Thursday, December 29, 2005

Evidence

Science continually refines what is meant by evidence. The epistemology is forever getting tuned up.
Other specialties -- theology, law, English ... -- also have their epistemology. How frequently are their epistemologies retuned?
In a word, does a court system, or a classroom for literature, have an epistemology anywhere nearly in tune as a science lab?

I bring this up to point out that kleptocracies maintain themselves by picking and choosing among established epistemologies, knowing that the specialists appealed to for that part of the argument will find the references reasonable: and at no point will the judge allow a team of scientists to come in and make mincemeat of the whole.
It’s exactly like the magician inviting the audience to inspect the prop, but only that part of the prop that isn’t rigged; or is rigged precisely to meet their approval.

This is how we cheat: by one hand not knowing what the other is doing. And if the scientists want to keep receiving their grants, they’ll know when to speak and when to keep mum.

Tuesday, December 27, 2005

Fake Science

That stem cell guy is S Korea has quit his post at the university. Everybody has egg on their face. Publishers mortaged the farm to get books about him on the shelves; and now it's all bust.

Committees have been reviewing his work to see if there's anything salvageable.

But of course pk laughs and shrugs. What did you expect? His work was in an area of big money, big fame. All such papers should be reviewed: but by whom? The government? The university? What integrity do they have?

Science is real. But it can't be administered. It comes when anyone is intellectually honest for a moment. It comes like falling in love: and goes, just as fast. We can try to attract it: take a shower, dress up ... train our minds. But it comes, or it doesn't. Like a visit from God.

Don't count too many reported visitations as true; but know: there can be some. It's just impossible to be sure when, where, or to whom.

Thursday, December 22, 2005

Time / Justice

Justice is impossible while time endures (and that’s infinitely): because agreement among intellects at stageA, stageB, stage z9omega at time0, time1, timen, is meaningless. Therefore democratic justice is impossible. Autocratic justice is also impossible within infinite time because whatever the intellectual stage of the tyrant, whatever the time, the evidence is not all in.

Human culture works by the majority, feeling itself to be the majority, feeling secure in ignoring input from extremes. Lock up, crucify, assassinate the genius, the saint. Call him a madman. Call the prison a sanitarium. Fill it with real madmen, so the ruse will convince all but the genius, the saint.

That’s how we persecute. It’s OK to kill Germans, Japs in 1945, but not in 1946. It’s moral to enslave in 1860, but not in 1870. In 1776 tarrifs were OK, but don’t tax my whiskey. In 15,000 BC there were no tariffs and no one would dream of taxing your beer.

The majority can always delude itself to think it’s being reasonable by being unaware of better meanings for reasonable. The court can throw improvements out of court. But even if every judge had an IQ of 180, it might just be that they needed IQs of 250. And if every single judge went to Harvard, he still hasn’t mastered Moses Harmon. Or Ivan Illich.

Trusting the Enlightenment was almost as grievous a mistake as trusting the Church had been.

But, pk: then what’s the solution?
There is none.

See? (Of course you don’t.) That’s the fundamental secular blasphemy: to fail to swallow the modern lie that we can fix anything and everything to our liking.

Tuesday, December 20, 2005

Purpose

The purpose of the schools, right on up to the universities, is to produce bureaucrats. And the purpose of bureaucrats is not to understand a single word said to them that doesn’t fit their state-authored form. The form asks Are you white or black? You say, Uh, sort of pink; and the bureaucrat enters White into the Library of Congress.

But of course bureaucrats are people. And the purpose of people is not to understand a goddam word said to them: said to them by anything sentient: intelligent, honest.

At least we have churches to make a ritual of this very pattern. We always know that our forebears paid Caesar, worshipped ghosts, and kangarooed Jesus: simultaneously not knowing that we’re cookies from the same cutter.
Every museum will kill for a Van Gogh: without a clue that here and there under their knife is another Van Gogh. We burn new manuscripts to keep old bullshit warm.

Meanwhile, god lives, the truth lives, art lives. There are new prophets, new Van Goghs: spilling their guts, despairing, then spilling some more.

If humans were only willing to become human, that is to stop paying Caesar, worshipping ghosts, and monkeying the law, humans might live too.

Sunday, December 18, 2005

White Men Can’t Jump

The Welsh sing. The Irish fight, and drink. The English have a stiff upper lip. Apaches’ll scalp y’a. We all recognize certain cultural generalizations that go beyond men wearing pants and women wearing dresses. Even with cultural prejudices alerted for and at least a bit discounted, some generalizations remain. The Scots are frugal. Boy, those darkies sure can sing and dance.

Before I identify and delve into my meat for this post, I throw in a pair of personal recollections. In grad school the professor apologized for some poet’s use of the stingy Scot saw. I said, "The Scots don’t see that as an insult; they’re proud of it." And: one old college friend visited another old college friend in Italy where the latter had moved with his Italian Commie film maker wife. The former was accompanied by a black grad school associate. The Commie wife went into convulsions about how Americans treated blacks. "Sure," said the "black": "but how about how the Italians treat the Sicilians?" The Commie wife had another fit. In essence: Americans called the blacks lazy, no good thieves to oppress them, following enslavement with prejudice; whereas the Sicilians really were lazy, no good thieves.

Even after prejudices are a bit discounted, some kernel of truth seems to remain with any number of cultural generalizations. Men are brave; women are pussies. Whites can’t sing, dance, or jump (proof that they are superior and should own all and rule all). Which raises the question which becomes a bit less imponderable with time: nature? or nurture?

There’s no serious question that nature determines lots of variables: skin color, eye color ... Some people can roll their tongue, some can’t digest milk, the women of some tribes have a huge caboose. Pygmies are short. We find it harder to acknowledge cultural differences: and that’s what I want to expatiate on a bit.

A couple of years ago I caught a PBS doc in which a woman with advanced degrees in percussion travelled about seeking folk groups around the world to sit in with, the show off. And by God, sitting in the dirt in India she played the tabla respectably right along with the locals who were in their own idiom! And though she looked a bit like a dog standing on its hind legs, she looked vastly less out of place than would have been possible oh so short an historical time ago.

Back in the 1950s, maybe 1960, in East Harlem I remember seeing eight year old Puerto Rican kids handing out of the fire escapes and pounding out astonishingly complex rhythms on the bongos. I remember a musicologist visiting Africa back a similar time ago and finding five and six year olds who showed perfect mastery of time combinations the pro himself wouldn’t dare try. He was the beginner; the kids were the experts. And before I go another step further I want to tie in a recollection already mentioned at (K.: link temp. down): my jazz musician friends in college had all been given music lessons since childhood. Their playing an instrument no doubt helped their also excellent school records in getting them into Columbia. But when they started playing professionally, instead of studying harder to get into law school, those same parents went berserk. Music was supposed to be a gentlemanly hobby; not a passion: and certainly not a respectable way to make a living. My own love of jazz got me blackballed among my own "friends." When I first danced, and the other dancers stopped, formed a circle around me, whooping and yelling, it was cute. Paul moves like Sammy Davis Junior. A couple of years later, when I added hip grinding, well before we’d ever heard of Elvis Presley, the looks of disapproval etched into permanence. (Our servants do all that for us.)

I heard no parents, no neighbors, yanking the young bongo players off of the fire escape to get to their rooms and study Latin.

The girl can’t throw the ball because any efforts she made as a girl got smacked back into a pose for the cotillion.

Gregory Bateson studied Iatmul women nursing their babies. He photo-documented how they tease the babes with the nipple, pulling it away if the infants seemed too eager. Stop trying, and I’ll feed you.

We carefully study what’s fed to children in the schools. We start school around six. Sorry: it’s way too late. What you can and can’t try is fed to you from your first cry. And what you’re fed varies not only according to whether you’re male or female, first born or second born, English or Italian, but also whether your father is a lawyer or a farmer.

Anna Magnani made audiences weep merely reciting the alphabet. She used her whole woman’s body to do it. Oh! Gracious! She gestured with her hands!

If the society suddenly wanted to produce bongo or tabla players, over time, it could do it. But the players couldn’t come from the crop that had already been smacked silly if they showed any rhythmic propensities.

PS There. That’s my composition for the moment. But as happens so often, I didn’t weave in the examples that had propelled me to the post in the first place. Too late to weave them now; I’ll just string a couple.

I’ve seen good explanations, very good, of why so many Jews in Europe became usurers. It wasn’t at all all their idea. Now Jews with a choice become doctors: since the med schools started letting a couple of Jews in. (Once more people realize how deadly the medicine game is, to doctors too, but mostly to patients, respectable cultures on the make will stop pushing their kids so hard in that direction.) But how many of us remember how many great athletes the Jews produced a hundred years ago? Jewish boxers? Unthinkable.

Where were the great English gentlemen among great baseball players a few generations ago? Where did all these Pollocks come from? Blink, and "all" the great players are "black." Blink again and they’re "all" from Central America. Do Dominican’s have better baseball genes than the Irish?

Look at the rosters of the medical schools, the law schools ... the Wall Street brokerage houses. Any group that stands out will not also be found dominating the boxing ring: or the dance bands.

We finally let Mick Jagger made a lot of money for imitating Muddy Waters decades after Muddy was past his prime. (That was after decades of smacking little Mick Jaggers who liked the nigger music.) But had Mick had a chance at becoming CEO of Disney, he could have made more: a lot more.

Don’t restrict your demographics to the playing field; look in the real money holes.

Saturday, December 17, 2005

PostModern Professional Sincerity

You know how these days TV shows advertise themselves by lining up their stars, not like the Kremlin used to do it, all of them in a row, and not like the Nazi’s did it at Nuremberg, the army down here and the fuehrer up there, but sort of like dominoes in a side profile: the news anchor up front, the woman right behind him, slightly diminished by perspective, the ethnic contribution right behind her: lined up and all superior to you. Well just now a show’s ad came on. Some blond was running, fear on her face, some male was running behind her: and with perfect choreography, the blond segued into a dominant domino pose and the male slide into place behind behind her. I am reminded only a little of Mount Rushmore and a lot of Hollywood Ben-Hur-type graphics.

