Review: The Netanyahus: An Account of a Minor and Ultimately Even Negligible Episode in the History of a Very Famous Family

The Netanyahus: An Account of a Minor and Ultimately Even Negligible Episode in the History of a Very Famous Family by Joshua Cohen
My rating: 4 of 5 stars



View all my reviews

You know, by virtue simply of reading this book, I belong to a minuscule elite. Most of us are discreet; we are circumspect enough not to try to compose ourselves in words. We know our betters.

But clearly, I suffer incontinence with words. It's not that I wish to join the hyper-elite of authorial authority. I am not so deluded. A kind of public service, merely, though no-one might care to read me. Well anyhow, what could it possibly matter, right? Amazon - which means simply that Bezos takes credit for all it if - Amazon owns Goodreads, owns IMDB, and can therefore funnel your enthusiasms better than I or any other elite reader. It all happens so discreetly. Mars? Really?

Influencers elsewhere make their way by appearing uncomposed, sometimes almost brutish. We elite readers really should control the world, and likely will in case we ever survive our current autocatalytic nightmares. It would make sense, wouldn't it? In a strange way. 

But meanwhile, here is a very strange book. I can't really say what I think because I'm not Jewish, and therefore likely have no right. In just the way that Canadians seem to have infiltrated our popular music culture, I am more than comfortable that handsome-looking, even boyishly androgenous self-aware Jews have taken up the best strains of our literature. It all makes for lovely reading.

The strangeness of this book is that it is supposed to contain some, or perhaps just an, actual fact(s). There is an "extra-credit" coda to the book, which is really the culmination, the conclusion, the climax, actually, of the read. This is where he fills us in on the book's inception. The Harold Bloom stuff. Perhaps the reason he's an author and I never shall be. 

I only got lore on Bloom because my Jewish girlfriend sold him books. I've never been up on names, myself. Drop them all the time, but nothing to jumpstart a career. And I would never wear little James Joyce glasses. Mine were always the same as Woody Allen's asshole characters.

Anyhow, the very finalmost culmination of the book's conclusion is a verbatim, apparently, of the actual prototype for the character Judy from the book. Now our author here seems to want us to riducule this actual self-identified dyke woman who actually did live with Harold, the man, Bloom for a while. For her, all is patriarchy, even the definition for Jew - what Jewish means - which has powerful ironic resonance with the book. So I don't know, maybe the actual woman was being celebrated. I thought what she wrote had a certain sort of cogency. At least as much as the book's protagonists do.

Meanwhile - and here's my punchline - after letting us know why and how he had to camouflage the book, because it would otherwise hew too close to real, you could actually take the coda and work it all backwards, almost like a <i>roman a clef</i> or something.

Now I thought that was really cool. Plus, he does kind of culminate all our brilliant Jewish authors in his roundabout sort-of definition of what it means to be Jewish. I'd thought he was going to toss the comic shtick, but nope, he almost does Roth one better. To whom this book should probably be dedicated except that I'm guessing Cohen rather looks down on Roth. Which is why only four stars from me.

Brilliant! What can I say?

On Invention; I Am Become Irony, Interpreter of Worlds

By rights, this post should be in response to a question posed on Quora, asking about "invention." The asker seems to betray ambition to invent. Sometimes, when I'm not quite in my right mind, I take such bait, but not often. There are lots of questions like this one on Quora, and the ones I might be inclined to respond to generally imply, to me, utter ignorance in the context for the question.

No expert myself, I still feel qualified to comment on ignorance.

I am myself quite ignorant, of course, which is likely why I never respond to most questions. I would rather be thought a fool than to open my mouth and remove all doubt, sort of thing. 

Anyhow, those who do feel that they possess sure knowledge seem always to teach me something that I didn't know. I don't even know if there is a realm where I feel any sort of expertise. Competence, perhaps, but expert status, rarely!

But here I go, on what is, by far, a less public forum. Mine. I am the only expert here. So expert that no-one dares to comment.

The term "invention" always implies an individual coming up with something de novo and changing the world thereby. But even the roots of the word are more about discovery than invention, as the word "invention" is deployed in common usage. 

Discovery implies, of course, much ground being laid ahead of time by many many more people than the discoverer. Our fixation on fixing who's first and giving them a Name is much more about our particular Western ways of viewing history than it is about anything real. 

We value individuals and we value individualism, when we value anything at all. Our economy values individualism. Our constitution enshrines it. 

As I've commented here before, it is patently absurd for Jeff Bezos to call himself an inventor, and then to claim personal responsibility for all the value-added that he attributes to Amazon. Fine, give him credit and lay at this feet the cost of all the "creative" destruction that he unleashed by simply being that unbound by scruple of any sort. 

He certainly never thought of doing good for the world, unless one wishes to make those thoughts continuous with getting us to Mars. That would be abandonment. He is a garden variety capitalist marauder is all, writ a little bit more large, and with a little bit less concern for lives of his (ever temporary) workers. It would be hard for me to ascribe anything like genius to his moves. And harder still to find any value added. The world changed, and now we can't do without Amazon. Brilliant! Give me a patent on climate change!

Many ascribe the interstate highway system to President Eisenhower. But at least he warned us about the Military Industrial Complex that it subserved. The excuse for building it was to have a way to mobilise troops across our vast continental expanse, in case of invasion. 

