The Endless Upward Spiral

In the aftermath of the Feb. 14th school shooting and massacre in Florida, pundits and our Chaos President are pushing the idea of arming teachers as a deterrent to future shooters, never mind the fact that most of these deranged people fully expect to die during their attack on the schools.  Wayne LaPierre of the NRA has repeated the old line “To stop a bad guy with a gun, it takes a good guy with a gun.”  Another talking head on Fox News called for schools to accumulate “superior firepower.”  According to the NY Times, arming 20% of the teachers in the country would result in 700,000 handguns circulating in schools (in addition to those already present), which would certainly be a boost to gun sales and the NRA, but not a boost to school safety.  Even trained police 1) often miss their intended targets in a shootout, potentially hitting bystanders and 2) have their own prejudices in identifying who is, or isn’t, a threat (a point well made by the Black Lives Matter movement).

Trump himself has said that it would have been “beautiful” if everyone in that club in Orlando had been armed, when the killer began to shoot.  I can just see it:  a dark, crowded club, someone by the bar fires a shot, and suddenly 200 guns whip out of holsters and start blasting away.  When the smoke finally clears, the original gunman may be the only one left standing.

Likewise, a teacher hears gunshots in the hallway, grabs a pistol from the desk drawer and fires at the first threatening-looking (these days, practically synonymous with black or Middle-Eastern) male who appears in the doorway.  I have a feeling that most teachers would instinctively throw themselves in the path of a bullet to save their students, but very few would want to convert their schools to combat zones.

Escalation, rather than rational gun control.  Dissemination of even more weapons, rather than removing access to semiautomatic rifles such as the AR-15.   The same mentality leads to increasing the nuclear armament rather than the pre-Trump era negotiated decreases on all sides, when we already have enough to destroy the world many times over.  If someone makes a threat, the only response is to make a bigger threat, “fire and fury like the world has never seen before!”

Here’s an excerpt from the final novel in the Fourth World trilogy, currently a work in progress.  The robot Protem is discussing escalation with General Slocumb:

“Our agents in Beijing report that, after seven years of neglect under Lee Kam-Mun, the attention of the PWE has once again settled on the worldwide Resistance.  Under their new Leader, Pers Bigelow, mobilization of PWE troops in Asia, Africa and the Eurozone has increased sharply.  It is only a matter of time before we come under attack here in the Western Quarantine Zone.”

“Then it’s a bloody good thing we haven’t wasted those seven years of respite,” said Slocumb, his smile easy and confident.  “As you know, Mr. President, we’ve built a rather substantial fleet of small fighter ships, each powered by a modified Flowsorb engine; they can outrun and out-maneuver anything on the PWE side.  The ships have been armed with the fourth-generation Razer cannons developed in our San Jose labs, which have greater range, and pack a more powerful wallop, than conventional PWE weapons.  Let the blighters come, I say; we’ll show ‘em what for!”  He suddenly brightened at another thought.  “And— and, I haven’t even brought up our beautiful, brand-new battleship, launched last week— Big Bella!”  Protem had heard that the ship’s name Bella was derived from bellum, war.  As in a bellicose, belligerent battleship:  was the name, along with the alliteration, an example of humor?

A warning signal always turned on in Protem’s neural network whenever its military officers began to speak in an over-excited way, like boys exulting over their new toys.  “You are assuming that the PWE has not made similar advances.”  The general’s smile slowly disappeared.

 

Super Blue-Bloods

The Bay Area has had front-row seats in the past couple of months for two major celestial events:  first the total solar eclipse (I’ve already lost the special glasses used to view that), then a few days ago, the total eclipse of a super blue blood moon (super because of its size at the moon’s closest distance to the Earth along its elliptical orbit, blue because it was the second full moon in the same month, and blood because of its color, imparted by red light from all the sunrises and sunsets on Earth passing through the atmosphere to be reflected back from the moon).  Shivering in my greatcoat and wiping the condensation off my binoculars at 4:30 in the morning, I watched the super moon gradually bleed red as it slivered into the pre-dawn darkness.

