Babel

Monrovia, California

April 24, 2015


"I think it's so people won't know what they're saying."

This statement by my young American friend of Filipino ancestry was a follow up to his initial response to my question about how many languages are spoken in the Philippines.  "Something like seventy," he had replied, and then made what at the moment I had thought of as that slightly paranoid observation with which I began this posting.  Really? I thought.  You're implying that there are that many languages in the Philippine archipelago because groups of people don't want other groups eavesdropping on them?

"My dad used to speak a different dialect of Tagalog, which my mother didn't understand at all.  It made her angry."  As regards the differences of opinion between his now-separated parents, I do not know if the language problem factored heavily into the mix; his mother's anger was probably more the function of things having nothing to do with language per se,  Still, I had never thought of deliberate secrecy or a desire to piss off others as reasons behind the origins of languages.  Maybe in their perpetuation--in fact certainly so--but not in their very initiation.  All my understanding of language development--and I admit it isn't a great deal--has centered on the idea of a reverse of our national motto, e pluribus unum--from many one--as it relates to the tongues of humans.  That is, our languages tended to multiply as we dispersed and became separated from one another, populating isolated chunks of land, where we soon evolved new languages like birds might develop new colored plumage in different environments.  I do know that linguists theorize about a proto-Indo European language that might have been the mother of many of the western languages, which developed into many different branches as its speakers scattered here and there.

 In the book of Genesis in the Old Testament, the kick-ass-God-as-lawgiver-and-punisher part of the scriptures that Republicans love to quote, there's a passage that talks about the Tower of Babel.  According to the story, for a time after Noah and the Great Flood, everyone spoke the same language.  Some time later, when the population had multiplied a good deal, they traveled eastward and decided to start a city and build a very high tower, one that would take them into the clouds, which evidently was tantamount to attempting to trespass into heaven.  God, who in the Old Testament is often depicted as a neglected and disgruntled guy ("like an old man trying to send back soup at a deli," in the immortal words of George Costanza), afraid that humans will have too much power and maybe forget to kiss his ass for having created them, decides to destroy the Tower of Babel and scatter the people, after which they spoke different languages and couldn't understand each other and were generally confused and befuddled.  Hence, the story would have us conclude, the breakup of languages into mutual unintelligibility was all our fault, because we sought too much power.  A bunch of languages would thus hinder us, due to the fact that we would always have a hard time understanding people who lived in other places.

This story is instructive of how some early people thought about God.  First, they saw God as a kind of fading tribal elder rather than an infinite and unchangeable Master of the Universe.  In fact, these two almost diametrically opposed images of God play back and forth throughout the Old Testament.  The Master of the Universe, who would have the power to destroy the tower and scatter the people, would obviously have no need to do such a thing, because he would already be so mighty that insecurity simply wouldn't register with him, much less give him any reason to take action.  After all, how god-like could humans ever become if they were the controlled product of the Creator of All Things?  Not too much so, I'm thinking.  But that rather deistic view of creation doesn't make for good storytelling or for effective domination over people by religions.  So if God was an old geezer who'd once been the top dog but was now sort of losing his clout, and not being worshiped enough in his opinion, then it would make sense for him to stick it to his potential competition before they put him out to pasture for good.  But as usual I digress.

Following my young friend's statements about the Philippines and about his parents, my mind went immediately to occasional afternoons when my father and his siblings, and in the early years my grandfather, would sit in the living room and speak Dutch in front of me.  I knew that all of them could as easily have spoken English. I knew they were consciously and deliberately excluding me from the conversation and at the same time indulging in a language they spoke as kids which they didn't get to use much any more.  It didn't make me angry; rather, I was somewhat fascinated with the strange guttural sounds emanating from their mouths.  This was just another form of "grownup talk," like the polysyllabic, euphemistic, and otherwise cryptic ways adults often talk over and past their children in their presence.

As we all know, existing languages are often employed as a way of excluding outsiders.  Sometimes this is done in the hope of keeping non-dominant cultures alive and important.  Other times speakers of a language have a feeling of superiority about their own language and consider other languages concomitantly inferior.  "Your language has no poetry, no romance--it doesn't sing."  People bemoan the extinction of a language in much the same way they wring their hands over the extinction of an animal species.  This doesn't take into consideration that languages, like living things, are in a constant state of evolution and flux, and that the world has lost many times more languages and species over the millennia than exist today, or even than existed at the supposedly Edenic moment (1066? 1492? 1620?) when some nasty evil conquering group came and began to supplant the indigenous folks whom God had placed on the land with his own hand.  Languages are indeed like species of flora and fauna: some invade, some adapt, and some die out, but all change constantly.  And yes, occasionally some are hunted down and extinguished on purpose.

