Catalytic Narrative

Go West Old Man

2010-03-17T10:00:00.001-04:00

You won't recognize me. For one thing, I'm on borrowed computer, which has one of those updated curvy keyboards, which techies like me hate simply becuase we are trained to move from keyboard to keyboard and therefore different slows us down. (which also means, if you are a careful reader, that I am really quite indifferent to and about styles of device. I raise the level of generality to "pointing device" and could almost care less about mouse or trackpad or touchpad or ball, although keyboard is a bit more personal).

For another, I'm in Seattle, which I really shouldn't say, since my identity is all over the Internet now, and therefore like someone at a family funeral, I might be preyed upon by watchers of the press, who know an absentee resident when they see one. You know, those predators who read the obits and schedule their burglary during the bereavement making a double whammy for the sufferers.

Speaking of which, I have to resurrect this ancient VW, "Bob", which my duaghter out here has been driving, and which is way beyond her (sorry) last legs, just so's I have some wheels. I was going to drive out, but even I'm not quite that crazy, especially what with excess clotting factors, although for the moment I remain artificially blue-blooded. Speaking of [last] legs.

I've been meaning for a while now to blog about this Chinese heartthrob adverted on the front page of the New York Times. A blogger and novelist and racecar driver, who is likely the most widely read author of all times, simply becuase he has three hundred million (!!!!) daily readers of his blog, nevermind his novels, which might get read for the same reason Angelina Jolie gets watched, regardless of her acting abilities, which, I am certain, are prodigious.

It seems this fellow has become a little cheeky with his commentary about the Chinese government, and he takes it in stride when they remove his more edgy blog postings without so much as a nevermind (we all know who "they" are). But there's a long tradition in China of writers outwitting censors, which, oddly, places this fellow right in the mainstream literary traditions of China and not quite off in some pulpy ghetto where you'd think he belonged (I'm actually enjoying enhanced speed now on this curvy keyboard, only ever having tried them while troubleshooting computers - which is only a pain - and never actually to write with).

Government censors, rather like IRS agents or the FBI agents who did Senator McCarthy's bidding back in the days of HUAC, are known to be rather humorless, which must mean literal, in the discharge of their duties. And so, there's an almost implied invitation to toy with their sensibilities.

Plus, the government now is between a rock star and a hard place, don't you think? As with Google's practice of alerting readers to the fact of redaction, folks - Chinese folks - are thereby alerted to what their government is doing on their behalf. For the moment they seem a little bit more peeved with Google for being American and un-Chinese, and are therefore offended in their patriotism, but be patient and they will come around.

Now this Chinese blogger probably has a habit, much as I do, of writing each and every day. So any lacunae (to make a veiled reference to this truly excellent novel I am now reading on my Kindle (tm)) would be obvious to his loyal readers, which just gives him that much more opportunity to toy in and with the stuff they won't delete because they will be witless to do so. Literalists are always looking to protect their own asses, which generally means to jump all over you when you deviate from the norm. Maybe you get the joke here?

I've already had a few check-up calls about my absense, so I know I'm cared for. We'll see what the burglar literalists think, although I can assure them that I own nothing of value, having given away all the good stuff (which I simply no longer fit into). My electronics are positvely primitive, so don't bother. (actually, I do intensely dislike this wireless mouse, because the pointer is simply too jumpy)

My doctor just called to tweak my rat poison dosage, feeling embarrassed that it was as early as it is here on the Left Coast, although I assured him I've already been up for hours, but see, I am actually well cared for, no matter what I say about the Military-industrial health care/insurance complex.

So, here are a couple of things about which I intensely disagree with our fearless leader. And, honest, I absolutely adore the guy, especially because he has a tendancy not to use fear as a tool for manipulation of the public. But sometimes he skates close, as in the case of healthcare and education.

He is dead wrong about education, but as of today, it does seem as though he might actually have a plan to co-opt Republicans at their own game. He's taking some of the negative momentum among educators toward No Child Left Behind, and using it to gain Republican support for real and meaningful reform. The guy just mgiht be a jiu-jitsu master.

On the healthcare front, I tend to be a bit more dubious. I just don't buy the idea that the insurance companies are precisely evil. After all, if life is "priceless" and you deserve the same extraordinary measures toward the end of your life that you do at its early stages, even someone as clueless as me about economics can see that there is a genuinely insoluble problem. Lots of people will be worth more to the medical complex near death, just in terms of transfers of wealth out of the insurance industry coffers and into the healtcare industry coffers, than they were ever worth over the course of their entire working lives. The math for this simply can't work.

We can throw up examples of dishonest doctors and profiteering insurers, but really they're just the same as the rest of us, afraid to lose their jobs. Doing the bidding therefore of The Man (whoever the hell the man is, although I think he might be anybody really really high up and therefore, by definition, detached from the reality of the rest of us). Doesn't anybody else see that these two forces are aligned against not only each other, but against the masses of us, harnessing as they can and must, our fear of death and dying?

That very same thing used against us so effectively by true believers in some Allah or other. Since they have none - no fear of dying.

I, for my part, intend to take reasonable precautions, so long as they don't feed The Beast (whoever the hell the Beast is, although I think he might have something to do with literalist thinking which is therefore detached from reality, by definition). I'm a little bit sketchy when it comes to the conflict between drugs which insult the liver, and alcohol, which does so also. Take Lipitor, for instance. No, you take Lipitor.

But I might be an actual and genuine case for it. Or I might not be. It's really hard to know. OK, gotta go back to reading that other great novel. This one, Melville's The Confidence Man I've managed to "download" onto my phone for free. I'm so freaking ethereal it's not even funny. Not to mention all the lacunae in my understandings . . .

Settling

2010-03-11T08:35:00.000-05:00

That's the thing I'm very not. Or very un. Settled. Nor do I settle. Which makes me a problem, to myself mostly. I'm one of those prosecute to the finish kind of guys. Which is an odd thing for a mild mannered person to be. Although I do laugh in the face of adversity, not to mention wild storms on Lake Erie, which are reputedly that much worse than on the seas. How would I know?

Meanwhile, back on the homefront, there is medication to turn me from a thick blooded survivor of slings and arrows of outrageous fortune [really really sic] to a blue blooded bleeder. I shall remain on it for a sentence nearly as long as the ones I write. At least life is terminable, and that's a blessing.

I remain amazed, as the crocuses rear their blooms, and as I am reminded that love stirs even among those looking back on themselves rather than forward, at how few people do seem amazed at the conspiracy screens large and small, to put us all in the same mind at the same time, and who still believe that nothing but harm will come of this. Nothing but the Glenn Beck show of impotence and hurt and rage against the machine.

I am amazed that people still do seem to fear Sarah Palin as Adolf Hitler redux, as though nothing else has changed in this so recently passed meantime. That so few of us realize our potency as one. Among a million talking heads. Blogging fools.

This was always to be the end of the long Greek tragedy, where the audience is the mind of the playwright, and the stage is its enactment. The audience now as large and as unified as ever could be, possibly, imagined. Metaphor also must end someday, although more's the pity in the mind. That was and has been the Christian promise.

Saint Patrick's Day, then Easter, if I have my calendar straight. Too bad I won't be drinking. Sing God Damn! I'll be out of town for the good parts, and that's the better part of valor right there. Following a nice send-off party just ahead of the Big Day (St. Patty's silly! It's not for me, I'm just taking advantage, as always, of the bachelor excuse against pot luck) having a cast of hundreds, none aware of my presence. Not the me with name who has plenty of good and close friends, the me up here, talking with you, the non-existent one.

Send in the clowns, the replacement figure, for comic relief, borrowed this time from Chinese, where the stage never did stand in as focal point for mind's attention. Where the meaning never was displaced, metaphorically, outside its embodiment. Where poetry remained imminent, at the heart of the matter, with surface writings all that ever could be noticed or remarked. This kind allows for perpetual something; life lived beyond the local settlements.

Such a busy day ahead of me today. I'm off!

Yes Massa!

2010-03-10T07:55:00.005-05:00

I drove some distance to watch one of those "town hall" health care meetings which were going on all across the country this past summer into fall. I'm pretty sure I blogged about it. I wasn't in Eric Massa's district, but I was just across the line, and this was my nearest opportunity.

I remember being really really impressed by his skill at oration, to a crowd spilled out of doors and without a microphone. I was especially impressed with his patience, and with his ability actually to listen, even to those people - and there were plenty - who were planted there to provoke a fight; to heckle and to present absurdist distorted positions. I credit Massa himself with keeping the temperature cool. But maybe it was just the blue-blood of this particular ex-urban and very very Republican venue.

I've just learned that I have the opposite of blue blood (that hemophiliac disease remarked in the British royal lineage, which provoked some insights into genetic inheritance, and still gets used in high school to teach them), which is so often synecdoche for wealth and privilege. At least poetically, my blood's hyper-clotting factor is descended from the Mayflower, which sailed from that town in Holland - Leiden - where a clustering of this factor was found. For sure, these genes are now implicated in a surprising number of Americans' lives. If you do the math.

I never watch Glenn Beck - I only have rabbit ears for one thing, and for another, I find him incredibly distasteful. But when I've seen him, there's always something almost endearing. He speaks for that part in each of us which just basically knows the differences between right and wrong, and is tired of all the bullshit in the way of its clear presentation. He knows in his guts that the way "the system" works is corrupted to its core.

Which makes it at least a little bit ironic that here's this guy, willing to go on Beck's show, who is saying out loud and publicly that it's not exactly the corruption that made him crack. It's the incredible frustration of being locked into a system bent on deadlocking by invocation of party discipline. And Glenn Beck calls this a waste of time??!!!

That's really really confusing to me. It's as if Beck not only doesn't want to, but quite literally can't let go of his name calling. He must get precisely the same heroin rush to his ego by using the term "Progressive" as an epithet, that Bible readers get when they rote-recite without reading those passages which make them feel "saved."

This right there represents the depths of immorality. I don't give a fig what Massa's sexual proclivities might be, and it doesn't sound like he's ever coerced anyone into anything. If he made someone uncomfortable, then he should pay the price, which shouldn't be all that steep. But Beck's hanging on that tightly to his right to push buttons and make gobs of money off it - that should be punished handsomely. That's the core of sin.

Beck says he's sticking in the fight, knowing full well that he'll be taken down by the "establishment," mocking Massa for waving his white flag. While Massa confesses openly that he's "whipped." He can't do it any more.

If you'd watched the man in front of this manipulated and largely hostile crowd, you'd realize that he's not lying. He had truly taken on the hardest job on the planet only to discover that all the hard work is rendered as if for naught by a system bent on gridlock. Why would anyone want to do it unless they were making the millions Glenn Beck makes?

I celebrate the man for refusing to be our slave anymore. For placing himself in the jaws of Glenn Beck, where only a fool would think he might actually come through alive. This man's my hero for a day, perhaps for longer. Fuck you Beck, and the horse you rode in on. This is my country too, and I've got the bloodline to prove it. I'm an immigrant like nearly every single soul among this nation of interlopers. Not a single one of us has any right to judge another. Certainly not you with your lily-white tongue flapping.

De-contextualizing on Oscar Sunday

2010-03-09T07:43:00.000-05:00

I know Oscar about as well as I know Superbowl. But I was alerted by the popcorn man when, the night before, I watched A Single Man, film version, with some friends at a miraculously preserved massive old cinema here in Buffalo. It's the same theater where my father remembers going for the double feature for ten cents on a Saturday or Sunday matinee.

Those who work at this place are true film lovers, and so the Oscars are significant to them. Enter the ancient doors and there is a genuine old-fashioned ticket booth (you might want to picture something descended from a London phone booth, and only slightly larger - perhaps like those booths from which they sell tickets at carnivals, but more ornate). Inside is a fairly old man - well, older than me - who I believe has been taking tickets for as long as I've been buying them. He smiles and seems genuinely glad to see you, inviting you to go ahead in and look around for your friends if you want. I said, no I'd just go ahead and buy my ticket.

This is one of those times when I might wish I could deploy a movie camera instead of just words. Picture me now before the movie - if each of us can pull it off - driving out of Buffalo to our spiritually grounded exurb to the south, East Aurora. East Aurora is the onetime home of Elbert Hubbard, the Roycrofter, and is and has been a significant one among a local spread of spiritual hubs. Around here the Mormons got their start, as did the patron saints of spiritualism more generally. The Fox sisters (yeah, I never heard of them either) grew up here. This is Iroquois land, long since desecrated by the white man.

I am an interloper also to this spiritualist gathering, organized (well, sprung like an impromptu party, in fact) in honor of a man - a true adept - who would later let our host know that he'd turned back home when he learned that there would be a party in his honor. He is that shy. My own entrance was announced in such a way that I was afraid I might be called on to make some sort of speech: "Chinese scholar, former headmaster, brilliant man" if I'm not mistaken. I didn't even blush, so absurd was it.

This was as nice a party as I've ever attended, populated by the likes of those on the inside of that Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus, in case you have that cinematic image ready to hand. I learned about Tarot, astrology, alchemy, qi-gong (with which I am acquainted in rather academic fashion - that far from practice), Native American spirituality, and a whole lot more. I wished I had a chance to learn about dousing, although now that I'm back in the city I don't think I'll need it.

I am very much an outsider to this sort of understanding, and therefore was by far the most ignorant of the bunch. To a person, these people are almost incredibly diligent in their studies. I can't imagine a single one of them fitting any billing as "charlatan" (just in case you're in the market for a reading).

There was one moment when the party was paused by our host, who'd been drinking - to be highly politically incorrect about it - like an Indian (which I could only be jealous about, having recently been ordered away from the sauce), announced that his recently proposed book about Native American spirituality had won a contract. Two, in fact, which must be the dream of any author - to have two houses competing for one's work. Applause and congratulations!

Then he told a funny story about how white people like to act as gatekeepers to the arcana of those whose tribes they bond with. Which must be about as funny from the inside as it is from the outside. I don't think Mason was intending to speak for the tradition. He would write, rather, about the tradition. Which, as a bona fide teacher of and about Chinese, I do actually know can sometimes be accomplished better as a non-native; a member of the target audience with whom the bond is more important at the outset. Sometimes those foreign to English have been its most accomplished stylists.

The pause in the party to make space for that announcement extended to that singular moment when the party is all one. The little clusters of animated conversation had stopped, and the topic turned to Buffalo. As in "what is it about the pall which hangs over our city?" The grey which almost always greets you driving or flying in. The certainty among our citizens that things will always be as they have been and that change is impossible. That we deserve our fate and can only learn to like it (which we typically succeed in doing).

Now here's the part where I would love it if you could be watching on film. Spontaneously around the circle there were offerings of astrological reads of the city ('very Taurian, and therefore stubborn and caught up in itself'), remembrances of some sort of grudge about a running race between the Iroquois and the white man, where the white man cheated. Desecration more generally of this sacred ground.

I felt my mouth opening to offer up my own prognostications of hope. But of course I realized discretion as the better part of valor. I was out-gunned here in all ways of knowing; the literary, the local and cultural history, the current politics. I'm only recently back in town and so what do I know? Plus, I've never been diligent in anything. I was certainly out-gunned in the occult ways of knowing.

As you know, faithful reader (I guess I'm speaking to myself again now, although even I don't have a good read on what I've written. Maybe especially I), I've had trouble lately with pulmonary embolisms, whose symptoms seem to keep me on my toes by coming back. As I often say, just like "I'm driving a Toyota" now in relation to my own body.

Well, even I know that just as Adam and Eve are a convenient fiction about what must be intertwined in each of us, and just as Jesus was distorted if not destroyed by a patriarchal power-elite which still owns His Church, there is no sense to believing or acting as though your body can be distinguished from your mind. Well, except for this Native American medicine man who recommends treating your body as your pet if you want to get healthy. Which seemed to make a lot of sense to me at the time.

Mostly, though, these folks stay clear of terms like soul and divinity. And for my part, I'm not exactly despairing that the enshrined and fully institutionalized and almost ungodly expensive Western medical establishment has no certain answers for me. After all, that would mean that something about me was definitively broken, even if they were able to offer some sort of fix for it. Some extravagantly expensive fix, just as the rule-out testing has been - extravagantly expensive.

The nice thing about no certain diagnosis is that perhaps there really is something you can and might and even should do about it yourself. I might just follow up on some leads for Shiatsu massage, or qi-gong internal alchemical exercises. Although they have yet to be theoretically validated by Western science, there is a growing body of evidence that these things "work" even in the absence of theory. Even government institutions now sanction their practice.

And for sure, within the theoretical frames as were presented or represented to me that night, my symtoms find a fit and therefore a reason for hope. Neither the diagnosis nor the treatment require much reaching in any of these "alternative" traditions, where in my "native" tradition, they are at an almost complete loss without a slot to put me in.

Which pretty much just begs the question about Buffalo, don't you almost have to say? As in why are these folks sitting around and grousing about what's wrong with Buffalo the same as everyone else does, no matter what their frame of reference. Shouldn't they be doing something about it? Or would Buffalo as a whole need to be willing to sit for its reading???

We do that already in the "what if a whole community were to read the same book" department. Like everything else about this town, we probably have much higher rates of participation than is the norm. But I guess we're hardly all together about what we want. I guess Buffalo would have to change its mind as a whole, and what are the chances for that?

So, I retreated from the party to the more conventional fare of dinner and a movie. I'd missed the dinner part, but the movie is where I started in this post. I did need to stay clear of the attraction of drink at each of the three dinners I avoided that night - so popcorn was my fare. Mmmmmm. Real butter!!

And then there were the inevitable Oscars. I have rabbit ears (no, silly, my TV does), being still not ready to sign any contracts or leases but the ones for mobility. The one channel I can never pull in is the one showing the Oscars. Now I never watch the Oscars, but somehow not being able to made me feel terribly alone. I tried every conceivable antenna position, scanned on-line to confirm that in fact there was no feed, gave up for about the third time, and then finally, as if by some miracle, I hit upon the one magic Kundalini position in which I could sync with the ethereal feed.

Now I was chained to the show. I felt less alone, but so very distant from the accomplishment of this apparent horde of winners. I was glad for their work. Who doesn't love the movies? The humility sounded almost genuine to me, moved just a bit beyond the acting. Mostly, I was bored. I guess that was true of a lot of people.

The stars almost did look and act like normal people though. That has to be some kind of progress, right? Now here's the kicker: (I've been at this now for a length of time unusual for me, who bangs out a thought a day, just about) Yesterday, which is now Monday, I fulfilled my appointment with my Native-to-me Doc. I have a diagnosis! I have a fairly rare mutation among my genes which causes a drastically increased propensity for clotting.

Of course, that hardly "explains" why me, why here, why now; all of which questions have the one important answer that if not me and here and now I would most likely not be alive. Lucky, in other words, that I had family around and was near a hospital. The propensity simply explains the why me part as a chain of unlucky inheritance.

The funny thing is that the mutation, called the "Factor V (Leiden) mutation" descends from that city in Holland from where the Mayflower set sail, where there was a cluster of such clotters. I guess that proves my ancestry, in a way that's hardly comforting. It means more tests now, and a lifelong blood-thinning regimen which, while handling one set of risk factors, hands me another.

So, I guess I won't be letting go of the Western medicine trapeze just yet. They've found me a place and made me an adherent. Not that it might not also be useful to go for the Eastern frame at the same time, which might help to address the why here, why now part of the equation, which in the West is always left to random chance.

It doesn't feel like random chance to me. There have been too many recent changes in my life. I still hold out hope that I can go back to un-medicated and happy without having my life changed by the contaminating knowledge that asteroids may hit, earthquakes may let loose, clots may form, the accelerator may stick, and even the key is no longer a mechanical object. It is a code and impossible to enter while driving.

Many of you may think that we are in the midst of some kind of information explosion. That there is so much *more* we know now than we ever did before. It doesn't take too much thinking to realize the absurdity of that notion. Our brains have not changed one iota since we were formed as a species. To use that hackneyed and tired brain-as-computer metaphor, believing in some kind of explosion of information would be to believe that our brains have been consistently upgraded, according to some kind of biological Moore's law of geometric expansion, which they clearly haven't been.

But no, you will say, the "information," so-called, is what's "out there" all around us, cataloged in libraries and on the internet now, in papers and in teaching traditions, and simply not possible of containment within a single mind. What has changed has been our relationship to the information that's always been there. Our frames have been filled out, almost to the point of being "fleshed." We now know that we can, in principle, guide ourselves to some solid sense of reality, and that we will not be disappointed *except* by random incursions from what must remain, in principle, like a roll of dice, beyond our ability to know, to control, to predict.

A single mind is no more elaborate than it ever was, it is simply better aligned than it could have been with all other non-disformed minds. This is the magic of trans-cultural scientific understanding, grounded in the universal "language" of mathematics. It's what you *must* agree with, unless you're nuts, perverse, true religious or some other patently dysfunctional aberration from survivability.

This then, is that precisely wonderful moment in history, where you can only imagine what God has written for us, for he hasn't said a thing (to paraphrase Oscar Wilde). It must be wonderful, right? Just as quickly as Toyota can transform from being the trusted creator of trusty automobiles into the panderer of more complexity than even they can be on top of (give me back my mechanical linkage, gas pedal to carburetor; key to ignition; brake pedal to pads); so quickly does a person leave his body.

Not some "soul" which is the silliest idea since ideas were thought of (the silliest word since "information"), rather some utter absence of the ability, or the need, to look forward. The plots - largely fictional - that we must hatch for ourselves to bridge each moment to the next must surely end somewhere. After a certain age, you simply are no longer your best and brightest self. There is more looking back than forward, and then it stops. The interval grows infinite, in mirror-image mockery of what Newton's Calculus once resolved.

This fact is hardly cause for terror. There never was a "you" in the first place. We're all gerunds - activities - spanning the intervals between one instance and the next. It is only the forward and the backing; there is no *being*. That would be absurd.

And therefore there is no end to being. There was never any beginning. As it now and ever shall be, Amen.

The hope I hold out, for Buffalo, and for the world, is trivially simple to apprehend. It is that there will be some rather massive conspiracy. Some breathing together of words which simply and perhaps suddenly make sense to all and each of us. This is the catalyzing of the language which is now upon us. Not more information, not more truth exactly, unless by that you mean truing, one against the other. We all suddenly agree on the basics. The frames unite, and we become all one. As it was in the beginning (which never was).

OK, bye bye for now. This is getting a bit overheated. My little brain needs a break before it turns to crystal and shatters into a million shards.

A Quick and Mild-Mannered Review of Harvest at Subversive Theatre

2010-03-06T07:56:00.001-05:00

For me, attending plays at Subversive Theatre feels as comfortable as going home, somehow. There's no sense of "going out;" no ritual of being seen (although I always see people I know). The productions are always expertly produced and cast, even if or when there may be things to criticize as somehow beneath the production values of better-funded more fully "professional" theater.

