough to know they don't want to waste their time coming here.  Why would they?  For the burgers and fries?  For Disneyland?  For Facebook?  Give me a break.

One of the things such science fiction usually overlooks is the incredibly long life of the infrastructure of most places, an intransigence that is built into life because of the high cost of and amount of work it takes to construct things, and because of the entrenchment of our institutions.  Highways are built to last for decades, and as long as they're around there will be automobiles, not little flying spacecraft flitting between buildings.  For one thing, such craft would be ridiculously expensive compared to cars, and for another the air traffic control situation in a three-dimensional world would be too formidable.  In all the time automobiles have dominated the human scene--a century now, in which other incredible advances have been made in medicine, air travel, astrophysics, you name it--the basic style of land travel has not changed in any fundamental way.  Roads have become smoother and wider and cars have become faster, but roads are still roads and cars are still cars.  And guess what?  They still run on petroleum and electricity, for the most part, just as they did a hundred years ago.  That's because some things are just too ponderous to change in a few decades, and the people who build them have a vested interest in keeping them the same.  While progress has been fast in some respects (electronics and telecommunications for example), in other respects it has been comparatively slow.  If a science fiction writer is at all interested in something approaching verisimilitude (as oxymoronic as that concept might be within the realm of the genre) the writer should set things in a future too distant to be disproved during the lifetime of the author or his contemporary audience.

Personally I look forward to seeing the things that really are going to change, as differentiated from the purely speculative and outlandish ones like alien visitation. For instance, I like the idea of global warming. The inundation of south Florida, for example, will be enjoyable to watch.  Also, it might be fun to go see what Greenland and Antarctica look like underneath all that ice.  It'll be interesting to see what kinds of technological challenges will be encountered and met by humans in response to climate change, and I hope I live to see some of them.  One thing is for sure--there's no use worrying about it.  It's going to happen, and definitely in some ways that prove to be wildly unexpected.  It's too damn late to change it, even if we wanted to.  Let's stop wringing our hands and stop making all those stupid movies about it.  Or to put it in another way, in the words of that old Jethro Tull song "Locomotive Breath,"
The train it won't stop going
No way to slow down.

The changes that will take place in the future are sometimes fun to imagine, and I'm sure that's part of the charm of science fiction.  But the imagining will prove for the most part to be utterly wrong.  In the short run, and probably in the much longer run, we are going to continue to live not on the Planet of the Apes, but on the Planet of the Baldwins, from which, it appears, there is to be no escape.

Progress

Monrovia, California

July 6, 2014

     History, as it is commonly described in books and shown on television and in films, vastly oversimplifies the course of human endeavor.  I suppose it really must do so, or the textbooks beleaguered students carry around would be even more ponderous than they already are.  History for public consumption tends to present the progress of our species as a series of long periods of comparative ignorance and torpor (and even regression) punctuated by bursts of profound inspiration, usually by famous individuals or small groups of famous individuals. Recorded history has little to say about the human race as a whole, instead tending to elevate the ideas of a few to such a level that we're given the impression that the rest of us just are just waiting for the next Einstein or Darwin or Newton to show up.  That definitely makes for good drama, but doesn't give much credit to the general populace, who are usually ignored except to be depicted as dumbly toiling in the grip of feudalism, peonage, economic depression, postwar healing, mindless consumerism, and so on, depending upon the era.  This idea in turn fuels the tendency in Western culture to elevate the accomplishments of individuals over those of the masses.  We like to have things summed up for us neatly and representatively, in little bites of print or sound or film.

     Of course many of us do just muddle along waiting for things to happen.  But it is our needs, our aspirations, and the deficiencies in our daily lives that push history along.  As trite as it may sound, necessity is indeed the mother of invention.  The problem with a stop-and-go view of history is that it ignores the fact that we are above all a species, not merely a collection of individuals, and that we have always worked together, generation after generation, building on who and what preceded us in order to solve problems and make things happen, instead of waiting for some savior genius to solve them for us.  Christianity elevates that latter misapprehension to its apogee by suggesting that one single man, the son of God, is the savior of all mankind.  Other religions do much the same thing.   Little wonder that we buy into the idea of the brilliant accomplishments of the individual over the collective. If we are encouraged to worship one single dude who saved us all, why wouldn't we tend to venerate individual dudes who, throughout history, have come to exemplify scientific and political and philosophical advances?

     And so the great leaps forward (or backwards) are usually represented in history books by the individual Big Thinkers or Doers.  For example, we love to believe (and in fact are taught from early childhood) that until fourteen hundred and ninety-two, when this intrepid explorer named Christopher Columbus sailed the ocean blue, people generally thought the earth was flat.  Although I'm sure a few people believed that, and still do, the idea that people generally thought so then, or ever, is demonstrably wrong.  Long before Copernicus and Keppler and Galileo (the Big Thinkers), the ancients who identified the planets and anyone who looked at the sun and moon could see they were spherical, so it stood to reason that the earth was no exception.  People may have quibbled over what revolved around what, but they knew they weren't in a universe of flat cubic chunks.  Anyone from the stone age onward could easily deduce, from standing on a mountaintop or at the seashore and looking off into the distance, that eventually the horizon gives way to the sky.  Then the next day they could travel to the point where that horizon had been the day before and see a new expanse of land  or sea beyond and a new horizon.  This wasn't, I daresay, rocket science.  Sailors, of all people, must have figured this out as they got farther from home and lost sight of land.  From such observations even the dullest of tools could deduce that the earth's surface must continuously curve.  Early humans weren't any less intelligent than we are; they simply possessed less cumulative data.  Columbus's big contribution wasn't in proving that the earth was round or that you could get to the far east by sailing west (something he didn't quite prove anyway).  His accomplishment was to convince the king and queen of Spain to pay for his trip, something which, by the way, they wouldn't have considered doing if they'd really believed the earth was flat.  And the Spanish monarchs were a bunch of inbred nitwits compared to the general populace. And if Columbus hadn't made the trip, someone else would have done so very soon, at the behest of a different monarch.  What scared people wasn't the idea that they'd fall off the edge of the earth so much as the vast unknown of the ocean.  And what prompted them to explore the world was the desire to make money.

     Similarly, Darwin didn't "discover" the idea of the origin of species through evolution; he merely observed and documented some fairly obvious things about species that confirmed what he and many of his predecessors suspected already, namely, that species change over time and adapt to their surroundings. The idea has its roots in the ancient thinking of others all over the world--China, the Middle East, and Europe.  True, Darwin (and his immediate predecessor Jean-Baptiste Lamarque) had to contend with the opposite theory, promoted by Platonic thinkers and the Christian church, that things are more or less as they have always been in the animal and plant world, having been stuck here by "the creator," whoever that might have been.  But had it not been for the absurdity of this "essentialist" theory (now called "creationism" by some), Darwin and his predecessors would not have been at such pains to disprove the theory in a systematic way.  So a necessarily dialectical approach to the issue pointed to the answer most of us knew to be the right one.  But even "primitive" people the world over have had the opportunity of observing the curious  interrelationships of such things as birds and plants, and to see the uncanny similarities and subtle differences between individual members of various groups of animals--primates, ruminants, equines, fish, reptiles, and so on--and understood that they probably had common evolutionary ancestors.  Ordinary people, I submit, could grasp these ideas without much trouble.  The people who opposed and resisted them were the self-appointed experts who had to protect their theological and pseudoscientific turfs.

     Columbus and Darwin are just two examples of how we tend to elevate gradual forward movement in human thought to something akin to a Cult of Personality.  Most people will latch onto a concept more readily when they can see an individual as its prime mover.  But look closer at any person who is considered "the father of" or "the inventor of" just about anything, and you'll find that no, they didn't actually invent it.  Perhaps they improved on it, or worked out a kink or two, or made a better or cheaper or more understandable version of it, but they didn't invent it from whole cloth, as it were.  People like to say that the Einsteins and Edisons and Teslas and Marconis of this world arrived at their conclusions riding on the shoulders of giants.  But even that is an exaggeration, and elevates the accomplishments of a few over those of many.  And it still encourages us to believe that, with respect to any great idea--in medicine, mechanics, political thought, whatever--before that great idea was promulgated and personified by some Great Thinker the rest of us didn't know jack shit about it.  You know the drill: "For thousands of years people believed [fill in the blank] was caused by evil spirits, and then suddenly [fill in the blank] discovered [fill in the blank]"  The problem with this paradigm is that it makes one wonder upon what stroke of oddball inspiration the great Fill in the Blank ever conceived the idea of wondering about Fill in the Blank, much less "discovering" it.  The question we should be asking is not something like, "What would we ever have done without Thomas Edison?"  Rather, it is, "Who gave Thomas Edison the idea that he could do what he did, and who in turn gave those persons the ideas they had?"  And so on.