And I said to myself, Oh, gracious, they’re giving the game away. They’re giving the game away sort of like Meg Ryan did, having coffee with Rob Reiner, and, cueing herself, goes into a Richter scale orgasm; then, just as abruptly, ceases and smiles sweetly. (Reiner, the film’s director, gave not dad, but this time mom a follow-up bit to do. Mom says to the diner’s waitress, "I’ll have what she’s having.")

Hollywood should be careful. Audiences cherish their primitive confidence that illusions prepared specifically for them are somehow real, not staged. When Tony Richardson had Albert Finney’s Tom Jones turn suddenly and speak directly to the camera (and therefore, directly to the audience) it was a riot. Making a whole film where Kevin Bacon delivers every other line as an aside to the audience shows that the whole culture is cracking at the seams.

Not many people are likely to spend more time thinking about semiotics and semantic map/territory distinctions than I do, but I too have my own cherished naivete. I like the actor to stay in the damn role until the scene is over. I don’t want them to show their acting chops just to show their acting chops. To me, musicians were showing their feelings, raw and naked, not just displaying a lifetime of acquired technique. My jaw dropped decades ago on TV when Dick Cavett was interviewing an opera star and she illustrated her musical point with perfect exercises, seemingly replete with passion, on and off, switching singing with speaking and speaking with singing. I don’t doubt that she could turn the feeling on or off as well. Apropos, I remember an interview with an actress talking about Alec Guiness. She reported that he had been deep in conversation with her off camera: he heard his cue, abruptly left her, went and did his scene, came back and picked the conversation right back up. "I’m not all Method or anything," she said, "But really ..." (I’m also reminded in that context of the story that Bobby Fischer, talking to a reporter, paused mid-sentence, had dinner, then another dinner, played solitaire chess for four hours, then resumed his sentence.)

If the whore, or your wife, or your girlfriend, is pretending to have an orgasm, let her maintain the pretense. (Though we’re all actors, males don’t have to pretend; not in THAT area.) Five years later, in the middle of a fight, your wife can claim that she was faking it (claiming thereby to be a whore), and of course, all of us being liars on one or another occasion, you’ll have no opinion but your own whether she was lying then or whether she’s lying now.

Am I the only primitive left? Is everyone else really thoroughly PostModern?

Winding down for the moment: a drummer told the story of the big moment in his life when he got to audition for Bird: Charlie Parker. He played his heart out. Bird said something like No, no, you got to mix it up. His saxophone still strapped around his neck, Bird sat at the drums. His one foot kicked a steady beat against the bass drum. His other foot kicked a charleston beat on the high hat. With his left hand he did triplets, and with his right, Latin: or some such mix.

The great pros can do anything. When Bird wanted to give young trumpeter, Miles Davis, a shot, then-trumpet-star-supreme Dizzy Gillespie said, "That’s OK, I’ll play piano." Later, when all-time supreme trumpet artist Miles Davis wanted the keyboard just so, he played it himself. But then the great pros must have had passion to start with. Mozart must have had passion a life time before puberty.

Wednesday, December 14, 2005

Push ’Em to the Wall

"Stone tools found embedded at the base of cliffs in southeastern England show that early humans lived in northern Europe 700,000 years ago -- much earlier than previously thought, scientists said on Wednesday." Says Reuters. Push those dates back. Push ’em back, push ’em back, way back.

At the same time every time you turn around some swimmer, some runner, has again broken the world record. How boring is the World Series, the golf tournament, if some record isn’t announced as broken every other second: all part of our self-hypnosis that no one has ever been better than us.

In the 1950s, when I ran the mile, a time of four minutes was believed to be an unbreakable barrier. Once it fell, the new record got peeled and re-peeled in short order. Will it ever be found that humans lived in Europe 900,000 years ago? A million years ago? Before the birth of the earth? Before the Big Bang?
Will the mile ever be run in three and a half minutes? Will the times for the Australian crawl ever get to minus figures: you come out of the pool before you dive in?

Statisticians have a good model for what stops us from getting too absurd. The left wall is where we come from. Bacteria never ran a mile, so their time is infinite. Since then some creatures have gotten speedy indeed: horses, cheetahs. Men aren’t very fast on their feet, but if we put a lot into it we can run faster and faster ... until we reach a right wall for our species, for our environment. Maybe some prior Homo species could cover a mile in three and a half minutes, but modern humans are probably pretty damn close to the right wall for the species. (Running on the moon won't count.) Someday, to use Stephen Jay Gould’s example, some human may be able to hit the fast ball a tiny bit better than Ted Williams, but no human will ever be able to hit any kind of ball more than a tiny bit better than Ted Williams. Ted Williams was damn close to the right wall.

Sunday, December 11, 2005

Fight Game

I’m a sucker for sports, including spectator sports. My own activities have always been of the individualist type. I fish. I like to hit tennis balls. I sure wish I could get to a good mountain for some more skiing. I like danger, I like speed, I like surviving danger.
Though I haven’t done any team sports since crew in college, and there I only participated freshman year, I respond to some team efforts much like anybody else with a TV set. I can get in an uproar during a World Series. Michael Jordan kept me hyper for close to a decade, and when he retired, I segued straight to the Spurs, then the Lakers. (It’s amazing how boobland can ride winners, then ride another winner. In boobland it seems like we win almost all the time.)
But I don’t know that I’ve ever gotten as excited over the Yankees or the Bulls as I used to get when Cassius Clay, then Muhammed Ali, boxed. Even on the couch with the sports page or the radio or the tube, I guess I’m really an individualist even for spectator competitions. Hell, I got almost as excited as a kid when Joe Louis fought as I did when an Ali fight was broadcast. Hell, I got almost as excited when I read a boxing magazine biography of Jack Johnson which was lying around the army base at Camp Drum.

It’s not just fighting. I’d go berserk over Jean Claude Killy, over Nadia Comaneci.
And my excitement over boxing puzzles me: it’s so out of synch with my theoretical morality: fighting / bad.

But I initiate this post over another puzzlement: even if fighting rouses our blood lust -- David and Goliath, US against Hitler ... -- how can people possibly respond so to staged fights? to fights where the combatants hold nothing serious against each other? Ali had to invent reasons to not like Joe Frazier.
The newspapers made a big deal about Louis versus Max Schmeling, stacking politics behind sports.

This puzzlement infects my enjoyment of some of the outstanding movies that have been made that center around boxing. Raging Bull! What a great film: in so many ways. I liked Girlfight a lot, the first half of it anyway. Million Dollar Baby was good; though not to my mind quite as good as claimed.
The other night I watched the DVD of Cinderella Man. I put that movie on a plane at least half-way toward Seabiscuit. The sports side was good. The picture of the Great Depression was even better. And the human story was tops.
Still, in Seabiscuit horses were running in circles. I don’t mind. In Cinderella Man Max Baer was trying to take Braddock’s head off. He hit him in the nuts at least twice. It was deliberate. Why wasn’t he severely penalized?
In a real fight of course you hit the guy in the nuts. And in the kidneys. Anywhere you can hurt him. And that’s what old style boxing used to be. And of course, old style, only a fool would hit a guy to the head. The skull is hard; the hand is fragile.
But the Marquis of Queensbury changed all that: for the delectation of the gentlemen bettors. Separate the guy from his brain. Who cares? so long as the betting prospers?

But what did Max Baer have against nice Jim Braddock? What nice James J. had against Max was simple: he wanted to move into a bigger house.

If Hitler killed Poles, Jews, Commies ... it was one thing. He was trying to deny Germans’ humiliations. Country meant something to him. If Goliath tried to kill David, well, the Jews were enemies of the Philistines. And visa versa when David killed Goliath.
When Clay humiliated Big Bad Sonny Liston, that was one thing. Sonny Liston was big and bad. But why should we want Ali to take Frazier’s head off? Or Forman’s?

Aren’t we embarrassed that the fight game is just about vanity? about money?

I think we should stage fights between real enemies. Broke as I am, I might scrape to pay to view Bush against a terrorist: where the terrorist stepped forward to fight Bush, the way David stepped forward to fight Goliath. And the hell with the Marquis of Queensbury. Leave off the gloves. Leave out the rules. Forget about rounds, times out. Never mind height, or weight, or reach, or age. Have at it till one of them can’t continue, or is dead.

Saturday, December 10, 2005

DVD

Aging is so weird. The first time I saw Hamlet the experience took two and a half hours: because that’s how long Laurence Olivier edited his movie for. The first time I read it it took me maybe five hours, Lear probably six hours. That’s because when I’m reading, I look out the window, or in my belly button, as often as I look at the page. I’m not just wool gathering; I find Hamlet out the widow or in my belly button when reading Hamlet and looking out the window. In the theater, in the movie, the lines are timed. When I’m reading I take my time. And the longer I take the more I see.
And of course it took me half a dozen years between seeing the movie and reading the play, and weeks and weeks between the assignment being due and my getting around to it.

With London weather so iffy, daylight so short, the original performances of Hamlet or Lear would have been sped through. The professor has fits at how much the movie production cut in its version: think how much Richard Burbage and the Kings Men might have cut on a blustery afternoon. It’s a play. Theater is a business. It’s not the Easter mass, it’s not the bishop’s sermon. It’s incomprehensible why Shakespeare put so much into it. Because he could? Because it amused him to?

What it is is so richly layered, so redundant -- not in the English teacher’s trivial sense but in the engineer’s profound sense -- that the audience member who understands 90% of the words and the audience member who understands 30% of the words are still seeing much the same drama. You could hear none of the words, watch from a blimp, and still experience some of the story, some of the drama.

The last time I read Lear it took me three days. That was thirty-odd years ago. I don’t dare read it again. If I read it again it might well take me three years.

It took me years and years to read War and Peace some parts I read slower than the characters were living it. When WBAI radio decided to read it out loud, continuously, they scheduled a week. Who knows how many of us read along, staying up all night, every night: thousands of us for sure. It went faster than anticipated and we listened to lots of Russian music during the breaks. Some parts we read repeatedly.

But Olivier’s Hamlet, at the Thalia theater would take one hundred fifty-five minutes: for the matinee, for Saturday night. And that’s one reason I loved movies. Empty your bladder before it starts: because it keeps going. You’ve got to sit and pay attention for however long the company edited it at: an hour and a half, two hours, sometimes longer. Olivier, Bogart, Orson Wells, says the line. Pay attention or you’ve missed it.

