Past posts from The Weekly:

Repeating history

We all know the wise advice that those who do not know history are doomed to repeat it, and at age 81, I can attest that we are indeed doomed for that very reason. Every new president elected in America thinks he has the key to peace in the Middle East despite thousands of years of tribal conflict there. He will negotiate a nuclear treaty with Iran - bring out the carbon copies. The sickening fact is clear: we do not learn from history, notwithstanding the idea that our unique ability to learn evolved at the cost of natural instincts. In that fanciful, if reliably relevant, tale of our origins in Genesis, the fruit of the Tree, arrogantly stolen, taught us just enough to wiggle out of the laws of natural selection, thereby arresting further evolution. Thus our patent inability to learn from history, instead continuing through the ages to be led by men, chosen or not, in the same mold as other animals - the top dogs, stupid, ignorant and vicious.

That is not to say that human history has been uniformly bleak. For a brief slice of it, we have made many attempts at civilization, the most promising perhaps being the American experiment. For 250 years since it broke away from British monarchy, it has been known as a champion of freedom, generous friend of the poor and weak, heroic in defense of democracy. In an instant last November, the world saw another face: autocratic, vengeful, imperialist, unjust. Now all nations are left to wonder who are these people? Who are Americans really, to choose tyranny and bestow the kind of absolute power that is easier to give than to revoke? In just over a year since, the seriousness of the case is clear: a wrecking ball to world peace and prosperity, humiliation to the “last best hope of earth.”

Surely though, it fits into a growing pattern of rupture within nations between a hated regime and the citizens it oppresses. There is notably Iran, a nation of Persians ruled by Islamic mullahs; Lebanon, where the legitimate government is subjugated by Hezbollah terrorists; and now the US, where as aforesaid one party has hastened to run roughshod over its opposing majority to extinguish all hope of restoration. They have the weapons. In future should anyone ask what is 2 + 2? Just say “5.”​​

The Silk Road

Last week the Post ran a column on globalization by Zachary Karabell, who writes “The Edgy Optimist” on Substack. After cataloging the several shocks that led wishful thinkers to declare the end of global trade, he makes the obvious point that recent closing to the Strait of Hormuz proves otherwise. “The interdependence of every country is a stark reality of the world." This got me reflecting on how benighted modern people are about world trade, among so many other subjects.

If there is one characteristic that has united all humanity since we came down out of the trees, it is surely wanderlust. We are vagabonds. Global trade? Think only of the ancient Silk Road, a trade route of 4000 miles from China to Europe that was in use between 200 BC until the fifteenth century, instituted by the Han Dynasty. Could there be any greater evidence of China’s long history of mercantile expertise? They traded not only silk but paper, gun powder, tea, dyes, perfume and porcelain, in exchange for horses, camels, honey, wine and gold. There were middle men along the way, and there was  a maritime route, which however might be subject to bad weather and piracy. The trade, moreover, facilitated the exchange of ideas, whether religious, philosophical, or scientific.

Notwithstanding the youthful, romantic yearning of some to live on a subsistence farm with a few chickens and a dairy cow, that vision is a pipe dream. We will trade with the world for things we need or want, and the stakes grow higher by the day as the population continues to grow. Still the parallels with ancient times afford perspective. Consider the beginning of the East India Company in the sixteenth century. Spain and Portugal had a monopoly on the eastern trade routes, when in 1591 James Lancaster on the Bonaventure sailed from England around Africa to the Arabian Sea, the first English vessel to reach India that way, returning to England in 1594 with the spoils. The rest as they say is history. The Company took over India, and by 1634 the opium trade was among its mainstays. By century’s end they were selling it to China. Thus did British misdeeds return to haunt them  in “pipe dreams.”

Fatalism redux

I daresay the most profound messages here on the weekly blog are to be seen in the Dokusan, where my collaborator Anna shares her ongoing conversations with Archangel. She finds his wise advice invaluable in holding on to sanity given the current state of the world. Last week she wondered whether retreating from the fray, as ancient masters were able to do in mountain monasteries, is not a copout. This query brought up the matter of fatalism, the belief that whatever is going to happen is preordained in any case. Prying open this seemingly simple viewpoint, Archangel reveals that events, while not actually fated, may as well be due to the tangle of causes that karma obscures. A simple fatalist, should he fall on hard times, may look for some agency to blame: God, an enemy spy, a conspiracy. But as Anna’s Guardian wisely observes, the agent is nature. 

Thus are we confounded. While sapient to a degree, we yet are subject to the laws of nature, body and mind, the rise and fall of tides. We see this not only in ourselves but in all of human affairs, and so must answer Einstein’s question in the negative: even free to do what we will, can we will what we will? An individual’s fate is already present at birth in the very long chain of their DNA. Was it really you who, after carefully deliberating the possible consequences of your vote in the last election, decided for the top dog, or was it your inherent nature as a pack animal swaying your action? And so goes the world. Indeed all society’s problems are closely interwoven. Political division, religious fundamentalism, were stoked by the culture wars. The drugs and free love of the 1960s teenagers were bequeathed to all generations since. Only the spirit of nonconformity of their forebears seems lost on today’s youth.

Notwithstanding the realization of unconscious forces directing our actions and thus our fate, we need not acquiesce to inertia. Our sapience is not so much wide knowledge but sagacity. We can learn. At the shore, standing in the waves, we feel the pull of the tide, and unless we are in a rip current, we stand against it. Likewise, with courage and honesty we can face our own nature and stand fast when it threatens independent reason.

Rifts in the clouds?

I do hope readers have forgiven me for waxing mystical last week on the abundance of metaphor to be seen in nature. News of barbarians approaching the citadel has just become so repetitive as to have passed depressing to emetic. The American tyrant reigns on supreme in his omnipotence, giving the finger to all nations and all people save those who bow and scrape, begging for his favor. He hands over the military to the worst war monger ever to master Mortal Kombat, who is now able to reduce the ancient city of Tehran to rubble without leaving the Pentagon. And it is still early in just the second year of chaos and idiocy. The world has learned that the US is not to be trusted, and the other dictatorships of Autocracy, Inc. are salivating as they watch the reckless squandering of our resources. I return to this dismal topic having seen some glimmers of hope in recent rulings pushing back against the tyrant’s absurd overreach, federal courts being in loco parentis where the Congress is AWOL. A federal judge has informed him that the president does not own the White House, and stopped construction of the grotesquely outsized ballroom. And the Supreme Court, if they hope to preserve what’s left of their integrity, is poised to rule against his order striking down birthright citizenship, an explicit Constitutional right. I also cheer the firing of two of the most fiendish harpies ever to disgrace government service, the wannabe cowgirls Noem and Bondi.

Still, Americans are desperate for better representation in Congress. With elections but seven months away, will they exercise their only tool to effect a change, even if troops and ICE agents are looking over their shoulders? A further question is whether younger people standing for public office, chastened by the impotency of hyper-partisanship, will succeed in turning things around - a consummation devoutly too be wished. Otherwise the karma of the so-called MAGA movement will mature. An already menacing debt will bankrupt the US Treasury, helped along by ever more destructive and frequent weather extremes.

It will be America forced back to the Stone Age, its warriors wielding old-fashioned tomahawks as they dance about the tribal bonfire, the prehistoric prelude to the warpath and the best way to rally the tribe. In thrall to their respective fundamentalist religions, three nations have taken to that bloody path - alarmed by those rifts in the clouds?