     My point is that the world as we know it is the sum total of all knowledge we've gathered up to this point.  Some ideas, of course, have been more important than others, and some have indeed had to be discarded in favor of better ones. Some, like astronomical discoveries beyond our immediate atmosphere, have been mere theoretical musings, little removed from theology.  What difference does it make to us how many solar systems are out there just like ours?  Ultimately, who gives a damn how the universe was created except the merely curious?  Far too much time and energy is spent on such speculation, giving rise to phrases like, "They can put a man on the moon, so why can't they [fill in the blank]?  The people who ask that question are right in a very practical way.  Take the time and energy and money devoted to putting men on the moon and put it to better use here on earth.  And get over this preoccupation with life on other planets.  Of course there's life on other planets.  But so what, unless you write science fiction stories for a living?

     Some ideas, like the progressive development of mechanical and electronic devices, have been very useful on a day-to-day basis.  Using a big rock to bash your prey to death was crude, but it worked, if you could get close enough.  But bashing gave way to throwing, and then to throwing with precision, and then to shooting.  The basic idea was there all along:  hit your prey hard enough or deep enough in the right place and it will die or be stunned so you can eat it. The rest was just a matter of improving on existing techniques.  They call weapons "arms" for a reason: they are things that are extensions of our own arms--allow us to extent our immediate reach.   Likewise in food production, running out of food might originally have led to wandering around to another place to find more food, but eventually people began to settle down and let the food come to them, leading to domestication of farm animals and plants.  It was all gradual, prompted by necessity and the need for convenience, and ultimately creating enough leisure time to muse on other problems.

     The greatest "invention" in the history of the human race has simply been our evolution into modern homo sapiens, and that didn't happen because some Great Thinker figured out it was time for us to come out of the trees and walk upright.  It happened out of a combination of necessity, luck, trial and error, and millions of years of very gradual change.  Because we're humans and quite fond of ourselves, we love to see ourselves as the most highly evolved animals on the planet.  And we are pretty damned clever and adaptable, at least superficially.  We're always puzzled by how early people could have created things like Stonehenge and the Pyramids, and we like to assume they couldn't possibly have done so without some divine or extraterrestrial help.  But hell, moving big stones from one place to another isn't really such a technological miracle.  Get some logs or some rivers or canals and a bunch of beasts of burden and slaves and you're basically in business.

     The world of great ideas and great accomplishments isn't a world separate from ours; rather it is going on around us incrementally as we speak.  Its prime movers are all of us and all of our needs and ideas and struggles.  We as a species make it happen.  The only obstacles in our way are the ones we've always had to contend with:  religion, entrenched interests, and a longing for a simpler and somehow purer past.  Those things, and the belief that we must wait for someone to come along and solve our problems for us.

To Hell

Monrovia, California

Saturday, May 10, 2014

     There is a persistent feeling, especially prevalent in those who are influenced by the media, that the world is going to hell in a handbasket.  Our food is bad for us because it contains nasty shit, pollution is choking and poisoning us, people are opening fire at schools and offices, the forces of repression are arrayed against us and others throughout the world, and you can't get a good five cent cigar anywhere.  Oh, and someone is out to steal your financial identity and use it to buy power tools at a Walmart in Arkansas.  In general, things are not going well.  Or, as Charles Barkley would say, "jus' turrble."

     I said "influenced by the media," and of course the media has taken many forms over the centuries.  Now it's television and the internet, and before that it was radio, newspapers, broadsides, the town crier, and the local preacher or priest (often the only person in town who could read and write).  We're pretty much all influenced by whatever media happens to be around at the time.  I'm no exception, except that I refuse to believe much for public consumption that I see, hear, or read.  So I'm generally prone not to accept what the media says, at least not at face value.  If it's predicted to rain, it might.  If it IS raining, I believe it.  Movies are replete with folks like me, who blithely deny the rumors of impending doom and then pay the price.  Godzilla does come.  The tornado does destroy the town.  The rogue European nutbar does plant a nuclear device in a soda machine.  The world does freeze over because of, well, whatever bad thing we set into motion years ago.  These movies function as excellent ancillary support for the "real" media, to reinforce in us the idea that we should PAY ATTENTION, for God's sake, to what we're being told, and BELIEVE IT before it's too late.  Never mind that in the movies it's almost always too late from the beginning.

     It's instructive to consider the media in the many forms it has taken throughout human history because the predictions from the earliest times to the present have always been roughly the same: "You, O Israel, O England, O America, O California, have displeased Me, and I will smite you with a curse."  Amazingly, there are still people who adhere to the basic scripts set out in the Old Testament or in the book of Revelation.  But mostly these days the forms of dystopian hysteria tend to appear superficially more sophisticated, dealing with stuff like the ability of computers to shut us down or the possibility that someone will create robots that decide to take matters into their own hands or that something we have done ostensibly to promote progress is instead going to kill us all.  Superficially more sophisticated, but then, look at history.  For instance, Mary Shelley's 1818 novel Frankenstein was pretty much the same story, predicting, in the early years of autopsies and modern anatomical study, that we were screwing around with Mother Nature in ways we should not be doing.  That might have been the point at which fear of science and progress really merged, and was thrown in to our existing mixed bag of fears.

     But even as things get more dire, from the point of view of the media, things tend to be getting better for us as a species.   Food is cheaper and more plentiful.  Deadly infectious diseases are decreasing rather than increasing (not that they're gone entirely of course, but we do know how to handle them in ways that are, shall we say, more proactive than merely going to church and praying for deliverance).  Warfare is as brutal as ever, but it is subject to more external scrutiny and isn't always considered merely the private business of the combatants or the visitation of God's vengeance on one side or the other.  We are beginning to understand the interconnectedness of things, even if we do not always behave responsibly about it.  And most importantly, from the perspective of our species (which after all is the only perspective that has ever been truly relevant to us) we are multiplying and, despite the horrors that lurk in the dark corners created by our own excesses, living longer on average.  And from a biological standpoint living longer and multiplying are probably the truest measures of where any species stands.

     Don't get me wrong, I'm not Candide's Dr. Pangloss, blithely ignoring the sickness of reality behind the naive idea that we are living in the best of all possible worlds.  This not the best of all possible worlds, by any means.  But it is better in most respects than all the worlds that have preceded it, if you reckon such a thing from the perspective of health and survival.

     Perhaps as a way of contributing to human progress on the larger scale, we seem to be motivated to make more progress by constantly finding something wrong with things as they are.  Sometimes I think people who are from younger generations than mine (notice that I said "generations" plural) may regret the lack of a specific cause to which they can attach themselves in order to vent their frustrations about what they see as wrong with the world today.  My generation had opposition to the war in Vietnam and the struggle for civil rights, among other things.  The previous generation had the international crusade against fascism, and the generation before that the quest for peace in Europe and the desire to expose ruthless monopolistic capitalism and establish basic rights for (some) working people here at home.  A generation or two before that was the war to end slavery.  Big Stuff, historically speaking.  Today there is gay rights, also a big thing, but beyond that what is there, exactly, for people to get riled up over, about which they also can do something?  The Occupy movement accomplished, as far as I can tell, next to nothing.  We knew beforehand that capitalism was bad, and we still know it.  But we're addicted to it, like a smoker who knows tobacco is going to kill him.  We purport to hate Wall Street, but we love Apple and Starbucks, two of the biggest corporate pigs in the world.  (The fact that they sell nifty communication devices or caffeinated drinks rather than petroleum or pesticides does not lessen their rapaciousness and greed for profit at the expense of workers.)  So what's left to the would-be earthshakers among the young?  Making marijuana legal for general non-medicinal consumption all over the country?  Really??  And that's going to do the following: it will permit us to get stoned and forget about everything except eating pizza and drinking five dollar double chocolate mochacccinos and texting our friends.

