Catalytic Narrative

Fluid Dynamics

2010-07-18T15:01:00.000-04:00

Extreme heat, then cold, then coffee, then a/c, having something to do with salt, I think my body can't calibrate properly. On a hybrid car, a Prius, say, not to name any corporate names, there is a pump to send coolant over the inverter, which is an electronic contraption to convert Alternating to Direct Current, and there is no fully lossless way. So there is waste heat, I'm thinking each time you put on the brakes, which means regenerate, and each time you draw from the battery.

And when the pump fails - I happen to know this - the entire car basically shuts down with error codes as if a fundamental connection were loosed. But there is also the possibility of a vapor lock, as happened on my P-P-Passat, when they were p-p-pretty sure that it was the heater core clogged, but it was bubbles and my logic was unassailable. Because loosing the bubbles made heat, and so the clog theory didn't hold water, but, well, maybe there is something about changed balance, as when the inverter cooling pump decides to fail in extreme heat. Was it only losing power over time?

My body fluids - the blood in this case - were obstructed by a clot, a clog, in the lungs near the heart pump which might have shut down in response but didn't. But the inner view was a lot like the kind of crazy which I am apparently susceptible to when the correspondences in the world play games up against the ones I might think about and talk about and eventually maybe even write about. I'm like the guy who counts the cracks in the sidewalk, looking for signs then? I hope not.

My words are going. I spend time - not quite so bad as my Dad - snapping my fingers or making spin ahead motions with my hands trying to come up with words or with connections among memories, and a lot of the time they never do come, and so I am left with the connections which do come, of themselves as it were, in the events impinging on me. Radiator, heater, coolant, pump, bubbles continuum kind of stuff.

Which, at the end of the day is why I am so curious to explore the blogging genre, if it can be called a genre yet. Because of its immediacy, it has to be about impingements just beyond one's control. As in, you cannot really make them happen. You can't be the editor in charge of what is going on around you. At best you can choose to pay attention, but then eventually you yourself might get weirded out by the consiliencies among the stuff you notice which also seems beyond your power just to pick and choose. The world seems to focus. Not only your attention.

Let's say you have a plan. An idea in someone's canonical sense of how this works. And you set out intentionally to marshal your words, using skill and planning and malice aforethought, you make some sense for some reader somewhere. But if the sense is coming at you, like numbers from your landscape, then you have to wonder about the integrity of the one doing the noticing. That would be a little bit like planning to win the lottery.

But, well, what else is an individual, if not a noticer, a nexus, among happenstance? To be otherwise is to build, merely, on the stuff with which you've been didacted. That's what mastery of genre means, right? To increment along the way toward something authentically yours. But, well, what if you relinquish that claim right at the outset and make yourself Bartleby content only to reiterate what impinges, but finally without master, even without a self as master and without preference, finally, even to eat?

Surely it is a mind which notices the metaphoric crossings, yes? These are not in the things themselves. Surely. And if I notice things which do but seem to conspire because I notice them, I still may not have caused them. There are plenty of things I haven't noticed. Without the words, what would there be? Is there progress then beyond words, as there was Inception before them? Words must destroy as much as they create.

Words individuate, and divide which from t'other. Ultimately, this quest for individual authenticity ends with castellated aloneness, right? With some perfect physical comfort but without consilience because all has been brought within control. Order will all then be imposed. I shall not want.

Well and so my blog is clogged. Rats!

Out Flooded

2010-07-15T13:45:00.002-04:00

Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

By misrerable happenstance, I have found myself reading end-of-life-as-we-know-it books. Watching movies. I hate these things. Why must everyone show us ourselves in the funhouse mirror as if we don't already know these things. As if the oil does not still spew beneath the surfaces we do know. We can read. We can watch movies intelligently. Why does no-one offer something better. Something more like a way out?

I have read The Road now. I watched The Book of Eli. I hear of God and Word all around me as we all, collectively, hallucinate our demises. Gak. I don't need hapless romance. Christ!

Authors are smug, as though they see these things ahead of our time. I stole this book, I borrowed it with a click from my local library which offers it in e-form, and I am amazed that there is no line at whose end to wait as there is for The Year of the Flood which I might just have to purchase. It's not like dear Margaret Atwood can live enough longer to appreciate her royalties. I shouldn't feel so bad. Actually, I don't. She makes me mad now. Is a cautionary tale all that is on offer from our best minds?

I so want to offer hope, to see hope on offer, about how it is that humans are Earth's mouthpiece and not in voices, not in written words, in fulfillment of what was already always implicit. Still, those who cannot read will never know. Those who worship their own richness, their bodies, their foodist intake of ever more delightful essences. They can never see it coming anyhow. A writer wastes her breath.

But I know how to read. I can appreciate Atwood's prose which rehearses her project, to project consciousness of what it might mean to be human if only we could break free of venality, is that the word, or is it, also, extinct? As humans are as are all things natural, as Atwood has internalized, yes she has, masculine mankind and it does not leave her proud. Patriarch be gone!

These things will end, as has our entrancement by things perceptual which are all that we can control. It is our minds which conspire, through words, to make a thing conscious which has always been and ever. Relations in the mind alone and humans alone can run this thing - the mind - above the grey matter of their silly brains. Cocksure, I wish she would pay attention to what is going on among Mama Grizzlies! We men are slumbering still, living large and in charge of what is already that far beyond us.

In the beginning I really didn't think she was all that brilliant. As a writer. Now I know that she is, and I will read, with relish, the Year of the Flood. I will watch that story enacted all around me, understanding that not only human life, but all life can be snuffed out, to start again, by Mother Earth awakening and dancing careless of her methane farts alighted.

I understand, I undertake to understand that it is time we leaned to use our minds which would mean to loosen and not to assert control. To re-enter flood, the flow, the thing which makes its own road, path, Way. Lunatic undertow. Subversion. There is a way forward. Damn!

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Subversive Shorts Bee Lineup, AKA "A"

2010-06-27T08:33:00.001-04:00

With a start, I realized that I should have been up in Toronto where all the real subversion was happening last night. Too late. I've been preoccupied with family matters, and numb to the world stage. Our own Seattle right around the corner, where acting up can make a difference. But then I watched a burning police car via over-the-Internets video and it looked so Canadian. Almost as if they have no interest in fanning flames of provocation. According to Michael Moore, they don't even lock their doors. And the cops with batons were equipped with bicycles, of all the crazy stuff. They were probably dialed in to the subversives' Twitter accounts. No-one looked very guilty. Not even the police. We're such hosers down below.

Subversion gets no satisfaction these days, and there are still unaccountably scant audiences down at the Theatre. Which only means that there's more room for YOU. These shorts are good!

I can't quite agree that this "A" or "Artaud" lineup is better than the one I saw last week. These short one-act plays were certainly engaging, but sometimes veered in the direction of a Saturday Night Live skit, which was what I fell asleep to last night, literally. Well, it was a re-run, so it wasn't technically "live", but it was live once! (Eat meat, it's what's for dinner, though you should eat stuff which was alive and not in industrial feedlot simulating life, as I learned the other time from the "B" lineup) It could just be the venue which keeps the crowds at bay - I'm pretty sure that if you threw these shorts up on a television screen, or a YouTube say, audiences would howl. Buffalo-born has made the world stage before!

Real theatre (sic) is face to face in a way, although I think if the actors were to make eye contact of the sort real people do they could never quite do the incredible job they did here last night. These actors were *in* to their roles. What a pleasure!

To run them down - not like police do, but like reviewers do - there were middle schoolers acting like adults negotiating gender politics as on the world stage of trade negotiations to our North (I might have my scale and venue mixed up). There was a traffic control disembodied voice posing as a very masculine God. There was celebration of the quiet choices of the abused women of the world, stood in for by an offstage silent smiling nun of ones imagination. The sister act-ed by a gay woman celebrant of absent judgement toward dronish subservients in a patriarchal structure of abuse which hardly becomes the Universal Church of Men. There really were bees composing Genesis, with some gender role reversals. Well, all you have to do is to imagine queens and drones and this was funny honey. Sweet. A Boorish banker opening an American do-gooder NGO-sponsored eco-tourism mecca down in South Africa with ironic twists. I mean, talk about ironic! You don't even know.

I don't know if life imitates art, or if the other way around, and how come it all coheres if only in this one mind, but each play plays on the others and on reality, so-called, and there's microcosmic shift which might be enough. It always has been. Did you think the world could change its mind all at once?

I'm not kidding, this was good stuff. The first short was acted out by students at the Performing Arts High School Magnet (another Buffalo invention), which is surely harboring some talent. Some good teaching. Some almost unbelievable presence on stage. The monologue by the gay sister of the sweetly innocent nun was performed so convincingly that I felt as though she stood for everyman, liberated, constrained, uncertain, freed, holding back from judgement herself, though she had every right to toss firebombs. On the model of silent women the world over who need honoring, but not, you know, worshipping.

And really, you should see actors channeling bees looking down on us humans-without-awareness. Divided as we are from the continuum of life. Genesis. Exodus. Who knows how the world will change? One awakening at a time? Person to person? The bees really are telling us something about our mono-culture, I mean the real bees, the ones we depend on for our pollination and our lives, and, um, I think we can't live without them, no matter the buzz down in South Africa which drowns out the thoughts of superstars. We didn't project our dreams on that screen this time, did we?

Right before the show I installed a new battery to the supposedly irreparable iPod my daughter's cat accidentally showered. People camped out all night to get the latest of these false presentations of seamlessness, interfaces without any way in. Willing to overlook flaws at the cost of a fatted service contract, as though they never crash. I will not refrain from opening smooth exteriors, you know, certainly not because I've been mesmerized by Word or words or acting.

The place where I bought the iPod battery represents a mission to protect landfills from poison superannuated electronic gear by demonstrating how easy it is to repair. Yeah, I know I'm being greenwashed, but, well, still I'd rather watch live theatre than participate in staged protest, and the "genius bar" just tells you they don't fix these things. I'm no sucker for guys in robes representing some mysterium.

Who knows how the world will change? The only thing that we do know is that it will, because the math doesn't work out the way we're going. Why not start here? Why not now? As my friend and I were walking out there was a full red moon just above the treetops, over the low buildings of this supposedly dying city. Now I just found out that I'd missed it's eclipse. The moon's, I mean, not the city's - for that I've been fully present. These menstrual pulls cannot be gainsaid by my manly artifice. My head was turned, as was God's, on stage, by flesh. Hey, I'm human. I'm implicated. She was hot!

Subversive Shorts!

2010-06-19T13:38:00.001-04:00

None of us can know our own personal deficits. They are blind spots; lacunae, to borrow the title from a recent Barbara Kingsolver novel I admired. (I'm now savoring her nonfictional take on living close to the land, reading it slowly in imitation of the manner of eating which will provide the best reward, local and global, as she celebrates.)

We can know our deficits only by a kind of emotional triangulation from among the feedback we receive, trying to filter out that which is motivated by the lacunae in others; sometimes these are projections which might have nothing at all to do with us. We can try to modulate the ways in which we discourage useful feedback. Our resistances and sensitivities and bluster and anger. Our touchiness.

Animal, Vegetable, Miracle must be the most intelligent book I have ever read. It uncovers much of what is really going on with our food culture. Just now, shopping at the local food co-op, I was distressed to learn from how far away my veggies had been shipped. But at least the Co-Op does provide that information now. I have been informed, and that's a start. The books wasn't meant as entertainment, but it's written well. Eat your spinach. As though it wasn't, well, yummy when well prepared and not repetitive to the point of evermore!

There is no delegating out my responsibility to make good choices, though good enough will nearly always be quite good by my lights. I have no real direct experience with the kind of fresh and lovingly raised food that Kingsolver celebrates and grows and worries over. I want to know why she will devote only a year and not a lifetime? Slowly. My standards aren't that high.

Last night I was among the ever more flush audience at Subversive Theatre for opening night of the "B" lineup, the "Brecht" series of their annual festival of short one-act plays. I liked them all. I don't know how to hoot as do the insiders, but I clapped loudly, only later learning that I should see the "A" or "Artaud" lineup if I want to see the good stuff.

The place felt cool; more comfortable than I remember. I remark on the irony now, that this theater has purchased an air conditioner, even as one of the shorts - a post-apocalyptic play set in the future when air conditioning is illegal and ice, bizarrely, is the erotic toy of choice - might make it seem a Hummer of a buy. There are no perfect, no pure, no ideal choices. There is no escaping irony. None.

How would I know? How would I know which of these short plays and how, degraded women to make an ideological point? I could tell that some did to some women present. I can tell the difference among didactic and entertaining and emotive. There is no accounting, none, for personal reaction, though.

There was only one play which really moved me that way, theatrically and not in my mind alone: three characters, the mother and father of a soldier deployed in Iraq, at a coffee shop to meet his sweetheart. She would be travelling through Turkey, abandoning her Olympic hopes, to assist her lover in his escape from the travesty of this so-called War. The father celebrated his own service medals and couldn't face the shame of his only son, the deserter. The mother handed over her St. Christopher medals, finally resisting instruction from her Man - direct orders actually. She remained behind to sip her tea. Sending her husband home, startling when the barrista called her name in stentorian fashion. The absent husband's coffee finally ready post-departure. In her name. Old habits. Die hard. Go AWOL. With difficulty. The girl's parents care only for her Olympic glory. Echoes of the gods of the first piece.

The Medals play was the main course for me, meaning that it moved me to understand in a way which had a chance to change me. I recognize these in-formations of my own self. The ways in which I am inhibited from making change in the world around me. Barked orders, timid forays, checking my moves against the norms.

Oh, I mean that one short, but you know, it was that they were short which made them so easy to swallow. A kind of ratatouille when taken as a whole, or, no, different foods on a single plate, or no, courses, maybe as part of a gourmet dinner. My reach exceeds my grasp, of theater, of food, of what it is that will make people more certain in ways to do less harm.

Others among the shorts were meant more purely to enlighten. The vegetable side dishes. The vitamins. To teach the audience about our prison system, and how cruel it is to families. To teach about our petro-based agriculture. To demonstrate how that line to distinguish humanity from beastliness gets pushed ever farther back until we can justify even torture, on animal Prozac and Muzak and climate controlled comfort in their solitary feedlot pens. Not so unlike the assisted living facility where I recently moved my Dad. Why wouldn't you be happy there, Dad? You can't do anything for yourself. Anyhow.

It's hard to see all the distortions - how it might be that there is no choice but to raise animals this way for slaughter; to justify their suffering by making a fine and final distinction between animal and human. Kingsolver gently mocks the purity of vegetarians, since animal death is also implicated in vegetable growth in human cultivated plots. But many vegetarians might eat meat if the animal's end was that surprising to it; that unanticipated and the life was merely cut short instead of denied at the outset.

Which justification would you like for your daily bread? That it does, in fact, taste that much better when raised with love and locally and without having been distorted by breeding to make the long trip from grower to grocer? Or that you will feel better spending more and tasting less, always waiting for the prize in its true season. How much more would you spend?

I admired the cleverness of each of these pieces, but in the end, I guess, I still choose to be enlightened in a manner which entertains, which moves, which stops short of teaching, didactically, someone else's certainties. I would prefer to witness someone acting out what we all must go through to make the right choices; to fill in all our own gaps. Vitamins are only necessary in the first place because we breed out the complexities of the food we eat. I've been so informed.

I can have no idea how food might taste if we were to raise it properly, without industrial feedlots, allowing fuller genetic variation, and bringing harvests closer to their markets. I still rather suspect that the food I prepare with love still tastes that much better than the stuff I could prepare if limited to a radius of 50 miles in its true season.

I have this feeling that it's not all bad. That the present distortions will be rectified, that this is all the inevitable result of an oil-bender which can't last much more than the hundred years of its allotment. A mere human lifetime, give or take. I have a feeling that people will start to understand how our pleasures distort and destroy so many lives; animal, vegetable and even miracle by the displaced and outsourced decisions we leave to the marketplace. I suspect that we will learn to nuzzle one another again, and walk away from our wombs with views in which we hibernate to be born anew.

But I am absolutely certain that nothing will change without courageous re-presentations of what is going on. That line between pure entertainment and truly moving art has become so distorted now that theater must mock cinema, cirque du soleil enterprise in scope. Phantom of some former opera. So, I remain glad for Subversive Theatre, and for protests the world over, and for pure didactic instruction. I don't care if it's someone else's certainty, if they are moved to act. I am lacking in taste, I guess. My lacuna. I moderate my gluttony by small bites, chewed slowly, followed by drink and not only for the bodily satisfaction. I've been so informed.

The Road, again

2010-06-18T11:09:00.002-04:00

The Road by Cormac McCarthy

My rating: 5 of 5 stars
Rarely do I make the mistake to see a good book first in movie form; degenerated that way as were the corpses desiccated in The Road's ashen landscape. This film was travesty, and made me detest misogynist McCarthy. I could see who he was, putting two and two together with No Country for Old Men. There is no need for this grim landscape of our future.