There is such an abundance of talented people, certainly in Buffalo, who would do almost anything for the chance to act on stage. You can apparently recruit them even for blatantly subversive productions. These are productions which are not only subversive of the oppressive norms of capitalist so-called democracy. But they are subversive of the norms of professional theater as well.

Although it's moving smartly in the direction of feeling almost like a conventional theater, the space has few of the creature comforts of homecoming. It remains plainly housed in a typical workshop warren as can be had cheaply among the surplus industrial factory space so abundant in Buffalo.

So, why do I feel like I'm coming home?

At its opening over a year ago, the space was almost impossibly uncomfortable. Noisy, echoing, and either far too cold or far too hot. Now, it actually begins to feel cozy. But they have started charging for tickets for shows which used to be stridently "free" (donations gratefully accepted). I guess I should be worried?

The production I saw last night of Langston Hughes' Harvest was, I felt, fully professionally produced, presented and acted. I missed Kurt's customary and fairly polished appeal to the audience for donations. I missed his explanation of the mission of this theatrical company. But then I feel like an indulgent parent, maybe, blind to what everyone else is wanting. I think they are smart in their new ways to grow an audience.

The play itself was plenty straight-up in its presentation of the capitalist dilemma from the point of view of those at the bottom of the supposedly naturalistic pyramid of suffering. The secret exposed: everyone at every level feels as though they suffer oppression coming down from above them. The farmers who oppress their pickers are themselves oppressed by the bankers and the taxman, and the sheriff who serves the farmers feels oppressed by the farmers themselves who finally, out of desperation to get their crops in or lose their shirts, take matters into their own hands with guns, and inevitably bloody results.

In nature, it is supposed, all creatures exist in a perpetual state of cringing fear, food insecurity, a pyramid of predatory eat and be eaten. The workers here must live out in the open under tents at best, subject not only to the serial and concurrent tyrannies of weather, disease, children to care for; but even romantic love and its inevitable outcome. If that weren't enough, these cotton pickers had to endure the predations of their betters. Betrayals from within.

Sad, but inevitably true, I guess. Cotton pickers are no different from the unfortunate frog getting eaten by the stately heron. Well, except that the players on this stage are all members of the same species. The divisions among them are presented as purely artificial and absurd. At the very top is a remote and absent FDR; earnest, but feckless at ground level. A professor stops by and in the end says something like "Oh, I see what you mean. I'll tell my students." He'd thought there must be some way for folks to meet at the middle and split the differences among their grievances, for surely the farmers had some too.

Although the play was presented authentically, from the period of its writing, there is no mismatch with today's lived reality. Sure, it feels primitive and almost simplistic in its staging, which is the way it was written. Stark. Plotting the lines of division, and then measuring the tensions across them.

One still wonders if the explosion is necessary. As of tectonic plates these days, whose power just builds and builds until the very earth shakes, each release triggering the likelihood of more. Might there be a different model?

Getting eaten in the state of nature is also the role of the outcast, the weak, the genetically deficient. In the family of man, as in more local families, these roles are reserved and limited, supposedly. Our fear of one another enacts only the act of flight and fright in the face of voracious and unthinking predators who are themselves driven by unanswerable hunger in nature.

Subversive Theater is a refuge from all of that. Not much money lifted from my pocket. Free refreshments. Easy conversation between the acts. And even the reduction to almost nil of the distance between the performance and its audience. I guess that's why it feels like coming home.

Relentlessly, this company asks us just what is and what can be art. Must it only exalt the already exalted, who will inevitably be the absent playwright? The absent God. The good and refined taste of the privileged audience. Or can it invite the audience in to the struggle for understanding which is still common at the root of all artistic production?

In the end, it is the state of nature which is artifice, generated in our mind in reminiscence of a time too recent in our own past. When Natives, who were only imitating us, would scalp and pillage. When bears would attack from the woods. That state has been so fully tamed now that to invoke it is to invoke a fiction whose only purpose is to let us feel more fully manly. Very much like blue jeans do, or SUVs or athletic contests or libertarian posturing as if it were the clear-eyed truth. Women dressed for nakedness as prey.

The stage on which we play out our very public fantasies has grown old. No wonder I feel at home in this superannuated warehouse space, built as if to withstand a bomb blast. Any size shaking of the earth. Although that too is an illusion. The only real safety is on the streets.

Starting Up in Buffalo

2010-03-05T13:12:00.000-05:00

There's this nutso notion out there that you can still make a killing with what is commonly called a "startup" on the Internet. The number of outfits attempting this on a daily basis now is rather astounding. There are even startups which serve other startups. In general it's a game of who has the most viewers/readers and then that person gets to be the market maker, in a food chain from top to bottom. They choose which startups to highlight and which to ignore. And seemingly everyone wants to "go viral."

I work here in Buffalo for a little non-startup called Hoover Blanket, Inc. It's a non-startup because, first of all, we've been at this for quite a long time. And second of all, we don't really believe in making a killing on or off or from the Internet. We actually believe in changing the world, pretty much in the way that people working on the so-called "smart grid" believe in changing the world.

We're like the people working on renewable energy sources. We know where the future has to be, and we know it's only a matter of time before we get there. Investments in oil are only sensible if you desperately want to get yours now, and could give a damn for what's coming down the pike. We think that's pretty sort sighted.

The name, Hoover Blanket, descends from the general derision Americans once felt toward our leader Herbert Hoover. During the great depression, President Hoover would habitually announce how well off we really were, and even make proclamations, all at such odds with reality that people started calling the hobo camps "Hoovervilles." A Hoover Blanket was how you kept warm in those Hoovervilles; you wrapped yourself in discarded newsprint! You go Herbie, rah rah us, and pass the revolution.

These days, lots of people fret the disappearance of bona-fide newspapers; the so-called "fourth estate" of our civilization, without which government might oppress and overwhelm us. So cognizant of this danger were our founding fathers that they enshrined the freedom of the press in our Constitution. No one is certain whether the more recent forms taken by the new "fifth estate" - which must include the blogosphere - are up to the task of replacing what gets lost as newspapers increasingly get shuttered.

The hand wringers do tend to forget how often the professional press has served as a shill to government power and preference. The press has as often endorsed such insanity as the Japanese American Internment, the War in Iraq, the Red Scare and on and on, as they have exposed the lies of government. Newspapers have arguably had too much wealth and power, but there doesn't seem to be anything in line to replace them.

As with the culture of startups, the supposition that the blogosphere can provide a check to power also needs to be examined.

Hoover Blanket, Inc., your local hometown hero, was almost selected as a finalist for the great big Tech Crunch 50 back in September. Tech Crunch is one of the gatekeeper websites. One of the market makers. Getting covered by Tech Crunch pretty much guarantees viewership to your site. You get attention. You get the critical-mass seeding needed to go viral.

We can easily guess the many reasons Hoover Blanket just missed the cut (we know we weren't higher than number 60 out of thousands). We didn't have millions in backing for one. Plus, we are working out of Buffalo, which pretty much guarantees a derisive guffaw from the startup community. We were invited to travel to San Francisco to join the competition in "the pit;" a consolation prize for the second 50. We somehow thought that would be beneath our dignity. Imagine that! Dignity in Buffalo. What a concept!

We chose our corporate name pretty deliberately, if you can consider flashes in the middle of the night deliberate. But if fits these times. Lots of people are out of work again, and even though our government this time has taken steps to prevent calamity, it doesn't really feel like we're quite out of the woods. And then there's that pesky worry about the disappearing newspapers. How will we keep warm?

Later on, still trying to get noticed by Tech Crunch, we made the mistake of going by way of a young blogger on their site who had a track record of being sympathetic to new businesses like ours. Just our luck, he was later let go when it was discovered that he had been taking quiet bribes from folks like us. The temptation must be very difficult to resist when you have the power of make or break over so many hopeful entrepreneurs. Our gullibility still stings.

It really isn't clear that what goes viral is really the best of the information or the resources that are out there. Often it's the trainwreck stuff, or the stuff with clandestine funding, just like Lonely Girl who made such a splash in the early days of blogging. And then there are the elephants in the room, like Google, which seems able to print money now with their (proprietary and private) control of keyterm auctions. When the whole world is searching on Google, they pretty much own the territory of how much you won't be able to make without them.

So, what does Hoover Blanket, Inc. set out to do? And why are we in Buffalo? The second part is simple; it's where we live. But it also doesn't and shouldn't matter, unless you really want and need to do your networking face-to-face in the coffee shops of Silicon Valley or, marginally, Seattle. (I'm shortly off to Seattle, and San Francisco for both personal and business reasons, if you really want to know). The first part is a little bit trickier to explain.

Let's start with Google's business model. As you might know, they now spend far more for electrical power than they do for the equipment it powers. They index and cache the entire "content" of the live Internet quite a few times over, far more quickly than any other company could possibly afford to do. And this includes some really really big ones like Microsoft and Yahoo! just to name a couple. Google even caches the content of the Internet as it changes, so you just go ahead and try to expunge that blog post you later wish you hadn't made!

In addition, without your necessarily really knowing that you could have "opted out," they are probably storing lots of things about what you search for, each time you use their services. Those of us who use their "free" email know how spooky it can be when they target ads depending on what we're writing about, and it seems like they might be reading our minds, or our secret love notes. Especially when those ads actually alert us to something we're really interested in but didn't know about beforehand.

Now, we trust Google not to expose this information, even to themselves. They seem nice enough, and their corporate motto - a side-wise jab in a grudge match against arch-rival Microsoft - is "don't be evil." Which pretty much begs the question, but still, they seem nice enough. Until you do something wrong, at which point they've cheerfully announced that they will turn you over immediately upon presentation of official bona-fides, to whatever authority might be asking.

Which pretty much comes right back to that free speech freedom-of-the-press thing about our Constitution. Just in case what you're searching on has something to do with what the government might be doing wrong. Folks in South America or in China aren't always that happy to have their searches stored and cataloged. And at this particular moment, it's not at all clear where Google stands. The Chinese government is blaming over-eager students for the targeted hacking of Google's sites. And Google is claiming a foothold in China in the name of the forces of freedom of information.

Do you really think information is free? If it were, then where is Google getting all its income? Just an innocent question.

Google might have located their data center right around here, just because of the Falls. Maybe all that cheap electrical power's already spoken for? Well, never mind, because we have seen the future and it's not about caching all your search behaviors, nor about storing all the "content" from the entire World Wide Web. It's not about reading your mind either.

Credit scoring companies and market research companies already know more about you than you might know about yourself. Buy a house and you can get that spooky feeling that they even knew about that place where you were hiding your mail from you wife before you divorced. They make mistakes, like sending me a solicitation from the NRA, but not often enough to have an impact on their bottom line. Of course, their mistakes can have a huge impact on your bottom line, but that's another story.

In general, what Google - and this is true for most Internet startups - what Google is all about falls into the overall category of artificial intelligence. In general, the economics of the Internet work by targeting information as accurately as possible, and then somehow getting your attention. The very best way to do this is by harnessing your friends and family, via something like Facebook, now one of the largest membership communities on the planet. Ever.

Somehow, it's become too expensive to do this sort of thing in person, so the holy grail is to get the machines to do it faster, more accurately and more efficiently than people ever could. Which might make you wonder why they all want in to Facebook, where there intrusion would clearly collapse that community in an instant. Well, except for the games. And those little annoying dating ads as if every old guy wanted someone looking younger targeted at the "mature set."

Sometimes we're willing and happy participants in these charades, and sometimes we get the sense that they're pretty skeezy. There are a few laws about it all, but in general Internet business makers move a lot more quickly than our government does. And, unless they're selling porn, Internet geeks just don't tend to look and feel all that scary.

Sometimes, like navigating the auto-attendants now de-rigeur for all the big companies, these automated processes do seem to beg some question themselves. Like maybe they really don't want you to be able to get through, while thinking that there's something wrong with the way you're paying attention.

At Hoover Blanket, Inc., pretty much as in the black community, pretty much as in the GLBT community, pretty much as in any community on the fringes of "mainstream," which is pretty much a definition of what it means to live in Buffalo compared to almost anywhere else in the nation, we think people should be able to be whatever they want to be, even if they're faking it, without worry that whatever they once were might become some kind of indelible stigma for all time. We don't think your searches, your deletions, or anything else for that matter, should be stored for examination either on your behalf or against you.

You might think that we are really "not evil," and we'd love for you to think that because we're not. But that's not even close to why we believe what we believe. We actually have enough sense to understand that "artificial intelligence" cannot, by definition (I love to say that - I'll try to explain in a minute) ever even come close to "real" intelligence. That's because intelligence is a human quality, and therefore includes the whole battery of emotive responses.

OK, so now in addition to thinking we'd like to be considered "not evil" you think we want to be loved too, right? Well, sure, but no, the point here is that while a sophisticated robot might be more "hot" than your wife, you're not about to make an emotional commitment to a robot, right? (I know you love your '65 mustang convertible, but let's not get distracted here) But even more than feelings, the point is that actual humans can distinguish what they want and what they don't far more trivially, quickly, accurately, and - most important - satisfactorily than any machine will ever duplicate. Try getting a machine to identify a friend at a hundred paces from the behind in Beijing, just for a quick example.

Half your searches on Google are really frustrating right now because you really don't want what everyone else is looking for by that name. You know what I'm talking about if you simply try to search on "avatar" say, or "beck" or "bolt" just after the Olympics, or "cronic" when they think you misspelled "chronic." Humans are metaphorical and subtle. Machines just aren't.

The reason that we know this stuff is that my business partner, Kevin Chugh, Ph.D. (yeah, I give him the business for that set of letters too) is pretty advanced in his understanding of these matters. Kevin has a bit of local fame for his invention of the V-Frog, which is a computer-based virtual dissection lab. Behind that is his Ph.D. research into ways for modelling complex structures like living tissues, so that a machine can return a tactile response just like the "real thing." It's pretty exciting stuff. I'm sure the pornographers are all over it!

In order to model structures more complex than a bridge or a skyscraper, engineers have to give up deterministic modelling in favor of something which works more at the level of cellular automata. That's the way, not incidentally, that the terrorists can provide actual real-life challenges to all of our military's technical sophistication. But it's also the way that complex structures can be accurately modeled by machines. You program the interactions among the pieces, depending on their relative properties, and you program their location. You can get something pretty lifelike.

Now you don't have to be too clever to notice that this same technique can be used to power Internet searching. It's actually analogous to the technique by which the micro packets which compose all the information on the internet get routed to their destination. Each host along the way only needs to know the next closer-to-the-destination host to send each packet on its way. It doesn't need the entire route. Designed for the military, it doesn't even want to know the whole route; in case a part of that pathway gets blown up, there will be a virtually infinite number of alternate routes.

A doctor palpating a virtual body can sense an occult tumor. A searcher can sense the right direction for what she's looking for in the same sense, if only we can get the machines out of our way and be presented with some human discernible clues. You get the idea.

So at Hoover Blanket, Inc., we not only don't want to store any of the content of the Internet, we don't need to. Hell, we're from Buffalo, we could never afford it even if we did want to. We certainly have no interest in storing anything about your behavior. It would only get in the way of what you're trying to find today, which might have very little to do with what you were looking for yesterday, when your wife was watching, say.

Our catalog of the Internet looks more like a multidimensional map. We don't care what you call it or what you want to do with it. We just show you where to find it, based on the discoveries of others looking for the same thing. Works every time. Of course we have to believe that most people are genuinely looking and that what they find is genuinely meant to be found.

Right now the Internet works pretty much as if most of us were skeezy sociopaths trying to get you to believe something you never would believe if you knew the truth about what they were really trying to do, or to get you to do. And that's because, right now, the Internet actually favors the gamers of your enthusiasms. Sometimes these same folks even make it into highest office, but that would be another story too, you know the old one about George and the Constitution.

Anyhow, we don't care who you are or what your motives are. We only care that you are human and not a machine, and so, naturally, among our products are sophisticated means to tell the difference. Like CAPTCHAS if you've seen those hard-to-read squiggled-up text boxes that you have to get past. Ours are way more fun, and trivially easy for humans to get past. Impossible for machines. That's because, unlike CAPTCHAS, ours are human-generated. We call them Bafflebots, and if anybody else tries for that name we will sue them with all the firepower of Buffalo's underpaid attorney class (well, not the ones on billboards, the ones used by the stars, you know who I'm talking about).

Where does free speech and the fourth estate - the newspapers - come back in? Simple. By its location in our multidimensional geography of Internet "location" you can see immediately the context for anything and everything. So, if some teapartier, angry at the government because there's no one else ready to hand to be angry at, makes some outrageous claim about, say, black welfare moms, you can see right where they're coming from based on where people go to find such things. Local news can be re-localized, even when it's coming from the New York Times, and speakers out against authority can establish their credentials on the spot, so to speak.

OK, that's enough about our company. Obviously the underpinnings are a little more complicated than what I'm letting on. Just as obviously, Google knows all this stuff too. They have whole armies of engineers working on these problems. But, as you might be able to see, they would have an awful lot to lose if the obvious got out. Pretty much the way that lots of people don't want you to know where they're really coming from (hint: money is a pretty good way to get a clue).

What about Buffalo? At the SuperBowl, the Stanley Cup, even the Olympics now, we're always almost there. Just missed. Wide right. No Goal! Heck, I've always been almost there myself. I was in a bar near the stadium when the audience started filing out from the game that made the history books; Frank Reich's record-breaking comeback. I wasn't nearly so disappointed as they all were - heck the game was going exactly the way I continued to hope it would.

I very nearly scored prime seats for the Ryan Miller homecoming the other day. I was down at Niagara Square for the Scotty Norwood homecoming, even though I didn't see the game. Well, those tickets were already getting beyond the reach of the normal folks from Buffalo anyhow. But how many times are we doomed to almost, but not quite, win the championship? Hoover Blanket's right there with you.

When New Orleans won this season's SuperBowl, how many in Buffalo wondered if catastrophes have to be considered acts of God before the country will pay attention and root for you? Our states of emergency are the cause for late-night jokes by those stellar wife-cheating hot-car driving multimillionaire hosts (At least we don't get the "act of God" exclusion from our insurance coverages).

Everyone knows the story of the frog who passes the point of no return as he basks in the kettle while it's heating. New Orleans got hit hard and fast, which upped the probability for outpourings of sympathy. They hopped right out of their kettle (there might have been gatekeepers for the way back in). In Buffalo, we're like the v-frog (tm) in the kettle, who stayed just a bit beyond the point where we should have thought about doing something different. Our catastrophes are slow and deliberate, and seem very much as though they're our own darned fault.

And we regret all those things we could have done differently, like where we built our University, where the highways went, where the subway doesn't go to or come from, leaving us a ghost town where there used to be a downtown.

I remember getting a new red winter cap with ear-flaps back when I was a little kid, back when
Naugahyde was cool. We used to stick our heads out the car windows in those days, riding over the
Skyway. I looked like a dork with the earflaps turned down.

Regret for me is watching my new red hat float down and away from the skyway bridge; my caught
heart plummeting with it. It didn't soar like a red balloon let go.

But hey, maybe it's really not our fault. Maybe we're not the dorks they all think we are.

I wonder where our hearts are tending, here at home in Buffalo. We have had some superstars around here lately, and they seem to like us well enough. The famous home makeover folks were impressed enough by our stone soup magic that they've changed the way they do business all over the country. They seem interested in manufacturing hope to almost the same extent as other more powerful forces seem interested in manufacturing fear.

Who knows? Maybe we have the real thing here, in our city of no illusions. Reality City. We ain't got no artificial nothing. No artificial hope. No artificial fear. And certainly no artificial intelligence, as I learned the other other night listening to our Canadian false friend Margaret Atwood. I call her a false friend because, while she made a point to let us know that there is a real Buffalo in her past, passing through from Toronto, she also spent most of her "talk" giving us examples of questions she gets a bit exasperated with from admirers.

So, naturally, we provided a few more reasons for her to roll her eyeballs. It's what we do, well, especially when the talk we paid for turns out to be more of a definition of the distance between us and her exalted heights. It came off like an attempt to get us on her side; to commiserate with her about silly folks who couldn't, could they?, be anything like this audience.

Atwood makes her living extrapolating the thinking and behaviors of those who are like our American teapartiers. You can just imagine what those Bully Canadian Hockey Moms think of those folks. Oh, I think I'm getting mixed up again. As if there's not a thinking soul in Buffalo who would accept her challenges if offered them dead on. As if we're not all wishing we were Canadian right about now.

Atwood remembered Buffalo from back when we were "sin city." When the drinking age was lower here, when the bars were open later and the girlie joints were more explicit than the ones now over there. I know, it's hard to imagine now, but we had our glory days.

How about let's overlook the Buffalo that everyone else thinks of. How about we look either farther back or farther forward, skipping over the embarrassing stuff.

I have no illusions. Starting up in Buffalo is really really hard compared to starting up almost anywhere else. But we do have plenty of real people here. We have real intelligence. We have products which are not premised only on being cool. And that's not even to mention the art, the music, the theater, the dance, the ethnic identities, and the food, the glorious food. Even the New York Times gives us credit now for that!

Spiritualist Commentary

2010-03-04T16:22:00.020-05:00

I once visited Lily Dale, a spiritualist enclave nearby Buffalo, where I now live for the moment (I absolutely adore the English ambiguation machine; do I "live for the moment?" Am I in Buffalo temporarily? Or do I live at Lily Dale?). I had high hopes that something might be triggered there. I was looking for some even slightest sense that there were insights beyond the ones I find through reading and a bit of academic study. I even got myself a "reading."

In the event, it was clearly something to be gotten over with for each of us. The "reader" must have seen that I am opaque and impenetrable. I knew that he wasn't seeing anything. It would be pretty much like some poor doctor trying to diagnose a hypochondriac. Better to go through the motions and get him out of there as quickly as possible.

I was disappointed. Or more likely I mean "I wasn't disappointed." The experience was and remains hardly surprising; pretty much what I'd expected. I'm as proof as they come against spiritualist anything. Like I wear condoms on my gullibility.

Maybe I'd wanted to see if someone would see something in me; something to pull me away from my prideful deficiencies. Or maybe there's just not that much which would surprise me about me; there's not that much that I would be looking for them to tell me, and so it all felt like being a tourist in one's home town. I think I was actually open minded, though. I wasn't looking for negative affirmation.

Around here, in Buffalo where I live again now, temporarily, we often get the chance to take visitors to Niagara Falls, and each time, we also get to see the falls anew. Lately, trying to steer my body in a new direction, I take long walks and see the city in a way which I never could while driving a car. In general, I am the only walker.

Sometimes one is most blinded to the familiar.

