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!

A Dream of the Good Old Days Before Juneteenth was a Holiday

Just now, like many of us, I'm holding my breath that Agent Orange won't carry on to drop his COVID nukes in Tulsa. The day after Juneteenth. We celebrate today, for tomorrow we may die. I wish all my black sibs the happiest of Juneteenths, the newest Federal holiday!

I'm also trying just now to restart my entire read-through in Chinese of the Dream of the Red Chamber. This is a book which many Chinese count as their North Star for what it means to be human on the planet. I remember thinking that as well. Like reading Tolstoy, I don't quite remember why. I only know that it changed me.

And I remember very well driving out to Madison, Wisconsin as a grad student of classical Chinese literature. I was going to attend the first-ever international conference on "Redology." That's the term for academic study of this singular Chinese novel. 

Along the way, I dropped off my friend at the University of Iowa where he was attending the renowned writing program. His father, Parker Po-fei Huang, a well-known poet among Chinese, and a low-ranked but highly esteemed "native informant" at Yale, where language instructors were not professors - his father had told my friend that he had no business writing; he hadn't truly lived. I could relate. My own father was stern that way too. 

But we all loved Professor Huang. I guess we all have our less good sides. 

I was allowed to sit in on a class. I don't remember the notorious tear-down masculine ethos that got the program so many celebrated and mostly male authors. I do remember wistfully feeling that I was not of that crowd.

How well I also remember driving north to arrive at the beautiful campus on Lake Mendota at Madison. It was summer, and the coeds (code for women in those days) were sunning themselves on the grass all over campus. A northern and wooded grassy California beach. I was somehow shocked. Never had I seen so much brazen skin. This was not my conception of what 'midwest' means. Not my crowd either, for sure!

The opening reception was held on the panoramic top floor of a circular tower. All the younger westerners were glued to the windows, gazing out over the beautiful campus to hide our social awkwardness. Very few of us were expected, after all, to have some bit of expressive performance queued up for presentation on demand, as all Chinese are. All the senior Chinese scholars were looking inward toward friends, and new acquaintances they had already mostly read. 

In the buffet line for dinner I chatted with David Hawkes, the premier English-language translator of The Dream of the Red Chamber, or as he properly called it, The Story of the Stone. All of us were waiting with 'bated breath for his completion of this life's work. I was a bit star-struck. I chatted up a different professor who was into using computer technology to analyze classical Chinese literature (he confessed that he couldn't really read it himself). That was according to the dictates of the structuralism which was then in vogue. The science of literature. Looking for stable patterns across works. 

But what I wish to write about today is our economy. I'm old enough to remember the 'good old days' when the local hardware store was manned by knowledgeable clerks who raised families on their salaries. Our store stocked everything from model airplane engines to lawnmowers, and all the parts and tools in between.

Milk was delivered in heavy refillable bottles then, and Grandma would sometimes send one of the kids down to the ice cream store with a crock, reminding us to have them pack it tightly so that it wouldn't melt along the walk home. 

Now I buy things from Amazon, and watch the prices creep up to cover the free shipping, while the quality seems increasingly indifferent. Caveat emptor and read the editorial reviews. That old hardware store would never tarnish its good name the way that Walmart always does, or Home Depot, or Amazon, by allowing shoddy goods along their shelves. They couldn't afford to. What happens when all the minimum-age hardware helpers age out?

My friend, a structuralist himself, and brilliant professor of Chinese met us at the conference. He took me - well, I took him since he didn't drive - to visit his old college friend who lived just north of Madison. This was a talented young man who'd forsaken an academic life to start a business. 

He had designed a refined set of mountain climbing chocks, and had set up a very high-tech and sophisticated manufacturing process which he explained to me in detail. The process ended up with nicely anodized pieces which were color-coded for size and usage. They felt wonderful in the hand, and apparently - by virtue of angles, metallic composition and surface treatment - held wonderfully in the field. 

Again, who knows what such a business was doing in Wisconsin, but he enjoyed showing me all the steps, partly because I understood them, and likely mostly because I was so googly-eyed. I especially appreciated the step where the nearly finished pieces were blasted with glass beads to provide golf-ballish micro-divots.

Speaking of which, I've only swung a golf club once in my life, and that time the ball went exactly where I was aiming it, to my absolute horror. It sailed right across the neighbor's long back yard, across the street and over the next lawn right into the "picture window" of the hardware store owner who lived around the corner. This is a sin from which I shall never recover. It taught me to always fess up (which I didn't do that time). I was a natural Zen archer, I guess, as I remember the magnetic pull of window to ball. 

It definitely wasn't my doing, although come to think of it I got three bulls eyes the first time I held a bow and arrow and the first time I fired a .22 rifle. I should have known better. But then I was never able to repeat those feats. Story of my life. 

Anyhow this wonderful climbing hardware manufactory was set to go out of business before it even sold its first chock (I received a bag of them as souvenirs). The poor fellow hadn't realized that even the niche sport of climbing was controlled by the one large manufacturer who determined which products could be stocked on pain of withholding all the others. This was just when even sporting goods stores were turning Big Box, and before distribution channels got disrupted. 

Just as is now the case with movie theaters, R.I.P., it doesn't matter how good the product is if you can't get it on the shelf at eyeball level. Money changes hands, as I learned later in the beer retailing business. Smaller brands have got to cheat to win: You have to brazenly follow the big boys and swap the shelves when no-one's looking.

I hadn't heard of WalMart or maybe it hadn't gotten started yet, but I did get an education from that young entrepreneur near Madison about how "Wall Street Money" will pay to overstock shelves with goods sold at a loss for the sole purpose of forcing competitors out of business. I also learned that such practices were illegal in Germany, say, among other countries. 

Some long time later, circumnavigating the continent in all innocence on my little Harley, I happened into Bentonville, Arkansas, where I took a break in front of what looked like the old five and dime hardware store I grew up with. 

Inside, a very nice old man who looked the part gave me a kind of personal tour. It was a museum disguised as a store. I knew something was amiss when I saw a photo of Gerald Ford shaking Sam Walton's hand. Sam would get the Presidential Medal of Freedom later from George H.W. The same medal that Rush Limbaugh just got.