Now try to imagine anyone succeeding in blocking such a massive public works. In hindsight, attempts to block it might be based on the environmental destruction that so many cars unleashed would wreak upon the land. But with military and economic imperatives aligned, of course there would be no way to succeed in any blockage. Indeed high speed limited access roadways have since covered the earth. They must have been inevitable. They surely made many of us enthusiastic about long distance car vacations, obsolete though those might be just now. 

In effect, that massive public expenditure offloaded onto the public the larger cost of the private vehicles and motive power. And we were happy to afford our cars - thanks Big Anti-Semite Henry Ford! - for the sense of independence they provided. Building high speed railways would surely have been cost-prohibitive and would never have provided the engine to the economy that family motoring would.

I descend from a line of inventors and players in these transformative developments, from both sides of my family. West Point, Westinghouse, the computer math behind miniaturized electronic circuitry, the limited access highway, radar . . . 

Guilty! I would be an inventor as well, except that invention has been exposed finally as fraud. Says me. Not quite so much credit should accrue to one just lucky enough to arrive first at a solution that looks inevitable in hindsight every time. 

And anyhow, it's always a mixed bag. The prizes should go to the ones who set out the best moral path to take in taking advantage of the inventions. I'm sure that Albert Einstein would take back his contributions to making the Bomb real, if he could. 

I would highlight the irony: That we celebrate the very thing that we deny. We deny that we can deflect progress, and see our advances as inevitable even as we celebrate individuals as though none of it would have come about without them. 

I declare that our own celebrated age of innovation is, in fact, stuck in a paradigm which should have shifted long ago. Indeed I can date the shift because I might have caused it my very own selfie-self. I failed to cause it. I feel guilty, truth be told. What an arrogant shit that makes me!

The trouble was and is that nobody wants this wonderful paradigm to shift; the one where individuals invent stuff and we celebrate those individuals with riches beyond imagining, and that is right and good and just. Even though it resembles the middle-ages for the power structures that we put back in place all over again. How much rent do you pay to the new rentiers, hein? You think it's free?

Truly no-one wants to listen to anything new which doesn't increase human agency; still against nature. Even though that agency is owned by so few. It's the principle that counts.

Responsibility for our inventiveness devolves to the people as a whole, and is by and large postponed on excuse of the incredible pace of improvements to knowledge and understanding. We shall be so much more ready to take responsibility in the future. We are still but children.

In fact we are afraid of choice. We want only agency, and our belief structures dictate - dogmatically - that our choice is subsumed by the agency afforded by our discoveries. There was no choice about the Bomb. There was no choice about the limited access highway system. There was no choice about radar. These things were just simply so intrinsically good that one could not get in their way. Hmmmm. Is there really any order to our operations?

And so the next great discovery will likely never happen until it's far too late. Global warming is a far far more terrible destroyer than the bomb could ever be. And we must shrug just as Ayn's Atlas does. I'll gladly pay you Tuesday for a hamburger today!

None of our inventions have been ontologically inevitable. Not one. We choose what becomes real. That doesn't make us as gods. Gods make rules. We make choices. As George Will says celebrating the man who celebrates the man who signed my diploma.

"[baseball] would emerge stronger, however, for the commissioner’s office had come through a difficult test with its absolute powers affirmed, and the principle established that no man, no matter how exalted, was above the game itself. For Giamatti, the whole episode had been about two things: living by the rules, and taking responsibility for one’s actions….

Which rules might we live by now? Does all invention become insurrection, then? Now? George Will gets his digs in on the "Nanny State." He is, after all, 'to the manor born.' As was A. Bartlett Giamatti. As am I. Sort of. "Just the manor missed," as I quipped to my fellow elitist headmasters once upon a blatantly racist conversation. I was rather appalled. 

Our constitution has been misinterpreted to death, by the very partisan political processes it was meant to guard against and override. Can we ever repeal the Second Amendment, now that it's fully decontextualized? Will we cancel the First? Surely Donald Trump has been the Pete Rose of  our constitutional Game of Life. Is that what George Will is saying?

We will just keep on keeping on, until the shift is upon us. And we suddenly see that the Emperor has no clothes, while the inventor is long dead and gone and voiceless. It was a minor invention at best to see that reality is not a game. That winning is not everything. That the meek will prevail in the end. As we cry out meekly, "this is not fair."

Just the Facts

I feel like I should explain myself. Most of what I write is me tangling with things beyond my ken. But there are some things that I know.

From the distance of Chinese tradition, it is easier to see the continuities of the West, broadly construed. I have taken some time and care to learn the Chinese traditions.

From that perspective, there looks to be a straight line, for instance, from Plato and his imagined archetypal truths which could be induced Socratically as though they were already there, through to monotheism and God's laws, then pivoting at Christ away from anger and toward love.

This was all disrupted in a way by Darwin, and that incredibly recently. 

Now it would be nature's laws, not God's, though as recently as Newton, scientists were working within the God's-world paradigm. We have been excited by truths elicited from the evident facts revealed by the scientific method. We have been excited by the power that these truths have granted us. We have learned to manipulate the world around us. And how!

I admit that I have been intrigued by critical theorists and radical thinkers who advance various forms of constructivism as a more general science than the one practiced by our evidence-based objectivists. I identify myself as an ethnoepistemologist recently, in distinction from thinkers like Richard Rorty, apparently. For Rorty and many others philosophy just plainly is a Western phenomenon; its proof, science. For an ethnoepistemologist, all ways of making meaning are radically equivalent. 

