It took a long time. A generation of politicians, economists, think-tankers, all the powers-that-be, have been totally, wildly wrong, stupid in a very debilitating way. I, of course, will now take time to set them straight.
Trade between nations is not about money. It just isn't. Trade between nations is about jobs. Just jobs. We're losing jobs, very badly, to the point that the rest of the world is sitting back, hands in their plump laps, smiling seraphically. Or is it cherubically? Our clocks are getting cleaned, our lunches are being eaten, our faces pushed into the mud. Put your own metaphor here. My personal favorite: We are being clubbed like baby seals, and then skinned.
Yipes. China, Vietnam, Indonesia, India; they all have more people working. We have fewer people working. They have industrial development guided by groups of smart people. We have smarmy, big haired people, making sure that industrial development isn't guided by anything smart.
We love our delusions. We keep saying that we are more creative than all those Asians; they can only copy, not be creative. We are the smart, creative folks who will lead the world in everything intellectual. Race-baiting swill. Japan beat us in cars and electronics -- creatively. Europe is beating us in bio-tech -- creatively. China is beating us in gew-gaws, or tchotchkes, or whatever you call them -- goofy little things that we like to buy. Stuff. OK, not so creatively.
Our biggest export to China, our intellectual value-added American-made stuff, our grand product of the best-in-the-world educational system: junk. Junk metal, and junk paper and junk plastic, shipped to China and morphed into the stuff we buy back. Ack. Your Alert Blogger is stunned!! Wasn't supposed to work like that. We somehow got on the wrong end.
Ok. Lemme hear it. They are: Slave-mongers!! Environment polluters who work in dreadful factories for dreadful wages, spoiling it all for us.
Well, sure. They have discovered, though, that having a job is better than being a peasant. Just like the Irish, Italians, Jews, Germans, Poles, and all the other peasants who left their homes to come to American jobs. Jobs, jobs, jobs: all that matters. Jobs.
So, if I'm so smart, what do I think we should do? I hate to say it -- well, not so much : we need to put up our fists, jab, float like butterflies, sting like bees. No More Mister Nice Guy. How? Easy, really. We stop buying stuff we didn't make.
No more Toyotas -- 200% tariff No more Porsches -- 300% tariff. No more grapes in the winter -- 2% tariff; I like grapes. No more tchotchkes -- 10,000% tariff. Thank god -- no more tchotchkes. No more Columbian coffee. No more stuff we didn't make. We just stop. OK, I'll give up the winter grapes, in the interest of the majority -- 100% tariff.
Sure. Right. You can't do that. The last 50 years of economic theory show that mercantilism -- what we are talking about here -- is a dreadful failure. Except when it isn't. The last 50 years show that guided development and strategically aimed tariffs work very well, thank you. There are, I suppose, exceptions -- Cambodia comes to mind, but no matter what, Cambodia wouldn't work. India and China, though, the largest of the Asian nations, seem to be OK. Why? Lots of jobs to go around.
We have made a dreadful mistake. We have put wealth before jobs. Please note that all the folks pushing for this wonderful world of free trade are sitting back, burning money in their barbecues so the steaks will be nice and tender. Yet again: I've got mine, the rest of you just go away and die.
When will we finally notice that class warfare is class warfare, and the weapons are jobs? When will we finally notice that the big earners still are working, and we aren't?
Thursday, November 25, 2010
Wednesday, November 17, 2010
Anchovies on Pillowcases
There was a tradition, during the 18th century, in Pennsylvania, upstate New York, the Ohio Valley, when those folks who already lived there traded with the new folks who were just arriving. Some types of food, not a lot of variety, but many, many furs, going in the one direction. Kettles, guns, knives -- mostly metal stuff, manufactured stuff, going in the other. Made sense. Both groups were better off. Free trade!!!! No tariffs!!!
Of course, someone actually had to do the trading. A surprisingly small number of folks were traders, usually working alone or with one family member. A lot was required: language skills, human skills, fearlessness, trust, wisdom, economic calculation gritty physical endurance. Both native and newcomer were traders between communities. Just imagine the first time arriving in such a strange place, carrying all your riches on your back. Their lives were often short, for one reason or other.
My interest was piqued (yes, piqued!!) by a small detail. When arriving in a community, whether native or newcomer, there was a cleaning ritual. Arriving folks would be given a bowl of water, to wash their hands and faces. Most of the time there was not much improvement in actual cleanliness. So, why this washing?
New arrivals had always passed through forest. Forests were considered by both parties as places of menace and filth. Not a benign playland. No Bambi. Cleaning after being in the forest was a ritual of passing into civilized society and putting the dirt behind.
When I was a good catholic youth, churches always had a bowl of holy water (yes, such a thing existed!!) at the doorway. On the way in or out, you were to dip a finger in the bowl and make the sign of the cross. Another ritual of passing into the civilized, and leaving the detritus of the world behind.
Forward, again, to the new american obsession, the ritual hand cleansing offered at some places. Originally begun as a defense against the influenza virus*, it has become something a bit more confusing. It is available, but not required. The utensils sit, visible, an appeal to conscience and civility. These are mysterious devices, which spurt a liquid on our hands; magically, the liquid disappears. We never know when one of the the cleansing devices will pop up, in a very strange place.
And then, there is this: A quarter of the folks surveyed walking down the street in the north of England have poop on their hands.** No reason the think the north of England is unique.
Wow! A huge literature on most/least effective ways to get folks to wash their hands when leaving bathrooms. Turns out the most effective is a cleansing trough outside of the bathroom, in plain sight of both genders; embarrassment is more effective than lecture. I haven't seen any troughs installed at, say, TGI Friday's, or even places lower on the pecking order, if there are any.
Alert Reader is sighing, knowing that more poop discussion was inevitable. Not if, but when.
My children, and their friends, take multiple showers each day; the showers are randomly timed. On occasion, the showers signify entering or leaving the house, but not always. Why take a shower in the middle of the day, neither coming in or going out? They have no explanation, and think I am odd to be asking about something so ordinary (see Tough Questions).
But there is yet another side. Through high school, at least, kids no longer take showers after phys ed class, team practices, even games. All of these are activities in which there is actual dirt, not symbolic dirt. But, no showers. I remember, so long ago, showers after gym class -- what we called it then -- and of being unclothed in front of the other kids. Difficult. And, after a while, not do difficult. I used to think the newer approach to group showers displayed increased homophobia. Yet, who could be more homophobic that a group of catholic high school boys in 1960? I am open to speculation.
But more about dirt. I read a book about dirt, a long time ago.*** The whole point: We think dirt is soil, grime, mud, dust, filth -- it goes on. Real you-can-touch-it dirt stuff. But the book looked at dirt as a social construct: The anchovy on the pillowcase is a central image of dirt. Dirt is something where it shouldn't be, like weeds are plants where they shouldn't be. Granules from the outside of the home become dirt inside the home.
Washing our hands was a symbol in the 18th century. Probably now, too. But now, in the shower age, there is confusion about washing. Looks like we don't really try to get the poop off when we leave the bathroom, and we didn't in 18th century washing rituals. But all those showers!!!
I'm beginning to think that the polite requirement of washing hands before leaving the bathroom is equivalent to emerging from the forest -- a pretend cleanliness ritual, that signifies the transition from the dirty place to the clean place. But doesn't really clean. A lot like the parental five-second rule: if you can pick it up within five seconds of it hitting the floor, it's safe for child consumption. No, it isn't.
Washing hands isn't enough any more; we're past the washing rituals of the eighteenth century, and have jumped forward into some other space. Washing hands in hospitals and some other settings is a health issue. Maybe. But maybe it is also a sign of confused internal life, metaphors gone wild. Showers taken when some impulse or other is felt. And, maybe William James was right, and there is strength where there is a fear of dirt. Yup. Me and Billy Jim.
Plumber's apprentices are told: It may be poop to them, but it's our bread and butter.
That takes care of that.
*Old joke: Giant cockroach goes into a bar. Asks for a beer. Bartender brings the beer. Giant cockroach thanks bartender, then begins to beat on the bartender, knocking him down and kicking him on the ground. Then the giant cockroach leaves the bar.
New customer enters the bar. Sees the bruised and bloody bartender, and says "Wow, what happened to you?"
The bartender explains, "You know, there's this nasty bug going around...." Ba-dum-dum.
**I am told I need to have a citation. Cynical doubters please see The London Times
***Mary Douglas: Purity and Danger
Enough with the footnotes. This is a blog, not a dissertation.
Of course, someone actually had to do the trading. A surprisingly small number of folks were traders, usually working alone or with one family member. A lot was required: language skills, human skills, fearlessness, trust, wisdom, economic calculation gritty physical endurance. Both native and newcomer were traders between communities. Just imagine the first time arriving in such a strange place, carrying all your riches on your back. Their lives were often short, for one reason or other.
My interest was piqued (yes, piqued!!) by a small detail. When arriving in a community, whether native or newcomer, there was a cleaning ritual. Arriving folks would be given a bowl of water, to wash their hands and faces. Most of the time there was not much improvement in actual cleanliness. So, why this washing?
New arrivals had always passed through forest. Forests were considered by both parties as places of menace and filth. Not a benign playland. No Bambi. Cleaning after being in the forest was a ritual of passing into civilized society and putting the dirt behind.
When I was a good catholic youth, churches always had a bowl of holy water (yes, such a thing existed!!) at the doorway. On the way in or out, you were to dip a finger in the bowl and make the sign of the cross. Another ritual of passing into the civilized, and leaving the detritus of the world behind.
Forward, again, to the new american obsession, the ritual hand cleansing offered at some places. Originally begun as a defense against the influenza virus*, it has become something a bit more confusing. It is available, but not required. The utensils sit, visible, an appeal to conscience and civility. These are mysterious devices, which spurt a liquid on our hands; magically, the liquid disappears. We never know when one of the the cleansing devices will pop up, in a very strange place.
And then, there is this: A quarter of the folks surveyed walking down the street in the north of England have poop on their hands.** No reason the think the north of England is unique.
Wow! A huge literature on most/least effective ways to get folks to wash their hands when leaving bathrooms. Turns out the most effective is a cleansing trough outside of the bathroom, in plain sight of both genders; embarrassment is more effective than lecture. I haven't seen any troughs installed at, say, TGI Friday's, or even places lower on the pecking order, if there are any.
Alert Reader is sighing, knowing that more poop discussion was inevitable. Not if, but when.
My children, and their friends, take multiple showers each day; the showers are randomly timed. On occasion, the showers signify entering or leaving the house, but not always. Why take a shower in the middle of the day, neither coming in or going out? They have no explanation, and think I am odd to be asking about something so ordinary (see Tough Questions).
But there is yet another side. Through high school, at least, kids no longer take showers after phys ed class, team practices, even games. All of these are activities in which there is actual dirt, not symbolic dirt. But, no showers. I remember, so long ago, showers after gym class -- what we called it then -- and of being unclothed in front of the other kids. Difficult. And, after a while, not do difficult. I used to think the newer approach to group showers displayed increased homophobia. Yet, who could be more homophobic that a group of catholic high school boys in 1960? I am open to speculation.
But more about dirt. I read a book about dirt, a long time ago.*** The whole point: We think dirt is soil, grime, mud, dust, filth -- it goes on. Real you-can-touch-it dirt stuff. But the book looked at dirt as a social construct: The anchovy on the pillowcase is a central image of dirt. Dirt is something where it shouldn't be, like weeds are plants where they shouldn't be. Granules from the outside of the home become dirt inside the home.
Washing our hands was a symbol in the 18th century. Probably now, too. But now, in the shower age, there is confusion about washing. Looks like we don't really try to get the poop off when we leave the bathroom, and we didn't in 18th century washing rituals. But all those showers!!!
I'm beginning to think that the polite requirement of washing hands before leaving the bathroom is equivalent to emerging from the forest -- a pretend cleanliness ritual, that signifies the transition from the dirty place to the clean place. But doesn't really clean. A lot like the parental five-second rule: if you can pick it up within five seconds of it hitting the floor, it's safe for child consumption. No, it isn't.
Washing hands isn't enough any more; we're past the washing rituals of the eighteenth century, and have jumped forward into some other space. Washing hands in hospitals and some other settings is a health issue. Maybe. But maybe it is also a sign of confused internal life, metaphors gone wild. Showers taken when some impulse or other is felt. And, maybe William James was right, and there is strength where there is a fear of dirt. Yup. Me and Billy Jim.
Plumber's apprentices are told: It may be poop to them, but it's our bread and butter.
That takes care of that.
*Old joke: Giant cockroach goes into a bar. Asks for a beer. Bartender brings the beer. Giant cockroach thanks bartender, then begins to beat on the bartender, knocking him down and kicking him on the ground. Then the giant cockroach leaves the bar.
New customer enters the bar. Sees the bruised and bloody bartender, and says "Wow, what happened to you?"
The bartender explains, "You know, there's this nasty bug going around...." Ba-dum-dum.
**I am told I need to have a citation. Cynical doubters please see The London Times
***Mary Douglas: Purity and Danger
Enough with the footnotes. This is a blog, not a dissertation.
Thursday, November 11, 2010
Well, It All Worked, for a While, At Least
The Doom Blogger will now give a short history of a time when it all worked, for a little while. Try to pay attention. This doesn't count in your grade. Well, yes it does, so pay attention. Put the cell phones away. No IM; put those thumbs away.
Before being wiped out, a group of folks managed to ignore the forces swirling around them for almost 150 years -- and then ultimately lost their work, their friends, and their nation. The place was north of Maine: Arcadia. Now Nova Scotia. Even the name has been changed.
In 1620, the Pilgrims landed. In 1604, though, the French had settled on what they called Port Royal or Arcadia. Port Royal was finally "conquered" for good by the English in 1710, and gently occupied until 1740, when the whole place went to the dogs.
What happened in the first hundred years of Arcadia? Not much, and a lot. The people who already lived there, the Mi'kmaq, were neutral toward the French when the colony began. In the 14th century, fishing boats came to the George's Banks for the cod, and landed to salt and dry the fish at Arcadia. Most of those boats were Portuguese, some Norwegian, some French. The Mi'kmaq were already seasoned traders when the French colony began, and not threatened by the mere presence of a small number of Europeans.
In other places, the French focused on fur trade and saving souls, in that order. Arcadia, though, was a farming community; access to the St. Lawrence river, the path to Quebec and Montreal, was controlled by the forts around the Gulf of St. Lawrence. Those forts were important to France, and needed food. Arcadia supplied grain and meat to the troops in the forts, and in return were supplied with tools, salt, and whatever else 17th century folks needed.
Who cares? Just another colony. Not at all. In that century, the French colonists and the Mi'kmaq managed to merge into one supercolony, with complex patterns of family relationships derived from both French and Mi'kmaq society. Intermarriage was more the rule than the exception; the usual pattern of European men having native wives was matched by Mi'kmaq men having French wives. After a century, the complexity of blood and custom must have confused the settlers themselves at times.
The colony was nominally Catholic, and was supplied with priests; no one seems to have cared much, and, when the British arrived for good, didn't fuss about the change over to Protestantism, and then back.
At the time, of course, French and English colonials faced off over religion at least as much as over land. Relatives thought that captives taken in raids were in the grips of heathens, doomed to burn in hell. Not in Arcadia. In the documents about the later history of Arcadia, there is a sense of frustration, on each side, about the nonchalant religious attitudes of the Arcadians.
And what of other parts of 17th century life? Productivity seems to have been good. The land was rocky, not really great for growing grain, but the Arcadians managed. The newcomers had been peasants in France, and knew the vagaries of small farm life. The Mi'kmaq could produce sea food and hunted meat and furs. Somebody always had food, important in times when famine and starvation were common.
Government was a strange institution. Between 1600 and 1710 (or so) the British from Maine and Massachusetts occasionally attacked, occasionally won, then lost interest and just meddled in the vagaries of colony politics. There was trade, some of it smuggling, with the New England colonies. Once, a merchant owned warehouses in Arcadia and Boston, and attacked his own buildings. Strange days. Ultimately, the French prevailed in the 17th century.
Much like other places at the time, and despite the success of the colony, starvation remained a great fear. Government faded into the background. Remember, these were French peasants, who were very familiar with not having enough food.
A side issue: Many academics have written about the French folktales of the time, which were largely about food. The academics use various theoretical approaches. For some reason, French folktales became a very fertile ground for dissertations. Finally, a sensible reader came along, and made the startling observation that French folk tales were largely about food because French folk were always worried about food. That was the end of the argument.
Back to Arcadia:
Everyone worked, danced, ate, talked, had babies, had arguments, all together. Housing was in small villages, with gathering places in larger towns. Not much city life; the size of the colony limited the number of folks not directly involved in food production. No bloggers in Arcadia. No mimes, either. Somehow the Arcadians managed their deprivation.
I don't mean to pass this all off as a 17th century paradise. I doubt anyplace in the 17th century (or now) is a paradise -- paradise wasn't even a paradise. But, there were very, very few problems generated by greed, rage, group loathing, religion, race hate -- the destructive social forces we seem to love so much. Whatever informal group values operated, everybody got along well enough to avoid prisons, lawsuits, blah, blah. Fill in your favorite social ill here. And, as I said before, the politics of colonial government intrigue just didn't matter very much to most people.
The 17th century in Europe was a tough time. Religious struggles were played out on large and small scales. Tens of thousands were murdered by different sects. The English Civil War began with the beheading of the king. Ireland fell completely to the English. Add the usual ration of disease, starvation, crime, what have you. A very tough time. But, sitting there, out of the way, Arcadia. Not quite bliss, but an awful lot better than most folks had.
Luck kicked Arcadia in the shins starting in 1704. English/French skirmishes in North America took on a more desperate tone, mirroring events in Europe. The French and their native allies -- from the interior of the continent -- began a long series of awful raids on English settlements. The Deerfield Raid is the most famous. Many were killed, many taken captive, and everybody terrified. King Philip's War, generated without French help, raised the terror level. Remember, at the time, the English might well have been pushed into the sea if the natives had gotten their act together. A few battles going a different way, I'd be blogging in French. Moi?
Then, the English exhibited a trait that has come all the way down to present day America: when agitated, go kill large numbers of brown people. The brown people in North America were difficult victims; they moved about, were good at fighting back, and necessary for the functions of the English colonies. Who to kill, then? Hmmm, French, Catholic, settled, and, above all, racially mixed. Arcadia!! The heathens!!!