Metaphor

Readers may suspect my fondness for metaphor. I find the device an exceptional tool in writing, whether in prose or poetry, especially poetry: “An egg yolk sun rises into milky clouds.” Indeed I am often struck by how many reflections of ourselves and of our lives are offered us by nature, to the point that I now view the phenomena as clear evidence of our deepest intuitions. In the last post, for example, I used the term metastases to describe the tribal factions released when a tyrant is violently removed. Metastasis refers to the spread of cancer cells from a malignant timor. As a metaphor, it may be widely applicable. Other examples of such self-similarity in nature inspired mathematician Mandelbrot’s work in fractal geometry which  became useful in computer based modeling. The branching of a tree is repeated in smaller scale when the limbs branch, and even in the branching veins of its leaves. Many of our oldest and wisest aphorisms are metaphors derived from nature: The bigger they are, the harder they fall (whether a tree or a powerful nation); Don’t put all your eggs in one basket (financial advice to hedge your bets).

Modern people are suspicious of intuition, preferring logic as infallible. That should have changed when physicists discovered the illogic of quantum mechanics, revealing that at the ultimate level reality need not be logical. But our own intuitions tell us that. As we live we feel, against logic, that we have always existed and always will. We never feel time move. Indeed what we view as temporal to our persistent grief, is truly timeless. That includes oneself. The glories of nature are reflections of this timeless brilliancy, and the abundance of metaphor they suggest binds us to that transcendent state, validating our intuitions. Notwithstanding, we busy ourselves with conflict, violence, destruction, until death returns each of us, each unique configuration, to the potentiality whence it sprang - like the leaves of a deciduous tree. As the new leaves come out this spring, observe how the veins mimic the branching trunk. It is easy to observe, quite another to wonder what nature is telling us.

Knowing ourselves to be bound to the timeless transcendence, why this hubris? The court where Jamshyd gloried and drank deep is now kept by the lion and the lizard; the wild ass stamps o’er the head of Bahrám, the great hunter, now fast asleep. No coincidence that the immortal Khayyam was Persian.

Rubbling

As I was writing last week about our unpreparedness for the barbarian onslaught that historically accompanies the decline of a civilization, I was pleasantly surprised to discover that the word rubble may be used as a verb, abbreviating our efforts to describe what is happening even now. While I am not generally fond of such cross usage of nouns, in this case it is clearly necessary. What must it be like to emerge from a subway tunnel where you have hidden from enemy bombs to find the multi-storied apartment building where you made your home was been rubbled? The shock that everything you had there is destroyed, lying under a mountain of blasted concrete along with the corpses of anyone who had not escaped? It is one thing when rubbling is caused by an act of nature, such events being not infrequent - tornadoes hurricanes, earthquakes, wildfires. We have learned that nature is an impersonal, random force. But when fellow humans, with no sign of empathy, can inflict utter destruction with callous indifference it is another matter entirely.

There will come initial desperate concerns - where to go, what to do. The civilized portion of the population, should they lack the perspective of history or even of current events, will be blindsided, screaming, “Why have I been singled out!!?” In those less civilized, the tribal mindset is intolerably inflamed, their only thought being vengeance. Wealthy people, having property in multiple time zones, will already have their resources hidden cleverly, and hedged, moreover, with hard currency such as precious metal which might be used to barter. The poor will walk, and as was reported after Hiroshima, envy the dead. Today, thanks to the astounding ignorance of American voters, it is not hyperbole to say the time is coming. Bombs are falling in Ukraine, the Middle East, the Caribbean. Cities are being rubbled every day. Those in Western Europe and Britain will again be leveled, and across the sea the USA will not be spared this time. The only uncertainty is which calamity will come first: all out war, or financial collapse. 

There may yet be time for us to study the siege of Sarajevo, which lasted from 1992-96, when that multi-ethnic city endured medieval conditions. Stock up on candles and be sure you have the Field Guide to Edible Wild Plants! 

Are we ready for this?

Some time ago, I posted on the topic of fatalism, the doctrine that events are predetermined by fate. I alluded to the idea last week when I wrote that we are powerless against the natural process that brings the collapse of civilization and the devolution to a tribal state. As ignorant leaders now attempt to slow the process by the assassination of rivals, only to watch more tribes spring up like metastases, it occurs to me that the civilized world is unprepared for what is coming - the unbridled barbarism of tribal warfare. Some early examples may already have been scarcely remarked: the rise of Fox News propaganda; the resulting cleavage of a wealthy and powerful democracy into two irreparably severed factions, one of which has become the largest most ruthless tribe since the Mafia spread its tentacles out of Sicily. 

A more recent and graphic demonstration was the tribal attack on 7 October 2023 in Israel, when Hamas warriors swept into the kibbutzim, and undeterred by any civilized qualmishness committed atrocities, butchering the despised enemies and taking off hostages to their tunnels to torture and starve for many months to follow. Horrific, yes, but typical of tribal society before civilization, a state into which we are rapidly returning. What we call terrorism equates to the guerrilla war of secretive ambush and merciless slaughter by tribes. Notice today the growing disdain of diplomacy, the geographic isolation into tribal territories engaging in the desperate hardening of borders, the subsequent migration into appropriate tribal lands, worst of all the indiscriminate rubbling of cities - the crown jewels of civilization. Military targets? Hardly that! Bomb them all - man, woman and child - to smithereens. Are we prepared? 

Over some generations, the many forms of visual media have leaned into the normalization of brutality, to abate the normal human revulsion toward blood and guts in its deliberate displays of raw violence. The popularity of a film depended on its power - on the mega screen at max volume - to induce vomiting in a large portion of the audience. Some few nonconformists abjured, refusing to watch graphic, lurid enactments of savage cruelty - while multitudes paid for the emetic, seeming to believe it the quintessence of mortal pleasure. I daresay, however, that if swathes of humanity are enjoying this derivative of barbarism, others are even now bearing its reality. No wonder firearms are ubiquitous. Perhaps the more demure among us should form our own tribe. Might Greenland take us in?

How to start a world war

Any youngster who has ever thought to bring down a hornet’s nest with a baseball bat only to be stung by angry hornets should have learned his lesson. On the other hand, the one who forgets the pain of a hornet’s stinger may grow up to be the fool who starts the next world war. That would be World War III, or might we call it World War I, based on these words of a historian describing Kaiser Wilhelm II: he was superficial and hasty, “without any deeper level of seriousness, without any desire for hard work or drive to see things through to the end… desperate for applause and success.” The quote in Wikipedia goes on to say that he had no sense for reality or real problems. And this was the hereditary monarch who fired Bismarck and took control, losing the most deadly war in recorded history - until now. 

Now the American Empire has chosen just such a fool as leader; the similarities are inescapable. He and his henchman at the helm of a mighty military, with no experience but for video games, steer the ship of state as from their Sony Playstation. I have asserted here whenever the topic has arisen that the Middle East is a region where human society remains stubbornly and implacably tribal, a nest of angry hornets. With this understanding, conflicts there come into focus: A tribe by nature is small, cohesive by virtue of intense loyalty, and readily violent. The end of a tribal war is not peace, hard as that may be for the Western mind to believe. Clearly, with the evidence of millennia, the aim is annihilation of the enemy tribe. Indeed in the current iteration of the endless violence comes the forbidding term “obliteration,” from the American chieftain himself.

The Western democracies have been entangled in this region for one reason - oil. Do we not now have enough fossil fuels of our own, which coupled with the growth of clean energy options, might finally liberate us? The inhabitants of the tribal regions are not of a nature to be liberated. Those who have been Westernized will pay the consequences, fulfill the imprecations of their religious leaders, religion being the ultimate glue of the tribe. These tribes are at present being pounded with a baseball bat by a juvenile clearly never stung by a hornet - how soon before we all are stung?