But it would be just plain insane to take this to the extent that creationists do. If one drives across the so-called "flyover" states, one may hear on the radio very intelligent-sounding people preaching creationism to the extent that God planted the dinosaurs to trick us. There is far worse than that. I was already very concerned way back when Bo Gritz was running for president. And he might have been sane in comparison to Trump. 

For me facts have the same ontological status as artifacts. You can't deny them, but you can't understand them either without constructing some superstructure of theory. Reality is just about as inaccessible as history is, which is to say not exactly inaccessible. 

We know scientific reality in a way now exposed as similar to historic methodology. We can't touch or see or feel any of the most important artifacts now, which are only available to us by means of complex instrumentation. What is returned to us by our instruments are fuzzy artifacts, as worn by lack of handling as are the ones we might dig up.

We call subatomic entities "particles," which is, at best, a metaphor. Something is real there, but it is revealed to us only as a statistical artifact. We rate signal versus noise and call it good. 

And right there is where cultural relativity creeps in. One might have stopped when it was already clear that this quest for some ultimate structure of subatomic physics would recede eternally like a fractal shoreline. One might have stopped at the point that probability waves were said to collapse upon observation. That had to mean that the observer was implicated in reality.

But we in the West refused to go there. As though ultimate responsibility had to be left to God, even though we didn't believe in Him anymore.

And one day long long ago while living aboard an old wooden sailboat that I'd rebuilt, it did hit me, in a moment of manic insanity, I'm sure, that emotion was also not some construction unique to humans, but that it had as much (or as little) solid reality as those subatomic particles did. Emotion is part of objective reality, and not just "inside" us as humans. 

I defined emotion as motion without force. That would mean without exchange of particles, as our current version of the Standard Model of physics would describe reality. That is even while that model remains incomplete, since we have yet to observe gravitons, even though we did recently "observe" gravity waves. That puts us halfway there, in a way, although there is a lot more to it than that.

I once did think that gravity is love, and there is some power to that metaphor. But no, love is attraction, and hate is repulsion and somebody far more advanced in these things than I am could, I'm certain, build an entire science upon that fact.

The "physical" structure of such relations - those not defined by forces - is conceptual and not perceptual, but both structures must exist everywhere at all times for there to be any reality at all. Which would mean, of course, that mind also is omnipresent in the cosmos, and precedes time just as physics must, if we remove the Big Bang, which of course we can't. Yet. 

I move closer to Chinese "cosmology" with these thoughts. A cosmology which never did depend on complex instrumentation, any more than Plato did. I don't see God there, but I do see mind apart from mankind. There is meaning in random, for instance, but that it is beyond the limits of mind to know. Our mind.

And that is why I have been known to claim that natural law is an analog to language, when trying to communicate beyond our earth. It can tell us a lot, but not everything. There is no completeness, Godel Escher, Bach.

Natural law is a start and the universe is vast. Before we can go any further - toward rescuing our planet home, or making contact with other life, we have to learn to take responsibility for our reality. It is comforting to me that we don't have to take ontological responsibility. That's my difference with Benjamin H. Bratton. He seems to see no choice. I see only choice.

But the choices we may make concern only human survival and can only go so far. If I drink wine, it seems that I would choose a statistically shorter life. More so if I smoke. And if humans fail to forsake neoliberal unregulated capitalism, the consequences are still more certain. Our home is gone and so are we much more rapidly than we can say 'get go.' 

That seems more like relinquishing control than to take it. And relinquishing may be the more responsible thing to do.

But for sure, no more than I can make myself immortal can we make humanity eternal, nor should we want to. We are just simply not that great. Demonstrably so. But we should at least get our act together long enough to usher in what might be post-human.

My post-humanism is probably not what yours is, if you're a fan of digital. Even when your technology -enhanced post-humanism is full of celebrations of diversity and feminism. My post-human is built more of culture than of individuals. The individuals will adapt and evolve and from that will come our post-human reality. 

I would see love develop faster than intellect. We shall then be ready for what comes next; in just the proportion that we learn to care for the least among us will we learn to take part in a cosmos so much greater than we are. 

We are never disconnected from that cosmos until the instant that we start believing that our digital fantasies are more real than reality. That's what zero/one logic means. You can't live in Platonic ideal reality, but we sure do keep trying.

We are very trying. Just now, I'm sure that's how cosmos feels toward us. Whatever cosmos is, it's alive and we are part of it. If we choose to be. Choose immortality as we now are and we won't become a has-been. We will never have been at all. There will be no artifact of our existence, because no-one will care to look for it. And because we will have become as dead as a rock, even though it might hide beautiful crystals of failed logic.

Feather Pillows

My mother insisted on feather pillows. A feature of our lives growing up was to have pillows restuffed, cleaned, or otherwise adjusted. I inherited two such pillows, more recently purchased from some online presence, which was likely a catalog presence for Mom. None available or serviceable locally. The piles the piles of catalogs when we moved her out from her last home. 

I've traipsed these pillows back and forth across the land, feeling vaguely concerned that they would concentrate my personal smell, and never quite dry as I packed them away with the bedding each day. A still more vague concern that I myself would stop being able to smell them.

I've since determined that these are not good summer pillows, damp as they are each morning, and so I decided to wash them, having my choice of daughters' washer-dryers. It has been a week since and I still feel as though the inside moisture content/ratio exceeds the ambient. Remembering that when Mom would shutter their house for the move across the border to now still-banned Canada, the furniture in the winter house would moulder. There was some destruction. And so I am uncertain about the hydrophilic qualities of goose feathers, mixed with some down. But I've stowed them anyhow. 