Expeditions to conquer Arcadia in the 17th century came often; the English would then lose interest, the French would move back in, and the cycle would start over. Intrigue, intrigue. In 1704, the British came to stay, and ruled with a gentle and confused hand until the 1740s. Then the English decided, all over the continent, that enough was enough. In the general dismantling of the French presence, Arcadia was completely destroyed. Obliterated. Buildings burned, animals killed, people murdered. Scorched earth policy. No one was to be left.
Some Arcadians fled to other parts of Canada, many fled to Mi'kmaq villages on the mainland. The British sent a few to France, and some to the British sugar plantations in the Caribbean; most, though, were sent to Louisiana, and became the Cajuns -- you can hear the name changing. Ethnic cleansing carried through. The entire French political presence north of Maine was ended. And, eventually, ended everywhere on the continent.
Can you imagine? One day in your house, on a farm on an island in the North Atlantic, then, after months on a ship, dumped in the diseased swamps of the South. Can there be a more peculiar end to a peculiar social experiment? Worse has happened to populations, of course; look at the Aztecs and the Mayans and everybody else who lived in the Americas in 1500. Or in Asia during the Mongol expansion in the 12th century. Supply your own genocide here.
There are different ways to look at what went on. Some military, some political, some economic. But it did happen, and it was genocide.
And Arcadia is a special kind of genocide, if there can be such a thing. Damn. They had it right, and kept it going for a century; they evolved ways to get along, and to mix races, without warfare. The English, ultimately, couldn't live with race mixing, and put an end to it all.
We have inherited their ugliness, and based a nation on their fearfulness. Great.
Before being wiped out, a group of folks managed to ignore the forces swirling around them for almost 150 years -- and then ultimately lost their work, their friends, and their nation. The place was north of Maine: Arcadia. Now Nova Scotia. Even the name has been changed.
In 1620, the Pilgrims landed. In 1604, though, the French had settled on what they called Port Royal or Arcadia. Port Royal was finally "conquered" for good by the English in 1710, and gently occupied until 1740, when the whole place went to the dogs.
What happened in the first hundred years of Arcadia? Not much, and a lot. The people who already lived there, the Mi'kmaq, were neutral toward the French when the colony began. In the 14th century, fishing boats came to the George's Banks for the cod, and landed to salt and dry the fish at Arcadia. Most of those boats were Portuguese, some Norwegian, some French. The Mi'kmaq were already seasoned traders when the French colony began, and not threatened by the mere presence of a small number of Europeans.
In other places, the French focused on fur trade and saving souls, in that order. Arcadia, though, was a farming community; access to the St. Lawrence river, the path to Quebec and Montreal, was controlled by the forts around the Gulf of St. Lawrence. Those forts were important to France, and needed food. Arcadia supplied grain and meat to the troops in the forts, and in return were supplied with tools, salt, and whatever else 17th century folks needed.
Who cares? Just another colony. Not at all. In that century, the French colonists and the Mi'kmaq managed to merge into one supercolony, with complex patterns of family relationships derived from both French and Mi'kmaq society. Intermarriage was more the rule than the exception; the usual pattern of European men having native wives was matched by Mi'kmaq men having French wives. After a century, the complexity of blood and custom must have confused the settlers themselves at times.
The colony was nominally Catholic, and was supplied with priests; no one seems to have cared much, and, when the British arrived for good, didn't fuss about the change over to Protestantism, and then back.
At the time, of course, French and English colonials faced off over religion at least as much as over land. Relatives thought that captives taken in raids were in the grips of heathens, doomed to burn in hell. Not in Arcadia. In the documents about the later history of Arcadia, there is a sense of frustration, on each side, about the nonchalant religious attitudes of the Arcadians.
And what of other parts of 17th century life? Productivity seems to have been good. The land was rocky, not really great for growing grain, but the Arcadians managed. The newcomers had been peasants in France, and knew the vagaries of small farm life. The Mi'kmaq could produce sea food and hunted meat and furs. Somebody always had food, important in times when famine and starvation were common.
Government was a strange institution. Between 1600 and 1710 (or so) the British from Maine and Massachusetts occasionally attacked, occasionally won, then lost interest and just meddled in the vagaries of colony politics. There was trade, some of it smuggling, with the New England colonies. Once, a merchant owned warehouses in Arcadia and Boston, and attacked his own buildings. Strange days. Ultimately, the French prevailed in the 17th century.
Much like other places at the time, and despite the success of the colony, starvation remained a great fear. Government faded into the background. Remember, these were French peasants, who were very familiar with not having enough food.
A side issue: Many academics have written about the French folktales of the time, which were largely about food. The academics use various theoretical approaches. For some reason, French folktales became a very fertile ground for dissertations. Finally, a sensible reader came along, and made the startling observation that French folk tales were largely about food because French folk were always worried about food. That was the end of the argument.
Back to Arcadia:
Everyone worked, danced, ate, talked, had babies, had arguments, all together. Housing was in small villages, with gathering places in larger towns. Not much city life; the size of the colony limited the number of folks not directly involved in food production. No bloggers in Arcadia. No mimes, either. Somehow the Arcadians managed their deprivation.
I don't mean to pass this all off as a 17th century paradise. I doubt anyplace in the 17th century (or now) is a paradise -- paradise wasn't even a paradise. But, there were very, very few problems generated by greed, rage, group loathing, religion, race hate -- the destructive social forces we seem to love so much. Whatever informal group values operated, everybody got along well enough to avoid prisons, lawsuits, blah, blah. Fill in your favorite social ill here. And, as I said before, the politics of colonial government intrigue just didn't matter very much to most people.
The 17th century in Europe was a tough time. Religious struggles were played out on large and small scales. Tens of thousands were murdered by different sects. The English Civil War began with the beheading of the king. Ireland fell completely to the English. Add the usual ration of disease, starvation, crime, what have you. A very tough time. But, sitting there, out of the way, Arcadia. Not quite bliss, but an awful lot better than most folks had.
Luck kicked Arcadia in the shins starting in 1704. English/French skirmishes in North America took on a more desperate tone, mirroring events in Europe. The French and their native allies -- from the interior of the continent -- began a long series of awful raids on English settlements. The Deerfield Raid is the most famous. Many were killed, many taken captive, and everybody terrified. King Philip's War, generated without French help, raised the terror level. Remember, at the time, the English might well have been pushed into the sea if the natives had gotten their act together. A few battles going a different way, I'd be blogging in French. Moi?
Then, the English exhibited a trait that has come all the way down to present day America: when agitated, go kill large numbers of brown people. The brown people in North America were difficult victims; they moved about, were good at fighting back, and necessary for the functions of the English colonies. Who to kill, then? Hmmm, French, Catholic, settled, and, above all, racially mixed. Arcadia!! The heathens!!!
Expeditions to conquer Arcadia in the 17th century came often; the English would then lose interest, the French would move back in, and the cycle would start over. Intrigue, intrigue. In 1704, the British came to stay, and ruled with a gentle and confused hand until the 1740s. Then the English decided, all over the continent, that enough was enough. In the general dismantling of the French presence, Arcadia was completely destroyed. Obliterated. Buildings burned, animals killed, people murdered. Scorched earth policy. No one was to be left.
Some Arcadians fled to other parts of Canada, many fled to Mi'kmaq villages on the mainland. The British sent a few to France, and some to the British sugar plantations in the Caribbean; most, though, were sent to Louisiana, and became the Cajuns -- you can hear the name changing. Ethnic cleansing carried through. The entire French political presence north of Maine was ended. And, eventually, ended everywhere on the continent.
Can you imagine? One day in your house, on a farm on an island in the North Atlantic, then, after months on a ship, dumped in the diseased swamps of the South. Can there be a more peculiar end to a peculiar social experiment? Worse has happened to populations, of course; look at the Aztecs and the Mayans and everybody else who lived in the Americas in 1500. Or in Asia during the Mongol expansion in the 12th century. Supply your own genocide here.
There are different ways to look at what went on. Some military, some political, some economic. But it did happen, and it was genocide.
And Arcadia is a special kind of genocide, if there can be such a thing. Damn. They had it right, and kept it going for a century; they evolved ways to get along, and to mix races, without warfare. The English, ultimately, couldn't live with race mixing, and put an end to it all.
We have inherited their ugliness, and based a nation on their fearfulness. Great.
Friday, October 29, 2010
Meat and post-classic America
If we all became vegans, there would be an agricultural crash; it would last just long enough for all the meat interests, corporate and family, to get more subsidies from the government. Farm lobbyist are more influential than anybody save the NRA.
Most of the howling about factory farms is about meat. Long experience growing meat animals has led to the livestock, including poultry, being penned; production is much higher if animals are closed in. Cattle grazing on the plains, the round-up, cattle drives, all the staples of Westerns? Gone, just gone.
Contemporary family farms do have huge barns, filled with agricultural machines; grain is the big product on family farms and most grain is produced on family farms. Family farms aren't the quaint 160 acres of yesteryear, though. A combination of leasing, futures contracts, and subsidized bank loans has led to family farms becoming huge. The owners may be related, but most of the work is done by managers and employees; the family lives in Miami, maybe. Or Paris. Use your imagination.
Who cares? What about those factory farms, that we all should hate? Factory farms produce four fifths of the meat in the US. Factory farms are sheds full of penned cattle or huge buildings full of caged chickens. They are notorious for disease, waste problems, animal cruelty. Dealing with waste is a sensational problem. Each cow, or pig, is a living poop machine. A 4.5 pound hen produces 2 pounds a week of chicken poop, a 1400 pound cow, 350 pounds, a 180 pound pig 90 pounds. Those pigs eat like.....
An example: In 2000, a feedlot in Nebraska had 85,000 cattle on 600 acres. That's about 142 cows per acre. Not exactly 2 acre zoning. If you figure that a third of the 600 acres is devoted to transport, processing, storage, and so on, you get about 212 per acre. They would need to be put in rows, side by side, nose to butt. Surprise: they are. One of the first cruel oddities is that the tails of the cows are amputated lest they bother the cows in back of them.
How do they spend their day on the feedlot? Bo-ring. Eat, then sleep, then eat. Eat really a lot. No exercise; exercise makes the meat tough. Oh, I forgot: Eat, then poop, then sleep, then eat, then poop, then sleep. That's 29,750,000 pounds of cow poop on our Nebraska feedlot -- every week. Every week. Cow poop stops for no man. Yipes. That's a lot of cow poop. And that's just one feedlot.
So what? Well, a couple of things. The poop has to go somewhere. Where? How does it get removed from the sheds? Turns out there are many competing belt systems to haul the poop out of the sheds. By the time it reaches the outside world, half the weight is evaporated as moisture. Down to about 15,000,000 pounds for this feedlot. Then it is dried further, processed, and ultimately becomes a solid ten percent of what was originally pooped. Fine. We are down to 3,000,000 pounds. The manure is then put on trains or trucks, and taken to grain farms, where it is used for fertilizer. Turns out the cow pee is a much more difficult problem, and requires several more steps to make relatively safe.
Ah, the cycle is complete. Zen stuff. Simple ideas, complex systems. Santa Fe Institute ideas. But this poop thing is just an interesting diversion from whatever the point of the essay is.
Each step in the cycle consumes stunning amounts of energy, in a lot of forms. Who knows how many gallons of gas or diesel we are throwing at each pound of meat? The systems have grown up without any real planning, and are not very efficient. Surprise. American energy costs have been so subsidized, and farming so subsidized, that both grain farms and feedlot operations are largely government-sponsored operations. Strange. "Keep your gummint hands off my Medicare" writ large. Like the defense industry. Strange.
Pretend that we all became vegans. Hell, pretend that half of us become vegans. I can certainly imagine a holiday dinner with no meat, and no fake meat. And less expensive than the whole turkey thing. TG dinner is mostly vegan anyway. Take away the turkey ("Oh, and it's not dry at all"), and we're in vegan territory. I actually think most folks wouldn't care much; I wouldn't. Despite the table talk, turkey is always dry. Stuffing, the dreaded lima beans, turnip, squash, mashed, sweets, yams. Even cranberries, which I loathe. More than enough different eats. Get that dry old animal away from me. Maybe I'm not the one who should be talking about dry old animals.
I would have guessed that meat consumption in the US crashed in the late 20th century. Wrong, wrong, wrong. In 1950, we each ate 144 pounds of meat; in 2005, 221 pounds. Everybody I know, though, is eating less meat. Is this a class issue? A race issue? What's going on?
Take pork; both race and class matter. In 2000, eating pork varied inversely with income. Race? Non-hispanic black folks are easily the highest consumers of pork. Hmm. If you put those together, you get the picture of poor black folks being the heaviest consumers of pork. Middle age men eat the most pork of all age-gender groups. Go figure.
Eating beef also varies inversely with income. The ethnicity numbers are about the same as pork. Strangely, though, Hispanic folks beat everyone else, easily, in the amount of beef eaten at home. Who knew?
Rural folks eat more beef and pork than their city cousins. But in age and gender, the big consumers of beef are young men. McDonald's?
Chicken? Consumption varies directly with income; the more money you make, the more chicken you eat. People living alone eat the most chicken. Odd. Families of more than eight eat the least chicken. I couldn't find more numbers for chicken. I did find numbers on exports; chicken exports have gone up a gazillion percent, to both asian and arab countries. Hmmm. What countries lend us most money?
The outcome of it all: in america, race and class strike again, this time in an unexpected arena.
By now, I have bored myself silly, and lost whatever point there was. It's always fun to look up numbers, and numbers about animal poop are the best. I'm comfortable with the numbers.
Hidden in the numbers, and in the USDA reports about consumption of all this stuff, is a nervous tone. China, India and Brazil are all chowing down on increasing amounts of meat, and on increasing amounts of energy. The train has left the station, and is coming down the track on diet and energy both. The post-classic american decline will change our diets, as well as our addiction to killing millions of brown people. We will have competition in both.
Energy will very soon cost a bunch more; we can kill all the darker-shaded folks we want. Doesn't matter. Oil is going through the roof. Food is going through the roof, because so much of what we grow is heavily subsidized by low oil prices. Obvious stuff, well known, well publicized.
So, our sins are coming home to haunt us. All the money we have borrowed from China, in particular, but also India and some of the Arab countries, will be used to buy our own cows and chickens. Meat producers will rejoice. The rest of us will sink into the dietary penury we deserve, for having worshipped at the altar of supply/demand. No turkey for you, even if you want it.
Ah, starving by our own greed. Not just sitting in the dark in the cold; now there's no food, either. Nice metaphor for pretty much everything in the new century. Well, enjoy, I guess. It just sounds pitiful. Again, the picture of having so much, and just throwing it all away. What for? What did we get in return? Everything we touch turns to animal poop.
And the promised cartoon, in the best size I could make it without blurring.
Click on it for the full size:
Most of the howling about factory farms is about meat. Long experience growing meat animals has led to the livestock, including poultry, being penned; production is much higher if animals are closed in. Cattle grazing on the plains, the round-up, cattle drives, all the staples of Westerns? Gone, just gone.
Contemporary family farms do have huge barns, filled with agricultural machines; grain is the big product on family farms and most grain is produced on family farms. Family farms aren't the quaint 160 acres of yesteryear, though. A combination of leasing, futures contracts, and subsidized bank loans has led to family farms becoming huge. The owners may be related, but most of the work is done by managers and employees; the family lives in Miami, maybe. Or Paris. Use your imagination.
Who cares? What about those factory farms, that we all should hate? Factory farms produce four fifths of the meat in the US. Factory farms are sheds full of penned cattle or huge buildings full of caged chickens. They are notorious for disease, waste problems, animal cruelty. Dealing with waste is a sensational problem. Each cow, or pig, is a living poop machine. A 4.5 pound hen produces 2 pounds a week of chicken poop, a 1400 pound cow, 350 pounds, a 180 pound pig 90 pounds. Those pigs eat like.....
An example: In 2000, a feedlot in Nebraska had 85,000 cattle on 600 acres. That's about 142 cows per acre. Not exactly 2 acre zoning. If you figure that a third of the 600 acres is devoted to transport, processing, storage, and so on, you get about 212 per acre. They would need to be put in rows, side by side, nose to butt. Surprise: they are. One of the first cruel oddities is that the tails of the cows are amputated lest they bother the cows in back of them.
How do they spend their day on the feedlot? Bo-ring. Eat, then sleep, then eat. Eat really a lot. No exercise; exercise makes the meat tough. Oh, I forgot: Eat, then poop, then sleep, then eat, then poop, then sleep. That's 29,750,000 pounds of cow poop on our Nebraska feedlot -- every week. Every week. Cow poop stops for no man. Yipes. That's a lot of cow poop. And that's just one feedlot.
So what? Well, a couple of things. The poop has to go somewhere. Where? How does it get removed from the sheds? Turns out there are many competing belt systems to haul the poop out of the sheds. By the time it reaches the outside world, half the weight is evaporated as moisture. Down to about 15,000,000 pounds for this feedlot. Then it is dried further, processed, and ultimately becomes a solid ten percent of what was originally pooped. Fine. We are down to 3,000,000 pounds. The manure is then put on trains or trucks, and taken to grain farms, where it is used for fertilizer. Turns out the cow pee is a much more difficult problem, and requires several more steps to make relatively safe.
Ah, the cycle is complete. Zen stuff. Simple ideas, complex systems. Santa Fe Institute ideas. But this poop thing is just an interesting diversion from whatever the point of the essay is.
Each step in the cycle consumes stunning amounts of energy, in a lot of forms. Who knows how many gallons of gas or diesel we are throwing at each pound of meat? The systems have grown up without any real planning, and are not very efficient. Surprise. American energy costs have been so subsidized, and farming so subsidized, that both grain farms and feedlot operations are largely government-sponsored operations. Strange. "Keep your gummint hands off my Medicare" writ large. Like the defense industry. Strange.
Pretend that we all became vegans. Hell, pretend that half of us become vegans. I can certainly imagine a holiday dinner with no meat, and no fake meat. And less expensive than the whole turkey thing. TG dinner is mostly vegan anyway. Take away the turkey ("Oh, and it's not dry at all"), and we're in vegan territory. I actually think most folks wouldn't care much; I wouldn't. Despite the table talk, turkey is always dry. Stuffing, the dreaded lima beans, turnip, squash, mashed, sweets, yams. Even cranberries, which I loathe. More than enough different eats. Get that dry old animal away from me. Maybe I'm not the one who should be talking about dry old animals.