We've seen instances of the outright suppression of the native languages of subjugated peoples by dominant cultures--practices like forbidding the speaking of French or Spanish or Native American languages among students in U.S. schools, or the prohibition of the use of Irish or Welsh or Scottish in Great Britain by the English.  Get everybody in a straight line, and most importantly, understand what they're saying so they can't joke about you behind your back or conspire to subvert your rule.  At the other end of the language-as-dominance spectrum, liturgical languages used in religions, such as Latin, Hebrew, and Old Church Slavonic, are artificially preserved more or less as they were centuries ago in order to keep the old magic and mystery of the liturgical traditions alive, and, more importantly, to separate those who know these languages--mainly the clergy--from the unwashed masses.  "There is only one way to talk to God, and we know what it is," say the wise men of the church.  In other areas of endeavor as well it's always been important for a group of people to master the language, or at least the arcane vocabulary, of their professions, so as to elevate themselves from those not in the know.  Lawyers do it, physicians do it, as do middle managers who engage in Dilbert-speak to show that they're up on the latest bureaucratic or corporate lingo.

So then, what if some languages, or most of them, began, in the dim recesses of human history, long before conquest by imperial hordes and the advent of the printed word, as ways of pissing other people off?  Imagine this: one small group of people related by blood and kinship (what I'll call Tribe A) decides it hates the next group over (Tribe B).  Tribe B has been stealing from Tribe A and interfering with their hunting or gathering, and perhaps Tribe B accidentally or purposely killed or injured one of Tribe A's people or kidnapped one of them.  This is the basic shit that has happened throughout human history, and happens today in one form or another all over the world, civilized or otherwise,  It happened in myth and legend and in historical and sacred stories everywhere.  Somebody fucks with somebody else, usually at the family or tribal level.  The people who have been messed with either retaliate, starting a feud or a war, or have to move somewhere else.

But suppose that instead of fighting or fleeing Tribe A just decides to make up a different language, so that the next time they encounter people from Tribe B, the Tribe B folks won't know what they're saying.  Meanwhile the Tribe A people would know both languages, so they'd have something of an advantage.  A little like school girls whispering into each other's ears and giggling.  Nothing pisses someone off more than having secrets kept from them.

I admit this is all a little far fetched.  But consider it as a concept that contrasts with our received idea of what language has always been used for, namely, to help us communicate better with others.  We think of the fact that people speak different languages as an obstacle to communication, and encourage them and ourselves to learn other languages, when maybe what we really enjoy as a species is being able to irritate others by making them have to figure out what's going on, then just when they do understand, changing it again.  Teenagers constantly create their own slang in order to exclude their elders, from whom they feel alienated.  Disenfranchised minorities of all kinds coin their own vocabularies to allow them to communicate in ways that exclude the majority.  It might just be more fun to speak a language that your neighbor, or your teacher, or your boss, or your government, doesn't understand.

Maybe the Bible got the moral of the Tower of Babel story all wrong.  When God tore down the tower and scattered the people who were trying to encroach on his divinity, perhaps the people decided to start speaking a whole bunch of different languages just so God wouldn't know what they were saying, and what they were up to.

Just to piss him off.

Strange Bedfellows

March 9, 2015

Monrovia, California

It's just a matter of time before same-sex marriage is legal throughout the United States.  States that have hitherto resisted are toppling on the issue one after the other, and all that remains is a Supreme Court review of the decision by the stodgy 6th Circuit Court of Appeals that upheld the constitutional ban imposed by my old home state of Michigan.  It'll all be over soon, and gay couples will be able to marry everywhere in the nation.

There's one phenomenon I've noticed, which I'm sure you have as well.  It is that most, if not all, of test cases brought to court involve elderly or middle-aged lesbian couples, not gay men.  This is interesting and telling, I think.  First, we should bear in mind that most of these test cases are guided through the system with a certain amount of deliberation beforehand by the civil rights people who take on the task of suing the various governments involved.  Therefore, these are not random would-be gay marriages, but ones selected with due care to present situations most carefully calculated to elicit sympathy from the jurists who hear them,  And it works for the most part, except of course when it comes to hard heads like Samuel Alito, Clarence Thomas, and Antonin Scalia, who are as lacking in the milk of human kindness as reptiles, and are the living embodiment of Ted Knight's character Judge Smails in the movie Caddy Shack.  ("I've sentenced boys younger than you to the gas chamber.  Didn't want to do it.  I felt I owed it to them.")