     Which trivialities bring me to the triviality about which I intended to post at the outset: Gluten.  It now seems that what's really wrong with the world is that there's just too much gluten in our diet.  This evil thing (which is a protein found in various grains and is a key component of most bread, as well as a protein additive to various other foods) seems to be the culprit in any number of health problems, and if we could only avoid it we'd all be better off.   In fact, a very few people are intolerant to gluten, and they should avoid it.  Statistics say that approximately one in 133 persons, or 2/3 of one percent of the population, has trouble tolerating gluten, from a dietary standpoint.  That means that at any moment in your local grocery store maybe half of one person is intolerant to gluten, meaning that they have trouble digesting it.  But a great many more people are simply intolerant of gluten, meaning that they've identified an apparently nasty thing which, if we could just eliminate it, would make life more pure and healthy and meaningful.  These are the depths to which folks have sunk.  Guns?  Well, there are too many and people use them to kill each other, but what the hell, there's the second amendment.  Meth?  That's bad too, but it makes for a great TV series and only affects other people, not us.  Lack of health care for people under 65?  That's their problem, not ours.  However, gluten must be avoided at all costs.  Maybe that's because, unlike gun control and the eradication of meth, it presents a fresh opportunity to make money.  Advertise foods as "gluten-free" and you can get more for them or at least sell them more readily.  The exploitation of the fear of gluten has lined the pockets of food manufacturers and purveyors everywhere.  I'm  drinking a cup of coffee now, which I imagine is utterly free of the dreaded gluten.  I feel so much better knowing this.

     Well, I didn't start this rant just to go on and on about gluten.  The point is, obviously, that if you can't do anything about the really large problems in society, like the inequality of wealth (which seems pretty insoluble short of a worldwide socialist revolution), you can at least limit your intake of some comparatively insignificant food protein.  Or eat less dairy and red meat or watch your cholesterol intake.  Or you can smoke cigarettes that contain no additives, and pretend that it's not the repetitive inhalation of smoke from burning leaves that gives you the cancer.  Or you can drink low calorie beer, which allows you to consume twice as much before you get a fat gut or a fatty liver.

     All of which underscores that fact that the problems the younger generations face are so large that they really can't do a damn thing about them unless they're willing to completely change their attitudes about economic and social justice and, frankly, start a revolution that might inconvenience everyone.  And so we continue our trip to hell in a handbasket.  But at least if it could be a gluten free handbasket that might make it a safer ride for all of us.

Forever Old

April 4, 2014

Monrovia, California

My keyboard has been finicky lately, making it difficult to write the blog.  Guess I shouldn't have spilled coffee on it.  At least I don't use sugar, but a little milk has enough sugar in it to gum up the works.  So it's been slow going, with the occasional freezeup.  Having now made that Facebook-worthy disclosure, I proceed, a bit tardily, with this posting.

A couple of weeks ago I awoke from a dream in which I was in the presence of a person I gradually came to understand was my great grandmother.  People were milling around, and she was talking to them and sometimes standing alone while I observed her and was given information about her by others or gradually came to understand things about her in that way that happens only in dreams.  In that weird fashion I was becoming aware of her existence for the first time, and was supposed to be--indeed was--rather impressed with her accomplishments.  She was a stout, matronly woman of indeterminate old age, rather tall as she stood there with her hair pulled back tightly from her face and gathered in a no-nonsense bun.  She wore a full dress, not quite formal but very dignified, and resembled older women in prewar movies and New Yorker cartoons.  Definitely a personage from another time.  She was supposed to have been the first president of something or other, and one of the few women to have.....whatever the hell it was.  That part was never quite clear, or the details were lost to me in the seconds after I woke up, but the overall sense I had was this was a forebear who did some remarkable things.  And in the dream she was alive and in front of me.

Of course this woman wasn't really my great grandmother, but after the shell of the dream had broken and floated away with most of its contents, I was left thinking about great grandparents in general.  Each of us has had precisely eight great grandparents, biologically speaking.  In my case all of them died before I was born.  All four of my grandparents were born in the 1880s, and their four sets of parents were all born before or during the Civil War.  As with most of my contemporaries in age, we are fortunate if even one of our parents is still living, and our grandparents are long gone, and great grandparents are out of the question.  Indeed comparatively few of us have any recollection of them.  Perhaps, if our parents or grandparents were story tellers, we have some sketchy information about those great grandparents, such as their names and where they were born and what they did, and maybe a personal anecdote or two about them.  Our great grandparents are for the most part the oldest relatives we might have had during our lifetimes, and probably the oldest our own parents had, given people's comparatively shorter lifespans half a century or more ago, and therefore the oldest people with which we have any degree of personal familiarity.  We might have a few old and yellowing photos or even some tintypes of them, from the early years of photography.

In my own case I know the first and last names and maiden names of all eight of my great grandparents and where they were born.  I have seen photos of seven or possibly eight of them, most taken the better part of a hundred years ago--rich yellow and ocher formal-sitting-type photographs such as were the norm in the those days.  Two were born and died in Holland; one was born in Germany and one in Canada of a German father and both came to Michigan; one was born in Illinois and one in Missouri; and two lived their whole lives in southern New Jersey, descended from early settlers in New England and New York.  That's pretty much the story of an average American of mixed northern European heritage.

The thing about great grandparents in general as opposed to great-great grandparents and earlier ancestors, is that they lived on after their deaths in story and pictures and maybe some family legends or anecdotes--either you knew them yourselves, or your parents could tell you about them, the way you might occasionally tell your children about your own grandparents.  They were close enough to be real and yet remote enough in time to be semi-historical--the last solid link with the past before becoming merely a name on a family tree, relevant only to the curious (unless you're a Mormon looking to baptize them).  We might know we had an ancestor who fought in the Revolutionary War or the Civil War, but half the time what we think we know isn't really the case, because stories always get more interesting in the retelling, and there's no real link with people we actually knew. With great grandparents it's harder to fudge the reality of their existences, since they're too close to the present.  Even if we knew them a little when we were kids, they were hopelessly old--caught and held forever, in photographs or in our memories, as too remote to be the affectionate and indulgent grandparents who might have loved and nurtured us, but too recently passed out of time to be full-fledged ancestors.

The bridge of progress and technology our great grandparents crossed was enormous.  Chances are they were born before automobiles, electricity, indoor plumbing, telephones, and air travel, to name just a few innovations that came into being during their lifetimes.  Their livelihoods more than likely were of a different era, too, if not in their particularity then in the way they conducted them.  Half of my great grandparents were farmers, one was a baker and one a sawmill operator.  I don't think any of them made it to what we'd call secondary school, and that was entirely the norm for their era.  The fact that they survived into adulthood, much less old age, was in itself a defiance of the odds.  At the turn of the 19th to the 20th century the most common cause of death was infectious diseases, followed by heart disease and strokes.  Childbirth complications for mothers and babies were common.  The life expectancy for someone born in 1860 was about 42 years.  It was rare for someone of my great grandparents' era not to have had at least one sibling who died at birth or at a young age from things like influenza, measles, diphtheria, and typhoid fever.  Antibiotics and vaccinations were rudimentary, injectible insulin didn't exist. Workplace accidents were frequent, as were unfortunate childhood events like falling into wells and dying in fires.  Life was risky in the way it still is in the third world.  Or people might live to be 35 and catch or develop something that today would be treatable, and be gone in a flash.  The fact that cancer and high blood pressure and type II diabetes and Alzheimer's Disease are so common today speaks volumes.  These are for the most part conditions that take decades to develop to the point where they are fatal.  It is in all respects, in this country at least, a safer world, even with the real and imaginary dangers that blare out at us from all the news media outlets.  In fact, the reason we hear so much about such dangers--plane crashes, murders, traffic fatalities, and so on--is that they are news, which is to say that they don't happen often enough to be taken for granted as part of the fabric of life in the advanced western world.

So often we unrealistically imagine the peace and quiet and comparative safety of a bygone and more rural age.  But the days of our great grandparents were not safe. Dangerous in a less noisy way, perhaps, but dangerous nonetheless.  In terms of what government or employers had to offer, they were not much removed from medieval times.  No social security, no old-age health insurance, no minimum wage, no child labor laws, very little reliable medical treatment.  Life was a bitch and then you died.  Between your fortunate survival of birth and early childhood and your departure from this mortal coil you worked your ass off six or seven days a week, read the scriptures (if you could read), and were ruled by your religion.  Many of that time also were born into slavery or peonage, or lived with the fear of impressment into military service, local vendettas, the oppression of a merciless employer and an equally merciless and indifferent government.  As Thomas Hobbes put it in the 17th century, life for the majority of people without the protection of a benevolent sovereign (and how many of them have there been?) was solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.  This was barely beginning to be less the norm than the exception in the western world during the last half of the 19th century.  And all of it was happening within the living memories of persons who were able to tell us, or our parents, about them.  But they didn't do so, for the most part.