Until VCRs, DVDs. Now it can take me all day and all night to watch a one hundred twenty minute movie. The DVD for Bergman’s Fanny and Alexander has been siting next to the Macintosh for weeks now. I’ve watched one scene. It was so great I had to pause it and catch my breath, write emails about it, look up the cast at IMDb.com. Good God: Gunnar Bjöornstrand and Erland Josephson on the same celluloid!

more in a bit

Thursday, December 08, 2005

Waste ’im: Bang, bang

Nature is famous for being wasteful: trillions of seeds for mere millions of trees. Everyone knows about the number of sperm in semen, and everyone knows that an awful lot of semen gets jetted into the breeze. But even a woman, who ripens at least one egg a month in her maturity, winds up with far fewer grown children than twelve a year. For all their millions of eggs, oysters do well just to maintain their population: or would if we’d let them.

Nature, whether wasteful or not, has lots of neat ways to have here a beach, there scrub lands, there pine forest, there climax forest -- there mountains, there grasslands, there a reef, there deep ocean.

Humans are wasteful. That’s why rats and ’roaches fare so well among us. Human societies are wasteful. Nature knew how to make deserts without us, but at nothing like the rate at which it makes deserts with us. We lose soil, forests, shoreline ...

If we had a different perspective, who knows, maybe we’d see nothing as wasted; or, everything as wasted.

There’s no way to tell, so we’d have to ask God, if we could trust him, but this is what I’d like to know:

Is a society with an institution to promote or to preserve something any better at promoting or preserving that something than a society without any such institution?

Lightning must have started many a fire before some animal thought to keep some of the fire going in a fireplace. Sitting in front of their cave, the fire having been domesticated for a million years, the kid gets an idea of how to bank the fire for baking and gets cuffed upside the head by the fire keeper.
Universities are fire keepers of a kind: the appointed fire keepers get tenure, while the kids with ideas get cuffed upside the head. No university was sitting there with a chair ready for Faraday and his electricity; but they had lots of chairs for whale oil captains. They "understood" their oil lamps; not electricity.

Some trees grow, some oysters mature, some babies. Some ideas get through, get a place at the fire: some tiny minority of ideas. And maybe that’s exactly as it should be. Once the critturs have figured out a way to grow a backbone, they’re reluctant to figure out ways not to grow a backbone. Indeed, they’d always already known trillions of ways not to grow a backbone.

So: few ideas get through. Universities get paid to promote ideas: and they do. They promote the ideas they already have. Which still leaves me with my question: which society lets more ideas through: the society with a university, or the society without a university?

I know one thing: the society without a university is cheaper.

Women always had babies. That’s what women do. In fact, many a woman can figure out how to have a baby without having a husband first. But now they can’t figure out how to have a baby without a doctor. And the first baby doctors killed an astonishing portion of their babies, and their women!

Maybe love, and family-making, were better off before there was marriage: before there was this society, before there was this church, before there was this God.

Tuesday, December 06, 2005

Social Semiotics

Remember at all times: it’s not for Jesus to hail himself as Christ; first John has to recognize him, then Peter, then Paul, then the rest of us.
God is whatever we’re all pointing at.

It’s not for Beethoven to know he’s great; first the duke has to tell him, then the public, then posterity.
Toulouse-Lautrec, Van Gogh ... have no right to an opinion: until the museum puts up a plaque.
Einstein wasn’t smart, Relativity wasn’t true: until Life Magazine said so.

As my sister’s friend’s much younger brother said: "Leonardo can’t be a genius; because it he were a genius, he’d be famous."

If you see the Buddha, kill him.

Society relies on the golden goose being immortal no matter how many times we kill it. My particular pessimism relies on the public getting cancer irreversibly before it stops smoking.

I suspect that Shakespeare, Tolstoy, Conrad ... would agree with me: the smartest of us was an idiot.

And what God is is none of our affair.

Monday, December 05, 2005

Rosy Dawn and the Ecliptic

Dawn’s rosy fingers teased through the trees at the horizon moments ago. A dwelling with a light on inside, in the next lane south, looked ghostly.
Now the sky is merely yellow-orange-pink: and dawn is close.

My computers are set up in the front. My work Mac is on the right, my play Mac to the left. Therefore my working face has a southern exposure, eastward biased. Ah: now the eastern sky is magenta-colored; but overall it’s much lighter.

Moments ago I had to step outside and scan eastward. From inside it had seemed that the sun would appear far more southward than I’d expected. When we say north, south ... we seldom mean precise compass points. There are places where the "northbound" highway may actually be running due east, or west. I know a road on Cape Code that says "south" but runs dead north! Anyway I stepped outside to check. Sure the ecliptic spans south east / south west in the northern hemisphere: conspicuously in the temperate zones, dramatically in the arctic.
Sure enough. My impression from indoors had been an illusion. The sky had seemed rosiest in the south-south east because that’s where the window was, that’s where the trees were thinnest, because that’s where I was looking ...

The Ecliptic
So, I stood outside and looked directly east: again, not a compass point: more or less. Brunns Road runs fairly true north / south. I had it to my back. Therefore I was facing east.
I tried in my mind to erase the tree line, to see the horizon as I would see it were I a half-mile east right now, on the lake, in my boat, no interference between me and the dawn horizon. "Sure," I said to myself. The ecliptic bisects the horizon about There. That’s where I’d be seeing the colors most intensely were I on the lake: the sun about to start showing directly. And I swept my head back and around, over my right shoulder, imagining the night sky. Yes, that’s the Zodiac. More or less along that line right there: lower in the sky now that autumn is so far advanced.

The Zodiac
And suddenly it hit me: like for the first time ever: all those old guys, all those astronomers, those astrologers, those Cro-Magnon cavemen: they all could follow the sun’s path better at night than in the day time!
In day light, unless you’re really socked in, you can see the sun in the sky. With clouds, you can see the sun through any cirrus cloud and through most cumulous clouds. But that’s just a point. You don’t see the path. The path shows on the opposite side of the day. You look up at the night sky: there’s Leo, there’s Virgo, there’s Libra ... That's the sun’s path!

Dynamic, Not Static
Ok, I just stepped outside again. Now I can see the sun directly, just passed clear of the horizon: a bit of sky underneath it as well as above and to its sides. The sun is already looking pathetically smaller than it had appeared a moment ago, glued with the horizon. And yes: the sun is MUCH further south that I was picturing it moments ago, based on my last dawn viewings from the lake. It’s December. The ecliptic intersects the horizon much further south than it had say in October when I was still fishing many a dawn.
September? Forget it: wind to sink the boat, making fishing a punishment. November was almost as bad. But there had been navigable nights in October: fish through the night, enjoy the dawn, then go home and sleep.

Final thought on the subject for now: I remember driving in the Keys, twenty-some years ago, winter. That’s the furthest south I’ve ever seen the night sky: and the darkest, Miami far to the north. Dark sky, great sky. Dark sky bright with natural light.
And man, the ecliptic was so far south I couldn’t believe it. Man, Scorpio, Capricorn: practically in the freaking Straights of Florida!

PS No, wait: gotta add a subsequent memory. Back when I lived in my "beach house" -- my apartment smack on the Atlantic in Long Beach, every room laid along the sand-side, a direct view of the ocean from every room but the second bedroom (which had an indirect view, you had to stand kind of close to the window and look south) -- I’d watch this dawn and that dusk from my terrace. I was almost always awake for the dusk, I was frequently awake for the dawn, and sometimes I was awake for both.

Long Island runs east / west. To the north is the Sound. The south shore has the Atlantic direct. At least it does if you live on the sand bars: Rockaway, Atlantic Beach, Long Beach, Lido Beach, Jones Beach, Fire Island ... Therefore if you live on the south shore, actually on the shore, on the beach side, you have a southern exposure: and therefore you have the entire day-time or night-time path of the ecliptic laid out right before you.
And if you can keep time in your head, as I work at being able to do, you can watch the ecliptic drift through the seasons, right before your eyes.
Back when I started writing this piece, I had to adjust my shoulders to parallel Brunns Road in order to be confident that I was facing east. In my beach house all I had to go was look out from my terrace and I was assured of a southern view. The architect had cooperated with geography to set my shoulders for me. I was looking south no matter what. The dawn began way to my left. The sun set way to my right. In winter I could follow the whole arc, no problem. In summer the sun’s first moments were partially blocked by my neighbor’s terrace. The sun’s last moments were partially blocked by my own kitchen. I had to move to the bedroom, or, lean over the railing, to see the last of it.

PPS I’ve got to stick in another memory, though this one has nothing to do with the ecliptic. I’d told David Tamerin that I’d accompany him to Atlantic Highlands to monitor the printing of his lithograph, Her Mind Moves Upon Silence, that I was publishing. David drives from Queens out to Long Beach, picks me up. We cross the Verizanno, head off into the wilds of New Jersey, bend over toward the coast ... David had talked me into letting him use an offset press. He assured me that everyone was doing it. What the hell, once you’re a whore you might as well be a whore.
... Never mind. Day’s end, we have a bite to eat. He shows me a scenic overpass, up by the old light house. There’s room for a car or two near the crest of the highlands. And there’s one of those public telescopes you put a coin into and get of couple of minutes of powerful looking. This machine was more like a telescope than like binoculars: well more than six or seven power. Not twenty, but powerful. I drop a dime (1977ish). I scan the distance. Oh, wow. There’s Coney Island. I can see the paint peeling on the Cyclone, see the cars sliding on the Wonder Wheel, see how sad the closed Parachute Jump looks. I pan right. Hey, I can see Rockaway just as well as I can see Brooklyn! I scan further right. Damn! That’s the Lido Hotel! I’m seeing the Lido closer than I ever saw it in person, closer than Saul Steinberg can ever have seen it, no matter how many times he painted it for The New Yorker.

Wait a minute: if I can see the Lido Hotel, then I ought to be able to see my own neighborhood, maybe my own apartment building. I panned back westward a tad.
Damn! I was looking in my own bedroom window! From a two plus hour drive away! I could see my love birds nuzzling and grooming each other. I could see my cockatiel looking all aone. I could see my waterbed with the sheets rumpled!

