Fools Rush in . . . Farewell to Jack Kemp

I want to tackle the big ones. I want to try the truth and beauty equation. Here's the plan: Beauty stimulates copulation, apparently. Copulation, when it's productive and not perverse, apparently has a lot to do with the processes of evolution. Controversially if you ever read Stephen Jay Gould, human intelligence seems like some pinnacle to the same evolutionary processes. So, in at least this minimal sense, intelligence and beauty seem like they might be linked. 

I'm thinking here that faceless animals don't copulate for anything like beauty. And I'm thinking beauty somehow overpowers pheromones and other organizers of ant farms to power aspects of human reproduction. 

And I have to accommodate, somehow, my absolute aversion to the stupid racist notion that beauty and intelligence are coupled. That winners always deserve to win. That's way way way too right wing for me, Jack. Lady Luck almost always deserves almost all the credit. Nor will I fail to notice that women do seem to trade on beauty; that there is some correspondence between social rank and hotness in this endphase capitalist dystopia. Which we will never see as such, because we live within the castle walls. Let them eat cake, indeed.

Sure part of this is that with enough money, almost anyone can be made to appear pretty good. Especially when the styles approach masquerade for daily life. Or when simple health equates to looking good in jeans, and when health is bought for money too. When you add to the dollings up, the bodily buffing up, you really can get something going. Not to mention airbrushings, and taking care about when and how you appear in public. Although it must be a lot of work, for certain. You have to give effort its due.

But let's just say, for starters, that the thing with beauty is that it turns your head. From there, doesn't there have to be something more? Or is it like the linkbacks here in the blogosphere, which I don't really care to get? The beauty gets you more starters. And how come so many really beautiful women are willing to trade on that?  Shouldn't it really just give you the strength not to? The confidence to go for something more than what you can get so easily? Or does risk always go along with nothing left to lose?

I know money is plenty hard to get, but the trouble with getting it by selling your looks or your skills or your talents is that you have to keep working harder and harder and always to deal with your insecurities that maybe he'll go elsewhere for what you once sold him. The Man. Old age should be relaxing. Unless, like me, you've dodged responsibility your whole life. Then you get what you deserve. Which is to work your way in to your dotage, armed only with what you never had, or lost in its true season.

How about this:  Beauty just stimulates the rest of us to copulate more? It's like a leadership role; like President Obama for instance, it sets a direction for our sweaty aspirations. Who would ever want that level of responsibility at this particular moment? But he stands up there, quite apparently keeping his good humor, and it kind of makes you want to work in that direction, doesn't it?  We'll set him straight eventually on the privacy stuff, and on the GNU public license, but in the meantime, what a beautiful mind, and it doesn't hurt a bit that he's quite black. It just makes him that much more believable, since no-one's been grooming blacks for long enough to have him descend from dynastic privilege.

Intelligence begets intelligence for sure, but not in the genetic sense, where everything regresses toward what's mean. It's the sharing which allows great things. Sometimes the showing off. The chasing after what might be better, and wanting to get there first. And at least a kind of working out from the kind of insecurity which provokes girls into flashing their tits as the one thing they know will get the guys attention, and maybe slow them down along the chase. Or cheer them on, stimulating the steroidal jolt. Or so it should. And guys should get over it already. Why not pick someone for better reasons than that everyone else wants her too? Save that for politics and shows. Alpha males must get fatigued from being everybody's target.

I do remain convinced that there is still a direction for evolution, but that it's not the one we're thinking. I'll have to do a lot more study, but I even think that intelligence is something more than something meta- riding like fluff on top of the survival of some fittest. There is this pattern re-cognition in the brain which makes it that much more likely that we can learn to avoid the pitfalls. Then something like invention, where we can take what we discover, and repattern it with tools, into something to give us huge advantage over what teeth nature can provide over eons of trial and mostly error. Tooth and claw into the wilderness, now beaten back by levity and light. Stirred but never shaken.

The gaffe we make right now is to mistake our proudest tools for that mind which made them. We act as if we invent what we discover, and as though our instruments can recognize patterns without us. They can't. They can only sort and filter among larger sets than we can handle all fleshy and alone. 