Critical mass

Neither myself nor my collaborator Anna - that jolly team of Jeremiah and Cassandra - take any satisfaction in watching our prophecies play out. We are equally as victimized as anyone living in this world today, and no one paying attention can deny the devolution of human society into warring tribes. In America, one party dominates, yet in every action they take, declare themselves not political at all but tribal, while the opposition demurs from the fray, refusing to be sucked down. Other Western democracies struggle as well with immigration from the global south, where ancient tribes regerminate by way of Islamic terror. Often have I written here of how civilizations cycle and wondered at the same time whether exponential population growth brings the tipping point. Surely the current trajectory lends credence to the veracity of that theory. 

Another iteration of tipping point is critical mass, borrowed from nuclear physics, where it refers to the minimum amount of fissile material required to cause a nuclear chain reaction. Used in a social context, it may mean, for example, the number of consumers who must adopt an innovation or a product for it to be successful. To me the term fits nicely into the mystery of why civilizations always decline: they reach a critical mass of population, when the prodigious resources needed to sustain, let alone to govern it, forces desperate people to break away violently into smaller kinship groups. As this process begins, the strongest men in the civilization at large thrash about for solutions. Their first choice is clear: to tighten the grip, to keep people in line by force. Democracies fall to charismatic dictators promising what no one can deliver, peace and plenty. 

The world is now at this stage of the process, and I begin to see a forbidding accelerant. In those leaders who are still required to attend the will of the people, comes the idea that tribal resurgence might be nipped in the bud via decapitation. Bomb the mullahs and free Iran; assassinate the chieftain of the criminal cartel; kidnap the corrupt president of a failing South American nation. Results of these operations are predictable to anyone who knows history: Haiti after Duvalier is still without a president. In any population that has been suppressed there are clans whose leaders will assert themselves, and there we are, devolving faster than ever into the primitive state of warring tribes. Ugly as it is, this process is natural, and we will never get the better of Mother Nature.

Despoiled

The great ice pack finally receding from my lawn and driveway, I must confess it has been a not unwelcome hiatus from the political wars. The news was all about a dead sex offender and his prominent clients, who shall remain nameless, and the mysterious account of an old woman taken from her desert home in the middle of the night. And of course, the games - bread and circuses! But now with the smell of spring in the air comes the less congenial scent of elections, as politicians begin to make nice hoping to win the unearned favor of voters. 

But the word of the week, dear readers, is despoil, the definition of which is “to strip of belongings, possessions, or value.” A synonym is maraud: “to roam about and raid in search of plunder.” There can be no doubt that the regime in America that was invited in by millions of reckless, ignorant voters last year has come to despoil, to maraud, to plunder. Consider what has been stripped of value: Without permission or even consultation, the president takes it upon himself to demolish the East Wing of the White House, a National Historic Landmark, to make room for a 9000 square foot ballroom; he takes over the Kennedy Centre, installing his toadies as the Board of Directors, and immediately has his name put up above that of John F. Kennedy; he proposes his own glorification with an Arc de Trump to overshadow the Lincoln Memorial. The man has no shame.

The response to these blatant abuses has been dodgy. Naturally people did not want to be associated with degradation. Subscriptions fell off at the Kennedy Center, performers canceled, the Washington Opera jumped ship. Continuance was seen as submission. Another example is the Washington Post, owned by tech oligarch Bezos, who has tried hard to accommodate the right wing. When the paper declined to endorse anyone in the last election it was dropped by scores of subscribers, and now has but a small chance to survive. I have kept my subscription for the sake of those worthy columnists who have likewise stuck with it: Fareed Zakaria, Theodore Johnson; even George Will, who leans rightward but never went tribal. And then too, the comic strips, in color! My point is that to abandon historic institutions in an excess of rectitude because they have been forcibly stripped of value is also to surrender. Instructive here, the courage of Maria Ressa, Nobel winning journalist under Duterte. Does Bezos have the balls?

Consequences

Are we not the cleverest of sentient beings to have evolved on the planet? Other such creatures are ruled by natural selection, survival of the fittest, having evolved to survive in their niche long enough to pass down their stronger genes. Humans alone are able to learn and adapt to varied habitats, knowing that to survive we must be prepared and make decisions about the future. In doing so we must have ways to assess the future, forecast the weather, anticipate diseases and geopolitical calamities. Until this year we have had highly sophisticated measures in all these crucial arenas. 

Not long ago the wind blew a weather balloon into the canopy of a tall tree on my property. It’s parachute was orange, and it hung there for years, all too visible like a mislaid pumpkin. When it finally was blown down, instructions on the transponder said it was the property of NOAA but not to return it, just discard it. Such balloons have been released around the world since 1896 to predict weather. Today NOAA, an agency of the US Commerce Department, has been gutted  by that grifter-in-chief in preparation for privatizing its functions. In consequence, we can have far less confidence than ever in a weather forecast. The snow would turn to sleet by afternoon? When I got up at five AM, it was already sleet.

Surely microbes have been our primary foe throughout evolution, the plague alone killing large number along trade routes. Not until science had advanced enabling us to see and to study this enemy were we in the least bit safe. Vaccines against the most deadly were developed and deployed creating an umbrella of herd immunity. Smallpox was eradicated, and measles. The WHO projects the eradication of TB by 2035, in expectations of a more effective vaccine. However, all advancement on these fronts face rising swells of unreason, a bizarre rejection of science by the unintelligent and the arrogant. In consequence, expect a shorter life span, truncated on either end, infant mortality saddest of all.

As we are now over eight billion in number, we have not believed for a very long time that our individual decisions are of any consequence to society. That fallacy should be laid to rest, since the last presidential election in America upended geopolitical stability worldwide, and those voters who thought their decision would make no difference anyway are learning the consequences of misrule. Do they lament they never saw it coming? For shame! Cassandra knew what was waiting for them in that Trojan horse.

Armchair naturalist

It has been nearly two weeks now since ice rained from the sky, encasing the region as I wrote of last week. Valiant efforts by road crews using heavy equipment got things moving again, though temperatures have only edged above freezing, and that briefly. The ice remains just as it was after the event. While my old Bentley surely could make it down the unplowed driveway, in this internet age I see no need, when food and anything else can be delivered; so I have stayed close to home, becoming an armchair naturalist. From that chair I have an excellent view of the feeders kept by my neighbor the doctor for all sorts of local wildlife. He joined me for coffee the other day, and we compared notes on how the arctic conditions have affected the animals. This post will tell you.

Even before the storm, I had noticed crows every morning flying from the northeast to the southwest, not in flocks but a steady stream. Were they going for breakfast by the river? I never saw them returning. Then for two or three days on end during the long freeze, the feeders were monopolized by very large flocks, mostly crows with a mix of other blackbirds. Were they migrating? Crows are highly intelligent, and hard to catch, so little is known of their habits. Yet Cornell’s Merlin app shows their breeding range in Canada. Were they already heading north, spurred by the longer hours of daylight?

Our deer herd is hard pressed by the polar weather. They hunker down under evergreens and bushes, coming to the feeders at dawn and twilight for the sunflower seed, usually six does at a time. On two occasions I have seen the bucks, half a dozen or more, still antlered. According to Wikipedia, my ready source of information, the male white-tailed deer shed their antlers from late December until February, when mating season ends, and here it was nearly time for that famous prognosticator to make his annual spring forecast. Here is Wikipedia on sleet, aka ice pellets: “accumulations of two inches not unheard of…significantly heavier than a like amount of snow…” and “takes significantly longer to melt.” Evidence of which the legs of lawn chairs sitting as deep as ever in the ice pack.

Next week, the good doctor and I plan to go out in our ice cleats in search of shed, a pair of antlers the prize, no taxidermy required!

Not anytime soon

If you caught last week’s post In the courtyard, you will see that my friend and colleague, Anna, and I are on the same page. I start the next Weekly post the day after updating the blog, so by the time this is posted there may have been some slight remediation of the phenomenal precipitation that paralyzed so much activity in this region. Forecasts of high temperatures are for above freezing but well below averages for at least the foreseeable future. Thus my headline: what is being called “snow-crete” is not going away anytime soon.