Sometimes I don't get clued in about who are the good authors. The shortcomings of random. But the Word can only be evacuated by words, and not by images which are as cruel is it would be to awaken in a coffin under ground. The reality of which was rendered by these words.

This is not a real world - in that one, we are not so powerful. We cannot wipe all life from the earth leaving only mankind living. Nature is not that particular. Narratives are. This one lays bare what choices are always present in the ever-present which only makes sense if there is its future. These are the choices which we avoid now, inventing a future which looks much like the one portrayed. Words cannot be depicted.

They can be hollowed. They can be made lifeless. They can be turned to purest rhetoric; something which is story only and can be rendered in film or audio tapes. Even an aging man like my own father who never was really likable and who smells bad might not be, well isn't yet, actually, without his future. Which must be not alone no matter how disagreeable he can be.

But. We must also preserve our laughter.

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Obama, BP, and Perpetual Retooling: an Ivy League Disaster

2010-06-16T12:57:00.003-04:00

I've been in and out of my apartment lately, and the magazines pile up. Today is recycling day, and road resurfacing day, and so there are lots of big machines grumbling about. There's been some lightning too, but so far no earthquakes. It's hard to find peace of mind.

While quickly scanning through the piled up magazines, to make sure that I don't throw away something I'd later wish I hadn't, I was struck by the cover of Information Week, March 8, just before the big Gulf oil blowout. They were celebrating the massive and radical transformation the shiny new BP CIO had accomplished.

According to the somewhat tired old saw which gets rehearsed in these particular pages, he had accomplished this great turnabout from IT being a moribund expense drag to it's being profit driven and cost conscious and mission centered. As you read the article, it's clear that the transformation was mostly about squeezing more productivity out of less money. They wanted to get rid of contractors and replace them with mission-oriented BP badge-wearing specialty staff. In place of "tenured generalists."

I'm certain that IT was already at the center of how BP makes its money. There are plenty of sophisticated applications which enable them to find oil and gas and then plan to extract it. Around these tools, there must be an incredible wealth of knowledge, much of it in the form of the lore of hard experience. Having been an IT "contractor" myself (which means you don't work directly for the company you support, but rather for an "outsourcing" company) I know how disparaged we types are by the company insiders.

But often the insiders are more focused on the politics of the place while the outsiders - the contractors - are focused only on getting the job done well, efficiently, and correctly. In many cases, contractors stay around long enough to know more about the processes their insider bosses direct them to accomplish than any of those insiders ever master. More than they ever need to master, because they have contractors to make them look good.

In one extreme case which used to give me chuckles bordering on helpless laughter, a particular government agency I'd had to interact with - one whose budget was the subject of a law suit on behalf of the people by the State's own Attorney General - kept firing this one lowly contractor, and then kept figuring out that he was the only one there who actually got things done. So they'd hire him back. He'd coach us "consumers" about how to circumvent the bureaucracy, and how to work the system, and finally he'd actually see to it that the goals on the books actually got accomplished.

He was a good-humored fellow who got through his days, I'm sure, by nursing along a book-length satire about government efficiency which I still hope to read some day. Maybe I was fooled by his Monty Python accent, but I think it should be a good read. Eventually, I discovered that virtually every single one of my peer "voluntary agencies" (meaning we were not-for-profit businesses apart from the government empire which controlled us) which interacted with this multi-hundreds-of-millions government IT operation was also best buddies with "Steve."

I don't doubt for even a second that the catastrophe in the Gulf is directly related to political transformations being effected inside BP. They were apparently discovering that they weren't making as much money as quickly as were their competitors and could see their own demise in their future. I'm also reasonably certain that this is directly related to those aspects of the company which truly were forward looking - all that "Beyond Petroleum" stuff which wouldn't pan out for years while competitors were cashing in on the here and now.

Information Week is clearly cognizant, even if only tangentially, of its complicity in the BP disaster - nobody wants to say these things out loud, but if you cut too much too fast, disaster is one likely scenario. It happens all the time in IT, which was the point of Information Week's follow on commentary about the cautionary nature of the BP disaster.

I still like President Obama fine, but like probably everyone else in the country, I was plenty disappointed by his message last night. The trouble with it was that is was all message. It was too well thought out, and reflected the Ivy world-view with which he has overpopulated his administration.

I should talk, but these guys have no real-world experience solving actual problems. They are skilled and talented and knowledgeable at the highest level only, and the bulk of their ability is rhetorical. They have to know how to align and motivate and direct those below them who actually do the work, just like that fellow at BP; their new and highest level IT manager.

Lowly IT people, no matter what their skills and knowledge level, would be scared shitless with the prospect to be the decision-maker at that height of accountability. That's what an Ivy League education actually means in the end, and it is no mistake that our presidents tend to come from there. They have no real doubts that they are as likely to know what to do as anybody else is, and gaining power and authority reinforces confidence in those positions.

Obama was off his game yesterday. He's allowed the message mavens to control his delivery and demeanor and to package a pitch-perfect rendering of the obvious, but really he should leave that to Time Magazine. It's what they're good at. He didn't come across as though he himself actually believes the platitudes about our better future, to be powered by our can-do American spirit. Maybe he's been ground down already by an insiders view of government in action.

It should be obvious to anyone that our future has never been brighter. We are at the brink of genuine breakthroughs in energy storage, transmission and distribution, and most of these will depend on sophisticated IT systems to be realized. An idiotic amount of energy - sorry - is still being expended on the supply side when any idiot can see that the sun deposits more than enough energy to run even our extravagant human consumption onto a space smaller than the state of Rhode Island if you do the math. Much smaller.

We are like lousy parents who talk a good game and maybe scream and argue and shout, but the kids know how to get the real rewards. The money right now is still in the hands and under the control of the oilmen. Oil is what's defined our civilization ever since the great wars of the last century, and continuing through the present. Oh, and by the way, there's lithium in Afghanistan, did I forget to tell you? How careless of me. Maybe that will quell the psychotic behaviors of our governors, even while it powers our cellphone and laptop batteries.

Maybe we'll let them concoct another third-world corrupted government narrative to maintain their hegemonic power over all that they survey. "They" are always graduated from the Ivy League.

Any damned fool can understand that the power of sub-global-corporate capitalism is more than equal to the task to rejigger our energy consumption patterns if there's money in it. Capitalism as we now practice it is more properly called global corporatism, and has about as much to do with buisness-minded energy as Stalinism does with Communism. We should get a rhetorical clue already!

It's government's role to change the incentive structure, and to do so somewhat drastically. So Rumsfeld is a criminal egotistical frat-boy jerk with some score to settle from the old days; that doesn't mean that all of his ideas were wrong. He was the majordomo of outsourcing, and likely of its corruption as well. Just imagine if we'd paid our grunts the money we paid to their private yahoo peers!

Sometimes we could use a Howdy Doody C-level intellect like Bush or Reagan, just simply because they can believe their own bullshit rhetoric. Hell, if I were to have exercised common sense ahead of time about many of my life's greatest accomplishments, I never would have attempted them in the first place.

OK, I don't have any great accomplishments, unless you consider the stuff I've already done which someday will be appreciated but so far isn't. Ha! But, there is something supremely satisfying about facing a problem which simply must be solved, and having to do it with the limited resources ready to hand. More times than not, I find that with a steady mind and steady resolve, and some body memory in my muscles which says that indeed this thing can be broken loose, there is a solution to be found.

The solution is almost never the one you might have wished for at the outset. Most of those fine soltions are readily had for a price, which is why not having the price of admission can be a pretty good solution driver, In order to get there you really do have to let your mind wander, and let some random in. You have to let the proper tools and parts and resources reveal themselves from among the stuff around you.

Right now, we think we all know everything we need to know about the problems which face us. We think we have all the facts we need about global warming and about Peak Oil and about population pressures, and oil-dependent agriculture and all we can see is gloom and doom because we can't imagine how to get all those stupid people to agree with us and agree to act in concert toward what we already know must be done.

Well folks, that's the Ivy League perspective in a nutshell. It can make you cynical, looking down at all those stupid people who just don't get it, how they have to put away their guns and snowmobiles and SUVs, while we continue to indulge our summer houses and multiple Priuses and jet-away holidays, and proxy murder of hundreds of thousands of innocents if it isn't millions anymore. Our proxy larceny of whole cultures beneath our desire for year-round veggies to pamper the personal temple of our ever-so-sensitive bodies.

We live on oil in precisely the same way that we live off all the stupid people who eat MacDonald's every day, and believe that it's they who've failed and not our system of education. I don't mean that it's which system. I mean that it's system in the first place. The very possibility for education has been destroyed in precisely the same fashion that we've already destroyed so many indigenous and self-sustaining cultures on the premise that they really want to be like us and should start my supporting us in the lifestyle according to which we'd like to remain accustomed.

Anyhow, what Obama needs is a few can-do Buffalonians on his advisory staff and a few fewer Ivy Leagers. He needs some more people with the actual experience of getting problems solved, and then he needs to let people take risks within the level of their expertise. Outsourcing, a notorious evil of our new global economy, can also mean autonomy, responsibility, risk-taking problem solving, and a collectively rendered solution very much in line with what's best about so-called capitalism.

Bureaucracies, no matter whether in government or in so-called private industry tend to stifle innovative problem solving. Surely this much is understood. You can see the buck passing written all over the face of the BP disaster, and the risk taking by people in no position to understand the consequences of the risks they would take. Everyone wants to be a cowboy, just like GWB was. The consequences are simply too obvious to bear rehearsing.

You can see our nation wanting to believe in the spirit so amply demonstrated in our past - the same damned World War II that Obama had to invoke yet again. The one which powered the oil-dependent economy my parents generation got wealthy on. I'm sick of that story. The emergency now is as great. Stop incentivising oil, stop incentivising agribusiness, stop incentivising too big to fail and the rest will take care of itself. Duh!

I just don't think this is rocket science - I mean getting people on the moon really was harder, and I'm tired of hearing about that too. Let's get our act together here on earth how 'bout, huh?

Occam's Razor

2010-06-15T09:29:00.000-04:00

I hear on NPR that there's this new book about being wrong.

It's about how we're all somehow programmed to find long explanations to bolster our certainties; about how we will go to almost any length to protect the reality of something we've made an identity investment with. During the NPR interview and call-in there was some talk about how the wondrous techniques of modern science are the only thing that's proof against these long rationalizations of our certainties. Scientists are taught to doubt.

But there is also a time and place beyond which the doubting is itself that thing which leads to the unnecessarily long and convoluted explanations. Just like trying to compute the orbits of the planets while positing Earth at their center, scientists now continue to contruct complicated-beyond-belief tests for their convoluted permutations of particulate reality.

As with the math for Ptolomeic orbits, it can be followed only by adepts in the art of abstraction. These folks are hailed as our heros of thought, capable to do things with their mind analogous to what Hercules could do with his body.

That shift from Geocentric to Heliocentric cosmology has long been touted as the emblematic error of stubborn chauvinism; the chauvinism of common sense. It seems as though we must be at the center. We build all sorts of rationalizations for what it means to be us on the assumption that we are at the center, and then we must consider as subversive anyone who would come along to disrupt that interlocking set of understandings.

Occam's Razor is the low-level test whereby, given competing explanations and all else being equal, the simplest one is probably the right one. This works for the Heliocentric description of the orbits of the planets. But only so far as the math is concerned. The mistake among the folks who were wrong was to invest too much in their metaphoric extensions from the basics. They thought decentering Earth was the same as decentering man.

The notion that God explains everything would almost always fit the bill for Occam's Razor, except that it fails to explain anything at all. It's all metaphor all the time, which pretty much explains the literality of the Bible for true believers.

At the point where we find ourselves now, it may be that explanations and wishful thinking have to merge in some slight way. At the fringes, where quantum reality takes hold, and particles are themselves conjectures; sometimes you see 'em and sometimes you don't. Provably.

We are dancing around now, trusting our champions in the field of abstraction. Trusting them with our money and our hopes and our dreams. Trusting that they will find a way for humans to control things, and then fix them and set the world right. We are all fans of the human endeavor, played on a field of dreams.

Well, I'm not. I've long since understood that at the fringes there is no real distinction between mind and matter. That mind apart from matter has become a dangerous fiction, because it projects reality as onto a stage, a screen, a field. Mind has always been implicated with matter, whether we as humans already existed or not. Our tears our hopes our dreams are simply not that important, except to ourselves, except that for so long as we project into our future some Savior descended from abstraction (which makes utterly no sense to say, but you'll think it does) or abstracted from the reality of our lives and education. Some genius to propose yet another mathematical and machine construable construct into which reality must be fitted.

When the Occam's Razor elegant solution is simply to change around our language. Regard as real those connections we now regard as merely emotional, and somehow centered on humanity. Emotional connections, which inhere in conceptual relations among perceptual phenomena, are always present in principle. As is the mind to know them. But no math can touch those relations before the phenomena have "touched" by exchange of particles, by impingement of forces, by interaction, mindlesslly, apart. As parts.

I am descending now - I am some way along the descent toward my dotage. I never did have the career rhetorical professional focus which would keep my words in play. I never did have a clear pitched voice, nor talent to project it. I am tired, my center does not hold. I seek company in the wilderness of whatever it is mine eyes are window unto. They grow dim, trifocular, abstracted from whatever it is I once could grasp.

But I will like continue to rehearse the obvious, just in case somebody starts to pay attention. Somebody other than those bots and scammers, dregs beneath humanity, who now own our world of discourse. People writing whole books on obvious matters, as though it might matter to all those who will remain so certain that there is a conspiracy. The dunces!

We all conspire together. I watched that dreadful film, The Road, over the course of a couple of days (the wages of older age). Then I read a bit of that dreadful rhetoric. A spare writer who hangs with physicist-types. They deserve each other, and their serial women, chosen for beauty, deserve them too.

The world is now crowded with projections of its end. Even Margaret Attwood, who has the sense to clip my commentary from her blog, admired by feminists, indulges grim rehearsals of our current voids. Didn't John Updike write one before his ending? Chomsky. They're all misogynists, so far as I can tell. Haters of the very possibility that men don't mean that much. Man doesn't. Which means that they are haters of our matrix. Not realizing that Earth is that much bigger than our little dreams.

I'm with the global warming deniers, the Small Change believers that Bush took down the Trade Center Towers, the believers that the war in Afghanistan was always all about the mineral rights, and staking claims before China could. As if any of this is news. As if the failure of the CERN collider is surprise. As if there was always a Hollywood ending in store. There is no secret code for trust. There is no there there unless and until you make it so.

Explanations for Absence

2010-06-12T10:58:00.000-04:00

Some day soon, I'm sure, the incredible power of computing hardware will be deployed where it belongs; in the direction of 'instant on.' I can imagine no reason anymore for the universal machine, which has to find a place in memory to park all of your Operating System and application choices and preferences. There is no reason any longer for the same physical machine to support so many different versions, deployments, distributions.

I'm that sick of the arms race between "software" (a useless term anymore) and ever faster hardware which just leaves me, in the end, waiting as long as I ever did for the infernal machine to let me do whatever it is I've set out to do.

Those long dialup negotiations have been replaced now with cellular setups with some little shim required to load so that they can meter and modulate your usage. There are all sorts of wireless encryption settings to negotiate, and only a fool would leave a machine connected permanently, without a lot of very expensive firewalling and intrusion detection machinery intervening between the loaded software and the wilds.

Then there's the need to monitor that, mostly automated, with, perhaps, some reasonably well-trained individual to monitor the rendered up reports. I understand now that some significant proportion of trading - and therefore of money made - on the stock market is simply algorithmic, nearly instantaneous and devoid of human reads of market trends based on any research. Am I the only one who thinks this might be a problem? Shouldn't the market reflect human reads of future trends? Factoring in a slice of desire, as in where do we want to go as a civilization?

With virtualization technology now deployable on the level of the application, there is no reason to allow any extrinsic influence to fiddle with the code. It should all be "hardware" in some virtual sense, instantly on and impregnable from attack short of power surging explosions. Most annoying of all is my phone, which has the Microsoft smartphony software on it. When it crashes I'm out of touch for what seems an eternity. They won't let me load on a different version of their software, so in the end, there's simply no excuse for this. Burn it in and make it work, bozos!

My phone's "state" should be permanent, like my Kindle's is, and it should respond to my touch that instantly, without consuming lots of power to be alert for my touch. This is a no-brainer, and I won't take it anymore what they do with my time and poise and equanimity.

But yeah, meanwhile, I've been absent from here because the time had come to move Dad out of Mom's house (you know, the one he worked his whole life to pay for, including her fussy decorations of it). He's been in a steady decline now for over a decade, finally having crossed the border they'd like to call dementia.