The polyester alternative seems hardly absorbent at all. Better for summer usage.

Yesterday's surprise trip to near-outer-space (it was a surprise to me) now feels, in briefest retrospect, like nothing very different from a monstrous slingshot launch of the sort you can experience at the county fair. Or a bungee jump. These afford, for me, thrills far in deficit from the charge to have them. 

Some $250,000 for the bungee shot to space. An amount not dissimilar to what I shall have to live out the rest of my life. But insignificant against earthly lodging costs for those who would take the flight. I doubt it will balance the books though, without some occult subsidy, in which I also, no doubt, unwittingly conspire.

I well know how lucky I am, born with sufficient social capital that if such things were measured, I would easily make the one-percent. Certainly if the planet is the ground. Of course I consider every possible livelihood to have been robbed from me by obligations. Who even feels those anymore? I am white and therefore noticed as an individual and evaluated as such. I have never liked attention.

The gradient of life between that below Earth's atmosphere and that beyond it is far more stark than that within me and that without. Our quest for individual recognition must still crave such launching, as though we could contain within ourselves such thrills of autonomy. I truly cannot understand it.

And so it does strike me that all of our economic arrangements now are calibrated around maximizing each our sense of individuality, without which we have no economic valence. And I find my connection between how tech has evolved and warfare. How we, this vaunted democracy, are the most imperialistic force still in the history of the planet. And Rumsfeld and his ilk are mostly gone.

This is hardly an original observation, but it does hit me with the force of, well, obviousness. Through the neoconservatism that brought endless war and the encampment of hoards, to neoliberalism and the end of history, our economy has transformed and perfected to something still more efficient than the Chinese surveillance megalopolis. Where I might feel more at home. But would not, thankfully really, ever be welcomed as such. A homelander there, in China.

China's rule still feels more common-directed. I'm sure that's illusion, but we treat our store of prisoners so abominably that it would be hard to imagine China doing even worse. Judge us by our lowest acts.

So I am forced to make the best of it here. 

For some reason I awake today - not really awake, since I never did sleep - with the memory of being lost in a fog on the way out into Long Island Sound from Mystic Seaport. Such a poetic sound. I was aware that I had never acquired the bell I needed, stolen perhaps by a previous owner for his kitchen. All that was left was the mount, low on the mast. Accessible by way of the hatch from the cabin, down below.

There were boats aground, and I had no electronics, but we did navigate to a marked buoy, and dropped anchor near its bell, not able even to see those other boats whose bells we could hear. I remember terror.

We heard a shout "man overboard" and realized that none of us, good enough swimmers all, would have been able to swim against the receding tidal current which left a wake abaft. Why not swim? There was nothing else to do while waiting out the fog. We could make no sense of any swimming sounds, nor find any place to throw a lifering, though the call had seemed to come upstream from us. I projected a more real terror, even than my own at being lost. Though we kept our mark.

I remember being sodden, it was that warm. It was drier below. Dryer is the machine. Spelling is so frivolous. Dryer hardly touches feather pillows. Days of fluffing by hand and those days have been damp. I was sodden because there was no more room in the air.

Now my brain is fogged by GPS. Could be just age, but I once had what friends and family saw as a near magical sense of direction. GPS is designed, of course, for targeting and ultimately for targeting ourselves as individuals. We may find ourselves on a digitally completed and overlaid earth. 

We imagine our minds to be contained by our brains, and now we imagine our brains to be extended by technology, forgetting that they were already enmeshed in the entirely of our mental, and especially in our physical scope. Which has been diminished and not enlarged by our martial technologies. Though we may designate and target any enemy to whatever degree of precision we may wish. We will recognize him autonomously.

Technology of the sort we now deploy cannot but destroy our minds, and render them crazed with lack of solid anything.

And yet it was a concession to we the people to open up that military tech for our personal enhancement. How quickly it all became an economic imperative. Was that its purpose all along?

Did that boat ever cast off anchor to follow their lost man? If so, we never heard about it. It haunts me still, somehow.

And where will the currents carry us now, utterly lost in space, with no anchor in meaning beyond the natural law, which has been reduced to facial recognition and a statistical match to profile? The bell tolls for thee, if it tolls at all.

At least I shall have a clean place to rest my head come winter, assuming the fog clears by then.

The Real: "Live" Blog of Virgin Galactic Takeoff

My daughter butt-dials me as I enter into a nap. Nearly there, napping, the nearby church bell chimes. It's Sunday. But I assume it's my phone. I remember when a friend overwrote the default text incoming chime on her iPhone. She chose a ding, which would soon become standard. How prescient. Does anyone even remember what the original default was?

The church bell has been meant to call all within hearing to worship. Sometimes the time of day. The Apple iPhone ding seems designed to be adirectional such that when one dings in a crowded room, everyone checks their phone.

The next ding, from my local news, alerts me that I may watch the launch of Richard Branson, 'astronaut 001' live at this very moment. And I do. I am. 

Stephen Colbert keynotes a comic take on this epic happening. The front-screen astronauts, 001, 002, 003, 004, seem selected for screen appeal, and even perhaps for social media presence. The production values are a mix of homebound - the presenters' mouse is visible and apparently active in choosing what's up next. Or is that staged? They seem to want to present the immediacy of Zoom. Now I watch the fleet of LandRovers, partners in this epic event. 

Do you drive a LandRover? Do you believe that ordinary people will get to outer space? When do his - Richard's - peccadillos make their appearance. He got away with a breasty chesty figurehead on the prow of the spacecraft. Homage to eons of manly seafaring craftiness. Is he really a nice rich person?