It stands to reason that a heterosexual federal judge at any level (and that must account for the majority of them) is going to feel far less threatened by a couple of "spinsters" than by a male couple who look like they belong in the Village People.  Female homosexuality and male homosexuality are alike in name only.  They occupy positions at two far different points on the continuum of what most straight people consider to be the least and most outrageous forms of human sexuality.  Contrast, if you will, the idea of a couple of women, one perhaps a bit butch, snuggling on the couch, caressing and kissing, to that of a couple of sodomitic men cavorting in shocking hairy nakedness.  Never mind the reality, to the extent that it differs from those images. As for the issue of homosexual partners as parents: if one mother is good, then two mothers must be twice as good, whereas the raising of a child by a pair of prancing, priapic, males...well...how wholesome can that ever be?  When people, especially men, think of lesbianism, if they're not a little, shall we say, interested, then they're at least generally not discomfited.  But when most straight folks think of gay men, they imagine nipple-pierced dudes in parades, groping men in seedy bars, boy scout leaders gone wrong, priests, sports coaches taking showers with the boys, old men in trench coats, fairies singing show tunes, and so on.  Add to that the (not erroneous) perception that men are generally more violent and prone to overt criminality than women are, and that's another reason male homosexuality is more feared than female homosexuality is.  Mind you, these are stereotypes and fortunately represent gradually disappearing images in public perception, but they count for a great deal with the old farts in robes who represent the law in its majestic equality.

Thus it is that more often than not lesbians have been chosen to carry the banner in the campaign for same-sex marriage.  Choosing one's battles in the realm of constitutional law isn't a new phenomenon.  Rosa Parks was selected by the NAACP because of her mature, studious (remember the glasses?), hard-working, nonthreatening demeanor. First, she was a woman, not a dangerous-looking guy who might rape the flower of southern womanhood up there in the front of the bus.  Second, she was plain, dignified, and prim--no smart-assed gum chewing teenage tart or flashy denizen of some sawdust-floored juke joint.  This was a deliberate calculation, and it helped to win the battle before it even began.  It wasn't a cynical decision, but a wise one.

Similarly, in the celebrated interracial marriage case, Loving v. Virginia, which is sure to be cited again soon, Richard Loving was white and his wife Mildred was black.  Had it been the other way around, one imagines that the case would never have made it beyond the rough justice of the nearest tidewater hanging tree, much less to federal court.  Again, as a test case, this was a carefully selected one.

Apart from being "homosexual," what do lesbians and gay men have in common?  Not a hell of a lot, besides their unfortunate placement by straight society under the canvas of the same freakshow tent, They appear to have no use for one another, sexually speaking.  Each side tends to use its own equipment, as it were, and never the twain shall meet.  Lesbians need gay men, as they say, like fish need bicycles.  And gay men need lesbians about as much as bicycles need, well, fish.  In terms of what turns them on, women who love women erotically have more in common with straight men when you think about it, and men who love men erotically have more in common with straight women.  But when the gay marriage ban is finally gone for good, these two diametrically divergent groups will have benefited equally by virtue of their propinquity within the same artificially-created category.

What I'm saying is that the two groups have only been thrown together by the narrowest of technical commonalities, and to the extent that they work for and root for one another they are comrades in arms.  Great.  But beyond that, what good are they to one another?   Except, of course, as compassionate human beings united in a campaign to bring more compassion to the public at large.  I guess that's enough.

Je suis....

Monrovia, California

January 12, 2015

One of the big stories in the news these past several days has to do with the attack on January 7 on a satirical magazine in Paris called Charlie Hebdo.  I'm sure I'm not telling you anything you don't know.  As I gather, Hebdo is short for hebdomadaire, which is French for weekly, in case you wondered about that.  Charlie is whatever....a cute first name for which there is no doubt an explanation.  Anyway, a bunch of people were killed, and most of the western world is up in arms about the attack, viewing it as an assault on free speech.  The magazine's stated editorial position is essentially left-wing, pluralist, and decidedly anti-authoritarian.  The phrase "je suis Charlie" is now circulating in the streets and on the social media worldwide, signifying a sense of solidarity with the magazine and its right to publish whatever it wants to, particularly if it's offensive, since if it weren't nobody would care and none of this would have happened.