Under the noise of geopolitics, the incendiary rhetoric, nature slowly and silently slides toward human extinction. A planet 24,900 miles in circumference, mostly underwater, is inhabited by eight billion people. Evidence of climate change since the industrial revolution is undeniable, extreme weather most flagrantly. May there have been precedents in ancient or prehistoric times? Indeed life may have been quite dangerous for the cavemen - ask the dinosaurs. It is beside the point. Weather is rapidly shattering precedents set in our time. For example, what would allow a snowstorm occurring in temperatures well below freezing to drop not as snow but sleet for twelve hours? Local meteorologists were at pains to describe the paradoxical phenomenon as follows: Under the approaching arctic air, a wedge of warm air from the south was a tall pillar in the upper atmosphere melting the snow as it fell only to refreeze as sleet. In short it was not the cold but the warm air that resulted in an epic encasement of ice. Try telling that to climate change deniers, unpersuaded even after their homes are destroyed time and again, their children swept under in floods. They believe in God not science, when it is likely their God punishing them for worshipping a false one. 

These extreme weather disasters ratify the warnings we have heard for years. Remedies to reduce greenhouses gas emissions have been launched, at least to slow the rate of increase in the warming and keep it under the point of no return. Popular support of these projects is fickle, now gone. Yet no matter how trying our circumstances, some of us can still imagine how they could be worse. Indeed there may be no floor to the depth of human misery, and we take comfort in the assurance that we at least are not suffering as the Palestinians or the Ukrainians today. Must we take comfort? Or “take arms against a sea of troubles and by opposing end them?”

Gratuitous

I search for threads that may connect parts of the surreal chaos we are enduring after a swath of jaundiced rubes in a once great country rose up en masse against the world in a storm of self pity. There may be many keywords to qualify; indeed I have often zoomed out here to show a bigger picture: over population, descent into tribalism when civil society collapses. All is connected in my “Sexual Theory of Everything” to primal drives, human nature. Now I try to focus on the chaos at a more granular level, where the word standing out in all caps is gratuitous. The first definition is “not called for by circumstances, not necessary, appropriate or justified. Unwarranted.” This word connects every single executive order, every single action of his henchmen, every social media tweet of the ignorant scoundrel installed by the foolhardy rustics aforementioned to lead them on a crusade of global destruction. 

Gratuitous violence: In order to remove millions of brown people from the country, we must round up law abiding citizens, body slam them to the ground, and put them in concentration camps. Anyone daring to protest will be summarily executed on the spot. To those cities and states that do not support our righteous work, we will send military troops to keep order. When this has the expectedly opposite effect, the “insurgents” will be massacred. Greenland? Sorry, we cannot defend you unless we own you, subjecting your people to the same indignities we now inflict on ours. Here we see the capstone of gratuitous, the threat of invasion, coercion, against a willing ally, territory of another willing ally with whom you are brothers in arms. All of the violence we have seen in the first calamitous year of the regime has been totally unwarranted despite smug falsehoods to the contrary. In order to rid the country of the scourge of fentanyl, was it appropriate to use military might against any small fishing boat in the Caribbean that might by carrying cocaine? Take no prisoners! 

The world has responded warily, in the belief that America will remain as rich as Croesus and almighty as God. The US military is already stretched thin, and there is still a deficit which any foreign adventures will serve to swell. Investors are already losing faith and trust in the US Treasury; the currency will collapse and bankruptcy ensue. A glimmer of hope? Croesus, that ancient Greek, is credited with minting the first gold coins.

Police state

At the end of the last post, “Unbalanced,” I added a parenthesis inviting readers to contribute their experiences of civilization’s unraveling, however trivial. You may put these anonymous reports here on the website or send to my email. Examples fly at us in the news like an icy northeast wind off Greenland. I am at pains to collect them fast enough, but here’s a good one: The president of the USA is caught on camera making a digital gesture towards a heckler that now signals a ubiquitous obscenity. It’s a twofer! Comedy faces extinction, especially satire, when even on SNL the best joke they conceive of is the mere mention of the male copulatory organ. Shame, shame! But coarsening began generations ago with the 1960s counterculture. Then came “reality TV,” cradle of narcissism. I call it cheap TV, no more writers or actors to pay. Would a civilized person sleep on the floor of an airport, like vagrants used to do in bus terminals? But there they are. Would they go into debt to take a river cruise of Europe when the rivers are too low to float the boat? Read my essay.

We might blame these developments on the “ugly Americans,” who after all elected a boorish old mafia boss as leader. But I would suggest there is a global drift toward a rejection of civilization in preference to brute force. Even in America where the president, deserving as he is to be the target of opprobrium, may be but one man surrounded by a cadre of idolatrous lackies, yet he has the undying support of millions of voters. Now he sets his sights on police states around the world, having first subdued the Americans by turning them against one another. Why is he toppling dictators? Simply so that America becomes the premier police state. There is a flaw in this plan!

If you strike a hornets nest with a baseball bat, angry hornets will pursue you to the death. Moreover, the hornets, having done with you, are thrown into a state of anarchy. Thus with civil society. Those who imagine a police state is preferable to civilization know nothing of anarchy, the tribal life of constant fear and war with neighbors. Must they relearn from experience what they have thrown away?

Unbalanced

I cannot do better, it seems to me, than to provide readers an eye witness, running account of that we experience today as the decay of civilization, and to invite them all to contribute here reports of their own, however small. This decay can happen swiftly, as with the destruction of Pompeii by the eruption of Vesuvius in the first century, or it can take centuries as in the case of the Roman Empire, until in 476 AD the Emperor Romulus Augustulus was deposed by Odoacer, a barbarian of one of the Germanic tribes. There can be no doubt that modern civilization is crumbling under the weight of insupportable population numbers and the consequent degradation of the planet, but current signs indicate a slow process, albeit accelerating. One sign is the strong current of impatience with and intolerant of democracy; but in any nation still enjoying democratic freedoms, including elections, to willfully choose a barbarian as a leader is grotesquely unbalanced, a national suicide from which there may be no returning. 

And unbalanced is precisely the word for what we experience. Turn on the news for a weather report, and there is the barbarian-in-chief, no escaping his visage. Go for groceries and there are empty shelves. This and other anomalies are now cause for worry: supply chain? tariffs? staff deported? Where once we knew where to go for household goods, that all important store was bankrupted by one too many financial blows. Favorite restaurants, small shops struggle to survive, then “one by one back in the closet lay,” like Khayyam’s chess pieces. Meanwhile, every neighbor now has a dog, not the once ubiquitous yellow lab, but a mastiff. The sadness of all this is bad enough, but mix it up with rage and one feels a fretful querulousness poisoning the soul. The condition strikes with spontaneous nausea at the sight of the harpies hovering about their master, looking all the uglier for their attempt to project feminine beauty: the waist length Rapunzel ringlets, the small gold cross gleaming from each neck in contrast to the stone cold eyes in keeping with their hearts as they spout the party line to rationalize sending soldiers to kill civilians. 

Kathleen Parker, one of the few rational columnists still writing for the The Post, sums up our malaise thus, “Paralyzed in a hellish limbo!” - waiting for the other shoe to drop.

(Readers, if you are yourselves having experiences indicative of  decaying civilization, I would love to learn of them. However small, however briefly, do send me a description to be shared in this conversation, anonymously of course.)

Co-optation

My neighbor here, the retired physician who feeds the birds along with an abundance of other wildlife, is married to the piano teacher whom I interviewed for an essay among those published in Ruminata. She is also retired. Throughout their working years, she was the one who tended the feeders, but only in winter. The good doctor, contrariwise, fraught lest any creature may go hungry, fills the feeders year round, co-opting her years of hegemony. They have always been a good team, and at their age, close to mine, I’m sure she does not mind, especially as she expressed in our interview her wish to spend retirement in her easy chair by a south-facing window watching the winter sunsets.