Atlantic Highlands was way more than one hundred miles on the odometer (and in New York traffic, that’s like two hundred miles), but had we gone by boat it was only about eighty miles.
Funny thing: after that day I started being able to pick out a hint of Atlantic Highlands from Long Beach. What I’d previously thought was pure sky over pure ocean actually betrayed a tiny hump of continent. And the binoculars confirmed it. It wasn’t just my imagination, my will to see with my naked eye the reverse of what I’d seen with a powerful instrument.

Thursday, December 01, 2005

Tolerance

Recent societies increasingly teach that tolerance is good.

But it depends. If the Big Enders crack their eggs at the big end and the Little Enders crack their eggs at the little end, what difference does it make? The part of the egg that we’re interested in plops into the bowl or into the pan either way.
If one nanny warms the baby by wrapping it in a blanket, by holding in her arms, by patting and cooing to it, fine. If the other nanny warms the baby up by setting it on fire, should both practices receive equal preference? Should the cooing nanny be fired to make room for the fire setter?

Well, there are no fire-setting nannies. If there ever were, we got rid of them. We also got rid of Jesus, and Reich, and Leary, but who ever said we were a rose garden?

Specifically, the United States was founded with an emphasis on religious tolerance: meaning, the pilgrims crossed the Atlantic in order to dissent. They had already proved the lengths they’d go to to protect their dissents. That did not mean that they wanted to tolerate new dissent; but if they had to, in order to dissent, the Puritans, the Baptists, would tolerate the Quakers, and maybe even the Methodists. If the Founding Fathers had suspected that someday their words might come to apply to atheists, or to anarchists, or the Catholics, or to Jews, they would have had a cow.

Let me try to focus on just one thing for one moment: Catholics. The Church had proved the very bastion of intolerance. If you wanted to practice religious tolerance, obviously you couldn’t tolerate Catholics.
Now a group that the Catholics had conspicuously not tolerated was the Jews. Many a European country had no Jewish problem because they had no Jews. Any Jew who showed up was swiftly introduced to some cousin of the fire-setting nanny.

What knee-jerk thing can we expect a Catholic to say about a Jew? What’s the first thing that will pop out? The Jews murdered Christ.
Translate that: "The Jews murdered God."
Should any God-lover tolerate God’s murderers?

I don’t see how. I don’t see why.

But first shouldn’t the God-lovers prove that the Jews in fact murdered God?
Shouldn’t they first prove that God is a synonym for Christ? and that Christ is a synonym for Jesus?

And where do Catholics get the idea that the Jews murdered Jesus? My reading of the gospels suggests to me that the Roman governors did it, prodded a bit not by the Jews but by the Jewish priests of the Temple of Solomon.
Do Catholics want to burn the Roman governors? The Catholics are the governors of Rome.
Was the poor Jew who showed up in Lisbon, maybe in the Fourteenth Century -- maybe trying to sell some pig’s bone as a relic, maybe offering cheaper, better crucifixes -- a priest in the Temple of Solomon? at the time Jesus came to Jerusalem? I’d like to see that explanation.

But first, even before that, shouldn’t the God-lovers prove that they actually love God? (And I don’t mean by shouting it louder and louder.)
And whether or not they prove that they love God, shouldn’t they prove that the object of their love isn’t merely some imaginary artifact of their own semantics?

I am for tolerating Big Enders and Little Enders. As well, I am for tolerating the nanny who coos. And I am for tolerating any religion that can objectively demonstrate any couple of their basic tenets to be more real than hypnotizing themselves in the mirror.

Get your god to manifest to the un-hypnotized. Then: also get your god to demonstrate that his tenets are more sane than un-sane.

Then: the idea of religious tolerance might have some basis.

PS SW's comment is good and welcome. Take a look.

Proof: Proof Positive

That the world is the way it is is proof that no one has ever understood a word I’ve said.

That the world is the way it is, the human world, I don’t mean the natural world, is proof, proof positive, that no one has ever understood a word I’ve said.

Then again, that the world is the way it is, the human world, is also proof, proof positive, that no one has ever understood a word that Prigogine has ever said. Or Bateson.

Or Thoreau. Or Tolstoy. Or Shakespeare.

And certainly not Illich.

And absolutely not Jesus.



That the world is the way it is just might be proof that 90% of communication is illusory. The phatic part works, but substance seldom transmits.

Tuesday, November 29, 2005

Feral Animals

Today Reuters has a good article on the impact of wild exotics -- dogs, pigs, rabbits, cats ... camels! -- on Australia. We’ve all learned what a disaster the introduction of rabbits caused. Some of us are even aware of the impact of mercantile and industrial civilizations marauding about: feral humans, fewer staying home these days.

Ah but the article mentions the possibilities for the menu! Imagine camel steaks in odd restaurants.

I always favored restaurants in which I could get odd meats: jelly fish, sea cucumber, sheep’s skull, brains in butter, chitterlings ... Here in Florida I know where I can dine on frogs, on turtle, on alligator ... I wish I knew where to be served snake, ’possum, ’coon ...

The Chinese are famous for eating everything; but local Chinese establishments know better than to offer variety to the locals. I asked one restaurant if they’d make an exception for me -- if I brought in the kill, would they prepare it for me? No way.

I’d do it myself if I only knew how to butcher. First though I should learn to hunt.

If things get really bad, remember how many people there are. Hunting them should be child’s play.

You’re right: I don’t mean that. It’s not just that cannibalism remains a deep taboo with me, as it does I am sure with you; but once humans realized they were being hunted, the bulk of us would start paying attention again real fast. And then the hunter would have his hands full. Hunting would NOT be easy. Or safe.

Saturday, November 26, 2005

Cannibals & Missionaries

I have another Either/Or metaphor to offer. An American Lit scholar divided literature between Redskins and Palefaces: useful so long as it’s not taken solemnly or too literally.
Shaw analyzed Ibsen as showing society to be composed of Idealists and Philistines, with here and there an occasional (rare and precious) Realist. The Philistines can wear the ready-made shoes and don’t mind. The Idealists are uncomfortable in the ready-made shoes but are also uncomfortable admitting it: and so the Idealist waxes Platonic: "The shoes are perfect; experience is faulty." The Realist says, "Dammit, the shoe doesn’t fit. Can’t we make better shoes?" (Whatever is true of Ibsen, Shaw’s analysis critiques his own work to a T.)

Lately I’ve been thinking in terms of Cannibals & Missionaries: by which I do not mean that the "cannibals" are necessarily wrong, or backwards, or primitive ... Neither do I mean that the "missionaries" are right, or advanced, or that God agrees with them. What I do mean consistently with the image is that the Cannibals are like Shaw’s Ibsenite Philistines and that the Missionaries try to colonize them, to convert them, to change them.

I believe that we all have a right to try to change each other. I believe that many of us do try to change each other regardless of what I believe. And I believe that those trying the changing are often in equal or greater need of change themselves.

How many cannibals though ask the missionary for proof that their God is god or that their Bible was actually written by this God?
(Right there: watch out for people who capitalize their hobbyhorse. Churches, businesses, governments ... Why is Coke a big deal? What’s wrong with cola?) (That’s why Kleenex wants us all to say Kleenex when all we mean is tissue. That’s why the culture says butter when all it means is grease, and why Parkay says Parkay when all it means is grease.)

When I was young I was taught that the Christians knew what they were doing. Now I believe that the Freudians don’t take it far enough: none of us can be relied on to know what we’re doing: including, perhaps especially, the Freudians! Missionaries are inevitable. Once only Jehovah’s Witnesses came knocking at my door. Now the knock may be coming from Jehovah’s Witnesses or Mormons. Or Democrats.

How many Christians really stand for anything Jesus taught? Do they love their enemies? Don’t they pay taxes? Don’t their taxes finance wars? Or do we love our enemies by dropping napalm on them? Would Jesus accept that as love? Would Jesus accept that as the love he meant?

Whoops, sorry. I mean to be focusing on my Cannibals & Missionaries.

I think we’re all cannibals: and this time I do mean something primitive, wrong, in need of correction, in need of learning. I also suspect that too damn many of us are missionaries: meddling in what we don’t understand, overlooking what there is to be appreciated.

Many taboos were silly, I don’t doubt. And Freud was dead right in elucidating which taboos still apply: no cannibalism, no incest, no murder. Freud was further right in saying that the first of those taboos is still largely effective, the second somewhat effective, and the third not very effective. But: between law and taboo, I’ll take taboo. Taboos don’t get "written." Taboos emerge. Taboos evolve. Taboos are far better than laws at modifying our behavior.

Well, this didn’t go the way I’d planned. That happens again and again. But for the meantime I’ll take it. As I use my terms Cannibals and Missionaries I hope I won’t be altogether misunderstood.



It’s too bad I didn’t write this a couple of decades ago. I believe Cannibals & Missionaries would have seemed more contrastive to me then: and their roles less confused. These days it’s often the cannibals who act as missionary to the missionary. The missionary says, "Turn the other cheek," and the cannibal condescends to correct him: "No, it’s an eye for an eye, you fool."

Or: the missionary tries to tell his cannibal family, "Be healthy." But they’re hypnotized by the tube which is advising them to "Ask your doctor."

Thursday, November 24, 2005

Polarized Intelligence

Everything we see is an image. Different energies are involved: the radiant energy of light: and bio-energies generated by the digestion of food by an organism with some kind of multiple feedback system: mind. Theorizing light has driven us crazy for centuries, though we seem to be getting somewhere. Semiotic epistemology in theorizing imaging makes one thing clear: Whatever is "out there," what we see, what we think, is wholly in our processing of it.

When we’re drunk, we can see double. When we look through a crystal we can see double.
Without careful study, all this business about transverse waves, wave versus particle, interference ... medium ... can be very confusing.

My interest isn’t physics though, but social intelligence. Societies see double all the time: though we can typically "think" only one image at a time. Still: contradictions go together like strawberries and cream.

For the moment what I have to say is mere introductory metaphor. But I intend to construct careful analogies in the near future.