I would have guessed that meat consumption in the US crashed in the late 20th century. Wrong, wrong, wrong. In 1950, we each ate 144 pounds of meat; in 2005, 221 pounds. Everybody I know, though, is eating less meat. Is this a class issue? A race issue? What's going on?
Take pork; both race and class matter. In 2000, eating pork varied inversely with income. Race? Non-hispanic black folks are easily the highest consumers of pork. Hmm. If you put those together, you get the picture of poor black folks being the heaviest consumers of pork. Middle age men eat the most pork of all age-gender groups. Go figure.
Eating beef also varies inversely with income. The ethnicity numbers are about the same as pork. Strangely, though, Hispanic folks beat everyone else, easily, in the amount of beef eaten at home. Who knew?
Rural folks eat more beef and pork than their city cousins. But in age and gender, the big consumers of beef are young men. McDonald's?
Chicken? Consumption varies directly with income; the more money you make, the more chicken you eat. People living alone eat the most chicken. Odd. Families of more than eight eat the least chicken. I couldn't find more numbers for chicken. I did find numbers on exports; chicken exports have gone up a gazillion percent, to both asian and arab countries. Hmmm. What countries lend us most money?
The outcome of it all: in america, race and class strike again, this time in an unexpected arena.
By now, I have bored myself silly, and lost whatever point there was. It's always fun to look up numbers, and numbers about animal poop are the best. I'm comfortable with the numbers.
Hidden in the numbers, and in the USDA reports about consumption of all this stuff, is a nervous tone. China, India and Brazil are all chowing down on increasing amounts of meat, and on increasing amounts of energy. The train has left the station, and is coming down the track on diet and energy both. The post-classic american decline will change our diets, as well as our addiction to killing millions of brown people. We will have competition in both.
Energy will very soon cost a bunch more; we can kill all the darker-shaded folks we want. Doesn't matter. Oil is going through the roof. Food is going through the roof, because so much of what we grow is heavily subsidized by low oil prices. Obvious stuff, well known, well publicized.
So, our sins are coming home to haunt us. All the money we have borrowed from China, in particular, but also India and some of the Arab countries, will be used to buy our own cows and chickens. Meat producers will rejoice. The rest of us will sink into the dietary penury we deserve, for having worshipped at the altar of supply/demand. No turkey for you, even if you want it.
Ah, starving by our own greed. Not just sitting in the dark in the cold; now there's no food, either. Nice metaphor for pretty much everything in the new century. Well, enjoy, I guess. It just sounds pitiful. Again, the picture of having so much, and just throwing it all away. What for? What did we get in return? Everything we touch turns to animal poop.
And the promised cartoon, in the best size I could make it without blurring.
Click on it for the full size:
Tuesday, October 12, 2010
Health Care
Imagine that the health care reform (reform? We don't have it to reform!) was for white people only.
Well, aside from the gasp that would have gone up, I think cradle to grave would have been passed in about fifteen minutes. Everyone forgets that all politics in this country begins with race. Why call it "Obamacare" so frequently and with such a delighted sneer? Maybe to connect it to a black president?
What if the Tea Baggers were folks of color? The National Guard would have been recalled from killing people in the Middle East, and pointed toward our own people.
I sent an email to the National Rifle Association suggesting that I would be glad to fund a program to train young black and Hispanic men in gun safety, and buy them their first gun. I waited a long time, then they apparently recovered from their laughing fits and told me they weren't interested now, but, by golly, if they became interested, they would get in touch. I'm guessing that my time in the nursing home will have passed before that will happen. And my great-grandchildren's time.
Why is that a funny story? Why is it so easy for us to accept that the country's largest and most effective lobbying group, by a big margin, has been in at least the last 50 years so clearly a bunch of virulent race-baiters?
I'm not advancing the fund of human knowledge to make this guess: A majority of white folks would be just as happy if slavery had continued. Maybe a close minority. Way fewer than half of whites voted for Obama running against an incompetent bozo and a smiling baboon. If it were just white folks, the bozo and baboon would have won handily.
What are we to do, then? Social Security was started because Roosevelt was worried about the Commies taking over if the white working classes weren't thrown a bone. Medicare was started because white people got sick of paying granny's hospital bills. And so on. But both to buy off the white folks.
The real progressive of my time was, unexpectedly, Lyndon Johnson. A Texan, born of nativist stock, he breathlessly gambled all his political capital, all his arm bending skills, and just plain bribery to get the Civil Rights Bill passed in the mid-sixties.
The Civil Rights Bill would not pass today -- it wouldn't even reach a vote. Johnson was aware of what he was doing. He knew that he had lost the South to the mouth-foaming, howling right for at least a generation. Turns out to be at least two generations, and probably three.
I don't think, though, that he gave weight to two things: one, that the Vietnam war would lose him the support of all those who didn't hate him already, the other that the progressives were a smaller bunch in the rest of the nation than he originally thought.
Toward his death he did realized some of what he had turned loose. Bush the Younger was the best and brightest (heh!) of the products of the Johnson era, at least until 2012, when the Baggers and their bagmen will come to power. Reagan was the most subtle, using his smiling senility to disguise mass murder in numbers that hadn't been reached in, well, a decade. After Vietnam (casualties: 5 million, at least), Guatemala, El Salvador, and all the rest of the benign 80s were a drop in the bucket. A big drop, maybe half cup. Surely not more than, say, two million. Staggering.
I will say, in Johnson's defense, and I don't much like defending him, that the number killed in Vietnam only picked up speed after Nixon slithered into command. The republicans -- Nixon, Reagan, Bush, have, by the nature of their virulent racial antagonisms, been just slightly more willing to murder the non-white. Just slightly.
In Massachusetts, remember that Baker is of this tribe, the know-nothings, the Baggers, the mouth-foaming racists, the folks who would have seniors begging on the street for food money. Impeccable swine, with innocent faces. Damn, how I loathe those people, the "we have too much debt" to pay for health care, but not the trillion-and-a-half bill for murdering Iraqis. As I said before, though, only slightly worse than the others.
It gets personal when I'm the one who could be eating the cat food, and crawling over the bodies of dead elders to get to the clinic. Miles the Cat better get used to being on short rations, just like the rest of us.
And that's where I started. Now that I think it through, since I'm white, the let-them-eat-cat-food advocates will always find a way to get me human food and get to the doc. If I weren't white, I'd be packing my bags and heading to Costa Rica, Canada, New Zealand, some places in Africa, some places in Europe. Keep those passports handy, folks. But, I am white.
I'll eat, I'm just not so sure about you about my darker-skinned fellow citizens
How humiliating for me to say that, in my country, in my lifetime.
Well, aside from the gasp that would have gone up, I think cradle to grave would have been passed in about fifteen minutes. Everyone forgets that all politics in this country begins with race. Why call it "Obamacare" so frequently and with such a delighted sneer? Maybe to connect it to a black president?
What if the Tea Baggers were folks of color? The National Guard would have been recalled from killing people in the Middle East, and pointed toward our own people.
I sent an email to the National Rifle Association suggesting that I would be glad to fund a program to train young black and Hispanic men in gun safety, and buy them their first gun. I waited a long time, then they apparently recovered from their laughing fits and told me they weren't interested now, but, by golly, if they became interested, they would get in touch. I'm guessing that my time in the nursing home will have passed before that will happen. And my great-grandchildren's time.
Why is that a funny story? Why is it so easy for us to accept that the country's largest and most effective lobbying group, by a big margin, has been in at least the last 50 years so clearly a bunch of virulent race-baiters?
I'm not advancing the fund of human knowledge to make this guess: A majority of white folks would be just as happy if slavery had continued. Maybe a close minority. Way fewer than half of whites voted for Obama running against an incompetent bozo and a smiling baboon. If it were just white folks, the bozo and baboon would have won handily.
What are we to do, then? Social Security was started because Roosevelt was worried about the Commies taking over if the white working classes weren't thrown a bone. Medicare was started because white people got sick of paying granny's hospital bills. And so on. But both to buy off the white folks.
The real progressive of my time was, unexpectedly, Lyndon Johnson. A Texan, born of nativist stock, he breathlessly gambled all his political capital, all his arm bending skills, and just plain bribery to get the Civil Rights Bill passed in the mid-sixties.
The Civil Rights Bill would not pass today -- it wouldn't even reach a vote. Johnson was aware of what he was doing. He knew that he had lost the South to the mouth-foaming, howling right for at least a generation. Turns out to be at least two generations, and probably three.
I don't think, though, that he gave weight to two things: one, that the Vietnam war would lose him the support of all those who didn't hate him already, the other that the progressives were a smaller bunch in the rest of the nation than he originally thought.
Toward his death he did realized some of what he had turned loose. Bush the Younger was the best and brightest (heh!) of the products of the Johnson era, at least until 2012, when the Baggers and their bagmen will come to power. Reagan was the most subtle, using his smiling senility to disguise mass murder in numbers that hadn't been reached in, well, a decade. After Vietnam (casualties: 5 million, at least), Guatemala, El Salvador, and all the rest of the benign 80s were a drop in the bucket. A big drop, maybe half cup. Surely not more than, say, two million. Staggering.
I will say, in Johnson's defense, and I don't much like defending him, that the number killed in Vietnam only picked up speed after Nixon slithered into command. The republicans -- Nixon, Reagan, Bush, have, by the nature of their virulent racial antagonisms, been just slightly more willing to murder the non-white. Just slightly.
In Massachusetts, remember that Baker is of this tribe, the know-nothings, the Baggers, the mouth-foaming racists, the folks who would have seniors begging on the street for food money. Impeccable swine, with innocent faces. Damn, how I loathe those people, the "we have too much debt" to pay for health care, but not the trillion-and-a-half bill for murdering Iraqis. As I said before, though, only slightly worse than the others.
It gets personal when I'm the one who could be eating the cat food, and crawling over the bodies of dead elders to get to the clinic. Miles the Cat better get used to being on short rations, just like the rest of us.
And that's where I started. Now that I think it through, since I'm white, the let-them-eat-cat-food advocates will always find a way to get me human food and get to the doc. If I weren't white, I'd be packing my bags and heading to Costa Rica, Canada, New Zealand, some places in Africa, some places in Europe. Keep those passports handy, folks. But, I am white.
I'll eat, I'm just not so sure about you about my darker-skinned fellow citizens
How humiliating for me to say that, in my country, in my lifetime.
Monday, October 4, 2010
Religious War 4
A friend suggested that I look on the sunny side. Here goes:
If it walks like a duck, and so on. If we are constantly in the business of accumulating the corpses of dark people, decade after decade, we are ducks.
Well, then, if not ducks, what are we? How about mass murderers? I can't think of another post-WW11 country -- I don't know enough about all the previous ones -- with our mass killing credentials.
Mao and the Cultural Revolution? Nope; close, but not enough bodies and, really, too short a time to really count. Cambodia? A trifling 3 million total. Don't forget; we've gotten up to a million in just the last decade, easily. Vietnam? Well, 5.4 million total; I'll give us credit for maybe 4 million. We had all the things that made the big bangs, and used them joyfully. We really did love dropping stuff on those little brown folks.
I listed a bunch more over the last blogs. Maybe I've missed one or two; Alert Readers should remind me. Low-balling the numbers is very easy. Seeing your own country as the most murderous entity in the world is very difficult. Nonetheless. No one else is near the top -- hell, no one else made the playoffs. The numbers are the numbers. That duck thing. You are what your record says you are. Oh, nooooo! No more sports metaphors. Please.
I find myself just letting the numbers slip from my mind most times. Onward to the less awful.
We are only #24 in the world murder rate; not much to say there. Of the first world countries, we are edged out by Russia, and, surprise, Poland. Who knew the Poles were so bloodthirsty? Perhaps the alcohol use in both of those countries has something to do with the murder rates. Perhaps our own use of alcohol has something to do with our murder rate. Naw. Lots of other countries drink just as much.
On to jail rates. In 2008, the US imprisoned about 1500 of every 100,000 men, with a trivial rate of 62 per 100,000 women. Better numbers. A little more than one out of every hundred men lives in jail. By race: one in twenty African American men sits in jail right now, today. Overall, we have, far and away, the top imprisonment rate in the world. We are followed (about 20% fewer) by Russia, using numbers for both genders. No other country is on the map, as it were. Heh. A remnant of the cold war, maybe?
If I were going to look at this sensibly, I would say that we are now the world's greatest mass murderers and that we are now the world's greatest self-imprisoners. Well, of course. How else could we be? American exceptionalism.
A few years ago, at the height of the Iraq thing, a couple of connections forced themselves into my usually unreflective mind. Take the first Earth Day in 1974. I remember thinking at the time, and saying to others, that I thought trying to clean up the Earth was a response to the collective guilt over Vietnam. I was laughed out of the room.
Now, though, not so funny. The environmental movement has picked up steam at roughly the same pace as our mass killings -- and mass imprisonments. We are counting on all the Greenies to wash the blood off our hands, and, when they fail, we put a lot of folks, notably folks of color, in jail. Then we know for sure who the bad people are, and we smother them in our guilt.
When I started graduate school in psychology, there were two jokes: one was that when we read about some pathology, we would instantly see it in ourselves. The second, though, was less amusing: we were in psychology to continually reassure ourselves which side of the line we were on; after all, we knew who the patients were. Ugly, and more true than we would admit. Didn't take me long to see the pathology in my colleagues.
Now, I can look at piles of dead, dark people, and I know two things for sure. One is that I didn't pull any triggers or drop any bombs; the other, that all the bad folks are in jail. I am doubly reassured. Triply reassured, really: the bad folks aren't even the same color I am. Guess I need a lot of reassurance. Strangely enough, this kind of talk doesn't startle African Americans. Perhaps their perception is that jail is better than being murdered.
I will stick to my previous blogs. We do the killing thing to insure our social stability. We don't even bother to pretend that our victims are a threat; we aren't afraid of them at all. Nope. Hey, there is just no other way to look at the data; the only other theory is that we suddenly started these massive killings on a whim. My perception works better.
Now, though, we're also talking about what happens after the killings. The locker room showers and self-congratulations include putting huge numbers of people in prison. Slippery ideas, hard to hold on to.
I am not a Marxist. We certainly make a good buck by all the killing/cleaning cycle. I've nothing against a good buck; fortunes are made. But I don't think we get into the killing for the bucks. Nope, I'll stick to my guns: We kill because of our terror of instability. A felicitous metaphor.
Terror over instability is no small thing. My TLE has left me with a sweet sense of how easily I can be brought low by a very small blip in brain functioning. I am tricked by my struggles for normalcy, and by my own hiding of the humiliations that TLE episodes bring. I know the terror that I might shatter. Nothing unique; a lot of people know that terror. Usually it comes to them when they are children; mine came at 65. I think they have it worse; I have a strong internal life, and strong family and friends. They don't have any of that.
I don't think much about the shattering times; I just suddenly begin acting or talking in ways strange to me, which at once exhibit and hide my terror. Nothing so extreme as mass murder and mass imprisonment, but I do know the path to those places. When we are terrified, most times we don't act terrified or even feel terrified; what we do is desperately find ways to not be terrified. We mass murder, and mass imprison, without the least hint of our fear of social shattering.
Surprise! I have made it all come together. Nice job, blogger guy. Fear and killing and humiliation and terror, all in one festering ball. When our descendants look back, a thousand years from now, they will be stunned. These people, with so much.....and they did THAT?
And, still, I can't look, and I can't look away.
If it walks like a duck, and so on. If we are constantly in the business of accumulating the corpses of dark people, decade after decade, we are ducks.
Well, then, if not ducks, what are we? How about mass murderers? I can't think of another post-WW11 country -- I don't know enough about all the previous ones -- with our mass killing credentials.
Mao and the Cultural Revolution? Nope; close, but not enough bodies and, really, too short a time to really count. Cambodia? A trifling 3 million total. Don't forget; we've gotten up to a million in just the last decade, easily. Vietnam? Well, 5.4 million total; I'll give us credit for maybe 4 million. We had all the things that made the big bangs, and used them joyfully. We really did love dropping stuff on those little brown folks.
I listed a bunch more over the last blogs. Maybe I've missed one or two; Alert Readers should remind me. Low-balling the numbers is very easy. Seeing your own country as the most murderous entity in the world is very difficult. Nonetheless. No one else is near the top -- hell, no one else made the playoffs. The numbers are the numbers. That duck thing. You are what your record says you are. Oh, nooooo! No more sports metaphors. Please.
I find myself just letting the numbers slip from my mind most times. Onward to the less awful.
We are only #24 in the world murder rate; not much to say there. Of the first world countries, we are edged out by Russia, and, surprise, Poland. Who knew the Poles were so bloodthirsty? Perhaps the alcohol use in both of those countries has something to do with the murder rates. Perhaps our own use of alcohol has something to do with our murder rate. Naw. Lots of other countries drink just as much.
On to jail rates. In 2008, the US imprisoned about 1500 of every 100,000 men, with a trivial rate of 62 per 100,000 women. Better numbers. A little more than one out of every hundred men lives in jail. By race: one in twenty African American men sits in jail right now, today. Overall, we have, far and away, the top imprisonment rate in the world. We are followed (about 20% fewer) by Russia, using numbers for both genders. No other country is on the map, as it were. Heh. A remnant of the cold war, maybe?
If I were going to look at this sensibly, I would say that we are now the world's greatest mass murderers and that we are now the world's greatest self-imprisoners. Well, of course. How else could we be? American exceptionalism.
A few years ago, at the height of the Iraq thing, a couple of connections forced themselves into my usually unreflective mind. Take the first Earth Day in 1974. I remember thinking at the time, and saying to others, that I thought trying to clean up the Earth was a response to the collective guilt over Vietnam. I was laughed out of the room.
Now, though, not so funny. The environmental movement has picked up steam at roughly the same pace as our mass killings -- and mass imprisonments. We are counting on all the Greenies to wash the blood off our hands, and, when they fail, we put a lot of folks, notably folks of color, in jail. Then we know for sure who the bad people are, and we smother them in our guilt.
When I started graduate school in psychology, there were two jokes: one was that when we read about some pathology, we would instantly see it in ourselves. The second, though, was less amusing: we were in psychology to continually reassure ourselves which side of the line we were on; after all, we knew who the patients were. Ugly, and more true than we would admit. Didn't take me long to see the pathology in my colleagues.