I've lately started participating in a local spiritualist writers group, a bunch of people who sense that there are realities which have not been let in to our common discourse; for whom the evidence is too strong that there is more to reality than can be told. But who try to tell it nonetheless.

I have met a Native American medicine man there; I re-met an astrologer I already knew; there are poets, and ordinary folk for whom things have happened which don't fit in to the ordinary narratives of life. Hell, my whole life looks like a bizarre improbability to me, so - apart from the never seeing ghosts part - I should fit right in.

The narratives of these writers would all be extraordinary - hard to believe - except that lots and lots of people follow astrology, even in the highest places. Lots of people believe in and see ghosts. But not everyone wants to tame what they know with words. Almost everyone is secretly skeptical, unless they've seen something themselves. Which I haven't. But I'm not really skeptical, except in ways that I'm perfectly open about. Like, I'm skeptical about the skepticism which powers scientific inquiry, for example.

I never will either see ghosts nor guide my life by the stars, but lots and lots of people will. Still, I am a writer, if I am a writer at all, who writes at that very same edge of sense. Words from others have driven away the mysteries for me. Ghosts have been rationalized to my satisfaction as the reification of what's only "in the mind." But words also take me over the edge, to where only metaphorical is real. Except, well, metaphor is far too limiting a figure.

For me, what's "out there" (fun ambiguating machine again) really is starting to look more and more as though it came from inside my mind. Hard reality is collapsing beneath something else that much more powerful. And reality is pretty darned powerful if you ask me. How strange would it be if the stars did not have any influence on our lives. It only depends how large your frame is allowed to become.

I resist any and all certainties. I therefore risk insanity of the most basic sort, of course. My personal and written narrative often goes off the rails. But, in precisely the manner of this author I recently heard on NPR , the frame within which the various authorities would box me not only doesn't seem to fit, but would seem positively to keep me from myself, as if there could be a me divided from myself by prison bars.

I land in the hospital, but no cause can be found. Or rather, no cause for the cause. (Do accidents always require causes? Or is that just an escape clause the insurance policy writers use) The most important connections in my life are the ones which have been made far beyond my control. Random. Easy to miss.

I'm almost certain the same is true of you, unless you're filthy rich, in which case you're likely to credit your own intelligence and cleverness. It's only human. As if these also weren't matters of good fortune. So, you'll credit yourself with intelligent and clever deployment of your intelligence and cleverness. You see where this is going.

Among the authorities I simply must resist, I would have to include the astrologers, the ones who already know all about ghosts, as well as the usual suspects; the scientists, the doctors, the academics - all the ones who have worked so much harder than I ever will for answers.

These conventional frames are all fully fleshed out now, and so there's nothing left there for me. Which doesn't mean, in any of those and many other cases, that I'm feeling superior to the sense that folks inside them can make. I'm not. There's just no sense there for me. My body's healthy, my mind is strong, the only thing I have to fear is fear, and I'm working on that one too.

* * *

I have a headache today well beyond the power of doctors to diagnose. But it's origin is trivial. Nothing to be alarmed about. I had to get a new "smartphone" because the old one would no longer connect to the Internet. Verizon had sent me five, count 'em, five new ones in fulfillment of the warranty I pay for. I asked them, please, to look a little more deeply into the issue before sending me another one. Each time I set a new one up, costing my precious time and attention, I am a little less confident that my work will last. I told the guy I didn't want to feel like I was driving a Toyota. I think he took my point.
.
They obliged me, they brought in their big guns, but in the end offered no other resolution than to send me yet another refurbished identical phone. It seems merest coincidence that the timing of this series of escalating failure rates coincides with the termination of my contract, and the ability, therefore for me to claim a new phone free. Honest - I think it's random. Well, OK, as much as anything is random.

Naturally, I had wanted to hold out until the newer cooler ones come out. The Verizon folks helpfully advised me that there's never a good time to commit with these things. There's always a newer cooler one just around the corner. And it's no real surprise that among the diminishing number of people who ever bought this particular defunct phone in the first place, there should be some kind of crescendo of trouble. Verizon's cost in PR and technical expenditures for a remedy would be impossible to justify.

I caved. They offered me an extra fifty bucks off. (Just now I got a coupon in the mail for a hundred bucks off - I guess the guy was really stretching himself out for me!!) I miss my old phone, though. It was a kludge, a terrible compromise between touch and buttons and Windows' seemingly pathological design-by-massive-terrified-of-the-boss-committee-consensus approach about including the kitchen sink. The very antithesis of the iPhone. But I'd learned to make it work, and especially liked its slide-out keyboard.

Now, I'm sure you're wondering how and why I can afford an Internet-connected smartphone, being out of work, and dissing technology the way I do. Well, I pretend to.

But as you can see, I practically live up here in the ether. It's how I present myself. I have no fixed geographic address, and so I require cellular technology just in order to be findable by friends and family. I swear I don't really want to be reachable at any moment. I extol the virtues of staying put, even of going back to the old ways. But just like Al Gore, I make some kind of exception of myself. I guess.

Well, not just like him. He's rich and growing and I'm poor and shrinking. Divesting myself of fat and other accumulated stuff. But I do find extravagant hope in certain of the new technologies. I watched that Afghani reporter embedded with the Taliban, and like lots of others, I awoke to the evident truth that they could not coordinate their activities, plant their bombs, nor even detonate them were it not for the cellular network. One wonders why "they" don't just turn it off. You know, the other "they."

Clearly, as with credit card companies who would rather we not know precisely how much money they lose to fraud and identity theft, there is far more to lose by shutting down the cellular networks, than there would be for "them" to gain. A few hundred or a few thousand soldiers a year is a perfectly acceptable price. It's commensurate with lots of other costs, like the cost of mayhem on our highways, for instance, or in our hospitals where "preventable" is the single biggest cause of death (OK, I think it's third, but I know it's up there).

The true cost for public admissions about what's really going on would be our lost confidence in the structures which sustain us.

I don't like these Taliban any better than you do. I might like them a lot less, since I also see them as very similar to our own teapartiers. Angry at everything and nothing in particular, so target the biggest thing around. The American government. The US government is acting very big so far.

But I find lots of hope in the terrorist cells' ability to use the technology of wealth to frustrate its power. Poverty stricken people around the globe can now have phones where once the cost to get on the grid was prohibitive for all but the privileged classes.

There is very nearly no limit to what a company as large as Citibank, say, will do to protect your confidence in them. How much of your fees pay for the invisibility of rampant fraud? Do you ever wonder? And still they want to put a tax on top of what they aren't telling you, against your fear, by selling you identity theft insurance. Fear and greed make a charming couple, don't you think?

"Mission Accomplished" was precisely what got done by the shock and awe campaign against Saddam Hussein. We shouldn't have made so much fun of Georgie Porgie in his jump suit. The whole point of our going in there was to cement the fear we all must have of ignorant people willing to fly planes into buildings. No cost is too high to validate the fear in a kind of super high stakes triumphalism. A massive cheer for the winners. It's like a heroin hit to the collective psyche.

There was and remains quite literally no limit to what must be spent to own and to control our enthusiasms. (And you thought the "war on drugs" was about your kids??? Well, in a way, of course, it is. They must be kept in training!) Even though the cost to the lives of "our own" (not "us" but, you know, the ones too poor or ignorant to understand how their enthusiasms are gamed) now far exceeds the harm "they" ever did or could do to us.

Never mind the collateral damage, or the meltdown to our economy, which was the only thing which could, even conceivably, trump the cost of war. The War. The perpetual war of one name or another.

Oh, but what might have could have probably would have - depending on who you listen to - happened had we done nothing? I guess about the same things that happen every day over in Iraq and Afghanistan, or those parts of town where your family would never let you live, but people still live there nonetheless. They do. Are they not afraid? Is terror only reserved for those whose daily life contrasts enough?

I caved against Verizon, and my new phone - which I chose because it had the largest brightest most apparently durable and readable screen, plus the promise of a better way to input text - is an even bigger kludge than the last one. I miss the buttons; no keyboard anymore, it's all swipe and gesture, in the direction of, and with a silent bow toward, Apple.

But Apple, I learn today, is suing Google now for ripping off certain of Apple's patented intellectual property. These people have got to be kidding! They're protecting their right to profit from ideas which quickly become something anybody could do a hundred different ways. Should something like a wheel really be patentable? Is there no commons left ??!!!

I have, apparently, purchased the least popular of the smartphones; certainly the least cool. It's running Microsoft's latest Mobile OS, which not a single tech guru praises. And to top it off, the manufacturer, Samsung, has hobbled plenty of the design aspects built-in by Microsoft, all in the direction of a better "consumer experience" I'm sure.

And on top of that Verizon has famously pushed the whole thing way over into the direction of an entertainment device, all for a fee, and all also in the direction of keeping you from putting your own hands on the device's locked away "features."

In the end, I'm happy enough. The browser beats Apple's in most ways. Text can actually be entered more rapidly than by either Apple's or anyone else's methods, or especially by a tiny keyboard with my thumbs. After a headache-inducing learning curve, in the end I think I got what I wanted. I won't be able to type so fast as I'm doing now with keyboard, but that might not be such a bad thing. Hell, I could give a damn for cool, and even hobbled, this beats the alternatives for me. Bizarre how Microsoft now is in the middle, stodgy, between the battling titans of cool.

So, I will deploy my technology precisely as does the Taliban. But I hope I'm a bit more enlightened than they are. I don't feel any anger toward those who screw me in the name of my own good. I'm sure not about to blow up myself or anybody else. I feel no need to be trimmed for Allah. But I do think that there's important work to do.

I sure can see how we have earned the Taliban's anger against us. As certain as I can be of anything, I'm certain that the way to win has nothing to do with guns or money (when the money's not in the form of relief aid). Just as the way to good health has little to do with the powers of medical technology, except when one is truly ill. The technology we need for good health is good information, good sanitation, public safety and housing, and an absence of fear and food insecurity and guilt; as though we cause all of our problems ourselves.

The large corporations now are all doomed to go the way of Toyota. There's not a single one of them which doesn't have the same sort of secret they'll spend any amount to keep from transforming into a generalized loss of faith.

The healthcare industry, collectively, is terrified that we won't be terrified anymore of dying. They act as though they too find the escalating costs out of touch with reality. This is a ploy folks. The more money goes through their hands, the more profit they can make. (Along with my Verizon coupon, I just got another denial of coverage for a blood test. You'd almost think they are trying to alienate me)

And if we stop being terrified, the evident magic will be that, collectively, we'll be that much healthier and better off than we ever could be on their drugs and surgical and genetic interventions when these get deployed as if every deviation from some norm were a cause for emergency response.

There is no massive turning which is necessary. There is no massive evil being perpetrated in our name. There's just a lot of fear, being rendered up into a fairly insane collective behavior pattern.

* * *

Last night, because my life is just that bizarre, I had a chance to attend the hockey event of the century. I nearly witnessed the Buffalo Sabres' own top goalie at his homecoming from center stage in the final event of the Winter Olympics. Canada won, but Buffalo would welcome home the next in a long line of superstar just-misses. We let him know how much we love and value him.

In the event, the son of the friend who'd offered me the last minute seat which he'd gotten last minute - absolute primo seats - the son invited a friend and so I got bumped.

Now, I'm sure you understand completely that this was no tragedy for me. I'm not the world's biggest sports fan, although I do seem magically to be in attendance at some great Buffalo sports happenings. Or just miss them. But the consolation prize was pretty good - I got to use their pre-empted tickets to hear Margaret Atwood in person.

Last minute, I couldn't get anyone to accompany me, so I dropped off two free tickets at the box office, which were then snapped up by some grateful students. So, in addition to feeling lucky, I got to feel generous. Which is a better thing to do than to feel pre-empted.

Atwood, poor woman, devoted her "talk" to answering publicly some frequently asked questions that she, as prominent author, often gets. It was pretty transparent to me that she was warning off those questions in the Q&A session which the format of this "distinguished speaker series" has established for itself.

Despite her sharing some intimate history of Buffalo from a Torontonian's point of view, you could sense this bit of tension between her and this crowd. She's most recently written one in a literary barrage of end-of-the world novels .

The crowd wants to know if she's optimistic, what we should do to prevent a catastrophic future. The questions veer just a bit in the direction of questions she's tired of asking. Questions she rolls her eyeballs at. She kept her poise, but the gulf between herself and this audience had grown immense. We felt mildly cheated by her impromptu carelessly prepared and brief remarks. She felt at odds with ill informed and familiar questions.

As a writer, she said, she is and must be an optimist: That she will finish the book, find a publisher, find an audience. As an accomplished author, she has about as much in common with her audience as the health insurance industry does with the ill. Why would she want anything changed? It's working for her. Being darkly pessimistic makes her life perfectly sunny.

I know that sounds like sour grapes, but honestly, it's not. In a way, it was generous of Atwood to give us her time in person. In a way, with the now inevitable mega-sized image of her talking head right over her actual - but too far away to be distinct - head, it was hard to get the sense of what "being there" really means anymore. A television would be a far more intimate way to hear her speak.

* * *

So anyhow, as you can see I have nothing at all spiritual to offer. Well, except that I have a really hard time finding almost anything at all which is not meaningful. The most random things just fit right in to what I'm thinking about. And I'd say that's just about as powerful as seeing ghosts. Just about as jarring. Not exactly terrifying, unless you lose your mind about it. I wouldn't want to go saying these things out loud, because everyone would just think I'm crazy.

But, in some new-agey spiritualist sense, all that needs to happen to change the world is for lots and lots of people to stop being so afraid. So terrorized. So subject to the narratives pandered by those already rich and famous and powerful. No, no, no, I'm not talking about Margaret Atwood (by strange co-incidence I found out where my long lost copy of The Handmaid's Tale went, but she couldn't use the tickets either). Atwood come to Buffalo, risking her reputation at the same time that our fair city was honoring a hockey player from somewhere else. Oh Canada!

She writes beautiful books full of implied cautionary tales. Stories and poetry which can reveal things about ourselves that we'd never know without the mirror of literature. But she too is asking us to be afraid. I'd say that's at odds with her audience in Buffalo. We have seen the future and it is us. We're only terrorized by what the better off might do. In Buffalo, silly sin-city of Atwood's past, we still sense a chance to turn it around. And if we can turn our city around, anything's possible, right?

Sorry. Way too long. I'm still working on the condensed version. That's a lot harder.

The Educator's Dilemma

2010-03-01T06:20:00.000-05:00

Any reasonable teacher understands that not every student is created equal. As regards the heights of academic accomplishment, some seem destined to fall short right out of the gate. Not to believe that would be as absurd as to suppose that every single human may triumph at the Olympics, given the proper nurture and coaching.

Of course, there may be more truth to that than many sour grapes Olympians might credit. But it's also true that to make each of us Olympians be default, at birth, would be nothing short of cruel. Perhaps as cruel as to force a gifted intellect to suffer the slow and plodding training of those around her, who are perhaps gifted in different ways.

We understand now, as educators, the hidden injuries of race and class. We know that sometimes the brightest students are invisible beneath the cover of different cultural and linguistic norms. We even know that we ourselves can be blinded by those things which we hold most dear; our own personal or cultural canon, for instance, or what we think of as proper behavior in the Academy.

You're probably wanting to jump down my throat now, that the problem is the Academy, which must form its own culture and norms which will be necessarily aligned with those of the ruling class, relative to which everyone else must be remediated.

But short of leaving cultures divided, which no longer seems a practical matter given the seemingly inevitable pressures of globalization, there still must be institutional structure to organize our teaching. Short of willy nilly, each to his or her own, which would leave the ruling class that much more fully in charge and distinct from those on its outside.

It would seem that the supposedly universal languages of math and science are what brings us together, ultimately, under a single roof, as it were, to learn. Leaving the elaborations in the realm of what often get called "the humanities" at the fringes, to be sorted out there and suffered.

And how nice it would and must be for educators to have scientific seeming tools, like diagnostic and IQ tests to cut through the large and petty biases and prejudices of the entrance examiners. To give those students who are different from the ruling class a way in, for the benefit of all.

But these tests then become a proxy for the Olympics of life, where everyone else is somehow less than human; protestations about "all men created equal" very much beside the evident truth that some are worth more than others. Just simply because everyone is supposed to go to approximately the same sort of school.

And this process of schooling gets rationalized, of course and naturally, relative to the organization of the economy. So that it is only economic worth which is being graded, and not some sort of core value as a human being. Automatically devaluing the labor of hands and craft and art, unless those appeal, of course, to the ruling class. The class which, according to our Constitution, we weren't even supposed to have.

Why should I be allowed to work out these sophomoric dilemmas so sophomorically? When there is so much written, so much brilliant angst expended on these very questions, dilemmas, and matters. So much well educated debate. Debate whose entrée would and should and must be denied the likes of myself.

Because even this debate is subject to the norms of discourse, which cannot be divided from the norms of the Academy, defined as broadly or as narrowly as you like.

I do call for more slack and less angst. The problems and their resolution can be found only outside the academy. The dignity assigned or allowed to labor which is not schooled. Dignity allowed even to workers in the government, who need not and in most cases should not or must not be elected, as would be their citizen supervisors.

But even there, the civil service exam does as much to prevent as to enforce a meritocracy. Just as has been the case with diagnostic IQ-style tests in education, we now must have a form of academic postmen, firemen and policmen, again defining "academic" as broadly as you please. All to prevent the petty corruptions and prejudices which we still fear would be rampant without these ideally "objective" differentiators.

None of these devices and techniques need be discarded wholesale. But each of them should and must be regarded askance, for the harm they do as well as for the good. How many, drawing on my recent interactions with the health care establishment; how many can retain some humility relative to the certainties of the frames within which they themselves must operate, given that it is their position relative to those frames which defines them? Against whose standards they struggled to gain, first, foothold, and later position and recognition.

It must be as terrifying at any heights, to fear what one would be in free-fall. Frameless.

And yet letting go of our certainties is precisely what must occur if we are to co-inhabit a world which has suddenly gone all one. We must learn to trust and honor one another across all sorts of divides. Of race and class and culture and language and religion. Divides much more extreme than those which divide the ranks in our Academies.

The reason I hold out extravagant hope is that we have filled in all our boundaries now. There are no more frontiers to cross. Science be damned, there are no more fundamental discoveries to be made. It's all about filling in now, as we realize that we have been turned back at every frontier.

You will not credit this. Or very very few of you will, so certain are you that the procedures, at least, of science are what holds out the most and best promise still. And I am as certain as you are that this remains the case. There are massive improvements still to come in the ways that we can harness energy for good, understand our bodies for better health, and even organize the economy for more human distribution of goods.

But as regards the fundamental sense of who we are in the cosmos, I believe there is no further that we can travel. At that frontier, science holds out nothing more. Or rather, what we already have is far more than enough. We are co-creators, participants now, in the processes of evolution and of sense.

Of course, we always have been. But now, via the cutting edge of physics, we have glimpsed the limits of what, in principle, can be known. There are no further procedures according to which we can discover any more of what is "out there" without implicating our mind in the process. We have choices, the most crucial of which is whether, in fact, we will regard each of us as fully human. And the determination of our choice will not be made by what we say. It will be made by what we do.

And even if you are waiting for some superior "intelligence" (such a telling term) to make some kind of contact, you should know ahead of time that without having come to consciousness yourself, He or She or It will only know you as a worm. You will have become just another life form embedded in the struggle for survival, of no meaning or value as an individual.

Making contact, a project of no interest to me, although it might be to some future generation, simply makes no sense prior to some sense of what it means to be human, "intelligent," and worthy of recognition. I'd say drop "intelligent" from the equation, and we might be on our way. The term human alone is enough. Divide off any single quality of humanity, and you lose it, plain and simple.

Framed!

2010-02-28T06:23:00.000-05:00

Back when I was working on my boat a lot, I would sometimes find myself in a mess of more than I could handle. A handy way to picture this situation might be to imagine me with toxic epoxy up to my elbows, a head full of the understanding that I would have to use toxic acetone (nail polish remover) to get it off, and panic about various boat parts in various stages of hardening into the wrong position.

Of course, none of these problems could or would occur had I been less concerned to make permanent repairs or modifications. In the "old days" before the advent of such conveniences as epoxy, it was understood that timbers would rot, that they would need periodic replacement and that the entire labor was an ongoing and therefore never-ending process. Things were even built with an eye toward the possibility to repair them.

We have such enduring and durable methods now, and hardly anyone really bothers with wooden boats. Still, the plastic ones don't, in fact, last forever, and they can be pretty hard to dispose of. And somehow the cost in real dollars to own one keeps shooting up to the point where you almost might as well just build more disposable ones. Except that the cost for a wooden boat goes up even faster.

It is very hard to find peace and calm up against the rush of daily life as we live it.

These days, politically, we seem to be engaged in a new version of trench warfare; that ancient WWI disastrous technique which led to the advent of chemical agents and other monstrous techniques to smoke soldiers out of their trenches.

The longer term solution, on top of fairly lame new laws of warfare, seems to have been bigger and more powerful machines of war, combined with a sort of tactical guerrilla deployment of lightweight units.

In the political arena, we have opposing camps of certainty, which keep looking for ever more powerful tactics or techniques to outsmart foes which are certainly more stupid than your camp. Deserving to die outright. Sometimes the camps even try to sharpen up their arguments, but it seems difficult to downright impossible to entice anyone out of the other team's trenches even to pay attention.

Certainty is certainly not a function of being right. We know, historically, that each time we have thought ourselves certain, that certainty, over time, looks silly. Think about bloodletting, or early treatments for mental illness, or certain medical techniques and chauvenisms. The only embarrassing thing, looking back, is that we were once so certain of something which now looks silly.

Look back on your childhood, for instance. There's nothing that terribly embarrassing about being a child, or being wrong. Just about being certain when it turns out you are in no position to be so.

Certainty is a function of meshing your own position to a larger frame whose stability feels like the very definition of sanity. These frames may be religious, or scientific, and sometimes, especially in the case of science, fairly propositional. You aren't sure what the "right" answer will be, but you're pretty confident of the procedures which will find it.

So, the frame, in the case of science, becomes the Grand Narrative of progress. And still, if you are a medical doctor, called upon to diagnose individuals' dire and distressing complaints, you have to operate within some kind of ad-hoc certainty to be able to function at all. You operate within the frame of what is state of the art today.

And still you might have a hard time listening to those who understand at least the broad outlines of what you're saying, but from the inside, as it were, can't quite go along with the diagnosis. They have contrary evidence, but maybe not the words.

In the case of warfare, nuclear explosive devices have arguably kept conflict down to what classroom teachers like to call a dull roar. World War and the epic-level casualties from the two Great Wars have been kept pretty well in check.

Meanwhile, even though the age of Einstein also marked the age of Thomas Kuhn's skepticism about the certainties of "progress," as well as the overall Post Modern critique of any kind of certainty, we do and must await some sort of new approach to resolving entrenched differences before we can put away the bomb.