Co-optation is not usually so easy nor acceptable. A synonym is appropriate, meaning in one sense “to take or make use of without authority or right.” This process is what we witness in the many budding dictatorships as tyrants insinuate their dominance over the population. Do his followers notice? Do they approve? Are they stupid enough to re-elect representatives who allow it to happen? Before long they have no choice, though nowadays dictators continue to hold elections to create a mantle of legitimacy, but only when they control the result. The American dictator, now in the full bloom of his narcissism, which has always given him a positive flair for self-glorification, is offering numerous examples of co-optation, chief of which among them, his appropriation of all legislative authority from his toadies in Congress. Then there is the Kennedy Center: first, fire everyone on the Board, appoint your own people who will elect you as chairman. In no time these illustrious individuals will honor your humble self by plastering your name outside  above that of John F. Kennedy. Here we have Ned Tulrumble, Mayor of Mudfog, fancying himself the Lord Mayor of London. Look no further than the White House, now repurposed as the permanent home of the reigning tyrant. We could not expect him to remain without being able to entertain 900 of his closest friends in a new ballroom. We have only to await the advent of the Holy MAGA Empire to match the greatest co-optation in history, when Rome co-opted the movement of the humble rabbi they martyred. Remember, you saw it here first! 

I must go now and see that my easy chair is placed at a south-facing window, where as the sun sets, I will assume a new posture of “learned helplessness.”

A Christmas Carol

My readers surely know by now that I am a great fan of Charles Dickens, who at this time of year lives on in “A Christmas Carol,” written in 1843. Of this beloved novella, his friend and biographer, John Forster, writes, “He had identified himself with Christmas… its life and spirits… its privilege to light up with some sort of comfort the squalidest places...” Dickens was already a successful author of six major works, but his latest, Martin Chuzzlewit, was not selling well, when sales of “A Christmas Carol” immediately soared. Its author expected great financial gains, at least a thousand pounds, but instead was vexed to receive only a few hundreds, causing him to change publishers. In 1849, he began to do public readings of the work at Christmastime to sold out crowds. For Dickens, who in early life aspired to be an actor, this method was both congenial and profitable, not only for his many charities but also his growing family.

Over the years there have been innumerable adaptations of the tale for stage and screen. My personal favorite, since having discovered it, is the film musical from 1970, Scrooge, starring Albert Finney, with Alec Guinness as Marley’s ghost. The incomparable score was written by the late Leslie Bricusse, including a witty patter song in the style of Gilbert and Sullivan, “I Hate People,” sung by Scrooge of course! It was filmed on an elaborate Victorian see at Shepperton Studios, London. Some of the dialogue is lifted from the original, but part of the story diverges. Scrooge’s fiancé Belle was not Fezziwig’s daughter, though that plot twist adds opportunity for more songs. The wildest variation comes after the last ghost, a silent Grim Reaper, shows Scrooge his tombstone. Scrooge falls into the grave and straight to Hell, where Marley’s ghost, a smirking Alec Guinness, gives him a tour. The point made is that the old miser is not redeemed by his fear of death alone, but more so by the dread of eternal damnation. That is simplistic in comparison to biographer Michael Slater’s comment that “A Christmas Carol” was “intended to … warn of the terrible danger to society created by the toleration of widespread ignorance and actual want among the poor.” A keen mission for Dickens all his life - that now should be ours.

Dogs

Humans are a social species very much like their canine companions, who run in packs. Even wild dogs run in packs. I venture to say that we differ in but one major aspect, i. e. dogs breed only in season whereas humans are perpetually in heat from puberty on. When it comes to other behaviors, we are indistinguishable. The best example of this is the foxhound, bred to follow the lead dog, find the scent of the fox and give chase. In centuries past, when over-populous foxes were considered a nuisance by landowners, fox hunting was a blood sport. Indeed, bloodshed has been a prime source of entertainment in human society long before Romulus and Remus were raised by wolves.

Mind you, I do not disparage the character of our countless pet dogs, nor their bonds of mutual devotion with their owners. I refer only to pack behavior, observing that in the millions of years of tribal society humans were brought up in much the same way as foxhounds: trained to follow a strong chieftain, identify the enemy tribe, and slaughter them. The pageantry of the old British fox hunt is instructive: the horses, the uniform, the Master of the Hunt, the Master of Hounds, and most interesting, the latter’s assistant known as the “whipper-in,” who with but a flick of his crop over their heads can control the movement of a large pack. If you have never witnessed this amazing feat of the whipper-in, trust me, it is impressive. The hounds are happy, energetic, docile, very docile. The metaphor that leaps to mind, due to associations with recent conditions, will be of rallies for the would-be autocrats in the many wannabe dictatorships springing up like toxic mushrooms - crowds of human hounds eager to follow, and given the scent, willing to kill.

In the mystery of “The Three Gables,” Holmes goes to gossip columnist Langdale Pike to learn the name of the wealthy woman behind the thugs who murdered his client’s grandson. Pike draws his attention to a young woman in the park below, who is very agitated; she has wild red hair and a hat with a turquoise band. Sherlock deduces that she is looking for a dog, probably a Saluki, perhaps with a turquoise ribbon. Presently the Saluki shows up looking just like his mistress, upon which Holmes remarks, “Dogs are meant to look like their owners.” Sadly, we must admit they may have far more in common than appearance. 

Zero sum

To keep a proper perspective on things we must remind ourselves to step back and look for the big picture. Clearly human society is dangerously, even violently divided in these times. Divisions are as obvious as the cleavage planes of a diamond to a skilled diamond cutter. The bigger picture is the overall realm of duality where we recognize the inexorable nature of our divisions. Start with those self-replicating organic compounds, described in my essay, “The Sexual Theory of Everything,” follow the eons of evolution bringing cell division and sexual reproduction, and look at the resulting symmetry of life, plain as the nose on your face, or more to the point, your two eyes, which depend on stereoscopic vision to bring their slightly different viewpoints into focus. If only it were that easy in our politics!

But no, trouble arises whenever our simple minds see duality as zero-sum. The sum is constant, thus for one side to win the other must lose in equal measure - an eye for an eye. This problem is especially consequential in two social arenas: race and gender. Sincere efforts have been made in America for generations to give advantage to racial minorities in education and in careers, thereby to improve their lives financially. These efforts have clearly paid off in a growing and prosperous Black middle class. At some point in the zero sum game, the colleges, the law firms are practicing reverse discrimination, when a highly qualified White person cannot get into the college, or the law firm. The same thing has happened in the matter of women’s rights. In our well-intentioned goal of encouraging girls from a young age to see themselves capable of achieving a fuller life than one circumscribed by stereotype, elementary schools provide ample role models: books about female super heroes, women doctors, fire fighters, the teachers themselves - mostly women. But what has become of the boys? Zero sum means they must lose. 

No one can argue with promoting the good of society, but that good requires balance. Racism and sexism will always exist, and as long as our push toward more enlightened norms is beneficial, it is laudable. When that changes, the sage will stop pushing - before the zero sum devotees push us off a cliff. In the Tao Te Ching it is written, “The man who keeps only to virtue is without virtue.