This is not what I witnessed NASA doing when I watched John Glenn take off, or Neil Armstrong on the moon. That was serious. This is purest entertainment, full of reminders that so much has stalled during this age of innovation. Commercial flight has hardly changed at all. 

I think, but cannot be sure, since I'm busy typing, that Colbert just made fun of gold toilets at the end of a dayflight to the other side of the earth. Did he say that? Was he mocking the very thing I watch. I really can't tell.

My morning read included a deep dive into Britney Spears' conservatorship, and RFK Junior's take against vaccines. He and Giorgio Ambagen seem to have gone off the rails in the very same way. Lost in the certainty of their fevered narratives. Is this inversion of sanity somehow related to the ubiquitous interweb connected iPhone? I rather think so. 

Didn't Julian Jaynes already warn us how images, cadences, and a certain kind of radio voice can dull our ability to think for ourselves. Or was that someone else? Have our brains been hijacked? By who?

Donald Trump only wishes that he could put on a show like this, and yet he probably has more attend his whacked out rallys than Sir Richard is getting for his show.

But I don't know. I seem to be watching on some sort of low-res webcast, Are the glitches - the video artifacts - deliberate too? Sir Branson live looks vaguely nervous. So much is riding on the separation from the mothership, named for his mother. Eve. Really?

Just higher than the flight of a routine commercial, unprogressed, airline. And I can't help wondering why no-one sends up Ray Kurzweil for his brand of nutty insanity. How different from RFK?

Release from the mothership! Verra exitin'

It seem to take only seconds to travel another two hundred thousand feet straight up. Still climbing after the burners burn out. Audio communications glitch. No word from space. It will be a recorded message. Logos visible on the ship. 

They flip glitchy weightless in the cabin. And so soon to reenter. We shall hear a double sonic boom.

Ding from my phone. I'm alone, so I know it's mine. I hope the church bell doesn't chime. We're supposed to shop in the Re-store store, hoping to find the right salvage house parts. Houses haven't changed much either, except for their size and their unreachability for so many working families. I myself can't even imagine owning. I have more than enough space, and have better things to do than to maintain a house and grounds. Well, I mean, besides maintaining my daughters' houses.

They have already returned to commercial altitude. Lower the feather for a feathered landing. What are the risks of casting this as a comedy? Are they that certain? What is Musk going through? What about Bozo Bezos? This surely ups his ante. 

No worries, lots of recording devices aboard the spaceship. Is this a spaceship? Is it disposable. Has this very one flown before? How much fuel?

The glide down seems to take longer than the flight up. Overall flight time similar to Mercury? I think a little less to maybe a similar height? Not sure. They aren't telling me what I want to know. This is pure show.

Is this the inflection point where we get our minds back? Or lose them forever. Gear down and locked. chase plane near.

500, 300, too late. Touchdown!!! 

Brakes.

Will this mean now that we hold on ever more tightly to the locked-down paradigms which we still refuse to leave? The ones guarded 

"Ladies and Gentlemen, There It Is" re-announces Stephen Colbert.

So, What Do I Do Now?

Walking over to dinner with my daughter last night, I passed a Tesla, rudely parked, whose license plate might be deciphered into "Star Citizen," which I take to mean some aspirational placement of oneself cosmically. But I know that person would have nothing to do with Cosmopolitics. Whatever that is, it's more related to life here on earth, and less enthusiastic about the prospects for populating beyond our earth. Probably a grown up gamer?

Then I read about Kyle Rittenhouse and how money and taking any advantage imaginable for taking advantage of anything or anyone's ability to take advantage of a potential money attractor. Some people are enthusiastic about space travel. Excited about what we've been able to accomplish so far, and all the human reaching that might imply. Hey, let's put on a show! It might attract some money!

I am mystified by now by all of my own one-time longing to live underwater. I might easily have constructed my habitat and tested it out, but my ambition only went so far. I've always thought that I was mostly driven by the freedom of mass neutrality, which required lesser reflexes than to stay aloft with artificial wings. The claustrophobia of being canned in outer space being somehow far more terrorizing than the claustrophobia of being canned under pressure. And I certainly didn't want to sit atop a rocket of my own making, though I sure did love that movie. And I did make rockets and shot all sorts of things up in them. Some of which got police attention.

Shall I go back to reading Gaddis' The Recognitions? Jonathan Franzen calls it the hardest book he's ever willingly finished. For me, it might end up along with Joyce's Ulysses, as a much attempted but only ever nearly completed read.

I think I'm pretty much done with Bratton, not because he can't be interesting - although he does seem to have hardened his thinking into a kind of schtick - but because I can't discern any worldview based on any kind of fundament. The triumph of human intelligence, in outer space, underwater, or in relation to making sense of the world around us, is not, in itself, fundamentally interesting to me. Anymore.

And I don't seem driven to making money. Money seems a far worse and more dangerous virus than the COVID-19 coronavirus which provides inspiration, of sorts, for Bratton's most recent musings. We can fight the coronavirus, but we haven't even begun to investigate how the money virus has acted on humanity. I suppose the span of more than a decade - we're talking all the way back to Newton here - doesn't really hold anyone's attention anymore.

Imagine this: Hyperwealthy people are shamed into direct investments for the sake of the people. They become ashamed of their jets and private yachts. Let's say the directors of Google are shamed into creating genuine search, which only their monopoly-scale pipes could afford us. It would break free of words and move into the realm of ideas, which are so notoriously difficult to monetize.