Here's a thought:

Yesterday, yet again, I landed in the ER. It felt like the same thing which happened Christmas Eve when I was found to have suffered multiple pulmonary emboli. The diagnosis yesterday was dehydration, likely related to having had a few too many drinks the night before.

The only trouble with that diagnosis for me is that I've had a few too many a few too many times for this brand new set of symptoms to make sense to me. Plus, I'd felt fine in the morning, no headache, no hangover, and had headed out for a walk, in the middle of which I felt the same kind of sudden and total loss of power that I'd felt on Christmas Eve. So, I kept walking, with whatever energy I had left, to the hospital which was no further than to turn around and go back home. Made sense to me.

Lots of tests later, the good news is that there is nothing apparently wrong with me. The clots are known to still be there, and the treatment protocol is ongoing. I guess I'm looking for some trigger this time which made my dehydration do something different than it had ever done before. I'm looking for some connection between this event, the event on Christmas Eve which also came on while walking in the cold, and an earlier event which bizarrely enough felt about the same from the inside, but which was diagnosed to be more of a manic episode with psychotic symptoms.

I know that in the earlier case my mind really did go off the rails. The narrative that I was inhabiting was fully detached from reality. There are reachy links among these events, relating to potassium levels, perhaps, but there have also been very definite and distinct diagnostic protocols which have been able to pin specific issues. And thankfully, some medicines to treat them.

Extraneous to all of these diagnoses is the fact that I have been making an awful lot of changes in pretty short order. I left my job, on the basis - I have to guess - that the cognitive dissonance between what I was doing and both expected of myself and was expected by those who paid me to be doing; and what I felt to be central to my being.

Then I moved premises, sold my house, re-established some important relationships, and established some important new ones. And without really thinking terribly hard about it, I find myself eating the kind of anti-cholesterol healthy diet which I never could get myself to do back when the doctors told me to. Not to mention distressing events in the Big Picture, like the catastrophic anti-government, anti-regulatory, anti-common sense regime of GWB and his team of hucksters. Global warming, peak oil, teapartyism, Fox TV, and all sorts of things to make a thinking man feel as if the whole world is going off the rails.

So, there have been a lot of changes to my life, and it makes perfect sense to me that there might be a slew of symptoms as I seek, however inchoately, to re-establish some sort of homeostasis.

I by no means wish to be my own doctor, nor to second guess the treatments that I've been receiving, many of which may well have saved my life. I do, rather, wish to second guess the certainties in which these treatments are embedded. Because the one and only thing which ties the different things which have happened together is me. Not me as in the master of psychosomatic symptomatologies, but me as in the guy who has made all the decisions as a result of dissonances which I didn't really do a whole lot to cause.

Sure, I had choices about what job to take, but like all of us, not as many as you might think. I could have deployed strategies to stay where I was, but I saw an opportunity, like a speed skater at the Olympics, and bolted through the gap. I could have tried more medicines, but, at least inwardly, my difference from the norm was worth taking into account, and none of the diagnoses fit well enough for me to inhabit them fully. Provisionally, for sure, but never quite fully. There has simply been too much changing at the same time, and it hardly surprises me that there might be physical or emotional manifestations.

It always surprises the medical establishment that I'm not on any meds. What's wrong with this picture?

What the doctors can offer me is a much more finely tuned sense than I could ever have of liklihood. They know how to weigh things in some context, where I might be latching onto potassium deficiencies, because among its list of symptoms are all the things which I have experienced. Where an experienced practitioner can put these into some sort of perspective, based on lots of obervations and research.

On my own, at best, I would make a kind of teaparty random mess of my desperate flailing after some explanation. And in the case of health issues, the explanation is precisely what you don't want because that would be a diagnosis, which would mean that there really is something basically wrong with you. So, I'd say ambiguity can be a good thing. Sometimes.

Well, unless a diagnosis is missed and then you end up dying when you needn't have. Which is pretty much why you keep your head down in the trenches too. It's scary to consider what might and can and sometimes likely will go wrong, and if smart people are warning you to look out for what might happen, it's pretty hard not to. Even though, sometimes, the aggregate net effect of looking too hard is pretty hard to distinguish from lots of people getting sick all at the same time, maybe mainly because they've stopped looking after themselves.

Which goes right back to that godawful mess you can get into working on an old fashioned wooden boat in the face of more modern technologies. Sometimes when you add up all the treatment regimens for any one human being, especially after they start interacting and even conflicting with one another, you do end up with a treatment looking a whole lot worse than whatever the disease was that started the whole thing way back in the first place. How many tales have you heard, especially from the elderly, about having to strip away the meds one by one to get back to some baseline from which some sense can start to be made.

The mess is the simple and perfectly predictable result of working within little subsets of certainty without, ever, being able to step back and consider the whole. Imagine if we let the Palin Republicans handle the economy, while the Obama Democrats handled health care. Is there anyone in the world who would consider that a very good idea?? But does anybody consider the compromises we end up with a very good idea? Really?

We will have to find a way to crawl up out of our trenches. We will have to accept that some of us may die of missed diagnoses, reticence, stupidity. It may well be fewer than die now from mistakes in the hospital, which is far more than die from mistakes on the highways.

In my life, retrospectively, there was no need for the big guns deployed against various possibilities which never did materialize. I think I would have died of an appendectomy if there had not been surgeons, but I don't really think that was a terribly complicated surgery. And who knows, I may not have needed to drink so much, which might have been what brought it on, if things hadn't become so crazy in the world by then. If I hadn't been in the middle of not just cognitive dissonance, but crazy amounts of stress trying to keep a school open to which all sorts of lovely people had somehow attached their identities.

The trouble is that you can't really know in advance which are the ones who really do need the intervention of the big guns. Which are the ones who will need the anti-psychotic meds for life. Whose hearts are ticking time bombs. Who is prone to clotting, who will die of cholesteremia. Which cancer must be cut out and how drastically?

But who wants to live life afraid of his own body? On the screen, we all love to watch and cheer and cry about those who live a life as though in contempt of death. These are our heros, athletic, firefighting, fishers in the north seas. And we are afraid, sometimes, even to step outdoors because the neighbors might be toting guns.

The fact of the matter, if you were to do the math, is that the only reason health insurance is affordable to any of us is that most of us don't really care for or need the drastic interventions. God help us if we all become thoroughly modern, and consider it our right to rule out each and every illness which might explain our current symptoms.

There is no wooden boat which lasts forever. There is no body either. It is no longer clear that the way medicine works is in the direction of progress overall. That's not because there aren't wonderful new techniques to help the truly ill. But likely too many folks are dragged into the system hoping for something that just cannot be forthcoming.

We look to the medical system, or at least I do, for simple statements such as "this is what we are willing to do" without the question back "are you willing to pay for it, then?" Instead we get the absurd statement "this is what could be done if you can get someone to pay for it." And no-one is in any position ahead of time to tell you it will be paid for. This creates a state of perpetual panic, pretty much like living on a fault line. Imagine if the police asked you each time they intervened for your safety.

We have displaced our grief in the same way that we have displaced our heros. When it comes home, it is almost always unbearable because we had thought that there could be none so close to home. We had fallen into the lulled sleep of those whose life is too smooth. Until the very earth starts quaking.

Let's dial it back, how about? Stop the advertising which makes us all feel unwell *unless.* Taking trains most of the time will hardly affect our lifestyles. Electric cars for the local trips, rented hopefully, should be sufficient. Walking out of doors makes a huge difference to your healthcare profile. And how about shaking hands across the divides of race and class and education. That would do a lot to calm our fears.

There is so much that is wonderful about life as we have discovered it in these United States. Let's not blow it because a tiny class of hucksters in our midst would have us believe that we must take snake oil to feel whole. I don't think that there's a single person, embedded in whatever trench of certainty, who wants the hucksters to prevail.

And surely no-one believes in a centrally controlled economy anymore. So, what's the fuss? We're only talking about the boundaries. Should healthcare be on the side of police and fire, or the side of coke and pepsi? It's not about goverment making decisions. It's about you and me making decisions, taking responsibility, and calling in the trained experts when that becomes necessary.

Meanwhile, I'm waiting for spring when I can figure out if that old wooden sailboat is still salvageable. For maybe the fifth time in its life. About the same number of times that I've failed to die myself. Let's see, there was the scarlet fever, the drowning, the near-miss on a motorcycle, the appendicitis, the embolism, not to mention the food poisoning, the storm at sea. Oh, I guess it's a lot more times than for the old sailboat. Bottom line, I feel pretty lucky to be alive. Which has not quite but almost nothing to do with elaborate interventions on my behalf.

I sometimes don't think it's my narrative which has gone off the rails. Sometimes I think it's the frame itself which isn't tethered any longer to reality.

Loser!

2010-02-23T08:27:00.002-05:00

My sweet daughter used to make an L on her forehead at me a lot. Powerful expressions always originate with the very young, and of course it took me a while to "get" what this expression meant.

It has taken me my entire life until, perhaps, about now to decide that no matter how often I earned the nickname HardLuck, I am precisely not a Loser.

Lately, I whine about what the Health Insurance Industry does to me - they have systematically rejected every single claim, except for the incidentals, for my recent hospitalization. The total bill is enough to wreck me, and having paid my premiums doesn't begin to cover my obligations up against the set of rules they have for me to break unwittingly.

But the good news is that they are showing their hand. Demographically, they should consider me on their side in the Big Fight. They should bend over backwards to convince me that we really do have a fair and honest and worth-preserving system of health care. I'm one of the lucky ones who's recently enough unemployed actually to have health insurance, and still luckier to continue to be able to pay their premiums.

But just like Dick Cheney, they can't help themselves. By their actions they seem to believe somehow that I will be grateful each time they make an exception to their arcane rules that somehow I haven't precisely followed. Most of the time, I'm not the one failing to follow the rules anyhow; it might be the doctor using the "wrong" code, or the hospital passing the deadline for pre-certification, or me getting sick while crossing insurance boundaries. But I'm the one at the end of the line. I'm the one with the fewest resources to fight.

So, the power remains entirely with them to make exceptions, and I should be grateful? Actually, I think I've been granted a glimpse into the hellish orgy which is behind the way profits get made around these parts.

Back in highschool, everyone was shown highway atrocities, enough to make you quite actually sick, for the purpose of discouraging drunk driving. And we continue to be told of what a large percentage of highway accidents are caused by alcohol. For that matter, we continue to be terrorized by stories about drunken airline pilots.

But the message is never conveyed that if you put that many autonomous death machines on high-speed roadways, a certain amount of mayhem is simply inevitable. And it will look just as gruesome.

I prefer to focus on how few fatalities there are, given the nutso system that we have to multiply the consequences of any one of us going off, or making the wrong deer in headlights move, or just being despondent because of some sort of extreme cognitive dissonance.

Leaping ahead here; the terrorists are not the problem. The problem is that we live in a world where we grant the nutjob or the drunk so much power. Every time we think it must have been some Islamic radical, it turns out to have been some neighbor (in the case of Buffalo and Tim McVeigh) or some local nutjob flying his private plane into a building (in the case of Austin) in imitation of the big guys.

And when it really is some Islamic radical, we come up with bizarre conspiracy theories about how it must have been the Big Guy. Which just diverts attention from the fact that the Big Guy was always ready to take full advantage of whatever happened whenever it happened. They tell us all the time that some sort of terrorist incident is inevitable. Is that so that we can prepare for it (how would you prepare???) or so that "they" can?

We are being prepared by a slow but steady erosion of our civil liberties and degrees of freedom, but not the ones that count, like being able to drive cars or fly planes. It's the ones we shrug about which are being whittled away. The ones which, each by themselves, don't mean much, but will add up, down the road, to something which looks very much like Too Big to Change.

Google's gmail wasn't really working very well yesterday. I don't know if this will be documented, or allowed to languish as something that lots of people might have noticed but assumed was something "on my end." We're all vaguely aware of how vulnerable our information systems are. Cybersecurity is generally recognized to be as critical as infrastructure security of any sort. Google gets attacked by overzealous Chinese patriotic students, but that might be a difference without a distinction from being attacked outright by the forces of the Chinese government.

Just as it really doesn't matter who is the pilot of a mobile bomb and what deranged him. The system is simply set such that this stuff has become an inevitability. We like to assign blame, but maybe it's the system that has gone rotten.

Or maybe "the system" is working really really well, but there are some terribly minority winners for whom what they've already won is never enough. Maybe our fear is fully functional for them. If we think the system is busted, wrecked, headed for disaster, then we will remain fully powerless to do anything about it, and the ones who have the power can just keep getting more.

I do think it's about that simple.

The good news is that we will learn to get along because we must. The bad news hardly needs reciting, it's on the news every day, whether it's a Harvard genius toting a gun, or the figment of someone's imagination toting a gun in the UB Library. We're really scared of one another.

But no-one seems to notice how well we do, in fact, get along.

I'm a weirdo on my street, just because, I guess, I'm the only renter. Plus, I'm shy by disposition and don't really know the rules for interaction in the local soap opera. I guess I'm part of it - I wonder what role they have scripted out for me? I could make up some fascinating tales, based on the part that makes it out in public. They'd be at least as believable as the truth, whatever that is. I have no idea what my role is or should be. Honest.

I did not get that job, by the way, where I would be taking on a very public role helping to diffuse the tectonic forces now at the intersection of China and the U.S. This was not a mistake on the part of the search committee, nor does it make me a loser. I was well qualified for the position, and made it to the podium for sure, in a very crowded field. But there was only one position on offer, and I didn't get it.

In a minor sense, I am a known quantity in Buffalo. I am not one of the players. More of a bit part at the fringes who somehow has been in prominent positions at certain moments, but never in a real spotlight. That has been fine for me, but I have also allowed myself to consider myself a loser, even though each time that I have 'failed to succeed' the entire arrangement was a kind of setup. I was a patsy for someone else's failure to set a winnable context.

I guess that makes me some kind of fool, stepping in where more sensible people always have something better to do, or know how to say no. (there's absolutely no way I would have been able to say "no" if I were offered this job. I'm just as scared as you are about being out of work)

Whether heading a school for gifted kids during a stagflationary recession in a shrinking city at a time when "gifted" was a widely derided claim. Whether guiding a high level commission to China without the proper high level alignment back at the home school. Whether struggling to keep up with expectations in a field where those in power all, to a person, announce their utter incompetency (that's what IT work means in case you didn't know what you were doing to those guys who fix your machines).

But it doesn't make me a loser. The losers are the ones who are not allowed to live on my street, and who are therefore concentrated in places I would consider it a risk to my life to live. I wonder how the people who do live there consider it. Isn't it a risk to their lives as well?

Very smart and very well-grounded (sic) people trade advice back and forth, at a very high level - like 30,000 feet in the air high - about what should be done to "rightsize" Buffalo's infrastructure. Which parts should be let go, which bulldozed, which mothballed, since it seems perfectly obvious that there simply isn't enough population of sufficient income to preserve it all.

I don't think I want to live at those 30,000 foot heights. There's no air to breath up there. Well grounded in some esoteric field of experts is not the same as having feet actually on the ground.

I'm guessing that there are lots and lots of people in Sprawlsville who would love to live closer to the action if they weren't so encouraged to fall prey to the notion that everyone in the city is bound and determined get you and yours.

There's a big shopping mall just outside the outer ring of Buffalo called the Galleria. When it was built, it was one of the larger such places in the nation, built to take advantage of the cross-border shopping trends from Canada (depending on the ascendancy of Canadian or American hockey, say).

It's been in the news nationally for not allowing buses from the city to terminate there, leading to the loss of one poor woman's life crossing the quite literally impossible-to-cross highway to get to her low-level job inside the mall.

The first thing you see when you enter the mall are signs announcing that "children" under 18 are not allowed unaccompanied. The assumption is that this too is because of the unruly kids from the city (as if they could get there in the first place).

I happen to know first hand, because I was there, that this rule is because of a very exclusive and expensive private boarding school for dyslexic boys where I used to work. This mall was their Friday night release. During the week, the prescription to empower these boys, who were demonstrably smart (and necessarily rich, which is neither here nor there) but who had trouble reading; the prescription was to provide order to their lives. And constant phonic drilling.

This was not exactly a military school, but it did set out to internalize order that the students were lacking, in a way often reminiscent of military schools. For the right sort of student, it really really worked. It was liberating.

But if you set these kids loose in the mall on a Friday, with teachers who have been on duty (you had to live on campus to teach there) virtually 24/7, you do have a bit of a problem waiting to happen.

It was these kids who were the reason for the rule at the mall.

As FDR once convinced us, it truly is fear and fear alone which is our adversary.

And if I, a winner in every sense of the game *except* perhaps my own internal impressions, cannot overcome fear, who can?

So, I'll continue to work on it. I'll keep you posted. I still think that the tectonic tensions between China and the US are critically important for us all to worry about, collectively. But of course, they are worries at the level of asteroids possibly coming in from the far reaches of the cosmos if you're on the ground dealing with health and safety emergencies.

The way to bring those issues down to earth, I am fully convinced, is to make it clear on a local level what it might mean to throw out the search for scientific stratosphere-level certainties (religious, technological, blueprinted - it hardly matters, because they're all the very same thing) in favor of a kind of contextualized flowing usage trued against centuries of drilling and practice and recitation. We could use the balance.

The funny thing is that in the so called ghettos, they're already way way ahead of us in the Eastern martial arts training. There may actually be less ground to travel there toward making sense of China, than there ever could be at the University which still only affords a tiny handful of professors and courses.

Well, it's a thought. My strength in my professional life has always and only been my patience. I seem to lend a bit of calm in the face of dire circumstances. It's why I like to sail in the wild weather. It's the kind of fool that I am. It defines my success in the field of IT, overpopulated by over-reacts who love the adrenalin pumping emergencies. I will remain calm, ever looking for ways on the ground to connect with the 30,000 foot perpetual emergency that the smart people in power pay attention to, exhorting us to do the right thing.

Busted!

2010-02-22T08:49:00.001-05:00

In the ever interesting scrimmage between Google and China, it seems a compromise is about to be reached. This will be hard for us on this side of the globe to understand, but students in China now are so patriotic that they will do the government's bidding without ever being asked. Actually, even when they are admonished strenuously not to do it, they will read Big Brother's mind.

In this country, the unruly teabaggers are as far from the Academy as they can possibly get. There is almost no intelligence there (I don't mean that there are no intelligent people there, I just mean that as a movement, it is utterly chaotic), just inchoate anger looking for an object. The obvious object is the government itself, which becomes almost spooky similar to what we used to taunt one another about as kids: "You have one finger pointing at me, and three pointing back at you! Neaner neaner neenah!!!"

It's astonishing that they accept Sarah Palin as their spokesmodel. Here is a woman who is as far from understanding real life as the Bushes and the Kennedys were, and yet they hold her up as some kind of one of them. Hers is a different sort of remove from reality, sure, but just because you hunt moose in Alaska doesn't make it real. Just because your husband's a mensch doesn't make him like your husband. They live a fantasy life up there, where the government gives them money.

This woman defines the very term "bitch goddess" and she wouldn't even know what that means. She'd think it was some kind of political incorrectness that she has a right to point her finger at. Well, debating her would be an utter waste of time, so I don't know why I bother. I had something to say about China.

(I always have something to say about China). You'd think, wouldn't you? that after what we call the Tian-an Men massacre in 1989, the students in China would be rather more radicalized toward their government. You'd be wrong. Those punished for that uprising were almost exclusively workers. The students were chastised for allowing their privileged understanding to spill out into the streets. The entire event became what we might call an object lesson. The students followed it very closely.

It is not hard to understand the terms of the bargain the Chinese government has made with its people. Their lives are getting palpably better day by day, and the only thing which can put a brake on that would be chaos; not accidentally the very word which the Chinese use to describe the events on Tian-an Men square that fateful day.

The Academy over here is meant to enlighten. The Academy there is meant to rectify. In both cases, this supposition forms a kind of benign fiction, masking all sorts of petty corruption and deviation. (If you think the Ivy League is all about enlightenment, you should examine the power structure of our nation once in a while)

Rectification means putting words in their proper contexts, mostly. Establishing their meaning - their proper usage - against, in China's case, thousands of years of usage. As you might imagine, this can put the brakes on what we celebrate as "innovation."

Corruption is a deviation, which doesn't change the main stream of improvement. It is the purpose of government, in China, for instance, to keep the rivers flowing in their proper channels, since the weather plays chaotic havoc from time to time, wiping out farms and farmers.

One might suggest that they have gone a bit too far now, damming up the Yangtze and in the process wiping out farms and farmers. Not to mention artifacts and history. But one would never suggest that inside China. That would be to invite chaos.

Decisions, once rendered, must be upheld in a single composed face. Of course we, on our side, also only pay lip service to protests which are now as effectively restrained to within the walls of the Academy as they had been before Vietnam. Only the teabaggers spill out onto the streets.

This is not accidental. Our elite students also accept the bargains offered them. The same riches, beautiful women, access to power, and a chance to enter the government and improve it. This also, is trivial to document. I've seen it from the inside, and it's not always pretty.

So, while I actually don't think that Paul Wellstone was killed by some earnest non-agent of the Bush administration who was reading the mind of Big Brother, I do think that this precise thing explains the cyber-attacks from China. I think Google and China should shake hands and carry on, and that the rest of us should get a clue.

The Chinese government is precisely as responsible as ours is, and precisely as corrupt. I don't say that because of some need for fearful symmetry. It just falls out from the actual balance of power, trade and what these mean for the rest of the world. We have a hard time understanding, much less condoning, China's behavior in Tibet, while the rest of the world has a hard time with us in the Middle East. Or with regard to Israel a lot of the time. Which is also in the Middle East, come to think of it. Duh.

Thinking these things does nothing about making them right or wrong in practice. The problem for Tibet is not its being inside our outside the Chinese sphere of linguistic rectitude, which is arguably as tried and trued as our sphere of scientific enlightenment. The problem is rather, what happens to the stuff that's actually valuable which is a part of their culture and only their culture. The living part and not just the artifacts, which I'm sure the Chinese government will be very careful to preserve.

What happens to all the cultures of the earth now that American English has swapped places with the Queen's own Empire? What happens when we're all just WalMart civ?

I don't think any of us should be pointing fingers, but I do think that we shouldn't exactly trust the Academies to do our dirty work for us either. Clearly, life is not getting palpably better over here day by day. But it surely is for the elites. Why, indeed, would they want anything at all to change??

I think there's room for righteous anger about that. Let the dialogs begin!!

Swindled!

2010-02-20T10:43:00.001-05:00

Last night, arguing with a very talented lawyer friend of mine (we like to posture adversarially, although it's not a fair match, since he does this professionally) I heard a sad and funny story.