Everything looks very sudden when you poke your head in to take a look. You discover what Mom's been covering for. You find a lot of denial and acceptance of claims for presence which were memorized simulations of statements and phrasing which once did,,indeed, have presence. Which is a tough thing to realize when it's memory which is the thing most often pointed to as the absence. There is recall only of the positions, the postures, the verbal bullying. There is no presence "behind" the thing pointed to as absence.

Mom couldn't take it anymore, and so I've had to orchestrate a late-in-life divorce. Which isn't easy when the principals involved aren't anywhere near what you might call willing to "get" what has to change. It would be so much easier if there were tears and outrage and recriminations. Instead, there is a different act; a different script to follow.

Instead there's just confusion, together with a nascent offshoot of the healthcare industrial economy which is taking off just now. By 'nascent,' I mean they don't know what they're doing yet. Like kids drinking their first beer. Fed by the aging-out of the baby boomers' leading edge progenitors, who have neatly swept up all the postwar (I'm talking the Big One) wealth to provide for themselves castles in our sky. (Beware what you hope for)

Dad looked ahead, against Mom's disinclination, and purchased a spot in an insurance-based facility which would provide for nearly all eventualities as they lost their grip, physically and mentally, and their ability to manage independent lives. But Dad's never done any cooking or cleaning or laundry in the first place, and now it has to be admitted that Mom can't do it for him anymore. And, well, at the end of the day she quite clearly resents his presence.

Enter the middle child. Me. I'm burning out.

I wonder how closely drink mimics what is happening to them? You pretty much know that you aren't all there the way that you normally are, but only pretty much. Sometimes, belligerantly even, you insist to those around you that you are capable to do those things you used to do almost without thinking. "Why can't I drive?" Dad yells in outrage. "I can drive!!" As I spirit away his keys.

Sure, there is a knockout point. A blackout beyond which there is no more presence of the person who used to be there. That shutting off of power to the hardware. Shorting out the motherboard, pulling the plug. Or if the software goes all wonky and the system freezes up.

But this instance is rather more the reverse of that long and difficult process of growing up. It takes forever to boot up a person. Sometimes it's only in decline that the missing pieces are apparent. The stuff which never really did get internalized, no matter how well some simulation was enacted. Love, for instance, in Dad's case, seems to be something not really on offer during his upbringing. At least not the "normal" sort.

He did a fantastic job of acting it out though. Always and ever the good provider, thinking mostly most of his life about his wife and kids. Applying shades of rectitude to the ambiguities of moral choice. Knowing how to stay clear of feeling-laden manipulations to indulge some one person's sweet interests. Until, eventually, responsibilities discharged, he began to indulge his own. Ever the control freak, he never let his wife, my Mom, feel that she was free to do whatever she wanted, even while the budget for her indulgences was ballooning almost beyond belief.

Well, it would be beyond belief from the perspective of nearly every other person on the planet. They traveled over most of the globe. They bought the best summer place on the long and storied Canadian shore across from Buffalo. They furnished it with fine antiques, all covered with expensive fabrics. Everything's out of date, but so are they now, and always have been. Nerdy superannuated throwbacks to that time in memory's mist where we all think we'd like to live.

Not me! I can't wait, frankly, until my machinery boots up as fast as that Windows 98 machine, unreconstructed, that I had a chance to turn on the other day. What a pleasure!! Flick the switch, and there it is! Of course, you wouldn't dare plug it in to the network. It would be dead in an instant, subject to the predations of stuff that's still out there. Dormant for lack of prey. A chunk of dead meat into a school of piranha.

Some day soon, I will install a kill switch on my own personal hardware. It will be controlled algorithmically, just like those drunken kill switches some people install on their cars against their worse judgement. It will monitor my congruence with the stuff I used to write and say, and then at that moment when I've crossed the threshold of recognizeability, it will just pull the switch and I won't wake up from my sleep state. That would be so much easier on everyone, don't you think?

Well, sorry, gotta go. All those professionally trained people at the incredibly expensive eldercare facility are having trouble fitting Dad into any of their categorical boxes again. I have to intervene and demonstrate good socialization, rehearsing my deficits, preparing for my own demise. What a trip!!

Tell Me More, Tell me Sweet Little Lies

2010-06-05T16:42:00.000-04:00

I don't know love. Oh, I know it better than you do, in the direction of the abstract, of God's love, or even of the sort which requires paid counselors to rectify. I even have a nifty little proof of how love is out there, a part of reality with or without us to feel it, a step more real than the sort attributed to God. Abstracted like a subatomic particle is abstracted. But the love I don't know is the kind that you have to learn, and it was never on offer where I got my learnin'. For you neither, I'll bet.

Here's a strange exercise: Go out to dinner with Dad, and then when he says that he doesn't remember anything, start to tell all the things you remember, in some sort of random order, or based, perhaps, on some assessment of their level of emotional impact. To him.

Some things will actually stir a memory. Sometimes, that will even trigger him remembering a few things on his own. Most of the time, it's just you remembering things, which is a pleasant enough exercise. It passes the time at dinner.

But the thing is that there is always something which will trigger interest when there is some presumption of involvement of Dad's "I". Some pride that there was a him actually involved in whatever it was I was telling him about. Or maybe he just appreciated that I appreciated it. But it doesn't seem that I could tell an outright lie and keep his interest. Although he frequently expresses disbelief at what I do tell. "Really, I did that? Tell me more . . ."

There are a few things I'd like to ask my daughter some day when the right moment comes along. Nothing about drugs and sex and alcohol, but I would like to know if she's ever cheated on a school assignment. I hear that all criminals feel justified, and so, you know, in this very dangerous exercise, I'd like to know if I feel as though I fell short, if I would like to assign blame to her Mom, or if I am angry with my child. I'd just like to know is all.

It's not the answer which weighs on me, ever so lightly. It's the question mark; the sense that there will never quite be an occasion to ask this question, to open up that channel for a level of trust which could transcend all questioning. Perhaps it will be denied me. I know it's a dangerous arena. It's not my love at risk. It's more about my character, and how much I devoted to her. I'm 99.99% sure that she never has. In fact I know of plenty of ways in which she demonstrated that she'd rather undermine herself than to do those cheap things her classmates did to grub a grade.

Alright. I don't want to know. I already do know. What am I talking about??

I have split my parents now, taking on that initiative because neither of them has the ability to do it for themself. Over time, it became blazingly apparent that there was no happiness in one another; Dad a kind of addict of Mom's mere presence, having long since forgotten that there is a life of its own inside the female of the species. He never was taught that way. Or he's just afraid, as he always says; afraid of "girls," afraid of dancing.

And Mom his slave through so many physical manifestations of introverted rage, near death each time, and still she has no idea what, actually, would make her happy. She has no instinct at all about what to do to please herself. Dad's memory is mostly gone, and so when springtime presented the opportunity to spirit him off to their summer home without Mom, I took it. But as I've learned it's not his memory that's gone. It's control, in perfect analog to his physical body which is remarkably strong and fit for its age, but not really all that strong.

I am regarded as some kind of hero within the small orbit of my family, having taken upon myself something no one else knew how to accomplish. And, in truth, I do resent it. I feel that my life has been robbed from me, as I tell both parents little lies, act out things I don't quite feel, determined to see this chess match through to where Dad believes that Mom is also in his past, a forgotten melange of Mom, grandma, some shadow person.

But that's not about to happen. It really isn't his memory that's gone, it's the story of his life, which he wrote before he would forget it, but which had already written itself as a long list of obligations capped by self-indulgence. I think that Dad was afraid to dream. I think he's always been terrified to step outside of his competency, formidable as it is, and every single move has gone according to plan, during a time in the history of mankind when such a thing was actually possible.

Now, the man is attenuated. The plan complete. What would you expect to be left at the remains of a completed life.

There is absolutely no question mark in my mind that neither of my parents ever cheated - not once - in school, and certainly not with each other. This has not seemed any sort of triumph - more a shortcoming in the passion department. Their rage is always staged. There is never any actual danger that it could escalate to physical harm. But it does the trick to keep each person from himself. It delineates the boundaries beyond which is something unknown, messy unpredictable.

I am become that sort of Catholic child I thought I never would or could become. The one who throws over some distant life to return back home to care for infirm parents. Those parents, or generally it is Mom, linger then for years and years and friends drop away since that particular sort of passion is exclusive of a life for oneself.

I have never ever cheated on a school assignment. I don't have it in me. And, well, I don't have it in me to know what it is that I really want with and of my life. And the lies I tell, therefore, are nowise geared toward advancing my own agenda. Other than to liberate myself from this strange purgatory on one of Earth's almost certainly most perfect pieces of real estate. This is the it life. Charming waterfront living, tastefully arranged.

I feel vaguely as though I should have a life, and it can't be here. I can't even last the summer, nevermind the years and years of lingering always in store for dutiful children. I don't feel as though I care either that little or that much. Perhaps I simply don't feel, enslaved all these years to some idea for myself. Some bottled aspirations, as my parents led the way toward what seems almost normal now. Like drinking corn sweetenered carbonated water, it's considered acceptable now to spend an entire life in devotion to the kids' success. That's what having enough means now: the sheer excess to be able to give your kids the message that if they don't get into the Ivy of their choice, they might as well die.

We saw an unusual bird today, and the other day there was some new not unattractive growth on the beach. Some invasive species, rendering useless the classic field guides strewn about this house. I once thought I had to learn the names of these things. I never did. Lots of Dad's memories are about the Boy Scouts. That's where I would have learned to identify plants and birds and constellations. Later on, I learned lots of Chinese characters. Then I stopped and they linger on in my being as unused competencies, shades of knowledge.

We eat often at a Chinese restaurant, one started by an artist, a calligrapher, a poet who drew his recipes from the classics. They know me there. I taught his daughter. I recognized the character in one of his "drawings." It was "filial piety" as normally translated. Respect for ones ancestors. It was somehow, vaguely mis-written. Or maybe it was an archaic form. It was tipped a bit, drunken. There's another full moon tonight. I snapped a picture of it, and got a flying saucer. I posted it to Facebook. I have no idea why. I thought it was funny.

Dad's struggle to find words is extreme. I struggle to find words, but his struggle leaves him comically bereft much of the time. He pantomimes with vague approximations, vocally, grasping for the most common terms. Things familiar. I'm not sure this is what's meant by "memory loss" to most people. In some cases, he has an apparent thing in mind, but can't get at the words for it. It reminds me of myself speaking some foreign tongue. It's frustrating, but only because you can't dig up the word to make a connection. You want a dictionary.

But a dictionary wouldn't help Dad. The mechanics would elude him. Right now he's watching something on PBS about something about war. War captivates him, just like memories of boy scouts seem the most present. But the war stuff has to be real. History. He can't watch caricatures. Dramatic enactments of WWII go well. Just now he remembered how his father was all set to ship off during WWI, but luckily was absolved by the War's end. He seemed to have a perfectly clear memory of this.

Lacking words for the organisms around us must be similar to what gets called "memory loss." We become abstracted from the natural environment which is also part of us, but it was the words themselves which abstracted us in the first place. Without them, we would be embedded, connected.

So there is nothing separate from losing grasp in general to memory loss. I guess there are some people who keep a good memory well after their body is decrepit. But what good would that be? Is a sharp mind in a blasted body more free than a blasted mind in a sharp body?

This sense of "I" that we celebrate so much is nothing other from abstraction, separation, identity, that thing which makes us unnatural. There is nothing about my Dad which is not perfectly recognizable as him. There is nothing lacking, though much has been attenuated. And he's no longer in control, even of his wife, who has finally learned to assert herself. At least on the phone. At least across an international boundary.

I won't be able to do this much longer. My mind is subsumed beneath the white noise of Dad. I can't think. I'm losing my mind in a different way. My words are not available to me because there is no peace. I think we mirror each others' frustration. Perhaps another TV uipstairs would do the trick?

Oh, I can read there on my Kindle, which allows me to purchase new books without leaving my seat, pulling in the tower from the hill across the lake in the good ol' U. S. of A. Remember when a book was something to have and to hold, and folks would have been embarrassed to sell you just the words and prevent you then from giving them away to the next person.

My struggle is with irritation, with bodily functions and smells and old bad habits which were only lightly veneered by some civilizing influence. It's hard to like Dad now. He smells and won't wash and makes embarrassing and loud comments in restaurants of the sort he used to know enough to keep to himself. And this new being can't be blamed on new deficits. Rather, something got removed which kept the disagreeable stuff in check. But it was always there.

Then what is left, when everything else gets removed? When the house and chotchkes gathered up across so many years of perpetually contested truce are disposed of and all the memories must be told from someone else's mouth, or pen, or also-fading memory. Constructed memory which will always be cartoon-like smoothed, toward abstracted perfect shapes, for better or for worse.

Is all that's left just simply this compulsion to care, to act out love, to treat the shell as though it were the real thing, and not what should get left behind. I'll keep you posted. I'm learning love, but I'm not there yet. I sitll have plenty of work to do, to arrange for disposals, for professional care, for preservations when necessary. I still have truths to tell so that there will be calm and peace and something like co-existence, on the same campus, of two individuals who can't help one another anymore.

One, my father, always competent and always preparing ahead, shedding things, before he can't handle them anymore. He is stubborn like a bull if asked to relinquish authority, autonomy, charge, unless invited to do so by someone who will help him as a peer. The other, my mother, always resentful of control taken away, and for whom help is something compelled, with belittlement if necessary, with money doled out or withheld.

So I must stand in. For love. In all the wrong places. And then one day, perhaps, I will experience it, as a felt experience, as something real beyond control. As something not dependent on so many things piled up across the years. Perhaps.

Power to the People!

2010-06-04T17:58:00.001-04:00

Journal of the Plague Year: The Inside Story of Eliot Spitzer's Short and Tragic Reign by Lloyd Constantine

My rating: 3 of 5 stars
Reading insider accounts of the workings of government makes a good corrective to conspiracy theories: if you ever fall victim to the belief that people in power are greater than you or me, well, then I suppose you will also believe that terrorists are evil geniuses.

It would empower us to realize they're not. But then we would be responsible to make things better. It's often nicer to be angry with someone who should have done more because it seems they could have.

Jail the feckless slob who manages to set off a forest fire with a careless match. For life. And make him a poster model for how responsible we'll be held if our cockamamie schemes should work. We recruit them - terrorists and shooters - by our very horror at their impact. As if it takes much plotting to do damage to a house of cards, an assemblage of fanatics; as if such doomsday machines as financial derivatives and deep sea oil wells don't have more probability for failure than for success.

Who are we kidding, if not ourselves?

Lloyd Constantine - certainly in his own mind - strives for truthfulness in his account of the early demise of the Spitzer administration in New York State. He doesn't spare himself, but finally, he faults Spitzer for indulging himself, not with prostitutes, but with the seductive temptation of the ordinary life of a wealthy alpha male. He took on the responsibilities of Governor, and he should have seen them through.

There is some mild recognition that there is no ultimate requirement that we the people are so uptight about sexual indiscretions. Why, the unspoken question gets asked, should a man as big as Spitzer internalize such small minded obsessions? Why should he be wracked with guilt? Why should he be so indiscreet as to allow his own undoing?

The real crime was that he'd led us all in New York state to believe that he really wanted to be governor. If that were so, he would have kept his promise to us. In the end, he's just another rich playboy, nevermind that he pays more than the rest of us would need to even if we wanted to, for the illusion of prowess in love. That much money should have bought discretion, unless he'd wanted or needed to be caught.

The hell of it is that he has this perfect wife, this perfect family. He had real prowess in his ability to attract such a powerful group of movers and shakers to the cause of his administration. But he saw himself, one guesses, as the Music Man, and couldn't keep up the act.

You know, I had the same feeling when I read Zhao Ziyang's smuggled out memoirs of his downfall from power in the People's Republic of China. From the inside, the moves of the extremely powerful look banal. They look like what we must imagine would be the inside narrative of sports heros, made up mostly of grunts and counting. There is not all that much to say from the inside of any exercise of the familiar moves of the greatly accomplished performing their great accomplishments. Some are more talented than others. But should we adore them quite so much?

As it is, how could they not see themselves as greater than they are. When politics is spectator sport? Lloyd Constantine clearly believes that he earns the millions that he earns, defending the likes of Rupert Murdoch from Constantine's self-styled Progressive side. As if he's that much better, more intelligent, harder working than the rest of us. As if the rawest wanting of the alpha-male is that distinguishable from luck.

And would the world be worse if Murdoch were crushed by the then still-reigning TV networks? Would New York be better off if the Spitzer administration carried though on its promise?

Or would we all be better off if we were to ignore the chest pounding of the alpha males, turn away, and do the hard work of making the right choices, as most of us do every day in our limited realms. Would we all be better off without such complex structures, such dizzying altitude distribution toward the various tops; things which will always seem more likely to topple than to stand.