It brought to mind an early morning in my novel Fourth World Nation (the sequel to Fourth World), when Benn steps out during the Double Lunar Eclipse Festival to explore the Martian colony where he now lives:

“Low in the morning sky, Deimos and Phobos sat perfectly aligned as Mars moved between them and the sun, plunging both moons simultaneously into darkness.  Over the preceding hour, Benn had watched tiny Deimos, which was 20,000 km away and appeared like a slow-moving star in the sky, duck into hiding behind Phobos, which was not only larger at 22 km across, but also much closer, appearing more like a small moon.  Phobos, circling the planet at high speed from west to east, had swallowed its little brother, and now both sons of the ancient Greek god Ares (called Mars by the Romans) lay in their father’s dense shadow.  Q!  A double-lunar eclipse!  Benn had never witnessed one, simply because he had lived most of his life underground.  It was highly unlikely that anyone from Tharsis Colony had ever seen such a spectacle.

In contrast, everyone in Highland City was out in the streets to begin the holiday, despite the early hour.  All eyes, drowsy or alert, were directed upward for the duration of the eclipse, which, although relatively brief, did not disappoint the cheering crowd.  The rarity of the phenomenon, the surrounding media buzz, and above all, the opportunity to throw a city-wide party at five-thirty in the morning more than compensated for the brevity of the actual eclipse.  In fact, the festival would stretch through the entire day, from unusually early opening times for the downtown bars, to the Mayor’s Parade at ten, and the lunar-themed dinner menus at many restaurants.

Among the myriad festival events, Benn had highlighted a noon concert by the Highlander Symphony; the program on his da-disc featured “The Planets” by Holst; Beethoven’s “Moonlight Sonata” transcribed for horn and Mars-harp; and finally, Panic and Fear, a modern piece by LaGuardia.  What a stark difference there was between Highland City, where wealth and a sophisticated population could support a “world-class” (albeit a small world) symphony orchestra, and Benn’s home colony of Tharsis, where the only musical ensemble was the five-man pit orchestra at Tharsis-on-Avon, the Shakespeare company.  At the thought of that singularly talentless quintet, Benn had to laugh.  Their conductor often made his musicians play over the actors’ voices, and Benn’s best friend Jace had sometimes stopped in the middle of a soliloquy to rail at them.  What had Jace called them?  Scurvy rogues?  Rampallions and fustilarians?  Was he making these up?  No, he remembered:  Basket-hilt stale jugglers!  At one particularly disjointed rehearsal, Jace had rushed downstage, drawing his cutlass and yelling, “Away, you cut-purse rascals, you filthy bungs, away!”  When the conductor responded with a rude hand gesture, Jace had raged on, “I’ll tickle your catastrophe; I’ll thrust my knife in your mouldy chaps!”  Hmm, Benn chuckled, maybe there was high culture at Tharsis, after all.

On this rare day off, the first thing that struck Benn—who had so far been shuttered away in an underground lab at MWI—was that Highland City clearly tried to fashion itself after New York Metropol—even their Mayor had been imported from there.  He savored the great outdoors by strolling aimlessly north on Av7, east on St46, then north again on Av5, stopping to explore the illogically-named neighborhoods.  Notably, there was no rise in altitude at Morningside Heights, neither park view nor terrace at Parkview Terrace, and he would have been shocked to find a river at Riverside Drive.  Pleasantly diverted, Benn wandered on, taking in the fascinating billboards and door signs on every street.  They reflected the City’s ethnic and cultural diversity (at least commercial diversity, down here at street level).  Overhanging the arched entrance to Nasser’s Lunch Site was a rocket ship that looked like chunks of meat on a skewer; its menu spoke with a Mideast Zone accent, promising an oasis of lush, exotic pleasures within.  Several doors down, Benn peeked into The Pho Chateau, a chain restaurant originally based in Earth’s Mekong District, which offered moon-shaped rice noodle dishes, served family-style in a Baroque white-and-gold paneled room, its high ceiling ringed by a slate mansard roof.  The menu at The Pho Chateau’s gilded entrance depicted dancing dumplings which accurately reflected the elongated shapes, if not the movements, of Deimos and Phobos.  Farther up Av5, a quasi-religious group calling themselves the Highland Druids hawked tiny Aresite amulets and gave demonstrations of Areodynamic cookery, which, they claimed, had healing powers tied to the phases of both moons.”