So we give out medals to those who destroy the very fabric of our society now?? People on Wall Street - investors - make a bet on what will be the next blockbuster. But it's really not a bet. It's a sure deal that an entire industry will be disrupted, which means destroyed, by predatory marketing practices. Along with the industry go unions, local ownership, and knowledge of the sort built up over years of purchasing decisions and getting to know the people. 

Gone now as the cost of doing business is so much else that we once did value. Local eateries. Doctors who make house calls. Packaging that isn't killing the planet. Short hauls from farm to table. Local craft beer. You know, the stuff that's coming back, if you're white and well off. At least we got the wholesalers out of the way. Hmmmm. 

Frankly I think black lives have gotten more and more marginal during my lifetime. Our celebrated progress with civil rights hasn't translated into main street lives simply because those aren't the kinds of businesses that we value anymore. 

When things are created digitally - where there is no marginal cost for each additional widget - mountains of investment will be piled into whoever gets the most eyeballs. The losses equal the mountains upside down until the existing players are fully destroyed to leave a sole monopolist. The monopolist is never guilty of the syndicate-style behaviors which anti-trust regulations were designed for. 

These are all nice and mostly white and mostly male youngsters who want to hit it big. Well sure, sometimes they cut corners and act ruthless. Young blonde women beware. Anyhow, the consumers fall like flies in their belief in falling prices. Those falling prices are themselves a temporary illusion, but life is short. 

And it's not as though Google is providing their services for free! Read Surveillance Capitalism, please! We are not the product. Our behaviors are. We all work for the Man for free now. Click to agree, and Yahoo!!

Eyeballs or ears, it's an easy bet that Rush Limbaugh or Howard Stern will get most of them. Pornography powered the Internet. Any hit to our most basic emotional plexus. And this is how we want to engineer our future? Well, I guess it is, now, isn't it?

Plastics, Benjamin, plastics.

You have to imagine a world without plastics to imagine a sustainable future. That's a fact. It's hard, but not impossible, to do. Wooden boats are more fun to own than the plastic sort. And they last longer. But you have to enjoy the actual work to own one. You don't need toxic paints - water based or oil - when you can use linseed oil and so forth.

Plastic bags were invented as a way to support the industry which would otherwise have been too expensive for the car companies. That's a fact. Black lives keep getting reinvented downward from slavery to jail (Watch 13th please!) so that we can have our capitalism and eat it too.

This is no way to live, people. We have to bring our economy back down to earth, and use the digital stuff to compute optimal infrastructures according to the data from our now fully instrumented planet. Sure, we need to have the entertainment side - the plastic baggies - to support that overhead, but it's already a done deal.  We just have it all upside down and backwards again is all.

Digital and plastics are fine in small quantities, so long as we pay up front for all their externalities. Short of that, bakelite is pretty good. Natural rubber and steel. Stuff that requires skilled workers to maintain. Writing on paper.

We will always require good writers. My apologies. I can fix a lot of things, but I don't seem to be able to fix my writing. Sorry!

Do The Right Thing With Digital

Let's think of it this way: we can never know ourselves as well as those who love us know us. There are certain kinds of self-knowledge that we really must resist if we are going to maintain our face to the world. The self requires a little varnishing. That's why ad hominem arguments should be expunged from our protestations. There is no better way to hit a brick wall, for the purposes of changing a mind.

I suppose that's why novelists often start with variations on their own lives. Sure I know that the reason I despise FaceBook, apart from its obvious political and organizational guilt, is that I've never felt comfortable on any social scene. People often assume I'm arrogant, perhaps just because I won't join in. As a small child, I would hide to nurse some small hurt, or perhaps just because that's how I felt comfortable. It would take a while before anyone was worried, and still I didn't want to be found out. I'm sure there's medical literature about such behaviors, but I'm not sure that I want to see it.

I'm one of those people about whom glancing acquaintances often say, in a nice way, that I'm trying to find myself. I'm more and more petulant with that. No, thank you, I found myself a long long time ago and now I have work to do. Frankly the whole notion of "finding oneself" has always struck me as a loser from the get go. What could it possibly mean? No wonder the sixties were co-opted by commerce.

I am quite certain that having myriad images, moving and still, and other forms of recording, sound or writing, will almost never allow anyone to know a person better than their friends do, even while you still might know that person better than they do themselves. Sure, it has changed me to see myself on TV, but it hasn't helped me to know myself. I just cringe and look away. Sometimes fascinated as by a train wreck.

Just imagine how unlikely Trump has ever been to know himself, and then just imagine him changing his mind. Why would he? As far as he can tell from his reflection (something he apparently never does) he's on top of the world, and can gather a crowd to his pleasing at any time, even as he warns others who know themselves better never to gather for any other reason. An edited and curated stint on reality TV must really mess with a person's self-image.

I've been trying my whole life to make sense of digital. Now it feels critical. And I still have no way to talk about the dangers of the digital revolution swamping us now. Most people blithely assume that it just another step in the long path of "progress." People seem to believe that, ultimately, this progress is what being alive and human is all about. 

The thing is we don't often agree about progress to what. I would call it progress if we were to preserve those high arts once reserved for the wealthy nobility, but open the doors to the masses of producers and appreciators. I feel like we've made good progress with that, taking a look at hip hop culture. We've done less well with the pleasures of nobility and wealth. Since our culture confuses pleasure with happiness, that part is problematical. 

I've placed up here the actual writing which brought me to an epiphany of sorts when I was a much younger man. My epiphany was rather like what Barbara Ehrenreich describes in her Living With a Wild God. I was trying to make sense of what becomes different in the world through the lense of the Chinese literary tradition, along with what has changed in the world along with the then-new standard model of physics.

One might say that I had two basic insights. The one that tipped me over the edge was by way of the paradoxes introduced by quantum physics and relativistic time-dilation. Now recently with the apparent creation of a stable instance of Bose-Einstein condensate under weightless conditions on the space station, I feel a further boost for my epiphany. But it also would not have been possible without my deep dive into Chinese ways of knowing.

The relevant paradoxes involve such things as Bell's Theorem, quantum entanglement, time dilation, and more. My basic insight is that no object anywhere can be in any kind of basic contact with any other object. Of course everything depends on what is meant by "contact." The real trouble for me and for Ehrenreich is that there is no scientific theory to be disproven by my actual lived experience. There is nothing that one might do with this kind of understanding.