All machines are nothing more (or less) than elaborated levers to extend our power; our reach; our grasp. Information technology is nothing different, except that by replacing mind with brain in stupid overtheorizing about intelligence as though it were an isolatable thing, we've managed yet again to become hoist by our own petard, childish bootstrap style, into thinking that machines can think. (I swear I remember being read a childish story, about a boy who'd dreamed of flying that way, by lifting himself up by his bootstraps, or maybe I even tried it myself, though I could find no reference anywhere to either)

Mind is interactive, and depends on Proper Names at its centers, to propagate throughout the brainscape. Tools can help. Pen, paper, books and ethereal keys. There is some touching attachment, or should be, to the tools we like to handle. But these are not the same thing as human to human touch. And human touch should not be mediated by machines. Mind, sure. But mind is nothing without heart. And heart depends on more than depictions and other virtual renderings.

There was (at least) one intriguing part to that "What the Bleep" film wherein they demonstrated, sort of, that the eye will literally not see what it has not learned to. Their example was Native Americans not even able to see that Columbus' ships were on their horizon, because they had no category for ships. And perhaps there was also every sort of wild hallucination from which such things as ships might be difficult to distinguish. The shaman had to be consulted, and once authorized, then they could see!

Now, we've tamed the hallucinations, and created instruments to measure every kind of alien intrusion, even beyond the range of our native senses. Which only seems to guarantee that the thing we must remain blind to is ourselves, enslaved to us. We have no authority for that one.

We reward winning always most extravagantly. The beauty queens. Captains of industry. Superstars. Inventors. Discoverers. Monopolists. Gamers of our hearts. Vicariously, it's where we want to be, and really think we should be. We give a nod to Sherpas, provided they climb high enough themselves.

But recently, in our American time, we did learn that it is wrong to use other human beings for our service to the winners.  Humans should not own other human beings, this much we know for certain. But for a good enough price, and if the bargain is straight up, winners might be able to rent their slaves, perhaps at an hourly rate. Perhaps for better and for worse. Beauty betrays the terms. It would be more honest, wouldn't it, if the money were to change hands more boldly and the terms were more straight up? Though none of it, except for the money, seems worth the paper it's written up on.

Still, we dream of machines at our service, which can provide us colder drinks and more pure mixes, and no dirt upon our souls. Except that they foul the earth, finally, with non-digestible transmuted waste which concentrates our most toxic qualities, most toxic of all of which might be our insecure desire just to be served in the first place. As if God were meant for me personally. As if there can be that pinnacle from which all dirt has been banished, but the air remains breathable. As if.

And so, upon this Internet, we are certain we must remain anonymous, cloaked and firewalled away from those who would pry our secrets, or even worse, steal our very identity. I am, at least still for a moment longer wanting to remain anonymous. Wanting to abstract my words so perfectly that they can true all hearts away from cosmic dreams of removal from all dirt and germs that would digest our bodies, sometimes before we're quite ready for that earth to earth return on investment.

But think of this. What if we actually were accountable for all our searches? What if it weren't just Google sneaking into my thoughts and offering up advertisements according to what I've been thinking, and reading and writing and historically searching. What if we called that what it is; an unconscionable invasion of privacy no matter what they promise to do or not to do with my identity. This Googling of my soul, which I shall not abide very much longer. This tapping of my phone lines without my knowing. This unaccountable theft of our commons.

What if I were to true my searchings with other identifiable souls who might also hold me accountable for my misplacings of mouse among rodents; black holes among non-celestial ethers. What if, in other words, humans were to contact other humans who would be held accountable for transgressions? A sort of alternate Internet of love instead of greed and fear and embarrassment. Where DNS sought out, first, actual names of actual people, and less particular and more abstracted, their place of business, and after that, what they like to do with their time.

What if we were to start a movement where instead of being afraid to announce where I live and how to contact me, I were to publish almost everything about myself, and you did too? What if I let almost everyone see into my life if they really cared to, and what if that turned out to be the very best defense against identity theft because no-one could hold your secrets, as they now do, even from you? You would be publicly you and I would be publicly me, and my holdings would be there for anyone and everyone to count and every transaction would leave a bright red trail, so that you could even leave the door unlocked again like they do in Canada where they must still somehow know their neighbors, even still.