The similarity to New York City had already struck Benn at a high-society dinner party.  Here’s another excerpt from Fourth World Nation:

“From his long wait in line, overhearing the nasty comments that the cream of society made about one another, Benn had concluded that the oldest families in Highland City enjoyed far less prestige than the newer ones.  Some even referred to them dismissively as Oldies (at least they weren’t called Martians, a distinction enjoyed only by natives of Tharsis)!  Benn thought again of the archived black-and-white films.  Unlike the New York high society they were trying so hard to emulate—where the oldest established families, many with Dutch or English surnames, looked down on social climbers and the nouveau riche—here, wealthy Oldies like the Monroes were perceived as the most backward colonial subjects.  It was the recent arrivals from Earth who occupied all the positions of power.  Unlike the early settlers of colonial New Amsterdam and New York, whose philanthropic families became permanent fixtures of city life, their modern equivalents on Mars had become largely irrelevant, as a growing technocracy rapidly supplanted the old plutocracy under the PWE.  Still, the old families understood the rules governing fashionable society.  They had defined local tradition, and that was something the diverse newcomers craved.  Therefore the Monroes and other Oldies were invited to high-society events; however, whispered the young technocrats and their spouses to one another, the blue-bloods should not let that further puff up their leathery egos, which some compared to overstuffed, old-fashioned club chairs.

 

A Body of Evidence

My son Christopher, a first-year medical student, has just begun his Anatomy course, marking with a pen the body landmarks and dissection lines on the skin of the female cadaver assigned to his dissection group.  Lines in place, the scalpel comes next.  He said it was his first experience in medical school that imparted such a visceral sensation, with no pun at all intended.  Unlike him, I remember needing to lean lightly on humor on my first day in the very same Anatomy class, when the four of us students first met our cadaver in the fall of 1976, that of a skinny man in his nineties:  it was surely a solemn, awe-inspiring moment, but also made us (I had just turned 21) a bit nervous and anxious– and in such circumstances, we often resort to humor to ease our discomfort.  With all respect, we voted to name our cadaver Slim.

In the year 2196, organs are grown in situ by injecting specialized stem cells intravenously, but there have been notable mishaps.  Here’s an excerpt form my first novel, Fourth World, in which Dr. Nestor Neelin demonstrates on a cadaver, whose name is Bob.  The course he teaches is Recombinant Anatomy:

Neelin dived in quickly:  “Now if you’ll observe:  here in Bob’s brain, there sit not one, not two, but look– three temporal lobes!  Bob, you see, suffered a devastating stroke in his sixties, and in those early days of therapeutic stem cell infusions, an effort was made to replace the lost brain tissue.  This effort marked a step forward in stem cell technology, prior to which most tissue types, such as brain, liver, eyes and so on, required engineering in vitro, then transplantation of the developed tissue to the patient.  The new targeted stem cells, in contrast, could be infused intravenously, and would find their way to their appropriate location, guided by seeker molecules implanted in their membranes.  There they would differentiate to the desired organ, thus obviating the need for a transplant procedure.  In Bob’s case, the infused stem cells did develop into a temporal lobe as planned, but unfortunately, growth stimulators infused at the same time caused the partially necrotic lobe to regenerate within his already-crowded skull– leaving him, quite literally, with not enough room to change his mind!”

Many in the audience, confused by this last phrase- was it meant to be funny?– consulted their data-discs only to find their screens blank.  Only one laugh could be heard, a loud “HA!” coming from the opposite side of the hall, some twenty rows below Lora.  “Ha-HAH!” the same voice persisted.  And that was how Lora finally located Benn.

…..

Neelin held his right hand up.  “I have one more example of quackery to show you.  Bob, you see, was a victim not only of technical incompetence, but of outright fraud.  Late in his life, he fell out of a Banyan tree while bird-watching in the district then known as Australia.  He sustained a pelvic fracture and had to enlist the help of a migrant clinic in the back country, in order to regenerate the broken bone.  They infused him with an unidentified stem cell, his diary shows, but the end result was only discovered at Bob’s post-mortem.”  Neelin appeared to be rummaging around in Bob’s intestines.  He finally pushed them toward the back with outstretched fingers, exposing two thin bony structures pointing upward from the pelvis.  Puzzled interns frantically interrogated their data-discs, again without success.