Now, I can look at piles of dead, dark people, and I know two things for sure. One is that I didn't pull any triggers or drop any bombs; the other, that all the bad folks are in jail. I am doubly reassured. Triply reassured, really: the bad folks aren't even the same color I am. Guess I need a lot of reassurance. Strangely enough, this kind of talk doesn't startle African Americans. Perhaps their perception is that jail is better than being murdered.
I will stick to my previous blogs. We do the killing thing to insure our social stability. We don't even bother to pretend that our victims are a threat; we aren't afraid of them at all. Nope. Hey, there is just no other way to look at the data; the only other theory is that we suddenly started these massive killings on a whim. My perception works better.
Now, though, we're also talking about what happens after the killings. The locker room showers and self-congratulations include putting huge numbers of people in prison. Slippery ideas, hard to hold on to.
I am not a Marxist. We certainly make a good buck by all the killing/cleaning cycle. I've nothing against a good buck; fortunes are made. But I don't think we get into the killing for the bucks. Nope, I'll stick to my guns: We kill because of our terror of instability. A felicitous metaphor.
Terror over instability is no small thing. My TLE has left me with a sweet sense of how easily I can be brought low by a very small blip in brain functioning. I am tricked by my struggles for normalcy, and by my own hiding of the humiliations that TLE episodes bring. I know the terror that I might shatter. Nothing unique; a lot of people know that terror. Usually it comes to them when they are children; mine came at 65. I think they have it worse; I have a strong internal life, and strong family and friends. They don't have any of that.
I don't think much about the shattering times; I just suddenly begin acting or talking in ways strange to me, which at once exhibit and hide my terror. Nothing so extreme as mass murder and mass imprisonment, but I do know the path to those places. When we are terrified, most times we don't act terrified or even feel terrified; what we do is desperately find ways to not be terrified. We mass murder, and mass imprison, without the least hint of our fear of social shattering.
Surprise! I have made it all come together. Nice job, blogger guy. Fear and killing and humiliation and terror, all in one festering ball. When our descendants look back, a thousand years from now, they will be stunned. These people, with so much.....and they did THAT?
And, still, I can't look, and I can't look away.
Sunday, September 26, 2010
Religious War 3
What if it all goes the way I expect? Total, absolute isolation from the rest of the world, Muslim countries attacking us (which we will just ignore for a while, then blow them off the earth if they continue) and a booming economy manufacturing all the junk we used to import, and doing the labor that used to import itself. No more embassies. No more money, or people, going across borders. The State Department a bunch of little kids making "Go Away" signs with markers. Go back to old blog for detail.
Two problems remain: One, what about our need to kill large numbers of people? And, two, what about our freedom? Will we be let ourselves be free, or will we remain in the grip of a bizarre and vicious ideology which rewards silliness and penalizes real work?
The first one is easy. We just lob a nuke now and then at a random country. We kill a lot of people now anyway, with conventional weapons. The weak sisters among you can revert to high explosives, but I'll go with the nukes. They're cheap -- we've got way more than we'll ever need already. We don't know if the ones we have actually work any more, so this is a nice chance to test them. A little more radioactivity in the atmosphere will vanish in the middle of all the other junk floating around. Plus, keeps everybody else just a little nervous.
I'll be conservative; one very small nuke every, oh, three years or so will do. The European countries will be off limits, of course, and only folks with darker skins will be subject to our random attack. Sort of resembles the foreign policy of the last 50 years, doesn't it?
Two blogs ago, when I went down the list, I forgot Guatemala: US victims, 200,000. And East Timor: US victims, 180,000. This in the last 20 years of the 20th century, mostly in the idyllic Reagan years. First decade of the 21st? A very conservative million, and those direct, by our own hands, not by our proxies. You think a little baby nuke every few years will be any worse?
It will be cheaper and it won't harm any of our folks. We can go on being the world's greatest nation. I know that this is all true, and I don't understand any of it.
On to freedom. The news about freedom: not so good. After we throw out all the Muslims, then what?. No other possibility than a fine christian theocracy, with one exception -- for a while -- for Jews. We still pretend otherwise, but politics in this country is first about race, and then about religion. We are not ready to take on race, not yet. But religion: woo-hoo. All you Unitarians out there, you're gonna have question marks burned on your lawns. That's a joke.
No more secular humanist atheists -- we'll stone them, I guess -- and no more Hare Krishnas and no more Baha'is. No more Darwinists, no more physicists talking about relativity-- get rid of all that science stuff. Science people can return to theology school if they need to retrain. Theology will be the only "ology" allowed. Finish the list above with your favorite non-christian sect.
The Mormons are going to be trouble, as they always are. You're guess is as good as mine about their fate, but I think, in the end, their aggressiveness and peculiar theology will be their downfall.
Ha ha, you say. People have been predicting this for years, still hasn't happened. Crying wolf is, after all, crying wolf.
Not this time. The armed forces are permeated by evangelicals, particularly the officer class. Congress and the Senate are permeated by the rotting husks of ruling-class wannabees. The Supreme Court is permeated by, of all things, fundamentalist catholics. You think they won't stick together? You think they won't unite for an election very, very soon? You think the inauguration of the first openly theocratic president won't be in an evangelical church? You think there will be any elections after that? Think again, bucko. The train has left the station on this one, and there's nothing big enough to stop it.
Prosperity for all, good godly christians in every public office, mandatory church attendance, tithes out of your paycheck, complete control of all media. Video cameras watching everything. And you say we're not getting close? Ok, forget the tithe thing.
We always ignore the fact that the whole free market "ideology" is just a way to ensure a ruling class and a pretty scummy underclass. I can't understand how we've been fooled for a century with that stupid and self-serving crap. When it came to the crisis, the ruling class abandoned pretense and saved itself, got rid of the free market foolishness in maybe, what, twenty seconds. No one batted an eyelash. The free market indeed spoke; it told everyone outside the ruling class to go away and die, same as it did with health care.
Orwell? 1984? He had it a little wrong. He didn't anticipate our hoopy theocracy, really; his was more a secular nightmare. And the war stuff? Orwell saw a forever war designed for profit, and to suck up the energy of youth. Wrong. Our need to kill is more obscure, darker, a historical swamp.
We don't want wars. We want piles of dark-skinned corpses, and we'll take them any way we can get them. Profit? Sure, always good to make a buck. But what we really want are the corpses. We kill to get back to normal. Any time there is social change, class confusion, economic upset, we just kill a lot of people, and we are healed.
We have killed millions upon millions of people in my lifetime, many hidden, many televised. Hard for me to keep myself seeing through that dark glass. Why do we murder these millions? We do it to make us whole. I can't look away, and I can't look.
About 10 years ago, I had a wonderful idea. You could state your religion when you set up your bank account, and then, when you used the ATM, there would be a cheerful religious saying, personalized for your belief system, printed at the top of the receipt. Millions for me in royalties!
Now, just the christian sayings will be on the receipt. Control of thought and economy, on one little, barely legible slip of paper. Control of my life is easy, and just about finished. I have no freedom left.
Next time, anonymity. Stay tuned. Remember, I know who you are. Heh.
BTW, to comment, just click on the 'Comments' link below. Put in your comment, then click on the dropdown box. Put in your name if you wish; you don't need a url, but you can add your link if you have one. Otherwise, click good old 'Anonymous', and I won't know who you are. Heh.
Two problems remain: One, what about our need to kill large numbers of people? And, two, what about our freedom? Will we be let ourselves be free, or will we remain in the grip of a bizarre and vicious ideology which rewards silliness and penalizes real work?
The first one is easy. We just lob a nuke now and then at a random country. We kill a lot of people now anyway, with conventional weapons. The weak sisters among you can revert to high explosives, but I'll go with the nukes. They're cheap -- we've got way more than we'll ever need already. We don't know if the ones we have actually work any more, so this is a nice chance to test them. A little more radioactivity in the atmosphere will vanish in the middle of all the other junk floating around. Plus, keeps everybody else just a little nervous.
I'll be conservative; one very small nuke every, oh, three years or so will do. The European countries will be off limits, of course, and only folks with darker skins will be subject to our random attack. Sort of resembles the foreign policy of the last 50 years, doesn't it?
Two blogs ago, when I went down the list, I forgot Guatemala: US victims, 200,000. And East Timor: US victims, 180,000. This in the last 20 years of the 20th century, mostly in the idyllic Reagan years. First decade of the 21st? A very conservative million, and those direct, by our own hands, not by our proxies. You think a little baby nuke every few years will be any worse?
It will be cheaper and it won't harm any of our folks. We can go on being the world's greatest nation. I know that this is all true, and I don't understand any of it.
On to freedom. The news about freedom: not so good. After we throw out all the Muslims, then what?. No other possibility than a fine christian theocracy, with one exception -- for a while -- for Jews. We still pretend otherwise, but politics in this country is first about race, and then about religion. We are not ready to take on race, not yet. But religion: woo-hoo. All you Unitarians out there, you're gonna have question marks burned on your lawns. That's a joke.
No more secular humanist atheists -- we'll stone them, I guess -- and no more Hare Krishnas and no more Baha'is. No more Darwinists, no more physicists talking about relativity-- get rid of all that science stuff. Science people can return to theology school if they need to retrain. Theology will be the only "ology" allowed. Finish the list above with your favorite non-christian sect.
The Mormons are going to be trouble, as they always are. You're guess is as good as mine about their fate, but I think, in the end, their aggressiveness and peculiar theology will be their downfall.
Ha ha, you say. People have been predicting this for years, still hasn't happened. Crying wolf is, after all, crying wolf.
Not this time. The armed forces are permeated by evangelicals, particularly the officer class. Congress and the Senate are permeated by the rotting husks of ruling-class wannabees. The Supreme Court is permeated by, of all things, fundamentalist catholics. You think they won't stick together? You think they won't unite for an election very, very soon? You think the inauguration of the first openly theocratic president won't be in an evangelical church? You think there will be any elections after that? Think again, bucko. The train has left the station on this one, and there's nothing big enough to stop it.
Prosperity for all, good godly christians in every public office, mandatory church attendance, tithes out of your paycheck, complete control of all media. Video cameras watching everything. And you say we're not getting close? Ok, forget the tithe thing.
We always ignore the fact that the whole free market "ideology" is just a way to ensure a ruling class and a pretty scummy underclass. I can't understand how we've been fooled for a century with that stupid and self-serving crap. When it came to the crisis, the ruling class abandoned pretense and saved itself, got rid of the free market foolishness in maybe, what, twenty seconds. No one batted an eyelash. The free market indeed spoke; it told everyone outside the ruling class to go away and die, same as it did with health care.
Orwell? 1984? He had it a little wrong. He didn't anticipate our hoopy theocracy, really; his was more a secular nightmare. And the war stuff? Orwell saw a forever war designed for profit, and to suck up the energy of youth. Wrong. Our need to kill is more obscure, darker, a historical swamp.
We don't want wars. We want piles of dark-skinned corpses, and we'll take them any way we can get them. Profit? Sure, always good to make a buck. But what we really want are the corpses. We kill to get back to normal. Any time there is social change, class confusion, economic upset, we just kill a lot of people, and we are healed.
We have killed millions upon millions of people in my lifetime, many hidden, many televised. Hard for me to keep myself seeing through that dark glass. Why do we murder these millions? We do it to make us whole. I can't look away, and I can't look.
About 10 years ago, I had a wonderful idea. You could state your religion when you set up your bank account, and then, when you used the ATM, there would be a cheerful religious saying, personalized for your belief system, printed at the top of the receipt. Millions for me in royalties!
Now, just the christian sayings will be on the receipt. Control of thought and economy, on one little, barely legible slip of paper. Control of my life is easy, and just about finished. I have no freedom left.
Next time, anonymity. Stay tuned. Remember, I know who you are. Heh.
BTW, to comment, just click on the 'Comments' link below. Put in your comment, then click on the dropdown box. Put in your name if you wish; you don't need a url, but you can add your link if you have one. Otherwise, click good old 'Anonymous', and I won't know who you are. Heh.
Tuesday, September 21, 2010
Religious War 2
The Cold War was a narcissistic engagement -- a dancing-war -- between two powerful, nasty states. Even the names were mirror images -- the US and the SU. Finally, one of them had the sense and courage to stop the dance-war. We required a new dance-war partner.
Very few candidates appeared when they were needed; the criteria were pretty tough. To get on the list, you had to be willing to kill really a lot of people, have threatening weapons, and be overtly in the grip of a wacky belief system. You must have no sense of self-satire, and be, as our former dance-war partner was, really, really vicious. You had to take great pleasure in being deeply hated by about half the world. And you had to be willing to impoverish your people. That is what we did and we were the good guys, after all.
Not so simple to find dance-war partners. We tried China, but the Chinese didn't want to play, for now. Neither did India; they apparently thought we were crazy to suggest such a thing. All of Africa was too busy. Brazil also had other engagements, at least for the time being.
Well, it all worked out and better than even the most optimistic among us could have hoped. Wasn't so easy, but at the same time we were losing one partner, we generated a new one! Imagine the skill -- and luck! Our best minds and huge amounts of money were needed to make it be so -- surely one of the great achievements of the late 20th century. The old "snatch defeat from the jaws of victory" seems to fit, but I can't quite get the mapping right.
In the previous post, I talked about my life being a series of war episodes. I also remember, in the late 80s and 90s, quaint debates about what to do with the "peace dividend". All that money, which had supported the war machine, would be turned loose, and we could do some pretty good things for our folks. Yup. Good things. Imagine that. I'm waiting.
Well, what now? A dangerous enemy, with terrible weapons, driven by alien beliefs, willing and eager to kill, and against whom no force will be big enough. An enemy who mocks our way of life, our values, who are cowards, who won't even take care of each other, who abuse their own women and children. They dress funny, smell funny and look funny, too.
And that's what they think of us.
There have been two Muslim-Christian wars before. Each one lasted at least a couple of centuries. Now, those folks are real dance-war partners. That SU thing -- hey, didn't last even 80 years. Short-hitters. Quitters. No guts and no glory. The Muslim thing -- those guys are pros. No more amateur hour. Once they get into gear, they're like the Energizer bunny; they just keep going, and going, and going.....
We can anticipate many, many more years of killing. In the last blog, I posted that killing is a normalizing experience for America. Whenever something unusual happens, or we feel insecure, or there's a slump in the economy, or there is minor social change, we kill a bunch of people, and then we feel more normal, reach some sort of equilibrium. It's a dynamic that we have played out for the last hundred years or so. It has worked well for us, not so well for our victims.
One of the personal odd moments of the last 20 years came listening to a radio interview with a former SU spy, one of a group ordered to keep an eye on the border with Finland. The Finns had their own spies, and the two groups got to know each other, had the occasional beer, and in general worked out a fine arrangement. And I remember the voice of this spy from the SU saying, with great emotion "I have never felt more proud of my country than when it abandoned the Cold War". In the seconds after hearing that spy, I was terribly jealous. I wished so much that I could have been the one to feel that pride. I wasn't. And I don't think it will be my country that has such courage the next time, or even the time after that. No.
Not in my lifetime, or in the lifetimes of my children. I don't know what it would take for us to abandon our savagery. A horrible economic depression, with complete failure of anything but a barter economy? A political awakening, as in the SU? Surely not a spiritual awakening -- hell, we have those twice a week. Maybe a grand despair, a complete loss of hope that life can possibly get better? Maybe, but my peasant ancestors stayed peasants, for maybe a thousand years before someone came out of the bogs. Is there anything that can push us into cooperating with the rest of our kind? Any way we can simply abandon the apparently central experience of the American 20th century, that we need to kill large numbers of people?
Sure there is, and maybe the green elephants flying over my house will poop elsewhere. Maybe not. I'm not giving away my shovel yet.
BTW, to comment, just click on the 'Comments' link below. Put in your comment, then click on the dropdown box. Put in your name if you wish; you don't need a url, but you can add your link if you have one. Otherwise, click good old 'Anonymous'.
Very few candidates appeared when they were needed; the criteria were pretty tough. To get on the list, you had to be willing to kill really a lot of people, have threatening weapons, and be overtly in the grip of a wacky belief system. You must have no sense of self-satire, and be, as our former dance-war partner was, really, really vicious. You had to take great pleasure in being deeply hated by about half the world. And you had to be willing to impoverish your people. That is what we did and we were the good guys, after all.
Not so simple to find dance-war partners. We tried China, but the Chinese didn't want to play, for now. Neither did India; they apparently thought we were crazy to suggest such a thing. All of Africa was too busy. Brazil also had other engagements, at least for the time being.
Well, it all worked out and better than even the most optimistic among us could have hoped. Wasn't so easy, but at the same time we were losing one partner, we generated a new one! Imagine the skill -- and luck! Our best minds and huge amounts of money were needed to make it be so -- surely one of the great achievements of the late 20th century. The old "snatch defeat from the jaws of victory" seems to fit, but I can't quite get the mapping right.
In the previous post, I talked about my life being a series of war episodes. I also remember, in the late 80s and 90s, quaint debates about what to do with the "peace dividend". All that money, which had supported the war machine, would be turned loose, and we could do some pretty good things for our folks. Yup. Good things. Imagine that. I'm waiting.
Well, what now? A dangerous enemy, with terrible weapons, driven by alien beliefs, willing and eager to kill, and against whom no force will be big enough. An enemy who mocks our way of life, our values, who are cowards, who won't even take care of each other, who abuse their own women and children. They dress funny, smell funny and look funny, too.
And that's what they think of us.
There have been two Muslim-Christian wars before. Each one lasted at least a couple of centuries. Now, those folks are real dance-war partners. That SU thing -- hey, didn't last even 80 years. Short-hitters. Quitters. No guts and no glory. The Muslim thing -- those guys are pros. No more amateur hour. Once they get into gear, they're like the Energizer bunny; they just keep going, and going, and going.....
We can anticipate many, many more years of killing. In the last blog, I posted that killing is a normalizing experience for America. Whenever something unusual happens, or we feel insecure, or there's a slump in the economy, or there is minor social change, we kill a bunch of people, and then we feel more normal, reach some sort of equilibrium. It's a dynamic that we have played out for the last hundred years or so. It has worked well for us, not so well for our victims.