Some wit once said that nostalgia ain't what it used to be, but of course it is what it always has been--a form of ignorance, in the true sense that it deliberately ignores facts.  For some this ignorance is probably therapeutic, for others it is merely self-delusion.  Despite all of human misery, what generally survives in the telling are the sweeter and more glossy recollections in life, which is where the nostalgia comes in.  I suppose that few who make it into comparative old age really enjoy dwelling on their own life's miseries, although the temptation, so often succumbed to, is to remind our descendants of how practically everything was done differently (and by implication better) when we were kids.  That of course is because what we're remembering is not life as a whole, but childhood.  Ironically, this gloss of nostalgia, which seeks the memories of the comforts of youth, is not how we see our great grandparents.  We tend to view them as old, because if we knew them at all, or have pictures of them, chances are they were old at the time.  No home movies survive of great grandparents frolicking down by the old fishing hole in some Huckleberry Finn-like way, or rolling hoops down the rutted dirt streets while avoiding horse turds, or spending shivering nighttime moments in the three-hole outhouse, or trudging out to the family graveyard with an infant's coffin.  But all that happened.  What we see is their mature old age, if they made it that far, and the serious looks on their faces--looks that said life is hard, by God, but we made it.

Most of us will someday be viewed that way by our own great grandchildren--as relics of another era, wearing out-of-date clothing and speaking in a hopelessly uncool way and sporting the comparatively grim looks that reflect a long life of comparative hardship: Having to get up to change one of the few channels on the TV; having to use only telephones that were attached to the wall by a cord; having to look things up in books; having to use typewriters; having only hot dogs and hamburgers to choose from at fast-food places, having to spend cash most of the time.  Having measles, mumps, and chicken pox; having had or known someone our age who had polio; having no seatbelts, airbags, or child car seats; having segregated public facilities; having to watch only white guys play major league sports.  The list, trivial and serious, goes on and on.  We will be the last living--or recently dead--links to a dinosaur world of semi-history.  We will, above all, be forever old.

Days And Years

March 8, 2014

Monrovia, California

Okay, I've already begun to backslide from my goal of posting more often.  But February was a short month, with two holidays.  How much work can you expect anyone to get done?  And speaking of the calendar, sort of, it was three years ago this week that I reported in this blog on the Academy Awards ceremony in Hollywood, or at least on my trip to Hollywood to get as close as I could to the glitterati. (Check out "The Last Oscars" posted here on 2/28/11.  I just reread it and I must say it's not bad.)  At that time there were people in the streets talking about the impeding end of the world.  It was going to occur in somewhere between 84 and 90 days from Oscar night, if I recall.  This date had been calculated independently by several end-time Armageddon type groups, based generally on various interpretations of the biblical book known as The Revelation of St. John the Divine.  (St. John the Divine was so named to differentiate him from St. John the Nosepicker, St. John the Not-too-Punctual, and other Monty Pythonesque personages.)

Back then, as I waited in vain for a close look at the famous Hollywood actors who were about to go into the Kodak Theater, I had just finished my walk across the country and was examining some of the more specific areas of quirkiness in the Los Angeles area, on which I've attempted to continue to report to my readers ever since, having now made LA County my home.  On that particular day I didn't get near enough to where the A-listers were disembarking from their limousines to see any of them too well, but I got a flavor of the whole scene.  More importantly, however, I got to chat with some end-of-the-world types, including one I called Armageddon Dude, and to read his manifesto regarding the state of the world in its waning months. The guy told me he was Jesus Christ himself, and although I was skeptical of this claim initially, I gradually came to realize that he had, at any rate, a divine world view in some respects.  Apart from believing he was from somewhere between Jupiter and Saturn, he also held that the Republican Party was the apotheosis of evil in America.  No arguing with that, and indeed, even though the world didn't come to an end later in 2011, as he and others were predicting, the Republicans have continued to wage their satanic war of attrition against the few good things others have tried to do through and within the government of this country.  I had hoped to find Armageddon Dude again over in Hollywood, and though I've been there a few times since then, I haven't seen him.  Maybe he's back upstairs with The Old Man, recalculating the whole second coming thing.  As anyone knows who is familiar with western theology and mythology, sometimes even the gods make mistakes.

But back to calendars, because that was the rub in that end-of-the-world thing in early 2011 when I visited Hollywood.   Somehow the end-time Christians screwed up.  Not long after that, in fact the next year, the Mayans, or at least their modern adherents, also screwed up. They got their dates wrong, and damn it, the world didn't end.  That would have been news.  Bigger even than war or the movies or sports.  Somehow humans have a tendency to make things for their own convenience, then forget that they've made them in the first place, and begin to think of them as God-given.  Happens over and over, throughout the world.  It's a major failing of the human race.  The calendar is one such device among many--created by man and then imbued with divine authority to give it more authenticity.  Within the calendar are a number of instances of days, weeks, or months that have become special or sacrosanct merely by having been arbitrarily designated so on the calendar.  December 25 as the date of the birth of Jesus comes immediately to mind, as if anyone could have figured that out, and of course no one really did, especially since not even all Christians agree on that date.  There are the eastern Orthodox folks and the western Christians, and they have different dates.  But whenever it's celebrated, it's holy.  It kind of gets you to wondering about how a species as clever as homo sapiens is in many ways can at the same time be so profoundly silly.

As for calendars in general, whoever it was who decided there were going to be seven days in a week also had to decide which day was going to be Sunday, and go from there.  As for the number of days in a week, you might well suppose that seven days makes sense in terms of the lunar cycle--there being four seven-day periods within one such cycle.  Possibly six days of breaking your ass seemed to a lot of folks as reasonably calling for a seventh day of comparative leisure.  But there could as easily have been seven four-day weeks as four seven-day weeks.

So my question still is, Why is Sunday Sunday, and not Monday or Tuesday, or whatever?  Well, the answer is buried forever in the recesses of time, although updates to the calendar have happened over the centuries, by agreement or fiat, some not so long ago.  As recently as the mid-1700s in Protestant Europe and even as recently as 1917 in Russia, today would not have been Saturday March 8, but some other day and date, about eleven or thirteen days earlier.  Different day of the week, different day of the month, even a different year, because up to a certain time March 1 was New Year's day.  George Washington's date of birth, for instance, is recognized today as having been February 22, 1732, but when George was born, it was February 11, 1731, and until Washington was about 20 and England got on the Gregorian calendar (the one decreed by the Pope for all Catholics in 1582, and the one we use today), he thought his birthday was on February 11.  Of course there was lot more he didn't know back then, including the fact that we'd still be commemorating his birthday in 2014 and that it would be on a convenient Monday instead of the real day so we could have a three-day weekend, and that it would have morphed into President's Day and that Crazy Dave's Mattress Store and all your local Toyota dealers would be having fantastic sales to commemorate it, and so on.

The Great October Socialist Revolution, which started on October 25, 1917 in Russia (a country that was even slower getting on board with the Gregorian calendar than England was), actually started on what is today November 7.  They really should have named that submarine Red November. When the Soviets shifted calendars, 13 days just went pfffffft, and disappeared.  Anybody whose birthday was within that period of almost two weeks just sort of missed out, I guess.  Maybe birthdays weren't as important then as they are now, but still.... imagine if someone told you on the day before your birthday that the calendar was going to jump ahead almost two weeks and your birthday would be skipped that year?  You'd be plenty pissed off, I'll bet.  Maybe you'd still get a cake and some presents, and you'd have to consider yourself a year older, but imagine the havoc it would play with other aspects of the modern world, where specific times and dates are so important?  My car payment is due on March 5, but there is no March 5.  What the hell do I do?  And more importantly, what will the loan company do?

