Hard Fail; Accident

Pondering Elon Musk's playful idiocy, as he expends the resources only he can have to realize childish SciFi fantasies, I must return to the ground of accident that is the only ground that counts. Just like the electrical ground that I struggle truly to understand before I undertake the tough stuff on This Old House on which I labor. Accident is the only safe constant.

Elon is Trump's twin as he leads us down the road away from accident. Those who suffer accident are, in Trump's terms "losers." He is, of course, quite correct in that. His mistake is to consider himself beyond the reach of accident. As do all of us who remain alive, his evidence is that he hasn't really suffered many. Accidents, that is. Or at least, apparently, he hasn't suffered enough of them. A winner like him can only be the Fool.

The accident ratio, of course, leaves a person far better off if he is white and rich, which is itself demonstrably goad to idiocy; the idiocy of self-congratulation for one's superior merit. Narcissism by any other name.

But the Trumpsters are onto something. They embrace accident, especially the sorts of accident most likely to emerge from the barrel of a gun or the carbureted or electronically fuel-injected barrel of an internal combustion explosion-containment chamber. 

Now Ol' Elon champions the electrical kind of motive power, just as he seems to imagine that the brain is a complexly wired container for our selfie-self. Perish the notion! The ground for all of us is accident, and the future is precisely that which we can neither project nor imagine because it always overtake us by surprise.

As we work to protect our selfie-selves, or to deny reality - take your pick - during this pandemic, our selfish genes are surely doing their own thing by managing to persist. The choices are among cucarachas, viruses, and perhaps still for just a moment longer whatever it is that could be meant by 'human.' 

If Trump suffers - heaven forfend - some unfortunate debilitating accident (prior to his ultimate demise, which can surprise nobody who hasn't internalized some fiction of immortality here on earth), that will cause no permanent harm to his ilk. Trump-alikes are apparently as numerous as Republicans now. They are the efficient causes - the 'engines' if you will - of our continued evolution. I suppose we should celebrate them for that. Pardon me while I puke out my guts.

The ground, remember, is accident. Life is an accidental direction away from entropy. It simply cannot be directed. No matter how much intelligence gets mustered, accident will prevail, and life will move the way that life has done for eons, which is, of course, in the direction of love. That's what love means. 

Intelligence is fine when it gets used properly in service to the comfort of our fellow humans. So often it gets used to engineer warfare and the death of those we deem to be on some 'other' team. As Dawkins so reliably demonstrates, those contests are at best only metaphorically related to what happens at the level of life's evolution. To treat them as contests between life and death is to make a categorical error. Genes are always grounded. Contests at any higher level can only cause sparks. Sparks are not alive, though heaven knows they may instigate life from time to time.

Intelligence cannot express love. Intelligence cannot channel love. Intelligence cannot in and of itself provide any basis for merit. Intelligence can only serve love, which it must do on the basis of exquisite balance. Our way of life demonstrates that beauty is the more reliable token for merit. Just ask Trump. 

We have surely crossed a tipping point in service to an excess of wealth that is more grotesque than whatever the First Emperor of the Chin Dynasty arrogated in attempt to obviate his mortality. Now there's a loser's game! 

Well over half of my stored energy for retirement is held on my behalf in hazardous bets - they call them equities - about the future of our economy as presently construed. Now that interest rates have descended to near zero, cash is a fool's reserve, though I can only try to enjoy the sport of my future being whipsawed by the stock market. 

Still, it's only half. Right? None of us is more than half right. But the amounts that evaporate in any given instant are stunningly beyond what I might need to live on during any given day. And I'm talking a mere multiple of three of my life-time's highest annual salary, which is right about at the median of income where I live, which is no place you'd aspire to. You do the math. I'm in the 50 percent, though - mostly by virtue of whiteness - I am immersed in the social capital of the one percenters.