One of the personal odd moments of the last 20 years came listening to a radio interview with a former SU spy, one of a group ordered to keep an eye on the border with Finland. The Finns had their own spies, and the two groups got to know each other, had the occasional beer, and in general worked out a fine arrangement. And I remember the voice of this spy from the SU saying, with great emotion "I have never felt more proud of my country than when it abandoned the Cold War". In the seconds after hearing that spy, I was terribly jealous. I wished so much that I could have been the one to feel that pride. I wasn't. And I don't think it will be my country that has such courage the next time, or even the time after that. No.
Not in my lifetime, or in the lifetimes of my children. I don't know what it would take for us to abandon our savagery. A horrible economic depression, with complete failure of anything but a barter economy? A political awakening, as in the SU? Surely not a spiritual awakening -- hell, we have those twice a week. Maybe a grand despair, a complete loss of hope that life can possibly get better? Maybe, but my peasant ancestors stayed peasants, for maybe a thousand years before someone came out of the bogs. Is there anything that can push us into cooperating with the rest of our kind? Any way we can simply abandon the apparently central experience of the American 20th century, that we need to kill large numbers of people?
Sure there is, and maybe the green elephants flying over my house will poop elsewhere. Maybe not. I'm not giving away my shovel yet.
BTW, to comment, just click on the 'Comments' link below. Put in your comment, then click on the dropdown box. Put in your name if you wish; you don't need a url, but you can add your link if you have one. Otherwise, click good old 'Anonymous'.
Thursday, September 16, 2010
Religious War
We are at the start of the third major brush between Christians and Muslims.
Arab Muslims are quite open about loathing the presence of Christians in their lands (I'm not too happy about Christians in my lands, either). We Americans have become increasingly intolerant of Muslim residents here, and it is only a matter of time -- a short time -- before Arabs are rounded up and expelled or put in camps, their property confiscated, and all that goes with being demonized. There will be resistance, but security will be evoked, as it always is. First, we'll give them national IDs with little crescents on them, and the demand "Show me your card!" will have some teeth. Then maybe we'll have them wear special hats -- the fez, for instance, would be a nice fashion touch. But I think camps/expulsion are far more likely. After all, we cannot tolerate potential terrorists in our midst.
Two other times, in the last 600 or so years, there have been long, ongoing wars between Christian Europeans and Arab Muslims. The first occurred on the Iberian Peninsula; Muslims took most of what is now Spain in 711 and stayed until 1492. The second was in the 17th to early 20th centuries, in Eastern Europe, and lasted until the Ottomans picked the wrong side in WW1.
Who cares? Within about the next decade, we will be at war with Iran, Egypt, Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Somalia and a few other of the Arab or Persian Muslim countries, and will have no choice but to keep outside our borders anyone who has any Muslim blood, going back, oh, three generations or so. Best expel them all while we have the chance. Indonesians and Filipinos? We'll have a vote on them, but I have a pretty good idea what to expect.
And then? Here is my very practical idea. Many will think it alarming, but bear with me. We are going to do most of it anyway.
We need to move from being a world power, and not even a regional power, to being a power at home only. Not just isolationist; complete isolation. That damn fence needs to be 50 feet high, not 10 feet high. Nothing will cross our borders: no people, no goods, no services, no money. No debt will be repaid, no further debt will be incurred. If you want to stay, fine; but once you go, you can't come back. Relatives can visit, but only for two weeks, and with a bracelet that indicates where they are at all times. Sort of like a reverse electric dog fence. The fishing industry is a problem; we may need to eat farmed fish only. Not good, but the fishing industry is doomed anyway.
All overseas military bases will be abandoned. The navy will be reduced to a coastal force -- a big coastal force. Boundaries will be 200 miles. Military airplanes will patrol up to the borders. Every inch of the borders will be bristling with arms. And, if you even think of smuggling a person or a thing or some money, we will publicly humiliate you; something to do with body functions, or whippings in the town square. No more teaching of foreign languages at any level. Why would we need that? Intense, intense weapons research. The threat, posted on the 50 foot walls, written in crayon on construction paper: Touch us, and you and your ilk will no longer be on the planet. The State Department will use the crayons and construction paper. Canada and Mexico, with long land boundaries, will be the major problems. BIG fences, not just electrified, but designed to do away with anyone who comes within, oh, a hundred yards. We will divide up the Great Lakes.
I'm willing to be humanitarian. You have until January 1, 2012 to decide where to live.
So, a great experiment? Could we really rebuild the country? Can we give up the big TVs and the tchotchkes that are made in Asia? Yipes: no more coffee. Have a nice hot cup of chicken broth for a wakeup. No bananas, but lots of oranges. Fruits and veggies only in season. No grapes from Chile in midwinter. Sigh.
No more Mercedes, no more Toyotas; all cars will be made by GM, or Chrysler, or Ford. I'm sure they and the UAW will be glad to have their pick of the Honda and other foreign factories that dot the South.
No more crops picked by immigrant labor. If we don't pick it, we don't eat it. No more nannies working under the table; we take care of our own children. No more landscaping crews invading the suburbs each day; we mow our own lawns. Restaurant prices will double -- no more illegals to hire for cash; we'll cook our own food.
The first time we built the country, we did it on the backs of Native Americans, Caribbean islanders, Asians, and, by far greatest, in number and in pain, African Americans. They did the labor that made this country, and they didn't get paid. They got murdered, instead.
Can we build America a second time, with everybody getting paid, and nobody murdered? I'm not so sure. I'm not sure that the children of the middle class will be overjoyed about working in factories, or laying brick, or any of the gazillion jobs that, not long ago, were what Americans did.
If we build the 50 foot walls, and shut down the internet and telephone lines at the border, and knock down all the satellites, surely bad things will happen. But what?
If we build the country a second time, regaining our dignity and our liberty may be worth all the hard labor. We will be able to take care of our sick and ailing, our blind and deaf, our demented and damaged. There will be plenty of jobs, millions, to make all the stuff we need. There won't be China or Saudi Arabia to enslave us. We will be working for us, not for them. We can go our own way, without consulting our foreign masters. Are we worried about China attacking Taiwan? Fine, worry all you want, but ultimately it is their problem to solve. We are Americans, after all, and we will defend only Americans. Taiwan, Pakistan, South Korea, Israel, and all the other members of the American protectorate will fend for themselves; there will be no American help. Not even remissions.
On the other hand, I, at least, think that our messing about in the world has caused way more harm than good, so not much is lost in complete isolation.
The fences need to go up, and we need to cut all ties with China, Saudi Arabia, and the others who own us. No more. They can come knocking at the door with our IOUs in their hands -- too bad. We don't need them; we don't need their oil, we don't need their tchochkes. Yes, there will be chaos. But not for long. We are a resourceful bunch. We did it once, on the cheap. We can do it again.
To almost repeat myself: God gave Noah the rainbow sign; no more slaves, full price this time.
If this doesn't get comments, nothing will.
Arab Muslims are quite open about loathing the presence of Christians in their lands (I'm not too happy about Christians in my lands, either). We Americans have become increasingly intolerant of Muslim residents here, and it is only a matter of time -- a short time -- before Arabs are rounded up and expelled or put in camps, their property confiscated, and all that goes with being demonized. There will be resistance, but security will be evoked, as it always is. First, we'll give them national IDs with little crescents on them, and the demand "Show me your card!" will have some teeth. Then maybe we'll have them wear special hats -- the fez, for instance, would be a nice fashion touch. But I think camps/expulsion are far more likely. After all, we cannot tolerate potential terrorists in our midst.
Two other times, in the last 600 or so years, there have been long, ongoing wars between Christian Europeans and Arab Muslims. The first occurred on the Iberian Peninsula; Muslims took most of what is now Spain in 711 and stayed until 1492. The second was in the 17th to early 20th centuries, in Eastern Europe, and lasted until the Ottomans picked the wrong side in WW1.
Who cares? Within about the next decade, we will be at war with Iran, Egypt, Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Somalia and a few other of the Arab or Persian Muslim countries, and will have no choice but to keep outside our borders anyone who has any Muslim blood, going back, oh, three generations or so. Best expel them all while we have the chance. Indonesians and Filipinos? We'll have a vote on them, but I have a pretty good idea what to expect.
And then? Here is my very practical idea. Many will think it alarming, but bear with me. We are going to do most of it anyway.
We need to move from being a world power, and not even a regional power, to being a power at home only. Not just isolationist; complete isolation. That damn fence needs to be 50 feet high, not 10 feet high. Nothing will cross our borders: no people, no goods, no services, no money. No debt will be repaid, no further debt will be incurred. If you want to stay, fine; but once you go, you can't come back. Relatives can visit, but only for two weeks, and with a bracelet that indicates where they are at all times. Sort of like a reverse electric dog fence. The fishing industry is a problem; we may need to eat farmed fish only. Not good, but the fishing industry is doomed anyway.
All overseas military bases will be abandoned. The navy will be reduced to a coastal force -- a big coastal force. Boundaries will be 200 miles. Military airplanes will patrol up to the borders. Every inch of the borders will be bristling with arms. And, if you even think of smuggling a person or a thing or some money, we will publicly humiliate you; something to do with body functions, or whippings in the town square. No more teaching of foreign languages at any level. Why would we need that? Intense, intense weapons research. The threat, posted on the 50 foot walls, written in crayon on construction paper: Touch us, and you and your ilk will no longer be on the planet. The State Department will use the crayons and construction paper. Canada and Mexico, with long land boundaries, will be the major problems. BIG fences, not just electrified, but designed to do away with anyone who comes within, oh, a hundred yards. We will divide up the Great Lakes.
I'm willing to be humanitarian. You have until January 1, 2012 to decide where to live.
So, a great experiment? Could we really rebuild the country? Can we give up the big TVs and the tchotchkes that are made in Asia? Yipes: no more coffee. Have a nice hot cup of chicken broth for a wakeup. No bananas, but lots of oranges. Fruits and veggies only in season. No grapes from Chile in midwinter. Sigh.
No more Mercedes, no more Toyotas; all cars will be made by GM, or Chrysler, or Ford. I'm sure they and the UAW will be glad to have their pick of the Honda and other foreign factories that dot the South.
No more crops picked by immigrant labor. If we don't pick it, we don't eat it. No more nannies working under the table; we take care of our own children. No more landscaping crews invading the suburbs each day; we mow our own lawns. Restaurant prices will double -- no more illegals to hire for cash; we'll cook our own food.
The first time we built the country, we did it on the backs of Native Americans, Caribbean islanders, Asians, and, by far greatest, in number and in pain, African Americans. They did the labor that made this country, and they didn't get paid. They got murdered, instead.
Can we build America a second time, with everybody getting paid, and nobody murdered? I'm not so sure. I'm not sure that the children of the middle class will be overjoyed about working in factories, or laying brick, or any of the gazillion jobs that, not long ago, were what Americans did.
If we build the 50 foot walls, and shut down the internet and telephone lines at the border, and knock down all the satellites, surely bad things will happen. But what?
If we build the country a second time, regaining our dignity and our liberty may be worth all the hard labor. We will be able to take care of our sick and ailing, our blind and deaf, our demented and damaged. There will be plenty of jobs, millions, to make all the stuff we need. There won't be China or Saudi Arabia to enslave us. We will be working for us, not for them. We can go our own way, without consulting our foreign masters. Are we worried about China attacking Taiwan? Fine, worry all you want, but ultimately it is their problem to solve. We are Americans, after all, and we will defend only Americans. Taiwan, Pakistan, South Korea, Israel, and all the other members of the American protectorate will fend for themselves; there will be no American help. Not even remissions.
On the other hand, I, at least, think that our messing about in the world has caused way more harm than good, so not much is lost in complete isolation.
The fences need to go up, and we need to cut all ties with China, Saudi Arabia, and the others who own us. No more. They can come knocking at the door with our IOUs in their hands -- too bad. We don't need them; we don't need their oil, we don't need their tchochkes. Yes, there will be chaos. But not for long. We are a resourceful bunch. We did it once, on the cheap. We can do it again.
To almost repeat myself: God gave Noah the rainbow sign; no more slaves, full price this time.
If this doesn't get comments, nothing will.
Monday, September 6, 2010
Sickening Humiliation 3
Well, doesn't THAT make your hair stand on end?
The last thing I ever expected, or wanted, is that I be dependent on medications. Not just need them for something or other. Dependent, as in, needing the little puppies to keep on going.
So, I go to CVS to pick up the latest in the long line of neurological munchies that have been partially successful in controlling the TLE -- Alert Reader will remember TLE from previous entries -- and, when I get there, turns out it's gonna cost me about $160 for the month. For one med. And I need FIVE meds. What happened, I inquired, to my prescription drug coverage? Oh, you need a new card, they replied. Eventually, I paid out of pocket for enough to last the weekend, until I could get a new card, and we parted ways.
I went out to the parking lot and just sat in the car and shook. Alert Reader will also remember Miles the Cat. I had a vision of dividing a can of his cat food three ways, and sending him off to beg food from the neighbors, or maybe catch a mouse. Unfortunately, my mousing skills have declined over the years, and we will need him to bring home the bacon. Nice metaphor.
I have no doubt that this episode will all work out, my card will be restored, and I will again join the ranks -- maybe 25% -- of Americans with decent prescription drug coverage. Note the "Americans" in that sentence.
I need these meds to live. If there were no prescriptions coverage -- or only that incomprehensible, apparently marginally useful Medicare D -- we would be able to survive economically for a couple of years, eating up whatever savings there is. And then what? The one med I needed that day was actually a very standard drug, used for almost two decades, with a huge user base. Not expensive, relatively. If the others are similar -- and I think so, given the history and the use -- that brings us to a whopping $800 each month for meds. Call it 10K a year.
And that is only one of us, and only if I don't get any more problems -- both unlikely. Fine; call the annual amount, in about a decade, of maybe 25K, in 2010 dollars. At least.
So here I am: The Perfected American. All the good demographics. The most middle-class of the middle-class, highly educated, a credit to my community, hard-working, white, home-owning, English-speaking, non-criminal, so on, so forth -- and it comes to this. Neither of our sets of parents, three of whom reached very advanced age, and the fourth of whom is still advancing, ever had any problem paying for docs, or prescriptions, or hospitals. None. I'm now 65. When I hit 90, we and Miles the Cat will be watching carefully to see who goes first. We will all be holding knives and forks.
I also know a bunch of folks who worked for big companies -- Polaroid, ADL -- who had been promised, and had contributed to, decent pensions. The funds were looted by the administrations of the companies, and folks with 25, 35, 40 years service had nothing. Nothing. No 401K. And there was no recourse. And, of course, there was nothing for prescriptions, or health care. The victims were stunned for a bit, then raging and they still are. Fortunately, the miscreants were all held accountable; they were stripped of their loot and jailed. Oh, wait....that "held accountable" thing -- never has worked.
I've always wanted, and pushed for, and been willing to pay for, a health care system that cared for all. But that was theoretical; it was for a human right, and a social good. Not any more, bucko. Nossir. Now it's me, now it gets serious.
I am fearful for my own financial future, but I am ashamed that we won't take care of each other. We won't even take care of our own, of Americans. During the excruciating debate of the last two years, all I could hear was this: No. We will not care for our own.
How humiliating that was for us. Leave the wounded on the battlefield. You just go ahead and die out there; we won't even figure a way to get you some pills, and we won't say why. And so goes our freedom, and our basic right to live.
I get the sickening feeling that we've always been this way. and nothing will save us. There is an endless supply of white-toothed, big-haired hucksters groveling for cash, babbling about bootstraps, and, by golly, doing things the American way and living out the American Dream.
From here, that sounds to me like "Screw you; I got mine. Go die." American dream, indeed.
Let's look at it this way: If I ever have to choose between meds and gas, and the meds are more expensive than the gas, I'm gonna buy the gas, and one of the lighters conveniently sold at the gas stations, and I'm gonna use the spiffy iPhone to find some home addresses.
If the powers-that-be are so vicious and craven that they cut off my life -- well, they're gonna go before I do. The folks who run things have decided against providing medical care. Bad decision. There is a large, very personal cost for making that decision. Do the powerful really think that we won't remember, and that the impoverished dying elders, and their families, will praise them for what they've done? Are they that removed? That arrogant? Do they think that they and theirs are safe from harm? That there will be no retribution? Think again.
During the closing days of the Vietnam war, an interesting episode occurred: In September 1972, a man attempted to throw Robert McNamara over the rail of the ferry to Martha's Vineyard. McNamara was one of the few who really designed that war, and had personal culpability for it. The attempt was unsuccessful, and the assailant, who identified himself years later, reported that his rage over the war led to the attempt; he regretted failure. We were more benign in 1972, despite the demonstrations and long hair and all. Now we are not so forgiving.
None of the other main players in that war ever suffered so much as a day of discomfort. Same in Iraq, same in denying health care to Americans. How can we tolerate this kind of corruption? How can we allow the same deeply malignant fools to go on, day after day, killing some of us by what they do, and most of us by what they don't do? This has gone on all of my life.
The powerful need to personally suffer for the pain they cause. Remember what happened to McNamara, and how easy it is to get a can of gas, and then listen to part of an old country song:
God gave Noah the rainbow sign. No more water, the fire next time.
The last thing I ever expected, or wanted, is that I be dependent on medications. Not just need them for something or other. Dependent, as in, needing the little puppies to keep on going.
So, I go to CVS to pick up the latest in the long line of neurological munchies that have been partially successful in controlling the TLE -- Alert Reader will remember TLE from previous entries -- and, when I get there, turns out it's gonna cost me about $160 for the month. For one med. And I need FIVE meds. What happened, I inquired, to my prescription drug coverage? Oh, you need a new card, they replied. Eventually, I paid out of pocket for enough to last the weekend, until I could get a new card, and we parted ways.
I went out to the parking lot and just sat in the car and shook. Alert Reader will also remember Miles the Cat. I had a vision of dividing a can of his cat food three ways, and sending him off to beg food from the neighbors, or maybe catch a mouse. Unfortunately, my mousing skills have declined over the years, and we will need him to bring home the bacon. Nice metaphor.
I have no doubt that this episode will all work out, my card will be restored, and I will again join the ranks -- maybe 25% -- of Americans with decent prescription drug coverage. Note the "Americans" in that sentence.
I need these meds to live. If there were no prescriptions coverage -- or only that incomprehensible, apparently marginally useful Medicare D -- we would be able to survive economically for a couple of years, eating up whatever savings there is. And then what? The one med I needed that day was actually a very standard drug, used for almost two decades, with a huge user base. Not expensive, relatively. If the others are similar -- and I think so, given the history and the use -- that brings us to a whopping $800 each month for meds. Call it 10K a year.