It seems that the attack on the magazine was carried out by some pissed-off Muslims, due to the fact that the publication prints insulting caricatures of Muhammad, and it is forbidden in some (but not all) versions of Islam to make any kind of image of that individual, known as The Prophet, most particularly I suppose images that are not flattering. In response to the attack some Muslim leaders have proclaimed that it was an indefensible act of terrorism and shouldn't be considered a religious act or to represent the mentality of the majority of Muslims.  These qualifications are deemed necessary because of anti-Muslim sentiment circulating in the western world because of various other violent actions sanctioned and financed by people professing to be Muslims of which we're all familiar--attacks, bombings, hijackings, assassinations, and prices being put on the heads of individuals, all by what we now call radical "Islamists," to differentiate them from Muslims in general. Most everyone is pretty happy to concede that there is a divide and even a disconnect between regular run-of-the-mill Muslims and people who are compelled in the name of Islam to kill, maim, and otherwise cause things to go BOOM against folks whom they consider to be the enemies of their religion and profane cultural imperialists to boot.

Also in the social media and elsewhere there have been some folks who, while condemning, or at least not condoning, the acts of people like those who shot up Charlie Hebdo, and its crew, have pointed out that the west is inherently racist and intolerant of pretty much all religions other than Christianity, and particularly of religions whose principal adherents are not of native European stock.  This is without a doubt true.  The folks who point out this fact are more concerned with the idea that a publication like Charlie Hebdo might represent cultural antipathy toward Muslim immigrants from Africa and the Middle East (of which there are many in France), as well as toward lots of other things, to the point of being pretty vicious in its satire.  These cultural relativists in effect have said that Charlie Hebdo is tolerated and even venerated because its targets are not your everyday walking around secular Frenchmen who consider themselves French in a more or less pure sense, i.e,, those who can trace their roots on the soil that is now France back to the time of the Celts, the Roman legions, or the mishmash of Frankish Germanic and Norman invaders who followed them and more or less defined, by about 1000 A.D., what it means today to be ethnically French.  Excluded from this group would be Jews and Muslims and Buddhists and Hindus and other wogs and fuzzy wuzzies.  The French have always been disdainful of  people and things that are not French, as they see it, and reserve the right to make fun of such persons and things.  And so, by the reckoning of the critics of Charlie Hebdo and western culture in general, the staff of the magazine was more insensitive than they had a right to be and perhaps got what was coming to them.  They were, like so much of the western world has been for a long time now, "Islamophobic."  Of course this view doesn't take into consideration the apparent fact that some of the same group that attacked Charlie Hebdo also attacked a kosher Jewish market which, one can safely assume, was not in the business printing caricatures of The Prophet.

Here I must pause to mention what I consider to be one of the peculiarities of the English language and perhaps also that of French.  We use the suffix "-phobia" (from the Greek) to denote hatred of things as well as fear of them.  Hence agoraphobia is fear of open places, but homophobia is hatred of homosexuals.  I suppose there are some who believe that all hatred is rooted in fear, and that fear and hatred are two sides of the same coin, so what's the difference?  But when it comes to suffixes we have one that means love of --"-philia" but none that precisely means only dislike of, so "-phobia" has to do double duty. Anyway, we are told by some that what might be the real culprit of the violence in France is Islamophobia, meaning a hatred and/or fear of the religion of Islam, or of Muslims, or both.

Liberal-minded people don't like to cop to being haters.  We like to say we respect all religions, but just not the extremists among them who would interfere with our right of free expression, including our right to make fun of the extremists.  We stand firmly and foursquare for the right of all people to peacefully worship God as they choose.  Etcetera, etcetera.  So even though we might be Charlie, at least for the time being and until the next big news happens somewhere else, we are emphatically not Islamophobes. and perish the thought.