Meantime: Culture puts glasses on its members. (Is society made of individuals? or of something else involving individuals? (Think particle vs. wave.) How does a culture’s glasses handle polarization?

How is it possible for us to imagine that we’re a democracy one moment and to have a Hitler or a Nixon or a Bush the next? How is it possible for us to imagine that we’re Christian, or at least moral, one moment and to napalm little girls the next? Why, if we’re interested in the free flow of ideas, do we fund institutions that man-handle ideas: and fund ONLY such institutions?

There’s a lot to relate here, a lot to resolve. I intend to do it.

Sunday, November 20, 2005

Art, Movies, Money

Less money; more freedom
Martin Scorsese

Hanging out at the Whitehorse Tavern in the later 1950s I would regularly share poet José Garcia Villa’s table in the back room on Friday nights. José taught poetry writing at CCNY: despite his quirk of putting commas after every single word. Friday nights he would gather with some of his students, some of his friends, and I seemed particularly welcome.

José, a little odd in a number of ways, made no secret of having the hots for me. Once he respected that I wasn't that way however, he left me my own space and I enjoyed his soirées. (Dylan gone, José was the most famous poet currently a regular. Oh, all sorts stopped by: Faulkner, James Baldwin ... Jack Hawkins ... Tom Clancy seemed glued. But those are novelists, actors, singers. The White Horse was Celtic, however German Ernie was, and poetry was the Celtic main thing there.) I always got tons of free drinks at the Whitehorse — why was gone into at Knatz.com [censored, temporarily offline] — and José also got more than his share.

Oh, hell, I’ll repeat why here: years passed before I myself learned the reason, but Ernie, the owner, hated the Madison Avenue types that flooded the place after Life Magazine had featured the White Horse in its article on Dylan Thomas. The ad exec would request a tab, Ernie would comply: and then put every second or third drink for his preferred customers onto the bill of those he didn’t like. Mr. Exec would show up on the weekend, and out loud call, "Ernie, my tab." Then, "What? $187? I only had two beers." And Ernie would respond, "Pay it, or get out." Again and again, they paid. Ernie also bought his own rounds: like once an evening. If Ernie’s pony of Chivas Regal arrived at your table, soon followed by Ernie himself, that round was on Ernie. Otherwise, 50%, sometimes 75% of my bill, of José’s bill, was on Madison Avenue. One time I think I had sixteen beers: my bill was seventy-five cents (if I could be said to be thinking under those circumstances).

Anyhow, José once explained to me how he became a poet. As a boy in the Philippines he had wanted to be an artist: that is, to paint -- with paints, brushes, canvas, paper. But José couldn’t afford paints and brushes. José could afford pencil, paper. José became a poet. It was cheaper.

I write this as I pause before watching Batman Begins, the DVD. These days I spend more time with the player paused than playing. But I plug away, and slowly catch up on many of the movies I missed while starving at FLEX, while starving at my novels ... When I had a couple of dollars and a little leisure, I had seen a lot of movies. Early 1970s that ground to a halt.

I vastly preferred movies to the theater. With movies you got drama, a social medium, without all the planning, date making, advanced ticket-buying. And the art: the art could be so fabulous: Fellini, Bergman, Kurosawa ... Griffiths, Chaplin, Ford, Hitchcock ...

In 1955 Ray’s Pather Panchali hit the world. International awards galore. It not only played in cities, it played the occasional suburb. By 1958 I had seen it I don’t know how many times. One time in the 1960s all three films in the trilogy were playing en suite at the Little Carnegie. I entered at noon and watched them cycle till midnight. Was I ever a basket case by the time I staggered off to find something to eat.
Point is: Ray made Pather Panchali using a rented camera: and friends, amateur actors. The movie cost him a few hundred dollars to make. Now Robert Rodriguez makes watchable films at bargain budgets. Still, even for staggering cases like Ray’s with Pather Panchali, cameras, film ... cost more than paints, brushes ... and a lot more than pencil, paper.

But think: think of the artists who’ve drawn in the sand. Think of the poets who wrote without pencil or paper. Think of the millennia of epic poets who composed in their head, who performed at the camp fire ... And think of our society were everything costs more and more and more.

I’m going to go watch my movie now. But I expect to come back sometime and marvel at how good movies can be despite being so, to some extent necessarily, expensive to make: to make, to market, to show. It’s astonishing -- to me -- that art and movies have ever come within a light year of each other.

Oh, wait: favorite story: Chaplin was wildly successful immediately upon entering Hollywood. We all know that. Chaplin was the first artist to "earn" $1,000 a week: an unheard of amount at the time. What we don’t all know ... Wait: Chaplin said, about to sign, "Could you make it $1,075 a week?" "What’s the $75 for?" he was asked. "I need something to live on," he answered.
What isn’t known is that he was expected to pay for the movies he made out of that grand! It wasn’t salary; it was budget. And he wanted to blow the whole grand on the celluloid.

Honor

If you speak French a book is "un livre." It’s not a book; it’s un livre. We say "chauffeur" and the French say "weekend": words swop.
In physics, "work" is "force through distance." In market economies, work is what you do Monday to Friday. In English tennis you "throw up" the ball to serve. "Chris throws up so beautifully," said Virginia Wade. In America we "toss" the ball.

In America we spied with our eyes, with cameras in the stratosphere, with cameras in satellites; in Russia they listened through the door, under the floor boards. WASPS know better than to talk on the street; the street is where a lot of "ethnics" live: of course they talk on the street. I was trained not to demonstrate with my hands when talking; Italians tend not to talk without their hands.
In England children should be seen but not heard; in America the kids’ behavior is the entertainment.

We speak different languages, we live different cultures. When we mix we live more different cultures than we’re ever aware of. And yet we have these ideas of monism: we are one people, one nation, one law ... one God. One mankind. One species, supposedly.

My life is a long record of this and that monism. I also am pleased to know a little French, a little German, a little Italian ... Just in English, I know a little Elizabethan, read Chaucer fairly well, for a modern, can ever read little Old English. On the tennis court I somehow, clumsily, get the ball up in the air for service whatever you call it. On the street I can keep mum with the WASPS, scowl with the misanthropes, or slap five with a brother. I like to eat Chinese, French, Italian, Greek, Japanese, Swedish ... or mix them any which way in my own cooking. But there’s one thing I never learn, or recognize only after I’ve blundered again: we don’t all have the same ethics. We don’t all have the same honor.

Oh, sure: sometimes we’re honorable by our own standards, and sometimes we are less than honorable. I mean that we don’t all have the same standards. Not only are there different standards of honor among different professions -- in business it was important to be able to tell which customer might lie, but more important to know if his check would probably clear -- but there are different standards among cultural groups -- the gypsy will cheat any non-gypsy, but will he cheat a gypsy? -- among this and that, but -- and here’s what will make people scream -- between the sexes!

I’m not ready to blog my question of Are Women Honorable? just yet. This is a promise to do so.

While here though, I’ll just say this: we have different histories.

Women gang together: to wash, to gossip, to gather food, to talk child-rearing ... Men gang together: to hunt, to wage war, to work, to pass laws telling others how they must behave ... The team hunter, the team soldier, have a very different history from the child-toting food-gatherer.
Ok, now there are women who go to work, who join the gang to pass laws ... But women don’t have a million-plus year history of it.

In business, I sold to dealers who I knew wouldn’t keep one item of our agreement, but whose checks usually cleared. That was their honor. That was the whole extent of their honor. (While there were many more who wouldn’t keep a single term of our agreement and whose checks bounced! They had NO honor: in business.
When a male tells me he’ll call me, I know there’s a chance that he’ll actually call me: whether I want him to or not. If a woman tells me she’ll call me, I know she probably won’t: unless she was the one who came up to me in the first place.

The whole issue gets very messy where the principal business is male/female. And there women have no team history.

I must admit: I, a "male," supposedly, have very little team history too.

PS One thing we’ll have to consider is that both men and women are predators: carnivores: even if we decide to go with veggies for a while, even if we buy our meat slaughtered and dressed by the market system (even if we let the farmer rip the carrot from the ground for us). Both men and women can hunt, but in general it’s the men who hunt the women. Thus the male is a carnivore and a sexual predator; the woman is a carnivore, but is simultaneously the hunted. Morality between hunters is one thing, morality between predator and pray may be quite different.
One may prefer to be truthful with the analyst. It does not follow that one must then be truthful to the lion, to the snake, to the mugger ... to the male predator?
But what if the male is just trying to ... sell insurance, hold the door ... Not everything a predator does is predatory.
The thief could steal the magazine, on another occasion the thief could pay for the magazine. No one steals quite everything.

Pure State

One can prove things within a tautology: Pythagoras’ theorem, for example. But tautologies have no necessary bearing on the world of experience. Natural languages, such as English, have tautological aspects, but they are not tautologies. things can be argued in a natural language, but never proved. Today’s evidence can be refuted by tomorrow’s, ditto testimony, arguments ...

The world of experience has few to no pure states. We glibly talk about vacuums; but we know of no pure vacuums in nature, and we certainly have none in labs. So we settle for some threshold of emptiness: and call it a vacuum. The moderator calls for a show of hands; but no angels show those gathered x rays into all the dungeons of the universe to prove that no one is being help captive, with his hand tied down.

Under the law gold alloy of a certain refinement is sold as "pure gold." If it were really pure, you could do little with it, form no rings, no coins, merely watch it become impure: all by itself.
(Nothing in the universe is ever "by itself"; everything in the universe is always in the universe. The gold is in an environment which interacts with it.)

Any culture abuses truth with its customs of what can pass for "pure." Once upon a time if the theater offered "butter" on the popcorn, one could expect it to be butter: processed, but from a cow. With artificials, the theater could give you anything it wanted and call it butter. Then the law-makers step in: and the theater can sell you corn oil as butter, but not soy oil. "Fresh" at the supermarket means not frozen and defrosted more than a dozen times.
I’m sure the store knows how many times the product has been deliberately frozen and thawed and refrozen, but does it have any idea of how many times it’s been inadvertently thawed, inadvertently frozen?