Insignificance

Earl Pickles is not shaving today, and he waxes philosophical in the Brian Crane comic strip, “When you realize you are insignificant, it frees up a lot of your spare time.” In the same newspaper is a column by Theodore Johnson, one of very few rational contributors remaining in the murky pool of a once great daily rag. He attempts to parse the capricious foreign adventures of the unhinged American president, concluding that in all these dangerous, unwarranted exploits, he seeks an excuse to become a war president, thereby achieving greatness. What better evidence of the pending collapse of civilization, which I wrote of in my last post, than the moral bankruptcy of such a leader, of his enablers, and I daresay of the millions of voters responsible for choosing such a person to command a great military power. Worse yet is the moral midget installed at the Pentagon, whose boyhood dream of killing whomever he chooses without getting blood on his hands is now realized. Was there ever a more loathsome person, sending bombers to strike tiny boats suspected of carrying drugs, then ordering survivors to be obliterated. Judge, jury and Lord High Executioner, gleeful as the chorus in Mikado.

But getting back to Earl Pickles. I believe most people are accepting of their insignificance, some from childhood who might have struggled in school or had a sibling next to whom they were eclipsed. Those with more ability learn of their insignificance later in life when they fail to achieve recognition: they are not drafted by the NBA or the NFL; their creative works are rejected by publishers, art dealers, major orchestras; the magic of the internet disappoints when Google sifts their posts down to page 100 to the tenth power. Unfortunately, there are some humans whose conceit is so enormous that on their deathbeds they will rant of the injustice, the persecution endured by their consummately superlative selves. They never heard of Earl Pickles nor enjoyed his philosophical bent, never owned up to the universal insignificance. And so like Bahrám the great hunter, the wild ass will stamp o’er their heads as they lie fast asleep!

Cracks in the foundation

We think of concrete as a very strong and long-lasting material, indispensable to building sturdy structures, from bridges to apartment houses. Over years, however, it may be subject to degrading by many sources, chiefly water; and those structures relying on its strength are in growing danger - the concrete cracks. As in the building industry analogously in civilization: foundations crack. From our vantage point today, these cracks are accelerating. Is collapse pending?

While I ascribe to the bromide that there is nothing new under the sun, surely it is equally true that every reiteration of a thing is distinct in some way. Today the chief distinction is in population numbers, growing every instant. Dangers to civilization grow out of this fact, and the quickening pace of these dangers lies squarely with cyber technology. In some respects it can be argued that to provide even the most basic social services to billions of people computers have been necessary. The worldwide web has in fact been a boon in the ease of communication and international trade, albeit at the same time causing considerable economic disruption. But in the so-called social media, we clearly observe the rising flood of murky waters that ever more swiftly erode the concrete foundations of modern civilization. These dangers are without equal in human history. 

Among the most consequential of these cracks, observe the phenomenon of the “influencer.” Any adolescent child sufficiently savvy may make a video of themselves doing nothing in particular - jumping up and down perhaps and gyrating in a manner prejudicial to the skeleton. Post the video and it catches on with millions of other adolescents, i.e. it “goes viral.” Adoring fans send money, sponsors are attracted. Other juveniles are inspired to follow this easy path to wealth, and suddenly countless puerile billionaires are born. Just what the world needs?! See evidence of more crumbling in the deepening roots of the culture war. Despite efforts by the right to torch progressive movements on the left the only result has been to further geographical segregation: Israelis and Palestinians leaving the Middle East, brown people being driven out of northern countries, women fleeing red states for blue. In the end? No more nations, only tribal territories. Tribal life is savage, and those who feel nostalgic for it have not read War Before Civilization. Read it before it’s too late. Yes, ours is in the process of collapsing.

Dies Irae

There is no end of fodder in the morning newspaper for a blog post, when every government department is headed by hacks whose partisanship is exceeded only by their incompetence. At the war department is a former TV journalist and one time mouthpiece of the Murdoch empire, who has his own personal video game going on in the Caribbean with real guns and live people. Given the escalating truculence of the war mongers could it be great wars that MAGA yearns for? Surely not! Just witness the obsequious deference of their dear leader to a blood thirsty Arab sheik, who went home with all of America’s most important military secrets. Still the only tyrant our chieftain loves more than himself is not this Arab, nor Xi nor Kim, but Putin, who wins all of his elections.

Closer to home, bellicosity is infectious in our daily lives, which become unpleasant and dangerous. In our quiet village, which we have kept carefully out of the fray for decades, it now seems that all 300 million people in the nation are descending upon us, and they are angry. There is a persistent jarring sound of car horns, and drivers pulling recklessly around one another. Clerks, those that remain, are surly at best, even those who were once friendly. Have their coworkers been deported, or are they late to work, stuck on our chronically clogged highways? People are increasingly desperate. Adding to the many who have lost their jobs are the functionally underemployed doing multiple jobs and still struggling to survive. But across the world these are days of wrath, described in the medieval hymn, Dies Irae, that became part of the Requiem Mass. Origins of the hymn, which refers to Judgement Day, are lost in the fog of medieval history. Here is a transition of the first lines: “That day is a day of wrath, a day of tribulation and distress, a day of calamity and misery, darkness and obscurity…” Sound familiar? It surely would to any Ukrainian, any Palestinian in Gaza, any woman in Sudan. At least there is good news in the polls here for next year’s election, and even some movement in the courts and among Republicans in Congress. Also remember this name: Jason Crow, representative from Colorado. He is young, intelligent, insightful, plain spoken, courageous, in short the real deal!

Tribal imperium

To all my dear friends and relations in the old country, whom I despair of ever seeing again in this life, I proffer my sincere apologies for the pain and chaos my adopted country is inflicting on the world, including allies such as you. At some point, those of us sidelined by this new revolution against common sense, wonder where next to take the discussion. Washington Post reporter Dana Milbank, one time scathing gadfly covering the Congress, bought a farm in rural Virginia, from which he now contributes to the weekly Health and Science section on such subjects as deer hunting and fly fishing. With all due respect and admiration for Milbank, I am not prepared to take such a drastic measure at my age. Thus I soldier on in the trenches. 

I must agree that the political party facing a tribal regime gone rogue is in considerable confusion. They seized upon affordable health insurance in refusing to fund the government, and for two months the tribe in power shut down services the lack of which hurt their own constituents, the supreme irony being that for ten months they have already been racing full speed to shut down this government permanently. Health insurance is but a smidgen of what the tribe intends to take away from Americans. Allow them to have their way and voters to feel the full consequences, praying the while for the safety of the next elections. What else can be done by the powerless?

Willfully and openly, the tribe has come upon us like the bulls of Pamplona, trampling every law and every tradition, the Constitution itself, with a flimsy rationale in each case based on their twisted interpretations of vague wording at best. Tribal toadies in the legislature smugly eschew laws passed and agencies established by their benighted predecessors, with the exception of their nineteenth century idols. They collect their paychecks and go home, leaving the country and the world at the mercy of a ruthless and bloody imperium. Until the insolent tribesmen in Congress can be voted out, only the courts have power; judges must rule on every flimsy basis of each infraction before we are all too numb to oppose our enslavement. 

Political vs. tribal

What must surely stand out in even a brief abstract of human history and prehistory will be the many failed attempts by Nature to exterminate us. We slogged for millennia through the mud of prehistory to a civilized state. Our civilizations have risen and fallen and risen again, in the manner suggested by Father Teilhard, spiraling each time to a greater level of cohesion. Yet still Nature, karma in fact, persists. Microbes continually knock us back with plagues to this day, and as though that were not bad enough, our own irrepressible propensity to kill one another in great wars helps Nature along. And still our numbers continue to explode exponentially, until the planet itself is endangered. Of course people will migrate from regions rendered uninhabitable, lost to the rising seas. What do we expect them to do? And as they seek the comfort of their kinship group, tribalism will spread - like plague.