I will now take a long breath and let it out slowly before I proceed.  After careful and due consideration of all the many manifestations of the religion of Islam, I must say that I am decidedly Islamophobic.  I don't hate the individuals who profess the religion, but I do most definitely hate the religion.  I think it's time to point out that the emperor is wearing no clothes, so to speak.  And dress it up any way you want to, Islam is a fucked up phenomenon.  Mind you I don't dislike only Islam, and I have nothing against the concept of a God as a force in the universe.  But the people who scare and repel me are those who profess to know what God is thinking or what God expects us to do or not to do.  That covers most of the religions that come readily to mind.  But more to the point, I don't like religions that have all-male clerical hierarchies, that believe in the segregation of men and women during worship, that put women into a position clearly subordinate to men, that tell women how to dress and act when they are in public, that tell people how to pray, what time to pray, and what to say or not to say to God.  I do not like religions that insist that only certain individuals can speak directly to God under certain circumstances.  I do not like religions that tell people what they should and should not eat.  I do not like religions that prohibit or require certain activities on certain days of the week or on certain holidays.  With respect to most of these things, Islam comes to mind, as well as parts of Judaism and parts of Christianity, particularly Roman Catholicism and evangelical Protestantism.  And most of all I do not like religions that are so conceived that their adherents can in any way take it into their heads to commit acts of murder and mayhem in the name of or in defense of those religions, whether or not such acts are, strictly speaking, condoned by the religion.  The mere fact that groups of persons can believe it to be okay to commit violence in defense of a given religion and not be considered insane is enough of an indictment of the religion and its adherents to make me more than ready to throw out the baby with the bathwater as far as that religion goes.

It is unfortunate that billions of people all over the world profess Islam as their religion.  That fact can't be undone, though I certainly wish it could be.  These people might be inclined to act like fools even if there were no such thing as Islam, but I can't help thinking that Islam helps them to act like even bigger fools.  So I am content to hate the religion, not just in its most extreme and politically-motivated manifestations, but in its most peaceful and well-meaning forms as well,  It is a blight on the earth and I'm sorry it can't be eradicated in one fell swoop.

But you say Pete, how can you condemn an entire religion based on the activities of some fanatical adherents of one of its extreme branches?  Easy, watch me.  And I'll condemn yours too if any of its members commit criminal, or misogynistic, or just plain bizarre acts in the name of their faith. Well then, you say, what about Christianity?  Shouldn't we get rid of that too?  Sure, put it on the list, but for right now the one we have to be most concerned with, worldwide, is Islam.  Priorities.

So, while je ne suis pas Charlie, je suis un islamophobe, if there is such a noun in French and if I got the gender right.  And even if not. 

Poopsie

Monrovia, California

December 15, 2014

It has been raining in southern California, which, for the benefit of my readers from places like the Eastern US and Europe, is a sort of significant event.  A couple of weeks ago there were two straight days of rain, bringing the annual total rainfall since July 1 from practically nothing to something like 2.3 inches.  That's was quite a deluge by LA standards.  Friday it rained again, adding another inch or so and catapulting us past the average for this time of year.  I think the average for an entire year (measured from July 1 to June 30) is about 12-15 inches. Los Angeles and environs would be expected to get a lot more rain than the areas east of the city, what with moisture coming off the ocean and all that.  (Palm Springs, about 100 miles inland, averages less than 5 inches a year.)  The rainy season, such as it is, is in the winter months, and from about April through November it rains so seldom that when it sprinkles for a few minutes I find myself looking skyward, slightly perturbed, thinking, "What's this? Did a jet empty its holding tank or something?"

Of course the newspapers will bitch, as they're wont to do, that this isn't going to relieve the drought, which has been several years in the making, but hell, what do they want, no rain?  Because this is the desert, or at least the edge of it, when it's dry for long stretches the soil gets hard packed and less absorbent, so there will be some flooding problems.  Most of the storm drains have been dry forever, and probably are filled with debris and animal nests and God knows what else, since why would anyone think to check them out on the otherwise endless sunny days?  Like fixing a leaking roof when it's not raining.  Oh, and then there are the mudslides from the hills.  As they say, every silver cloud has a dark lining.  It seems to be in the nature of people to find a problem in the midst of a boon of some kind.  When it comes to the weather, everyone's a critic.

You know it's a generally dry area when you can remember the last time it rained hard (here you Easterners may read "moderately and steadily, for most of the day"),  And I do remember it, with particularity.  It was in the fall of 2013, and on that day as well as a week ago Tuesday I was walking the half mile or so from a parking lot in Chinatown to the Los Angeles County Hall of Administration where I ply my current trade as a mediator, all dressed up in my fancy duds.  My Sunday-go-to-meetin' suit, as Jed Clampett might say.  I had a big umbrella both times, but got soaked from the thighs down.  Since I only work two or three days a week you could call this a coincidence, but I prefer to think of it as my personal sacrifice to the rain gods.