The great modern philosopher, Wittgenstein, was conspicuous for not taking philosophy too literally.
I know that that’s a tree, says A.
B says to C, My friend isn’t insane:
We’re just doing philosophy.
Wittgenstein knew how seriously to take testimony. Ask a guy if he’s ever been to the moon.
No.
Are you sure?
Yes. Never.
You mean you’ve never slept? You’re perfectly, infallibly, conscious each and every nanosecond? God, or some demon, or some UFO, couldn’t have taken you to the moon while you slept?
This string of associations was sparked in my head the other day by a string of associations pk and bk were batting back and forth by email. Considerations of Shays’s Rebellion, and of the Whiskey War, had us talking, always in relation to anarchism, ideas of government, property, taxation; on distinctions between internal and external taxation: taxing imported booze versus taxing the products of private stills. bk was bothered by impurities in Thoreau’s anarchism: when T. dismissed some fuss over taxes.
I recognized the problem, the more so because of bk’s activities of recent years, but advised against being too bothered by it. Efforts at philosophical purity could lead to excesses such as we have seen with efforts at racial purity. We’re all mutts. Accept it.
I no longer worry so much even over the purity of my sainthood. Though the question remains: are you 99.9% sin and still calling yourself a saint? or are you 99.9% saint and still calling yourself a sinner?

Blah, blah, which brings me to today’s association: censorship.
The conservative challenges the liberal to a debate: on censorship. The conservative rents the theater and invites the liberal to go first. While the liberal is blahing against censorship, the conservative drops a screen and stars displaying, porn, then kiddie porn, then snuff films. Finally the liberal abandons the podium and rushes the screen, pulling it down.
I rest my case, says the conservative.
We have laws against censorship. Hell, it’s in the constitution. But we practice it. I can run for office promising to practice it better, but why should anyone believe me? I can also promise to hold my breath for eight minutes; but I’d be a fool to bet on it.

The Constitution offers what we interpret as freedom of conscience, as freedom of speech ... So then why do universities still blather about academic freedom? Is academic freedom somehow more free than a Constitutional guarantee? Or are both guarantees of the same kind as the guarantee you get from the car salesman, the clothing salesman, the beer brewer? Has there ever been a university that didn’t squelch this idea while it was promoting that idea? Ignore the university’s testimony on the subject.

Has there ever been a church that admitted messages from its god that didn’t reflect the prejudices of the elders? Sure the god can say old things, things approved by the elders, but can the god say anything new? Can’t the elders shush the young theologian as they wish?

The university can stack its faculty with its brand of secular theologians; but the culture can always trump the university: make them sign a loyalty oath.
In Heller’s Catch-22 officers who’d already taken oaths to get their commissions had, during the waxing hysteria, to take additional loyalty oaths: at the mess hall, if they wanted to eat.

As always, I'm branching off before I've hit all my targets. I'll just stick stuff here and maybe reweave the whole later: two things:

Censorship:The schools, the media, teach us the Bill of Rights. Therefore, we think that we actually have them, not just on parchment, but in fact. Any college freshman though will tell you that freedom, no censorship, does not extend to shouting Fire in a crowded theater.
Now we're back to pure gold again. If a statement needs qualifications from lawyers, from college students, from a special class of experts ... forget it. You're talking bullshit in the first place. Political science is politics; not science.

Institutions:How we use our institutions -- our government, our universities, our churches -- to convince ourselves of our lies.
Just yesterday I posted this to my InfoAll blog:Institutions magnify our natural tendency to confuse map with territory. We think the word is the thing, the actor is the character. On top of that old established and bloated institutions can milk the confusion. Gathering together for hymns, the church encourages our deception that we're godly, spiritual; not thieves living on stolen land with the royalties for our ideas largely unpaid.
And this:Institutions structure and channel a society's illusions, especially its self-deceptions. We have laws, therefore we must be lawful. We have a Justice Department, therefore we must be just. Having a Defense Department proves that we're safe.

Churches prove that we're spiritual, schools that we are learned.

They prove it: if the proved-to are as naive as a typical audience at a typical magic show. But the magician said that the box the coin disappeared into was an ordinary box, he said he had nothing up his sleeves ...

See? If we're fooled by our own lies, then God must be fooled too. If we tell God we're innocent, he has to believe us, doesn't he? And if we say we're sorry, he has to forgive us. So we can all get into heaven: whole, with our stolen ideas, deeding our stolen lands.

The museum is very careful to show the provenance of the Van Gogh: donated by Mrs. Eli Watkins. The scholar at the university cites his college at the other university. Still: God knows, and we all know: Van Gogh didn't get paid. Mrs. Watkinds can't have owned it. And it doesn't matter if Professor Smith credits Professor Jones if both are hoarding water that nature gave to everything.
We know not to trust the testimony of the accused: why do we trust the testimony of the cop? of the judge? of the expert? Are we in any real respect different from the people who called for Jesus to be crucified?
Don’t care about Jesus? OK, fine. Are we in any real respect different from the people who called for Socrates to pour hemlock in his ear? Didn’t we all sit with our thumb up our ass while Reich’s books were burned? while Leary was hounded from Harvard?
While pk was interrupted at NYU?

I iterate: whatever you say is true of the society, I challenge you. I challenge you to stand with me in an open boat on an open ocean during the lightning blitz. If I get fried, so what? If you get fried, will your seconds admit that I might have been right?
Uhh ... pk, What if you both get fried?

PS Re: Shouting Fire, triggering panic: Part of the problem is our facile confidence that complex issues can be handled by one-dimensional slogans. "No censorship" skips over too many problems. Then again these things are problems only in a hierarchical, centrally administered authority. Scientists studying emergent behaviors in decentralized systems are saying some very interesting and revealing things these days. Mitchel Resnick, for example, suggests that while for birds to flock together and fly in "formation," while there is no commander bird who keeps screaming "Fly in a Vee, a big damn Vee," the flocking may result from something as simple as the instruction pair: "Get close to another bird"; "Don’t bump into it."
Now note: a positive instruction is paired with a negative instruction: Do, Don’t. (And of course the instructions are in the genes, not in the politics.) I intend to keep my eyes open for additional Positive/Negative pairings.

Thursday, November 17, 2005

Civilian Blood

Colonel: We can’t have you running around wasting friendly civilians.
Rambo: There are no friendly civilians.

First Blood was on the tube tonight. I got a glance at much of it, watched some as carefully as possible on the silly box. I’m pleased to find that I liked it almost as much as I did in 1982 when bk and I caught it fairly early in its first run. I’ll list a couple of things I like best about it, pretty much unchanged I find by the decades.

The movie brought the Vietnam war home -- where it belonged. US involvement in Vietnam killed an estimated four million Vietnamese; here the green beret tears up the local constabulary: and, boy, do they deserve it.

I liked its action. I liked Sly’s posing. I liked everybody’s overkill on everything they do, everything they touch.

I liked the movie’s silence. It’s terrific: until they start talking; then it’s ghastly.

I adore the utter realism: Sheriff Will Teasle violates the law, morality, decency, ethics, police procedure ... at every opportunity, but he’s still the boss, still in charge, still respected: even obeyed, in so far as the yokels were capable of following orders. The Americans here really didn’t make very obedient Nazis, but then the Nazis themselves turned out to be not quite so robotic as they were cast in WW II. Teasle gets his cops killed, his town blown up, and no one kicks his head through the street.

Hollywood has never failed to provide scripts in which the authorities, like Satan in Milton’s Paradise Lost, learn nothing from their experience. Before long it’s pretty clear that Sheriff Teasle’s stupidity is deliberate. I find that First Blood is a sterling example of that tradition: and Brian Dennehy performed the brainless beef beautifully: born for the role. My first memory of Brian Dennehy dates to 1957 or 1958. My old buddy Brian Carey had come to room with me in the Apple. Brian was sporting the beard that, among other things, had gotten him thrown out of Notre Dame. On our way to the West End Tavern we crossed from Amsterdam Avenue toward Broadway on West 114th Street. The DEKs were already well-partied up as we passed, Brian and I, for the moment, utterly sober. Brian, I presume for his beard, got drenched in beer which the DEKs were quaffing directly from pitchers. They must have had a keg, so what the hell, dump it by the pitcher-full on the beatnik. When I glowered at them, myself having been spared the shower by accident or by design, the one drunk who met my gaze without flinching his eyes away was Brian Dennehy: our Lion center: and future terrific character actor for red-neck cop roles.

But back to the movie for at least a moment more: as a kid I loved the Burroughs Tarzan novels. Tarzan had only one weapon other than his body and his wits and his will to prevail: his knife. The cops have stripped Rambo down to hose him, so he’s half naked as he escapes. The one thing he is careful to grab as he flees the precinct house is his knife. The cops have cars, guns, radios, helicopters ... automatic weapons, bazookas ... That’s all right: the morons always bring the hero all the additional weaponry he will need when they come after him. All the hero has to do is take it away from them and shove it up their ass. But I don’t remember Tarzan bawling like a baby. Tarzan goes through kraut soldiers like butter. But I don’t remember Tarzan chickening out the second he sees an officer. Rambo kills the dogs, kills the cops, spares a kid with a hunting rifle, then resumes chewing up the non-coms. But as soon as he faces the sheriff, he backs off. As soon as he sees his old colonel, he goes all to pieces.

Rambo was half-naked, Tarzan was all naked (except in the movies). Tarzan didn’t hold his hand because the bad guy had a commission from some kleptocracy. Rambo blows everything to hell, sees the trinket of rank: and blubbers.

But at least the civilians got mauled.

The dialogue is really awful, but some of the lines are nevertheless revealing: gems. As his town is getting torched, Sheriff Teasle, over the bull horn, commands that the civilians "get indoors; await further instructions." The sheriff who’s gotten their town blown up assumes authority not just to harass unfamiliar long-haired pedestrians but to tell the citizenry what to do?
Leni Riefenstahl reported that Marlene Dietrich, on learning that Hitler had been elected, said, "Oh, good. Now the German people will have someone to tell them what to do." Sheriff Teasle makes sure that his pillaged Americans get the same privilege: he tells them what to do, promises to tell them more.