I suppose the point I'm getting to is that we're pretty strongly tied to calendars, much more so than when Washington or Lenin were kids.  In this context I was examining my own calendar this morning and noticed that on the calendar hanging on the kitchen door, picked up for free at a bank, it says March is Women's History Month.  I thought more or less the same thing I thought last month when it was Black History Month, namely, hmmmm, why do these groups--one comprising about 12.5 % of the country's population and the other an overlapping 51%--have one lousy month per year dedicated to their history?  And doesn't that mean that Black females get two months a year, while Black males get only one?  Does that mean that the other ten months of the year--from April through January--are by default white male history months?  Then upon closer examination of my calendar I observed that May has been designated Asian Pacific Heritage Month and November is National Native American and Alaskan Heritage Month, so I guess we white guys get eight months a year--but still, that's two-thirds of the time--not bad, in a disproportionate way.  And after all, in addition to all those months white males gets, even though we're 35% of the population, we get most of the wealth, property, and political power, not to mention fame and fortune in the entertainment industry and the majority of the Get Out of Jail Free cards.  It seems that on just about every corner these days you see a white man.  Turn on the TV and what do you see?  White men.  Go to court and who do you see sitting in black robes and carrying around briefcases?  White men.  Look at the heads of the large corporations, the inventors of technological advances, the members of rock bands--mostly white men.  What's the country coming to?  All but one president has been a white man, and all the vice presidents, too.  Maybe we're a bit underrepresented in professional sports--hockey and golf excepted--but that's not a bad trade-off for being the owners and head coaches and managers of most of the teams.  Even Armageddon Dude was white.

But take heart, women of America, and people of color, because you've got yourself a whole month dedicated to your history, and if you're a woman, two whole months.  And if you're part Native American or Asian and African American, maybe three months.  This, and the subject of the Oscars, helps me hop up into the saddle of another hobby horse.  The movie Twelve Years a Slave took some of the prime Academy Awards this year.  I saw the movie and liked it, in an uncomfortable sort of way.  Slavery, as we all know, was bad.  But why does it take the story of a guy who was illegally pressed into slavery to make us pay attention to the subject?  What about all his plantation companions who were born and died as slaves and didn't even get a chance to engage in a tearful reunion with their free families up north?  Twelve years is bad enough, but how about a lifetime?  I'm just saying.

Oh, by the way, here's a good trivia question involving knowledge not only of U.S. presidents but of the Gregorian calendar:  Other than George Washington, who was elected to his first term in 1789, name the only two presidents who were elected in years that weren't leap years.

The Death Scream Of The Carrot

Monrovia, California

February 19, 2014

This is about what we eat, as a species.  Somehow I have the feeling I've written about this before on the blog, but it might be that I've only alluded to aspects of the problem.  Problem? you ask.  What's the problem?  Let's have pizza!  Well, go right ahead.  Extra cheese and pepperoni for me.  And while you're eating a slice, I'll chat.

One of the things about humans that has made us so successful (in the short run at least as the history of the world goes) is our adaptability.  We can live almost anywhere on earth, from the frozen poles to the jungles of the equator to the lone and level sands of the desert, and everywhere in between.  Give us something to eat and wear and something with which to shelter ourselves and we're good.  Of course there are other species that can and do adapt to all sorts of climates--rats and dogs and certain insects come immediately to mind, and they don't even have to make clothing.  It's our ability to imitate other species and use them for our own purposes that allows us to be damned near everywhere.  We are predators of the highest possible order, in that we not only prey on other species but have developed ways, on a vast scale, of managing them, changing them, and molding them to our needs.  We hunt, we fish, we gather, but more importantly we develop and refine.  In some places and at some stages of social and economic development we do simply grab what's at hand.  But in most areas we do far more than that, and for most of us, historically, each phase of development has led to a more complex one, from subsistence to full-blown agriculture.

Where human habitation has been unsuccessful on a large scale that has been due to the fact that folks have been unable or unwilling to adapt--to get with the local program.  (The Vikings in Greenland come immediately to mind here--they knew there were Inuits who had adapted well to that environment by fishing and hunting aquatic mammals, but instead of copying them they chose to transplant the agricultural model of their native Scandinavia, which, when the going got rough climatically, just didn't work.  So they died or went back home.)  But almost everywhere we've not only gotten with the program, but have improved upon it and developed it.  Where there were once herds of wild bovines we have converted them into domestic cattle; where there have been schools of wild fish we have learned to net them or better yet have enclosed them into fish farms; where there were once fat wild edible birds we have converted them to tame chickens, ducks, and geese.  We use their meat, their hides, their feathers, their milk, or their eggs, as the case may be.  We not only prey on other animals, but we actually improve the quality and quantity of our prey, often on a mass scale, for our own consumption.  And of course we do the same with plants.

The human level of predatory behavior goes far beyond the cunning and opportunistic habits of those predators we most fear and admire--lions and tigers and bears, for instance.  It is not entirely unprecedented in the rest of nature for one species to, as it were, farm another.  Certain wasps are known to keep bees under their control in order to have a steady supply of honey.  But the average meat-eating king of the jungle appears to just lie in wait and take what it can from the weak and the slow of the herd rather than killing the fattest and strongest of them as we do.  Lions are kind of a garbage disposal for their prey.  In human terms, they're dumpster divers.  Lions do make it a point to kill competing predators when possible--no baby cheetah is safe from a lion, and a lion will eat a human when it can, with relish.  They're opportunistic, as I say, but not particularly forward-thinking, just highly adapted in a narrow way.  It's worked okay for them for quite some time, except where they've come into contact with us, because we're more efficient as predators than they are, however much stronger they may be than us, however much we like their sinuous ferocity.  We reduce their habitat for our personal use, and we kill not only them, as competitors and potential predators of us, but we also kill their prey.  So while we admire their pure bloodthirstiness, reflecting as it does our own, we also know how to get rid of them if necessary.

Because humans live all over the world, we've learned to get by with whatever food is at hand, for the most part, and to avoid what's not good for us.  Where meat or seafood is potentially tainted or harmful to us, we've developed rules against such foods, usually dressing them up in the elaborate proscriptions of religion.  Where plants are practically nonexistent, we eat meat only, deriving whatever necessary nutrients we can from body parts.  And where meat is scarce, we eat only plants, getting as much nutrition out of them as possible.  But mostly, when we can, we eat just about anything and everything, because our digestive systems have developed to allow us to be omnivorous.  It all seems to work pretty well.  Folks in some parts of the world eat things that people elsewhere would consider revolting or perhaps a bit wacky.  Raw blood, insects, guinea pigs, even dirt.  Nature seems to provide pretty well for us wherever we find ourselves.  And if not, we move on or die.

This brings me to people who are vegetarians by choice, rather than by necessity or under the insidious influence of some religious mumbo-jumbo.  This particular subset of our species is dedicated to the proposition that even though we live in the midst of plenty and are enjoying ever-longer lives (in part by having successfully exterminated or reined in the species, from large to microbial, that prey on or compete with us) we are doing something drastically wrong to ourselves by consuming animals.  And here I'm talking mostly about American and western European vegetarians who have the luxury of choice in this area.  These vegetarians seem to have, as their primary motivation, the promotion of human health, and maybe also some concerns about the cost and waste of eating high on the food pyramid.  But those opposed generally to the eating of meat usually observe a kind of natural, and telling, set of priorities.  They are, to put it bluntly, species-centric, and concerned with the welfare of their own kind--good old homo sapiens.  They are vegetarians because eating no meat appears to them to be the best thing for humans, above all.

Then there are vegans--those who don't eat anything that comes from an animal, even things that don't involve the killing of animals, such as milk, cheese, eggs, or honey.  They seem to be vegetarians who have moved to a different level, motivated by a more extended agenda.  This agenda has more political and social  overtones.  For the vegan mere dietary and health considerations are perhaps important, but human self-interest appears to have taken a back seat to altruism.  They profess to object to the killing or even the exploitation in any manner of other animals.  It's these folks I worry about, because, without seeming to realize it, they still practice self-centeredness, or at least what might be termed, biologically, kingdom-centrism.  Perhaps without meaning to, the species whose consumption both vegetarians and vegans most abhor are the ones that most closely resemble us, or our own conception of ourselves.  Thus the smarter an animal is, or the larger it is, or the cuter it is, or the more useful or attractive to us it is in some capacity other than as meat, the more likely they are to oppose the butchering and devouring of it, either on grounds of human health or in the interest of kindness to our fellow-creatures.  Whales, and especially dolphins, have big brains, so they're high on the list of the forbidden, since we believe we have big brains.  Cows and horses, fellow-mammals, are also a no-no.  And puppies, even the tenderest and most potentially succulent of them--well it would be just unthinkable to eat one of them.  Vegans of course don't stop at objecting to the consumption of mammalian flesh.  They oppose the eating of birds, fish, insects, reptiles--anything that is within the animal kingdom, and anything produced by members of that taxonomic group.  Their objections seem to arise from a general sense of solidarity with the rest of the beings within our kingdom--the swimmers, the quackers, the mooers, the growlers, the buzzers, the singers of the mournful songs of the sea.