But then let's move real-estate into the virtual realm and put the adverts there. The actual ground is re-taken for the people, to build on as they see fit, and no billboards allowed, just like in Vermont where the entire state is a natural resource.

Let's build trolleys which are designed from the get-go to provide their own power, by solar, by tide, by wind, by panel, owned by the people in return for their taxes. The taxes on private cars can go through the roof, for all the people care. But of course, the farmers can make their own. It will be that trivial, as it already is in China. They'll be outlawed within the city "walls" of course. Too noxious and deadly. The farmers will have their own sources of energy.

Our current religion holds that wealth accrues to all the earth when the "geniuses" are allowed to flourish. It's thought the opposite of a zero-sum game, where the extravagance of the wealthy has no impact on the rest of us. Except, perhaps, to inspire us in similar profligate aspiration.

And actually nothing will be powered by shame or fear of God, though it will be informed by a better religion. One where none of shame or guilt or face hold sway. Or rather where each of these is tied to personal virtue. Where immortality is realized by extension of one's essence into each and every person round about, who are always credited equally for the contributions of the whole.

This all happens because the end of science is the beginning of human responsibility. It's already written in the code, if we did but take the time to read it. 

Now so far, that puts me in the same stance as Bratton. We differ as regards agency. There is nothing in science which tells us that there is a Grand Universal Theorem to be uncovered. That is but our untutored conviction. 

We will come to terms with the already evident fact that science is also a process to unlearn things one once did know. Ghosts are not only unfindable anymore, they cease to exist entirely for that portion of the general population who suddenly knows that there can be none there. The rest of the population, perhaps not so interested in scientific knowledge, feels mocked. This has not led to good things, so far.

There is similarly nothing in science which says that absent hunan virtue, the progressive uncoverings of science will lead us in a progressive and ameliorative direction. That part should be patently obvious post-nukes and now with dreams of autonomous profiling robotic drones powered by what? Artificial intelligence? Can there be virtue there? There can sure be power.

You are going to hell, Mr. Gates, for all your wanting to do good. You need to find a way to listen to the people and not to be so taken by your own success. As though meeting the moment in history were something other from luck. What you did with such luck is hardly different than all our various Attilas the various Huns. How many better dreams were snuffed underneath your collosus? 

I've probably lost my old sub- and super-liminal interests because - aside from a general despair that we will ever get it together as humans on the planet - my attempts even to automate my own life are failing at an accelerated clip. 

I try to find ways of doing things based on setting out a sequence of reasoning which will still make sense to me after I forget the specific decision I made. The forgetting is increasingly reliable, but even the principles for coming up with a particular decision won't quite stay put. Just about the only thing I can really do is to build habits, but even those can tend to change or invert from disuse.

I toss around certain technical terms - things like epistemology or phenomenology or ontology - really just to mock myself, because I can never quite remember which is which or how to gloss their meaning. I guess that means I'm making fun of people who know how to use technical terms reliably, and who have some memory of their provenance; and which great thinker pinned them.

So why are so few of the smart people interested in the life force of money, which is the patent root of all our troubles? Why do they think that they can polaristically philosophize their way to final clarity? Money only took off virally post-digital, and the banks were among the first, of course, to accelerate the accounting. I lack detail. 

And still I believe that my own thought and writing do sit on a fundament, just like I sit on my ass most days most of the time, now. Although I did walk a good six miles on Independence day, the Monday holiday not the day itself, down to the water and back through a city entirely evacuated for the holiday, though the waterfront was populated, if not so crowded as it once would have been. 

I watched a family trying to sail without a centerboard, and it was frustrating. Back and forth and no forward progress. Expertise is attenuated where there is no critical mass of experts. The seasons disturb habits which might otherwise be more fully developed. Skiers must travel to the global South or up higher on Mt. Hood to keep their practice up. Sailors are better in California. Perhaps they didn't even know what a centerboard is, and left it at the dock. Swindled by their lessor.

I can only imagine how I would have appeared back in the day, running the gauntlet of the gawkers in my gaudily painted (for lack of patience for the redo, except on an annualized schedule) and awkward old wooden boat. I hadn't yet acquired the swollen belly which all sailors seem to sport now. Standing abaft an overlarge wheel, and likely pushing buttons. I scampered and hauled and tied off. Must have been at least mildly entertaining.

Yes, I believe that I am perseverating. Feeling sore and lazy. What'll it be Ace? Sport? An IPA? A boilermaker? What's your pleasure?

We shall increasingly buy our cars in shares now, and reduce, thereby, the press of the highways. The economy demands it, since it won't afford us workers a living wage anymore. Will that be our revenge on the real? To remove ourselves from the marketplace that enriches so few? We will abuse the platforms to spread a kind of slacker ethos, mocked now by the bloating platform which brazenly stole the name.

Slack might just be what saves the world and frees the planet. We think too hard just now. We spend way too much time on our phones. Nothing exciting will happen soon. Anymore. And so we must turn away from disaster and catastrophe to cultivate, well, our own gardens.

When Buckminster Fuller called our planet "Spaceship Earth," we should already have started thinking about what that entailed; that we would have to learn to be the pilots. He was an engineer and a designer, but mostly pre-digital, I think. 

Now Bratton thinks digital, and is probably dreaming of spaceships travelling off-earth, so he has moved beyond "Spaceship Earth," to something more like "homebase Earth," though I really can't tell. 