PS 2005 11 21 Same thing in Batman Begins (another movie I like; though I don’t love it as I love First Blood): Hollywood always offers a hero who mows through the pawns, chops up the knights and bishops, but stalls at the rook, queen, king. Rambo kills the dogs, kills the helicopter, kills the cops; but just talks to the sheriff, whines at the colonel. What would he do if he saw a congressman? or the president? What would he do if he saw the damn Pope?
Batman shows up for the big drug smuggle. He kicks hell out of the longshoremen, the truck loaders. Good thing there are no mail clerks, assistant copy boys around. Hierarchical society is a triangle with a very broad base. But Batman too can’t climb the sides of the triangle, doesn’t seem to even aim for the top. The crime king pin is sitting in his limo: right there, fer CrySake. Batman pulls him up through the limo’s moon roof, gives him a shake, a good talking to. If Batman really wanted to do something, why didn’t he leave the truck loaders alone, just show up in the limo, and kick hell out of the king pin?

Anthropologists tell of the African tribal villagers who were plagued by some white-man crooks. Some other white-man colonialists rounded up the crooks, arrested them, told the tribal villagers to keep them guarded in the hut. The crooks just slept for a day, and then walked out. The crooks were a worse parasite on the tribe than the colonial officials; but the tribesmen could do nothing to interfere with the free movements of a white man: except when some other white man was standing there, giving and supervising the order.
When my German shepherd was a puppy it was cute when he jumped toward my knee. But as he grew it was time to dissuade him from the habit. I read that all I had to do was to wait till he was on his none-too-well-balanced hind legs, half-way toward my crotch, and deflect him with my knee. The advice came with a theory, an explanation: the dog doesn’t see your knee deflect him, neither does he feel it: he feels only his failure: after a while he decides that it is simply impossible to put his front paws on a human body above the ankle. It worked.

So it’s understandable if the Rambos of the world can kick hell out of each other, maybe even frag a lieutenant, but they tremble at the captain, the major, the colonel ...
But Batman? Bruce Wayne? raised in a freaking gothic horror of a castle? Why couldn’t he stomp the chief?

I don’t think it’s Bruce Wayne. I think it’s Hollywood: doesn’t want to give the audience, the little would-be Rambos, chasing the popcorn with steroids, the little cops-to-be, the pups, the local tribesmen, any ideas.

Hail Victory

In 1949, observing Nuban rituals, George Rodger photographed that day’s version of their ancient wrestling. The vanquished bears the victor on his back.

Nuban wrestlers
Nuban wrestlers, detail, vanquished carrying victor

In the United States the photograph was shown in Life, or National Geographic ... I was eleven, maybe still only ten. That photograph has lived with me ever since, though I never saw it again until last night.

Watching The Wonderful, Horrible Life of Leni Riefenstahl, already riveted, I went bug-eyed when she showed the second of two photographs that had changed her life. The first had gotten her into movies; the second was the Nuban wrestlers --MY photograph. She narrated that it had moved her to quick-exit-left: the Sudan. She lived among the Nubans, danced with them, filmed them.

Leni Riefenstahl’s images had already formed much of my esthetic by the time I was ten. As a college friend explained to me (Jewish college friend), the reason all those news clips of Hitler and his Nazi rallies between features at the movie theaters during WWII were so stirring is that our documentary makers used Leni Riefenstahl’s footage. The sound track said Boo, but the visual track shouted Yea!
(The real information (the macroinformation) contradicted -- and trumped! -- the supposed information.)

I believe Riefenstahl when she iterated that she was never a Nazi. I believe her when she says that however much Goebbels wanted to get into her pants, she couldn’t stand him. BUT Leni Riefenstahl is THE genius of victory. Sieg Heil.

(And Leni Riefenstahl is THE genius of athleticism cresting as transcendant.)



Now the top wrestler in Roger’s photo is absolutely magnificent. I forgive myself for so responding to him as a child. I still respond to him today.
I still respond to Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will, to her Olympiad. When I was six or eight I responded to the Saturday morning parades, building up the high school football game. I thought the drum majorette was a beauty queen. I’d be a couple of years older before I saw instead a skinny adolescent with goose pimples from the autumn cold: showing flesh that had nothing to show. By the time I was in junior high the football ritual embarrassed me in all ways.

The Nuban wrestlers are naked for the occasion: decorated though with gray dust. At the end of the occasion though the whole tribe would still be pretty much naked: with more everyday decoration.
Were those two to meet again, the outcome conceivably could reverse. Without Roger’s document, the moment was evanescent: both ancient and transient.
Hitler wanted France to carry him on its shoulders today, tomorrow ... for a thousand years. That’s the part that’s disgusting to me: our willingness to destroy the world to extend our time share.

Down the road lives a tribe of Nuba who decorate their faces on occasion. In twenty minutes any one of them can paint himself a unique design, as original, as startling, as beautiful as a Picasso. When they wash it off it’s gone forever: except for the endurance of the culture. Snowflakes: unique, gorgeous, gone.

Without Roger’s image I wouldn’t know that moment, and neither would Riefenstahl. With photography, with intrusive record keeping, we’re all Hitlers: unfortunates bearing us on their shoulders.

Was any of the fighting fair?



I just poked around, for the first time, a new-Nazi web site (just checking on my spelling for "Sieg Heil"). They said that Nazis are for greatness. (Well then they must be for a zillion things that Hitler’s Nazis were against! Much of the art they burned, for example.) They said they were for nature, beauty, health ... Well, in that sense then Leni Riefenstahl was the perfect Nazi. (So then who where those ugly stupid shit heads she worked for?) And so am I. And who isn’t?

German romanticism. Man!

I recommend The Wonderful, Horrible Life of Leni Riefenstahl to anyone who isn’t already expert on her work. I’ll wait a while, then watch it again: if only to see at least once more her climbing vertical rocks at the top of the Alps (no ropes) barefoot, in a dress!

And she lived past 100. What a woman.



I don’t doubt that I’ll want to continue to add scrapbook-type jottings to this post. But it belongs at Knatz.com, slim and trim, with a scrapbook file linked from it.

As of today Tiger is a shot behind David Duval in Japan. Welcome back David! The divine Federer beat the wonderful Coria in Shanghai. Roger is running 80 wins to 3 loses in 2005. Two more victories and he’ll match McEnroe’s 82-3 of 1984. I wouldn’t mind if Michael, Tiger, Roger ... Ali ... never lost. But if they were still riding another guy’s shoulders beyond a discrete celebration period, I’d agitate to shoot them. Sports victories seem innocent. What Nixon did to get elected is not. What General Motors did to sell more cars is not.

But, as long as the core of the public tolerate GM and US welded piggyback, what can I do? But grind my teeth.

In the big world I hate the concept of Victory. In the stadium I’m still a little kid.

As soon as I found Rodger’s photo on line last night, finally knowing how to search for and find it, not easy before recently, since we refused to make it easy in 1970 with FLEX, I wrote bk how seeing that photo again sure puts Ali, Michael, Tiger ... in perspective. The movie concocts some trick to show Brad Pitt and Achilles leaping above some Goliath and piercing him neck to knee. We’ve seen Michael in enough real games to know that the spectacular really can happen. The Nuba show us that it’s been happing since before Homer.
And until we get archival footage of Homo erectus, we ain’t seen nothin’. Extinct, there have been pre-men who could eat Shaq and Jim Brown for breakfast, the women and children also covering territory that would challenge a leopard.

Wednesday, November 16, 2005

Brancusi

A couple of issues rattling around in my head this afternoon bumped into some old flotsam cankered there for half a century. The other issues I plan to develop and relate, some of my relationships not normally seen, but the old sore I must excise right now.

Back in the 1950s I heard that US Customs refused to admit some Brancusi pieces into the US until the import tax was paid on it. Works of art are exempt, but customs refused to recognize the acknowledged masterpieces as "art." Customs said that far from art, the Brancusis were just some wood and some bronze and some string.

The museums, the galleries, had the items valued at say $24,000 per. So customs wanted a whopping tax.


Hey, wait a minute. The Brancusi's were worth $24,000 per only as works of art. As wood, bronze, string the value was maybe $3. So pay the tax on the three dollars and consign Customs to the subhuman oblivion it belongs in. If Customs recognizes the value as $24,000 per, then it must also concede the items to be art: it was only as art that the value was "real." So: either let it in valued at $24,000, exempt, or value it at what you're taxing it as: $3 worth of string.

Related question: by what vanity does Customs imagine that it can distinguish art from string? First any government bureaucracy should demonstrate that it can tell shit from Shinola.

Tuesday, November 15, 2005

Fractal History

One generation hasn’t a clue. Another generation can track footprints while mama finds cookie crumbs on Junior’s clothing. Another generation can ID from fingerprints. Then we ID from DNA. We don’t know what tools we’ll have tomorrow. We don’t know that we’ll have a tomorrow.

bk just gave me Shays’s Rebellion: never heard of it: till very recently. Oh, I don’t mean it never crossed my ears; I mean it never came to my attention. Author Leonard L. Richards is a history teacher who, apparently like many another, had thought he knew all about it: until he did some research: research he didn’t have to climb Mt. Everest for; just through the annoyance and drudgery of reading some old records in difficult hand-writings. Presto: his, and now others’, views are changed: permanently.

Never mind what the views were, or are: just register that they’re different. View A was based on X information and a set Y of opinions; view B is based on X information and a set Y of opinions plus Y information and a set Z of unearthed old opinions.

Bull-headedness is immune to evidence; science changes with the evidence. And even history can have scientific moments.

I’ve only just begun the book. But I’m not writing about Shays’s Rebellion; I’m pondering the nature of evidence: is it fractal? Real onions can’t have infinite layers, but how about layers of evidence? What of what’s beyond our reach will ever come within our reach?

Once upon a time scholars of John Henry Cardinal Newman knew that he had written a book of a certain title. They knew that Newman had never published that book. Every Newman scholar knew that there must have been a manuscript, and that that "book," that manuscript, was missing. Let’s call the title X. One scholar went to the late cardinal’s office, had permission to look through his desk. It was one of those old desks with a row of dividers? pigeonholes? There he discovered the missing manuscript: in a compartment clearly labeled X! No one had looked for it! at least not very hard.