We were arguing about Tiger Woods and Bill Clinton, and the Starr commission and framing and responsibility. For the sake of argument, let's say I was taking Clinton's side, excoriating (a word lawyers would never use in a courtroom) Starr for dispensing with procedural justice in his rabid pursuit of some truth with a capital T. It seemed to me that Clinton was simply maneuvered into a position where his answer was guaranteed, and that it would necessarily be at odds with the goods being held in reserve against him.

The other side of the argument in this case being that he was *out* maneuvered, and that Clnton was the one with the brains, the staff, the power to avoid precisely this predicament, and in the end he still lied to the American public, in whose service he had pledged to labor.

Clinton lied, perhaps, because it was a small matter. He lied, perhaps, because the consequences of telling the truth would cause greater harm to the public than the harm of keeping it from them. He'd been cornered, and perhaps he'd proved his mettle?

I don't much care about the proper answer. It makes interesting dinner conversation.

So, there was this judge, having an affair with a university professor. One night, they are caught on tape having "not-sex" (if you speak like Clinton) in the parking lot of a restaurant. There was a small accident - a fender bender in the process of backing out - which entailed a quick "no problem, officer" check written on the spot (not to the officer, to the victim, sorry!). There was a tale of drunken weaving on the skyway bridge, and an arrest for DWI.

You pretty much know which side you should be on, until you hear that the judge's wife was having him tailed, and that the DWI was a setup. A tipoff. The pictures were not captured accidentally. Who knows about the bumper bumping?

Apart from your envy that these participants in an illicit affair could keep it that hot after two years, it's not all that easy to tell where the justice is or should be. At least not for me.

The part that's hard to get beyond though, is that you do know that the scorned wife was the reason that the affair stayed hot. She was being used that way. You also know that these players probably knew that about themselves, and wanted to keep things that way for as long as they could. Well, you don't really know, but you can reasonably surmise.

I don't really know the end of the story, although I have to assume that a few lives were wrecked. Once public, these things make a hard time stuffing them back into the can. It's hard not to see the wife both vindicated and justified. But you don't really know the backstory. You don't really know anything about their homelife, what led up to things. Do you need to? So what if she was just a controlling bitch. Isn't that just a cliche to put down those who outmaneuver you?

I spent part of yesterday in the VW shop. My brakes were always on (take that Toyota!), and it was costing me lots of gas mileage. They'd just completed a total redecoration of their shop, which made the entire customer service experience much more lavish than it used to be. I hardly need to tell you that it made me nervous.

Now, I'm pretty loaded down with technology, and I tend to know how to use it. This was the first time that I remember their quote for the part being so far out of line with the "standard" price on the Internet. They'd suggested I should have the brakes replaced at the same time but I held off, on the reasonable argument that I'm still not working. I made some lame jokes about how they'd better not start serving Cappuccino or I'd start thinking I was among the wrong class of customer anymore. They assured me I'd have to bring my own. (the coffee was pretty good, oh, and I just rechecked and it must have been a fluke, like looking up prices on Travelocity before you move to commit. It no longer looks like they overcharged me.)

Of course it did turn out that there was more wear left "than we'd thought". I couldn't tell if that was said sheepishly. It wouldn't have mattered to me. I've driven this car nearly 300,000 miles, and all the service has been done at this shop, and I'm not about to stop loving them just because they made their showroom and customer waiting area look more like that rip-off place which serves Cappuccino, and which I, of course, eschew.

But there's more to the story, of course. Recently, in Toronto, on a Sunday, picking up my girls from the airport, one of my coils went out. (yeah, I thought there was only one too) The car made it home at potentially great expense to the car, and later on I found that the 'net is full of VW haters and flamers who post about this issue, and how VW sux. But when I'd taken my car in for the brake diagnosis, they just replaced all these coils, no charge to me, fixed the rattle with some duct tape arrangement, and told me how I could get reimbursed for the coil I'd bought myself, on the road, on a guess.

The coil I bought was too cheap to bother searching for its receipt (that plus the time to manage the paperwork). And I know the VW shop was eager to do this for me because the newly official recall would mean that they would be paid for charging me nothing. I'm not stupid. But it felt like I was being respected, treated well, favored. Any damage done to the car was by now ancient history. I mean that rather literally.

But now I have no way to tell which was the bigger factor in my lost gas mileage, and where the permanent injury is. An ambiguity I'll just have to live with. I think the difference from Toyota is that there was never any danger to life and limb here. Just pocketbook risk. But they didn't exactly come clean about it ahead of time, and who knows if maybe the flamers on the 'net had something to do with forcing their hand.

Trust is rough. The temptations are all over the place - I'm sure the VW shop is hurting as much as anyone else for business.

***

Sorry, had to take a break. You know how it is when you stay out late, have a few drinks (I walked home!). You're ravenous the next morning.

I made myself an omelette. It was incredible. I don't know if you'd like it, or if it was just incredible to me. It was a garbage omelette, full of too much unmatched stuff that I had by the dregs. Beans. Chorizo. Olives. Broccoli. Brie. Salza. Little bits of stuff. I have no way to know if I liked it because I'm an easy sell, or because I was happy to find use for those dregs. Oh, I forgot to tell you about the potatoes fried in olive oil.

The one thing I do know for certain is that you would never be able to eat such a thing in any restaurant. That I know for certain. What I don't know is whether that is because there can't possibly be that much love in a plate for hire, or if no self-respecting chef would even think of that combination, or simply because there would be some guarantee of returns to the kitchen. All I know for certain is that you'd never get that in a restaurant.

I also know for certain that I'd never have satisfied my particular craving in a restaurant.

Anyhow, where was I? Oh, OK, sure, you're thinking this is pretty clever, right, trying to make it seem as though these things just happen and I don't orchestrate them, and that they will somehow magically fit right into the story?

I'm not that disingenuous. Please! I make shit up as much as the next guy. I edit. I revise. (the omelette story is true though, and even I know I'll have a hard time selling the notion that I revise. I'm not stupid)

I was going to speak, rather, about how, magically, on the news, as if I were the one to cause it, there are these seemingly coincident happenings. Well, their happening is not coincident, it's plain fact that they coincided. But the randomness of their apparent alignment, that's the seeming part.

First, there's Dick Cheney outing himself as a "big fan of torture." Then there's this guy over in England who pretty much confesses to murder right on TV; how he suffocated his "partner" suffering from terminal AIDS and lots of pain. How he thereby relieved the doctors and his lover all, of what he knew they could never do. And how he was interrogated for 30 hours against the likelihood that he was, in fact, guilty of murder.

Here's the shocker. I want to give them both a pass, both Cheney and the lover. Both of them had the decency to speak their "truths" out loud and in public. Now, you might say that they have little enough to lose. They're old, both of them, on death's door for various reasons. But there's little enough of that truth telling out there. (there are few enough cars that even get that far!) I'd really like for Cheney to be interrogated, on the power of risking his life, but I'm tipping my hat that he at least says out loud what he's doing in private. When it affects us, I mean. I don't really give a damn what he does in his closet.

How are the rest of us supposed to make good decisions, when everyone's making up stories? How, when everyone's got an angle on everyone else's story?

That's my story, and I'm sticking with it. Really the omelette was incredible. I'm not about to open a restaurant, but still . . . .

Those Who Can't Do

2010-02-19T09:45:00.000-05:00

How about these variations: "Those who can't, do." "Those who, can't do." "Those, who can't do . . . " Now let's complete the sentences. "Those who can't, do as they will and consider the rest of us fools for trying." "Those WHO, can't do a thing with their music anymore." "Those, who can't do, should stay over there in the Academy, teaching."

I know it's a silly exercise. Classical Chinese, classically, was never punctuated. They hadn't seen the need for it, plus it made a really good exercise for budding readers. They would follow along with pen while reading, and mark the pauses off to the side. The teacher then could instantly tell which ones knew how to read - which ones were missing essential pieces of context; of background mastery. They could tell which ones were fooled by the subtleties. And the ones who found a new way of reading, which the teacher himself had never noticed, well these ones were taken aside to be browbeaten.

It was an essential part of learning to read. It would be a very very big mistake for a student to be allowed any sense of new with the received classics. You can just imagine the dangers. It would be very much like opening a crack in the cosmic egg. Some light might get in! Or things could fall apart.

Meanwhile, in precisely the same way that childish rhymes rehearse the problems with adulthood, we are fond of reciting the truism that "those who can't do, teach." ("Ashes to ashes, we all fall DOWN" or how about "rockabye baby" or "he bumped his head and he went to bed and he couldn't get up in the morning") For sure, it allows students to get back at their masters. Even, or especially, as the masters themselves take special joy in their students' accomplishment in life after school. Like good parents, they wish only for their children's flight. Or at least marry a doctor, for Chrissakes! You'll never fly, idiot!

Well, not necessarily in China, where your child is still your main insurance policy, which might not be a bad thing for us to emulate, come to think of it. In the Chinese case, the Academy actually was the way in to real-world power. Academic conservatism was extremely functional. And parents figured, hey, if he's gonna fly, he'll do it no matter how strong a cage I build. Chinese parenting has been likened to Jewish parenting by a lot more people than just me. I wonder if Jerry Seinfeld knows about it?

It's pretty much the same way here now, as to ties between the academy and the world beyond. With the big difference being that it doesn't really matter how you score. Here, it's much more important which academy you attended. Our important exams are all entrance exams - entrance to the academy, not entrance to some position beyond the academy. Beyond the academy, it's all just a matter of who you know. Usually, you got to know them inside the academy. Kind of a vicious-circle serpent eating its tail kind of thing, I know.

It is, or at least should be, a commonplace that oppressed people often internalize their oppressors, and become thereby their own jailers. Their own worst enemy. The best evidence for this is how prison trustees are that much crueler toward those under their charge compared to the ones getting paid. This principle has been exploited for eons to great effect.

The question must naturally be begged then, what about the teachers in our academies? These are by and large left-leaning thinkers now, in institutions lavishly funded by the capitalist owner class. Or at least the better the institutions are, the more likely to be so owned and funded. Is the peer review process for tenure simply a handing down of the oppression from the owners of the teachers' minds?

You won't have followed me this far, so I'm going to revert to a bit of shorthand, likely for myself alone. A kind of placeholder to be followed up on later. I actually tried this argument once from the inside of the Academy, and it didn't get me very far there either. In fact, it was the proximate cause of the most recent of my occasions for escape. Oh, I guess I've already reverted to the shorthand, for which I apologize retrospectively, which is what apology should be come to think about it. Sorry!

Some academics are fond of talking about the colonization of their students' minds by various sorts of "grand narratives." They talk about this in language which would not only be utterly uninteresting to those outside the academy walls, but more critically, which would be almost entirely incomprehensible. This "post-modernist" sort of language is utterly impossible to parse. Scientists, of which one famous example would be Edward O. Wilson, the ethnobiologist, try and try sometimes, and can find nothing but circular statements of such occult density that they are certain the scholars themselves have been taken in and made lost by their very own words. Hoist, as it were, by their own petard.

But of course these scientists are denizens of the very same academies, even while being far less likely to lean left. Although still a lot more likely than the population at large. Still, for scientists, the expropriation of their work by the capitalist owner class is pretty much welcome. The feedback loop in that case is fairly direct. You cause our theoretical work to be embodied in the world of better living through chemistry (for instance), continue to fund our research lavishly, and we'll go on being your humble servants, for so long as you let us work on what really turns us on and not just what you think might be useful. Pretty much like artists with a patron.

Be patient and utility will come. It always has. Of course, this implied contract has become strained lately, with universities depending more and more on direct funding from companies expecting tangible and financially rewarding results. There's lots of valid concern now about "motivated" research, as even or maybe especially scientists get in on the take from the great capitalistic economic engine of supposed progress (which ain't looking so great now that the caps are melting, for instance, although the technological fix is surely just around the corner now!!).

Tenure comes to those who pull in grant money. Of course, you have to watch out for the ones with a really tightly wound sense of justice, since they might go on a shooting spree or fly a plane into a building. If the cognitive dissonance becomes too great.

If you're not a scientist, the feedback loop is harder to identify. There are certain routes to political power, to roles inside the government, which, if you're a good player, can be parlayed into power in industry, through that famous revolving door. You might even be able to get away with torture if you rise high enough. And brag about it publicly without worry about the consequences. Which I think is a pretty hopeful sign. Honest! (What, you'd rather have them stay secret about this stuff???!!)

But if you're out of that loop, then you're pretty much relegated to talking about how your own mind has been colonized, even as you browbeat your students into learning how to read and write and talk the way that you do. Jews for Israel and damn the Palestinians who could never know the oppression we have felt. Is it any mistake that so many scholars and writers have been Jewish? Oh, I know, I'm just jealous. Well, sure, and I admit it!

OK, so you don't really browbeat if you're a teacher. It's way more subtle than that. But if you were to be honest, you would have to admit that without that academy you never would have the freedom to indulge this thing which feels like flying. This flight of words which feels very much as though it was approaching some sort of sun, whose existence the words themselves deny. You could do it forever. Admit it. You've never had to work a day in your lives.

That may sound like a taunt or a complaint, but it's not. Honest. I, for one, don't believe that work has to be oppressive to count as work. The forces of the economy would like you to think so for sure, to preserve the economic value of play, for instance, but not me. I know very much what it's like to be penalized for liking work too much. So do those pilots for the regional airlines, who could easily get more for driving a bus.

Still you do have to wonder who owns your mind, according to the little compromises you make each and every day for the sake of peace in the valley. And for most oppressed classes, it's not the things you already know about which are the problems. You can probably identify and make peace with yourself about the paper chase, and the tenure compromises, and the shilling for the admissions or development office.

The things you really have to monitor though, are those things which make you the most exercised, and you don't even know how to identify where the oppression really is. What is it that really bothers you most about your students? What would you really like to slap them down about. That would be the cue to the internal oppression. When the students get uppity, and it really bothers you, and you're wondering if it should.

Sometimes you are just concerned that they are being misled by their own enthusiasm. Usually, you already understand that this particular student, based on a pretty good background check from other assignments, just simply is not equipped for the territory he is heading into, and you want to keep him from embarrassment or worse.

But sometimes they really do find the weak spot in your presentation, and you just want them to shut up. I know a thing or two about how hard it is to stand up in front of a class, exposed, and still to try to resist the temptation to pull rank and bolster the pretense that you really do know exactly what you're talking about. It's a really scary position.

Really, you should just accept the fact that the University owns your mind. That by accepting the credential, you implicitly accepted the need for such a credential to distinguish you from those who don't or won't or can't get it. You recognize that a few of those are just plain too smart to need it or want it or to waste their time getting it, and these become the artists; who produce the actual objects of your teaching. It is and will and should be strange if and why any of them, these objectifiers, become colleagues in the Academy itself, except, perhaps, as "Artists in Residence" who are known to know as little about their own work as it is possible to know. Just in the sense that no-one can really know himself, or why he does or says what he does. That's the magic lacuna in each of us, and it's a good thing as both Anne Tyler and Barbara Kingsolver happened to have figured out, magically, and the very same time. For instance. The University is their Patron then, and as distinguished from you, the Big U. is not their employer.

And that's just the way it is. So get used to it. Unless you want to own your own damned mind, in which case you'd better be pretty proof against crazy. Which if you were you wouldn't require the reassurance of peer review about it in the first place. And just because nobody gets what I'm saying doesn't make me crazy. You know? Right? Hey!!!

Still, I really don't think it's true that 'those who can't do teach.' Teaching is surely doing. You're standing up there in front of a bunch of eager and earnest learners (so long as you don't give them objective measures for feedback, which will only encourage them to game it and become your adversaries) and maintaining this potential fiction that you can lead them someplace valuable, which they could never reach alone. You do it because you love them, more even than you would love to be where they might go yourself. And you take a meta look askance at the work of the real producers in the world beyond the academy. Which, if it had any sense, that world, it would prize this meta-looking in you beyond all reason. It's what a University is for! I have seen the mountain and I can't make it myself, but I can ease your efforts by taking you to my jump off point. What, that's not doing?

Which, speaking of, reason, is how come I have turned almost all of my attacks against the Left. As non-believers in absolute anything, as people who understand that the word truth, while grammatically possible, cannot possibly mean anything at all, except as reification of what originally meant just simply comparison against a standard, in the absence of which, the standard, there is no possible meaning at all, unless you believe that the abstract can be real, and measurable, and something to be trued against. Which just comes right back to that jealous of Jews thing again, now, doesn't it? Because they seem to be able to true things without some actual objectification of that thing against which what they know is being trued. Which was what was so great about that recent Coen brothers movie, A Serious Man, which I'm not, in case you were wondering. I'm not a serious man.

I ramble. And I'm pretty sure I'm right about this stuff, but in the end, those who can't do write, and are almost never actually right, right? I just wish we'd all stop being so shrill and certain about stuff. It doesn't do any good to want people's heads, no matter which side you're on. The problems are all on the fringes, at the extremes, and the solution is about finding some dialog, some truing which can happen among the reasonable people in the middle, not against a standard, but against each other. And it's not that the extremists are wrong. They're just dug in. Trench warfare gets nowhere. Just watch history. Just watch Congress. Well, if you can stand it.

I, for one, just wish that they would let the Olympics play out on their own, competition by competition, and not keep trying to make a story about it, which makes one Olympics look just like any other and not even worth watching. Because I've seen that story and that announcer, and that little heart-wrenching vignette about the struggle to the podium at least a million times. I just want to watch the race!

And what if there are no more mountains left to climb? What if the struggles now are all inside our heads? Would that really be so terrible? Really? We'd have to make the important choices now, instead of kicking them down the road, for instance . . . .

Vote Fraud

2010-02-18T09:27:00.004-05:00

I don't know how to pose questions, and I'm in charge of the darned polling company. Did you mean "Boo!" lousy story, or "Boo!" let's turn off the TV, or "Boo!" to turning off the TV. Questions are so much about context. I can never get it right.

I have three "opportunities" out there right now, or maybe four or five depending on how you count them. Maybe the people in charge of the opportunities wouldn't consider me a contender, but how would I know? They aren't talking - pretty much like you ya bastard reader! It's amazing how people and companies and readers and critics will just keep you waiting and waiting, like a frog in a kettle, as if we weren't all desperate for work these days. You might almost say it borders on cruel.

Just for fun, while I'm still in free fall here, which as a line in some movie I recently watched but can't remember which pointed out, free fall is like flying (until you hit). Maybe it was a TV show? I know it's not original with me. Crazy Heart???

Anyhow just for fun - and I'm going on record here that nobody's in danger of a shooting spree from me if you reject me - I'm going to idly suggest the connection among these apparently disconnected applications of myself to someone else's business. Here's the list in no particular order:

China/US inter-paradigm understanding and cross-cultural brokerage before we end up at odds with each other and take the whole world down with us . . .
Health Insurance IT development to internalize market externalities to optimise care and cost (externalities include what would be humanly "best" and not just what would cover the most bases - sometimes more "care" isn't better, that sort of thing.)
non-profit business software development for a sustainable planet (same idea as with healthcare - developing a new economics of humanity)
love
startup business to shift the critical distinction for technology from software/hardware to machine/human where it belongs

A couple more are just long shots hardly worth mentioning:

Winning the lottery (hey, I bought a ticket once)
Writing for pay (keep your yap shut!)

Some would pay better than others, I'm sure. Some would sustain the soul in ways to make up for shortfalls in pay. Some would sell the soul. Some would defer compensation for some period up to eternity. I'm having a hard time recognizing which is which.

I'll bet you would have a hard time drawing the connections among them. I'll give you a hand.

First of all, in the Chinese tradition, before contamination from us, the West, the technologists, if you will; before that the Chinese literary, linguistic and cultural tradition had no need to noodle the mind/body problem which so obsesses us. There was not a whole lot of obsessing about beginnings and endings, and therefore no concern for ultimate meanings. The word God, for instance just simply never dropped out from or in to the language.

Then there's the utterly ridiculous, obsolete and just silly distinction between hardware and software in the world of technology. It's all circuits in some virtual space. Logic circuits, embodied in hardware or virtually hosted on hardware, it's all on the machine side of a distinction which does count, and which falls out of many languages after a while. That's the human/machine distinction. It falls out of math, that supposed "universal language," in the form of "paradoxes" which only machine-like thinkers could possibly give a damn about.

Some wag on Facebook just now thought I was talking about "love" when I said free fall is like flying (I just meant a job hunt), so that connection doesn't even bear mentioning.

The economics of healthcare are obvious enough for anyone paying even the slightest attention. For instance, who, if told the price ahead of time, would ride an ambulance rather than a taxi if they were going to be asked to foot the bill themselves? Pretty much only the virtually dead already, right? And where do you think all the expenditures go? And do you think any of it could be used to refund the life of the person who likely never made as much in a whole lifetime as will be spent at its end (for the benefit, presumably, of those to be left behind). Q.E.D.

And as to sustainable industry, well that should be a no-brainer too. If you only charge what it costs to extract something, without considering the cost to renew it, you'd pretty much be shooting yourself in the foot unless you were only concerned about a good time right now. In which case, fuck you! Which takes us back to the love connection again.

I suppose that it's OK for two people to be looking for a good time right now from each other, as long as nobody else is involved. Maybe you know how to get to that magic spot of no implication with anyone other than yourself? But then we get back to the soul selling thing again, I mean assuming you have any usage for the term soul, which I, for one, sure don't.

Well, I'm whistling. While I work? Like a bomb in free fall? Because I like the tune? Because I'm in love? All of the above? I always hated multiple choice. So easy to game. (What? You think I earned my way into the Ivy League - fat chance! I was that dog they let in when some Black Hat was proving how easy it is to game the system. But you're too young to remember that one.)

Vote Fraud!!

Katrina, Katrina; Buffalo's Super Bowl Projections

2010-02-17T12:20:00.003-05:00

(take two)

After Super Bowl 44, I was part of the collective sigh when the empty streets flooded with cars leaving friends and family's houses. It wasn't quite like the good old days when the streets had emptied for the Bills, but you could still feel the collectively held breath letting go. Everyone in Buffalo must have been rooting for The Saints.

There was no big party afterward in Buffalo this time, although we might have hung out to watch the one down in New Orleans on TV. We never could do it ourselves in Buffalo, even with four chances in a row! Damn!

President number 44, Super Bowl number 44, Buffalo finally cheered a winner! In the aftermath, I still feel as quiet about it as I felt among the cars gliding through our gears on Main St. after the game. Even while we were cheering wildly, we knew that change for the better is barely visible through that glass darkly; our future doesn't look so promising these days. But we did project the winner this time; the underdog finally won!

The one who played us up on the big screen for the Hollywood version was so much better looking. That might be flattering, except that no one seems to care about Buffalo in real life. It's as if the sudden disasters are the only ones which count. The ones which are unaccountable except as an “act of God”, even when they were predictable.