What if names were geographically located too, and after that ideologically, for civil civic purposes so that we might debate without hating one another? What if intersections among actual people were tracked, and texts and pictures and things to buy were catalogued where they belong according to the interests of the parties who want them. What if we were to find that some right wing interests actually do cross lines with left wing? In reading his obituary, I find that Jack Kemp doesn't seem such a bad guy, although when I met him in person he had some sort of vocal diarrhea worse than mine and jumped all over the place and never made any full sense. Such a champion of all Richies Rich.

But I can buy the idea that creativity and industry both are released by some rewards for them. I can also buy that some of the best and truest words were never motivated by anything at all, other than some beauty in their utterance. The best of art is never known because its baseline requires getting out from the contest, and in to that kind of beauty which kindles far away and off from any field. Why can these things not both co-exist? There are more kinds of beauty than those which provoke our loins and pocketbooks. There are other ways to arrange our co-existence on this planet than conquest, glory, and abstract removal.

What if we were to find that human metaphoric categories work ever so much more smoothly than machine-made approximations and that nothing we can ever invent will be a match for our own pattern recognition accomplishments. Certainly not for speed, where I can almost always recognize friend at 1000 paces, which helps at least to distinguish from unknown and possible foe.

What if the machine were realigned in service to all mankind and not, Sherpa like, only in service to the winners? And what if we were once again to risk riding in cars with strangers because most of our germs have already travelled the world around and our best defense is a kind of orgy of interinfection to build up our natural defenses against all viral mockings of our designs, since, I'm pretty sure, these interbreedings - tending in the end to brown I'm sure - guarantee more instead of less diversity, as long as diversity is not so much measured by the color of one's skin. 

I am so tired of superstar talents. I am so tired of wanting that kind of supercharged beauty. I am so tired of overelaborated super intelligence which needs to be checked by something more from the manual arts. I am so tired of measures for intelligence, which, like contests for beauty only show up parochial prejudices and miss the breakthrough minds every time. I am so tired of stigmas made against everyone who's not a winner, for whatever it is they're supposed to lack. I'm tired of being a winner without portfolio too, and needing always to reinvent myself. It's all a crass stand in for beauty to transcend our baser cartoon-like common denominators. I'll sing for Leaves of Grass.

Lets have a demasquerade! Let's let each of us be himself, and accept that Mom will always love us, no matter what we do. Sheesh, I make about as much sense as Jack Kemp talking supply side. But not only is beauty in the eye of each beholder, and intelligence for each reader to decide, what we can do to improve upon nature cannot be simply to strip it bare and purify its essentials. There must be more to art that drives us.

What's a Meta For, Indeed

Finally, I just watched "The Corporation", a fairly ambitious documentary film whose first half traces the history of the "legal person", of much more recent vintage than you'd think. It was, I'm proud to say, a former student of mine who arranged the screening, for a (very very) small assortment of lefty thinkers and, apparently, homeless people who might have been attracted by the goulash. As one might expect, the screening was held in an old warehouse space - I think this one might have been the old Kittinger factory, or maybe the Pierce Arrow automobile factory, both centers for pride gone by in this "We're Talking Proud" community.

I'd been looking for the film - no surprise that you can't get it at Blockbuster - and so made a point to go. For some unknown reason, I can't seem to spring for the monthly fee to get those NetFlix discs, even though living out in the country without even a phone line now to do the Dish Pay-per-view, you'd think I'd make the perfect candidate.

So this film traces some sort of elaborate figure of speech, whereby a precise likeness is traced between a corporation, which has legal rights and standing as a fictional person, and a psychopath - a person, like my oft berated brother in law, without a conscience. Without a heart, in my own very precise terminology.

This, of course, sets out the very dangerous form of argumentation used in all conspiracy-type films. You paint a kind of picture, generally by editorializing on how you present the evidence, and then allow the congruence of this picture with the pattern of your proposed explanation to provide the force of your argumentation.