All of which brings me gradually, a drop at a time, to my main topic.  Speaking of Jed Clampett, and actually more generally of old situation comedies from my childhood and that of most of the folks who read this, I'm reminded of something.  As I've mentioned before in this blog the mighty County of Los Angeles is ruled by a board of five supervisors, one elected from each of five districts that divide it into chunks containing about 2 million people each.  That of course means there are 10 million souls in this county alone, making it the most populous county in the nation.  In fact, if LA County were a state it would rank eighth in population in the US.  And most of these souls are crammed into the lower third of the county in a vast and often ugly expanse of overpriced one- and two-story dwellings.

These five supervisor's districts vary greatly in geographic size and shape, so as to be fairly equal in population, but are gerrymandered somewhat to achieve representation by some of the county's  major ethnic groups .  There's the predominantly African American 2nd District that covers the central and southern part of the city of Los Angeles and adjacent communities--Compton, Inglewood, Hawthorne, etc.  Its supervisor is Mark Ridley-Thomas, who was once the head of the LA branch of the SCLC.  Then there's the heavily Hispanic 1st District, including East LA and several other communities, whose supervisor is a woman named Hilda Solis.  The 4th District, headed by a guy named Don Knabe, sort of wraps around the chin of the county.  The 5th District, where I live, covers the San Gabriel Valley, Pasadena, Burbank and Glendale, and the vast two-thirds of the land mass of the county north of the mountains, which has comparatively few people.  Its supervisor is Michael Antonovich, the longest serving supervisor, who for some odd reason began to be called "mayor" as well as supervisor a few weeks back.  The Mayor of the Board of Supervisors, I guess, whatever the hell that means.  Finally there is the 3rd District, covering the more affluent west side communities and the northern part of the city--including Santa Monica, Beverly Hills, Hollywood, Bel Air, the San Fernando Valley, and Malibu, This district is home to much of the Jewish community, the Russian mob, actors and would-be actors, Scientologists, wackos and grifters, and women with artificially-created fish lips and apple cheeks--in other words, what most outsiders imagine when they think of Los Angeles.  In November's election that district's long-time former supervisor, Zev Yaroslavsky, who was term limited, was replaced by a 73-year-old woman named Sheila Kuehl.

  

Here I should pause to confess my comparative ignorance of exactly how the County governs itself.  There are, of necessity, overlapping jursidictional matters.  The City of Los Angeles and dozens of other cities have their own governments.  But there are many areas that are directly run and policed by the County.  My ignorance is especially glaring given the fact that I sort of work for the LA County Department of Consumer Affairs.  Technically this isn't true, since I'm employed by a temp agency that contracts with the County, but for all practical purposes I'm a County employee, going to work at the central County building, named after a guy named Kenneth Hahn, who was once a long-serving supervisor, and who is now dead, which is what generally precedes getting a building named after you.  This quintumvirate of county supervisors occupy offices on the 8th floor, the penthouse, of the self-same block-long building in which I work in the basement.  They are rarely if ever seen, sort of like the Great and Powerful Oz.  In fact the only one I've met is Mark Ridley-Thomas, who spoke at some mediation conference I had to attend, and whose mere presence at the conference seemed to be a big deal and to lend great credence to the mediation program. He was on that occasion down on the 1st floor of the same building where he and I both work, although he didn't seem to quite know where he was.  He was accompanied by two guys who seemed to be his bodyguards or handlers, and who, if they had been wearing bow ties instead of neckties, would have resembled denizens of the Nation of Islam.  It  didn't seem to me that Supervisor Ridley-Thomas had ever been on the 1st floor before.  I think the supervisors have their own private elevator from the underground garage to the 8th floor.  I should add that his remarks at the conference were brief and pointless.

I'm not sure how much actual work the supervisors do, since they employ a County Executive to do  the day-to day-stuff.  You don't see them at ribbon-cutting ceremonies, and they don't get the press that the Mayor of Los Angeles or the always-under-the-gun sheriff get.  They probably like it that way.  I guess they're sort of like the board of directors of a huge corporation, content to know among themselves that they wield considerable power, that their votes can ratify labor contracts, decide tax and zoning issues, build (or not build) jails and other buildings, and determine how much money goes for social services, parks and recreation, and infrastructure of all kinds.  They can't fire the sheriff, who is separately elected, but I think they can tighten or loosen the Sheriff Department's purse strings more or less at will and harass him with investigations if they wish to.  Any investigation into the activities of the LA County Sheriff's Department is bound to cause at least a minir shit storm, since like most large municipal police forces it is as corrupt and ruthless as the day is long.  The supervisors meet weekly and/or monthly in a room somewhere in the building--I think on the 4th floor--where they confront the people, great and small, who petition them, and take up the weighty matters of the county.  They also have local offices within their districts.  But as to how much real work they do--well, who knows?  They could work their asses off, or pretty much let the county run itself, like most governments do.  I do know that whenever we mediators hear the word "supervisor" we're supposed to more or less drop everything and genuflect.