Or, in other words, my insights do nothing for what we call human progress. Agreement with them is not obligatory in relation to any definition for physical reality. Of course I don't really believe that. I believe that these insights make all the difference in the world to our thriving as a world community. But they don't seem to make me any more persuasive in the face of the stubborn recalcitrance demonstrated by that approximately half of our voting population which firmly believes in static and, to me, impossible truths.

So my obligation is as an educator, and indeed I have spent most of my academic life studying education, even while discouraged by actually doing it. As it is for many people who study education, part of my problem is that schooling continues to diverge from education to some terrifying extent. I would be a humble teacher if I had my druthers, but that doesn't seem to have been in the cards for me. I won't go into the reasons here, except to say that my teaching project keeps growing as I grow older. That's what I can't abandon.

I do know myself enough to admit that I arrogate to myself the really big questions. Of course I have no business doing that, but I'm not trying to be in anybody's face. Only once in my life did I ever introduce myself properly as a cosmologist, then quickly demurring that "of course I make my living in other ways." You do hair, then?

Far better to devote one's life to something interesting, like battery technology or gaming. Make a living and be humble. But for the astounding size of transnational conglomerates, and the even more astounding size of a small number of personal fortunes. In no good world would we allow so much power to the likes of Mark Zuckerberg, even though I am grateful to him for introducing me to The Three Body Problem. His spoken Chinese is execrable, by the way. He sounds just like an American technocrat, all descended from Jobs.

The task to deconstruct the current order of things is just too massive. Of course global corporations aren't going to care that Black Lives Matter, but oddly they now seem to. Putting a good face on a corrupt body? Deeper change? Time will tell.

My insights involve the ways in which we are embedded in cosmos and not subject to it as object (I do love English for its tortured ambiguity, meaning, of course, that I love to torture English, even while I know that's not very nice to you, gentle reader . . .). I almost have to work backwards from our mistaken apprehension that computers approximate how our brain might work to get to what is wrong with digital. But that almost always seems to get me nowhere.

So let's start from the other end, shall we? Machines in general and digital machines in particular introduce structures which quite simply don't and can't exist "in nature." Sure, there is a continuum from our skeletal bodies as machines and through our hands to our tools as operators on the world around us, but it is at the inception of digital reality that we, literally now, lose touch. Recognizing patterns which are anomalously regular is how we recognize cognition out in the wild. We spend a lot of money on a SETI array to do precisely that. No dial-twiddling, digital requires only instruction.

In physics, of course, there is no actual touch between objects. Instead there are forces mediated by "particles" which define the interactions not of things, but of clouds of probability. Even our very own bodies can be described by those complex equations, though our accurate placement in any cosmos is hardly problematical at the scale of such huge bodily aggregations of smaller "particles." Our position scintillates, which is probably part of what it means to be alive.

We are working now on quantum computers which attempt to harness quantum entanglement for our next step in crypto. This apparently has nothing to do with breakthroughs in computational theory, but rather with the speed possible for certain types of computation. As I understand it, the speed is in turn a function of the fact that there is no time-delay for the transmission of "information" from one stateful cubit to its partner which is at some distance.

But of course, we are not talking about information so much as we are the definition for what may be considered a single "thing." The distance possible between "entangled" quanta has been experimentally shown to approach infinity. Touch "here" may be felt simultaneously "there." But what in the world does touch mean in that regard? Feeling???? Is there an emotional/physical divide too now? Yes!

I am less than an amateur with these matters. Of course, I would like to know more, but as with post-modern critical theory, there is simply not world enough and time. Each of us planes off at some point to focus on some very local problem that we find ourselves interested in. Well, if we're not black and if we have some social capital mostly. IF you're not forced to be a wage slave.

A cosmologist can't be too picky about what he chooses to study. The meanings could come from most anywhere.

I have been graced by resources not available to most of us, and feel a powerful reciprocal obligation to make something of that grace. But it is hard. I don't have the language to be native in any field. I can't get in the door. And I haven't worked hard enough for 'The Man' to be able to choose to retreat from the fray to just simply enjoy my wonderful life, although I do plenty of that. 

To simply enjoy life seems the most irresponsible choice at the moment in our history, and far worse than all the promise forsaken by my not choosing to embed myself in some one particular field. There are many kinds of regret now, aren't there? It's not that life is awful. We're not coming out of a World War. But it sure does feel like a tipping point.

As far as I know, people continue to search for some magic in the brain, as though it were the brain alone which makes us human. I am much more of a whole body (and whole earth) person. I can't separate any part from the whole. I have described elsewhere how and why I subscribe to Riccardo Manzotti's "Spread Mind" theory of consciousness. For me, it means that we are present in much more of the cosmos than the space displaced by our bodies can describe. The title for his book-form summary is The Spread Mind: Why Consciousness and the World Are One. We are not so separate, one from each other.

So the root of digital evil is that digital reality chops off the connection. Much of what we enact now in our history realizes this chopping off in the form of a very American sort of radical individualism. I don't mean that digital reality is causing radical individualism, though I'm sure that a case could be made for that. I'm suggesting that both trends realize the same underlying misapprehension about who and what we are and what is cosmos.

I speak in radically metaphorical terms in everything that I can say. That's because there terms can only be meant metaphorically. Of course physicists don't really deal with actual particles at the subatomic level, starting with the atom in one direction or the other. There is nothing very particular about anything there. And of course I can make only a metaphorical connection between the literal digital divide I'm talking about here and the other one I want to talk about. But the connection is no less real than subatomic particles are. 

I happen to believe that the American experiment is very much worth preserving. That's not because the radical individual is the way into the future, but because, despite our original sin, we are the only place where the arc of history has even a chance to bend toward the good. This is fundamentally because we are structurally not afraid of knowledge. That is a very good thing, indeed.

We still need to figure out how to decide what to do with the knowledge that we gain.

We are prevented from being a great nation (in moral terms) because of our radical individualism and the peculiar form of rampant capitalism which we've adopted as native. Our brand of capitalism tends toward the same results in relation to the open pursuit of knowledge that various forms of totalitarianism do. Even China's approach is better. In China, they're not so much afraid of knowledge as they are cautious about what can count as knowledge in the short term. My problem is that the short term is much shorter than anyone seems to realize. 

Sure, I'm talking about climate change or pandemics or species and planet extinction, but I'm not talking about what we need to do about those things. I think I'm talking more about what we need to stop doing, and I mean in our systems of knowledge and understanding, not even in our behaviors. Well, that's a chicken/egg kind of problem. The trouble is that we have to figure out how to change our minds collectively. The story of Jesus did that once upon a time. Relativity theory did that too, with a very brief sort of boom.