In the case of Shays’s Rebellion Leonard L. Richards noticed something anomalous (anomaly : difference : information): there was an odd quantity of records detailing who participated in the rebellion. There were records on these people. It seemed that other historians hadn’t bothered to look. The records were right in or around Boston: a Massachusetts scholar could walk, take the bus ... look into the neglected.

But again, I’m not talking about this rebellion, about which I still know little; I’m wondering: is evidence fractal? Infinite? Or finite? and we just need a bit more of it?

If information is infinite, we may as well give up right now: one point on the spectrum of ignorance is hardly more ignorant than any other point: knowledge will remain out of reach to infinity. Or ae we lazy prejudiced bastards who just need to wake up a little?

PS I’ll tell you one thing: my "desk" is full of evidence: evidence against the intelligence of publishers, the integrity of teachers, of governors ... My desk is replete with messages essential for survival: messages I’ve received and tried to relay, messages I’ve initiated ... none to few of them reaching their targets: no matter what I did. I’ve nearly run out of things to try. Mass murder I’m saving till last. But there are no pk scholars. Well, there are a couple. A couple have come to my desk and poked around. But no one has inventoried the whole, photographed the originals, looked for evidence to date them, logged all into a safe ...

So: either god has his own copies; or society’s evidence rooms are a joke.

Monday, November 14, 2005

Spend the Loot

The gal puts curlers in her hair to hold what she, not her genes, not the weather, put there. Maybe she perms it, sprays it, as well. Maybe she looks good, maybe she looks like a horse’s ass: point is, it works: for a while. But after a few night’s sleep, a few rain storms, that curl is a faded memory. After enough centuries her skull in the tomb looks pretty much like any other skull. Long enough later, there may not even be a skull.

If "nature" had put the curl there, eventually, "she" still looks just like any other skull, or, like nothing at all.

The thief grabs her purse. Quick: scores, and shoots up. The cops grab him. "Where’s the money?" Guh, guh ... He’s still on the nod. If the cops grab him in time, they can give the gal her purse back, the money still in it; or they can go have a beer, or donate the cash to St. Patrick’s Firemen.

If the thief is quick enough, there’ll be nothing to pay back.

When Napoleon grabbed the Rosetta Stone from Egypt, took it to Paris, it wasn’t the sort of thing that could easily be "spent." Centuries later a different "French" government could give the stone back to a different Egypt. And there could be all sorts of good excuses: We were putting it to good use; you were ignoring it.
It’s not quite the same with the Elgin Marbles. "Greece" was doing "nothing" with its classic architectural heritage. Greece wasn’t selling textiles to the world, sailing all over hell and gone, taking tall trees from Maine for ships’ masts, impressing sailors, soldiers ... Lord Elgin swiped the marbles, put them in London, where, thanks to all the sailing around and impressing of sailors and manufacturing textiles and hiring Cockneys into a new slave class, London got socked into a pollution such as the world had never seen, at least not associated with man. The marbles started to rot: faster than they were rotting left where they’d fallen at the Acropolis. England swipes marbles. Oh, sure: they were "putting them to use." England centuries later can give back only dust.

Guh, guh. On the nod.

Peoples swept across Asia, pushing other peoples. Sometimes they would have ousted the evictees nose to nose, spear to club, arrow to a stone cutter that fit the hand, machine gun to wooden staff. Sometimes the evictees would have receded before the advance, and the rousters would never have seen their costumes, heard their babble. Same in Europe, same in the Americas. What if, eons later, the "Chinese" felt bad, said they were withdrawing back to Mongolia, invited the Polynesians back to their "China" ... Say the Polynesians recognized themselves to be the true Chinese, wanted the mainland again: the China they got back would be only the ashes of the China they’d fled.

If the English gave Australia back to the natives, would they take the rabbits and cats back with them? Even if they did (even if they could, even if there were an England capable and willing of receiving them back), would the ashes of Australia then satisfy the natives who once had a very different ecology?

Modern kleptocracies in-common close their books at the end of the year. The values of the purses that they snatched are in their arm, burbling around in their blood streams, or long ago excreted, taken by the bacteria.

Columbus could have given the West Indians back their islands meaningfully only if he did it before he scored and shot up, before the King of Spain scored and shot up.

What if God specially resurrected Van Gogh, put him back in contemporary Arles, Paris, or Amsterdam: or Philadelphia or Tokyo. Could Van Gogh say to any effect, "Those are my paintings. You have no right to them. Give them back"? Could MOMA, could the Barnes, meaningfully say, "Oh, why don’t we buy them from you?"
Where would MOMA get new billions of dollars? What about the "owners" who got multi-million dollar write-offs when they "gave" the paintings to MOMA? When Barnes bought the Van Goghs for $20, $40, $80 ... maybe $200, did the dealers have a right to sell them?

If Australia gave Australia back to the natives, what would they do with wealth they had actually created, wealth they had a legitimate claim to? Much is stolen, but much is innovated too, earned.

Well, it’s beyond me. But I don’t believe it’s beyond God. God has got to be able to find a way to punish the junky purse-snatcher and to compensate the poor girl: who had a little curl, whose purse was snatched.
Surely God must have some way of knowing what contents of her purse were legitimately hers and what devolved from thefts she cooperated in.
(If you’re paying taxes on land snatched from the Mohawk, you’re cooperating.)

Now just a goddamn minute, pk. Who’s this goddamn God? Is this the same one who couldn’t find Adam hiding in the tree?

No, no, no. Sorry. I misspelled it. I meant god: the intelligence behind how blood clots, behind the Four Basic Forces ... behind evolution ... cybernetics, information ... behind how any cubic hectare of reef is every bit as complex, as simple, as any human brain, as any human city ... behind we don’t know what all (if indeed it’s intelligence that’s behind it).
Christians tell us that justice can never happen here, but assure it transpiring after death: in heaven and in hell.
I don’t believe that humans are capable to distinguishing earth from life from death from heaven from hell.
I believe that earth is just one of infinites of petri dishes in god’s "lab." I believe that god puts one kind of culture in one dish, infects it with a disease or two, watches what happens. god can then throw the dish away, clean and sterilize it, extract some of the resultant culture and move it to a new dish. god can throw a culture he likes out into the garden where it can take its own chances. Or, in a new dish, he can infect it with still other new diseases ...

Now just a goddamn minute, pk. You mean this "god" of yours is really just like God after all? just maybe a little smarter?

No, no, no. Sorry. I believe nothing of the kind. I’m just fantasizing: and trying to communicate something
using your language.

Social truths cannot be uttered in university natural languages: like Standard Written English. Only macroinformation can rise an inch off the pavement, only art.

PS This draft isn’t bad, it says some of what I mean, but it also totally missed a couple of the illustrations I’m meant to put near the climax: illustrations not standard to anthropologists’ litanies:In the 1960s Ivan Illich was developing his critique of rampant American culture, cresting for example in Kennedy’s Alliance for Progress. Illich said that American trucks, exported to South America, could be more harmful than American tanks placed in the same places. The tanks could run things over, knock things down, burn and kill; but the trucks would addict subsistence cultures to tools it could never afford to keep up with. Roads would have to be built, a whole new (expensive) infrastrucutre would have to be inserted. Tanks would destroy some things; trucks would destroy everything. Suddenly, Illich, the Church’s most popular priest, the priest clearly closest to Jesus (and to St. Francis) in the two-millennium-long history of Christianity, was suddenly persona non grata.
Ours is the society of business: of greed enthroned, of no-questions-asked profit as our summa-theologica. Yet when Illich’s books sold surprisingly well, when paperback editions became best sellers, his books disappeared!
Ah! So profit wasn’t our only consideration after all. What we value even more is no criticism, no intelligent criticism.

Illich showed us how a people could shrug off centralized, top-down rulers: the public must network itself, obviate our reliance on hierarchy. (This from a priest!)
I recognized Illich’s design to be the internet I had been awaiting since 1960. Disregard the governments’ insistence on licenses, certificates, centrally-approved performance ... and people might judge for themselves. Soon, their judgments would necessarily improve: survival-driven. (And if they didn’t? Tough nugies.)
Immediately I told Illich, "I’ll do it." Over night I was answering correspondence with other mushrooming local nets (and licensed schools, universities), telling them how I would coordinate all the local nets into an internet. (Understand: network was a word conspicuously used by Illich; neither of us said specifically "internet"; the concept had been coined, but not the word.

Illich’s books disappeared from print, from the book stores. Fewer and fewer libraries acquired them. Illich’s speaking engagements in the US shrank. I witnessed him being invited to say more on TV by Hugh Downes, I witnessed him squeezed out, no explanation offered, Downes’ invitation was just silenced.
Illich’s books disappeared; pk’s never appeared.
Americans practice their "free speech," universities practice their academic freedom, only the way the Soviet practiced its highly ideal constitution:
when convenient.

At first, by late 1971, pk’s FLEX (Free Learning Exchange, my seed for an internet) was getting free publicity right and left. Several dozen people were using it.
Then, all at once, we got no new publicity: and our contributions dried up: from two cents, to one cent, to no cents: and my volunteers finally fled: before we were tarred and feathered.

PPS This post is emphasizing theft and displacement over innovation, invention, new earnings. I’m aware of that. For some purposes I live with that flaw. Maybe Barns put his $40 Van Gogh into a nice frame: the frame belongs to Barns, not at all to Van Gogh. Barns and a host of others made the Van Goghs "worth" forty-, sixty-million dollars. But it was Van Gogh’s style they were doing it with.See? Right there: Van Gogh’s style doesn’t exist in isolation: MOMA, Barnes, were also using business’s billions, governments’ tax systems ...The baby can be killed, but there’s no way to give the father’s part back to the father and the mother’s part back to the mother once their union goes the way of all unions.
Wouldn’t it be nice if we refrained from improving things until we actually owned them?
I’ll bet god’s petri dishes have more than one genius hiding their light under a bushel until the correct green light comes on.
In the Seven Samurai Rikichi’s wife smiles in silence as the bandits’ stronghold burns around her. She refrains from shouting Fire. She’ll die happy knowing that some of her rapists will burn around her. (Maybe she even knows that her husband is among those setting the fire! Ah, but regardless, she knows she’s now damaged goods.)