I said I was worried about vegans, so let me clarify what I mean.  I think, in their zeal, they've drawn the line a bit too high, taxonomically speaking.  It's all well and good to be considerate to animals (and to make ourselves feel better, in a sort of self-sacrificing way, at the same time), but can we afford to ignore the feelings of plants?  Why should the sufferings of species that are rooted in the ground be absent from the consciences of these otherwise well-meaning folks, as if things that have flourished on earth for millennia longer than animals are less deserving of our thoughtfulness?   And why should we exploit them for our selfish uses, forcing them from wild to tame and planting them in uniform rows to serve our needs?  Have vegans never heard the death scream of the carrot as it is untimely ripped from the womb of Mother Earth?  What about the cry of agony of the broccoli plant as its flowers are amputated?  Or the grief of the fruit or nut tree as its offspring are plucked from its branches or gathered from the ground beneath its protective shade?  Have these vegans no hearts, no souls, no consciences?  Shouldn't we, as thoughtful humans, be more circumspect?  To spare our fellow biological species, we should, by rights, eat nothing but dirt and minerals.  And for that matter, who are we to presume that rocks have no feelings?  Where will it end?  We should, I think, in the apotheosis of the vegan mentality, simply go out of existence.

Of course I'm being deliberately hyperbolic here.  Almost all of us draw the line somewhere, in terms of what's okay to eat and what's not.  Most people don't consider plants to be sentient beings in the same sense that animals are, and most of us even imagine a hierarchy of sentience within the animal kingdom.  This is mostly to make ourselves feel better.  Hook a fish through the lip with a pointed piece of metal, throw it in the boat and let it suffocate, what's the harm?  The fish has a tiny brain, after all, not a large one like ours.  Toss a live lobster into a pot of boiling water and bring on the clarified butter.  It's just a giant insect anyway.  But cut the still-beating heart out of a cute little lamb or eat a house cat?  Well mister, you're going straight to hell.

Somehow it doesn't bother either vegetarians or their more unhappy cousins the vegans that other animals eat nothing but meat, often while it's still alive: the soaring  eagle, the crouching tiger, the graceful killer whale.  Or that others are omnivorous: the pig, the rat, the chimpanzee.  It only irks them that we humans have these same eating habits.  This discomfort with our nature, amounting to self-loathing, is what really worries me.  How full of hatred for all that we are and have been in our comparatively short run on this planet must someone be to hold himself to such drastically different standards of behavior than any of his fellow animals? Does a deer think more or less of itself because it eats only grass and other plants, and does it worry about ruining trees and bushes?  Does a mountain lion feel guilty about eating the deer until they are no more?  I think not.  Why, then should we care?   It suggests, simultaneously, that we are both inferior and superior to other species: inferior in that our carnivorousness is somehow more evil than that of other animals, and superior in that we are, or ought to be, the caretakers of the rest of creation.  And how self-consciously pro-animal and anti-vegetable these vegans are.

Shakespeare's Hamlet comes to mind here, as an example of mankind in its most befuddled state of indecision and misplaced priorities:

Thus conscience does make cowards of us all,
And thus the native hue of resolution
Is sicklied o'er, with the pale cast of thought.

For Hamlet and his story that quote cuts more than one way.  The poor guy just doesn't know what's right.  Should he kill his uncle and avenge his father's death--a fairly natural human response to murder and usurpation?  Should he send him straight to hell, or should he let him say his prayers first?  Should he punish his mother for marrying his father's killer and make her a widow, or, for want of being able to make any damned decision, should he just kill himself?  What to do, what to do?  By the end of the play pretty much everybody gets killed, deliberately or accidentally, in a real tragedy of errors.  Hamlet gets it from a guy with a poisoned sword blade who is avenging his own father's and sister's deaths caused by Hamlet's mistake; but oops, Hamlet's killer dies from the poisoned blade, too; Hamlet's mom accidentally drinks poison intended for Hamlet; and Hamlet finally does kill his uncle, which, had he done that in the first place, would have shortened the play considerably and saved a lot of lives. You students of great literature might disagree here, but I think Hamlet's tragic flaw is that he's a ditherer, unable to accept the reality of what's right in front of him.  He doesn't trust his natural impulses, or recognize what ought to have been pretty obvious to him from the beginning--(gee, dad died and Uncle Claudius immediately married mom, wonder what's going on?).  He remains supremely self-centered from beginning to end, even while imagining that he's being thoughtful and careful.  What passes for compassion on his part is only momentary indecision.  He keeps wondering where and when to draw the line.  

I'm convinced that if such a thing had been on anybody's radar screen back then, Hamlet would have been a vegan.

To put it more bluntly, shut up, eat, enjoy.

Shits And Giggles

Monrovia, California

January 26, 2014

I address this to the 39 official followers of my blog, which includes at least three people who are listed twice, at least one of whom is dead.  Dead once, but listed twice.  So I address this to the 35 or so official separate living followers of my blog, and especially to the five to ten who read it on a regular or semi-regular basis.  I address this also to the people who are not listed as official followers who nevertheless read it.  Among those, in particular, I address this to the hundreds of random readers from countries like China, the Ukraine, Brazil, and South Korea, most of whom take a peek in order to post spam comments like "Great blog, really well written.  If you get an opportunity, take a look at my blog, which I call women in tattered underwear working in the sex trade."

It is for all of you, my cherished readers the world over, that I toil to make this blog what it is, or at least what it once was when you started reading it.

I feel that I haven't been giving you your money's worth lately (which is a figure of speech of course, since it's free).  Don't worry (or get your hopes up as the case may be), this is not a valedictory posting.  I'm not going out of business.  I just think I've been a bit too narrow in my selection of topics, and therefore haven't been producing as much as I should.  So my New Year's resolution is to post more often.  Not every day, mind you, but more than once a month, which is what it's come down to lately.  Since it started as a travel blog and my traveling days consist mostly of trips into downtown Los Angeles, the journey will continue on a more cerebral plane.

I take my inspiration from that most esteemed and currently popular of the social media, Facebook.  I acknowledge that I am on Facebook, and do like to exchange banter with a few family members, friends, and acquaintances, sharing my personal feelings from time to time, announcing the sad passing of relatives, wishing people happy birthday, and so on.

It is also on Facebook that I learn such things as how happy people are that they're off work today, or will be off work tomorrow, or how pissed they are that it's only Wednesday, for Christ's sake.  I also learn what they think about the weather where they live, how much they love photos and videos featuring cute animals, and what an awesome God our God really is, with streams of sunlight emanating from his ethereal presence and illuminating the snow, or the mountains, or whatever he deigns to brighten with those streams of sunlight of his.  Our God is truly an awesome God, because he created Facebook and all the shit it contains.  I think that might have been on the eighth or ninth day, after he had rested a bit and seen that everything was good, but couldn't resist putting in his two cents about the minor details of creation.  Kvetching, mostly, in the tradition of his original chosen people.  In addition, of course, on Facebook I learn of personal triumphs, such as the successful plowing or shoveling of the driveway, the fact that the family pet can do tricks, the consumption of a great meal, etc.

Facebook is also where I learn what political reactionaries or utter nostalgic fools some of my old school acquaintances have become over the years, and occasionally, to my satisfaction, what compassionate and liberal souls some of them have.  I'm sure a few of my old classmates always were the way they are now, but not most of them.  For instance, I don't remember anyone campaigning for arch-conservative politicians or advocating the abridgment of the Bill of Rights (second amendment excepted, always) back when we in high school.  But then, they were busy doing what they had to do: eating 18 minute lunches, hurrying from class to class lugging heavy textbooks (sans backpacks), making out in the hallways in front of their lockers, popping their pimples, playing sports, cheering for sports, chewing gum, sneaking cigarettes, and occasionally studying.  Now they want the world to know, on a daily basis, how they're feeling about just about EVERYTHING.  Aches and pains, pet peeves, how much snow has fallen overnight, their pride in their children or grandchildren--you name it.  Well, sic transit gloria mundi, which is Latin for "by the way, whatever happened to Gloria Mundi, the girl most likely to succeed?  I wonder if she's on Facebook?"