We've tended in the direction of disparaging mind against digital machine, just because signals along the neurons move so slowly. We confuse our mind with our brain. By our brain? By the way we think!

We can't possibly be as efficient in our rational calculations as a machine can be. Heck, we can't even rationalize the decisions we've already made quickly enough to claim to have made them ourselves, and we somehow think that might be infringing on our precious free will. Guess what, free will takes time. That thing that we're running out of.

Manzotti points out that we're conceptualizing how the brain works in the wrong way. It's not about speed. In fact it's about slowing down perceptual information even to the point of holding that information in a kind of near perpetual cycling so that we can perceive it again in the form of memory. 

I came at this realization myself lo those many years ago, but I was coming at it from the perspective of Chinese literature, which isn't so concerned with the inner person. The patterns on the surfaces are what counts, and of course, we know those we love much better than they know themselves. 

So the brain is a complex series of slowed down cycling messages and intersections. It can be repurposed if there are injuries, and the circuits are largely self-healing even as the neurons wither and die. Sleep perchance and death and dreaming are all essential for this all to work. Too much conscious attention just makes a mess of things. The brain largely wants to be autonomous. The cycling from birth to death is also an over-ordering of the brain until it just simply can't track, much in the way that I can't remember which digital article I read this morning, and no matter how good search is, I'll never find it again. 

Immortality, like literal infinity, would just crowd out every other. Not a good result.

Autonomous machines are different. Make enough racial profiling facial recognizing deadly force drones and we can end the world in a jiffy. Not by killing it off, but by the backlash disruption we've been causing to all those feeling the pain of collateral damage. It's the immune response which does the killing. That's what this moment in history means.

We have all been enabled to socially distance ourselves from trouble to the extent that we've won the lottery jackpot of disrupting someone else's industry. And we have all the right and good ideas as we amuse ourselves up to the point of death, which is inevitable in any case. That's what socially distancing social stratification means, and guess who gets left behind to pay our piper? The ones out in the streets now, being called terrorists by our terrorist in chief.

So, not only do we have to deconstruct and rebuild our policing on the model of Camden, New Jersey, but we have to do the same with our military. We create the terrorists and then, just like Vietnam all over again, they outwit us with their very human ingenuity. The end. 

Of course fascists love technology. It keeps the trains on time, and identifies everyone so that they (we) can be pinched in an instant the moment we cross whatever line they've drawn for us. We in these United States think its fine when it's done commercially, but now it's being done politically, and for sure militarily.

Of course Big Business loves technology. It allows it to grow and grow and then the business itself turns into technology, just like the economy turns into finance and a bunch of gig workers. Producing nothing of any value, no matter how pleasant it might be.

Even still the ubiquitous smartphones make it hard for the powers that be to lie. Except why then does our commander in chief get to lie out loud and often and still have his following? Well, duh, it's because of all those autonomous processes which run our newsrooms. I'm not only talking about how Facebook spoons up its newsfeeds to a level of complexity impossible for any human to keep up with. I'm also talking about the actual newsrooms which profit the same way from whatever grabs eyeballs, and then the aggregators who find out what you like to read by the same algorithms used by Google and Facebook.

How the hell can we even know what truth is? What the truth is? One lie is as good as any other, and so it comes down to the stories we like to tell ourselves. And these are nearly all impervious to being educated out once we call ourselves adults. Trust me, I've tried really hard for most of my life and it can't be done.

So, that's why I dig down to the basics. Particle physics. Quantum reality. Chaos theory. Getting rid of the mind/body subject/object dualisms. That's the only thing that can save us or else we're just not worth saving, sayeth Gaia or what-you-will. We are now in the process of stepping out from nature, and if we keep it up we will have succeeded once and forevermore. We will be as dead as an autonomous robot whose plug got pulled.

What then is the difference between the information being held in mind and the information being held in computer memory? I'm going with Manzotti's definition here for information, which is just the stuff which passes among objects which makes them perceptible. Which means to be in touch. Which means that physical information-carrying signals, in the case of animal minds, impinge on our perceptual apparatus. Which means to feel.

In a computer, or should I say for a computer, the information needs to be digitized which means conceptualized which means a static relation among conceptual objects. Ideal Platonic Numbers, say. Conceptual objects are things held in mind for the purpose of organizing perceptual objects. A kind of literal calculus takes place in and by computational representations of reality where conceptual slices are stacked together to form an approximation of actual fluid non-binary reality. 

Irony be my north star.

As with any mathematical calculus, digital reality can only be a very precise approximation of what is being measured. Again, as Manzotti would have it, there are no images in our heads any more than there are images stored in computer memory. Computers can't see. We can. And no matter how many pixels, the stored image can never be the same as the live one. The live one is felt directly.

Our brains don't store conceptual reality. They store perceptual reality, which is much richer. Since we store concepts so poorly, we must construct a narrative frame to hold them. The narrative frame of science is the best and most durable one that has ever been constructed, but it's showing its age already. It apparently can't overpower the Jesus frame. Both have been expropriated for use by the military industrial complex. We need a new frame!

Bill Gates has built his spaceship here on earth, which is the only place such a life would be viable. I'm sure it's more impregnable than Donald Trump's bunker, even given all the secret service, who might, after all, be carrying some kind of virus. The wealthy everywhere have escaped reality and deploy the police and the military to keep themselves safe. They might as well be on Mars, and good riddance!

Why not? If life is only about happiness and if you only have so much time on earth, then why not make that short time as pleasant as possible? Too bad about the marginal classes and the precariat. We'd love to have them join us for the cost of membership.

The trouble is the carrying cost to the planet though, right? 

In my book, conceptual relations are just as real as perceptual relations are. In place of information to define the relation among objects in motion, I talk of e-motion to describe non-forceful relations among objects in free-fall. Love moves through the eons in the direction of life, while hate moves toward stasis in the direction of the dead. The difference then is between the quick and the dead, and we have been moving toward the dead. 

I want to convince the likes of Bill Gates to live more modestly. The party is down in the engine room in the bowels of the ship and not up where you need black tie. 