I'd thought surely that one of Spitzer's enemies had entrapped him. The Church perhaps, which he could have brought down in New York State by erasing any statute of limitation for child rape. The stakes were high. Everyone has a weakness. Maybe that is what happened. Maybe the personal cost to do right by the people truly was made too high. Maybe his exposure of what really happened was simply made too personally dangerouus.

Or, you know, maybe the responsibilities Spitzer had taken on were in themselves, of necessity, destructive to the family that he loved, and he really did need a way out. Maybe no-one could threaten them more than his job did.

Well, that's the lesson I take from this and the Zhao Ziyang book. By the time you want that much power, or need it, your humanity has already been erased. Our democracy is not meant that way. Humility should be the norm in sport and in government. Extreme competence is its own reward. Constantine should go back to government. He's not that great a writer. And the position of Chancellor for the State University belongs to an ac academic, for chrissakes. Who do these operators think they are?

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Finally, Buffalo Trued

2010-06-04T16:55:00.000-04:00

Buffalo Lockjaw by Greg Ames

My rating: 5 of 5 stars
Everybody in Buffalo wants to find a way to be ourselves in the world in a way to be noticed as something not quite dismiss-able, the way that Buffalo is. To do that, you have to find a theme - a big theme, that will sustain an entire novel, or a life, without once seeming clunky or contrived or making the whole text one extended metaphor in any way that you've heard it all already.

Yeah, who would want to go there? What is it we all avoid? Could that be where the humanity is? Could it? Can we look hard at the City of No Illusions and retain any illusions for ourselves?

People give up, you know, fall back, from dreams and accept life in its fullest mediocrity, take pride in that to the point of delusional boosterism, so? But why would you want to go there if given the chance to go somewhere else? Lots of creative types get born here, but they call it their beloved home. They don't stay. Visiting celebrities, filming, say, love it here. Why would they stay? Maybe aging football stars find a place where they can remain a celebrity for the rest of their lives.

From the inside, Buffalo seems a place of might-have-beens, if-onlies. Petty politics, advantaging local bigshots, trump vision every time and so we build our perpetual wanna-be flagship university out of town, wipe out our waterfront with highways and dead industrial tracts, and conspire to route traffic around our natural transportation hub. Hell, we even sell our hydro-power down the river, downstate.

So, it's in the person of a once-vital Mom, a noted expert in the care of elderly demented patients, who herself becomes a living shell of who she once was, that Buffalo can come alive, in words at least, as something larger than its life.

Something about each of our lives, no matter how accomplished, no matter how smug or self-satisfied must remain in the world's capitals of mediocrity. You will find yourself less than you could be and at the same time find the lock-jawed striving in the face of white-out blizzards determination to find in yourself and in your life something still better. Something to make light of. Something to brood about, and mostly long long lists of friends who care for you as you are.

This is not the fictional Buffalo. This is the real thing, real places named and authenticated. Real characters. I live here. I know them. I am them. If you want to be judged by your proximity to beauty, to power, to accomplishment, then this is not your place. But you are not those things, and if you are, you won't be for long.

If you realize, as did de Kooning in an essay which was for me, the central figure in this novel, "Content is a Glimpse;" if you realize that perfect beauty is always only glimpsed, perfect accomplishment, no matter that the glimpse may last an entire performance. I haven't read that essay, but it's title gives a glimpse, right? into its content.

In the end, that's all we are to each other, unless we make more of it than that. Unless we commit to stark beginnings and endings. Unless we understand that regret perpetuates the dissected stare, the bloodied guts-revealed loss of what might have been which is the city of Buffalo. Where only a glimpse is required for a father and son to bond, to conspire, to complete life.

Our natural disasters merit guffaws. No hurricanes, no oil to spew, just perpetual and powerful Falls. No Superbowl wins, ever, before they will inevitably move to another town more celebrated. More besieged by worse disasters. Ours are merely relentless. And of our very own making, if you'd like to have some excuse to pass us by.

But this novel makes of Buffalo what it truly is. A life. Worth living in and by and through. Stark. But not Carol-Oates stark. These are lives moving up, the way you feel when facing the Falls.

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A ghost story, translated from reality

2010-05-25T11:53:00.000-04:00

(the last ghost story I posted was translated from Chinese. This one's translated from that thing which words can't approach, no matter what your ridiculous feelings about the "truth," a vacant abstraction if ever there was one)

Dad is walking around like a ghost now. He’s a little lost without his wife to complain at. And she too keeps thinking he’s still alive, the same person. They’ve been dead to one another for a long time now. I had to separate them. They were getting on each other’s nerves.

I’m a ghost myself. I’ve died lots and lots of times, and I’ve been reborn a few times too, but I don’t think the score is even. By my count, I’m still dead.

It took a while for me to realize that I’m a ghost. We all resist. We’d like to think that we’re still alive, just like my Dad would like to think that he can still drive. Actually, he gets downright ornery on the topic. It would be as if you were trying to shove me into a coffin and put me into the ground and I was shouting at you that I’m still alive. If you can imagine that, you can imagine levels of rage you have never displayed in your actual life.

That’s pretty much the way a ghost is born. It’s not the killing, it’s the resistance, and so I’m not feeling guilty here. I’m no murderer – I just divert attention, trying to come up with a few new things to put into Dad’s field of thought and vision so that he forgets the car.

I took him to his summer house, the one Mom loves, but I made her choose between having him around, which just makes her sick, or letting go of the house. She still won’t stop decorating it, but I think she’s not planning to live here anymore. But it seems important to her that the real thing looks good in her mind.

She still worries about me too, which is pretty silly considering that I’m sitting in a nice chair in a cool summer house, looking out over a calm lake in perfect summer weather. Birds are twittering. Mom worries that I’m giving up my life to take care of Dad, which I sort of am, but then, you know, how do I tell her I’m already in heaven? She might take it the wrong way, or get jealous. The sweet little lies get trickier all the time.

It’s only a car, Dad. I’m only taking away your ability to hurt yourself or others. But for all of us now, the car has become a symbol. Just like those people who think they have the solution for our economic woes by re-denominating the dollar in gold. They don’t seem to realize that gold has only symbolic value. There’s nothing more real about its value than there is about the equation between the automobile and freedom. Well, except that in our minds there is a strictly limited quantity of gold. I read somewhere that all the gold in the world would fill a brick only 80 feet by 80 feet. Amazing!! Can you imagine!! But there’s always more to be found.

Well, we can’t all keep driving cars, and that’s for sure. There’s only a limited quantity of oil under our feet, and the environment can only stand a certain amount of extra carbon. But damn if any of us want to give up our cars any more than Dad does.

Sometimes I wonder if we’ve all already become ghosts, you know, kind of like those tall buildings which get demolished by an explosive charge. For just a moment afterward, they still look intact. And then they fall to dust. Just like Oliver Wendell Holmes’ incredible One Horse Shay. One minute it’s there, and then poof, it was made so perfectly and designed so well that every single piece of it wears out at precisely the same instant. Makes a good metaphor for life, don’t you think?

We’d like to think that someone could plan it that way. You know, someone so brilliant that he could get all those super patriotic operatives to agree that killing their own compatriots was the only way to save them. Some God-like figure who might just be the devil in disguise, but after all God is looking out for the greater good, always willing to sacrifice a few Jobs along the way.

What if it’s all just dumb luck? What if all symbols are empty unless we invest them with something? What if ghosts are no more or less real than the people all around you? Most of them you treat as though they were ghosts anyhow, don’t you? Brother, can you spare a dime?

Ghosts don’t like to be exposed. Like that one time when I was born again, I wasn’t all that happy about it at first. No, it wasn’t one of those symbolic religious things. I’m not that kind of emotional, as you can tell. I was living aboard my old wooden sailboat, and some random chunk of ice woke me up. It sounded like it was going to crush the hull. I couldn’t’ get back to sleep after I rescued my hull, and so I started writing.

Just a few weeks ago, I gave the boat away. I used to love sitting down below each Spring, remembering sailing adventures from my past, stirred by the smells, of salt, for instance, which lingered long after the boat was moved to the fresh water of the Great Lakes.

I must be wooden myself, devoid of human feeling, because it wasn’t all that hard to let go of the boat in the end. Sure, I’d put it off for years, thinking that I might regret it; that I might finally have a chance to fit out that interior I’d dreamed of like the glossy pictures in a craftsman’s magazine. But who was I kidding? I wasn’t born with that sort of skill.

Mom and Dad are having a harder time letting go. Still decorating, still imagining future summers with the grandkids. Some shells are harder to let go of than others.

I Am Hamlet

2010-05-21T08:09:00.000-04:00

(Meant to stand in for a review of I Am Hamlet, presented on stage at the Subversive Theatre Collective, as Adapted and Directed by Joe Siracusa and performed by Brian Morey)

We all are, Hamlet, seeking that point of intention which dictates the act. Tricking it out. Glancing at audience to see its reaction, play within, some truth to quiet raging unknowns. The act so well rehearsed by the time it's committed; to memory, to reality, that the intention has long since receded beneath what are nearly autonomous motions and their representation emotionally. The play's the thing. The actor is beside himself, drawn along by certain knowledge of what comes next, that thing we lack, our dreams projected.

If there is a flaw to this production of Shakespeare; this spin, perhaps, off Shakespeare, but really, who can know his intentions - but if there is a flaw, it is that the actor, even more than the words, exceeds his audience. The energy required to pay attention, to follow the words, is exceeded by the energy required even to believe that this is a one man show. That there aren't at least several persons beneath the rapid fire costume transformations, just for instance. I stared mightily trying to decide if Brian Morey was lip syncing to some professionally pre-recorded soundtrack.

He might have been. This is not just Shakespeare brought up to date, it is Shakespeare transcending date and time and place. This actor is a rock star, a female rock star, a male rock star, Avatar floating above the stage (the fog machine failed I later found out, as did the microphone for proof that there was no trick and still intention prevailed, which is beyond metaphorical requirements for acted out reality, please!) and the play within the play is film is television, is playing in my own head, the sole member, yet again, of an audience adverted, apparently, by the Buffalo News to stay away, on pain of what? Some realization of your mortality? I am growing, well, weary of presentations meant for crowds and then finding myself alone.

During intermission I was as rube from county (my actual role in life) among the theater hags, so called by themselves, who were the only other witnesses to this remarkable show this summery night. They were recalling costume and lighting and sound and stage malfunctions in their own storied pasts. I was focussed on my own mortality, staged malfunction recently so many times in Emergency Departments, in dealing with aging parents and romantically spurned children whose future cannot be rehearsed, whose future remains mystery, all futures weighing now like pendulous question marks, anon.

These skulls on stage were not the prompt to my own pounding heart, which seems to have a mind of its own these days, acting out, stealing from me my own mind's ability to pay attention, and so the words, enunciated almost beyond perfection as if there were some better way to recite Hamlet, and it turns out that there actually is, the words had to wash over me, and I had to let them, they were that far beyond my grasp.

How many times have I seen Hamlet, have I read it? Not even once, it would seem, or am I rescued by failing memory, failing to internalize the plot, the point, the theme, it's all new to me every time as Dad said last Thanksgiving when around the table we were sharing "the new" and he can't remember the conversation less than a minute previous. But I guess he still has a sense of humor.

This then is my life, and I am truly Hamlet, and if I must endure one more turn as audience to myself there it will end. There will be an end to it. I will have become the narrative, without sense or sensibility. Acted out by others, even though they might call me by some name I once did inhabit. Poor Rick, I am Hamlet. You would be too if you were to dare genuine theater. I dare you, voice echoing in an ever empty skull.

Magical Thinking

2010-05-19T16:29:00.000-04:00

The other day while driving my car some unconscionable distance, I was listening to NPR talking about the volume of oil escaping from that deep sea fiasco in the Gulf. It was somehow encouraging to hear that there are entire ecosystems which handle the natural leakage of oil from the ocean floor.

Then today I find that they are running out of clever tricks, and that it might be months, and that each week will be like another Exxon Valdiz cracking open its hull. This is not encouraging. Our little pinprick down a bit too deep could clearly overwhelm a lot of ecosystems. I can only hope the contrarians on global warming will take note.

I've recently discovered a slew of Chinese movies whose scope is blockbuster huge. These rehearse the span of Chinese narrative history. I've seen a few more rehearsing Western narratives. There's always lots of blood. Lots of miraculous fighting even after the fatal blow. I'm not really sure why that particular fiction captivates audiences, as though a well trained and determined fighter can keep on keeping on after his blood is drained..

The Earth is clearly bleeding. This wound could be fatal, though not, of course, for the living Earth. It could be fatal for us, Earth's conscious denizens. We are those for whom the oil has been meant. And we have perched ourselves precariously on oil's pinnacle with scant time to climb down before the structure beneath us crumbles.

Yes, I did say that. The oil is meant for us. And we have gone a click too far. It is long past trivial to observe that the Earth is a living organism. The balance of systems is far far more complex than that in any one identifiable organism on her surface (by which I mean to include the shallows of our oceans, by which I mean their depths). This is clear enough, since those systems include and incorporate every single individual subsystem.

We'd thought until now that the earth as a whole was rather simpler than us. That it was the ground for our complex species; we the capstone of evolution, conscious creatures of the Earth. We still secretly did and do believe that we are at the very center of the cosmos, defined in terms of the complexity of our nervous system. The elaboration of our understandings.

We are none of that. Our bodies, rather, are but the ground for dialogic thought, and this in turn, through writing, is what is meant by consciousness. We had none before we got civilized. Period.

The earth has no vocal apparatus. No means to store communications. Well, apart from us. We are the voice of the earth, and not of our individual selves, nor certainly of our "culture." Whatever complexity we represent is embedded, not separated, from the ecosystems of the entire planet. We cannot be abstracted, no matter how much we exalt that particular sense of "meaning." Earth's oil was meant for us in precisely the same manner that anything is meant. It's not about intention.

It is easy now to imagine the end. The oil will gush for months. The price impact of peak oil will hit the globe, very much as though we'd reached that magic tipping point. Cars will suddenly look absurd, and the failure of the economy, writ large, will engender anger far far beyond what folks feel now, directing it willy nilly against this or that object.

Our monocultural food basket will collapse in an instant, from some virus, from lack of oil inputs, by analog to oil blowout prevention failure. There will surely be a systemic collapse of the flimsy scaffolding of law. Nature will sort this out. We won't. We will have gone beyond ourselves, and God help us.

Against the oil leakage, we will eventually deploy all remaining resources. But it will be too late.

Not too late for nature's crops. Not too late for the Earth. But far too late for the current manner of our human organization, an economy built on an extravagant narrative of absurdist religious hope and fervor and insanity.

There will be those who Praise the Lord as he fulfills his promised destiny. I won't be among them. Our complicity in our demise will have been too obvious. We have crawled into our narrative. We are gone insane.

The massive influence of the Christian narrative is a piece of evidence that we remain willfully blind to. We might take it as evidence of Divinity, as how else to explain its clear impact on our human history and now, very recently, on the fate of the very Earth. But it would be wiser to take it as a grand example - the grandest example - of how narrative forms as much as it describes reality. Imagine others. Please!

There are alternatives, you know. It won't be luck that stops the gushing. It will be deliberate acts of care, of doctoring, of re-established equilibrium. It will be our stepping back from this Devil's brink (oh, why must I capitalize that Name?) where sweets and fats and oversalting trump our bodies' sense of safety. We must not slaughter the fatted Earth. Her prodigal Son has not returned. We have fallen.

Now hey, how is it we are so certain the the Earth herself is not in dialogic communion with other organismic planets, huh? Why is our personal narrative so compelling? Who, indeed, do we think we are? If the Earth were conscious, it would be just barely; a babe among babes whose language is only started and almost certainly not yet written.

Or are we that pathetic beginning, despite how impressed we are with our shiny toys and trinkets.

I remember changing my daughters' diapers while having a conversation with them. Assuming consciousness includes some function to control the bowels, it's not enough simply to be able to speak. It's not even enough to be able to read and write. Just now I had to deal again with Dad, who can deploy reason well enough in defense of his angry position that he can still drive a car, but then can't remember the position he's already agreed to after another minute goes by. His anger no longer belongs to him. It's ours, his family's, and utterly dependent on our manner of presentation.

Tonight I will go to a book signing for a book I feel that I must read. It details the demise of Eliot Spitzer who, the book's author claims, might have made some significant difference in the fate this great Empire State now suffers. Another sad instance of the fallacy that mind has dominion over flesh. Spitzer's is, by all accounts, one of the finest minds among the current stock of politicians. And that brilliance is now for naught, just as our most brilliant human contrivances are as naught against the ever so much more powerful juggernaut of our lowest common denominator desires. Rendered up by the magic of capitalist economics to an utter dependence on oil.

We will drive, dammit, and we will eat red meat and we will be angry at any deprivation thereof. If it is so hard to take Dad's car from him, just imagine how tough it will be for the rest of the planet, which still believes that it can hoist itself with the cleverness of its engineered narrative.