Mardi Gras coincided with the Presidents' Day Holiday-weekend this year. How fortunate for the revelers. I stayed home and watched a re-run on my computer of the PBS Frontline show on the crash of flight 3407. I should have been watching the Olympics, but that just seems like a another re-run all over again. I must be getting old.

This morning as she drew my blood (alright, I am getting old), the phlebotomist wondered where all the money for Haiti came from, if people in Buffalo can be allowed to live in bombed out houses starving. She wasn't getting rich on my blood, and that's for sure. We had a good time, which is a funny thing to do while getting blood drawn.

How does one deal with regret, then? Looking back, we could have avoided so many of our permanent scars: the Kensington Expressway almost completely tore us apart, just as similar projects did to so many Northeast cities. Its right-of-way downtown has been scabbed over now with low-rise offices and institutions.

We could have had our Great University on the waterfront. Heck, we could have faced down Robert Moses and kept our waterfront in the first place. We could have built our light rail from lots of somewheres to downtown, and then we could have had something other than our ghost-town after dark. I hope Chippewa Street lit up for the Mardi Gras celebrations.

Maybe these scars are just birthmarks; indelible parts of our character? I remember as a kid, when Mom used to take us downtown to buy school clothes. I'd gotten a new red Naugahyde winter cap with earflaps, back when Naugahyde was cool. It made me feel really proud. We used to stick our heads out the windows in those days, riding over the skyway bridge even before it had any safety barriers. My older brother looked way cooler in his green hat with the flaps turned up. I looked like a dork.

Regret for me is watching my new red hat float down and away from the skyway bridge. My terrorized heart went floating with it, tugging me in a direction opposite to a red balloon wanting to float upward. I pulled my head back in like a scared turtle, and stared silently at the back of my brother's seat up front. Now that I think of it, until I went bald I pretty much refused even to wear a hat after that. I look pretty dorky in hats.

Hey New Orleans, our politics are almost as corrupt as yours are! Our schools are just as bad! We suffer natural disasters too, except that ours are laughable. We suffer whiteouts that the rest of the country just makes fun of. And although we don't generally show our tits, we get just as drunk in public as you do on St. Patrick's day, say, or at the Bills games. Chippewa St. ain't Bourbon Street, but still!

What we lack is cool. The harder we try to make ourselves understood, the more our nasal Buffalo twang sticks out. But as they say in Hollywood, when one theater closes, another one opens. No, really, we open nearly enough new theaters around here to make up for the ones that go out of business.

We were once even grander than the Big Easy, but we never were as down and dirty cool in our decadence. We came on our decay the old fashioned way - we earned it over time. Hell, we never got it together enough even to put a roof over our stadium, and it would make a lot more sense here than in New Orleans. But at least our roofs hardly ever blow off, although if we did have a roof it might have a hard time containing the blast of our crowds.

Everyone knows the story of the frog in the kettle who never knows enough to jump out until it's just too late. While the kettle's heating, the frog just feels nice, and sunny, and like it's in a hot-tub, maybe. Somewhere along the line, the frog's energy has been robbed, and by then it's too late to late to do anything about getting cooked. It keeps getting hotter and hotter until, well, until it's all over.

Is that what happened down in New Orleans then, when the sea swells overwhelmed your dikes? Or is that what happened to us up here, dying slowly across so very many years. Who do we all wait for to save us from ourselves? If only Buffalo could pull the rest of the country down the way that Greece is doing for Europe, maybe we'd get a rescue package too. Isn't that where the Olympics got started?

We got our start here in Buffalo at the Westward Ho! Terminus of the great Erie Canal which changed the world. We were once the gateway barons of lumber and leather and grain and imports and even propeller airplanes and automobiles. We got hit by further West, young man, and then the St. Lawrence Seaway, which took the Midwestern shipping right past us. And then the National Defense Funded Interstate Highway System made our 'biggest switch-yard on the planet' railroad nexus redundant too. Our breadbasket grain elevators were emptied.

But hey, how 'bout them Bills now?! And how about our fiber optics? Build it and they will come? In your dreams! They check out the Falls and leave. Or they rifle though our stores and leave. Or they take their education and run.

I guess, looking at that frog, you can just feel contempt that he didn't have the sense to jump out when he could have. Most of the talented people who grew up in Buffalo or went to school here have done that for as long as I can remember.

Turn around froggie, and let's call it suicide redundantly? You can eat the frog's legs, but shouldn't you have killed him off ahead of time? Or is Buffalo like a lobster, without an advanced enough nervous system to register pain. Yeah, that's it. We're just too stupid (but watch the top, Julia, watch the top).

And everybody down in Haiti now is looking for that silver lining, like all those people had to die before the centuries-long tragedy could be turned about? Where were we all before when it was a slow motion death?

If you are a slave, you have been made an object. If you are raped. If you are taken for your beauty only. Or for your wit. Or for your money. If your actual life is not worth paying any attention, then you have been made an object. And if you live through it, then all that you have left is your humanity. And right there, as Victor Frankel reminded us, is the only choice you've ever had in your life. To be human or not to be. It's a choice and not a grant.

But so much of the time we only know how to do back unto others as they have done to us. Not because we're mean, but because we never really did understand that we were being made into objects ourselves.

In New Orleans, the pre-gaming before Fat Tuesday was even more extreme than the party which happened the day before we must begin our pretense of mourning. Because today we are alive, even though tomorrow that asteroid might hit, as they made such good fun of in those Super-Bowl ads.

And I just love to watch Sarah Palin roast herself in the media kettle without even knowing that she now looks and acts more like Tina Fey than Tina does. But what does it say about my humanity, then, when I feel such glee that she makes a fool of herself?

Palin just really wants to be the object of your attention, and I just want to take her down. She's a lightning rod is all, for the entire country's frustration that nobody, seemingly nobody at all, is paying any attention at all to their interests. Everyone's gaming everybody else, and the big corporations make their margins gaming your ability to predict your limits and then hitting you when you cross the line. A tsunami of debt, and it's all our fault, somehow, for wanting.

Well, we're still here in Buffalo. We're still human, what's left of us, and lots of people are coming back home now that the bubble's burst elsewhere. We're not looking forward to some disaster larger than the laughable ones, which still kill lots of people if you really want to know. Walking around in circles snow-blind, or maybe dropping from the sky because the airlines want to outsource responsibility, or just on the streets from guns since all the money has skittered out to the suburbs because our desegregation was stopped at the city line. By Nixon, of all the wonderful people.

And those suburbs won't share a dime with the city whose teats they suck at. As they compete against each other to push their property values higher on the backs of the schools even they won't fund???

That plane came down in Buffalo, they've determined now, because of "pilot error." The steering column was literally shaking at him in his hands, announcing an issue which just simply couldn't be ignored. The idiot lights or warning buzzers or flashers couldn't be counted on to be enough. The pilot pulled a deer-in-headlights move, and bolted in the wrong direction. Would you have done any better? How many such situations have you prepared for?

It seems that it might have been the little decisions that went before which are the ones that really count.

And so then it's the industry's fault, for hiring such an under-tried and trued guy in the first place? Or are wages set according to how much people really want a job? Lots of people want to fly, and should we blame them?

Why isn't it our fault for demanding no slack in the way that the prices get set. (As if the corporations would cut us any slack if we gave it to them!) One only hopes that those teabaggers will be happy with their caveat emptor nirvana. Let's whittle down our government even more now, even though it didn't even have enough regulators to be aware, much less to do anything about what was going on with the airlines. Don't we remember how much we longed for good government back when Katrina hit?

Wait until after the fact and then bring on the multi-millions to investigate the obvious.

Or Toyota now, you know, pundits wondering what's the connection among all these seemingly unconnected failures; what could be the holistic issue which relates brakes to acceleration? Maybe it's the whole "drive-by-wire" concept, except how the hell does that relate to issues with the steering? Surely that part has not lost its actual connection to the wheels?!

There was a general systems failure, despite the need to assign blame. Toyota, not the hot wheels label, the "good old reliable" Buffalo-style label rather, just simply made the wrong decision at lots of little places along their line. No one of them seemed to merit coming clean, until they were forced to come clean and then suddenly a whole lot of little retrospectively wrong decisions are getting swept up into their mess, and so the holistic problem is what is it now about Toyota culture which has them protecting the brand at all costs? So that, in the end, the brand might get, well, not destroyed exactly, but tarnished surely?

It's a culture of deny deny deny, until the least of us feels responsible for a situation not of her making, because none of us was smart enough or prepared enough to see it coming. It's a culture of denial, as anybody knows who's tried to collect on insurance, whether for health care or on an “act of God” caveat in New Orleans. As anybody knows who's tried to pin responsibility on somebody in power.

Some lowest common denominator always has the veto power now, and so Sarah Palin can say "retard" when she means it satirically, but not when she means it seriously. But seriously now, who can tell her difference from Tina Fey? There is no difference at all anymore between earnest and satire except in point of view. But nobody's really laughing. There's lots of finger pointing, desperate for an object.

Protect brand America, I guess. But when the Supreme Court grants rights to corporate “persons” as if they also were inalienable from their pursuit of happiness, something's gone very wrong. Big corporations have the money to drown out your voice and mine in elections, as if they haven't been using it that way already.

Don't we remember that women and blacks never had the vote in the first place? That more than half of us had to fight off that same supreme court to even get to vote?

Grim? Even the Bills are probably not about to stay around these parts. Our stadium looks like the WalMart edition, and Toronto has one with a flip top right around the corner. In the same dense media market, only cooler. Way cooler.

Bring in the outsourced quality. Pay something under half of the wages of dignity. Because people are willing, at least, to have something rather than nothing.

We never pay attention until it can make us look good. But we're not looking so good, America, we're not looking so good.

Will we make stone soup then, the way they did here in Buffalo when the superstars came to town for our home makeover, Buffalo style? Can we be like Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz, and find that we'd always had what we needed within ourselves? Or will we just grab for the bowl to see who gets it first and fastest, and then let the tears come flowing out when we watch the story get retold up on TV or at the movies?

Make of yourself an object, and treat yourself the way you do your dog. Excellence is what you've always had, if you were to nurture it. And how do you treat your dog? I'm thinking a lot better, sometimes, than you treat your neighbor.

We could choose not to take responsibility for someone else's claim of excellence on our behalf. (Nothing wrong with a little partying now and then though!) That pilot could have used to read "The Message to Garcia" written by our man right here in East Aurora. There's room for personal responsibility.

Excellence is not something you're in the audience just to witness. It's not only in the Super Bowl, or at the Olympics, or flashing off the balconies in New Orleans, or on the screen from Hollywood.

There's also excellence in comparison to you. We still have a chance to win the real competition. Or maybe we already have, except let's not tip back the Gatorade just yet.

Another Spy Thriller Goodreads Review of Noel Hynd

2010-02-16T10:44:00.002-05:00

Conspiracy in Kiev (The Russian Trilogy, #1) by Noel Hynd

(from my Amazon.com review "Spymaster Masters me Again")

I was a little nervous reading this book. I'd really enjoyed Midnight in Madrid (another in this trilogy), but that was my first Kindle read, and I didn't know then that these books are published by a Christian publishing house. Starting this one, I was afraid my positive impression might have been contaminated by first-timeism (I liked reading on the Kindle) and I have to assume that Christian publishing would prove to be, you know, programmatic and rule-based and therefore shallow.

This book has two parts, and part one had me completely. A good spy novel, for me, has to lead the reader to the same spot as the protagonist, wondering whom to trust, what's real, and if she's actually working for the good guys. Hynd's writing does that for me in (sorry) Spades. He is utterly convincing with his takes on the world's actual ambiguity, which he backs up with utterly reliable and detailed rich descriptions of the situations where our hero, Alex, finds herself. Including all the historical and political background you might need to leave what you thought you knew - for the purposes of the story - well and far behind.

Hynd's world is a complex place, full of spy v. spy, cynicism on the part of the 'good' guys, themselves doing illegal and nasty thing; and good hearts at the core of 'bad' guys, who have nothing good at all in their brutish resumes. You give him a pass for making Alex impossibly attractive and talented and dedicated. It makes it conceivable that she could actually be that clear-eyed about what she's up against. She's been hit on, competed against, cheated, and uses what she's got in a world where she's utterly alone and without family. She looks good because she has to, and makes a triumph of it.

I almost gave it up in the second half though, where the complexity of a world where America is not very certainly good, starts to break down. You sense flags waving, missionary certainty regaining an upper hand, and you remember that this is just a page turner where the ugly people are bad, and the pretty people good. As though all it might take is prayer and determination and style to move from one side to the other.

The second half presents a billionaire in flat relief, who's doing good by virtue of spending money on spreading God's word to indigenous people, sure along with stuff they wouldn't need without having had their world upset by that same impulse in the first place. The protagonist shrinks, in this reader's estimation, by her apparently unthinking willingness to abide by her judgments of people's hearts, regardless of the harm they wreak by their actions and by their omissions, or how they throw around their money and power.

And then, in the most blatant of possible heavy handed, programmatic and didactic moves (surely worthy of a Christian author writing Christian books), the prayerful Alex gets saved by a medallion of the cross, given her by a pure hearted and surprisingly talented child. Oh please! I thought this was a reader's book, written by a writer.

Most spy novels don't afford the reader tears, remaining focused instead on the adrenaline and mind games. This one does, again in part one, which is both surprising and a good clue to what sets the work apart. So, I'm cutting the author some slack, and here's why: the reader actually gets a chance to rise a bit above the book's protagonist. We can't be anywhere near so beautiful, so multi-lingual and muli-talented, and only James Bond himself could be so good a shot. Never mind that we would do something other than make lots of money doing missionary work to console ourselves for our pain and loss. Our choices are not so, well, lavish.

But we do understand, by the author's own recounting, just exactly where she was lead astray by her own gullibility in service to a flag and to a missionary cause whose principals were never, in any way, willing to take the risks that she did on their behalf. Unless for vanity.

The author shows how the carnage directly results, in reality, from these disingenuous self-serving moves, and reminds the reader of the Church's missionary atrocities in the name of evangelism across the centuries. You don't know where the author stands (I'm giving him back his writer's stripes), but you're pretty sure, as reader, that you're not going to be so gullible as Alex was. You're pretty sure that you're real and she's not. Which is a nice thing to be reminded of, by a book that draws you in so completely.

Then there's the matter of prayer. The stimulus-response of God's hand in apparent "answer" to prayer was so heavy handed that you have to assume it to be an announcement on the part of the author that he's not God, even in relation to the book. It's a reminder to the reader that it is just a book, and that in real life the miracles are never quite so obvious. What choice did the author have?

View all my reviews >>

Reading to Write, Writing to Read, Wearing a Black Hat

2010-02-16T10:42:00.000-05:00

You probably knew I couldn't stay away. I wasn't so sure. I have other more compelling writing projects now, some of which I actually hope to get paid for. Am desperate to get paid for, if you want to know the truth. Because any moment now I'm likely to hear if I got this or that job which I've applied for. Earnestly and in good faith, but I dread as much as long for the chance again to renew my upstanding ability to pay my bills.

I'm sure you care a bit less than I do for the kind of integrity which bedevils my every decision. I'm trying for a word here which implies nothing about a moral better or worse. Just integrity. I feel split apart by jobs. I feel split apart by love affairs. I feel split apart by having to follow protocols or directions or etiquette of any sort now that I think about it. I want and need and even sometimes demand to be the exception to every rule. I am not, ultimately, a believer in rules. I believe in slack. So do you. You want to be considered special too. Despite your shortcomings. I've learned to stay away from things which split me apart, or to find some way to stay apart.

As in, if even I, as well capitalized socially as I manifestly am (or at least "could be if I wanted to"), cannot stand up for slack, then what chance does anybody have? I think there's integrity in that. But you may not want to get near me, just like those "black hat" hackers who now have conventions all over the world but are not always savory types themselves. I mean you have to wonder where they got their skills if not by breaking into places all over the place. You have to wonder where the thrill changes over into wanting money for what they're good at. You have to wonder if they'd ever be honest behind your back, given enough temptation.

You have to wonder, if you're me, if the only distinction between a black hat hacker on the side of the good guys and a black hat hacker on the side of the bad guys is which side of what boundary he (I think it's still mostly "he") finds himself on. If you live in Eastern Europe, then nobody's going to give you the time of day about what it is you've learned how to do, so you might as well steal as much as you can from the evil oppressor capitalist pigs you so much want just to like you. To be like.

If you're inside the NSA, you might as well do what the boss tells you to do, since to question that will get you ejected out of rank. And if you're living to some reasonable standard inside the boundaries of these United States - if you have a reasonably respectable "day job" - then you can call out your hacks and expect someone to both trust that you meant well by them, and expect them to do something about closing the gaping hole.

The one you wouldn't close before the hacker demonstrated that it was open. You wouldn't listen to him until he just popped right through it, showed you what he could have done, and then hopped right back out.

What do you do, what should you do, if you think the ones you're helping are in fact themselves oppressors? You could rationalize that you're really helping the hapless victims of the corporate slackers. The customers whose identity is getting stolen. And your expectation of getting paid by the corporations, against the cost to expose them to their customers, is extortion by some other name. What if you really think that these corporations are evil, not just by their omissions, but by all sorts of facts about them. What would be the right thing then? To stay out of the game entirely? Who do you call that out to?

So now there's a body of hackers, just like there's a body of authors, all wanting to be paid attention for the terrible things they can do with and to your trust. I bow out, I bow in, I read authors who compel me, and know I could never write as well as they do, I read authors who compel me, but don't compel so many others, and I think I can tell the readers how to read, I read myself and think I should learn to write, but I have no way at all to get anyone's attention. At least not by writing.

And in the world of writing, there's no way to be a hacker!!??? Isn't that where the word got started? I've driven a taxi. I'll do it again if I have to. Now tell me, what do you want me to act like I believe? How much does it pay? Who's the audience?

Well, I'm just not that good, or sleazy, or whatever. I mean I think that if I could write a potboiler, or whatever they're called, I really would. It would still beat having to take another day job. Now can I please take your day job?

I've blown it in the world of power-networking, having forsaken all the friends who could exercise some clout on my behalf. I seem to keep only friends who don't quite believe in me any more than I believe in myself, or who have so much integrity themselves that they'd never exericise influence on my or anybody else's behalf for that matter. Is there integrity in that? Which??? Has nobody ever helped you, then? Must you claim yourself for yourself alone?

Well, I think that's what family is, those who would cut you slack, except that to do so would be to betray their responsibility to you. I'm not like good Catholics, for instance, who will sacrifice their own life for the betterment of some family member's life. I rationalize - I don't even believe, in the end, that my sacrifice would lead to the betterment of anyone else's life. Ever. At all. If they don't learn to do it themselves, then it's not worth doing. I'm not reliable enough to depend on. Although I'm happy to use my connections shamelessly on your behalf if I find that I ever have any. Which might explain my apparent strategy not to.

And yet I do allow - have allowed - what I consider to be the inhuman abuse of me rather than to contest it. Other people can't know what they're asking of you when they demand that you get a job, or risk jail in the case of child support. Risk accusations of abandonment. But they can't know that for you this is precisely the same as being consigned to a galley, pulling oars day in and day out and sometimes even sustaining the stripes down your back, just because there's no-one who believes it can be as bad as that. Who are you to know what goes on in someone else's heart?

We are, each and every one of us, quite fully capable to demand of others things which if we were to know what it felt like "inside" we would realize that we had just made of that person something lower than an object, but we exercise some "right" and objectively, what we're asking is no real sacrifice at all. It's what we would want if we were that person. We impose our dreams on others, never considering that it might hurt to be imposed on that way. Keep your own fucking dreams, I've got my own. Now what was it you thought that I should do for my own good? Please, don't leave me on my own. I need a teacher.

The pivotal line in that great film Precious, where she looks at the social worker and realizes that the social worker wouldn't have nearly enough strength to live her life, Precious' own life. And social workers - I've known a few in my day - are almost never those who've lived lives of privilege themselves. These are often enough people who've had to pick themselves up, though probably no one of them has had so far to go as Precious did.

I resist your dreams for me, you resist mine for you. Nothing makes me more livid inside than when my own mother says how she'll pray for me that I will get this or that job. She's praying for my death sentence because it means so much for her is all. To see me safe and upstanding and recognized for what she knows to be my talents and skills and what I have to offer. If she knew what it felt like inside me to face yet another round of up the hill to roll back down, she would never wish for me something to make her feel that easy. But I have no way to say that. I wouldn't say it if I did. Well, OK, I do say it all the time, and it doesn't make me very nice.

OK, so I've gotta go now, to meet Mom at the day care center for memory challenged elders. To check it out for Dad. They're popping up all over the place, and just like day-care for infants if you want to get a job, likely cost way more than the most tony private prep school. And the working class stands for that? Or do they all just get family to help. As it was in the beginning. Amen.

I'm not complaining. I'm just saying. You don't know me. You can't, no matter how much I write, nor how well, you will never know me. Now cut me some slack. I don't even know myself. Not even close.

Fraudulence

2010-02-15T07:39:00.000-05:00

I see I've worn you out, dear reader. Sorry 'bout that.

Because I'm helpless against temptation, I've been tracking visits to this site, and whereas I got more "return visitors" when I wrote less, I get almost none anymore. No one seems to come back for more.

It doesn't really hurt my feelings. Honest. I mean it's not like you were giving me any feedback anyhow, even if you were coming back. Even if you know me in real life, which I think it's pretty unlikely that you do. I wear those people out just by talking.

It is interesting to see, though, how much commentary there is on angled sites. Sites with an angle. The ones you go to because you already agree with everything the blogger has to say, and you just want to register your rah rah agreement. So, I can be happy that I'm not that kind of site. I don't ever want to be cunning the way that Sarah Palin is. (I seem to have a thing about her, don't I? Well, she is worrisome. She seems a fraud to me. Raw ambition cloaked in something attractive, and it scares me.)

And anyhow, I'm used to being a fraud. I have a fairly long and reasonably distinguished career as a techie. You're not going to see me on the cover of Information Week or anything, because at least I know I'm a fraud and don't want to expose that fact. I would never in a million years stand up and represent that I know exactly what you should do with your technology. But I would maintain that my judgment is as good as the next guys and I have a decent track record.

What I lack is theoretical underpinnings. In pretty much the same way that I've had a hard time with academic credentials, I've never had the time or the resources or, frankly, the inclination to slow down enough to get the theory right. But in the field of Information Technology, the facts of the marketplace so out-pace their theoretical underpinnings, that a decent argument can actually be made that you're better off without theory.

In other words, while sitting in school learning about how things have been done and how they should be done, someone out there in the "real world" is already doing it differently. You have to be hands-on full time all the time to even have a chance to keep up with what's going on.