And that is only one of us, and only if I don't get any more problems -- both unlikely. Fine; call the annual amount, in about a decade, of maybe 25K, in 2010 dollars. At least.
So here I am: The Perfected American. All the good demographics. The most middle-class of the middle-class, highly educated, a credit to my community, hard-working, white, home-owning, English-speaking, non-criminal, so on, so forth -- and it comes to this. Neither of our sets of parents, three of whom reached very advanced age, and the fourth of whom is still advancing, ever had any problem paying for docs, or prescriptions, or hospitals. None. I'm now 65. When I hit 90, we and Miles the Cat will be watching carefully to see who goes first. We will all be holding knives and forks.
I also know a bunch of folks who worked for big companies -- Polaroid, ADL -- who had been promised, and had contributed to, decent pensions. The funds were looted by the administrations of the companies, and folks with 25, 35, 40 years service had nothing. Nothing. No 401K. And there was no recourse. And, of course, there was nothing for prescriptions, or health care. The victims were stunned for a bit, then raging and they still are. Fortunately, the miscreants were all held accountable; they were stripped of their loot and jailed. Oh, wait....that "held accountable" thing -- never has worked.
I've always wanted, and pushed for, and been willing to pay for, a health care system that cared for all. But that was theoretical; it was for a human right, and a social good. Not any more, bucko. Nossir. Now it's me, now it gets serious.
I am fearful for my own financial future, but I am ashamed that we won't take care of each other. We won't even take care of our own, of Americans. During the excruciating debate of the last two years, all I could hear was this: No. We will not care for our own.
How humiliating that was for us. Leave the wounded on the battlefield. You just go ahead and die out there; we won't even figure a way to get you some pills, and we won't say why. And so goes our freedom, and our basic right to live.
I get the sickening feeling that we've always been this way. and nothing will save us. There is an endless supply of white-toothed, big-haired hucksters groveling for cash, babbling about bootstraps, and, by golly, doing things the American way and living out the American Dream.
From here, that sounds to me like "Screw you; I got mine. Go die." American dream, indeed.
Let's look at it this way: If I ever have to choose between meds and gas, and the meds are more expensive than the gas, I'm gonna buy the gas, and one of the lighters conveniently sold at the gas stations, and I'm gonna use the spiffy iPhone to find some home addresses.
If the powers-that-be are so vicious and craven that they cut off my life -- well, they're gonna go before I do. The folks who run things have decided against providing medical care. Bad decision. There is a large, very personal cost for making that decision. Do the powerful really think that we won't remember, and that the impoverished dying elders, and their families, will praise them for what they've done? Are they that removed? That arrogant? Do they think that they and theirs are safe from harm? That there will be no retribution? Think again.
During the closing days of the Vietnam war, an interesting episode occurred: In September 1972, a man attempted to throw Robert McNamara over the rail of the ferry to Martha's Vineyard. McNamara was one of the few who really designed that war, and had personal culpability for it. The attempt was unsuccessful, and the assailant, who identified himself years later, reported that his rage over the war led to the attempt; he regretted failure. We were more benign in 1972, despite the demonstrations and long hair and all. Now we are not so forgiving.
None of the other main players in that war ever suffered so much as a day of discomfort. Same in Iraq, same in denying health care to Americans. How can we tolerate this kind of corruption? How can we allow the same deeply malignant fools to go on, day after day, killing some of us by what they do, and most of us by what they don't do? This has gone on all of my life.
The powerful need to personally suffer for the pain they cause. Remember what happened to McNamara, and how easy it is to get a can of gas, and then listen to part of an old country song:
God gave Noah the rainbow sign. No more water, the fire next time.
Thursday, August 26, 2010
Sickening Humiliation 2
The Master (ok, Freud) used the amoeba as a metaphor for illness and depression. In normal times, the amoeba moves by extending a part of itself; if everything is ok, the rest of the little fella catches up to the extension, called a pseudopod. And so it moves to get food, find a nice starter house, go to those peculiar amoeba family reunions.
But in bad times, if the amoeba is ill or injured, no pseudopods. Wait a while, regain strength, think about amoeba-type things, and then consider moving on.
When people get sick or hurt, same thing. No new risks, no new challenges; take care of the immediate, then hunker down to heal and rest. Not always the best strategy, but not so bad, either. Evolution and all.
Well, then. Back to 9/12/2001. We had just suffered a terrible injury. An amoeba would have hunkered down. The getting injured part was over, the damage to us was done. No more pseudopods for us, not for a while. The evolutionary wisdom of the amoeba, and just about any animal larger than an amoeba.
Instead, we went all over the world -- really ALL over the world -- and just killed a lot of people. And then, the very, very strange part: we barely noticed. It became the normal. The only question was where and when it would stop, and nobody cared very much. Of course we didn't. We threw a blanket over our injury, and did what was normalizing for us: just kill a lot of people.
During my lifetime, there has never been anything more normal. I was born in time for Hiroshima, spent early youth reading about the dead in Korea, put my head under the desk like everybody else. Cuba, Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Panama, Iraq, Afghanistan, Somalia. Salvador, Nicaragua, Lebanon. Even Granada, but, hey, Granada was a real threat. Now I'm channeling Billy Joel.
I could go on. Nothing is more normal to our country than killing people, so that is what we did when we were injured. A very strange, disturbing idea, and I believe it completely: we kill people not for revenge, not for defense, not out of rage. We kill to be normal again. Yipes.
As they would say in mind-brain land, there was a physical injury -- the towers were our damaged organ. We made it all normal, and tidied up around it, and, when a little too much blood leaked out (torture, say, or mass murder), gave out more normalizing justifications: we had to do it, blah, blah. After all, this is what anyone would do. All mind-stuff, all about what us normal tribal people do. And what a country does, after an injury. Whew. We may be injured, but we act normal, and talk normal, and do normal things.
Me, too. After my brain was injured, it was left to the mind to coat it all with a nice chrome plating of normalcy. I acted as I had before, talked as I had before. When people noticed a small limp, I said I had a sore knee, and that was that.
Until about four years later. The onset of the dreaded TLE -- Temporal Lobe Epilepsy, to you civilians out there. Hallucinatory smells, short episodes of humiliating despair, the odd jerky movement, some humming in my ears. No loss of consciousness. Tiny little baby-step seizures.
But, woo-hoo, personality changes. Episodes of barely controlled rage; writing at great length about random stuff (heh!), moodiness, asceticism about food and drink and sleep. Grand theories about everything, from time travel to cat genetics. And, my heavens, pressure of speech. Oh, such pressure of speech.
I see it this way: my brain damage was turning into mind damage, and I couldn't control what about me was public. I began to be talked about: "Oh, how's he doing now?" when I wasn't present -- which, incidentally, is about as bad as it gets for the Irish. This whole blog is an effort to persuade myself, and everybody else, that, hey, I'm still a member in full standing of the tribe, just like I used to be. I want to control the flow of information. What I need is an Office of Public Communication.
I'm also starting to think that the whole enterprise is not going to work. The amount of brain pathology is simply too great, and too much of my social behavior is too strange; I'm on the edge of the tribe, and moving toward the outside.
And outside is not a place you want to be. Outside means all the connections are broken. Outside is true psychosis, deep Alzheimer's, a few other things that can just make it all crash. Really, really not a place you want to be. Injury to the brain becoming the terminal disease of the mind. Hey, we see it all the time: damaged brains chugging along for years; and really, truly dead minds. See? Mind and brain are categorically different. Maybe I'm right about all this stuff after all, you doubting weasels. I'll start getting my Nobel speech ready tomorrow. The children will know how to behave at the celebratory dinner, even if I can't pull it off.
Now, where was I about all these wars and stuff? Oh, yeah, random murder as a normalizing strategy. Well, I need a new normalizing strategy, better mind-stuff. Random murder might work for the good old USA, but probably not for me. Not even in the short run. And, Miles the Cat would surely disapprove, as he does with most human behavior.
I think a lot about music as mind-stuff that can normalize me, talking without words, being part of the world; I think less about technical stuff, working without words, and even less about craft stuff, building without words. Money stuff, accumulating without words, would be fine, but I just don't know how to make it go.
Losing trust in my own words has been a pretty nasty blow, and now I need something else for mind-stuff, so that I'm still a full tribal member.
Enough!!
Alert Reader will not be surprised that I'll still find enough insightful prattle to continue to blog.
But in bad times, if the amoeba is ill or injured, no pseudopods. Wait a while, regain strength, think about amoeba-type things, and then consider moving on.
When people get sick or hurt, same thing. No new risks, no new challenges; take care of the immediate, then hunker down to heal and rest. Not always the best strategy, but not so bad, either. Evolution and all.
Well, then. Back to 9/12/2001. We had just suffered a terrible injury. An amoeba would have hunkered down. The getting injured part was over, the damage to us was done. No more pseudopods for us, not for a while. The evolutionary wisdom of the amoeba, and just about any animal larger than an amoeba.
Instead, we went all over the world -- really ALL over the world -- and just killed a lot of people. And then, the very, very strange part: we barely noticed. It became the normal. The only question was where and when it would stop, and nobody cared very much. Of course we didn't. We threw a blanket over our injury, and did what was normalizing for us: just kill a lot of people.
During my lifetime, there has never been anything more normal. I was born in time for Hiroshima, spent early youth reading about the dead in Korea, put my head under the desk like everybody else. Cuba, Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Panama, Iraq, Afghanistan, Somalia. Salvador, Nicaragua, Lebanon. Even Granada, but, hey, Granada was a real threat. Now I'm channeling Billy Joel.
I could go on. Nothing is more normal to our country than killing people, so that is what we did when we were injured. A very strange, disturbing idea, and I believe it completely: we kill people not for revenge, not for defense, not out of rage. We kill to be normal again. Yipes.
As they would say in mind-brain land, there was a physical injury -- the towers were our damaged organ. We made it all normal, and tidied up around it, and, when a little too much blood leaked out (torture, say, or mass murder), gave out more normalizing justifications: we had to do it, blah, blah. After all, this is what anyone would do. All mind-stuff, all about what us normal tribal people do. And what a country does, after an injury. Whew. We may be injured, but we act normal, and talk normal, and do normal things.
Me, too. After my brain was injured, it was left to the mind to coat it all with a nice chrome plating of normalcy. I acted as I had before, talked as I had before. When people noticed a small limp, I said I had a sore knee, and that was that.
Until about four years later. The onset of the dreaded TLE -- Temporal Lobe Epilepsy, to you civilians out there. Hallucinatory smells, short episodes of humiliating despair, the odd jerky movement, some humming in my ears. No loss of consciousness. Tiny little baby-step seizures.
But, woo-hoo, personality changes. Episodes of barely controlled rage; writing at great length about random stuff (heh!), moodiness, asceticism about food and drink and sleep. Grand theories about everything, from time travel to cat genetics. And, my heavens, pressure of speech. Oh, such pressure of speech.
I see it this way: my brain damage was turning into mind damage, and I couldn't control what about me was public. I began to be talked about: "Oh, how's he doing now?" when I wasn't present -- which, incidentally, is about as bad as it gets for the Irish. This whole blog is an effort to persuade myself, and everybody else, that, hey, I'm still a member in full standing of the tribe, just like I used to be. I want to control the flow of information. What I need is an Office of Public Communication.
I'm also starting to think that the whole enterprise is not going to work. The amount of brain pathology is simply too great, and too much of my social behavior is too strange; I'm on the edge of the tribe, and moving toward the outside.
And outside is not a place you want to be. Outside means all the connections are broken. Outside is true psychosis, deep Alzheimer's, a few other things that can just make it all crash. Really, really not a place you want to be. Injury to the brain becoming the terminal disease of the mind. Hey, we see it all the time: damaged brains chugging along for years; and really, truly dead minds. See? Mind and brain are categorically different. Maybe I'm right about all this stuff after all, you doubting weasels. I'll start getting my Nobel speech ready tomorrow. The children will know how to behave at the celebratory dinner, even if I can't pull it off.
Now, where was I about all these wars and stuff? Oh, yeah, random murder as a normalizing strategy. Well, I need a new normalizing strategy, better mind-stuff. Random murder might work for the good old USA, but probably not for me. Not even in the short run. And, Miles the Cat would surely disapprove, as he does with most human behavior.
I think a lot about music as mind-stuff that can normalize me, talking without words, being part of the world; I think less about technical stuff, working without words, and even less about craft stuff, building without words. Money stuff, accumulating without words, would be fine, but I just don't know how to make it go.
Losing trust in my own words has been a pretty nasty blow, and now I need something else for mind-stuff, so that I'm still a full tribal member.
Enough!!
Alert Reader will not be surprised that I'll still find enough insightful prattle to continue to blog.
Monday, August 16, 2010
Sickening Humiliation
The day after 9/11, every airplane in the country was grounded but one, the one used to fly some Saudis home. The corruption of that single act enraged me more than the destruction of the towers. I suppose I can stand our being attacked, but being reduced to a groveling nation, humiliating ourselves when we needed to be strong.....no. I didn't hear a collective howl about our sniveling to the Saudis. None.
There is less plain old freedom here, of course; at their whim, the repressive forces of the state can make me disappear, just like the corrupt regimes in Guatemala and Salvadore and Argentina and all the others used to do. In 1970, there were trials for some of the more heroic and visible domestic reformers; now, maybe, there would just be rendition. Jose Padilla, a U.S. citizen, from Chicago, charged with no crime, was held for almost five years before he was allowed to see a lawyer; by that time, his mind had been destroyed. He was one of us, and I am ashamed at how we treated him.
But, so what? We've done a lot worse. This is what African Americans have lived with for centuries. The big difference, of course, is that their freedom was taken from them. The rest of us gave ours away.
We used to say, in the heyday of the changes around 1970, that someone we didn't like was a lapdog for the capitalist pigs. Well, now it has been reversed; now, we are all lapdogs for the non-capitalists pigs, the king of the Saudis and the communist regime in China. Funny how that worked out. We agree that they run the show; we tremble at the possibility that we might fall from their favor, we reassure ourselves that they need us as much as we need them, and so on. Just feeble attempts to get our dignity back. Too late; all but the most obtuse know who owns us.
Some groups have fewer constraints now. African Americans, in some important ways. Women, in some less important ways. Gay folks, but still pretty qualified. And against this we have the tremendous loss of economic freedom. Our economic best and brightest have given our enormous wealth to the Saudis and Chinese, for some oil and a bunch of plastic tchotchkes. Miles the Cat could have gotten a better bargain. It's not so much that we owe them a lot of money; debt we could just pay off, and be done with it. The problem is that we can't live without the stuff we get from them.
Pulling it partly together: Choice, freedom, and so on all describe the varying number of constraints on us. More constraints, less choice, less freedom.
What is the freedom of someone unable to move, say, two limbs, after a stroke. Not much. Pretty tough constraints, pretty great loss of freedom. What is the freedom of a country unable live without oil and Chinese economic slavery? Not much. We spend so much of our lives giving money to those people!! There is almost nothing left. Just a few toys, and some crappy houses and cars. We can't even take care of all our people! Dignity? In both the stroke person, and the crippled country, not much. Ah, the endless small humiliations of dependency, the endless wishing for what had been before. Now I know why the conservatives want to go backward; some stuff was pretty bad back then, but at least we could pretend that we ran the world. Now, all we see are constraints and failures.
I know it's a difficult case to make: How is debt to the Saudis the same kind of thing as damage to the brain? Sounds like some rejected SAT question.
Well, that's the point of the whole damn blog, as Alert Reader knows by now. Both the debt and the damage can pass under the radar, and most often do. When there is an autopsy, pretty severe brain disease is often found, in folks who acted perfectly well until the truck hit them. When there is an Enron, the disease of the economy is found in a company that had seemed perfectly well until the market hit it.
When things go wrong, when life is pushed out of being ordinary, we notice. When the price of gas hits $1o.00, we suddenly see economic pathology. When actions or speech get strange enough, we suddenly see mind pathology.
Damage can be to the economy, or to the brain, but it is only when the social fact, the social pathology, emerges that we know about the loss of freedom -- the price at the pump, the scrambled mind, or the scrambled limbs. We don't look at the brain, and say, wow, that brain is damaged. We look at how someone fits into the world, and only then look at the brain. We look at how a person can be ordinary, and then we decide about pathology.
The chorus, once more: brain is about wet stuff, mind is about how well we fit into the tribe.
Is there any way to be more obscure? I'm working on it, with the help of Miles the Cat. I've got a few ideas....and, BTW, I think this was a pretty good blog entry.
If you don't, tell me I'm a complete bozo -- c'mon, Alert Readers!!! Relieve me of the delusion that I am part of the fabric of ordinary life.
There is less plain old freedom here, of course; at their whim, the repressive forces of the state can make me disappear, just like the corrupt regimes in Guatemala and Salvadore and Argentina and all the others used to do. In 1970, there were trials for some of the more heroic and visible domestic reformers; now, maybe, there would just be rendition. Jose Padilla, a U.S. citizen, from Chicago, charged with no crime, was held for almost five years before he was allowed to see a lawyer; by that time, his mind had been destroyed. He was one of us, and I am ashamed at how we treated him.
But, so what? We've done a lot worse. This is what African Americans have lived with for centuries. The big difference, of course, is that their freedom was taken from them. The rest of us gave ours away.
We used to say, in the heyday of the changes around 1970, that someone we didn't like was a lapdog for the capitalist pigs. Well, now it has been reversed; now, we are all lapdogs for the non-capitalists pigs, the king of the Saudis and the communist regime in China. Funny how that worked out. We agree that they run the show; we tremble at the possibility that we might fall from their favor, we reassure ourselves that they need us as much as we need them, and so on. Just feeble attempts to get our dignity back. Too late; all but the most obtuse know who owns us.
Some groups have fewer constraints now. African Americans, in some important ways. Women, in some less important ways. Gay folks, but still pretty qualified. And against this we have the tremendous loss of economic freedom. Our economic best and brightest have given our enormous wealth to the Saudis and Chinese, for some oil and a bunch of plastic tchotchkes. Miles the Cat could have gotten a better bargain. It's not so much that we owe them a lot of money; debt we could just pay off, and be done with it. The problem is that we can't live without the stuff we get from them.