“Their treatment provided Bob, bless his original heart, with these two extraneous bones, which you see protruding here.  These bones did nothing to help Bob with his pelvic fracture, but he would have found them useful– very useful indeed– had he… been… born… a…”  Neelin paused expectantly.

“A kangaroo!” shouted Benn triumphantly.

Neelin released Bob’s intestines with a loud flop and whirled around to face Benn.  “A kangaroo or any marsupial– excellent!  Young man, you are the first intern in over two decades to recognize these as epipubic bones:  their function is to support a marsupial’s pouch.  Excellent!  Your name, please?”

 

Hope Marches On II

It took me a few days of wrestling with my own ambiguity, to digest the meaning of the Women’s March this past weekend.  Because of the crush at the San Francisco Civic Center last year, I decided to join the march in Oakland’s Lake Merritt Amphitheater.  With the change in setting, it’s hard to make an accurate comparison, but the women’s movement has clearly evolved, probably as a result of all the trauma following Trump’s inauguration.

Last year the focus was on women’s rights and equality, with other intersecting issues on the periphery:  immigration, racism, LGBT and sexual freedom, and so on.  This year, the signs looked different, more extreme:  “Feminism without intersectionality is simply racism!” and “Destroy white feminism!”  Large, diverse groups of men and women (none of them wearing pink hats) formed drum circles in support of undocumented immigrants, Dreamers, Black Lives Matter, universal healthcare, and against ICE, the Wall, Harvey Weinstein, nuclear buttons and of course Donald Trump.  From the stage, women spoke and recited poems on sexual harassment and assault; #MeToo has definitely changed the movement’s trajectory.  There were more commercial sponsors, more pleas for money and voter registration than last year, but also a stronger sense of activism and long term personal commitment, as opposed to donning pink hats and marching on any given day.  Hats show solidarity, but solidarity, although necessary, is not sufficient for true empowerment.  Some signs this year read, “Marching is important, but running is more important.”

Last year, with a new march, a movement more fluid in nature, I wished for greater focus on the central issues (e.g. equal pay for equal work).  But this year the movement has grown and solidified to the extent that intersection with other causes, such as racial oppression and immigration– rather than what the Women’s March has been accused of, namely appealing only to white middle-class women in an effort to get more votes for the Democratic party– has now become crucial.  The pain and anger felt by women is multi-faceted; these different facets, after the divisive year we’ve just gone through, have a brighter light than ever shining upon them.  The different causes and effects of pain are more clearly distinguishable than ever, and the movement should engage all of them.

Maybe lose the pink hats next time, the sense of victimization which the hats symbolize.  Instead, roll up your sleeves in true empowerment, ready to work, write, organize, run for office.  In my struggle to understand the movement’s new face, it helped to read this morning’s news, in which Judge Rosemarie Aquilina sentenced Dr. Larry Nassar to 40-175 years in prison for sexual assault.  In giving all the victims a voice and her personal support, she urged them to “Leave your pain here” and to go forth and live their magnificent lives.  Be a former victim, and do great things.  For me, that sums up the crossroads where the women’s movement now finds itself.

This Is Not A Drill

Alert:  a policy missile of the Trump Administration is heading your way.  Seek shelter immediately.  This is not a drill.

Within the next few weeks, ICE officials will conduct a massive sweep of neighborhoods and workplaces in San Francisco and other Northern California cities to strike against sanctuary laws that aim to protect undocumented immigrants.  They plan to arrest and deport more than 1500  people, which will unavoidably destroy families, disrupt essential services such as healthcare, and instill fear in communities of color.

The federal government faces a shutdown this weekend if our Chaos President and Congress can’t resolve the DACA issue, which is entangled with the Great Wall of Mexico, and now funding for children’s healthcare as well.  The GOP’s holding CHIP hostage in order to get money for the Wall truly demonstrates the cynical nature of political football:  option plays, end runs, mis-directions, flea-flickers, razzle-dazzle.  Just win, baby.