I try really hardly to share my wealth in ways that don't lead to my being a burden on my progeny. For some reason, I just hate to work for the man, but I also have to admit that I hate that a little less than I would hate to be the man. It's a tough balance lots of the time. 

So, I give away my labor freely, now that I'm too old to work. Ironically enough, the labor I give away is precisely the sort that underlies the presumption of the need for a retirement battery. My donations are mostly physical, aided by tools. The logic is not linguistic logic. I make bad mistakes if and when my 'mind' is clouded by emotional charge. I have to love and to focus on the object that I'm fashioning. Mostly by hand. Without distraction.

How very ironic that labor with and by means of my body feels less painful than laboring with and by and through language! Both sorts deteriorate badly, though in some sense I am doing my very best work now. I am more motivated, apparently, to handle the more literal tools. My mind and my body have become one. Thanks God for that! I have some sense that I once did lack. I hope.

I do now actually prefer an electric bicycle. Go figure! I hope never to drive a Tesla, praying for streetcars in their place. Apple's so-called AI battery management really sucks. The batteries in my little mobile house are dying as we speak. I'm winding down myself. 

I labor for love, despite the evident fact that my motive undermines any and all appreciation for what it is that I provide. That is an unfortunate accidental side-effect of the sort of rampant unregulated capitalism that we still practice in these United States. Troglodytes!

What sort of fool am I? I am a fool for love. So is Trump, but his definition for love has a very low denominator. I think Biden may be my kind of fool. There are plenty of people whose work I admire that I can't really much agree with much of the time. That's OK. I love them anyhow. 

At my age, I'm less afraid to fail, and I guess that's how it should be. I must nurture my genes which are now contained in my progeny, right? They are my betters, though I wish they'd take more of my advice about what would be good for the planet. Electric better. Trolleys better. Cars bad. Diversity better. Race bad. Winning is not possible in love. Only losing. Love must be tested to be true. Intelligence is no foil. Alone and bitter in touch with truthiness and an audience of one. Time to get to work!

My, how time flies . . .

Even as I thought I knew that I wouldn't really maintain any commitment to this silly business, I do get little ideas while tracing the mandala of the roadways on my daily rounds - my own special and personal version of the rat race. And having the blog in the background, as it were, is an excuse to organize the thinking, even if it never leaves that impossible referent: the mind.

So, way over here, beyond every pale that ever gets mentioned, in upstate has-been Empire-land, where I have managed 230,000 miles on my car even before it was paid for - an accomplishment which should at least get me a discount on my next VW if no particular honor - I think I may have standing to comment about driving etiquette. We're all familiar with the internal battles of road-rage, hormones against brains, reason against outrage, and ride that little wagon veering between self righteous pride in our own nobility and terrible shame when we manage, carelessly, genuinely to earn the flipped bird in our own right. The searing honk of correction that you too are guilty and low.

Which leads me (isn't this the point of blogs) to comment on another leftie apostate (hadn't I once expressed dismay at the heterodoxy of Alexander Cockburn - I hardly remember), recently reminded of; Christopher Hitchens. At least he isn't off his rocker wacko with the religionists, but I have this feeling that he abandoned the Nation for lucre and selfish calming of angst. Anyhow, I was alerted to his damn-the-main-currents upstream observations about our culture of self-improvement in Vanity Fair following upon (maybe preceding, but not in the order of my awareness) a genuinely moving piece about a noble young soldier dying, still in my eyes, for a brand name more than an honorable nation, and apparently moved to accept the risk in part by Hitchens' writings. I know it is cruel of me, and reflective more of my own passivity than the truth of our nation's relation to its mythology, but I cannot find any death for this cause in Iraq to be other than wasted. But if I could come close, it would be thanks to Hitchens' take on this particular young man, who might actually, in the manner of his commitment and by that very act, have managed to bring the United States closer to its promise than whole armies of passive objectors such as myself. Admitted. Guilty.