Screw that! It is fully NOT necessary that our lust for oil trump every bit of common sense. But the way in which we organize our economy would have to change. As it is, the prizes flow to he or to that organization which best harnesses the lowest part of each of us. These tea baggers are onto something, but they're not in on the joke. They seem to think that decency at the dinner table is the same as decency in the only sense that matters. The cosmic sense.

We may feel virtuous because of our polite behaviors and politically correct actions as we sail our yachts, drive leather upholstered disposable cars, set tables groaning with ethnic delicacies from around the world, and speak of edgy arts. But we are not only no better, we are no different from the pornographer who preys by means of lust. We may shutter our minds, but it's not our minds which lead us.

I am sick to death of people invoking religious or health-based objections to this or that food on offer to them as a guest. I will honor only politically motivated requests, and those only if I may be educated as to the offensive content of what I have on offer. It is not my body's purity which must be defended. Nor is it the precious sensibility of some animal which had to be slaughtered. It is the planet, and our place on it.

Parents who create perfect and perfectly beautiful minds for admission to Yale and Harvard have in fact created analogs of sex slaves; made beautiful by being trained to ape actual thought and adult creation. This is easily enough proven by the choices the graduates of these places largely make for high profile careers and lifestyles and private jets and hauty cuisine. These are, in essence, childish choices. No different from dolled up sex slaves to depraved adult lusts. Good work, helicopter parents! You have created perfect apes of humanity, brilliant in all ways but those which count. Our lust is always for youth, and yet we discount those who act as we know our priests should. They are merely normal, and the priests depraved. But each of us is trained in stimulus response to candy on offer to the babe within us.

What if, instead of the idiotic conception of the human mind as something whose power can be measured, we were to consider it like a tuning fork, in harmony with the entire cosmos. What if the range from hideous to beautiful were considered a range of gifts, and the measure of the character of their properly named embodiment was the distance between the gift and the congruence of its usage with the health of the entire planet. What if intelligence is analog to beauty, and what if all of this is culturally relative.

Would we ever learn to see as truly hideous the winners who indulge only themselves at the expense of everyone on the planet less fortunate? Would we ever learn to see the luscious bodies on display as the monstrous embodiments of decay they really are? Doubtful. But, you know, that was the narrative which got us to this point. That was the burden of Christ's story. It is not our cleverness which can harmonize with the natural impulses of our planet.

Well, this is tiresome. My voice gets weird when I try to work these things out. I would far rather ride my Walmart (guilty!!) bicycle around town on such a sunny day, and marvel at this beautiful but empty city, decked out in springtime glory, waiting for the fall. Wheeee!!!! (plus, I stopped along the way to get my locally roasted Sumatra, which is almost too wonderful to embody in words).

Power, Control, Metaphors and I'm Beat

2010-05-16T10:10:00.000-04:00

President Obama came to town the other day. I wanted to mount my bicycle and ride over to check out the crowds, but instead I learned that Mom would be out for the afternoon, giving me my chance to do the family's bidding and get Dad's car keys from him. I'd taken him to the doctor on Monday, after having gone driving with him several days before, and the verdict was clear.

This was not fun. It felt about like murdering someone you love, who is using every single non-violent tactic in the book to get you to stop. We drew a truce. He gave me the keys just to get me out of his face. I had the legitimate threat to have his license revoked to make me unanswerable. It wasn't exactly a fair fight.

Now I've just returned from a trip to Albany where I hope that I was helpful to a fellow traveller in the game of divorce your feelings. Home again, I notice that the Preakness stakes are about to run, and having somehow gotten snared by the Kentucky Derby, I'm snared again, rooting, of course, for the winning horse and jockey combination; hoping for the odds-defying triple crown. Not to be.

I read of a fellow China watcher, who also watches the blogging and freedom of speech scene in China, who observes that the nature of Chinese blogging is the same as blogging all over. Lots of self-disclosure, blah blah blah.

Of course, I engage in lots of self-disclosure, and it would seem I'm just another Lonely Girl, wanting people to pay attention to my life. But, of course, I prefer to think that I'm developing yet another form of performance art, where the random happenstance of my every day is disclosed as some sort of context for the events of the day on the larger stage which I feel compelled to write about. I say compelled, because, honest, I wouldn't be writing if it weren't that I feel that I have something of some importance to say.

That doesn't mean that I'm saying it here and now and that there's something wrong with you if you don't see it. It means that I feel the need to practice, to work it out, to learn how to write, and, I suppose, to develop what I hear gets called a "voice" to my writing. I'm not sure it's going too well.

It's my sense that "self-disclosure" might lend a kind of credence to what I'm writing about. It tells both why I'm paying attention to what I pay attention to, and relates myself as microcosm to the larger scene. My feelings, after all, count toward my slant on the events on the large stage, and I figure that if I disclose those feelings, and in particular how they might relate to what's going on in my life, then what I write about will be less contrived and abstract and ideological.

Needless to say, I'm not a great believer in logical "truth", truth in any kind of abstract, nor in understanding as an even possible outcome of argument or study or dialog or discussion. I'm disturbed by the certainty which people seem to lead by, as they enter into arguments, take positions. It seems clear enough that there is almost never any grounds for certainty on ideological or scientific or depth of preparation grounds.

There might be, however, grounds for certainty on various emotional grounds. I'm reasonably certain, for instance, that we should stop raping the earth. I'm certain that I would prefer that there weren't so many miserable people on the Earth, and I'm pretty certain that the lack of imagination among those of us with the power of choice have a lot to do - at the very least by our omissions - with the plight of so much of humanity.

The means for amelioration are very very debatable, and I'm always amazed at the certainty displayed by so many people about what means are best. Especially in the face of what is clearly the randomness at the root of most historical sequences.

So, it seems clear to me that my Dad need not attach so much significance to his ability to drive a car. It is clear to me that if he were still reasonable, he would be able to stand beside himself, as it were, and agree that it's just not a good idea. He would do that if he were blind. But in this case, it's his cognitive abilities which are lacking. Plus some real deficits in what might be called reaction time. There is some horrific Catch-22 at work here. He hasn't the sense to discern the irrationality of his demands.

For Europeans and Americans north of the equator, and increasingly for people everywhere, to own a car means to be a free agent. There is no way that the Earth can support this collective compulsion toward such an extreme manifestation of such personal freedom, but each of us who has it seems loathe, ever, to give it up. The very economy is organized to make it seem as though our vehicular freedom not only makes economic sense, but is even economic necessity. You can't even get to the first square of making a living without one.

So, in that sense, we are, as a people, as irrational - as embedded in our own personal Catch-22 - as is my Dad. He isn't 'with it' enough to understand why he must not drive. He only knows that something very important is being taken away from him. He also knows that he's a good driver. In terms of body memory, that remains true. But he can't find the right pedals if he thinks about it. Only if he doesn't.

Now, I know you think I'm going to attempt some kind of environmentalist case about how each of our cars must be prised from us in the same way that Dad's was from him. But I'm not. I wouldn't give that enterprise a snowball's chance in hell.

No, what interests me now is how certain we all are that the Chinese, for instance, are just simply dead wrong in their censorship of what we call "free speech." We are certain that such censorship will doom their form of capitalism, just as we labor to bring them fully into the Western regime of intellectual property protections. They not only censor free speech, but they tacitly encourage theft of intellectual property, in the form of industrial knock offs, but most prominently, in the form of software theft. Media theft. General laxity about copyright and copy protection

Perhaps this is just as evil of them as their artificial pegging of their currency to the dollar, instead of letting it float freely according to market forces. I guess that they like to manipulate the directionality and quantity of import/export flows. It all just seems unfair. As though they are able to get for free what the rest of the world must pay for., As though they have inputs to their economic engine which they have not properly earned.

Well, no-one earns their winnings. No one earns the natural resources they are lucky enough to find under their ground. No-one earns their smarts of the social capital they started their schooling with.

Just today, I learned from the radio, some on this side of some great divide are celebrating this new piece of stealth software which is being deployed by hand to hand combat in Iran against the totalitarian regime which our American narrative insists that they have. I'm certain that theirs is a god-awful regime, but I'm not entirely sure about how this software achievement should be received.

For a long while, there have been ways to skirt around firewalls and censors by going through anonymizing proxy sites, and by using encryption. But this product offers to go a few steps further, so that you don't even have to go so far as to disclose your intentions in the first place by heading over to that wrong part of the Internet town.

Since it can't be downloaded, for obvious reasons having to do with the censors spoofing or infiltrating the download site - in the target country, the censors presumably have privileged access - the idea is to distribute this software hand to hand from trusted person to trusted person. They were very public about making Iran 'target regime number one.' They were coy about which country would be number two, but only a fool wouldn't bet on China. (Although you can easily see why naming China as a part of any 'axis of evil' would get a little dicey really quickly, since, well, they hold all that debt of ours)

OK, so even apart from the liklihood that dissident Iranians (or Chinese, for that matter) will actually trust that this software is somehow pure, coming as it does from the U.S. of A. Hell, even apart from the liklihood of you or I trusting that it hasn't somehow been concocted by our own government's secret services as a stealthy way to infiltrate and co-op the friendly to the U.S. ranks of these targeted countries. I mean, who really knows about the viruses attacking the Afghani opium crop, you know? And even apart from the simplicity with which the target regime could insert their own stealthy code for use in rounding up the usual suspects (that's a hack so trivial, even I could accomplish it)

Even apart from all that, what I want to know is why this kind of software is any different from all the various techniques now out there to aid and abet the criminals among us who would steal digital property by sharing files and keygen cracks and pictures and music and all the rest. It's the use to which the software is put that gets celebrated.

Fact is, of course, that the reason we sell so much more software around here than gets stolen is purely ideological. Well, OK, there might be a little bit of fear of getting caught thrown in, but our narrative about why the Chinese don't speak freely about their government would have it only because they are afraid to do so. Even while we marvel at how fully co-opted the Chinese intelligentsia have become, we seem to think they would speak freely if only they weren't afraid to.

Supposedly, the Chinese self-censor because they are afraid of government sanctioned consequences, and it is this fear which tones the language well on the inside of some kind of shifty and only partially discernible barrier.

But is it fear which keeps us honest, or some kind of true belief in the fundamental validity of intellectual property law? If we win, we want to be able to keep our winnings. If we come out with something first, then we want to be able to lay claim. Even though this approach, like all and every one of us owning a private powered vehicle, will doom us all collectively. We equate intellectual property rights to the chastity of our spouse, the inviolability of our private space and the ownership of our bank accounts. Well unless our stuff is ill gotten, in which case, all bets are off.

Let me ask you. Do you think it's fair that farmers who don't police their land to be sure that no stray patented seeds are taking root should be sued for patent infringment (our courts do)? Do you think that someone surfing for adult pornography should be held accountable when some site slips in child porn which is then discoverable on that hapless lonely person's hard drive? Do you think that users of health insurance should be accountable to understand all the rules before getting sick, on threat of being financially accountable for expenses incurred as ordered by expert health care practitioners (I have stories to tell)?

The Chinese arrange things a little differently is all. I imagine they never did learn anything about the inviolability of private space, and chastity was always more about pledges than romance, and well, as to the bank accounts, until recently, private wealth was never a real possibility.

My guess is that the most dangerous move the Chinese government has ever made was to open the possibility for personal ownership of automobiles. This was as calculated risk, since the automobile has been the engine of vibrant economies the world over. And it would be hard to stop it without stopping the exuberance of the Chinese economic miracle altogether. But the danger of the automobile is that it will embed notions of personal autonomy, the inviolability of personal and private space, and the priority of individual rights and possession over all else. Demands for free speech will follow, right?

It's not, in other words, that the Great Firewall of China won't be able to keep up with the quest for freedom of thought and speech craved by the newly wealthy and emboldened citizenry. Rather, it is that the citizenry will forget about its individual responsibility to labor in concert with the interests of the whole. It would be as though the entire U.S. populations collectively and suddenly decided it would be alright to "steal" digital property. It would be like the futile exercise of trying to get people to stop smoking dope, or before that, to get them to stop drinking alcohol. Not gonna happen.

OK, so I've got to find some way to wind this up. Over here, we are getting all exercised that Google would sneak up on us, Facebook would give away our privacy rights, ignorant that it's all a grudge match against Bill Gates' company, because of what he once did to the leaders of these newer upstart companies. They have tried and tried to brand themselves as something other than the goon-squad of Microsoft's marketing engine, and in the end look rather, well, evil.

But this stuff is trivial and almost meaningless up against what agribusiness does in defense of their patents over genetically modified crops. This is as nothing against the consequences of our mono-culture when the bee population risks collapse, and global starvation is one virus away from a genetically neutered food production regime. The powers of natural evolution have been stopped dead in their tracks by the American Intellectual Property regime, which has ensured that most of the food the world over is dependent on both petroleum and a very very few genetic lines. Not quite as few as were allowed for stem cell research or as get used for cancer research, but you get the idea.

Nature requires diversity in the face of stresses. Especially such global stresses as are being applied by humanity against the entire planet. Intellectual property law now is like Nature rewarding the winners of some evolutionary contest with rights in perpetuity against all possible variants. Sure, the intellectual rights are termed, and I can read my Melville free, but for Monsanto or ADM, they have all the marbles, and are pretty much guaranteed to be able to keep improving their patented varieties of whatever mono-cultural corn is most effectively produced on the back of cheap oil. The term never runs out for so long as there is "innovation" once you have the monopoly. Another Microsoft lesson.

So here I am very nearly favoring Chinese censorship over freedom of speech, for so long as freedom of speech is constrained by copyright and intellectual property law. I do so for the sake of the planet. Of course, only an idiot ever really believed that there is any such thing as free speech. Speech is one of the most dangerous tools at our disposal. Just try talking your Dad out of his car keys. But wait until he's too old to hurt you.

Meanwhile, if they had any sense, good farmers everywhere would do the bidding of the patent holding companies. They would boycott agribusiness altogether, plant biologically diverse crops using proven techniques for combatting pestilent hoards of insects and smaller organic enemies. We would all refuse to purchase any digital product that is copy protected, or protected by any sort of digital rights management. We would disclose our full identity and particulars over the Internet, just like the Chinese make their citizens do. And we would work assiduously within the constraints of powers deployed against us to be sure that we are never ever placed in the position of utter powerlessness to know which actions of our own are consequential and which are not.

I'd say it's a toss up which regime is more dangerous in that regard. As I drive, I must remain ever vigilant of the tricky speed limit signs. As I submit my written work to the academy, I must somehow first use the same tools my professors will use to check for snippets which might, by happenstance or perhaps by some workings of my subconcsious, match those of published authors from whom I will be assumed, by default, of stealing.

Google now will do this for me, and remove from exposure anything I might have seemed to cut and paste. Will they soon learn to discern the idea that was never mine in the first place, and remove my very thoughts? Or will I learn to game their system, submit my writings first to the 'hand me in' engines, change a few phrases until I pass, and then fool the professors into thinking I'm that much smarter than I am. Catch me if you can . . .

Volcanic Ashes

2010-05-12T10:25:00.000-04:00

How shall we then remain composed? When even Ginsberg's Howl would get no play were it written today? Now that those 15 minutes of fame are moving in the direction of equal distribution in some kind of bizarre lockstep against the flow of money magma, which concentrates, ever concentrates at some pinnacle of vertical marketing miracles of patented mono-cultural seed creations, meant to feed the world, cross linked with particular pesticides and fertilizers, it looks a lot like evil.

How render good from ill events? Will the weather be changed by the eruptions? Will there be perpetual winter now to mock our enthusiasms for global warming? Will the jet engines condense the ash to glass on their internal workings and fall to earth? Will all of China run amok in school now, seeking treatment for psychological ills not even recognized in a culture which could use some Prozac nationalism?

My news is so fragmented. There are brilliant YouTubes to have just missed in their true season, which is about a mayfly's lifespan. There are longish emails against the tide of children now, who only twitter and might respond to a composed email months beyond its ripeness. Days seem like months. A moment is eternity.

There is lust conveyed between bored bodies getting off, and only in the mind of some viewer. There are authors abundant, published and republished because they are read because they are published. But the fragmentation is positively tectonic. As though the earth were moving beneath our feet. As though the overheated core was about to spew forever, slick upon our surfaces, waging some kind of war against our presumption of innocence.

Which accidents will we count? Which discount? Which give away for free? There surely can be no meaning when the plates shift, which would have nothing at all to do with our preparation to be disturbed by them. But that we could, remember, wink out in a nod, which is something less than an instant. Because within it there remains an I. Which accident do you prefer? There are so many on offer.

Too Much Complexity?