As just about everyone knows, on Facebook you get to "like" or "comment" on others' observations, which is a way of affirming what they have posted or perhaps criticizing it a little.  I say "a little" with regard to the criticism, because I don't generally see anyone challenging anyone else's opinions on Facebook.  It's usually a sort of "right on" response, or a "like," or silence.  Rarely is there any debate.  I suppose that's not what Facebook is supposed to be about.  Let people spout off and if you don't like it, don't comment.  It's like what everyone claims their mother used to tell them (though few of our mothers ever did):  "If you can't say something nice about someone, don't say anything at all."  If I were to post on Facebook that Marco Rubio is an asshole, for instance, I would get a few "likes" from a few like-minded folks, but probably not many comments challenging what I said.  By the same token, when I see people blaming Barack Obama or the politically divided congress for the ills of the country I don't generally challenge them either.  I don't point out, for instance, that congress has been severely divided far more often throughout the course of the nation's history than it has been united.  (Does anyone remember reading about the Civil War?  Does anyone remember the impeachment of Bill Clinton?)  So I just shake my head and scroll on down the page, looking for something interesting or useful, which I occasionally find, though not too often.

Like this blog, the social media in general have elevated the pronouncement of trivial thoughts on trivial ideas to a new art form.  It's as if we're all chatting with one another over the back fence or over the telephone, but without the need to listen to an answer from anyone.  And after all, who expects an answer to an observation about the weather or politics or religion?  These are subjects that admit of no meaningful discussion, since no one can do anything about them.  The weather is what it is.  Political opinions are seldom if ever changed as a result of personal debate.  Only the self-appointed experts on television can change our beliefs there, and usually not to much effect, because we tend to choose the channels where the talking heads tell us what we already think.  And as for religion--who ever changed anyone's opinion about that through discussion?  Wars and natural catastrophes can scare people into changing religions, but not discussion.  It's always interesting to me that while we have an organization like the United Nations to nominally arbitrate socio-political issues, and which indeed does manage to come to some worldwide consensus on certain things such as the fact that genocide, disease, and despotism are not good (consensuses that are nevertheless ignored by many), we do not have an organization dedicated to discussing the worldwide merits of religion.  It's simply off limits.  Yet without confronting religion head on no real progress will ever be made on the social and political issues that organizations like the UN try to address.  We have no problem at the global level saying, for instance, that gender equality is a good thing, or that the arrogation of absolute power over an entire people or group of nations into the hands of a few individuals is a bad thing, yet billions of people belong to religions that preach and practice just the opposite, headed by dictators who claim to derive their power from God alone.  Does anyone else think this is more than a bit odd?

And here I'll say that some of these absolute religious dictators are not necessarily bad folks. But being a dictator can take a little of the niceness out of anyone.  The pope might smile beneficently and tousle the heads of young folks and preach worldwide love and tolerance in some areas, but he also can and does relegate women to a subordinate place in his realm and suggests that post mortem trouble lies ahead for people who use contraception or have abortions.  And he could, if he chose, reverse those positions with a stroke of the pen, more or less, because he speaks for God.  The Dalai Lama isn't such a bad guy, even though he purports to be the fourteenth reincarnation of blah blah blah and the chosen one and to be more in touch with the divine than the rest of us mortals.  His chief complaint in life, and the reason he's so well known to us all, is that he's not being allowed to be the spiritual and temporal ruler of his home country, Tibet.  The fact that he's now just a giggly member of the worldwide lecture circuit and the author of inspiring books that sell in new age stores and the darling of people who don't like the Chinese government seems to have made him a hero. But give him some real power in his own country and he'd pretty much have to behave like a pope does, telling everyone what to think, even if he tells them nice things.  That, after all, would be his job.

All this, as I say, along with the pronouncements of ayatollahs and chief rabbis and televangelists and the like, to whom many people listen far more attentively than they do to their elected or appointed secular leaders, is pretty much off limits for debate.  Everyone has the right to overthrow despotism, but no group seems to have the right, collectively, to tell people that their religion is reactionary and full of shit.  World religions are allowed to assert worldwide dominance in the name of God almighty, but world secular leaders are not, at least not any more.  The modicum of progress inherent in the tail end of the last sentence--"not any more"--might just provide a glimmer of hope.

How the hell did I get from Facebook to all this, you ask?  I don't know, it just happened.  Maybe God made me do it, or maybe the Devil did.  Or maybe I just got up on my figurative soapbox and it all sort of tumbled out.  Like a preacher, or like someone on Facebook.

The Golden Globes

Monrovia, California

January 13, 2014

Here's the latest gossip from this blog about the Golden Globe Awards, as if the Oscars weren't enough, along with the Emmys, Grammys, Tonys, and all the rest of the awards ceremonies for the other types of "performing arts."  (Arts my ass, by the way.  You want art?  Go to a museum or listen to a classical music station.  You might see or hear some.)   For those of you who weren't glued to your TV to see the Golden Globes, which includes me, I will give you my observations on the high points I have managed to glean from the AOL home page and a few other internet sources.

1.  Diane Keaton looks like an old English man.  She looks a little better than Keith Richards, mostly because of the necktie and because she wears less makeup than Keith does.  Also, she's had a less interesting life.

2.  People like to swear on TV, even though they know the words will be bleeped out.  This reminds me of the way we used to swear as little kids when no adults were around.  (Oh wait, it just hit me.  No adults ARE around at the Golden Globes.)  They realize they're going to be on prime time television, where they bleep things out, but they swear anyway and leave the mental work to the sound editors.  This results in long silent gaps in their speeches, while their lips move and you try to read them.  Maybe it's an homage to the silent movies, I don't know.  Partly they do it out of habit, and partly because they're stoned to the gills and whatever built-in filters they might have had are temporarily knocked out of commission.

3.  Almost all the women wore silly dresses or things that would have been silly dresses in any real-world context.

4.  Did I mention that Diane Keaton looks like an old British queen?  And I don't mean Elizabeth II.

5.  The men who wore tuxedos looked good compared to almost everyone else, because that's a good look for just about any man--fat, slim, intelligent, or stupid.  Women shouldn't have so many choices, but unfortunately they do.  It's like the choices we have in fast food restaurants.  You want fries with that dress?  Can I supersize that for you?

6.  Diane Keaton should have worn a tuxedo.

7.  Women's dress designers are the greatest practical jokers in the world.

8.  Women's hairdressers are the second greatest practical jokers in the world.

9.  At least Tina Fey and Amy Poehler were deliberately trying to be funny, which is more than you can say for the rest of the people who attended.

10.  Diane Keaton shouldn't be allowed to go out in public, except on Halloween.

I'm just sayin'.    

Pride and Prejudice

Central Lake, Michigan

December 29, 2013

Recently I noticed on Facebook one of those pseudo-Hallmark postings, put there by a very nice and thoughtful woman who is fond of sharing her observations on all aspects of life (children, work, favorite movies, songs, holiday customs--you name it).  If you go on Facebook you know the particular shared sayings I'm talking about--usually they're done as pen and ink drawings of Victorian-era women over pastel backgrounds, with sometimes nostalgic and sometimes mildly to moderately irreverent observations about the lives of women, intended to be evocative, funny, cynical, or critical--particularly of men.

The one that caught my eye in this instance had this to say:  "All women desire a Mr. Darcy.  Unfortunately, all men have no idea who that is."  I found this interesting because I was about to reread Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice for the first time since graduate school, and also because of the astounding degree of both pride and prejudice contained in the posting.  Many people are aware that several television and movie versions of the book have been made, starring the usual suspects in British film, known and revered by movie-goers everywhere.  In all likelihood the "all women" to whom the card referred have seen one or more of these cinematic versions, but fewer of them have read the book.

I was struck by the obvious anti-male sentiment this e-card conveyed, coming from a person I believe to be enlightened and circumspect.  I don't think "anti-male" is too strong a characterization of the message, since it doesn't require women to have read Pride and Prejudice, only to want a man like its male protagonist, Mr. Darcy.  The women are let off the hook when it comes to reading, or even movie watching.  But it also says, in effect, that men don't read 19th century English literature or watch movies based on such books, and implies further that men are clueless about romance and matters of the heart and that they have no such needs of their own.  Moreover, it suggests a certain overall boorishness on the part of our gender, and a concomitant desire on the part of the other gender to have us be more literate and sensitive and, given the man to whom we are unfavorably compared, more wealthy and generous.  All this I chalk up in part to the e-card genre I described above, which seems to specialize in self-pitying word bites.