My changes are definitional and not scientifically testable. That's a shame, really, because I won't be able to convince anyone by showing them what I'm able to do that couldn't be done before because of some new theoretical understanding which is experimentally demonstrably real. This theory requires a different kind of enactment. The kind we're watching (most of us, stuck off in some safe space in our wombs with a view) playing out right now out in the streets. 

There simply is no army powerful enough to quiet the people. That's what defunding the police state has to mean. To the extent that we hold our smartphones high, we still own the digital reality. We will depopulate our prisons by deconstructing our militarized police force. We will depolarize the world by deconstructing our obsolete notions of armed forces. We will jump back into the fray of nature be reconceptualizing what it means to be human, and we won't have to lose a thing about our humanity to do it. We won't have to become beastly. We won't have to forsake our art and our music and our dance and especially not our food and wine. These are what connect us. These are how we touch the cosmic forces. These are our expressions of love in return for the love which brought us this far.

These are the facts of life, fight them though we think Jesus wants us to do. That's not Jesus talking, that's The Man, and he only wants to grab your pussy. Defund the Church (oh, right, that's already happening), and Jesus will come to life again for real.

Numbers don't exist in nature. Numbers are an abstraction from nature, but it isn't only humans who know how to count. Humans learned how to tabulate, and that was the start of all the trouble. Tabulation led to writing as one thing leads to another and we find ourselves in over our head. We have to get it together, people!

Science can't advance without metrics. Metrics means numbers. Before science government needed metrics. Before government, agriculture needed metrics. But somehow we learned to separate the perceptual world from the world of the subject who was doing the observations and working the metrics to abstract theories which would enable ever more fruitful manipulations of the world around so that the subjects could live and rest more easily. 

But now finally we know that mind cannot be abstracted from matter; it can't be separated. We should be culturally grown up enough to know - woke enough to realize - that there is no personal God who's going to rescue us and take it from here. We should also know that we aren't even close to being equal to the complexity of the natural environment in which we live. Our science has barely gotten started, for chissakes!

Along comes digital reality to accelerate everything and we seem to understand that we're going off the rails. That we have failed morally in our development. Not only have we failed our fellow humans, but we're about to destroy the natural homeostasis that we depend on in the same way that all life depends on it. We're acting as though we can destroy nature with impunity. But nature's destruction is what happens naturally when one tries to order it. When one takes dominion. 

I think we need to rediscover balance.

These separations - heart from mind, subject from object, mind from body - they all enable a disconnect not just from life but from our neighbors. By forcing and enforcing social distancing - by wearing masks and building walls - Covid-19 and the various Donald Trumps of the world call the question; what if we were to join together? What if we were never to profit again from illness? What if we were never to prosecute a deal where someone has to be the loser so that we can win?

Numbers to enhance scientific understanding somehow transmuted into numbers to represent reality. We can't know intimately what we can only see on TV.  We can't have a discussion by texting and tweeting. Nobody even reads a long email anymore. What choice is there but to take to the streets?

Man, I sure do wish I could write more better. Well, not more. You know what I mean, by very definition.

Fame!

China is all over the news these days. People with a somewhat longer memory than normal here still remember the events tagged by "June 4" back in 1989. We now watch China carefully as the MidEast - where China is so a-politically invested - enters the global tide of people-power. It seemed that China started it all way back when the walls came down all over Europe.

China started just about everything! But they themselves had no notion that such was the case until the West held up the mirror. Gunpowder, the compass, paper and the printed replication of authoritative texts as carved on blocks. Stele-rubbings to carry far and wide and forward those inscriptions on the landscape of Chinese antiquity. Heaven brought to earth as wen 文 which were regular and stable patterns with the human heart 心 at their center 中, or zi 字 the child in the temple of his ancestors. Literature and culture have deep roots in the Middle Kingdom.

Chinese, in ignorance of our personal God and Savior, developed a meritocratic system for selection into the ranks of government service. In the West it would take until the paroxysms of political revolution, themselves descended from a knocking away of the barrier of literacy between the folk and the lettered priesthood. And even then, only America would really confront, directly, the notion that some deserved to be closer to God than others.

Gutenberg is credited in the West with combining the fruits of the metal-casters' arts of endurance with the wine-press of the fruiterer's arts of intoxication to create a vehicle for the widespread dissemination of alphabetic words. The Word, which only recently is thought ever to have existed apart from interpretation and translation, could be rendered in the vulgar tongue. God could be brought closer to the masses, or the masses closer to God, so long as the Word could remain sanctified and sanctioned without divine hearings. Without interpretation of history or language or truth or illusion.

Along with the nobility we pushed out from their palaces, we also displaced the notion that those at society's pinnacle should behave in noble fashion. We thought we might engender a natural aristocracy, and have struggled ever since to find quasi-scientific ways to take the measure of a man. In the end, we still and always worship the marketplace, where the true measure of a man is his fame or his fortune, either of which alone or combined with the other will suffice. Even word-smithing is evaluated by the marketplace.

That is as near as we can come to some method to distribute power and authority which will encourage the best among us to the fore. Of course, it has always been an embarrassment that Jesus himself would be left behind by this method, and that so many who rise to the top show themselves concupiscent and greedy. The Chinese seem to have done, marginally, better over the years.

Recently, the Chinese have faced a much more sudden change than we went through here in the West. Yet even in the face of Western gunboats, they remained smug in their confidence about their cultural superiority, right up through the very day when their long-lived empire finally crumbled. They had to turn around their history on a dime.

In fact it was the discovery of individualism which most changed China. I have been indulging in a fairly concerted read of documentation about China's impact against Western style industrialization, at the lead of which, as in the West, was the printing press. Individualism is obsessed with personality and with personal histories of the sort which could be and was ignored except for the literati in China.

Now, with the help of Joseph Needham, the Chinese could rehabilitate some long forgotten artisans: inventors, proto-scientists and mathematicians. History was suddenly forward looking. The Word became as much a promise as an archive. Literacy had escaped the bounds of what the imperial center could sanction.

Chauvinism remains. Even as it struggles to contain the exuberance of its individualistic seekers after fame and fortune, the one thing still most constant about the Chinese people seems to be their smug certainty that they are the center of civilized humanity. So long as they can hold order in the face of chaos.

Labors are nearly complete now to rectify the Chinese collective memory. Tiananmen the massacre, or Tiananmen the public square, clean and safe and open. So recent in historic memory.Orthodox subversion of the historical record for purposes of order.