What turns me on anymore is the notion that we were already starting to be "in touch" (touchlessly, of course) with other life, which would mean that no travelling needed to be done from either side. What I think I mean is that while we were starting to turn natural law to our uses, we had the opportunity to notice that natural law is itself a form of communication. 

Beyond coaxing us to agree about basic material reality here at home, it was challenging us to wonder where else in cosmos these natural laws might apply. And if there was choice in our construings of those natural law, then where did the law end and the choice begin? And when did the virus of money start construing things as if there were positive truth and proof after Einstein turned it all on its head. And then we started to distrust positivism and introduce relativity to our constructivist social realities, and we did recognize that this was so much more difficult than the physical sciences. 

We did have plenty of choice within the constraints of natural law in the physical sciences, and then along came digital and everything was choice, no physical limitations at all to our imaginations. And then we were cut off from any and all other life in the cosmos, hoist by our own petard away from the real. We live in the zero, which is without connection to the one. That's what on/off means.

When one construes natural law as some insight and revelation into God's mind, we do at least remain in touch with something other. Now, we no longer bother to ask, and simply wonder how much more gaudy we could make our private jets and private yachts, to live our lives ungrounded and high. Perpetually stoned. And this now is progress?

Progress will be reversion not to the patriarchal interpretation of God into law, nor the patriarchal interpretation of scientific findings about reality, now interpreted statistically into simulacra of truthiness. Progress will be progress beyond interpretation to a felt connection beyond oneself. And to forsake this connection will be actual damnation in our not so very distant future. 

And so I, for one, remain hopeful. Likely, I don't get excited about the same future you do. I like hot baths, yes, and interior climate control, sure, and I like to be able to move about and change my scenery. I don't like that all destinations look alike, or that people have stopped thinking because, presumably, scientists and philosophers do it for them. 

There is truth to art and culture. There is truth to love. Science can facilitate that as well. IT needn't be so totalizing.

Oh well. Back to Gaddis.

And Finally, THE REVENGE OF THE REAL

In this new Heart of Darkness, it's the Irony, the Irony! That good churchgoers from the countryside should consider Trump a decent and honest man. I ride out from our fair city which promises to elect a Socialist Democrat (female black!) as mayor, into the countryside where the Trumpers still prevail. Maybe the signage has been muted a tad, but the signs remain. I mean signs in the other sense.

These are people who live closer to nature, often in quite spectacular - by my sights as an apartment dweller - houses, often new. Of course I am mystified by the desire to have all the modern conveniences in the middle of nowhere. Even surrounded as I am by the rogue gunshot-like sounds of random privateered fireworks near where I live, I feel that much more at home in the polyglot miscegenated variegated city. One can walk here among people. 

The RVs also proliferate away from the city, and somehow these are extensions of the political demand that we not be forced to abandon the promised rapture. It is also a technological rapture, where AK's and snow and water mobility without sails and Internets galore and connected screens are never absent. Comfort in the wilderness, where those who would agree with Bratton all must prefer tents, or simply not indulge  In the countryside, nearly everyone owns an RV, and many if not most are far nicer than my apartment. (I still get 24 mpg towing my tiny home)

I said before that I don't know Agamben, but I do, it would seem, find his vocabulary familiar. From Bratton? No, I think I predate him. And so the serpent eats its tail and Agamben, the radical, is identical to those calling a state of exception against all rational governance. 

Of course I still wear a mask, even vaccinated and immune from having contracted the contagion, now moving among an ever smaller minority. I am not an idiot. Though I still find Agamben and his ilk interestingly provocative; affording some truth that others would eschew. You know, like that film about GW (Bush) bringing down the Trade Towers, Small Change, was as if it were true in a way. Some people can't distinguish signal from noise. Some crave a clarity that never has been and never will be.

The thing that no-one wants to say is that this contagion is a direct result of our very success at overtaking the planet. There are too many of us, overcome now by our own effluent, living too closely together and travelling too often. By most measures, it was inevitable. 

Our governments put our collective heads into the sand, affording more interminable warfare and almost no medical preparedness. Ever confident that only the homo zoe would ever be destroyed, in warfare or in contagion. Zoe's revenge, as objective embodied man becomes ever more dangerous in the red zones. Armed, flag waving, unmasked and dangerous. 

The irony. The irony. It was never the sacred man, homo sacer. Bios. It was the intelligent man; the one Bratton celebrates, who believes that our science is only ameliorative in the end. That we will always resolve the worst of our lives into the better, no matter how bad it gets. Because understanding is progressive, I suppose.

One wonders how many straw dogs Bratton has fired up here. We hardly require a sensing layer to know already that we have the tech to distribute pretty good living to all on the planet. We just simply won't do it. Same reason we misuse "data extraction" for the private profit of a minuscule handful of people with one-name impact on the planet.

From Wikipedia:

In one translation Chapter 5 of the Tao Te Ching begins with the lines "Heaven and Earth are impartial/ treating creatures like straw dogs".

Su Zhe's commentary on this verse explains: "Heaven and Earth are not partial. They do not kill living things out of cruelty or give them birth out of kindness. We do the same when we make straw dogs to use in sacrifices. We dress them up and put them on the altar, but not because we love them. And when the ceremony is over, we throw them into the street, but not because we hate them."

This is Bratton's whole book, really, isn't it? We have China as a reasonable facsimile of eradicating poverty. Over here we delegate government to invisible technocrats because we can't be bothered. Those we elect pretty much deflect us from government, no matter which side of the fake divide within neoliberalism they sit on. Capitalist and anti-China to their bones, eh Liz?