But back to the recently-elected 3rd District Supervisor, Sheila Kuehl.  It turns out that Sheila Kuehl was the actress who played Zelda Gilroy on the old sitcom The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis, from 1959 to 1963.  She acted under the name Sheila James then.  Her character Zelda was this smart girl who was very fond of Dobie, who in turn always had his eye on some unattainable beauty like Thalia Menninger, played by Tuesday Weld.  Zelda always sat next to Dobie in class, and scrunched her nose at him and called him Poopsie.  Dobie's sidekick was Maynard G. Krebs, played by Bob Denver, who went on to be Gilligan on Gilligan's Island, a vastly inferior show.  And there was Dobie's nemesis Chatsworth Osborne, Jr., played by Steve Franken, who died a couple of years ago and was the subject of a posting on this blog.

Electing former actors to high office is nothing new in California politics, as we all know.  Two of the state's governors were actors, and one even went on to become President of the United States (I forget his name).  As for Sheila Kuehl, now Supervisor Kuehl, she seems to have had a career characterized by more integrity and quality than some other local actors-turned-politicians.  After Dobie Gillis ended, she continued to play parts here and there on TV shows, until she quit show business in the early 1970s.  Like her character Zelda, she was smart as a whip, and graduated from UCLA and went on to get her law degree from Harvard, after which she came back to LA and practiced law for the next couple of decades.  Then in about 1994 she was elected to the California General Assembly as an openly gay candidate, perhaps the first in the state.  In 2000 she was elected to the state senate and served two terms there.  Then this year she edged out the former Mayor of Santa Monica, Bobby Shriver (Maria Shriver's brother and the son of Sargent Shriver and Eunice Kennedy), for the 3rd District Supervisor position.    

My hope is to encounter my new boss Sheila Kuehl, a remnant of my past when I sat in front of the TV every week to watch Dobie and Maynard G. Krebs and Zelda, and of course Dobie's longsuffering parents, Herbert T. and Winifred Gillis.  Chances are not great that this will happen, since I am only one of almost 100,000 county employees (not all of whom work in my building by any means).  I suppose I could go up to the 8th floor and just say hi.  I don't know how it's set up, but I might have to make an appointment, and more than likely she wouldn't be there anyway.  The supervisors do, as I said, convene weekly or monthly or something in their stately hearing room, but I think it's while I'm busy working. I'm hoping for a chance meeting in the parking garage as I walk across to the Superior Court building in the morning.  Sheila is no longer the perky teenager she was on TV as Zelda Gilroy, but if you look at the photos accompanying this posting you'll see that in her eyes and her nose she's the same person.

Since there are at least two generations after me, including most of my coworkers, who have no idea who Dobie Gillis or Zelda Gilroy were, those of us who do remember her as Zelda are becoming rarer with the passing years, and although she probably regards her political career and her present position as more important than that of a teenage actress who called her costar Poopsie, for me it would be a delight to shake the hand of someone who graced my pre-teen television evenings, and to thank her for the memories.

Career Move

Monrovia, California

October 4, 2014

Wow, it has taken me a long time to finish this post.  Started it back in August.  Obviously I'm not keeping to my resolution to put up more posts this year.  Oh well, here's what I have been meaning to say, although its currency as news has been undercut with the passage of time and the relatively short attention span of the public.

I pretty much liked Robin Williams.  He was funny and versatile, could act in both comic and serious roles.  A bit too hairy, but hey, that happens.  I didn't care for Mork and Mindy, which was just a silly joke repeated endlessly, though in that respect hardly different from many other situation comedies.  Like a lot of other zany comic actors who are still alive (Jim Carrey, Will Farrell, and Melissa McCarthy come immediately to mind), Robin Williams was at his best not when he was given free reign to do whatever he wanted to do, but when he was well-directed and reined in somewhat by a decent script.  Give such folks too much liberty, performance-wise, and they are likely to go over the top in an uncomfortably manic way.  Let them write their own material and the movie would become just an extended and much more expensive variation of a standup bit or a Saturday Night Live performance.