Now our own highly irresponsible political rhetoricians would have us afraid of China. These players on the registers of our emotions are the real terrorists. Perhaps we should be fearful all the time, but one still should wonder why, when our most important export after blue jeans is the individualism which they celebrate, and whose destruction, they feel, is imminent.

It's individualism that rocks the Middle East now, and not its proxy: a craving for freedom. And that's what's rocking China. Our political rhetoric can even make us angry about our anger. It can confuse us about collective comforts. Maybe we need to learn to read a little bit beneath our own surfaces.

Celebrity style and authorial cool are the things which now run the globe, and running up on Oscar, why then is it that we must be so nervous? These are American triumphs! We should and must be gloating.

I don't suppose that it could be that the titans of cool, the pinnacle occupiers in this the early 21st century, are as desperate as the Koch brothers or Steve Jobs to stay on top. Their days are numbered, sure, but there is no limit, clearly, to the desire to win. Perhaps at any cost.

If the printing press is the exemplar, avatar and enabler of industrialism, then the Internet is the same for post-industrial reality. Cause and effect must be discarded in favor of a more Foucault-esque delineation of our Grand Controlling Narratives. Text is the operator. Humanity the operand.

Single-party rule in China mocks the ascendancy of financial power; iron fist in velvet glove with the mockery of politics at home enacted by the Coke/Pepsi dance of Republican v. Democrat. It's all about the money, stupid! China's leaders also want to maintain a creative fiction of poise - to preserve a glorious constructed past in service to a still more glorious future.

And interestingly, it all comes down to a differing preference for the way the written word gets rendered. To have a name is to be famous. Alternatively, one is a "mouth," a consumer, to be counted but not to count. By the Confucian tradition, names are to be rectified (chaos ordered) and the count of written words to be contained. By the loyal heterodoxy of Taoism, the name that can be called such is not the eternal name, just as the way that can be followed is not the everlasting way.

By means of its proliferating and lavishly funded Confucius Institutes, the Chinese wish to lay claim again to their traditional written form. Long presumed a clumsy obstacle in the way of mass literacy, it also continues to  serve the purpose it always has served: to define and to unite a culture, a people and a civilization.

Here in the West we descend inexorably away from those unifying original words. We're left only with ideas, to be realized in some distant future. And so the battle is joined? Why could it not be resolved into something more in manner of a love affair, one has to wonder. Ah, but the terrorism of the Word would have to be subverted. Players would have to relinquish the cheap and easy victories of mass motivation by tweets, bumper stickers and mass-mediated sloganeering.

Names proliferate in these fallen times. Words, words and more words, all as media for money which renders power by way of fame and fortune. The party would remain poised at the intersection of conservative and liberal forces. All parties are deployments of wealth.

Yet at this moment, historically, we all do and must seek something other from fame. Something human. Something lettered. Something of character. Something more collective than individual, but at the same time something not collectively rendered. Ironically true.

Now, back to reading. I'll report back to you when I find it. Or you can report to me.

Will the Authentic Seattle Please Stand Up?

Puzzling authenticity is really fun and challenging in Seattle. Everything is all about authenticity here, and it can  be really really hard to tell the posers from the real. Having walked all over Buffalo recently, the city I grew up around, I understand that walking is the only way really to get to know a place. It also happens to be the only real side benefit to pulmonary emboli since it seems that one must do something to get ones breath back, and walking fits the bill.

So, if I can discover a new Buffalo just by walking through the city I know best, it would seem that I could also discover a new Seattle, a city I know reasonably well, but not so well as I do Buffalo. Still, who are the authentic ones? Is it the fine guitartist with a nice and mellow deep voice at the Public Market whose face and clothes and distended belly prove that he sleeps on the street although he has CDs of his music for sale? Is it the pair of Native Americans sitting on the dock down at water level, sharing a simple meal of bread and polished apples? Is it me gawking at the Tesla Roadster which runs faster on laptop batteries than a Ferrari can on elaborate fuel injection, welcomed warmly to a city where no-one can tell who's got the money?

It can seem as though everyone in Seattle is striving mightily to become that "it" self; the one you get by driving the vintage Mini Cooper instead of the new one everyone else drives. The one you get by unfurling the sails on your wooden boat just at the solstice while everyone else is strolling in the unaccustomed sunshine. The one perhaps who throws the fish instead of merely buying it or snapping its picture. The one who understands that the best fish cannot be had from that particular tourist market in the first place.

Yesterday happened to be the day when admissions letters would go out from the Northwest School, one of several to which anxious parents submit their child's application with far more raw desire invested than you or I might have for shiny new toys of either child or adult variety. I had discovered two things the evening before; that a former student of mine is the Upper School director there, and that my niece had applied. Or rather my sister had applied my niece.

I knew neither of these things ahead of time and so could invest no guilt to my dear sister's all-in-good-jest complaint about missed connections. But as my daughter's boyfriend would be subbing at the school that day, it seemed a reasonable thing to do to walk there just in case I might be able to scare up my former student who I'd last seen when he was well beneath adulthood.

As I arrived still near the beginning of my perhaps 10 mile cicumnavigation of the city, the students had all poured out into the streets for a fire drill, and there was Ben looking very much in charge. We eventually had lunch together and I got the very insiders look at the school, and a take on its history with which I was already acquainted, because we had, the school and I, shared some history about the wars of transition from founding to continuing energy way way back in the day. This can be a problem for schools, as for most anything about life.

Does this count to make me a kind of "it" Seattlelite?? I hardly think so. But it surely does count as authentically random, unpredictable and somehow raw. Maybe? I really don't know.

I do think that there is something important to be discovered by hanging back from too much control. By staying open to what might come along in the course of simply being alert. I think that there may even be something to be said for hanging back from too much investment in authenticity. My own daughter never had as a choice a school so fine as the Northwest School, and yet I can find nothing deficient in her, or even in the potential she still might realize to change the world for the better. Or was it always and only about what she might accomplish for herself?

Among other things, I have been puzzling what to do about a chopstick my daughter's boyfriend and I managed to drop down into the oil pan of an engine whose blown head gasket we have been working to replace. I'd thought that the chopstick might do as a guide to place the cylinder head, but somehow it went down the wrong and bottomless hole. In the act of retrieval, I got to watch it disappear very much like the way in which cinematic drama might capture the feeling of losing your friend to the abyss when your grip on his hand fails.