On a different battlefront, the Trump Administration has unveiled a sweeping proposal to open nearly all US waters, including the long-protected California coast, to offshore drilling for oil and gas.  Florida, which has a Republican governor and Mar-a-Lago (not necessarily in that order), has been exempted from a proposed policy which would endanger coastal economies and the environment.  Not to mention ruining the view from Trump’s golf course, hence the Florida exemption.  California has been ravaged by a series of devastating fires and floods, natural disasters which can be linked to global climate change, while Trump shuns the Paris Accord and blithely (or perhaps corruptly) continues to promote fossil fuels. To me, the image of millions of acres and a thousand homes going up in flames, then many others swept away by the ensuing mudslides, is as alarming as an incoming nuclear warhead.

Trump continues daily to launch missiles of misogyny and rockets of racism; it seems almost an intentional distraction, when he flashes xenophobia, support for white nationalists, vulgar references to Haiti and Africa, attacks on the press, threats to the nation’s health coverage, and on and on.  The delayed-action bomb of tax “reform” has already hit its target.  While our attention is drawn to yet another outrage, he pushes the allegedly big nuclear button, risking the lives and well-being of millions of immigrants, Dreamers, sick children, coastal dwellers and, in the case of global warming, merely all future generations of humankind!

In Hawaii and Japan recently, nuclear alerts turned out to be false alarms.  This is not a false alarm; for many, it is a matter of life and death.  It’s hugely ironic to me that, when Trump passed his physical last week and was declared not to be (officially) demented or insane, I actually took that as bad news:  in other words, he is doing all of this on purpose, with intentional malice.  If Trump is “like, really smart” and a “stable genius,” he is also an evil one.

So seek shelter.  Or better yet:  on Saturday January 20th, the first anniversary of Trump’s inauguration, seek the protest nearest you.  Protest for racial equality, demonstrate for women’s rights, march for science and the environment, protect the Dreamers and other immigrants, reach out to one another and, as I’ve been urging all year, VOTE in this year’s midterm elections.

Most Likely to Secede

In the late 1970’s, my college friends in Connecticut sometimes teased me about coming from California:  a huge earthquake, they said, would one day split the state from the rest of the country, depositing it into the Pacific Ocean; better buy some oceanfront property in Nevada!  Perhaps they were thinking metaphorically of the degree to which California remained separate, in terms of its liberal politics, mindset, laid-back lifestyle, tolerance, diversity,  weather, inventiveness etc.  People here love to point out that, if ranked alongside all the nations of the world, California’s economy would be No. 6.  We have economic engines such as the Bay Area, Silicon Valley, famous Wine Country, Central Valley agriculture, biotech and space industries, superb universities, electric cars, Google, Facebook, Twitter, touristic natural beauty, great Mexican food and, well OK, Hollywood too.  Talk of seceding from the Union has always been a distant background noise, and not always originating from our own state:  didn’t someone in the Utah state legislature, about two years ago, propose that California ought to be cut off?

Our Chaos President’s negative attitude toward California seems to be– surprise!– making things worse.  He has moved to vastly expand offshore drilling along the California coastline, threatening coastal ecology and economies, as well as public health.  His tax “reform” will increase the federal tax burden for Californians, prompting the state Senate to come up with a creative counter-proposal.  He has undertaken punitive measures against sanctuary cities which are being challenged in the courts.  His FCC has overturned net neutrality rules, and the fight to restore a free and open Internet has moved from Washington DC to Sacramento.  He has withdrawn from the Paris Accord on climate change, so that Governor Jerry Brown now attends the international climate meetings and commits California to surpassing the terms to which the US previously agreed.  While Trump wants to prop up coal and oil, California is fast building up solar and other renewable energy.  Trump’s first move as president was to cancel the Trans-Pacific Pact, leaving the US on the sidelines while China expands its influence in Asia and Europe; California has prudently continued to negotiate its own, separate trade deals on the world stage.  Now North and South Korea have begun talks, encouraged by China and Russia– again leaving the US to worry from the sidelines, largely because of Trump’s bellicose schoolyard tweets about Kim Jong-Un.

Since California is within range and directly threatened by North Korea’s nuclear weapons, shouldn’t Jerry Brown be attending those talks?  But California doesn’t possess a nuclear arsenal– or do we?  What about the decision to move the US embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, and the threat to withdraw support for Palestinian refugees unless they toe the line?  Should Jerry clear some time on his schedule?  It was a dramatic moment when all but a handful of nations in the UN voted to condemn the Jerusalem decision:  isolating the US from former friends and allies in the Middle East, Asia and Europe must be the guiding principle of this Administration.  By so diminishing the international stature of the United States, Trump has increased the leadership role of California.