2010-05-09T12:00:00.000-04:00

OK, so if you read about the oil rig which blew up, you'll find that the operation had as much complexity as the space shuttle. If you read about the stock market's recent wild fluctuations, you'll find that there are interactions among all the computer assisted trading systems which are simply impossible to plumb. If you follow the recent history of the CERN supercollider, you'll find that earnest physicists suggest much simpler experiments to test the limits of control.

The trouble with the CERN fate-testing experiments is that they won't work unless you make an earnest effort actually to do the underlying measurement. You can't trick fate. So, the idea is that you build the machine to find out if the Higgs boson really exists, but you insert into the control apparatus a kind of random process like tossing dice - and then if the dice toss comes up that far from random, to some degree similar to the liklihood of all the complex parts of the supercollider working in concert, you don't actually have to make the machine work. You can consider it a message from the lacunae where God is thought to reside, that the experiment will be fruitless. That's what beating the odds in this case would mean.

In other words, you will have made a machine with enough complexity to change the odds of probabilty for something as well understood as the toss of dice. Something trivially simple like that. Everybody knows that you can't change the odds of random events, but this model suggests that this is exactly what the supercollider itself is attempting to do. The limits of control are in collision with the limits of control.

This, of course, is "meant" to be something only God can do. It's what's meant by the word miracle.

Now any given miracle can be chalked up as that natural and mathematically inevitable fluctuation in random stuff. A coin which always came up heads then tails then heads then tails, while it wouldn't change the odds, would be just as bizarre as one which came up heads 100 times in a row. Neither one could be called a "fair" coin.

But somebody will win the lottery, even though the odds of that particular someone winning are astronomically against him. That's what's meant by beating the odds. Winning. It's only a miracle if some desperate emotion is involved. Well, desperate emotions are in plentiful supply, so I can easily imagine that almost every beating of the odds feels like miracle or catastrophe to someone. I guess it gets to be a miracle if it seems connected to some seeming act of extreme wanting which, if your think about it, is a funny thing to think of as an act.

As you know, I just finished reading this quite wonderful book about a smart fellow who came to the rational conclusion that life is better lived without such an absurd concept as God. He presents plenty of evidence, or rather, he represents that he's seen plenty of evidence, that there is no evidence that prayer "works" or that religious people act according to any higher moral standard than the rest of us. And then he represents plenty of evidence that religious organizations seem capable of behaviors, in defense of themselves, even more horrific when you examine them, than the faults by omission of such mega-corporations as BP Oil, or Toyota, or AIG, or take your pick.

Part of what makes these behaviors horrific is of course that these religious organizations purport to represent Jesus, or perhaps Mohammed, and that the person in whose Name they act would never condone or execute the behaviors done in defense of the institution created in His name. Calculations apparently get made about the greatest good to the greatest number, and, well, the little guy is just plain screwed. Um, literally. And, globally, the church behaves no better, and perhaps worse, than the globo-cap predators of our enthusiasms.

Recently, I was asked to exercise my privilege as a graduate of Yale College, to vote for one of three candidates on a slate of proposed board members, some of whom get chosen by alumni. I'm vaguely proud of this process, since unlike so many college or other boards, it seems to give the little guy - me - a say in the governance of the Institution which anointed me.

Well, except that of course this is a ridiculous proposition, since the number of intellectual lefties among the minor hoard of graduates would likely fit into a school auditorium. If you aren't an extravagantly successful inventor, scientist, capitalist, author, professor, runner of institutions, then Yale has failed you famously. Or perhaps there's something wrong with your psyche. Something you could deploy a pill against.

One of the candidates seemed like a superman inventor. Apparently just popping with ideas about how to cure disease, but also popping with lots of money from his endeavors. Wouldn't you just love to know how to cure all your genetic deficiencies? We already do the silicone implant nose-job stuff, but now you can nurse hopes to cure such things as Turettes, or well, you just have to imagine that the sky's the limit, right?

Or are deficiencies sometimes not exactly deficiencies? We lefties once heaped venom at that Harvard dude, Herrnstein, who studied IQ (the Bell Curve) and had the temerity to suggest that blacks were genetically deficient in that measure compared to whites (he's dead now, so we can talk about him). But we should be careful about our battles. What if it turned out that the genome really is divergent according to geographic dispersals, and that humanity doesn't consist in genetic capacity? I mean, what if there's a whole range of genotypes which could qualify for full humanity, but some were stupider than others by some measure?

Why should this be any more shocking than that white blondes show up more often on nudie sites? (Do they? I may be making an unwarranted assumption). Or that there are more fast runners who are black? (are there?)?

I just re-met this former student of mine who is "profoundly dyslexic." I was gratified to hear him describe this "defect" as an asset when it comes to certain ways of understanding. I've worked at a school for dyslexics, and conducted a fair amount of reading and research on the topic (although you couldn't call any of it really organized), and had concocted my own sense that what he told me might be true. That there is a different and largely non-analytical way to see things, for which facility with the logical arrangements of the written language might get in the way.

The example used by this fellow was from his current work as the "incentives director" at a large public school in the Bronx. Coming into the school, he questioned the wisdom of using expulsion as a punishment for kids who misbehaved. Especially when what was wanted was inclusion. So, he implements and supervises a system of positive feedback rewards for good behaviors, which give the kids the ability to participate in a periodic hip-hop in-school rave. I guess no-one wants to be left out.

Of course, this sort of behaviorism is what got old Herrnstein in so much trouble. It fairly (or unfairly?) formed the political battle lines at Harvard, reverberating throughout the land, between the biological/evolutionary determinists and the liberals.

OK, I know I'm jumping all around here. I always do! And I'm laboring to restrain myself about what's up with cellular internet, computer operating systems, and a few more things which all seem connected in my random mind. But getting back to where I started - too much complexity, ha! - a lot of time it does seem as though there is some basic opposition between a way to understand things which is based on logical scaffolding, and a different way which is based on a matrix of interconnections, and never mind the logic.

When things get too complex, sometimes it's really hard not to imagine clever minds feverishly at work looking for ways to take advantage. You know, the stock market when it spiked downward gave tremendous opportunity to anyone who would have known about it ahead of time to buy valuable stock at bargain basement prices. Well, actually, at a whole lot less than bargain basement.

Lots of people just can't suspend the temptation, say, if no-one's looking and something is there for the taking. In the midst of complexity, if you happen to find a weak spot where flicking a lever might just have a massive outsized impact, why wouldn't you do it just to take advantage? So sometimes it might not be about clever minds so much as about perfect positioning. Right place, right time, lucky.

OK, so it's so windy right at the moment that my apartment is shaking. No, I'm not just imagining this. It really does shake when it gets really windy. It's kind of unnerving, but it also does serve to remind me about the limits of control. The weather is a very complex matter, although one now where lots of us are worried about human impacts; a kind of wilding of the weather caused, paradoxically enough, by our trying too hard to make our own lives more predictable, comfortable, and, well, civilized. Except, of course, for the humans whose lives have been immiserated in that effort though no deficiency in themselves other than the accident of birthplace, skincolor, intelligence perhaps, or gender.

The trouble with complexity, when it's human engineered, seems to be that it allows way too much temptation for someone with the right kind of knowledge and position to take way too much advantage. Plus, in the case of the Large Hadron supercollider, for instance, if only a few people actually do understand both how to construct the device, if it can possbly work, and how to guarantee random to the extent that the dice-throw cheapening device inserted into its control mechanism is really random, then for the rest of us it's still all a confidence game.

We'd have to trust the integrity of those in on the design. We might say that the dice inserted weren't really fair dice, or that the experiment wasn't really designed actually to work, corners being cut, and so forth. That if it were really designed to work, the only proof could be its working, just as the only proof for fair dice would be to try them lots and lots of times outside of their insertion into the running of the massively complex apparatus into whose control stream they've been inserted. But the point of insertion is exactly what's meant by sleight of hand. How could one know? What would be the various motives?

We'll never ever know. Except that the results of, say, our economy make it look as though the game is rigged. The winners keep on winning and the losers, well, they're out of luck.

One thing which is perfectly knowable is that we could deploy our human efforts in different ways than is now being accomplished. We don't have to give so much power to accidental advantages of place, genetics, upbringing, whatever. Those things should dissipate once spent, and not feed back on themselves like some kind of nuclear chain reaction. What gets fed back should be such things as love, warmth, protection.

What does, in fact, get fed back now by the taking advantage of what one has been lucky enough to come by is more ability to take more advantage. Power, by any other name. And there seems to be no limit to the desire of human beings to concentrate that in the face of mortality. No limit at all.

But the interesting thing is that the powerful are never the ones actually doing the work. They don't design the incredibly complex oil rigs to suck the oil out from beneath a mile of ocean and then another seven miles beneath that. They don't design the incredibly complex trading and odds-calculating instruments which get deployed in the trading of our various futures. They just call the shots and calculate the odds from a position where things like the weather and normal odds are, for practical purposes, non-existent. These are not bets at all. Just simply calculations, where winning is utterly assured. If you're calling shots, you're already a winner.

Well, until complexity overwhelms even the bank, and the whole complicated construct comes crashing down, or blowing up, and then the guy calling the shots is suddenly aware of the things which can't be predicted. Sometimes the whole economy melts down. Sometimes the well blows. Sometimes things go wrong, even though they've been done smoothly a thousand times before.

Actually, in fact, that's the only thing that's really certain. If one well is going to blow, according to reasonable and calculable odds, after the point when a few thousand have been drilled, but if only one of them blowing is required to wreck the whole game, then is it morally acceptable to keep drilling?

Would you play Russian roulette? What if there were 1000 chambers and the reward was $1 million bucks? What if the show were put on TV? How many times would it be fair to play it? Certainly not a thousand times! After a certain point, it is near certainty that someone is going to have his head blown off!

How about if the family were to get the million even if his head gets blown off? Then it's all win/win, right? No losers except for the guy who's no longer there. Who was, if he was sane, willing to lose in the first place. Now the trouble is that you'd have to set up a lottery to determine who gets to play, since rationally just about everyone on the planet would want to play against those odds. Imagine the insurance policies, and the money that could be made premised on the general public's idiocy when it comes to basic math.

Something about the picture is morally repugnant, no? But the thing is that this is pretty much how we do organize our economy. The real winners are the ones who have the savvy to set up the insurance funds. The ones who get the math. The ones who call the, um, shots.

From this perspective, things don't look so much like conspiracy plots to immiserate people, or peoples. Corpoprate titans start to look a lot like priests. Sure there are some pedarists, but the really guilty parties are the ones who protect the institution at the expense of the victims. And their number is legion.

No, wait, our number is legion (numbers are?). The victims. Why, indeed, do we give all these priests that much power?

Next time, I promise, I'll talk me about Operating Systems. How the big mega corporations have finally figured out that there is no real distinction between hardware and software. That people just want the machine to work seamlessly and they don't really care what goes on inside it to make it so. That making it seamless is easier, a la Apple, if you control the whole design. That these big corporate honchos are getting tired of having Microsoft bossism control all their shots. That the famous WebOS from Palm can make the basis for a killer iPad competitor, HP branded, which contains nothing from Microsoft. That it's all about the cloud and getting 4G access to it from anywhere. Which is two or three orders of magnitude more bandwidth than we get now. Which is a lot. So, TV and video conferencing from anywhere and everywhere on anything. Which is a whole lot more powerful than what happened back in '89 on Tiananmen square, powered by nascent cellphones and, shades of Model T, faxes (????!!!!).

Talk about truth to power! How are the Chinese going to firewall point to point realtime screen connections? And how are they going to power their economy without them?

Wouldn't it be really cool if all the burgeoning complexity of our world, gifted us by the accident of oil, was tending toward the stunning and spectacular simplicity of individual people making informed judgement about other individual people so that they could decide who and what to trust? If losing a job or getting a speeding ticket or being fired for your political beliefs might cost you only a chance at winning some lottery, but were not accompanied by the raw terror of wrecking your day, your year, your life?

Each of us does depend on the stunning complexity of the natural order. What if we were to put human barriers in the way of replacing that complexity with the ordered complexity which springs from the abstract human mind; of the sort which is, after all, guaranteed to fail, periodically. Nature makes use of failure according to the marvelous processes of evolution. Humanity, it now seems, wants to ensure failure by building dependence on a kind of logical complexity into as much as we can about as much of our lives as we can extend it to. This is lunacy. This can only provide a guarantee of an unhappy end.

Buffalo Bloodline

2010-05-04T15:27:00.000-04:00

Although I'm not settled enough to be a subscriber, sometimes I think the Buffalo News is written exclusively for me. The other day, I saw a notice for the Boom Day ball drop. I rode my bicycle along the breakwater which goes under the Peace Bridge where I was pretty much the only one to watch the event. I'd expected at least a small crowd. What people had come were all dignitaries on the Fireboat, but I still felt the hosing was all for me!

WHAT A HOSER, EH?

Then yesterday, I decided to see how hard it would be to bike down to the Small Boat Harbor, since the News had indicated that one of its new draws is a bike path. Along the way, I found that I could ride up to the top of a parking ramp alongside Pilot field, and watch the ball game as though I'd bought a ticket. Whoops! Coca-Cola field. I find on Wikipedia that I've blown right by Dunn Tire Park. Well, anyhow, it's the home of the Triple-A Bisons. Whoops, I guess that's "International League." I'm so out of touch. Or do even names just go to the highest bidder now?

From my perch on the parking ramp, the stadium looked pretty empty. I had a blast zooming back down the levels, although it sure did look as though the beams were going to clip my head off. You can't ride your bicycle over the Skyway Bridge anymore, so if I wanted to get to the Small Boat Harbor, I was going to have to do the drawbridge thing. It made me a little nervous, since I'd bicycled down there the other day to the General Mills plant, where they make Cheerios, and the young guard told me "you can't be here" even though it looked like a public road. They must have worried I would be secretly counting rats or something.

I'm a little skittish about these things, like the other day when I pulled aside to let the siren by and then the cop figured I must be guilty of something so she followed me off to the side. You know, you try to do the right thing . . . like I eat Cheerios all the time for my high cholesterol. Why don't they want me hanging around?

So I ended up biking down this long and really lonely, and very wide thoroughfare, feeling like I'm in a Hitchcock movie, knowing all the while that this used to be bustling with factories and businesses of all sorts. The one newish and clean looking plant had a realtor's sign on it, which can't be a good, um, sign. I checked on my handly smartphone, and sure enough the place had been closed down upon buyout. I guess this is more evidence of the efficiency of our capital markets.

Eventually, I did get down to the Small Boat Harbor. It's a Sunday, and the weather is fine (although thunder storms had been called for), but there isn't exactly a crowd there.

But there are people in Dug's Dive, and there is a bike path. It's still early. I'd learned from the News that the Harbor had been opened two weeks early because of our fine spring, and I guess the boats were still on their way in:

You know, it's actually a bit tricky to follow the designated bike paths around Buffalo. Some places have signs, and sometimes you can see the faded outline of the bike path on the roadway - washed down from the famously harsh winter - but then sometimes it just seems to end, and you find yourself on a road where no-one else seems to have ever thought of biking.

The same thing happened in reverse when I biked past the Small Boat Harbor. This time there was a brand new asphalt bike path, which still has yet to be completed and doesn't have it's painted striping yet. I followed it along, past the smoking fishermen - I think that might be a reason to escape to such places; you can smoke in public. Well, it would be public if anyone else were around.

I ended up at the old headquarters for the long since closed Bethlehem Steel Plant, which looked far worse up close than it does from the highway, although its grass was mown. It is a beautiful structure, and I was struck again how much the old business edifices, striving for a kind of legitimacy, look the same as schools from the era, striving for the same.

I sat there for a while, chatting on my cellphone, feeling very much as though I was still in the Hitchcock film, in some nowhere crossroads, with some catastrophe impending. The building is right next to some offices for the water authority, which did seem to be populated on a Sunday. Since these are Homeland Security protected sites now, I wasn't sure about getting pulled over again. I remember once or twice in Taiwan, innocently taking a picture only to have some guard appear seemingly out of nowhere, becuase I'd managed to take a shot of some infrastruture installation. I think they were paranoid about having targets identified by mainlanders.

Well, that ship has sailed, but still it seemed as though I should keep moving. Heading back along the trail, I couldn't help wondering about the legislative process which created this path, apparently just for me. There was landscaping and new planting, and the bases for what promised to be some nice lighting, although such signs as there were all seemed to indicate "closed after dusk." Government decision-making can be so confusing sometimes.

ROAD TO SOMEWHERE?

See, there's Buffalo rising in the distance. I did notice, on my way out from the Boat Harbor, that there is another paved bike path which would take me down past the Tifft Nature preserve. I almost can't imagine that anyone else would ride this one, but there it was, just for me.

I decided to keep going, heading into South Buffalo. By now, I'd gotten familiar with the expectation that the bike path would end, but I was pretty sure that I could make my way back home along South Park Ave., and that it wouldn't be much longer than the way I'd come. Perhaps less desolate?