This particular car - a VW of course - requires some significant disassembly before its oil pan can be removed. There are time constraints. There are tool and equipment constraints. Of course there are massive money constraints. The full drama has yet to unfold. I wonder - I really do - how it will end. I wonder if the chopstick also will force the proper cleaning out of the oilpan, the accomplishment of which will add that much new life to this old car. I wonder, honestly, how I can accomplish the blood draw which my doctor requires of me in a medical and insurance nightmare whose plot can only be the most absurdist comedy I have ever even imagined.

Stay tuned.

* * * 

So, OK, as if I'd willed it, March madness produces health care reform. I am as obscenely gleeful about this as are those basketball fans waving towels and shouting to break their vocal apparatus. If it wouldn't be unseemly, I would paint my face Obama warpaint colors, as someone along my walk did his garage door. I would shout it out on streets as so many were doing along the way to pick up our pizza at Fat Mama's up on Capital Hill. This is not an insignificant accomplishment.

This morning, I removed Bob's wheel - that's the other VW which belongs in the junk yard - and found that indeed his brake pads were down to the metal core, and tossing shiny flakes all over get-out. But the cost to replace these is still below the cost to rent a car for a day. Chris is rounding up the tools and parts to put the other VW back together. The sun is coming out.

No matter how much I feel akin to the folks out here, who are multicolored among their friends and even among the hypertalented children they adopt, I still find myself offended by the hyperachieving. It still feels an indictment on everyone else who isn't quite so great either in reality or aspiration. It still feels like a species of racism, although clearly it's not racism. But it is exclusivity, and even though these kids will likely be the ones to "save the world" which they actually are already doing by break-dancing for Haiti (you have to pause to parse that statement, consider what break dancing is, and where it got its start, and the fact that there are expensive schools here to teach it).

I still want somehow to howl, and scream and exclaim that we can do better than this. That it really isn't necessary to be that elaborate in the preparation of your mind or body. That there is something to be said for normalcy, for spaces filled with nothing more than absurd laughter.

Well, I'll keep you posted as and if I figure any of this stuff out. I'm sure your breath is 'bated. My daughter took me on the underground Seattle tour on Sunday. Her boss had given her a couple of tickets as a Christmas present, although the major domo of the tour still required that we sign our names, and give him our phone numbers, and those of my daughter's boss. He wouldn't say these gift cards had been forged. Something about being given away too freely. But I don't think her boss is that cheap.

The tour was great, in a touristy kind of way. There wasn't much to see, well, except for the genetic uderpinnings of Seattle. The building too fast in a sandy bottom, where incoming tide would cause the newly invented flush crappers to spout their contents which had been meant to go out to sea. Where a fire required rebuilding in stone what had gone up in wood, and where the merchants were too impatient to await the city fathers' plan to fill in the low ground. Where the architecture sits half submerged, and you must enter the spots where the whores used to await you, before the stone, before the fire, through an upstairs window, now at street level, now overcrowded by tourists. The Elliot Bay bookstore, anchor to the Pioneer Square district, will be moving up to Capital Hill. Perhaps Buffalo's fortunes and those of Seattle are more closely aligned than these folks could ever guess. The trajectory is trending down, just like my clotting factors.

Fallen ladies all, with fine aspirations for their offspring. Good day!

Negotiating Price - Conclusive Proof of Conspiracy

Lots of people these days find that just as they were about to poke their nose above water, something bad happens. The car breaks or the furnace needs attention. It's as if there were a conspiracy, with rising prices calibrated to hit your cynicism button. Like when I moved out into the country and my auto insurance rates went up. "Well, that's just what the computer shows" and I read some stuff about how rural roads are actually more dangerous than city streets, and then forgot about it.

Yes yes, we all know that there's a conspiracy against us, but who can we be righteously angry at? What person can we stick in what bullseye, and then throw outrageous darts at? And once they take that spot, well, is it really just a matter of how much they're worth? Can our anger be gaged by the price of the target? Why not, right? What other metric can we possibly have.

Moving back into the city now they want to nearly double my auto insurance rates. It can almost make a guy hopping mad. But who do you get mad at, exactly? Not the nice woman on the phone. Not at her computer. Just like when gas prices were going up, and so everything else had to raise dependent prices at the same time. Sometimes calling it a fuel surcharge, just to outsource some petty rage.

And now the Governor here in New York State has had to cancel payments to local school districts since he can't print money he doesn't have. As if that cut won't get passed along too. It makes you want to go back on all the little deals you made where you accepted logo value for the real thing. As in, how does that price get computed anyhow? Isn't it simply what you're willing to pay, based on some calculus of desire? Weren't we all out buying iPods and making a lifestyle out of it? And then paying the breakdown insurance fee becauase they're not really supposed to be repairable. And then somehow thinking that Steve Jobs is the more cool-friendly dude at the top, up against dweeby cloud warriors like Steve Ballmer or Eric Schmidt.

Jobs runs his job like a fascist dictator, and has his own cult-like following. We don't even resent that he gets his new body organs from the head of some outsourced line, since he's so crucial to the workings of our economy. Well, hell I'm almost certain I'd like him a lot better than I would Bill Gates. I mean, for anyone with a sense of humor who reads Dr. Suess, Mom is the consummate fascist, and she's pretty nice. And Steve manufactures cool, while Bill just makes money, right? Or gives it away to folks who think like he does.

But these are all the guys at the center of the conspiracy to set price just at your breaking point. Um, I think that's what capitalism means. Even though universal healthcare would save more businesses than it could possibly destroy, the business community fights against it. Even though an even and well regulated playing field for doing business would liberate corporations from being forced by business logic to act like really bad citizens in their bogus role as "legal persons", they rail against more regulation.

Well, ultimately, you have the choice to buy or not to, right? Except when it comes to certain things, and those things now raise their prices I guess just because they have to. The economy's bad all over. But it never is quite clear whether the incredibly falling prices or the incredibly rising prices are what constitutes the biggest danger to our economy.

The falling prices are built on the fictional cost of oil, which is subsidized by simply mortgaging our future. Only the cost to extract and for political baksheesh gets factored in, and never the actual cost of the decimation of our commons; our common heritage. Never the cost of war. Never the cost to those we exploit, who aren't resourceful enough to slow our extraction of their resources.