After Robin Williams killed himself the media, in typical fashion, fell all over themselves with repeated "Why?"s, as if there were something mysterious and unknowable about the phenomenon of serious depression followed by suicide.  Then they discovered that he'd been diagnosed with Parkinson's disease, and suddenly it was as if they'd found the KEY to the whole event.  Oh, they said, parroting expert physicians, Parkinson's can cause depression, or exacerbate it if it already exists; or alternatively Parkinson's medications can do the same.  It's all brain chemistry, and his went unexpectedly haywire.

Well I'm sorry, but BULLSHIT.  There was nothing unexpected about it.  Robin Williams had been subject to depression all along, probably from birth.  The fact that he was funny and not all mopey all the time and often almost the opposite of depressed signified nothing other than that he was subject to drastic mood swings, by whatever diagnostic term you wish to use.  Richard Pryor was so afflicted; so were Lenny Bruce, John Belushi, Chris Farley, and a host of others, and they all killed themselves or tried very hard to do so.  Thinking that being funny and making jokes predisposes someone to being cheerful and living a happy life is like thinking that a Formula One racing car isn't likely to crash and burn or blow an engine just because it's really fast and well-tuned and cared for.  In fact, it's counter-intuitive, when you think about it.  Laughing and creating humor and goofing around are some of the drugs certain people use to stave off the depression that lies in wait for them every day of their lives.

Yeah, Robin Williams could be cheerful at times, and productive, and downright funny.  But he was depressed, and eventually that part of him overcame all else.  When he "fell off the wagon" a few years ago that was just the prelude to a long slide that ended inevitably.  The gum-chewing public, not to mention substance abusers themselves, don't always understand that substance abuse isn't about a lack of willpower, and that returning to substance use isn't a sign that someone is all better and can handle whatever underlying malady afflicts them.  It's all about self-medicating.

Then there are those in the media who point only to other brilliant famous people who have committed suicide, as if it's a phenomenon reserved for the super-successful or the super-funny.  The fact is that skid rows and dry-out clinics and institutions of all kinds and homes in suburbia are filled with depressed people.  It's a disease that kills, only it kills in a variety of ways--sometimes quickly and sometimes slowly.  If Williams had been diagnosed with terminal cancer everyone would have nodded and said, yeah, that shit happens, to the young and old alike--wow, tough break--a good guy lost the battle with his disease.

In truth I'm sure many people got the picture.  Lots of the people I know did.  But out there, on the covers of magazines and tabloids, still lurks the lurid suspicion that something else, more explainable, more convenient and less mundane, was the true culprit in his death.  Progressive neurological disease of course, or maybe alien intrusion, the insidious workings of the NSA, whatever.

This phenomenon is related of course to the tendency of people to accept alternative theories about a myriad of situations, from the assassination of Kennedy to the bombing of the World Trade Towers, all the way to the dazzlingly absurd story I saw on Facebook recently that the reason Mr. Rogers always wore long-sleeved shirts and sweaters on his program (as if anyone wondered about that) is that his arms were covered in wartime tattoos or scars or something, and that he and Captain Kangaroo (Bob Keeshan) and another well-known person whose identity I can't remember now were all combat buddies who saved one another's lives.  Holy cow.

What lies beneath this tendency is the same thing that lies beneath the search for alternative, or at least supplementary, explanations for the suicide of Robin Williams.  We abhor the vacuum created by the mundane reality of the obvious, and we crave a sort of Hollywood plot twist that will tie everything with a neat and amazing bow and leave us, as we depart from the theater of everyday life, wondering why we ever took the rather straightforward word of the authorities, or the initial news coverage, or the reports of friends and eyewitnesses and medical examiners, when really there was lurking behind it all some unseen and surprising plot or culprit.  Come to think of it, I'd be willing to bet that soon people will be speculating that Robin Williams was really murdered.  And why not?  Doesn't that make for more compelling reading that the fact that the guy was chronically depressed and trying to medicate himself and finally gave in to the urge to end it all?

In any event, he's dead, which is a sad thing, even if it may have been, as Gore Vidal said when he heard of the demise of Truman Capote, a good career move.

                                   and what i want to know is
how do you like your blueeyed boy
Mister Death

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.