Pulling it partly together: Choice, freedom, and so on all describe the varying number of constraints on us. More constraints, less choice, less freedom.
What is the freedom of someone unable to move, say, two limbs, after a stroke. Not much. Pretty tough constraints, pretty great loss of freedom. What is the freedom of a country unable live without oil and Chinese economic slavery? Not much. We spend so much of our lives giving money to those people!! There is almost nothing left. Just a few toys, and some crappy houses and cars. We can't even take care of all our people! Dignity? In both the stroke person, and the crippled country, not much. Ah, the endless small humiliations of dependency, the endless wishing for what had been before. Now I know why the conservatives want to go backward; some stuff was pretty bad back then, but at least we could pretend that we ran the world. Now, all we see are constraints and failures.
I know it's a difficult case to make: How is debt to the Saudis the same kind of thing as damage to the brain? Sounds like some rejected SAT question.
Well, that's the point of the whole damn blog, as Alert Reader knows by now. Both the debt and the damage can pass under the radar, and most often do. When there is an autopsy, pretty severe brain disease is often found, in folks who acted perfectly well until the truck hit them. When there is an Enron, the disease of the economy is found in a company that had seemed perfectly well until the market hit it.
When things go wrong, when life is pushed out of being ordinary, we notice. When the price of gas hits $1o.00, we suddenly see economic pathology. When actions or speech get strange enough, we suddenly see mind pathology.
Damage can be to the economy, or to the brain, but it is only when the social fact, the social pathology, emerges that we know about the loss of freedom -- the price at the pump, the scrambled mind, or the scrambled limbs. We don't look at the brain, and say, wow, that brain is damaged. We look at how someone fits into the world, and only then look at the brain. We look at how a person can be ordinary, and then we decide about pathology.
The chorus, once more: brain is about wet stuff, mind is about how well we fit into the tribe.
Is there any way to be more obscure? I'm working on it, with the help of Miles the Cat. I've got a few ideas....and, BTW, I think this was a pretty good blog entry.
If you don't, tell me I'm a complete bozo -- c'mon, Alert Readers!!! Relieve me of the delusion that I am part of the fabric of ordinary life.
Thursday, August 12, 2010
Crosses and Croissants Get Sticks in the Eye
It is apparent that putting a Muslim community center close to the 9/11 site is the equivalent of a stick in the eye to many non-Muslim Americans. Why be so inflammatory?
I don't know, since I haven't spoken to any Muslims about the situation. I do know that if I were an American Muslim whose family had been here for a long time, and who had been demonized, as middle-eastern folks were after 9/11, this would be an opportunity I couldn't pass up. Yipes -- I got to conditionals, like I promised before. And I got in a performative, by the way!!! A two-fer!!
We are a country, like most, with the political intelligence of Miles the Cat. The idea that Muslim folks who have lived down the street for the last 20 years should beg my forgiveness for 9/11 sounds like a bit much. Yet, that's just what we required. "I don't hear the moderate Muslims condemning the use of violence!!", went the refrain. We want them to satisfy our -- what? All this is about the ultimate function of so much of ordinary language: to determine who belongs, and who doesn't. In this instance, if you grovel, you make the cut. Our minds can be put to rest.
I was around when the JDL was causing quite a stir, and made violence very personal. There were constant, tiresome entreaties to mainstream Jewish organizations to disown the JDL. Well, the long-standing groups never owned them in the first place, and found themselves stuck between defending a bunch of pretty nasty folks, or else capitulating to the demands of a society that had never put out much effort to defend Jewish communities here or anywhere else. Nice choices. It was very hard for them to make up their minds how to respond.
I didn't hear the reactionaries condemning the use of violence after Oklahoma City, either. I do often hear holier-than-thou rants about the Taliban targeting police and village elders; then I hear about the American list of a thousand Taliban who have been singled out for assassination. No need to grovel here; this is pure American stuff, and doesn't move any of us outside.
It reminds me of the old SNCC days. SNCC was the most abrasive of African-American action groups in the 60s. Their leader was Stokely Carmichael, a very charismatic and smart man. He was hounded by the press, at literally every opportunity (how tired of it all he must have been!!): Would he renounce violence? He readily agreed that he would be glad to sit down with the white sheriffs of Alabama and Mississippi and they would all issue a joint statement renouncing violence. He had a little smile as he said this. For a century, the white sheriffs had terrorized African-Americans throughout the South, with a systematic brutality that murdered and maimed, and SNCC was supposed to renounce violence?? A stick in the eye indeed. The meeting never happened. The sheriffs wouldn't change their minds about their vision of race, and refused to grovel, as well they might. But, neither did Stokely Carmichael, and his sparkling mind enchanted millions.
To demand renunciation is to seek capitulation, and renunciation is a ritual of self-loathing. There is a complex relationship between power, capitulation, renunciation and sanctimony. It seems always to be the same. Why do we do this? Still, it all comes down to this: who is a truly one of us, and who not.
In the 1490s, the Jews of Spain were given a choice: find another place to live, convert to Christianity, or be killed. Many did leave, about 160,000, going primarily to the Netherlands and Turkey. About 20,000 died before getting to somewhere welcome. Some estimates double all these numbers. About 50,000 changed their minds about being Christians, going through ritual after ritual to prove that they were really converted. They were called "conversos". Their lives have been the subject of many books and movies; imagine the territory they present!! But they also a good object lesson in ordinary language.
The conversions were -- like I've been saying, all you folks who have been paying attention -- performative utterances. Saying "I hereby convert..." or some such thing, was the act that changed someone from an apostate to a Christian, from an enemy of Spain to a citizen of Spain.
And, the conversions? Surprise!! Many of them were false. Most conversos had no intention of converting, but they were willing to pretend. Torquemada, of the famed Inquisition, was a tad suspicious of them, as you can imagine, and tested them through torture. He was great at torture. But what did he want? The more he tortured, the more false declarations he heard. From the distance of five centuries, it sure looks like he just had fun torturing. Hmmm.
Even The Godfather got into the act: recall the scene of Michael Corleone reciting, at his nephew's baptism, "I renounce Satan and all his works", and at the same time murdering the baby's father. Renouncing becoming an art form.
So, conditionals. As ifs. Is the conversion an as if? Were the conversos acting as if they had converted? Would we say, knowing that their intention was to deceive, that they had actually converted? They were listed on church rolls, after all. And would we say that Michael Corleone meant what he said when he renounced Satan? Most people, I think, would say no. Only those with truly wishful thinking would believe otherwise. Torquemada was not a wishful thinker, but he ultimately accepted many of the conversos. Michael Corleone's sister was not naive, but she accepted his explanations. The pressure of the community sometimes triumphs.
The language of mind meets the language of persecution. No questions of brains here, just the conversions of minds, just rituals of humiliation and deceit, in which all participants go through the "as if" motions. And like all the rest of the performative utterances, talk is cheap, and talk is the most valuable tool of life -- for all these folks, to stay alive.
But, we have come around to it again. All this talk is about mind fact, social fact, not brain fact. It is about enforcing social norms, deciding who is a part of the tribe and who is to be an outcast. It is not about brain function; it is about mind function. Mind appears again this time, as so often, in the vestments of religion. The religious have been having their way with minds, language, and social compliance for a pretty long time. Sanctimony and humiliation do wonderful work.
And here I am. What if all the docs conclude that my mind is damaged, just as my brain is? How would they, and I, know? Well, if my behavior is so odd, so strange, so deviant that I cannot be discussed as a regular human, a full person, then I am expunged from the group. I can pretend, maybe, like a converso, but someone so damaged would have a hard time getting by. I can renounce my mind, like Michael Corleone did. But even that much groveling might not work; ultimately, it didn't work for him.
Hard to imagine the devastation. And is it a performative? Does the act of uttering become a promise? A prediction? A description? I've been around the mental health types for too long to think that those are all the same thing. Maybe the performative is a way of getting more money from insurance companies. It is hard to avoid thinking of diagnoses, in psychiatry always, and neurology often, as performatives. Saying it brings it into being, like a promise or a bet or a marriage.
This chapter is way too long, I think, but I feel in the grip of the TLE, and just can't stop. The message scrawled on the mirror, in the lipstick of the victim, who is lying on the floor in a pool of blood: "Stop me before I talk again". A command? A taunt? A statement of intent? A plea? We've come a long way. And I haven't even mentioned ambivalence!!!
Probably the one thing I haven't mentioned.
I don't know, since I haven't spoken to any Muslims about the situation. I do know that if I were an American Muslim whose family had been here for a long time, and who had been demonized, as middle-eastern folks were after 9/11, this would be an opportunity I couldn't pass up. Yipes -- I got to conditionals, like I promised before. And I got in a performative, by the way!!! A two-fer!!
We are a country, like most, with the political intelligence of Miles the Cat. The idea that Muslim folks who have lived down the street for the last 20 years should beg my forgiveness for 9/11 sounds like a bit much. Yet, that's just what we required. "I don't hear the moderate Muslims condemning the use of violence!!", went the refrain. We want them to satisfy our -- what? All this is about the ultimate function of so much of ordinary language: to determine who belongs, and who doesn't. In this instance, if you grovel, you make the cut. Our minds can be put to rest.
I was around when the JDL was causing quite a stir, and made violence very personal. There were constant, tiresome entreaties to mainstream Jewish organizations to disown the JDL. Well, the long-standing groups never owned them in the first place, and found themselves stuck between defending a bunch of pretty nasty folks, or else capitulating to the demands of a society that had never put out much effort to defend Jewish communities here or anywhere else. Nice choices. It was very hard for them to make up their minds how to respond.
I didn't hear the reactionaries condemning the use of violence after Oklahoma City, either. I do often hear holier-than-thou rants about the Taliban targeting police and village elders; then I hear about the American list of a thousand Taliban who have been singled out for assassination. No need to grovel here; this is pure American stuff, and doesn't move any of us outside.
It reminds me of the old SNCC days. SNCC was the most abrasive of African-American action groups in the 60s. Their leader was Stokely Carmichael, a very charismatic and smart man. He was hounded by the press, at literally every opportunity (how tired of it all he must have been!!): Would he renounce violence? He readily agreed that he would be glad to sit down with the white sheriffs of Alabama and Mississippi and they would all issue a joint statement renouncing violence. He had a little smile as he said this. For a century, the white sheriffs had terrorized African-Americans throughout the South, with a systematic brutality that murdered and maimed, and SNCC was supposed to renounce violence?? A stick in the eye indeed. The meeting never happened. The sheriffs wouldn't change their minds about their vision of race, and refused to grovel, as well they might. But, neither did Stokely Carmichael, and his sparkling mind enchanted millions.
To demand renunciation is to seek capitulation, and renunciation is a ritual of self-loathing. There is a complex relationship between power, capitulation, renunciation and sanctimony. It seems always to be the same. Why do we do this? Still, it all comes down to this: who is a truly one of us, and who not.
In the 1490s, the Jews of Spain were given a choice: find another place to live, convert to Christianity, or be killed. Many did leave, about 160,000, going primarily to the Netherlands and Turkey. About 20,000 died before getting to somewhere welcome. Some estimates double all these numbers. About 50,000 changed their minds about being Christians, going through ritual after ritual to prove that they were really converted. They were called "conversos". Their lives have been the subject of many books and movies; imagine the territory they present!! But they also a good object lesson in ordinary language.
The conversions were -- like I've been saying, all you folks who have been paying attention -- performative utterances. Saying "I hereby convert..." or some such thing, was the act that changed someone from an apostate to a Christian, from an enemy of Spain to a citizen of Spain.
And, the conversions? Surprise!! Many of them were false. Most conversos had no intention of converting, but they were willing to pretend. Torquemada, of the famed Inquisition, was a tad suspicious of them, as you can imagine, and tested them through torture. He was great at torture. But what did he want? The more he tortured, the more false declarations he heard. From the distance of five centuries, it sure looks like he just had fun torturing. Hmmm.
Even The Godfather got into the act: recall the scene of Michael Corleone reciting, at his nephew's baptism, "I renounce Satan and all his works", and at the same time murdering the baby's father. Renouncing becoming an art form.
So, conditionals. As ifs. Is the conversion an as if? Were the conversos acting as if they had converted? Would we say, knowing that their intention was to deceive, that they had actually converted? They were listed on church rolls, after all. And would we say that Michael Corleone meant what he said when he renounced Satan? Most people, I think, would say no. Only those with truly wishful thinking would believe otherwise. Torquemada was not a wishful thinker, but he ultimately accepted many of the conversos. Michael Corleone's sister was not naive, but she accepted his explanations. The pressure of the community sometimes triumphs.
The language of mind meets the language of persecution. No questions of brains here, just the conversions of minds, just rituals of humiliation and deceit, in which all participants go through the "as if" motions. And like all the rest of the performative utterances, talk is cheap, and talk is the most valuable tool of life -- for all these folks, to stay alive.
But, we have come around to it again. All this talk is about mind fact, social fact, not brain fact. It is about enforcing social norms, deciding who is a part of the tribe and who is to be an outcast. It is not about brain function; it is about mind function. Mind appears again this time, as so often, in the vestments of religion. The religious have been having their way with minds, language, and social compliance for a pretty long time. Sanctimony and humiliation do wonderful work.
And here I am. What if all the docs conclude that my mind is damaged, just as my brain is? How would they, and I, know? Well, if my behavior is so odd, so strange, so deviant that I cannot be discussed as a regular human, a full person, then I am expunged from the group. I can pretend, maybe, like a converso, but someone so damaged would have a hard time getting by. I can renounce my mind, like Michael Corleone did. But even that much groveling might not work; ultimately, it didn't work for him.
Hard to imagine the devastation. And is it a performative? Does the act of uttering become a promise? A prediction? A description? I've been around the mental health types for too long to think that those are all the same thing. Maybe the performative is a way of getting more money from insurance companies. It is hard to avoid thinking of diagnoses, in psychiatry always, and neurology often, as performatives. Saying it brings it into being, like a promise or a bet or a marriage.
This chapter is way too long, I think, but I feel in the grip of the TLE, and just can't stop. The message scrawled on the mirror, in the lipstick of the victim, who is lying on the floor in a pool of blood: "Stop me before I talk again". A command? A taunt? A statement of intent? A plea? We've come a long way. And I haven't even mentioned ambivalence!!!
Probably the one thing I haven't mentioned.
Friday, August 6, 2010
Crosses and Crescents. Or hot cross buns and croissants?
The current contretemps about the Islamic Community Center in lower Manhattan, hard by the WTC site, is pretty easy to get goofy about, and get goofy we have. I kept thinking it reminded me of something, and so it does:
The caption:
In 1998, Polish nationalists embarked upon a mission to put up 152 Christian crosses in honor of the Polish Catholic resistance fighters who were executed by the Nazis in a gravel pit behind Block 11 at the main Auschwitz concentration camp. This was their way of protesting Jewish demands, over the previous 10 years, that the 26-foot souvenir cross from a Mass, said by the Pope at Birkenau, be removed. The basic attitude of the Poles, openly expressed, was "This is our country. You have your country and we have ours. If we want to put up a Catholic Cross in our country, we'll put it."
The result:
Unimaginable without actually seeing the picture.
Not much of a testament to Polish carpentry skills. Ultimately, a compromise of sorts was reached, and the trash crosses came down. The original remained. The official Catholic Church justification for all this was that, after all, there had been some Catholics executed. In addition to what is in the photos, a convent has been established in the former administrative building.
What is there to be said?
How does this map on to the Islamic Center/WTC controversy? I don't know. I first felt a kind of "Yipes!", that the Islamic building was planned, a startle. But then, when I remembered the Auschwitz episode, it got a little more complicated. I guess my feeling now is that 9/11 is notable in modern times for the purity of its malevolence. There was certainly no attempt to spare any religion, class, ethnicity, origin, gender -- anybody, or any group. Not even a pretense. Just, make a hole in the earth. How strange, at a time in history in which most violent episodes pretend to be so selective. Previous terrorist episodes were aimed at particular groups, most frequently, in my lifetime, Israelis and African-Americans. Sometimes Europeans, sometimes Americans, but always members of a group. Pinpoint bombing, after all, has ended civilian casualties in....well, never mind.
9/11 was purely about geography. There is also the Hiroshima/Nagasaki (from here, H/N) anniversary this week. I have read much of the rationalizations people made at the time. Very few talk about killing lots of people. Most talk about the hole in the ground that they wanted to make. I must say, I still don't understand why we couldn't build a fence around the place, in 1945, and put a little doorbell in the fence, with a sign saying "Ring when you want to talk", and then sit back and drop a few bombs on factories and trains and food supply systems now and then, just to show them we were still hanging on. But there was some reason we couldn't. Didn't make a nice hole in the ground.
That's the glib response, and it contains a sliver of reality. What is the difference between killing a hundred thousand Japanese with one bomb, and a similar number of Jews, or Cambodians, or Rwandans, or Vietnamese, over time? There is a tremendous difference.
I suppose most of my response to it all is about collective guilt. I still feel like I did not do nearly enough, in my salad days, to end the Vietnam episode. We did a lot, but we never made the warmongers (!) pay for their misdeeds, and that failure has cost us dearly. Nixon, Johnson, and their lackeys (as we said then) should have died in prison, rather than being allowed to live out their lives in luxury. Perhaps Bush might have been just a little less impulsive with the spectre of a grim federal prison facing him. But perhaps not. In these cases, history was written by the losers.
So, do all the Germans of 1946 bear the responsibility for the Holocaust? Yup. Do all the Americans of 1973 bear the responsibility for the Vietnam invasion? Yup. Do all the Americans of 2002 bear the responsibility for the Iraq invasion? Yup. Cambodians for genocide? Yup. I can go on. But do Muslims bear the responsibility for 9/11? I'm not so sure.
I think both Hiroshima/Nagasaki and WTC have some things in common. For one, only a few people knew what was going to happen. Both were unique events, black swans, as they are now called. Americans couldn't have stopped H/N, and Muslims couldn't have stopped 9/11. And, so, no chance for collective guilt. No collective guilt for me over H/N, or for Muslims over 9/11.
I think I obsess about collective guilt too much, but I also think everybody else obsesses too little. As the moralists say, we should be "held accountable". I love that phrase. How to be accountable for a million dead? One dead? Oh, sure: Take full responsibility.