The rising prices are built on want or greed or desperation moves to stay in business despite fallen demand. But sometimes new things, like iPods, can be compared to the incredible cost they would have had were that same "functionality" to be introduced the year before, and they can seem like falling prices even when they fill a category which never even had existed.

So, in the end it can seem marvelously conspiratorial when you find yourself right on that edge if something happens, and certainly over it if you lose your job or get sick. And none of us knows how to fly as escape from free fall.

But this conspiracy is surely between you, the consumer, and those who present stuff for your conspicuous consumption. There can be no real mystery about that. Price means to set you near your edge, which is fine until you lose your confidence or balance, and then the game is up.

Everyone steps away, and like those Chinese who we thought once were being all taught to jump off their stools on some cue to focus a shockwave down to the Big Apple, say, more effectively than a nuke could be delivered; everyone steps away from their edge and the economy reels from the shock waves of it. As if not one chance Chinaman could be counted on to have second thoughts. As if it's all a confidence game.

Because those cappos at the center of the financial economy were caught up in new ways to manufacture confidence and deliver the certainty of high returns by simple math which by any other name would be called a Ponzi scheme. Selling futures at a discount. So long as the future can be pushed off into seeming eternity. Which it can't. I'll insure you insuring me and we're all happy until we're not.

And so now how is it that we can keep full employment without the automobile, say, no matter how powered, to take up that much of our paychecks? How can we keep the economy humming without people playing perpetual musical houses on some bizarre notion that the price of real-estate will keep magically rising just because, what? There continue to be more and more of us? That's gotta stop too.

It would seem that we could and must bring things back down to earth. If the cost of oil were to reflect, truly, the cost to replace it. If the cost of parking were to reflect its true value, and not the reverse-protectionist scheme of if you charge for it no-one will come.

If the actual labor cost for goods were to be some significant fraction of what are now the distributed logo-costs, the shipping costs, the marketing costs, the free-parking costs, the salesperson costs, the stocking costs, all of which are in competition with the free-of-them-all-but-shipping cost of goods from the virtual shelving of the Internet.

The fact that there is not a greater disparity in price from store shelves and price from the Internet does beg one great big question, don't you think? As in, where does the real subsidy come from? Could it be, simply, the roads and the parking and the fact that none of us factor in the cost to own our cars? It might turn out that labor represents the almost nil actually built in to final price. It might turn out that there really is a conspiracy of price fixing which has nothing to do with anything at all but your desire.

But where will people work when this all collapses? Can there really be enough jobs after the big box stores shuffle down their cardboard walls, and all those underpaid workers go back out into the local stores where the clerks once could earn enough to raise a family? When physical widgets get manufactured locally without physical danger to children or smokestack effluent to spoil the air, will there be enough actual jobs for handy people without the desire to prove it in college?

Why not, right? I mean, if you do the math, there's enough money right now going to the center that if it were to be redistributed out would generate enough tax revenue to even silence Glenn Beck about his trillions that he can't conceive.

I'd say maybe. I'd say it might be worth the investment of some hope, which costs precisely nothing. What if instead of doing everything ourselves, according to the massive educational infrastructure of lego-style DIY home improvement, we were to actually learn, once again, to trust our neighbors, and pay the ones with that kind of genius to build and to repair our houses? Could it actually be that the price, rid of all those externalities of centralized design copyright costs, would drop to where we might wonder how we ever could afford the extravagant cost of widgets sent from distant shores?

Could it be that we could end up with houses worth living in, and minds not all ticky-tacky identical? Where design flowed more naturally from workers trained as apprentices, and who understood local conditions and materials? Where the distance from source to market was actually walkable? Bicycles in a pinch?

Not to mention the food, which we've already learned to never cook ourselves, as though the cost of servants was ever so extravagant as the cost, including the externalized health-care cost, of eating out perpetually and rapidly. Julia Child compiled her guide to French cooking for servantless Americans. Well . . . .

Not to mention the dialing back of war overhead. Not to mention the re-creation of tourist destinations worth visiting since they aren't all variations on the very same theme park. They could be so interesting that it might be worth threading them together across a slow walk, like beads on a necklace, making the flyover far too boring to be worth its expenditure of however little time and inconvenience.

This extravagant vision is as near to hand as ceasing to hand over all of our power to those Ivy generated thinkers who have been allowed actually to believe that their particular brand of genius - the kind which gets measured by IQ - is the only kind which counts. They are naked now, with nothing to show for their supposed intelligence apart from a very clever deflowering of our mother earth.

So, I'm also extravagantly hoping that our very fine community organizing president has surrounded himself with so many Ivy Leaguers simply because he knows that they represent the actual power elite; and that he has that much confidence in his own powers of persuasion that he can convince them to relinquish their strangle-hold on what gets considered for publication. That he understand that one must hold ones friends close, but ones enemies even closer.

That once the power elite are convinced that they too will feel the pain of the least among us, whether transmitted along with the rampant and indiscriminate disease vectors of poverty, or the indiscriminate desolation of living on a despoiled planet; that once this seed-core of sourdough thinkers and doers and lever pullers sees that they actually are naked emperors, then the catalytic outspread of better living actually can change the world, so to speak.

Because, of course, scant readable publications do come from the Ivy. The good stuff all comes from somewhere else; the music, the literature, the interesting architecture, the theater, the painting. All that comes from the Ivies is power. They train for the voice of power, the assumption of power, the supposition of power, and they populate elite museums with meaningless art removed from the context of any life. They fill the elite concert halls with music which never can quite remove itself from the age when cardinals actually did wear red and jewels and screwed around and wielded power behind their curtains.

And these folks are the ones we allow to represent us in the halls of power? And Glenn Beck is the enemy? It really can be hard to know which are the more powerful delusions, but it does seem clear that the mutual suspicious between intellectuals and people whose genius is elsewhere, might be the most corrosive actual divide in our actual Republic.

I retain some real hope that this divide can be crossed. Rock and roll has made its way into the halls of power. Powerful stories sell better than refined literature. Good wine can still be had. What the hell, eh? Size really does matter, as does height. Some things are just too high, and must come down, like Tiger Woods, for the sheer pedestrian weight of being human. Some kinds of genius are simply over-compensated, as are some shortcomings overcompensated for. And no matter how perfectly composed are your publications, reclusive and exlusive geniuses of my world, I'll take mine live and local. Every time.