It was in this light, then, that I undertook my previously-planned re-reading of the most famous and best of Jane Austen's novels.  Now here I should perhaps qualify the term "re-reading."  In fact, although I have read the novel twice in printed form, this time I listened to a recorded book version of it, read by an Englishwoman with a suitably Sloaney upper-class English accent, perfect for the astoundingly articulate text written by an essentially self-educated woman barely out of her twenties.  So far, so good.

Jane Austen, it turns out, is considerably more generous to the male sex than my Facebook friend is.  The story, for those who aren't familiar with it (and I don't think less of anyone for that, male or female--tastes in literature and the cinema are vastly variable) may be distilled to this description:

The time is the beginning of the 19th century and the social milieu is the English gentry.  Everybody who figures in the book, even the most relatively poor of them, has servants and leisure and, by 21st century standards, is damned well off.  A wealthy single man named Mr. Bingley has just moved into a mansion in a country neighborhood, and people in or near his social circle are thinking that he might marry a local woman and make her rich, or perhaps unite two existing fortunes.  The folks to whom I refer don't have much else to do but to contemplate the preservation of wealth.

A certain Mr. Bennett is an even-tempered man with five semi-adult daughters and no sons and a silly wife to whose beauty he was once attracted.  He has plenty of money to live on, but because of an "entail" of his estate in favor of male heirs only, when he dies all his property will devolve to his nearest male relative, a first cousin once removed.  Rather than being distressed about this state of affairs, however, Mr. Bennett is philosophical, and is, because of his learned and gently cynical and resigned disposition, quite amused and bemused by this young cousin of his.  The cousin, Mr. Collins, is a completely idiotic, socially sycophantic clergyman who is thinking maybe he would be doing the Bennett family a favor by marrying one of the five daughters.  This was in the days when being in the clergy was regarded as a necessary but rather frivolous occupation, to be opted for if you weren't already rich and if you didn't have the stomach to become a military officer or an adventurer. Rather than being a calling by God, the Anglican priesthood was (and probably still is) an elevated form of civil service.  But enough about Mr. Collins and his profession; suffice it to say he does not succeed in marrying one of the Bennett girls.

Meanwhile Mr. Bennett's eldest daughter, Jane, who is beautiful and intelligent and sensible (having taken after her father in the brains department and her mother in the beauty department), becomes romantically involved with Mr. Bingley, who subsequently goes to London and appears to drop her.  But during Jane's visits to Mr. Bingley's country place her next-in-line sister, twenty-year-old Elizabeth (the heroine of the story, also very intelligent and down-to-earth) meets a close friend of Mr. Bingley's, the immensely rich Mr. Darcy, also single and in his twenties.  There's chemistry between him and Elizabeth, but she thinks he's too proud and supercilious, and he looks down on Elizabeth's family, especially her silly mother and her three equally silly younger sisters, as well as her uncle who (God forbid) has made his money in business, rather than the old-fashioned way, by inheritance.  Mr. and Mrs. Bennett, though decently well-off with no need to work for a living, have chump change compared to Mr. Darcy, whose income is over 10,000 pounds a year, which in today's money is well over a million dollars, but at a time when a million dollars could buy a hell of a lot more than it does now.  And that's his income, mind you, which consists mostly of interest on a considerably larger fortune, along with whatever he makes as the feudal overlord of a huge country estate.

Here is where most of the pride and the prejudice come in.  Elizabeth becomes prejudiced against Mr. Darcy, perceiving him to be too proud, based in part on her own observations and in part on misinformation fed to her by others.  Mr. Darcy is prejudiced against Elizabeth's immediate family and collateral relatives, a fact that she discovers, causing her own pride in her family to kick in.  So it goes, back and forth, through the inevitable misunderstandings and chance meetings between the two as well as meetings arranged by Mr. Darcy, who, in spite of himself, is falling madly in love with Elizabeth and is becoming willing to do damned near anything to win her heart, including putting up with her zany family.  I'll spare you the rest of the details and sub-plots and jump to the end.  Mr. Bingley and Jane do get married, and of course Elizabeth and Mr. Darcy get married too.  Elizabeth has become ashamed of herself for having judged Mr. Darcy so severely at first, discovering that what she perceived as his pride consists in part of a natural shyness and in part of such a complete lack of pretense that he can't bring himself to make small talk at dinner parties and balls and all that.  But he does possess social pride as well, which he gradually dampens down in favor of a more relatively egalitarian viewpoint (meaning, in this context, that he's willing to reach down into the middle level of the landed gentry for a wife).

When all is said and done Mr. Darcy is just a fabulously wealthy guy with a good heart, if you can get to know him.  And Elizabeth is a kind and sensible and bright woman of the correct social class who seems to be able to bring out the best in Darcy without sacrificing anything of herself.  The promise at the end of the book is that she's going to get him to gradually lighten up, and he's going to let her into his world of untold wealth, and they'll both be happy doing what well-off people in England do, which is, well, basically nothing.

As much as I can I've avoided reading any literary criticism of Pride and Prejudice, or for that matter any literary criticism at all.  For me it tends to ruin the story, and I like to figure out things like "what does it mean" for myself.  Which is not to say that I don't enjoy engaging in amateur literary criticism of my own.  It seems to me that Pride and Prejudice is at one level just a modern (for its time) retelling of an oft-told story, a fairy tale really, in which a deserving woman of lesser means is discovered and rescued by a wealthy prince type.  It's Cinderella, or the movie "Pretty Woman."  It's different in that the heroine isn't an abused stepsister or a whore-with-a-heart, but the same in that it's a story of a girl who is surrounded by people a little beneath her, though none of them know it, and who gets saved by a rich and noble guy.

Now let's revisit the offensive quotation from that e-card and explore what it might mean:  "All women desire a Mr. Darcy.  Unfortunately, all men have no idea who that is."  Does this mean that all women desire a guy who is richer than God?  If so, it takes 99.99% of us out of the running right away and leaves those women desiring something virtually unattainable.  Does it mean that all women desire a guy who starts out being an aloof snob and gradually becomes a little more liberal in his attitudes?  That describes Mr. Darcy pretty well, too.  If that's the case, it also excludes most of us because we weren't that way to begin with, not having possessed the wherewithal or inclination to indulge in such peering down our noses at the rest of the world.  Does it mean that all women desire a guy who is both wealthy and tolerably decent?  Again, that keeps the field extremely narrow.  And no matter what anyone says, Mr. Darcy's most important and endearing trait, the one that keeps everyone interested in him, is his fabulous wealth.  Of course it might also mean that all women desire a man who is so madly in love with them that he is willing to change dramatically and risk incurring the wrath, or at least the scorn, of some of his family members and social set, which did happen to Mr. Darcy.  Or, at its most simplistic level, it means that all women desire a man who desires them even more than they desire him.  (Here we might be getting somewhere.)

And what of the second part of this sentiment, that "unfortunately, all men have no idea who that is"?  That's where the screw really turns, isn't it?  It's insulting and inaccurate no matter how you read it.  Read literally, it means that men don't read old novels or watch movies based on them, which isn't true.  Alternatively, it pretty much has to mean that even if a few men do know who Mr. Darcy is, there's not a damn thing they can do about being more like him than other regular Joes are, because (a) they're not wealthy and so in love they'd stoop to a slightly lower social level for the woman they love, (b) they're complete egomaniacs and/or knuckle-draggers who wouldn't change unless Bill O'Reilly told them to, or (c) they're hopelessly unromantic.  Of course it's the last of these three possibilities that makes the most sense in the context of the card.

Having read Pride and Prejudice again it's obvious to me that Elizabeth Bennett, the female protagonist, is the one to be sought after, and far far more valuable than Mr. Darcy could ever be.  She's the keeper, not him, and so unlike all the other women in Jane Austen's novel that she leaves them in the dust.  She's attractive in a variety of ways, and not just physically.  She has wit, a fine sense of humor, an understanding of irony, knowledge of human nature (including her own shortcomings), levelheadedness, and education.  And she possesses a variety of other good traits, not the least of which are the ability to change and a complete lack of the type of unrealistic sentimentalism and underlying resentment of the opposite sex that characterize those who would create or post such a twisted e-card sentiment as the one that is the subject at hand.  She captivates without guile, she perseveres without suffering, she adjusts and prevails without sacrificing anything of her self, she possesses humility without being humbled.    

Indeed, after reading Pride and Prejudice, I think it would be more accurate to say, "All men desire an Elizabeth Bennett.  Unfortunately, few women have any idea who that really is."