But there is a really long stretch of Fuhrman Boulevard where I did actually pass another biker, though he was walking his bike along with fishing gear and looked to be heading to where I was coming from. Another view from another bridge of another way in to Buffalo:

TRACKS WHICH USED TO GO SOMEWHERE?

Anyhow, along I went, catching the flag on the huge South Park high school through someone's back yard. This one doesn't look quite so stately as the Bethlehem Steel offices - it must have come along at some more modern period of efficient production. I used to supervise student teachers in this facility, and let me tell you, there is a kind of martial efficiency going on in there.

Well, further along was an older, more stately school, where the kids had a bit more freedom

Still, you can see the direction of things. Now, a lot of the schools I rode by are special "charter schools" where the thing to do seems to be to find a theme, and move backward along the liberating assumption that all kids would benefit from general education, and maybe try to fit them sooner into whatever it is they're most fit for. The funny thing is that this just seems to leave the ordinary public schools whose purpose still is general education full of those kids who aren't fit for much. Anyhow, I'm sure glad I never had to decide about my fate that early. Otherwise, I'd be stuck in it right now, you know, having a clue about what I'd like to do for the rest of my life.

Well, I have lots more pictures, and thousands upon thousands more words. I really wanted to paste up here the pictures from a recent canoe trip when I saw the other side of all these things from the perspective of the Buffalo River, but paddling a canoe in the city is even stranger than riding a bicycle, and you'd probably get really really bored. Or maybe it's just me?

Anyhow, it's really really hard to see any sort of renaissance amid all this vacant space where things used to get made. I even saw the offices of the massive hydroponic tomato greenhouse complex which was being put up during one canoe trip, and magically disappeared before the next one. I should have been reading the Buffalo News every day, and then I would have known what the heck was going on, you know? The headquarters still looked pretty spiffy. Maybe they sold all that glass to Dubai or Abu Dabi or something. Like they need greenhouses in the desert. Oh.

Well, there it is. My city. It used to be a thriving place, just like I used to be a young man. You have to squint really hard to see a bright future. For the city, I mean. Obviously I won't be getting any younger. You know, we're all doomed by our astrological accidents, like who we chose for parents, what the great roulette wheel in the sky had in store for us, whether we're on this side or that of some border or other.

These are all the accidents of birth. Sometimes they become the accidents of death and dying. Sometimes it's how you look at things. To tell you the truth, when I ride (or paddle) through Buffalo, I see lots of possibility. It's like a blank slate. We could try other things besides letting global capitalism put labor against the wall of too cheap to meter. We could take the oil out of most production processes, and bring the work back home. We could make it really costly to commute out to the lawn-belt, and by mixing it up a little better, make it really safe to live in cities. Modern industrial production doesn't even need to be hazardous or exclusive of kids who might want to learn.

These are choices, which bloodlines are not. Or maybe we really don't care about what got us here anymore. Well, at least the cars did stop to let a few geese across the road. If you squint, you can see the chicks. Peeking out behind the old grain elevators are windmills. It's easier to see possibility in Spring, don't you think?

Yet Another Unreadable Review of a Very Readable Book

2010-05-04T12:17:00.002-04:00

Losing My Religion: How I Lost My Faith Reporting on Religion in America-and Found Unexpected Peace by William Lobdell

My rating: 5 of 5 stars
OK, so I find this really funny: Just yesterday, I was visiting my extremely well-read friend who is just exactly 20 years older than me, and facing not just his mortality, but the fact that he can no longer master things. A cellphone, for instance. Or walking to the library to return a book which friends had so helpfully transported him to borrow. There was some sense of resentment that the return trip, whether by him walking or by the helpmates returning, was never anticipated. Getting old can really make a person cranky, don't I know.

Well, of course, I offered to return the book along my way, since I would be walking right by the library. But, well, you know, I glanced at the book, and decided I might like to read it. Despite the lines of people no doubt more justified in their desire than I am in mine, queued up in orderly fashion as the computer can now arrange.

I wasted no time, and am only now an hour and a half beyond the library's opening, so I don't feel too bad. Nor, for that matter do I regard it as a terrible sin that my friend had once pilfered some hundreds of dollars in library fines proffered him in a part-time job he once held as a college student, when he realized that there was quite literally no accounting for the fines. I guess it weighed enough on him to tell me. I guess my own sin of stealing a read from this book weighs on me that much. So I'm confessing it publicly, dear reader, to you. Yes, I secretly read books about religion. Off the record. Privately.

Anyhow, I was just dying to see how this story would unfold. I was glad to find the author not overly intellectual. He is honest in his telling, and skilled as the celebrated journalist he actually is. I could easily get away with this without any worry about any accounting. Ordinarily a somewhat painfully slow reader, I do find that I can be extraordinarily quick if the read is of merely professional interest. I guess that's the case with this one.

I mean, I've differed from Richard Dawkin's take on religion, suggesting that he throws the baby out with the bathwater, to make an utterly atrocious pun on Jesus. This one disappoints me for mildly different reasons. And those, if you are a careful reader, have already been embodied in what I've written to this point here and now. It seems that baby Jesus has now been placed in some sort of limbo. And it's hard for me to get past the pure coincidence of the book landing in my hands.

Well, it would be if there were any program to my reading at all.

The book ends with a kind of celebration of Howard Stern. I must say that just as the movie "8 Mile" did for me on behalf of the rapper M&M, I may have to take another listen to Howard Stern. I'd rather thought him to be a celebrant of gross and crude, which of course, he is, and, you know, I'm in favor of better taste than that. But there seems to be something about honesty and openness that I'm missing.

Well, until you see what's generally hidden by attempts to distinguish, by rules of civility, the ranks of us radically equal humans, I guess you don't really know what gross is. Which it is the burden of this book to expose. Not just the evil of the Church or churches of whatever denomination, but the evil more generally of the fictions we pose for ourselves. The fictional postures we make of ourselves. The fictional narrative we try to fit ourselves to. Etc.

But, you know, ultimately if playing out a role in public makes me somehow less than good, I'd like to see the gutsy person I'm meant to be. Or rather, yuch, no I wouldn't! A bit of taste is a good thing. I've never cared very much for Howard Stern, but then again I never really considered him very different from lots of priests I've known. They just cloak it better. Sorry.

So yeah, no personal God for certain. But not quite random either. Now, I've gotta go see a Man about a Book. It's the decent thing to do. Plus, I wouldn't want to be accountable for my friend's fines. Oh. I meant I've gotta go see an institution about a book, silly. There's just no accounting for Capitals in English.

Confused? Me too. But I can say this about religion. Get lost! You're in the way of my life, which has always been partly truth and partly fiction. I think the author agrees with me. Maybe.

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Mayday! Mayday! Mayday!

2010-05-03T10:26:00.000-04:00

Illegal border crossings are on my mind today, the day after May Day (OK, now it's the day after the day after). May Day is the international day of celebration for labor. It got its start in the United States, but at some point it made us nervous. We tamed the day and moved it to coincide with the start of school each fall.

I celebrated with a house-busting crowd at Subversive Theatre last night. Funny. There is a ton of parking at this former factory facility, but last night it was over-full. Turns out there was a fashion show of some kind at the same venue. I had to park on the grass.

What a day! I caught the Kentucky Derby. They opened the Small Boat Harbor. Someone planted a carbomb and got Times Square evacuated. Subversive Theatre gets a full house! I learned about Mother Jones, who was, I believe, channeled more than she was acted out. It was as though a ghost was present, as we all sang songs of labor; defiance of the capitalist Man.

I missed the real protest march, some small echo of the big one I heard they had in L.A. But I was there in spirit, asleep on my couch, blacked out somehow from too much excitement the day before, although I can't remember exactly what I'd been doing. Oh yeah! Reading my ghost story. Staying out late afterward to have dinner with a friend.

Then last night my phone rang three times before I figured out that someone really needed to get in touch with me. I didn't recognize the area code. It was my daughter on a borrowed phone, distraught because her own had been stolen. M'aidez papa!

Three dots three dashes and three more dots, the universal call for help at sea. Well, I'm at sea. I told them at the reading, trying to locate the story I was about to read, that I'd translated it some 30 years ago while living aboard my old wooden sailboat. The one I just now gave away. It was my molted cocoon somehow, and I'd thought I'd emerged from it that many years ago, but in fact I am only recently shed of it.

And now I'm stuck in some sort of limbo. No income, no clear sense of where I'll be living come labor day. No sense of any further energy to endure more labor pains for myself aborning. I never could fall back to sleep last night. My heart had taken on a kind of ringing beat. My mind would not let go of the day.

No question for me that the labor movement, proper, must itself now move offshore. These goods and services we pay so little for are created on the backs of workers in some Chinese or Indian sweatshop. We have exported all the misery we once fought so hard against. And now even those on the left seem all too eager to regain control of our borders, as though that will ever work.

The osmotic pressure at our limits goes both ways. Capitalists have always craved desperate workers to put alongside the ones who have become too comfortable. That's what the union movement was all about. Now unions have been rendered not just irrelevant but somehow deserving of the contempt of working folks. It's all very very confusing.

This will be a lazy post I should have posted yesterday, but I was too busy taking a bike ride to check out the city. Stay tuned . . .

Countdown in Cairo - GoodReads review

2010-05-01T11:03:00.003-04:00

Countdown in Cairo by Noel Hynd

My rating: 5 of 5 stars
I have just now finished this third in Noel Hynd's Russian Trilogy. It must be said that I have never read a trilogy so well conceived as such. Each book stands on its own, and yet reading all three lends depth and satisfaction to the whole.

At the beginning of Part II of this volume, Alex, the accidental master spy of the series, remembers how she got her start. A young student alone in Europe, she faced and mastered that most extreme form of self-reliance - away from home in alien surroundings but without even rudimentary experience. She'd had to trust and to judge and to master alien tongues and ways. She might have turned around, but random bits of luck enabled her not to. Others might have ignored them, or mistrusted potentially dangerous offers of help. She's a good reader of the people and signs around her.

What is a spy but someone who must, on pain of instant death, master all the subtle signals the rest of us can safely ignore as random happenings? Nothing is random when you are plotting against powerful people able to deploy armies against you. Everything can become a sign. Everything can have meaning. Nothing is as it seems - it's meant not to be.

And what is a spymaster - a writer of spy novels - if not someone who can convince the reader that his descriptions are trued to the actual goings on among those with decision making power over our own lives? As a Buffalo boy, Hynd almost lost me with his ham handed description of a terrorist border crossing near Buffalo, the impossibility for which would be obvious to anyone who bothered to consult a map. But nothing is as it seems, and I must forgive.

But of course, that minor lapse served mostly to highlight this good author's truest artistry; to get the reader to keep turning the pages, which happened for me all too quickly. The particulars gain your confidence for the larger scheme, and it, in turn, makes you want to know this protagonist's innermost workings. What will she do, how will she feel, why does she do it.

Of course, she doesn't really know. Neither does the author, who also writes to find out. Why would any of us put ourselves in harms way? Alex doesn't exactly buy even her own handlers' motives for deploying her the way that they do. They are automatically included among those she can't entirely trust. She is hardly a blind patriot. She is not a rote order taker.

But all of us are, in fact, in harms way all the time. The real question Alex sets out to answer is the one all of us really would rather not bother with, or have its answer handed to us somehow, stripped of doubt, stripped of ambiguity.

Why wouldn't you put yourself in harm's way, when the alternative is to play victim to life's meaningless impingements. Take the meaningless accidents of fate as they come, and leave meaning to some greater power. Why wouldn't you make something of your life? The same ending will come in any case.

I continue to marvel at how well Noel Hynd foregrounds that most fundamental matter; faith. Faith in oneself, in meaning; for him and for his protagonist apparently, faith in God. Alex finds in herself a capacity for love and for forgiveness, which must be strange to the reader, since she has been wronged and betrayed and has found man all too capable of betrayal of any confidence.

Except that she has read the signs well, and was never disappointed in her certainty that there was in fact meaning to it all. Not meaning as in conclusion, story lines tied up(although Hynd does that masterfully for each book, and especially for the trilogy) some answer revealed. But meaning as in living her own life to its fullest potential, exercising every one of her God-given talents and bits of good fortune in a way, if not to make the world a better place, certainly not to serve only herself; her aggrandizement here on earth.

She is not patient with those who would do otherwise. But she'd rather help them to wake up than to kill them. I'd rather read another of these books than to pick nits about what falls short. Well, I do have interesting thoughts about border crossings near Buffalo. Anyhow, if each of us were to make courageous decisions without mistrusting what we already know to be our morally correct instincts, the world really would be a better place. The pages would keep turning.

Imagine that! Me a fan of spy novels!

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Stupid Economic Theories

2010-04-30T10:15:00.000-04:00

Yesterday, watching the evening news on PBS, I heard this really dim-witted fellow from some misleadingly named organization called something like "numbers-usa" debating the "immigration issue." He made the seemingly obvious claim that since we are short maybe 20 million jobs and that "illegals" now hold 7 million of the jobs that exist, we need to kick them out so that we citizens can reclaim those 7 million jobs. This guy clearly knows numbers only in the way that a flimflam artists does. It's a talent, but one we should watch out for.

Then my otherwise intelligent friend was marveling at the very evident fact that dual income families are now struggling to maintain the standard of living which used to be common when only the men were working. It feels as though there were some kind of conspiracy to dilute the wages of working people. Some kind of OK women, if you want to work, go for it. We'll adjust. Um, yeah, I thought this much was obvious. These two matters are not disconnected. Hello!

The idiocy of the anti-immigrant comment is that this economy is "designed" such that some percentage of the workforce is out of work. That doesn't mean that there is some designer, any more than do the results of natural evolution, no matter what the crazies say. It just means that there is no set number of jobs, such that kicking someone out of his might free it up for you. The issue is systemic. As with food and water and energy, it's usually not the quantity which causes shortages, it's the distribution. The appearance or especially the fear of shortage allows prices to spike. That serves somebody or some class of people that ain't you or me.

A pretty good clue for what's up with immigration is that when you dig, you are as likely to find that it was the right wing which wanted the cheap immigrant labor as it was the liberals who wanted to afford every soul a human chance. Pitting workers against desperate "illegals" does a pretty good job to push the price for labor down. Ditto women.

But these arguments play because we're angry and we seem to need some target for that anger. Someone who doesn't look too familiar in the mirror.

And so some grand artificial debate gets played out over our heads, without our ever having a chance to find where the game is fixed.

Like the healthcare debates; it helps the criminally kleptocratic insurance industry (executives, owners, not workers) when the left side calls for government to just take it over. That energizes the teapartiers, who - probably sensibly- recoil in horror at the notion of civil-service healthcare. So no one imagines what could be accomplished if we were to have some sensible regulation of insurance as we already know it.

Like what if there were severe penalties for not paying legitimate claims? What if there were a time limit to pay, and what if the price for uninsured were required to be identical to that charged the insurance companies? What if the providers were required to get pre-authorization for payment, the client were completely off that hook, and the subsequent negotiations and arguments were required to take place between and among the experts? I think that's been tried around the world, and it works pretty well.

What if, furthermore, the patients weren't somehow taught that it is their right to feel entitled for treatment for whatever sort of "off" they feel. What if drugs were not deployed as a cure for the stresses of poverty or of warfare? What if we didn't all crave endless medical testing against terror at various what-ifs as encouraged by advertisements from the drug companies? What if those ads were made illegal again?

Well, apart form the absurdity of attempting to put the genie of information back into its bottle, there is reason to think that all the decisions shouldn't really be in the hands of the doctors. Sometimes they might be motivated to call for more tests than you yourself would if fully informed. They're fighting the insurance companies right now, and have to make up for their losses somehow. The system seems stacked against us even as the sides seem to be warring against each other. Coke and Pepsi. Microsoft and Google. Democrats and Republicans. They need each other. But even more, they need us to think they are opposed and in competition.

Drug companies seem to spend, naturally enough, the most money on issues which might require constant medical intervention. Viagra and Lipitor and things like Prozac are the perfect drugs, compared to useful things like antibiotics which might be used once in a while and that's it. Where overuse creates more problems than the drug can solve, but also where the excuse is somehow "out there" that it's we who use them too much. Forgetting that it might be our feedlot meat production system which creates many of the problems. That with bacteria, it should never be about eradication, but more about a kind of ecological balance among the organisms always present in our bodies and environments. By and large, "we" do what we're told within the limits of our education, intelligence and information. I know I'm not one to second guess my doctor, unless there's a really good reason to do so.

The distortions get created from and by the very same sort of motivated misinformation that the racist fellow used to cover his actual fear of difference. I'm sure he's even convinced himself that all he really wants are jobs for his fellow Americans. Drug companies don't want us to know everything about what they're selling - they speed up the voices magically when forced to fill us in. They refine and expand the unreadable print.