Plus, theory sometimes, or even often, traps you into conclusions based more on the shape things should have, in your mind, than it does on things as they really are. Like a clunky plot in a movie, it goes exactly where it has to go, and so the movie makers have to come up with new ways to keep the audience on its toes.

Or do like House, the TV show, and bring the audience right into the plot, writing by committee, and just make the whole thing like a three-ring circus. Where there's so much to watch, under-girded by some medical mystery, that you can hardly even think of turning away, even though you know exactly how it's going to end. Sort of. But you still want to see.

That's the kind of show you just hope they'll be able to keep going forever. Unless they succumb to the temptation of letting House fall in love. That would end the show in an instant. But barring that, the show will and can go on forever.

Pretty much like my writing, you might think?

I'm honestly not so sure being a doctor is all that different from being a techie. You think you want someone handling your body who has had lots and lots of theoretical training, but the world of medicine now seems to be modeling itself after the world of IT. Every day a new and better medicine. Every day a new diagnostic machine.

The big difference is that in medicine, they actually pay the professors pretty well, and even expect them to practice while they teach. And maybe the good new stuff still comes out from the academies?

In the case of actual IT, you'd be nuts to move into the academy from the real world, which pretty much guarantees that students will not get what they need there either. Unless you're Carnegie Mellon or MIT, perhaps, but even there it might be a toss-up if the really cool stuff is going on inside or outside the academy walls.

Those walls are pretty porous anyhow, aren't they? anymore. Technology transfer arrangements can make both universities and professors pretty rich now, but we won't go into that.

I'm just wondering what a fraud really is anymore. If you can do the job, you're manifestly not a fraud. But sometimes, like Matt Damon in that movie, even if you can do the job, you're a fraud if you don't have the credential. In the field of IT, that's a difficult call. Sometimes the theoretical underpinnings are helpful. Sometimes, just like a predictable Hollywood plot, they lead you in directions which have a nice shape but nothing at all to do with reality.

I was always a pretty good troubleshooter. I think a bit more theory might have wrecked that ability. But it was a game of nerves, keeping up with what's new and different, and weighing the likely honesty of salespeople against your own read of the marketplace. The proprietary against the free. Having to give the game over half the time to the young and certain ones who think they know everything, and often enough actually do! about whatever they are thinking is the latest coolest thing.

Now I turn my attention to words, where I really know I'm a fraud. But where somehow, the credentials really are expected to get in the way. Would you read a novel whose author put Ph.D. after her name? I didn't think so.

Well, back to my writing then. See ya! Or not. Whatever. Bye. I never said I loved you. And you're way too experienced to be handling my body. Yuch! That's just disgusting. If I wanted to be manipulated, I'd get a doctor. If I wanted to teach, I'd get a doctorate. If I wanted a virtual lover, the kind with all that experience and technique, well, I have better things to do with what money I have left. You can find somebody else, and it won't hurt my feelings. Honest.

A Role Playing Game

2010-02-14T10:07:00.000-05:00

I saw a little friend of mine the other day. A little boy. An only child. I was surprised to learn that he doesn't like to watch kids' movies. His Mom told me that he gets very upset when people turn out to be bad.

I think there are always roles in the kids' movies where good seeming people turn out bad, or bad seeming people turn out good for that matter. But he's OK with live actors on stage playing bad people. I speculated that he must be able to see that these are real people acting, and that they are not really bad.

But, you know, I also know that little kids - far less little than you might think - can be easily fooled into believing that a single real person is actually two different people depending on the act. You don't even need to make it obvious by using the classic cues for villain and hero, or even for cultural shifts.

I used to teach Chinese to little kids. I'd had no particular training for this when I started - I had been trained in teaching Chinese, but not in teaching little kids. But I did have a fair amount of experience with young children, from volunteer work during high school and in college. I'd done some baby-sitting. I wasn't good at wielding authority, but I was OK with getting some connection going. I even did a stint in college in a seminar on early childhood education. So I wasn't totally raw.

But on my very first day on the job, which happened to be the Kindergarten teacher's first day also, I came in, burnished by some kind of OK Yalie hotshot let's see what you've got reputation, and there was no way I could be prepared for what seemed dozens of noisy kindergärtners all piling up around me. Their teacher desperately needed a break by the time that I showed up, and so it was just me and them.

Spontaneously, I think, from a kind of panic, or maybe it was over the course of a few fiasco classes, I learned that I could get their attention by explaining about my Chinese friend who was waiting outside the classroom for them to quiet down. I would explain what he would be doing, what he would be talking about if they would just let him come in; what kind of words he would be using, and that I would go get him if they would just be quiet. We got a kind of conspiracy going, me and those kids.

I'd tell them also that I would be coming back afterward to find out what he'd taught them. What he'd done, and how he'd acted. (I'd also be asking him how they'd acted. I wasn't going to be around to be their guide. I wanted them to figure it out by themselves, and then tell me about it.)

And so, I'd go out of the room and change my sweater. I had some kind of "Chinaman sweater," which was a Mr. Rogers sweater I think,and nothing Chinese about it. But I'd come back into the room speaking only Chinese.

At first they'd try to yell at me that they "knew who I really was", or at least the smart ones did. But I didn't understand a word they said. And pretty soon they would drop that line.

It worked! Both as a way to keep control and as a way to teach a little bit of actual Chinese. I think I used it with the older kids too. But the younger ones would tell me later, after they'd grown up a bit, that they really did believe that there were two different people. One Mr. Harrington, and one Mr. He.

I guess they learned to believe the illusion, because I don't think I fooled anyone at the outset. They must have taken cues from each other, and eventually the center of gravity for certainty got shifted.

Now I don't want to be critical of anyone, but my little friend is an only child, and so naturally his parents do things like using a safety harness when they take him skiing. I have little girls - well not so little any more - but when I would watch the kids on the safety harnesses from up in the chairlift it would always make me sad, and I even told them so.

Maybe it made me sad because it depicted me, always striving to escape, always held back by loving fears for me. Maybe it just made me feel sad, and I can't begin to explain why. I took my girls down the hill between my legs, I think, and then at some point I just let them go, and it wasn't always pretty. I did lots of terrified body English up at the top, or speeding down to catch them up, but they did learn to turn and stop.

But those harnesses always made me sad, somehow. Maybe it was because it was a rehearsal of the impossibility to keep anybody safe from the truth that they never will be safe unless they learn discernment on their own? Maybe because the letdown will be that much harder, and I'm sadded by their attachment to some illusion?

Maybe it's sad to me that they will be so disappointed when they find out that Mommy and Daddy were only protecting themselves, and that the child was always on his own? Always doing what he should do because it makes Mommy and Daddy happy.

Somewhere there is a role reversal, and it just makes me sad. Kids shouldn't have to worry so much about their parents' happiness. Kids learn quickly who the harness is for. Some kids beg for it. Some beg to be out of it. Some do as they're told.

Caricatures up on the screen are always this or that. Cartoons are always, well cartoonish in their distinctions of good from bad. On stage, sometimes, it can help to wear a mask. The more sophisticated movies now keep you guessing, right up until the end, which is the villain and which the hero. As if the entire plot would fail if you were to guess it ahead of time. Or like on that great TV show House, where he plays the edge of mean and they, the co-actors, play the audience wondering also if mean is not secretly nice. We wonder if the most important lessons are always the toughest to deliver. Because you'd do anything to avoid being the one who has to deliver tough lessons. Better dress up as the bad guy and let them think they figured it out all on their own.

I think there must be no more jarring thing than to awaken to realize that the person you thought had loved you has betrayed you. That the person you'd thought was being mean was doing it for your own good. Finding the balance is tough, though, with so many of us just passing down abuse because we ourselves were yelled at more than loved. And so when our bosses just act mean, we don't know if this is a good way to kick us from our torpor or just some habitual power-play learned by heart in some church. You must do as I say or you can and likely will just go to hell.

Sometimes the fiction delivers more truth than what's real. Sometimes what's real is easier to take than the fiction, especially when it gets doled out painlessly, over time. Sometimes the difference is impossible to tell, and the only important thing is that the message gets delivered. That the learning happens. That the kids get what they want, which is to be listened to, as well as to be given lessons.

After the fact, after we went skiing, after we left behind my tearful little friend who'd really really wanted to come along except that dark skiing is big people skiing which I probably shouldn't have said. After I re-realized some actual joy in the grace of dancing down the slopes which I never could do as a kid because then it was all about technique, and I was far from the greatest. But now I don't care so much anymore. The moves come from some memory which must be better than the truth, because, in truth, I was a pretty clutsy nerdy dancer too.

It's a body memory, I guess, of a bodily fiction which I won't be held accountable for anymore as an old guy. I can pretend I used to have the moves. But after the fact, when I was telling my doctor with some guilt how I'd driven over an hour and a half there, and still more again driving back; the guilt was because we were discussing my blood clotting factors, and the supposition when you get an embolism to the lungs is that it must have started from pooling in the legs which usually comes from sitting too long in cars or on planes.

But no, he wasn't bothered by that because I'm taking the rat poison which will prevent those clots. No, he was bothered by my skiing, which I'd felt so proud of, you know, like a kid, since it was such a good first step toward better health.

But the perverse thing about clotting problems is that they urge you to eat stuff which your high cholesterol warnings warn you against, and then you can't risk falling because your insides might bleed out. Of course I could slip on ice while walking, especially if and as I get still more out of shape. I could have a crash while driving. I did almost fall while skiing, but had enough strength and wit to recover. Could it really have been that disastrous?

I'm not really wanting to loose that harness from the good doctor's good advice. That's not my point. I'm not wanting anybody to stop using safety harnesses either. That's not my point.

I can't account for my reaction at seeing those kids on harnesses. It just doesn't look like love to me. It probably is love, but it doesn't look like it to me. And I really would like to know how it is that I'm going to be able to recapture that simple pleasure at dancing down the hill in perfect absence of any awareness that what I was doing could in any way be life threatening.

I think there's nothing wrong in trusting a role, well played. I think there is no unvarnished truth, no unmasked authentic self, no perfect being that is not at the same time acting. And yes, Virginia, I think there is no God either, other than the one who is used to trick us into paying attention. Abused by men, usually, into deployments of fear so that we will trust them as they abuse us. And I don't mean in all the obvious ways. Very very few of us do that.

But in that case, in the case of God, remove the mask and there is nothing there. Nothing at all but audience, still in rapt attention, but having to pay attention to one another now, co-creators of illusion. Is that so very bad then? There's not a person on the planet who doesn't love House. How could you not? Especially as he has the sense not to want or need your love at all. Especially as the plot disclaims the obvious in layer over layer replayings of the same story, microcosmed out. But that's the way it is now with art. You have to be pounded over the head with it to see anything at all. Or you won't even watch in the first place. Over and out.

(Oh, I'll be back tomorrow. That was just your cue to get a word in edgewise.)

What Should Microsoft Do?

2010-02-13T11:32:00.001-05:00

I haven't read it yet, but this is meant to riff off "What Would Google Do?". Which is meant to riff off "What Would Jesus Do?" I'm thinking. Which is meant to be guidance for life.

I don't mind giving Microsoft advice, because, pretty much like giving Attila the Hun advice, he's just going to look at it, maybe with a kind of curiousity and then carry on raping and pillaging, because, like the scorpion on the frog's back, it's what monopolizing corporations do.

But clearly, it's all about rugged multi-touch. It's all about holding in one hand. It's all about free access to the Internet. It's all about easy reading and easy input. In other words, there's something to be made of a combination of the Kindle, the iPad, the iPhone, the netbook. I mean, think of the opportunity. The iPad has staked out a $600 slot for a $300, max, product (judging against the netbook market). The Kindle gives you internet access for free, slanting heavily in the direction of buying their reads. The Kindle is as easy as reading a book. The multi-touch is a no-brainer, because, well, it takes not brains, and no instruction, to make the machine do what you think it should do.

And the only thing in the way of Microsoft entering this market is their greed. Obviously, they can't let go of the revenue stream from Office and Windows, and that means that they will remain wedded to the absurd notion that people still have to or want to or can be tricked into getting that kind of functionality for a price when it can be had so trivially for free.

They want to retain the software hardware divide, when there is none anymore. It's all machine vs. human, with the software/hardware on the same side of the diff-e-q. The machine is a photo-reproduced schematic, plain and simple (what, you thought they engineered these things the way that they once did railroads and spaceships??). And you need a machine to design it, because it's too damned intricate for humans to draw. Expand out the schematic so you and I could see it and it would fill football fields now.

But no machine can, any more than can a corporation, do human. It's just not possible. Any more than a scorpion can refrain from killing when it has the opportunity. Even when the killing drowns itself. I'm standing by for your call, M$, whenever you want to know how to repair your fortunes. But, you'll have to cede control, power - the greed thing - and actually want and need to compete on a level playing field in the open market which has never, so far, existed. And with all your money, I am betting you're far far too chicken. You're afraid you can't win on your merits, because you know you never have. You're like all the rich people now, afraid that they will be exposed for having won the lottery instead of earning the slot by honest work.

Best wishes, though. Really. It's not like I'm rooting for Google. They're just plain evil.

Writing the God Removal Machine

2010-02-12T11:52:00.000-05:00

As a reasonably overschooled individual, I know that "Deus ex machina" refers the the machine from which the gods might be introduced to a stage production. Literally, a crane for lowering in the plot fixer, the god, who intervenes to make things right. Figuratively, a clunky plot which just couldn't happen in real life.

As I am instructed repeatedly, faith is found at that intersection between fate - what just happens - and meaningful coincidence. It is a choice, in other words, about how to interpret. And there is meant to be no possibility to influence what has happened, because that would to be tempt fate or cheat God, depending on your choice of words.

Science chases down this nexus, trying to the extent possible to find that final intersection between what can be known (and manipulated) and what is only random. And, by definition, what gets left out as random is meaningless. God's province, if you will, or the Fates'.

Now you know I like to play with metaphors from science. You know I can't write - good writing tells a story, and it has to be a story that's not my own. Good journalism starts with interviews. Good story telling starts with characters. I don't know what the hell I'm doing here, but I'm pretty sure it's not good writing.

But I do have something to say, which can be a plain old burden a lot of the time. And I don't really wish to expose the fact, any more than I have to, that I am just a plain old lousy and flawed human being without a hell of a lot to recommend me in the virtue, talent, and accomplishment departments. But let's not kid ourselves here, I obviously think I'm pretty smart, whatever the hell you might mean by that. (I can't even keep my grammatical "persons" straight! You, me, I, us, we, whatever)

Anyhow, my main big metaphors from science have to do with the fringy stuff. The quantum mechanics and the general theory of relativity, the big bang and the chaos theories, with all of which I have some glancing acquaintance. As much as a journalist might have, say, with those he interviews for a story. Instead of just thinking and writing all by myself about what the Saints' win at the SuperBowl might mean to Buffalonians who were "cheated" out of our win, I could have and probably should have asked a few.

But I was wanting to stuff people's heads, like a bad teacher wants to do. I wanted to fill your head with stuff I've already worked out in mine, across the ages to the extent that I can, by reading. Sometimes even across the cultures.

And you know, in addition to not knowing how to write, I never do bother to do the math. Just like the beginning of A Serious Man - yet another Coen Brothers grim fairy tale so far (it takes almost as much longer than you might be willing to spend for me to watch a movie as it does to read a book) if you don't know the math, you don't know the physics.

But you know, just like the Coen Brothers, I think, or Avatar for that matter, I'd like to turn that problem on its head. If you don't do metaphor, you just can't get physics. Nevermind the math.

I did finally see Precious - I had to wait until I could sit next to someone, since I was a bit timid about seeing it alone, plus I didn't want to have a rewind/reset button at my disposal. The novel it's based on is called "Push" and I'm going to have to say that this term refers to the same thing I've been wanting to do in my writing. It's a kind of abuse of you, for which I'm truly sorry.

Precious is so abused that she can barely make out letters. She's illiterate not just because she's been abused both at home and in school by feedback clearly telling her she's stupid, she's illiterate because the very leastmost modicum of energy required to make sense of any symbol has been, well, pushed right out of her.

And so the turning point in the film, and I'm sorry but I don't really quite care if it's a spoiler, is when the teacher persists, pushes if you will, and Precious realizes she can learn to read. And later, she tells her social worker, "I like you, I really do, but you don't have the strength to handle me." Talk about a Turning Point. You couldn't deal with my life, educated boy.

So, you know, I'm feeling humbled just about all over the place now, but I'm still going to try to tell you something. It's that old E=MC² thing again. Where Mass gets equated to Energy, according to the speed of light. Where the speed of light becomes the Universal Constant, and the Energy and Mass become all shifty depending on point of view.

We're all familiar in real life with how time is the same as distance, or money depending on what interests you most. It takes time to get there from here. It takes money to save time. You can mix and match these around as much as you like, but you can't deny you know what I'm talking about. Machines to collapse these distinctions are the fruits of our sciences, embodied now by engineered technologies and techniques.

Sure, you're going to say it's not all about cars and planes and Information Technologies. What about Biology and genetics? Well, what about them? There's still that matter of getting down inside the machine-like parts to find that originating impulse, or what went wrong, or what could go wrong. As in, it would be aweful to die just before "they" come up with the cure for what ails you. That time and money and distance issue again.,

At the center, where moral choice resides, at the heart of the matter, we just have to leave a question mark or maybe God, depending on your choice of words. But, see, here's the thing, God, the word (thankfully at the beginning of the sentence this time, so I can hedge), is like "green numbers," it has no "content". There's no there there, and so the question might become what harm is caused by putting a word in the place of the question mark. For which the answer is a quick scan of history, or current events for that matter. So, I'll leave that Word (whoops!) alone for a moment longer.

But no-one really thinks science, as a process, is going to reveal that mechanism for choice. Well, except for the Geek Rapture folks, but you know what I think of them, right? (if you do, then tell me, because I can't figure it out) There are lots of proposals, but in the end, everyone's pretty sure it will end up, like in quantum mechanics, at the fringes where mechanism meets probability. Kind of like that Coen brothers movie. Hmmm I wonder how it ends?

So, choice might be right about at that spot where chance meets implication. That faith thing again, except that in this case, you're having a kind of faith in yourself. Your choices, over time, might even define your character. If your life is not some kind of big act, then you might even deserve some honor. That kind of thing.

And if you give God (whoops, sorry, there He is again) all the credit, it's pretty much like cheating, don't you think? Shouldn't you just give Him all the blame too? But I'm OK with that formula I overheard now while waiting to give blood to check my viscosity so I can keep on breathing and stuff; "the way I see it is every time you resist those temptations, you know for steak or wine or ice-cream you shouldn't be eating, you're resisting the devil, you know, and moving more toward God".

I might quibble with the moral content of choice at that level, but I at least get the idea. Faith means choice means a push, of yourself, in a certain direction, and you couldn't always do it yourself without some guidance about the right direction. And lots of times, you really don't understand all the reasons, but you have a sense of which would be the right direction, and if you have character, you take it. That kind of thing.

But distance from moral content gives a kind of deniability of implication. I didn't exactly feel responsible for the condition of Precious up on screen; girls like her I mean. I would never treat my kids the way she was treated. And frankly, the movie was kind to me that way. It wasn't pushing anything down my throat, or into my head, it led me to form my own conclusions, and decide for myself just where my implication is. But it never did let me just turn away. It didn't hide the truth either. I didn't make me turn away the way Tarantino does, for instance. I don't ever want to be that practiced in my reading, er, viewing.

Physical distance, cultural distance, neighborhood distance, school distance, these can all be ways to disimplicate ourselves from moral choices we must and by omission all the time, do make. And who would ever see the need to live outside and be cold all the time to be moral? That's not the point.

The point is that there really is a different non-mathematical equation which must always also be kept in mind. That's the one where disimplication by distance - that point of view thing - squared, if you will, times the gravity of the situation (um, not quite punning, but I'm not sure yet) equals your character. Your moral content. If you will. Your meaning-making energy potential. Your worthiness for love.

And in the case, the Universal constant, which not quite co-incidentally is the same one the Bible uses, is that each human is decreed at the outset to have the identical same character value. (see what I mean about not being able to write?)

The universal constant, in other words is humanity, which doesn't get to be assigned a weight in this equation. It's a constant. That's what constant means, dummie. Sorry, talking to myself again, but I think we all already agree about that, even though we hardly ever act that way. Because, well, it's kind of scary. We don't know how to behave across the boundaries. But we would never want to live in a world where human lives were differentially valued.

Even though, ahem, that's how insurance rates get calculated. Even though that's what grades in school come to mean. Even though that's what gets meant by money. But, to be fair, we are having a really really hard time figuring out how else to do it.

My radical proposal (I'm such a radical! That's my only saving grace in the how strong are you really contest) is so trivial. Just write God out of the equation. It's not that big a deal. Really. It's, well, trivial (I never quite know if I'm punning).

It goes like this. Written words are what connects us, as humans, across time and space and sometimes even cultures. Written words guide us toward good moves, even when we're alone in private. Written words inform that part of us which so often gets mistakenly labelled too, as soul or the ghost in the machine fallacy or the intentional fallacy or the pathetic fallacy, you know, where you project human qualities onto animals and other, um, things .

God, the Word now, is a cop-out. It lets us off the hook. It's too easy anymore, and I'm not saying it always was, I'm just saying now it is. Now, at this point in the history of science, the compilation of too many words for just one, ahem, soul to master, to where the most sensible way to navigate the choices is just by random. It's how I do it. Almost. Sort of.

If we just netFlix up everything so that only the good stuff rises to the top, in just the way that they stock the shelves in stores now such that you never can find the oddball stuff, then we will have lost the ability to read the world at all.

Our economy now is quite literally organized such that each of us, the least of us, is made to feel responsible for what in the end has been a setup by those in power. That's what Marx meant by the internal contradictions of Capitalism. We're at or beyond the endtimes for that kind of logic. And that's because the markets have been so perfected - made so friction-free to crib a few of Bill Gate's words - that the fatal flaw in the logic can no longer be avoided.

If we're all responsible, then no-one's responsible, and at the core of corporations, which are now just massive structures for moral disimplication because everyone needs a paycheck, there's only someone getting paid a whole lot of money to set you up. The good news is that you have to pay an incredible amount for someone to do the devil's act.

But you know, the crane, that god removal machine, is right in our hands, and I'm pretty sure it has something to do with writing, and something to do with our real human hearts (which in Chinese now, remember, is the same word as mind, but sorry, I didn't mean to talk down to you again). Why not use it to remove the devil(s)? We can run our own damn stories without your Logos all over them.

And the word which can't be spoken but is the real word, can have a space to come back in. The everything is nothing paradox of God. Without all the religious stuffing which is just a way for men to keep control. But there I go getting carried away again . . . . (and where does the punctuation belong in my title?)