Though that is not why I thought of Hitchens. It had more to do with the similarity of our lifestyles and body types, and the levels of our vigor in correcting them (nil). I know this is a stretch upon a meander, but what I was thinking of is how very Buffalo is the condition of our bodies. There is some perfected self-knowledge here about how buff, beautiful and fit belong in some other place, and here is rusty and has-been, but loving our families, when not convinced that we are somehow doomed by subtle childhood abuse of our never quite budded self-esteem to languish here forever awaiting the never forthcoming but somehow always identified with its only canonical source - familial - approval.

So, here's what happens in these parts when there is construction on the highway. Two lanes combine to one, with advanced warning, and so, innocent of traffic jams, which happen in more prosperous parts, we dutifully move to the open lane way before it becomes necessary. Precisely, in fact, when the traffic starts thickening. This leaves the asshole lane wide open, for the more savvy drivers - we assume they are from Long Island, taking advantage of our superior educational resources at reduced upstate rates - who whiz by and merge at the last minute. Always the expensive cars. Buffalo is all about Chevy Impalas, and anything more is embarrassing grandstanding. Just ask Tim Russert.

It takes no particular mathematical understanding to see that the polite drivers, wanting no advantage for themselves, and in a civilized way knowing how to queue (a sign, I believe, among denizens that other has-been Empire, of true civilization) are screwed forever by these advantage-takers, and so the line slows to a potentially permanent stop.

Sometimes truckers, never from Ontario, genteelly block the asshole lane and generate this shower of positive ions (negative?) among the thereby more relaxed and no longer conflicted obediant. Hmmm, I never have checked to see if these are the Jesus drivers, perhaps since it's hard, for me, to associate that bent with gentility. But these must be truckers from around here.

So, it is after all clear that the overall best thing to do would be for everyone to drive right up to the merge and then zipper together in polite alternating fashion. I understand that this is what happens in the rest of the world, though I have had no occasion to witness it myself, being an undocumented wage-slave (yes, these are primitive parts) without papers to travel beyond my ancestral esteem valley.

I don't know if this self-tortuous behavior is connected to our globally high concentration of church-attending Catholics, but I suspect so. Non-Catholic myself, I have always been outside that particular familiar, and therefore free at least, if not to leave, to raise ridiculous questions.

So the net angst is raised, and we get what we always wanted, our own validating traffic jams. And incredible heart-risking self-righteous glares at those in the asshole lane, where sometimes we must sneak by ourselves, beyond all endurance with fatigue and frustration and somehow concocting an inner story to keep our outward impassivity (if only you knew my story you'd call a police escort). But the ones who know better and drive flashier cars either have the validating experience of real traffic jams or at least know how to get out and improve their lives.

So, this is precisely what happens in the minds of all the Buffalo Bills fans (I'm not one, and can't even begin to understand the fanaticism) when on a recent Monday night the Bills are blessed with an incredible run of good fortune and defensive out-of-place offense. All the plot elements are there. The rookie quarterback moving with poise and precision. The exteme underdog position of the team against the league stars. And every single fan, this time including me, knew with certainty that we were watching a slow moving train wreck. That we could not possibly keep this enormous lead and inevitable victory. We knew even after that really clever dodge which revoked the last-minute field goal that there would have to be another last minute, and that the wide right was reserved only for Buffalo. Huzzah and goddamn! We must love it this way. Even the television announcers were too abashed to ply the obvious, though the 'only in Buffalo' undertone was clear enough.

It might be like the leftie bind, which Hitchens broke free of. It might be like staying home to rescue Dad's old business instead of taking that Harvard degree off to the big times. It might actually be a nicer cut of human being. It might just be patsie-land. But it is at least clear that there is a lot of unnecessary agonizing going on and angst that we, around here, are likely not good enough. By not politely filling the asshole lane, it is certain that we cut ourselves off. I'm an asshole, yodeloo yodeleee, yipee! But I'm still not going to engage in any self-improvement, profit-oriented religion, or flag-waving.