Government doesn't have to be populated by geniuses to provide the same sort of intervention to the public discourse - the balance to the body politic - that antibiotics might provide to the individual human body gone out of whack.

It serves someone's purpose to suppose that the problem is that the regulators now are not so clever as those they regulate. That the germs are smart; the terrorists are smart, that the bombs we need are smart bombs, that each of us only wants to get for ourselves what the least of us, the Bernie Madoffs, want to get for themselves. And morally, he is the least among us. Not a one of us would do what he did against his fellow Americans even if we had the chance.

I for one don't really imagine that the folks who work for the NSA are at the cutting edge of cybercriminal investigation (I have inside information). I doubt the government actually has the most computing power, and if it does, I doubt it's as cleverly deployed as the stuff arrayed in the private economy to measure my desire. I worry that dullards in government service will become overeager in their enforcement, just like the FBI did under J. Edgar, knowing which direction their promotion would come from.

So, too much power is no good answer. But there ought to be a way to release the creative energies of the private marketplace without allowing the predators, always, the upper hand. There ought to be a way to allow the financial markets to do their thing with the efficiency of money flows without always presenting those geniuses with that much temptation to dip into the flow for themselves. You don't have to be a genius yourself, you just have to get the sense that your work is valued, secure, amply rewarded against its difficulty and risks. Something we no longer really provide to our civil servants.

And another thing! Wouldn't you think the capitalist system would prefer a mobile work force? How about a nice regulation limiting the drag on mobility now guaranteed by regionally limited and company-connected health insurance. It's almost as though "they" want you to remain enchained. Or pitted against the great unwashed masses of "illegals." Vagrants. Homeless. Border crossers.

Come on, let's get a clue. This isn't as difficult as we're making it out to be.

Oil Blowout!

2010-04-29T18:41:00.000-04:00

This will not come across right. You will think I'm some sort of Pollyanna, and who knows, maybe I am. But I hear of the oil slick down toward New Orleans, and I think something along the lines of OK, cool, Mama is finally getting up to dance. She's reminding us who's in charge here. Of course, that's after I run through my feelings of dread at what it is that we've unleashed. What were Oppenheimer's words? "I am become death, the destroyer of worlds."

I have the feeling in the face of this oil blow that I do while sailing and the weather clearly asserts how puny I am. This oil blow terrifies me, even while it thrills me that humans are being shown how small we are. How incapable to contain all contingencies.

I don't really give a whole lot of credibility to the Gaia hypothesis on most levels; that the earth can be considered a unitary living organism. Or in particular, that it/she might be conscious. But then again, the notion of a conscious God is poppycock to me too. Since, for me, what can consciousness mean if not a kind of dialogic awakening, resulting, through language, from multiple minds conspiring. (I won't bore you just now with more Julian Jaynes.)

Sure, I've wondered about a kind of dialog between heaven and earth, but the trouble is that while consciousness is dialogic, language, the substrate for consciousness, requires a lot more than two for the dance to get started. There has to be a whole community.

And if there are other planets alive, well then they are communicating in language which won't be picked up by puny man's technologically based receivers. But surely the Earth is alive It is more than a single organism. It has co-evolved with life, and just as my mind is neither fully responsive nor responsible for everything that befalls it, the Earth reflects us back. It makes no more sense to wonder whether the Earth is dead or alive than it does to wonder whether the me I was a second ago is dead. The earth also, is still becoming, and we shouldn't be so sloppy with our categories.

Which brings me around again to the weather; manifestations of what often gets called fate. The toss of dice beyond anyone's control, except for God's if you want to raise things to that level of abstraction. We can regard this oil blow as a regrettable accident, with no meaning other than what we make of it. But if you follow that chain far enough, there is almost nothing about our existence which can't be traced to accident. At some point its "meaning" comes from outside your puny self.

And so it has suited me to wonder if oil cannot and should not be regarded as a gift from earth to man. Ecologically minded people like me tend to be horrified when we learn the extent to which our current capitalistic and poisonous diet is actually oil based. From the fertilizer to the pumping of water from the ground, to the plowing and transport and refrigerating and drying, there is as much oil as input to our food chain as there is to our transportation industry. And at least as many outflow points, therefore, for greenhouse gaseous emissions.

We're horrified by the warfare, by the money power, by the straight up raping of the earth accomplished for what There Will be Blood demonstrated so clearly must be a game of greed and self-aggrandizement, inevitably to the point of utter desertification of the earth, the self, the soul. Rosebud.

We're horrified by the poisoning of our bodies by the corn sweeteners, the soybean economy, the concentration of energy production into the hooved animals we consume with such lusty gusto. And most of all we're horrified by the immiseration of so many otherwise intact and self-sufficient cultures and peoples beneath the unleashed Halliburton empires of rapacious global capitalism.

But, you know, just as I was taken aback the other day to hear someone voicing a cogent caution about the impact of all this new (only about 100 years) radioactive energy we swim through: The power grid, the radio, the television, the cellphone, the WiFi, WiMax interconnected super-saturated world of communications and power distribution technology for which, as anyone who's grabbed rabbit ears knows, our bodies make really good antennae: just as I was taken aback by that seeming paranoia, I'm sometimes taken aback by the presumption that we must engineer our way out of the predicament we're in.

My thought was simple; do you really think this occult effect which might be doing something at our cellular level, and who knows, might even be tweaking our propensity for cancer, and might have some subtle effect on our moods; do you really think that impact can hold a candle to the solar power of the actual human communication which rides on all these waves?

Hasn't the impact of that drowned out the other stuff in some kind of inverse of the proverbial drop in the ocean? Hello people, we're globally interconnected now by all this electromagnetic radiation which powers our communications technology.

Or like when people study paranormal interactions between mind and matter, isn't it enough of a miracle that I can apparently will my hand to pick up tools and impact literal mountains of matter, even before I deploy the petroleum-powered engines at my disposal. Have we really become so numb to the miracles right before us?

All of these wonders descend from Earth's gift of oil to man. We have squandered it, surely, and there are some among us who are as bereft of soul as Bernie Madoff. Who would make of it a magnificent tomb. But the majority of us by far do not mean harm by our actions. Harm is caused by their collection and concentration - these petty actions - and by proxy when we allow those who speak for us to aggrandize themselves upon our meager wants.

Anyhow, I'd say Earth has had about enough of our uppity oil-sucking ways. I'd say we put a drill right into her heart and she's bleeding and we'd better start paying attention. But that doesn't mean we have to disavow all that we've done as though it were the result of evil, devil guided mankind.

There is a lot of expanded consciousness riding on the gift of oil. Most of it engendered by the likes of mass mediated communication, leading right up to and including Facebook, which I hate to say, has given me quite a few new and important connections. Ones I wouldn't have had otherwise.

Let's put a diaphragm over top that gusher just as quickly as we can. If oil is still lighter than water, then we should be able to suck the oil out the top. It's a kind of opposite to putting a band-aid on the wound, but the concept's identical.

Then let's let the Earth heal a bit. Let's dial back our proxy aggrandizement, individually and one by one. I know I am not even remotely interested in some fanciful mansion on a hill. I'd rather live in civilization, and leave the hilltops for picnics. I enjoy walking to the extent that the city affords that luxury. And I do enjoy how much I can get accomplished, even socially, from right inside my home. No time wasted commuting. No life threatening challenges against fate on the highway. And hopefully some smallish fraction of oil use compared to turning the key of my car.

Springtime in Buffalo

2010-04-29T11:56:00.000-04:00

It's been beautifully sunny and chilly for a few days. Just in time for warmer days now, I've finally figured out how to purge the air out and get heat back into my old VW. My timing isn't always perfect. But I'm getting ready to leave town, and with 300,000 miles on her, I want to be sure that air in the cooling system isn't a sign of something worse.

The dealer thought the heater core must be clogged, but I found out that the dealers all think that. All on my own - with help from Samaritans on the Internet - I discovered that if I purged the air I would get heat. I struggled for just a minute with mistrust for the VW shop. You know, where you nurse the assumption that they were just trying to sell me the expensive procedure to put in a new heater core.

In the end, I opted for open questions. After all, they're the ones who helped me get the car this far. And "advisors" on the Internet are as often people taking advantage (although I couldn't tell how in this case). Anyhow, I did find out that this is one among several notorious weak points in the VW design when I chatted with the guy who runs the shop today. They're going to do the power purge for me tomorrow morning, no charge! I'm happy.

All the other manufacturers are benefiting from Toyota's woes now. They built their cars to perfect Consumer Reports specs, but it turns out that there are other things which can go wrong when you over-engineer. Do we just enjoy the fall of the too big? Not too long ago, I ran into a friend who owns my identical VW, and he considers his a lemon. He would never get another one!

I guess I overlook the weak points and find myself pleased with the overall package. I like VW's emphasis on sound basic materials engineering. Lots of little stuff might go wrong, and even cause a catastrophe with the big stuff, but if you keep it from going that far, the car is built to last forever. That just wasn't true of a Toyota I once owned.

But, to each her own. I know my car has a Nazi pedigree, but I don't root for anyone's downfall, no matter what their difference from me.

Everyone seems to know who they hate these days. I was lucky enough to watch the Sabres beat the Bruins at the Arena in their second-to-last game of the season. It was a thrill which spilled out onto the street beyond the last-minute rule-challenging glove-flying exclamation point fight on the ice. The thrill was marred only slightly by "let's go Buffalo" horn tooting drivers who yelled "where's a Bruins fan to run over?" out their windows. Hey, it's all in sport.

Before that, I'd tried to make a clever point when New Orleans won the Super Bowl, about how only sudden disasters get sympathy from the crowd. Although New Orleans, and the nation, had prepared for Katrina by neglect over many many years, the actual event defined our generosity as a nation. Just as it contributed to bringing down a presidency. Just as Haiti's earthquake brought out the best in us, even though we couldn't be bothered for so many years while the ramshackle disaster waiting to happen got put together.

I used the analogy of the frog in the slowly heating kettle. He likes the hot-tub, and by the time he realizes it's getting way too hot, his energy is sapped and he's cooked. Despite the wooden carvings I walk by each day on Elmwood, left over from our great October tree-smashing snow storm, Buffalo's emergencies are all slow motion. Nothing to bring out the best in the crowd of people making fun of us.

But still, the other day, riding my bicycle back from watching the big orange ball drop off the Peace Bridge (along with maybe half a dozen others) at the start of Boom Day festivities, I rode past that home-makeover house on Massachusetts Ave. There's a sign out front which looks like a for sale sign. I was slightly outraged until I realized it was just the builder exercising bragging rights. There was something to cheer for, wasn't it, even from the rest of the country. Extreme home makeover, Buffalo edition.

Boom Day, chicken wings, wide right, we make lemonade from the lemons handed us. But we have water and power and infrastructure and beautiful surroundings and are the very setting for the whole "if you build it they will come" idea. Nice thoughts while leaving town in search of a job.

The Trouble with Computers

2010-04-28T18:21:00.000-04:00

Against my better judgment, I recently agreed to "help out" at a local non-profit which was having trouble with computers. It was pretty clear that there was some sort of infestation. I explained that I wasn't really looking to do this sort of work anymore, but agreed to help, setting a price that we could both feel good about - something like a quarter of the going rate - about what a gardener might charge.

The recommendations were easy enough, and the emergency patch up was smooth except for that one computer. There's always one, maybe the Executive Director's, maybe the volunteer workstation (in this case), but the general rule is that 90% of the issues/machines/whatever take 10% of the time, and then there is that 10%. This isn't a precise rule, but you get the idea. It gets called the Pareto Principle generally, and I find that I'm no longer the only person who seems to have heard of this rule.

The temptation is always to just get rid of the 10%, but the way it works is that it's the rule, not the machine, and so you pretty much have no choice about this. There will always be the 10%, just like work will always expand to fill the time available for it. It's why computer techs after the briefest trial by fire become really arbitrary and dictatorial about standards. Without them you spend 90% of your time getting nothing productive done. And when you're "helping out" with an unmanaged network for a not-for-profit, you know that going in, which is why I agreed to such a low rate.

Well, then the Executive Director, without so much as a nevermind, went ahead and ordered a Mac into the mix. Now if I had the dough, I'd definitely have a Mac for home use, but you can see what happens to the whole idea of standards. It just doesn't make sense in a network which needs to be managed.

Which got me thinking about how the trouble with computers is that they are both tools and desirable objects in and of themselves. That is to say that people want these things still, if you can imagine that, pretty much the way they want all libidinously invested objects, which is what capitalism is all about after all. If there weren't any of that sort of desire, we'd all drive Ladas or identical Beetles, and our computers would still be black and white and look like little file cabinets the way my first one did. Way back when the excitement was in the magic that this new tool could do, and not how it looked or felt.

Steve Jobs, of course, understands this about machines. You'd be nuts not to want a Mac more than a PC. It's just cooler, which is pretty much what cool means. Libidinous investment.

And even in the work place, people can't avoid playing with these attractive machines. Hell, a Windows machine is pretty libidinously invested these days too, especially after Windows 7. It's fluid, slick and cool, but still manages to do that within the "confines" of being more straightforward to deploy as a tool. But in an unmanaged state, it really still is an attractive nuisance for workers' free time, or for volunteers to play with, especially before broadband was ubiquitous in the home. This is why techs are so arbitrary and dictatorial about management and locking things down against being toyed with.

This volunteer computer today just plain defeated me. The more infestation I ripped out by the roots, the more that was revealed, lurking, being contained by the thing I'd ripped out. The thing is that many of the bits of what we in the business call "spyware" are themselves pandered as configuration assistants, spyware destroyers, and system tweakers. Everyone with a home computer has a favorite that they swear by. And sometimes the more the merrier.

I pretty much decided that this particular computer had a "root kit" by which is meant something so intertwined, as it were, "beneath" the actual OS that you can't even tell in principle that it's there and the only real remedy is a system rebuild. Which, in the absence of standardized setups and cataloged software licenses and media becomes a necessarily destructive process. You can see why I consider this gig to be against my better judgement.

But here's the thing. I can't go so far as to bemoan the capitalist system and what it does to trick us into relationships with our tools instead of what those tools can do for our actual work. I'm not a big fan of Amish furniture, for instance. I think it's ugly and represents the work of people who are doing it for God, or something extrinsic to the beauty of what they produce.

I think you can convince yourself that it's somehow beautiful, and perhaps sometimes it is, in the manner of naive untutored "vernacular" art. But frankly, I prefer the self-consciously beautiful stuff, even when it will obviously go out of style shortly. Anyhow, the Amish stuff confuses something about either the tool or the one who's meant to be pleased or both. You use basic tools to create objects which are themselves only meant to be purposeful. Yuch.

But there is no craftsperson on the planet, or artist I imagine, who doesn't form a kind of relationship with his particular tools. Tools are, not incidentally, those things which according to Marx, the capitalist system expropriates from the worker. Not only can't you form a relationship with your tools in the manner of a journeyman craftsperson once you work for the system, you can't select them or care for them, or become attached to them in any way.

I hope you see where I'm going with this.

Hell, maybe someday real soon, when all the work is in "the cloud" it really won't matter what tool you bring to bear on your work. Maybe you'll bring your own, the way I once did when I worked as a bicycle mechanic. The young turks I worked alongside made fun of me because my tools were all Craftsman/Sears which is all I could afford. But I have them still, and they served me well enough.

Anyhow the "knowledge workers" who use computers to get their work done are generally of the managerial class. They directly serve the capitalists, maybe like chambermaids or something. The "administrative assistants" who serve the managers have a much greater tendency to form something approaching an emotional relationship with their machines, calling them things like "'puters" or maybe even naming them. It must be part of what they look forward to each day.

And, of course, at the very top you get to use whatever tool you feel like using and the techs had better make it OK.

I have no real point here, except that it should be obvious to anyone that the PC (here I use the term to encompass Macs, probably smartphones, and certainly the iPad) exists at an interesting intersection in our history of labor. It is, in fact now, the universal tool and as such crosses boundaries between work and play, home and office, right along with its making those boundaries more porous and much less meaningful.

Anyhow, it's why I can't do tech work anymore; at least not on the level of PC support. I could easily enjoy guiding the work of others. I'd be arbitrary and dictatorial and insist that if workers were to use company machines, then they will have little to no choice about their configuration. At the same time, I'd be working to move all the applications into the cloud, for access from strictly sandboxed (insulated from whatever workers do with these things in their play-time) secure and company deployed browsers.

Then the workers could take their own machines home, like a company car say. Or maybe they'd just be responsible to bring their own tools to work. Well, it's a thought.

Meanwhile, I think we should disinvest the objectified female form a bit. Now that should be an interesting project. But seriously, this is where capitalism really does go too far. Because human value should not be determined by relative anything; wealth, beauty, intelligence. These things can be allowed to spread as much as is comfortable, but wouldn't it be cool if we could disentangle actual love from economic relations?? I mean, good luck with that and everything, but stranger things have happened.