Paintball Justice

2010-02-11T18:12:00.001-05:00

I'm drawing my line in the sand right here. I heard just now about how in Iran when the people come out to protest, the police are shooting them with paintguns - marking them to be dealt with later. How diabolically clever is that?

This is even better than smartbombs. Better than teargas by far. Better than surveillance cameras, against which people can wear disguises. No one is hurt, and it might almost be confused with fun if it were done in this country. Hell in 1984, the fictional version, they didn't even have to bother with real wars, when the pretend ones could have the same effect.

We all already knew that anonymity is impossible anymore, no matter what we used to think about how a dog can be a dog on the Internet. But if our government condones this as a crowd control method, then we're fucked, and I use that term advisedly. Or unadvisedly, so take your choice.

We already know that they can make us standout by searching our phone calls and emails for particular words or patterns of speech. But we also know that speech doesn't prove anything.

We know that they might selectively arrest people according to their background checks, putting away activists for twittering crowd avoidance methods, say, but we hope they won't shut off twitter the way they did in Iran.

Put all these things together, though, and now you've got real problems with civil liberties. And it could be the teaparty activists as readily as the antiwar activists (if there were any anymore, or is that just a media preference? Or a venue preference - try imagining anti-war protesters at Opryland.). But one hopes that if the police in this country were to be ordered to shoot with paintguns, there would be a suit and they would lose. But who can tell with this supreme court?

And you do have to wonder what's the difference between picking, based on speech, who to follow at the protests, and picking them out in your paintball sights. The intimidation factor is about identical.

So, why, exactly, aren't the teabaggers concerned? And why is everyone else staying home?

I guess the teabaggers are the ones feeling screwed while the rest of us, frogs in a slowly heating pot, are rationalizing away all the little things. Or maybe it's a media spotlight thing. Or maybe they've already made it clear how outraged they would be, and so shooting them with paintballs would just prove their point. That they're the victims and everyone in the government is out to get them. I guess they might want to be shot with paintballs. Do you?

Maybe they're just more used to guns. Oh hell, I don't know, maybe they're just too stupid to think about civil liberties, but I do know that if we assume that and act like we think they're stupid, then they've won because, well, that's what they were complaining about in the first place.

Something to think about . . .

Who Owns Me? Google does!

2010-02-11T08:24:00.001-05:00

Google owns me, and I don't really mind. Yet. Once they fully team up with the NSA, I might have something else to say on the topic. But up against Verizon gaming me, I discovered rather lately - as a techie it's embarrassing - that the once-free tool which Verizon had provided doesn't hold a candle to what Google allows me for free now.

OK, it's not all Google. It's Microsoft ActiveSync, but Google has opened up their email in ways that used to require an enterprise Exchange server, and it works better - much better - than Verizon imitating Blackberry. Which they now charge for??!!! It makes no sense. I save $15 bucks a month for something better that Verizon never told me about, and used to charge nothing for. Right, and I guess I should expect them to lower my rate, automatically, every time they lower it on to the general public! So what am I, you loyal customer, chopped liver??!!

And looking at my Google dashboard, I see that they store more information about me than even the credit-scoring services do. Well, not more, but it would make a scary complement to what the credit scoring services have on me. They track my youtube visits. They track whose blogs I follow. They cache my searching, but that part I'm not allowed to see, and I trust that they won't identify me with it either.

Except that they've already said that they will comply with the law if requested. Just like Verizon did when they tapped into the net on the request of the government, even though the request wasn't legal???

One has to wonder now if the law and the government are at odds again. The way they were when blacks and women coudn't vote, for instance. The way they are when corporations are declared to have the inalienable right to pursue your happiness; to drown out your voice and make your freedom of speech irrelevant.

I don't really care even if the NSA already had access to my searchings, which they probably already do even without Google's help. It's all noise, right? Until you say something edgy, which will just stick right out from the noise, and provoke someone to look a little bit more closely. And Google, happy lapdog, will just hand you right over in an instant, if the request is bona-fide and legal. Or at least if it's government sponsored.

But I am not the content of what can be known about me. And if I were a too-tightly wound nutjob ready to pop, they quite manifestly now, wouldn't know that either. Even if I were a radical Muslim high-ranking in the military. Even if I seemed nice to those around me, like that shooter recently here in Buffalo.

So, the excuse to keep our searches is just that. An excuse. We'd like to think it can and will help responsible people to know who's out to get us, but in the end it can't and won't. Unless, of course, someone goes the extra step to actually get to know someone, which can't really be done, in the end, virtually. Now can it?

And it can't be done just one on one. Someone would have to get to know your whole story, from lots of points of view, not just the on-line or phone conversation one, which will always be taken out of context. Always be dangerously unfair and untrue.

But you know if Google does succeed now with their experiment to bring ultra-high-speed Internet right into your living room, so that you can have the same telepresence "enjoyed" by corporate enterprises within their pecincts, then we might almost only exist online.

Which used to be thought a pretty terrifying prospect. Minority report. The Matrix. That Max Headroom old TV show. I could go on and on. I do go on and on, but I'll stop here today.

There is a clear trend here, and we should stop it before it's too late. The issue is word for word identical to the patenting of our genes. And just as important. If we allow ourselves to be considered identical to our "content" then we have already ceased to exist, and our suicide would indeed, just like life in Buffalo, be redundant.

Caveat Excellence

2010-02-10T08:05:00.001-05:00

There must be no term in the English language more likely to elicit general agreement than Excellence. We all wish and hope for excellence, surely. Well, unless it's the Wayne's World kind.

And yet our economy is organized now such that the only profit margins left are from gaming. You are being gamed each time that you agree to terms which cause draconian overcharges when you pass some limit. You agree that it will be your fault, and that is why and how, supposedly, these companies can keep their doors open now. They make their profits on the late fees, the over-the-limit penalties, the minutes you talk beyond your predictions or your rollovers, the number of people who don't know how to deny the denial of their health insurance payments, and then there's the porn which provides the profit margin for our various information "carriers."

What? What the hell am I doing talking about porn again? Hang on, I'll get to that. But I want to talk about slack. As in, how come the local banks can give you your banking for free, and yet we still flock to the mega-sized ones?

How come a local and marginally excellent carpenter can build your kitchen cabinets for less and better than the factory mass-produced ones - even at the top end, er, bottom end - and we still spend the endless amounts for the brand names? How come we drive by the local Mom and Pop restaurant and go to Denny's? How come we think it's worth our effort to let them give us a "free" grand slam, saving us the cost of the gallon of gas we likely spent to get there?

I guess we're scared. We're scared that we may not become our best self. We know that we cannot and never will be excellent ourselves, at least never to the extent of that super-star projected onto our various big and flat and palm-held screens. We want to know what everybody else means by excellence, and then we don't want to be left behind. I guess. But you know as well as I do that it doesn't make any sense.

They can make their profits without gaming you and me, but I guess they can't make as much as the next guy if he's gaming you, and so there is a race to the bottom, which ought to be considered the opposite of excellence.

A race of wall street money to find the enterprise best able to maximize the return. The gamers quickly learn how to overwhelm profit margins from sales almost instantly by profit margins from market share, and so that capital just floods the shelves even if they have to sell below cost to drive the little guy out of business to steal his market share, so that the big gamers of the system back on wall street will bet - and it's not a risky bet until the bubble pops and you know what happens then - that they will eventually get it all, especially as more capital becomes available for the predations.

This is not what should be called a virtuous feedback loop. And it's not the rich guys, it's you and me, by proxy from our retirement funds which we were hoodwinked into putting on the market. And then we can refund by tax payments what got ripped off by too much risk taking?? No wonder people are pissed off, but sure, yeah, it was our own damn fault for thinking that we could get as rich as the next guy who made a killing selling off his property. Investing in the market. Money in return for no work at all.

There is nothing which can't or won't be done to harness your guilty fear about overages. But really they're taking advantage of your terror at being left behind. At being reduced to less than nothing because you have nothing to show for what everyone else so evidently is. Nobody wants to be made an object of ridicule. Nobody wants to be made an object at all, unless you get told that you are really really excellent, and then, what? You don't have a rubber soul?

I think we can't help ourselves to want to eat just exactly what we see up on the screen, I think it gets our appetite going, and we just can't help, maybe a bit furtively, maybe with a touch of guilt, being lured in by that logo-subliminal message of sublime.

We can't help ourselves either, and statistics say that includes you, wanting to see what that superstar might look like undressed. And here's the really bizarre part, and I never did inhale, but still, there's no question that the young girls who do undress before the cameras are that much more alluring than ever the superstarlets could be, who probably have perfect titted body-doubles anyhow, most of the time, or airbrushing and tit-trainer workout specialists plus implants, but still people will pay the good money to see what they think might actually be the real thing caught on camera. By accident, theft or omission. Do you find this bizarre?

We treat each other also as though we must be psychopaths, out to take advantage, out to best you at some transaction. You know, I've worked the other side of that sales counter as a bicycle mechanic, a tech support guy, a salesperson, and sometimes you really do have to make up stories so that the buyer - the emptor if you will - will trust you and let you do your work. These might be lies depending on what your motive is, right? But if you bore them with the real story, they'll almost always walk right out the door and go get their bike preemptively at WalMart, which is just outrageous in every sense.

I guess you build trust over time, and every single person that you don't know is a psychopath by default, pretty much the way you should learn to ride a motorcycle if you want to stay alive. They would screw you if they could do it without your knowing about it. That's the story and you're meant to buy it.

No, I mean you're really meant to buy it, because that's where the profit margins are. You're meant to believe that any tiniest bit of excess price above whatever used to be called wholesale constitutes a kind of theft and so you'll troll the highways or the information superhighway to get that last penny of difference now.

And the joke is that almost every time by walking to the corner hardware store you can find something that does the same trick for maybe sometimes only half. Just like the local diner, if you even have local diners where you live, will cost less than the big box fast food eats. And might even come highly recommended by real people, if you can muster the nerve to trust their judgment. The way you do on the highway each and every day.

They gave me a game ticket when I picked up my prescription at the drug store the other day, and I wondered idly to myself if I should open it up and check up on the Internet. Which is the missing piece which will make up the million dollar prize in this Rite-Aid "game of life"? You know, there's always an oversupply of certain game pieces, and then the rare ones like Park Place or the Boardwalk (as I vaguely recall from Monopoly, or the MacDonalds version we played once driving across the country and then found out that it was rigged).

There's always the capstone piece, and knowing that I would never have the patience actually to set out the game board, assuming they are paying for my attention which I just refuse to grant them, I thought maybe I should just peek up on line to see what's the going price for the capstone piece. You know, there's a market for everything if you want to cash in now instead of waiting until you might have nothing left of interest, might have died while playing the game, might end up with someone no longer hot to look at.

But I don't even have that much energy to game them gaming me. Or Toyota now, you know, pundits wondering what's the connection among all these seemingly unrelatable failures; what could be the holistic issue which relates brakes to acceleration. Maybe it's the whole "drive-by-wire" concept, except how the hell does that relate to issues with the steering. Surely that part has not lost its literal connection to the wheels?!

That plane came down in Buffalo, they're determined now, because of "pilot error" despite the fact that the steering column was literally shaking in his hands, announcing an issue which just simply couldn't be ignored, where the idiot lights or warning buzzers or flashers just couldn't be counted on, and so what does he do but pull a deer in headlights move, and bolts in the wrong direction.

And so then it's the industry's fault, for hiring such an under-tried and trued guy in the first place? But why isn't it our fault for demanding no slack in the way that the prices get set. One only hopes that those teabaggers are happy in their caveat emptor nirvana (apologies bro). Let's whittle down our government now, which didn't even have enough regulators to be aware, much less to do anything about what was going on. Until after the fact and then bring on the multi-millions to investigate the obvious.

That there was a general systems failure, despite the need to assign blame. That Toyota, not the hot wheels label, the "good old reliable" label rather, just simply made the wrong decision at lots of little places along their line. No one of them seemed to merit coming clean, until they were forced to come clean and then suddenly a whole lot of little retrospectively wrong decisions are getting swept up into their mess, and so the holistic problem is what is it now about Toyota culture which has them protecting the brand at all costs so that, in the end, the brand might get, well, not destroyed exactly, but tarnished surely? What culture of deniability, exactly? Or who now will fall on his sword the way that they were traditionally meant to do in Japan?

It's a game now of find the least and fall on him.

How, then, can we protect against human error? How re-invite in the governors, who we now mistrust the most? How when at that pinnacle falling for any slightest temptation now can be more than enough to bring you down hard on usually your metaphorical sword, but you know what I mean, right? Dirk?

Some lowest common denominator always has the veto power now, and so Sarah Palin can say "retard" when she means it satirically, but not when she means it seriously, but seriously now, who can tell the difference from Tina Fey? There is no difference now between earnest and satire except in point of view. But nobody's really laughing. They're just fighting mad and desperate for an object. Even the satire is just biting as in "yeah, take that you bitch" and glad that I got mine. Got my dig in. Even when it's word for word identical, there's something wrong in it for the audience of people who won't stand up and say it themselves, out loud, in public.

Protect brand America, I guess, and when they market handguns and cigarettes to children - and you know "they" really do this - and our congressional representatives protect that right under some really stretchy constitutionality thingie, who really are you supposed to trust? Where should the outrage be, as though we can't ourselves decide where that boundary ought to be, and which way we should turn.

Will we make stone soup then, the way they did here in Buffalo when the superstars came to town? Or will we just grab for the bowl to see who gets it first and fastest, and then let the tears come flowing out when we watch the story get retold up on TV or at the movies? Huh, which way, Precious, which way?

Excellence is what you've always had, inside, if you were but to nurture it. Choosing not to take responsibility for someone else's claim to excellence. That pilot could have used to read "The Message to Garcia". There's room for personal responsibility. There's also room for corporate responsibility. And you know, unions which protect incompetence ought to be ashamed of themselves too, but not quite so much as should their bosses for letting them get away with it. Which they're always happy to do so long as we the people are willing to believe that there's excellence only in comparison to life, the universe and everything. There's also excellence in comparison to you.

I only know that as General Motors goes, so goes the nation, and General Motors is dead and gone now, for all intents and purposes. Shouldn't we be looking for a different set of metaphors? They drive three-wheeled homebuilt electric cars in China now, put together from generic parts in tiny factories. These things drive right below the regulatory radar, and still if you need to get around and aren't yet part of the newly rich, what else would you do?

Why, really, do we have to go so fast? Why must we suffer sprawl and traffic jamming? Why not walk and trust our neighbors not to jump us, the way that we trust the other guy coming at us at something over 55 MPH? Why not, horrors, hook our cars together into trains where the failure of any one of them isn't the failure of them all, and the check on intervals is, well, mechanically obvious. Where the only real danger is going off the rails, and even that will be exaggerated to keep you afraid. Keep you very afraid.

I spent much of the day yesterday, and I'm not proud of this at all, trying to understand how I might take advantage of Verizon's newly discounted calling plans. Yes, I feel like naming names here. Just for shits and giggles, I asked the very nice lady on the phone, "so, um, like, why didn't I automatically get the newly discounted rate for my um,[gamed predictor of] my minutes?"

It wasn't fair at all on my part, because they'd already given me the answer by not giving me the new discount automatically, but still I had to ask, and the certainly highly scripted answer just got me laughing and I couldn't help myself. I really didn't want to hurt her feelings, and it must have taken a lot of practice and effort to be ready for every question, but the response was precisely as confusing as their website, where somewhere along the way terms had changed. I mean literally, the terms had come to mean something else, and the terms that I'd signed on to were no longer available, and they made it out to where I had been getting something for nothing which they now charged for, while raising the rate for something I never got, but if I did I'd have to pay double for it, so that I might be content to just stay right where I was, if I was even able to understand the terms.

Which is exactly what the nice lady was trying to tell me, very articulately and standing at my ready to do whatever it is that I wished for her to do. But I caught myself just in time, and realized that I would lose all 1200 contacts "in" my phone if I weren't careful. Which I would have if I had accepted the terms of the removal of what I didn't ever need in the first place, but which was free and now I'd have to pay for, was paying for actually, but hadn't realized they'd changed the meaning of the terms.

And if I'm not the only one to have figured this all out, I'm in a tiny minority, I'm certain of that, because I'm actually pretty good at this stuff, the tech support, guessing where the flaw may be learning how to game the system (and here I'm talking about the literal Operating System!) gaming me, and still you can't avoid the inevitable thing which isn't quite working the way that it should be but you just don't have the patience for yet another hard reset.

And I know it would be just paranoid to think that a company as large as Verizon would be deliberately slowing down their website to make it frustrating almost beyond endurance to research these questions, but it would be just as weird if a company that big did not have the wherewithal to make their website fast. And you know, you just figure it's something on your end, because when you do get to the part you were waiting for it's all cheery and helpful and complete with full disclosure.

And I've decided it's worth the $10 bucks extra for them not to game me gaming them so that they can charge me $.40 per minute which these days really is highway robbery considering how cheap talk has become, as they recently did at Christmas time, when they must know that everyone's going to go over their minutes, especially if they land in the hospital, which is kind of like, you know, a tax on happiness or a tax on misery, depending on how you might want to look at it.

However you want to look at it, it's unconscionable, and I don't even want to think about how much they make, indirectly and deniably of course, on porn.

And then I got another denial from the health insurance company, and here I really don't want to name names because they've been so nice about it, but I've faced them down three times already for three different categories of don't-land-in-the-hospital-on-Christmas-especially-when-you're-moving charges. Guilty!

And then, get this! It's really funny and you can try it at home, I mistyped verizonwireless.com as verizonwireless.cm (missing a letter there, you see?) and I was instantly on AT&T's website, so then you wonder, hmmm, maybe this big Goliath is on his way down, if they can't even keep on top of AT&T gaming them. Who's number one now? And why is their website so slow? Isn't their gaming working for them any more? Or were they left behind in the big iPhone rollover minutes get it faster NOW sweepstakes, gobble gobble gobble?

So, what would be so wrong if, the way they used to do in France by fixing the price of bread, these companies were forced to compete on the actual terms of service? What if a per-minute rate were set, say, and what if over-the-limit blame-the-consumer predations were made illegal across the board, and what if logo value got collapsed by exposure of the vacuity and sweatshop cruelty underneath it - you know the assembly lines over in China were one stream gets the logo stamp and the other is for the local market, and sometimes for illicit boundary crossings to that undercover seller in the Queens, maybe?

What if the hardware vendors were forced to split from the carriers, what if the TV medium couldn't both charge for advertising and for the line in, what if the newspapers . . .STOP! We'd never be willing to pay the full price if we were to see it, right? You know, the maybe one buck that those Nike shoes actually cost? The nothing that it costs to get the signal right off the air? And the book companies complain that they won't be able to make any money on eBooks because what, you can't lend them to your friends anymore? Huh?

What if we just stopped gaming one another, then, huh? What about that?

Oh, sorry, just another rant and I can't seem to help myself, but this shit keeps happening in real life, and what else do I have to talk about?

Katrina, Katrina

2010-02-09T07:59:00.001-05:00

Everyone in Buffalo must have been rooting for The Saints. And everyone in Buffalo must have felt cheated when New Orleans got to win its Super Bowl. We couldn't ever do it even with four chances almost in a row. We saw our projection; the underdog. But the one who played us up on the big screen was so much better looking. Which might be flattering, except that you have to live with yourself in real life.

Our politics are just as corrupt! Our schools are just as bad! We suffer natural disasters too, except that ours are laughable. Something to make contemptuous jokes about. And although we don't generally show our tits, we get just as drunk in public on St. Patrick's day, say, or at the Bills games.

What we lack is cool, and so, although we were once as big, and came on our falling short the old fashioned way - we earned it over time - we don't even deserve anything other than contempt for our bombed out condition. Hell, we never got it together enough to put a roof over our stadium in the first place, and it would make a lot more sense here than there. And our roofs hardly ever blow off, although they might from the blasting of our crowds.

Everyone knows the story of the frog in the kettle who never knows enough to jump out until it's just too late. Until it's too late, it just feels nice, and sunny, and like a hot-tub, maybe, and then somewhere along the line your energy's been robbed, and still it gets hotter and hotter, and somewhere in there you lose all sense at all.

I guess, looking at that frog, you can just feel contempt that he didn't have the sense to jump out when he could, just like most of the talented people who grew up in Buffalo have always done. And then you just wanna say something like die, sucka, die. So you can eat the frog's legs? Shouldn't you have killed him off ahead of time? Or is Buffalo like a lobster, without an advanced enough nervous system to register pain. Yeah, that's it. We're just too stupid.

And everybody down in Haiti now is looking for that silver lining, like all those people had to die before the centuries-long tragedy could be turned about. As though it will be now? As though somehow if you get the chance to know what being made an object feels like, then at least you will never do it to some other? Or never do it again? Or will you just write a check and be on your way?

If you are raped, you have been made an object. If you are a slave. If you are taken for your beauty only. Or for your intelligence. Or your money. If your life is not worth paying any attention, then you have been made an object. And if you live, then all that you have left is your humanity. And right there, as David Foster Wallace reminds us that Victor Frankel reminded us, is the only choice you've ever had in your life. To be human or not to be. It's a choice and not a grant.

But so much of the time we only know how to do back unto others as they have done to us. Not because we're mean, but because we never really did understand that we were being made into an object ourselves. So, we celebrate getting ours back even before the Mardi Gras, even to something more extreme than the party that will happen the day before we must begin our pretense of mourning. Because today we are alive, even though tomorrow that asteroid might hit, as they made such good fun of in those SuperBowl ads.

Well, we're still here in Buffalo. We're still human, what's left of us. We're not looking forward to some disaster larger than the laughable ones, which still kill lots of people if you want to really know. Walking around in circles snowblind, or maybe dropping from the sky because we won't stand for unions, or just on the streets from guns since all the money has skittered out to the suburbs where they eat each others' children just to get their own into the most Ivys.

Grim? Even the Bills are probably not about to stay around these parts. Our stadium looks like the WalMart edition, and Toronto has one with a flip top right around the corner. In the same dense market, only cooler. Way cooler.

The real test is what you do for the one who's losing consciousness slowly. The real test is what you do to your neighbor, even though he stinks. The real test is how much looting you're already doing, in slow motion, from the wide open stores of the once great now dying cities, happy that you can win by airconditioned wild west absence of civic anything, and nevermind virtue, bringing in the outsourced quality, and paying something under half of the wages of dignity. Because people are willing, at least, to have something rather than nothing.

Well, shame on you America, shame on you. You never pay attention until it can make you look good. And you know, I do feel a bit of pity for the ones who are loved only for their wealth and beauty and intelligence. But more sorry that you have to take it out on the rest of the world, as if there were no other choice.