The modern evidence of these developments is irrefutable. In the Middle East and Africa, historically tribal regions, we see the earmark tribal barbarism, call it what you will - terrorism, ethnic cleansing. In the rest of the world, all the commentary speaks of partisanship, deep political divisions. This is only a half truth that glosses over a dreaded reality. America is the perfect example: There are not two political parties; only one is invested in governance. The other is clearly a tribe whose one rule is blind loyalty and whose purpose is domination by any means, from skullduggery to slaughter. The chieftain at present is a farcical old codger, but tribal members are in the millions. 

Is it not telling that the major religions of the world have slipped precipitately toward fundamentalism, religion being the bulwark institution of a tribe. In each of these faiths, however, the fundamentalist version is the antithesis of the true creed. Christ after all was an outlier in his time and place; his tribal adherents appear never to have read the Sermon on the Mount. Christians, Jews, Muslims, may appear to be at war with each other in the name of religion, but they are cut of the same cloth - merciless savagery. And Nature is taking its course.

Desperate times

These are desperate times in the USA, for everyone regardless of politics. There is food insecurity for the poor and for a growing number of the unemployed. Many businesses and farmers are reaching the precipice of bankruptcy in an economy being manipulated by narcissistic whimsy, blasted through social media in the dead of night. Meanwhile as Rome burns, Nero fiddles, sending his amateur military forces and intelligence services to start a war with Venezuela. 

Senator Chris Murphy was the subject of an article last week in the Post, highlighting his vehement assertion that the nation is “sleep walking into autocracy,” while even those who agree with him fail to appreciate the urgency. Why should his party, holding but few levers of power, accede to fund a government now ruled by fiat? Laws and appropriations passed by Congress are simply ignored. Government shutdown? No, no! This has nothing to do with passing a budget. Just another way to speed up fulfillment of the guiding principle the rulers have expounded for generations: the elimination of government, except perhaps to rubber stamp their violent and corrupt motivations. As this brouhaha goes on, the rulers scold the powerless party for starving the poor, and their warlord goes off to Asia to schmooze with Genghis Khan. But he is not a dictator. He has not yet ordered his gestapo to lay siege to all cities who oppose him. He has only succeeded in crippling any institution that might block his successor. And he is an old man.

Our village and surrounding neighborhoods, where Anna and I live, enjoy relative affluence, and even here imports in the grocery aisles are becoming scarce.  No more winter strawberries from Mexico. Readers may recall demolition of the vacant house that was home to a family of red foxes. The gigantic monstrosity that replaced it is still a construction zone. It is twice the size of any other house in the development, and looms over us all from a great height, a towering hodgepodge of glass boxes. The owner, an Indian man, introduced himself to the neighbors in a chat group by complaining about Arnold, a happy canine vagabond who often gets loose. Mr. Gupta was naively welcomed in response. America is now safe for the wealthy narcissist. But thankfully nature at least remains indomitable, of which I was assured today when a red fox shot across in front of my back porch. 

Skepticism

In my last post on epistemology, I explained it as the study of knowledge with reference to its limits and validity. Such a study is uniquely critical to humans, blessed by evolution with the ability to learn and to accumulate knowledge, a mixed blessing perhaps considering it was the fruit of that tree that got us ejected from the Garden in Genesis. Human history, as I wrote, has been punctuated by perversions of reality, doubts of facts or even our own senses. The worst of such perversions, as I concluded, are lies, and today magnified by technology the sickness spreads virally, poisoning human society. But what can be the cause of these recurrent suspensions of disbelief, the ebbing tide of what should be normal skepticism? That question surely must lie in the realm of psychiatry. 

Degrees of skepticism of course are variable. Some people are more gullible by nature. Religious fundamentalism breeds rejection of any idea inconsistent with sacred text, as interpreted by tribal leaders. Moreover reality - the facts, the truth - can be a moving target. What was accepted truth a hundred years ago may have since been disproven. On the other hand, once you have accepted the usefulness of arithmetic, 2+2 will never equal five. There is the crux of it: when the ordinary person can be persuaded to doubt logic and demonstrable fact, the gate is wide open to the self serving partisan for their exploitation. 

Critical to this dangerous enterprise are the worst of human emotions: fear, anger, pride. A time comes when there are a sufficient number of the ingenuous - nay, millions - in whom those emotions can easily be fanned to flames. First light the spark of doubt: What is the source of the knowledge? It is the monstrous enemy! Be afraid! Use the bellows of anger: How dare they lie to you! Now amplify the roar of pride: You are superior to them! The holocaust begins, and the enemy is a stable government, its nonpartisan agencies, trusted for generations to gather important data, destroyed under a cloud of opprobrium. Thus facts are no longer “demonstrable.” With great irony the dupes that brought this about will find themselves in a state of even greater fear, forbidden to express anger, humiliated by their exploiters who will burden them like the beasts they always were.

Epistemology

(32)My neighbor the retired doctor who feeds the birds, along with a loyal following of other wildlife, has told me a story about a class he took as a student at Georgetown. It was a course in epistemology, the study of knowledge with reference to its limits and validity. The final exam was one question: to write an essay on the window in the classroom wall. The only student to earn an A+ had given this answer: “What window?” Provocative as this incident may have seemed in that long ago era, I venture to say that today in an age of “alternative facts,” millions of people would not even scratch their heads, having slipped into an Orwellian rabbit hole where 2+2=5, depending on who is demanding it is so. How have we come to this point, where suspicion of certainty is coupled rigidly to impatience with uncertainty, its frustrating subtlety and nuance? How in God’s name!

In God’s name indeed is precisely how human perversions of reality began in eons of prehistoric tribal life when only a supreme being could account for the inexplicable threats. Very slowly, with the development of agriculture and animal husbandry, civilization brought opportunity to indulge insatiable human curiosity, and the resulting science undermined the grip of religion. For the first time, we learned not to trust our perceptions: the earth is not flat after all. Soon however modern science outstripped the understanding of an average person, and many have fallen prey to the easiest alternative, conspiracy, an ancient and virulent perversion of reality, symptomatic of declining civilization.

'Autism a spectrum of a genetic trait? No, no! It is caused by vaccines. Let your child die of measles instead. They are lying to you!" Expect ignorance and fear to bring about the reversion to religion and with it idolatry, its ironic obverse. 

The truth is that human curiosity is not insatiable. We will always distrust our perceptions, harboring as we do a deep intuition that things are not ultimately as they appear. The key is that adjective, ultimate. A thoughtful person will decide that such questions are unanswerable and become agnostic. At the quantum level, science reaches the same conclusion because the observer is inextricable from his observation. Yet the ultimate reality is accessible in the Zen master’s charge: one must swallow the red hot iron ball of paradox! It is a rare person up to such a challenge. Instead human history is punctuated not uncommonly by the worst, most devastating perversions, lies, bald-faced lies. 

Cracks

A fragile thing is something that is easily broken or destroyed, like a china cup. It may fall and break suddenly, or even in normal use may develop cracks, which can grow causing its eventual breakage to seem sudden. Even the hardest known mineral, a diamond, due to its crystalline nature, is fragile in the hands of a skilled cutter who knows the stones cleavage planes along which it will break into smaller gems. Have you surmised, dear readers, where I am going with his topic? If so, you may share my amazement at the fractal nature of perceived reality, when similar patterns are seen between stones and societies.

Democracy, and its protection of cherished freedoms, is extremely fragile and has for generations been cracking along partisan, i.e. tribal, lines. It is truly among the most worthy creations of society, yet unfortunately it's cleavage planes have been all too obvious throughout history. In cleaving a diamond, a groove is made on the given plane, and a gentle tap with a steel blade breaks the stone. I have written often in this blog, using the pendulum as metaphor, regarding the danger of an extreme amplitude - too far to the left and it will swing equally far to the right. Now for the perfect mixture of metaphor: the pendulum of politics throughout the free world has worn the groove in a cleavage plane of that precious gem, democracy; and dare I say it, the steel blade is in place awaiting that gentle tap.