Gone are standards for evidence gathering. Gone are trails of proof. It's all circumstantial evidence, matching likely opportunity with likely motive, say, and leaving the blanks all but filled in.  It's what Michael Moore gets accused of, and it's what left me cold after watching about how the Bush administration brought down the World Trade Center towers deliberately. I had no way to assess the validity of the pictures and the information as presented. Like watching a magician on stage, I trust that what seemed to have happened cannot really have happened, and behind that trust is some solid sense of what can and cannot happen in the wide wide world.

So, when I watch some overheated documentary about how Bill Clinton arranged the murder of all his opposition, I'm only reminded of that numerologist I once did watch with gape-mouthed awe at some Rainbow Homecoming (I swear I was quite the outsider there). The coincidence of his math seems so unlikely that you wind up being convinced that there must be some occult meaning to the numbers, as assigned to letters of the alphabet, names like Reagan (hint - it ends up 666), or whatever. Like a really good magic act, you end up almost tasting the in to that secret key, to unlock all the secrets and leave you somehow what? Zoned in? Harmonically on some wavelength with all like minds, and not deluded like all the other unenlightened? In the presence of someone with real power?

Well, but then you're left with what these days goes by the shorthand MSM, to provide your better evidence against these slants???? Where editorializing is hardly even disguised, as though the magician were to expose all his sleights of hand before the show, so why would you even watch?  Perhaps in admiration of his talent, but not for the same reason that most do watch (to test their own credulity, I guess, and to address a puzzle beyond solution).

So, the argument at the heart of The Corporation is not quite one that can be tested. It urges a coloring on the way we find the world. A king of gestalt shift to where the old lady in the picture is young, even though there may be some other, editorially perverse, way to construe those lines.

A likeness is made, then, between the corporation and a person, but that a person acts with conscience and a corporation, qua corporation, never does. Evidence is presented that corporate behavior regards the laws and norms of society as so much new information for the calculus of the bottom line. And most compellingly of all, there is a tracing from enclosure movement, through fabulously edited outtakes from interviews, to a kind of exuberant celebration of the privatization of absolutely everything, from among those shilling for the wealth-generation point of view.

Most horrific and on the face of it beyond the pale of absurdity, are the claiming of patents on genetic codes, so that now not only has evolution been violently thwarted by wanton destruction of species along the way toward wealth generation in obliviousness of the externalities of living systems; but now to the extent that it can be consciously guided by genetic engineering, the course of evolution will and must be made profitable. So, presumably, we can progress and generate more wealth. Or rights to sell the water, and next the air. Because the commons has been so fully now enclosed. Natural systems will and should get replaced completely, so that we can move right in to the cartoon world of Disney.

Another presumption gets mocked, that the miserable of the world are and should be glad to earn a few cents per hour, as improved alternative to starvation. That this somehow lifts them up. But from what?? Can this be any better than coursing through the wild with spears to chuck and snarling jaws to outsmart? So that subsequent generations can be removed to Disney life? Wall-E?

Now, here comes the hard part again. There is, between metaphoric and literal truth, a divide not unlike that I claim between perceptual and conceptual reality. Of course I further claim that there is no way to privilege one from the other in any ultimate sense, but generally and in the local sense, there is no significant issue to distinguish what's meant literally from what's meant by indirection.

A person is a person, and a corporation is like a person, and everyone is meant to understand that the differences are writ large enough that no-one gets confused. But a person, acting without accountability, will generally devise a chain of deniability such that his actions have only local significance and that externalities are quite, and literally, beyond his comprehension. Such a person, now, is like a corporation.

But comprehension is itself a veiled metaphor, right? It means beyond his grasp. Beyond the grip of his hand, but in this case his mind is the thing doing the grasping. Metaphorically of course. And what is it that gives the mind this purchase? Well, a mental schema, of course.  A conceptual framework supposed to mirror or at best to idealize the perceptual world as it is, out there. It is what gives us confidence in our behaviors, or often what makes us shy.

It is indeed very very difficult to imagine our personal behaviors having much impact beyond our immediate circle of influence. And when they do, we must recoil in horror. Like when the cigarette so casually tossed from the window of a moving car lights up the forest, or a moment's inattention squashes a cat. But to be a trader on the stock market floor, you cannot pause to calculate the moral harm which made your trading day, as this film displays by interviews and examples of gold's value in response to the Trade Tower's collapse. Or how your purchase might stimulate some destruction by the socially misguided corporate power it encourages.