Should California secede from the Union, aside from the dubious legality of such a move?  The actions of the Trump Administration make it look as though the Union is seceding from California (as it is from the rest of the world)!  But despite that, I would argue against secession.  Spoiler alert:  Even in science fiction, forming a separate nation is fraught with unforeseen consequences.  In Fourth World Nation, the second book in the Fourth World Series, the Martian colonies declare their independence from Earth.  Here’s an excerpt:

When the applause finally stopped, Ran began by addressing Khalmed Salman.  “Superintendent Salman, you represent the Pan-World Electorate in this historic transition.  Do you have anything to say?”

Salman’s tone was stoic but contained something chilling, like a sharp blade buried just beneath the sand.  “Yes, perhaps historic to you, but not to the PWE.  By taking control of the colonies,” he said, his dark gaze sweeping the room, “you imagine that you have defeated us, but quite the opposite is true.  We will withdraw all of our personnel and resources to Earth, and in our absence, the consequences of your actions will become painfully clear:  the  law and order you have taken for granted will disappear; your Resistance movement will break up into factions pitted against one another; the material supplies necessary to maintain function in the cities will run out.  All remaining PWE ships will transport troops as well as any civilians who wish to depart for Earth.  Within four weeks, however, you can expect that a new fleet of fully-manned warships will arrive to retake the colonies.”

Or at least retake Congress in the mid-term elections.  On that optimistic note, I wish all my readers a happy 2018!

 

 

Let’s Go Giants!

The San Francisco Giants have just announced a trade of Denard Span (getting on in age, less athletic with every passing year), Christian Arroyo (came in with a big splash last year, then his batting flattened out) and two minor league pitchers in exchange for slugger and infielder Evan Longoria plus cash, from the Tampa Bay Rays.  They needed a big hitter badly, and Longoria is also a great infielder, but I hope he helps to revive the old magic in the Giants’ dugout.  In winning three World Series in five years, they seemed to outperform any expectations based on the sheer talents of individual players; it was always the combination of players, the team chemistry as a whole, that led to their surprising victories over teams which often seemed stronger, at least on paper.

Baseball provided me with a metaphor for the homecoming theme in Fourth World and has played a major part in both of my novels.  Now as I write, I’m trying to think of a role for baseball in the third book of the trilogy.  To tide you over, here’s an excerpt from Fourth World Nation:

“Suppressing his excitement, he nodded at Hank, picked up a bat and stepped up onto the field.  A thousand hostile baseball fanatics, many wearing black PWE uniforms, glared at him.  A metallic voice announced the substitution, to a chorus of catcalls and booing.  Even the programs clutched in the fans’ hands—supposedly there to provide objective analysis of the game—reacted poorly.  The crowd rained scorn on Benn as he stood at home plate, their expletives addressing everything from his Asian ethnicity to the “gouging” water rates set by Hydra.  Benn, however, focused his thoughts and heard none of the noise; to his ears, the diamond was still and quiet.  Behind him, the mobile QI umpire adjusted his mask.  The catcher shifted stealthily to the outer half of the plate, his shoes grinding into the red clay.  The pitcher Helmut rolled the ball deep in his glove, his fingers seeking its seams.  To Benn’s eyes, events unfolded as if in slow motion:  he anticipated the limited wind-up; the delivery from a low release point; the seams spinning centrifugally; the appearance of a red dot at the center of the ball.  It was a slider, unhurried in its journey toward home plate, where Benn waited patiently.  He flexed his knees, shifted his front foot forward, then planted his lower body firmly.   As the ball curved low and away, Benn extended his arms and kept his body balanced.  On impact, the bat exploded into a hundred shards.”

SF Giants fans, having winced at the loss of prospects Stanton and Ohtani, will now turn to Longoria and pin their hopes on him (and Posey, Crawford et al), that the dream of another World Series will not meet the same fate as Benn’s bat.  Come on, Giants, let’s go!