Power hungry men in the democracies, knowing the cleavage planes, have been plying that groove for generations, until now we see the divisions clearly: race, religion, gender identity. In hindsight we may even see, as with a broken china cup, where the cracks began. Free people have been swayed to choose their own ruin, bondage over freedom. Just when good leaders are needed, the dupes are unable to put the good over partisanship; and we should not expect the gentle tap of a diamond cutter from despots whose sole aim is to smash democratic freedoms for their personal enrichment. Look how easy we have made it for them by highlighting the social fragments: Asian American, Native Hawaiian, Pacific Islander Month, among other monthly commemorations celebrating shards! Who is the better for that?

Harpies

Stereotypes should never be used to generalize, yet in some cases they may be instructive in explaining our reactions. For example, gender stereotypes: a man is expected to be masculine, strong, coarse, insensitive to the point of cruel. This stereotypical machismo has throughout history brought untold grief to humankind, individually and collectively. A woman is opposite, the yin to his yang: feminine, soft, yielding, empathetic. With these sentiments in mind, as tyrants at the helm of great nations around the world link arms and cooperate to maintain power and to further enrich themselves, the male stereotype is portrayed in caricature, Kabuki indeed. It is the women in this terrible performance who chill the blood with their discordant apostasy to the stereotype. They are the Harpies, monsters of Greek and Roman mythology, half woman and half raptor. 

These creatures of myth were described variously over the centuries as hideous hags or beautiful maidens. Our current iteration of them in their appearance is the picture of femininity. They have the perfect fair skin, the long blonde hair deftly arranged with the curling iron into the obligatory Rapunzel locks. Often there is the delicate gold cross adorning the Harpy’s throat as she declares herself the rightful judge of whomever has sinned. Thus it is in their behavior, their voices, that they defy their sex, overturn the stereotype. Loud, strident, more fierce than any man would dare to be, their caterwauling resembles nothing so much as the scream of the harpy eagle. The disconnect between the image of this person and the cruelty of her intent enhances the intimidation. Here is a woman ordering people swept off the streets and whisked away to foreign prisons, claiming they are vicious gang members. Her eyes flash fire in the accusation, proof of which is never shown leaving us to deduce it is only the color of their skin. 

The article in Wikipedia references Homer’s Odyssey, “When a person suddenly disappeared from the Earth, it was said that he had been carried off by the Harpies.” And here they are again. The harpy eagle is native to Central and South America, though populations are in decline. Perhaps, in the form of these savage women, the predatory birds have come to replenish their native territory with more of their prey.

Decline and fall

The term “tribe” and its adjective “tribal” are becoming so common as to verge on cliché. There it was in that Atlantic article I posted about in the definition of patrimonialism: a style of governance seen “among tribes, street gangs, and criminal organizations.” The frequency with which the term is popping up causes me to remind even my loyal readers - you saw it here first! And when tribalism comes up, I always associate it with the primal state of human society seen to cycle through history with civilizations. The recent currency of the term therefore is troubling, as it speaks of this unravelling.

A tribe is our natural state alike with all other pack animals. It is a kinship group. In the great span of our history and prehistory, civilization is very recent, occurring when many tribes unite, through trade, intermarriage, or most often coercion. No civilization has survived for long, relatively speaking, against the tribal mindset. My essay on the topic in Ruminata is titled “Decline and Fall” in fact. The tribe represents the comfort of familiarity, cohesion, comradery, esprit de corps. Compare that with the extreme alienation in modern society, constantly being exacerbated by isolation, and since the pandemic enforced by viral contagion. No surprise then that people are yearning and searching for their tribe, its territory and its chieftain. Missing the tribal life, they grow angry.

That anger, however, is ironically the scourge of the tribe. The tribe is repressive, violent, barbaric against the enemy. Enslavement, grotesquely unnatural forms of torture, cannibalism among primitive tribes is documented by archeology, debunking the myth of the “noble savage.” Watch the news today to see a rise in violence motivated by tribalism, as the unravelling proceeds. The fall of Rome is often seen as a benchmark in this narrative. The Roman Republic lasted for a few centuries BC before it gave way to dictatorship, marching on to empire for centuries more of ruthless conquest. Some historians believe its fall began with the end of the Republic. Might that be where modern civilization now stands, as that most imperious “leader of the free world” threatens aggression? No, I believe the similarity ends there. This wannabe Caesar is not Roman - he is Sicilian. 

A trapdoor tax

The very morning I was about to begin this post on the arcane subject of tariffs there appeared a column in the paper by Ramesh Ponnuru on the same topic, which is a hot one lately, given the bizarre thrashing about by the newly installed dictator here. Ponnuru tends to lean rightward, but not irrationally, and the article was informative, even droll. Quoting the new treasury secretary, “Access to cheap goods is not the essence of the American Dream,” he comments, “Perhaps a man with assets above $500 million should have found a better way to phrase this opinion.” In truth trade between nations involves a complex balance of forces from natural resources to consumer behavior, and nations play to their strengths. One with cheap labor might manufacture inexpensive clothing and sell it to another that excels in technology. In the latter country the garment industry would suffer. A tariff high enough to cover wage standards might be imposed to protect garment workers, but then who would be able to afford the clothing? That is but one example of the intricate web of global trade.

Tariffs have their place in protecting vital industries or nurturing a new ones to success. They should not be used as a cudgel whenever a vengeful ruler has a fit pique. The danger if they are normalized is economic stagnation as industries without competition grow complacent. Even worse, a trade war results in a depression. The contortions of apologists for tariffs, addressed by Ponnuru, even speak of currency manipulation. He rejects all such theories, concluding they only “distract from the unsettling truth: The president has an obsession with tariffs, and it is impervious to facts and logic.” 

Personally, I believe these grotesque machinations with tariffs may be a backdoor tax on the American consumer, or should I say “trapdoor.” Whatever revenue might accrete to the treasury the regime will claim is reducing the deficit, relieving them of the hideous necessity to raise taxes, which mega-corporations will celebrate, while the rest of us will be reduced to grinding chicory root to substitute for coffee.  For generations that drumbeat of tax cutting and the expected “trickle down” of wealth has drowned out all considerations of common good. Now this…

The terror of guns

One reason I follow the news, grim as it is these days, and read the daily paper is in order that I may avoid boring you, dear friends, with tropes on any given subject, but offer a perspective I have not et come upon. Indeed, after I have written about something I more often see the idea pop up elsewhere, not that I credit my influence; but born in 1945, I often find myself ahead of the curve, now better described as a tsunami.

Thus to the matter of guns in America, a colossal crisis that positions this powerful country in the eyes of the world on the edge of a precipice and a plunge into anarchy. After yet another slaughter of babes in school and ensuing response of photos, crosses, hearts, and teddy bears, the sickening cant of news media of “thoughts and prayers,” and authorities “searching for a motive,” as though any disturbed juvenile needs a motive to kill, a thoughtful column by Paul Waldman was in the Post. He pointed to the fact of liberal successes on social issues, making for a more open society, the very thing that conservatives abhor. Only on the matter of gun laws does the rightwing prevail, obstructing any and all reasonable restrictions, and of late even refusing to justify their untenable position. Waldman concludes with this: “Our terror is their achievement.”

Terror is the playing field of dictatorship, and this observation of Mr. Waldman is the first inkling I have come upon of my own view that the politics of guns is not simple obstinacy, not malfeasance but deliberate dereliction with the aim of creating a reign of terror. The legislators standing in the way of sound laws are far from conservative; they are cold blooded killers who want your children to die horribly, want you to live in fear. Consider: it is their only route to overcome the will of the majority, which in their view is decadent and sinful, to install in its place a theocracy, sharia law, with their chosen overlord atop.