But how can you know?

You have to trust in some structure beyond your personal understanding, which rectifies these things together for the common good. Or perhaps you are a psychopath yourself, and there is some evidence, I guess, that market traders and lawyers are overrepresented among that crowd. You might only care about yourself and this very moment. But you have to trust that the pilot of the plane is not that way, and that its design represents thinking that is tested and trued.

The behavior of an individual in a corporation rehearses this very same sense of personal limitation, most excruciatingly portrayed in the film from the very top, where CEO's, whose legal mandate is so clearly limited to maximizing short term gains, have almost no discretion toward the common good. If they pilot a plane, then that plane is almost always on autopilot, perhaps until it is too late, and when the machine lets go the mere human is beyond his strength and reflex to respond.

Or maybe, like the captain on the spaceship ark in that dark and happy Disney film Wall-E, there is very little for him to do but uphold the appearance of being all he's worth. (Michael Moore claims it's greed which allows corporate powers to hoist themselves by their own petard, and I suppose he must be right)

It is this enclosure, of one from each other as we interact in response alone, to Main Stream Media and its collective framing, which enables deniability of one from each other, and each from the earth we do so collectively destroy - in this enclosure, there is nothing we can, individually, do. Metaphorically, the machines have already taken over, because there is no place for heart in the system. 

Although, to be absolutely sure, there will be no smiling and glad handing good cheer when Disney's world is finally complete. Psychopaths, I trust, when at the end of their hand's play, seem always and only to grow bored and off themselves.

Now, at land's end, I turn in tears toward my co-passenger. There is no return but afoot.

It is not only that conscience does provide a guide. It is not only that consultation with ones heart does provide for some accountability beyond the merely local. It is, for actual fact, that there are, by very design, as it were, true occult vibes which link us one to other. But the courage to let these be our guide is so far beyond what I for one can muster. It must be a common turning.

As Disney provides Wall-E, so the cosmos of corporate greed (and it is only that and nothing truly evil, since there is no heart to it) provides this Internet for my somewhat free amusement. Still, there could be a spark tossed off, and conflagration among myriad minds like thinking, aligned by words and images and thoughts.

There could be some resonance more powerful than that of MSM or the electrical grid. There could be some actual alignment of hearts along the vectors not of purchase power, but those more metaphorical vectors, arranged for systems quite beyond us and beyond our grasping control.

These evolved life systems have as their metaphorical ground our emotional caring, which is the meaning of their having come together in this particular way. A fated conclusion is what had to have happened, looking past, without even metaphorical access to why. So, looking forward, what is our fate dear hearts? Or do we even care?

I do know that particles, like money changing hands, must mediate the forces of the physical universe. I also know that waves describe seeming action at a distance, quantum collapsed to actual here and impossible now, by mind's perception. Waves, or their function more properly, pervade by inverse square attenuation, the entire cosmos depending on its population.

There must be some fair balance among the cancerous proliferation of minds on planet earth and its substrate which cannot support us. There must be some form of education which can lift our burden from this ecosystem, by the magic trick of courage to trust and to believe, but not in the Christ as metaphoric realization (I hedge my words). So Disneyesque now in ugly stentorian fascistic outline rules and awful commandments.

How about trust that there is some common good, or that self indulgence truly does become boring, and that aggrandizement is no longer sign of accomplishment toward anything other than hell on earth? Full wisdom is so common. So often childlike. So utterly thrilled to take off down a hill on a bicycle the moment the snow is melted even for a minute. 

And educated out from childhood is dull oblivion, grinding cogs, in corporate mass annihilation.

I must now screw up my courage to leave the Church, with whom I literally am employed. This quite dysfunctional embodiment of Christ on earth. A shell. A husk. A corporate structure of aristrocratic inertia, having at its center something no less absurd than a queen in Britain's heart. The child support winds down. The grasping after love is dulled. The care about endings or conclusions is narratively well away, and I shall attempt a turn towards poetry. (not for you, dear hearts, I would not torture the you so.  Merely for my passive taking in)

The world's a song, more like, than story with conclusion. Let's sing together full throated loud, a chorus against the booming. A song to carry the aching heart. A song to cheer full stop.