I still fail to see how more information will change the game if we won't change it until it's just patently too late. Or in other words, what if there really is something wrong with science as we practice it, or medicine as we practice it, or care as we administer it? Because we even delegate truth, which is what the crazies patently refuse to do. Can't there be a better coming together than this?

I am simply not so enamored of scientific rationalism as Bratton seems to be. I am with him up until he abdicates, in favor of what I'm not sure. We already have all the information that we could possibly need. The corruption was already within us before the virus hit. This was no epidemiological event. This was a metaphysical failure. 

Irony, indeed.

I am now reading Bratton's conclusion, and I have no hope nor certainly any expectation that I will understand what sort of a world it is that he wishes to live in. We seem to agree on most points, and yet I have no feel for how he thinks life may evolve such that I shall want to live it. He does sketch a negative trend, and how it will feel quite normal. I need a more positive vision at my conclusion.

Over the course of my life, once might say that there has been drastic change. And yet trains, planes and automobiles have hardly changed at all. I started along with the Interstate system. Death on the highways was but a street away. My uncle flew a boxcar and would storm our beach house when he could. I did travel overnight by train, and across the continent by plane.

I simply want not to want to do those things anymore. In this last brief phase of transformation, it seems that the cost-content of an automobile has shifted rapidly toward electronics. It is apparently so cheap to build the car I want that the automakers, almost out of desperation, need us to want all the automated processes. Built on the promise of better safety. Somewhat realized. But  so much easier if we simply didn't drive so very much in such extravagant comfort.

I admit that I wish I could still buy a stick shift without a backup screen and without all those sensors. I confess also that I did enjoy getting on the Shanghai subway or walking the dark streets without any fear at all of violence. It was a kind of surveillance that provided that ease. Also some lack of obsession with privacy. But they sure did like their selfie sticks, which I had only ever seen there. Software to post themselves as racially ideal, and identical to everyone else, it also seemed.

The biggest change to flight is also in the screens and the shuttered windows even though the North Pole or the Rockies might be on view below. Still, the planes do crash when the pilot doesn't know how to mistrust the obviously malfunctioning sensors when there's ice on the wings. And the wife of a good friend, a MacArthur genius for exposing genocide, dies with all the rest.

We were shuttered during the pandemic, and then there was a chip shortage. We thought it wise to poke China. I was happy enough to stroll or ride my bike or even ski during the shuttering. Not really missing the anxiety of wanting to travel coast to coast or over to China. 

I miss my little sailboat rowboat shuttered away in Canada. It is more than all I need to get me on the water. I practically had to beg my close friends to let go of Zoom and come to my apartment for dinner the other night. It was a lovely time had by all.

Last night - Independence Day - the private fireworks built in a kind of crescendo as though somehow orchestrated. They came from all over, and I was astounded that so many had bought so many. I now know why I felt comforted and not afraid when I heard the sparse popping leading up to this, when it came from so few that it did sound like gunfire. And you know the shootings have been going up. An almost nightly affair and not far from where I live. 

Bratton mistakes Trump for wanting to be the sovereign - that embodied state. No, Trump is simply the avatar for the manly white world outside the city, and the sovereignty those men wish to preserve over their domains. Their wives, their kids, their motorized thrills. There are, as yet no screens in the side-by-side four wheel drives, or on the Harleys. "You're fired" is a nice thing to be able to say, as you coal the bicyclist from your outsized diesel pickup.

The cars and planes will mostly go because they must. The trains may stay, and some trolleys. We will want fewer goods less often, and they will be delivered by a packet switching system of autonomous vehicles which also move stored electricity about. They may have racks for boats and kayaks and bicycles and they may travel to the countryside for recharging and even wait for you to recharge yourself. And you will not wish to hover in a bloated drone because there is so little thrill to doing nothing.

And our tracks will be cheaply built by China, and designed to enter quietly into and through the wilds, and we will naturally dwindle in numbers since kids will no longer be to us what Trump is to them. A maxi me. Because there will be no fantasy about love's product, and so schools will be rebuilt of love and not of what Illich wanted to deschool, and he was right about that. And the children will be part of the economy again because they will be excited about it., and they will grow by it.

And no-one will ever again want their selfie self to endure forevermore. As though we could extend to infinity in any dimension. As though we could fill the cosmos, which was never empty in the first place.

And all that we require to accomplish all of this is to take back the shock and awe of the military industrial complex and never again delegate its control to the likes of Donald Rumsfeld. We will stop exploding anything or building buildings toward the sky. We will stop designing our own destruction, and our doctors will be our friends and they will touch us.

We will recognize the accidents of life and death and evolution as the expressions of cosmic love that they are, and we will nevermore work to replicate death and destruction in the name of such love because it was never about tooth and blood and claw within any species, really, except for ours. 

It was never about survival of the fittest. It was always about putting a face on love and we should live it. We are plenty smart enough already.

The coming together will be when we realize that we all want the very same thing. I have never actually met a Trumper that I didn't like, though I've seen some from a distance. I sure do know the thrills of motorized joy, though I don't wish to expend my soul to afford them anymore. I even know a father's outrage. Even racist though I most certainly am, it seems obvious to me that the beauty is tending toward far darker skin than mine. 

I will work for our new Socialist Democratic mayor. Things will improve. The economy will flatten. Life will prevail. What's not to celebrate? I want my guitar back too. From Canada where all our musicians seem to originate. Oh Beautiful!