Well, I suppose, build the building in lower Manhattan. We didn't see Hiroshima/Nagasaki coming, and they didn't see 9/11 coming. No guilt involved, and this was decided by a grand connoisseur of collective guilt. And we need to be "held accountable" for the tens and hundreds of thousands we have killed in the last decade.
Thanks to scrapbookpages.com for the photos and caption.
The caption:
In 1998, Polish nationalists embarked upon a mission to put up 152 Christian crosses in honor of the Polish Catholic resistance fighters who were executed by the Nazis in a gravel pit behind Block 11 at the main Auschwitz concentration camp. This was their way of protesting Jewish demands, over the previous 10 years, that the 26-foot souvenir cross from a Mass, said by the Pope at Birkenau, be removed. The basic attitude of the Poles, openly expressed, was "This is our country. You have your country and we have ours. If we want to put up a Catholic Cross in our country, we'll put it."
The result:
Unimaginable without actually seeing the picture.
Not much of a testament to Polish carpentry skills. Ultimately, a compromise of sorts was reached, and the trash crosses came down. The original remained. The official Catholic Church justification for all this was that, after all, there had been some Catholics executed. In addition to what is in the photos, a convent has been established in the former administrative building.
What is there to be said?
How does this map on to the Islamic Center/WTC controversy? I don't know. I first felt a kind of "Yipes!", that the Islamic building was planned, a startle. But then, when I remembered the Auschwitz episode, it got a little more complicated. I guess my feeling now is that 9/11 is notable in modern times for the purity of its malevolence. There was certainly no attempt to spare any religion, class, ethnicity, origin, gender -- anybody, or any group. Not even a pretense. Just, make a hole in the earth. How strange, at a time in history in which most violent episodes pretend to be so selective. Previous terrorist episodes were aimed at particular groups, most frequently, in my lifetime, Israelis and African-Americans. Sometimes Europeans, sometimes Americans, but always members of a group. Pinpoint bombing, after all, has ended civilian casualties in....well, never mind.
9/11 was purely about geography. There is also the Hiroshima/Nagasaki (from here, H/N) anniversary this week. I have read much of the rationalizations people made at the time. Very few talk about killing lots of people. Most talk about the hole in the ground that they wanted to make. I must say, I still don't understand why we couldn't build a fence around the place, in 1945, and put a little doorbell in the fence, with a sign saying "Ring when you want to talk", and then sit back and drop a few bombs on factories and trains and food supply systems now and then, just to show them we were still hanging on. But there was some reason we couldn't. Didn't make a nice hole in the ground.
That's the glib response, and it contains a sliver of reality. What is the difference between killing a hundred thousand Japanese with one bomb, and a similar number of Jews, or Cambodians, or Rwandans, or Vietnamese, over time? There is a tremendous difference.
I suppose most of my response to it all is about collective guilt. I still feel like I did not do nearly enough, in my salad days, to end the Vietnam episode. We did a lot, but we never made the warmongers (!) pay for their misdeeds, and that failure has cost us dearly. Nixon, Johnson, and their lackeys (as we said then) should have died in prison, rather than being allowed to live out their lives in luxury. Perhaps Bush might have been just a little less impulsive with the spectre of a grim federal prison facing him. But perhaps not. In these cases, history was written by the losers.
So, do all the Germans of 1946 bear the responsibility for the Holocaust? Yup. Do all the Americans of 1973 bear the responsibility for the Vietnam invasion? Yup. Do all the Americans of 2002 bear the responsibility for the Iraq invasion? Yup. Cambodians for genocide? Yup. I can go on. But do Muslims bear the responsibility for 9/11? I'm not so sure.
I think both Hiroshima/Nagasaki and WTC have some things in common. For one, only a few people knew what was going to happen. Both were unique events, black swans, as they are now called. Americans couldn't have stopped H/N, and Muslims couldn't have stopped 9/11. And, so, no chance for collective guilt. No collective guilt for me over H/N, or for Muslims over 9/11.
I think I obsess about collective guilt too much, but I also think everybody else obsesses too little. As the moralists say, we should be "held accountable". I love that phrase. How to be accountable for a million dead? One dead? Oh, sure: Take full responsibility.
Well, I suppose, build the building in lower Manhattan. We didn't see Hiroshima/Nagasaki coming, and they didn't see 9/11 coming. No guilt involved, and this was decided by a grand connoisseur of collective guilt. And we need to be "held accountable" for the tens and hundreds of thousands we have killed in the last decade.
Thanks to scrapbookpages.com for the photos and caption.
Tuesday, July 27, 2010
Austin's Wisdom: Free will and Constraints and Canada
Reading again. About freedom. And free will.
Take Mr. Reasonable. A miscreant puts a gun to his head, and says, "Move your left foot." Mr. R., a sensible sort, moves his left foot.
Would we say that Mr. R. moved of his own free will? Well, no. We might say that the threat caused Mr. R. to wiggle the foot. We might say that he had to move the foot or get shot. We might say he moved the foot rather than get shot. We might say he was very highly motivated to move the foot rather than risk the bullet. Or a lot of other ways of saying pretty much -- but not exactly -- the same thing.
So, what of free will? Well, a lot of the talk of free will, or freedom, is based on the idea that neither is a "thing"; both are negatives, the absence of constraints. Mr. R., in this instance, certainly did not act freely. We would not talk about free will in this situation; it would make no sense. And all because of the gun to his head. The gun is the constraint. I think, in general, that this is the most sensible way to look at "freedom" talk; we talk about freedom only when we are not burdened by obligation or threat.
Who cares? In practical terms, losing freedom is, among other things, about health, economics, privacy, emotional state, relations with others, law -- we could all go on. There are an ocean of constraints on our freedoms. We take many of them for granted; there are a lot of constraints on robbing banks. Do I have the freedom to rob a bank? Sure. But we just don't talk that way.
If someone robs a bank, we don't say "Ah, free will at work". We say, "Yipes. He must have been desperate". The constraints on bank robbing are many and severe. It is not about free will. Bank robbery is an act of desperation, not an embrace of freedom.
Or, more difficult: A person with kidney failure, who has been on dialysis for years, abandons the treatment, facing imminent death. This is not uncommon for those who have suffered the rigors of dialysis over long term. What do we say? "How lovely is free will." More likely, we would say "He just couldn't take it any more". He has been constrained in truly awful ways.
Alert Reader (and there may be only one of you) will notice that once again I am talking about the way people really talk to each other, not the way we want them to talk, or the way we hallucinate that they do talk. My one source will be J.L. Austin, an old Brit -- well, long dead now -- who thought there was very strong wisdom in the ordinary language of ordinary people. He led us out of the dark ages by looking at that ordinary talk.
Talk of free will, and freedom, is rare outside of political contexts. Inside political contexts, the talk of freedom is ubiquitous and trivial. Dictators of the most repressive states boast of the freedom of their people.
My Canadian relatives experience less constraint -- hmm, maybe it should be fewer constraints -- in their lives than I do, for a lot of reasons, most of them related to governmental functions. They have more freedom. They also live longer, on average. Hard to imagine how freedom is related to life span, but there it is. Probably health care, maybe diet. They seem to think that they have a better standard of living in general. I don't know.
But I do know that I made a mistake that will probably cost me three years of life by not moving to Canada. But then, I had constraints, didn't I? Must have. Or I would have gone.
Next time: Woulda, coulda, shoulda. And, I guess, mighta, hadda, wanted to but -- well, we could (heh!) go on. Conditionals and their discontents.
Take Mr. Reasonable. A miscreant puts a gun to his head, and says, "Move your left foot." Mr. R., a sensible sort, moves his left foot.
Would we say that Mr. R. moved of his own free will? Well, no. We might say that the threat caused Mr. R. to wiggle the foot. We might say that he had to move the foot or get shot. We might say he moved the foot rather than get shot. We might say he was very highly motivated to move the foot rather than risk the bullet. Or a lot of other ways of saying pretty much -- but not exactly -- the same thing.
So, what of free will? Well, a lot of the talk of free will, or freedom, is based on the idea that neither is a "thing"; both are negatives, the absence of constraints. Mr. R., in this instance, certainly did not act freely. We would not talk about free will in this situation; it would make no sense. And all because of the gun to his head. The gun is the constraint. I think, in general, that this is the most sensible way to look at "freedom" talk; we talk about freedom only when we are not burdened by obligation or threat.
Who cares? In practical terms, losing freedom is, among other things, about health, economics, privacy, emotional state, relations with others, law -- we could all go on. There are an ocean of constraints on our freedoms. We take many of them for granted; there are a lot of constraints on robbing banks. Do I have the freedom to rob a bank? Sure. But we just don't talk that way.
If someone robs a bank, we don't say "Ah, free will at work". We say, "Yipes. He must have been desperate". The constraints on bank robbing are many and severe. It is not about free will. Bank robbery is an act of desperation, not an embrace of freedom.
Or, more difficult: A person with kidney failure, who has been on dialysis for years, abandons the treatment, facing imminent death. This is not uncommon for those who have suffered the rigors of dialysis over long term. What do we say? "How lovely is free will." More likely, we would say "He just couldn't take it any more". He has been constrained in truly awful ways.
Alert Reader (and there may be only one of you) will notice that once again I am talking about the way people really talk to each other, not the way we want them to talk, or the way we hallucinate that they do talk. My one source will be J.L. Austin, an old Brit -- well, long dead now -- who thought there was very strong wisdom in the ordinary language of ordinary people. He led us out of the dark ages by looking at that ordinary talk.
Talk of free will, and freedom, is rare outside of political contexts. Inside political contexts, the talk of freedom is ubiquitous and trivial. Dictators of the most repressive states boast of the freedom of their people.
My Canadian relatives experience less constraint -- hmm, maybe it should be fewer constraints -- in their lives than I do, for a lot of reasons, most of them related to governmental functions. They have more freedom. They also live longer, on average. Hard to imagine how freedom is related to life span, but there it is. Probably health care, maybe diet. They seem to think that they have a better standard of living in general. I don't know.
But I do know that I made a mistake that will probably cost me three years of life by not moving to Canada. But then, I had constraints, didn't I? Must have. Or I would have gone.
Next time: Woulda, coulda, shoulda. And, I guess, mighta, hadda, wanted to but -- well, we could (heh!) go on. Conditionals and their discontents.
Thursday, July 22, 2010
Let be be finale of seem. I guess.
I was talking about bees over the weekend. We know really a lot about bees. The hive has a language, some of it chemical, that determines all sorts of things about bee behavior. If you take bees out of the hive, one by one, you reach a point at which there just aren't enough to communicate; they can't do bee stuff any more. There is a minimum number of bees that allows the survival of the hive.
I remember an old group facilitation exercise we did 40 years ago; six people sitting on the floor, forbidden to talk, each with an envelope containing cardboard shapes. The instruction was to make squares out of the shapes in our envelopes. We each started out trying to fit just the pieces in our own envelopes together to make the square. After a while, we noticed that it was impossible. We started trading pieces with the others. Impossible again. Finally, we understood: we threw all the pieces on the floor in the middle of the group, and were able to make the squares pretty quickly. I remember that after each square was completed we sat up straight and all smiled and clapped for ourselves for a few seconds. Very nice group dynamics lesson.
The group developed a language: gestures, odd grunts and that delightful clapping, which allowed useful cognition to exist. There was just no other way to get it done. We had all been "cogitating" unsuccessfully. I don't want to say that the problem solving was done in some weird groupthink. Not at all. What was done was the emergence of mind, an implementation of informal rules in which we guided ourselves toward useful problem-solving, out-of-the-box activities. "Mind" is not a place or a thing; "mind" is a set of utterance used to shape, define and control the behaviors that allow -- and require -- us to be human.
What of those who can't communicate -- the comatose, the demented, the brain dead? What of their minds? Do we say that they have minds, even though their brains are either dead or terribly compromised? I've never heard anyone talk about "minds" in that way. We do talk, ordinarily, in these cases, about brains and their dysfunctions. But, what of those who have seizures, or less extensive damage to the brain? Obviously different; those with seizure disorders still have language. Do we say that their minds are disordered? Or just their brains? I think brains. In all the discussions I've had with neurologists, nobody has said anything about my mind. Brain, sure. What is up with that? Don't they think that a mind can be damaged by a stroke? Maybe they're on to something. Ordinarily language seeps over into specialized language. Ack. I'm getting too abstract; how about some concrete examples?
The most confounding and interesting, for me, are the folks with the various language disabilities: the various aphasias, on the expressive end, and the decoding disorders on the receptive end. This is the arena in which the folks with the damaged brains often have some problems with mind, too. Stories of extensive brain injury with no apparent mind disorders are many, and, I'm sure, are sometimes apocryphal; still, the lesson is clear. An injury to the brain does not have to be an injury to the mind.
More: I once evaluated a young man who had shot himself in the head. He recovered all his physical abilities, but his cognitive functions were very strangely impaired. He could communicate only by telling jokes, or stories, or singing songs. His "talk", in that form, was precise and complex; however, it took a long time and a lot of patience and effort to listen in the right way. I also found it difficult, even with all my own capabilities, to help other people learn how to listen to him, and recognized after a while that my own problems mirrored his, at a much less severe level.
I also evaluated stroke patients, who were disabled and unable to function on their own physically, but whose thinking and language were just fine.
Well? Who is worse off? I think the first man; talking to him is so difficult that he was, ultimately, dismissed from the tribe, and banished to a unit in a chronic care facility. Brain and mind the same, in this instance, both damaged terribly. The stroke folks? Bad, but clear brain injury with no mind injury; rehabbed, back to work, back to family.
And what of my own brain and mind? I think it is not so much the physical changes that bother me since I had the stroke six years ago; those are pretty minor. Some loss of coordination, middling pain in the extremities. But the recent TLE stuff: yipes! It threatens my ability to be part of the tribe, and that is scary. The hallucinated smells, compusive talking, occasional misspeaking -- am I more like my first example, or the second? Hard to tell.
Right now, I don't have any way to pull it all together. The philosophers are off in Middle Earth, having fun arguing. No joy there. The neurologists are looking at scans. No joy there, either. I am between them somewhere. I still have a sense that there is something important that no one is exploring, something about minds and groups and tribes and social facts.
Contributions not just welcome, but demanded!!!! Maybe that will work. How about I up the ante just a little??? A $10 iTunes Store card for whoever recognizes the quote first. What quote? Part of the puzzle.
Miles the Cat is ineligible, but everybody else, relatives included, is welcome to guess.
Addendum: The prize has been claimed. It was claimed by a treacherous snake who used Google. Shame.
I remember an old group facilitation exercise we did 40 years ago; six people sitting on the floor, forbidden to talk, each with an envelope containing cardboard shapes. The instruction was to make squares out of the shapes in our envelopes. We each started out trying to fit just the pieces in our own envelopes together to make the square. After a while, we noticed that it was impossible. We started trading pieces with the others. Impossible again. Finally, we understood: we threw all the pieces on the floor in the middle of the group, and were able to make the squares pretty quickly. I remember that after each square was completed we sat up straight and all smiled and clapped for ourselves for a few seconds. Very nice group dynamics lesson.
The group developed a language: gestures, odd grunts and that delightful clapping, which allowed useful cognition to exist. There was just no other way to get it done. We had all been "cogitating" unsuccessfully. I don't want to say that the problem solving was done in some weird groupthink. Not at all. What was done was the emergence of mind, an implementation of informal rules in which we guided ourselves toward useful problem-solving, out-of-the-box activities. "Mind" is not a place or a thing; "mind" is a set of utterance used to shape, define and control the behaviors that allow -- and require -- us to be human.
What of those who can't communicate -- the comatose, the demented, the brain dead? What of their minds? Do we say that they have minds, even though their brains are either dead or terribly compromised? I've never heard anyone talk about "minds" in that way. We do talk, ordinarily, in these cases, about brains and their dysfunctions. But, what of those who have seizures, or less extensive damage to the brain? Obviously different; those with seizure disorders still have language. Do we say that their minds are disordered? Or just their brains? I think brains. In all the discussions I've had with neurologists, nobody has said anything about my mind. Brain, sure. What is up with that? Don't they think that a mind can be damaged by a stroke? Maybe they're on to something. Ordinarily language seeps over into specialized language. Ack. I'm getting too abstract; how about some concrete examples?
The most confounding and interesting, for me, are the folks with the various language disabilities: the various aphasias, on the expressive end, and the decoding disorders on the receptive end. This is the arena in which the folks with the damaged brains often have some problems with mind, too. Stories of extensive brain injury with no apparent mind disorders are many, and, I'm sure, are sometimes apocryphal; still, the lesson is clear. An injury to the brain does not have to be an injury to the mind.
More: I once evaluated a young man who had shot himself in the head. He recovered all his physical abilities, but his cognitive functions were very strangely impaired. He could communicate only by telling jokes, or stories, or singing songs. His "talk", in that form, was precise and complex; however, it took a long time and a lot of patience and effort to listen in the right way. I also found it difficult, even with all my own capabilities, to help other people learn how to listen to him, and recognized after a while that my own problems mirrored his, at a much less severe level.
I also evaluated stroke patients, who were disabled and unable to function on their own physically, but whose thinking and language were just fine.
Well? Who is worse off? I think the first man; talking to him is so difficult that he was, ultimately, dismissed from the tribe, and banished to a unit in a chronic care facility. Brain and mind the same, in this instance, both damaged terribly. The stroke folks? Bad, but clear brain injury with no mind injury; rehabbed, back to work, back to family.
And what of my own brain and mind? I think it is not so much the physical changes that bother me since I had the stroke six years ago; those are pretty minor. Some loss of coordination, middling pain in the extremities. But the recent TLE stuff: yipes! It threatens my ability to be part of the tribe, and that is scary. The hallucinated smells, compusive talking, occasional misspeaking -- am I more like my first example, or the second? Hard to tell.
Right now, I don't have any way to pull it all together. The philosophers are off in Middle Earth, having fun arguing. No joy there. The neurologists are looking at scans. No joy there, either. I am between them somewhere. I still have a sense that there is something important that no one is exploring, something about minds and groups and tribes and social facts.
Contributions not just welcome, but demanded!!!! Maybe that will work. How about I up the ante just a little??? A $10 iTunes Store card for whoever recognizes the quote first. What quote? Part of the puzzle.
Miles the Cat is ineligible, but everybody else, relatives included, is welcome to guess.
Addendum: The prize has been claimed. It was claimed by a treacherous snake who used Google. Shame.
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