It’s That Time of Year

Christmas isn’t just a time for shopping!  In his thoughtful Christmas 2017 newsletter, a dear friend, A.D., reflects on moral foundations:  “There is still great danger in certainty, whether it is embodied by an ideology like Communism or in a fundamentalist faith… what we now hold as fundamental values and attitudes may look pretty silly in 200 years… even ‘Foundational’ beliefs change over time.”

Roy Moore’s senatorial candidacy in Alabama shows that the passage of 200 years is not required for things to start looking crazy.  Since the election of Donald Trump (heavens, only a year ago!), the moral foundations of the Republican party have morphed such that a credibly-accused pedophile, an Islamophobic racist who feels that America was last “great” during times of slavery, enjoys the full support of the Republican National Committee.  And, of course, Moore has the strong support of our Chaos President, himself a compulsive liar, misogynist, racist, xenophobic, white nationalist bully.  What in the world has happened to the Party of Lincoln?  The self-hypnosis and extreme moral rationalization necessary in order to sacrifice its traditional values for the sake of political expediency has the GOP either sleepwalking or tied in knots.

I’ve been reading Sarah Bakewell’s How to Live, or a Life of Montaigne (highly recommended).  Michel de Montaigne, a 16th-century writer whose influence remains powerful today, adopted several Hellenistic philosophies, particularly Skepticism.  He addressed life problems by saying, essentially, “I withhold judgment,” which freed him from having to find an answer to anything, including the endless unanswerable questions that plague us every day.  The Skeptics accepted everything provisionally, rather than try to confront a “real world” with absolute truths which could be known, categorized and arranged in an orderly fashion.  To be so supremely unassuming, as they saw it, was the path to relaxation, joy and ultimately the flourishing of humanity.

Montaigne’s essays were initially embraced by the Catholic Church as exemplary arguments in support of faith, and then, within a century, denounced as subtle works of the Devil.  The Essays remained on a list of banned books until their eventual rehabilitation in the eyes of the Church.  Back and forth went the interpretation:  even the Church, a purported source of moral “foundations” could not claim a firm grip on bedrock.  Bakewell suggests that Zen Buddhism, with its perplexing koans, may have been a better approach to the imponderables of Montaigne’s universe.

A.D. does not “affiliate with a particular catechism,” but nevertheless writes, “I may not be someone swayed by revealed truth, prophecy or miracles but I recognize that, in my attempt to live some sort of a ‘virtuous’ life, I function in a web of religious history and culture... without it, I would probably be paralyzed by a sense of relativity and by a cosmic complexity that is way beyond  my puny reasoning capacities.”  A.D. is being rightfully unassuming:  the only thing we know for sure is that we don’t know anything for sure, says the Skeptic, the Montaigne, in all of us.  Thankfully, faith of a more general (not necessarily religious) type and hope in goodness save us from living in a bleak, unknowable world.  I might also look into Zen…

Not a bad newsletter to get for Christmas!  With apologies to our friend A.D., even Fourth World Nation, the just-released second novel in my sci-fi trilogy, takes a stand.  Here’s a brief excerpt:

“They had so readily mistaken mindless mob behavior for unity, just as they were doing now, thought Benn.  And, according to Marc, the fact that their intolerance would only be assuaged by a tangible demonstration—such as a prophecy or a miracle—was the opposite of faith.  Benn could easily provide such a demonstration, but even then, he would either be seen as a messiah or a witch.”

On that cheerful but skeptical note, Happy Holidays to all those who follow this blog!

 

Sanity Clause II

Remember when the truth was important?  In a previous post (11/8/17), I bemoaned the fact that the country has been sliding into a collective delusional state, where there is a “new normal” and alternative facts can turn everything upside-down.  The truth becomes fluid (or is simply dismissed as inconsequential, as Sarah Huckabee Sanders has done); anything becomes possible; and history can be rewritten before it has even happened.  I had hoped that the Sanity Clause in our social contract would set things straight, but that appears increasingly to be a big pie in the sky.

Michelle Goldberg writes in her Opinion column today, “There is a debate over whether Trump is unaware of reality or merely indifferent to it.  He might be delusional, or he might simply be asserting the power to blithely override truth, which is the ultimate privilege of a despot.”  Hmm– delusional or overriding truth:  which is worse?

Arguing for the former, Dr. Bandy Lee, a forensic psychiatrist at Yale Medical School, represents thousands of mental health professionals when he writes:  “We are currently witnessing more than his usual state of instability– in fact a pattern of decompensation:  increasing loss of touch with reality, marked signs of volatility and unpredictable behavior, and an attraction to violence as a means of coping.  These characteristics place our country and the world at extreme risk of danger.”

Timothy Egan, in the NY Times, points out that our Chaos President still questions Barrack Obama’s birth certificate; does not believe his own words on the infamous “Access Hollywood” sexual assault videotape; still thinks (without any evidence) that three million fraudulent votes caused him to lose the popular vote; endorsed a website that says the Pope uses magic to mastermind world events; and “gave a thumbs up to a media outlet that claims NASA runs a child labor colony on Mars.”

No kidding.  For those unfamiliar with Alex Jones’s Infowars channel, he’s the apoplectic guy who claims that the Sandy Hook massacre of schoolchildren and teachers was a staged hoax.  A guest on his show claimed that NASA has secretly kidnapped children and is keeping them as sex slaves on Mars, forcing a NASA spokesperson to deny the existence of such a colony.  It’s just incredible, the kind of insanity that passes for conspiracy theory (already a very low bar)!

Here’s some Fake News from my sci-fi novel Fourth World:

“When had Tharsis One and Two dropped off the map?  Shortly after the Great War of Unification.  Mr. Otis Walker, Benn’s second-grade teacher, had explained it many times- often in heatedly emotional terms- to his young, impressionable students.  From the Martian (that is, Tharsis) viewpoint, the centralization of Earth’s government in 2096 marked the beginning of the end:  birth of the Pan-World Electorate.  What was it like, his teacher wondered, receiving the news that your home government no longer existed; that your country had been all but destroyed in a cataclysmic global war?  That NASA, an agency of the former United States of America and your lifeline to Earth, had suddenly vanished?”

What, no NASA?  It must have been brutal, hearing that there would no longer be any kidnapped sex slaves…

 

 

 

 

Trickle-down Ecology

On the same day that the House passed their version of tax “reform,” it was announced that the Trump administration is lifting an Obama-era ban on the  importation of ivory and other elephant body parts from Zimbabwe and Zambia.  The ban was meant to eliminate demand and thereby help to protect this threatened species.  Who wouldn’t want that, right?  The rationale for declaring hunting season for elephants open again, according to US Fish & Wildlife, is that allowing wealthy trophy hunters to pay for killing elephants will raise more money for conservation programs.  So killing more elephants will generate money to protect elephants (assuming those hunting fees actually end up in conservation efforts and not the pockets of corrupt officials)!  I’m sure all the dead elephants will appreciate that their sacrifice was not in vain.

This way of thinking is a metaphor, although imperfect, for the GOP tax plan.  Higher taxes for working families and ultimately for the middle class (after a temporary modest reduction) in order to benefit the wealthy— including huge permanent tax cuts for corporations— is supposed to generate more growth for the economy.  According to an already-disproven theory, the accumulation of wealth in the top 1% will trickle down to help everyone else.   It hasn’t happened before, and even prospectively, corporations are not planning on spending more capital to “grow the economy.”  These tax cuts will not pay for themselves, as the GOP claims.  The plan also explodes the federal debt, placing entitlement programs such as Medicare in danger, along with tax breaks for having children, for tuition, for mortgage interest, for state and local taxes, university endowments— all for a plan which will “pay for itself.”  And while the Senate is at it, why not launch yet another torpedo at the Affordable Care Act?  The zombie rises again (see my previous “Kill Bill” posts), and when they tacked elimination of the individual health coverage mandate onto the bill (which would remove health coverage from 13 million people and raise premiums for everyone else), I thought that would be the death knell for this tax proposal; after all, Repeal and Replace in its various guises had failed so many times before.  But now, because of shrewd maneuvering in Congress, I’m not so sure.

In my mind is the image of a vast elephant graveyard, abandoned by wealthy conservation programs.   More money, it turns out, does not help the dead elephants.  Nor does it help those who will bear the tax burden and feel the pain under this GOP bill, in order to make the rich even richer.  The elephant graveyard, in that case, might well be Congress, in the aftermath of the 2018 midterm elections.