Past posts from The Weekly:

Defining intelligence

It started with the hullabaloo over data centers, when a county just over the river became the world capital for the gigantic, sprawling buildings taking up huge tacts of land and straining resources. Were these “data” centers stand-ins for “the cloud,” storing all the memory for all the smartphones of billions of people? Surely not! Now the truth is out: they manufacture bots, and train them with Large Language Models. In other words they are creating Artificial Intelligence, recently the subject of an even more serious uproar. The heart of the matter is the meaning of “intelligence,” and for that we must go deeper than its superficial definition. The bots are super computers, and the LLM they are fed are purported to contain all of human knowledge since the caveman. Fewer than a hundred people alive, I have heard from authorities, know the abilities of these machines, but are they intelligent?

We have assumed the brain to be necessary for intelligence, yet it is only a tool for survival. Without a brain, trees communicate through their roots, and indeed every living cell is stamped with intelligence. Ultimately at the quantum level the essence of reality is insubstantial, being energy itself. Thus “insentient beings speak dharma.” The mountains and rivers are of the same essence; they are real. Considering how malicious and efficient hackers have become, now scamming billions from Americans, it is apparent that a super computing bot could bring a nation to its knees. This potential introduces a new arms race: if we do not prevail in the field of AI, our adversary will, and use it against us. The question of intelligence, however, remains. 

The human brain has the ability to think and to reason, but is thought the same as mind? Consider meditation, of which there are different practices. Most think of it as contemplation about something. A deeper sort aims to clear the mind of thought by allowing thoughts to pass unattended. After some practice one may be surprised that the mind is still present absent of thought. In that clear mind lies inspiration and intuition, which represent the uniqueness of human intelligence - knowledge arising without input.

AI puts me mind of the ancient Greek myth of Pandora who looses from her box all the evils of the race. According to the poet Heseod, when she closed the box, Hope was left inside. He goes on to tell of humanity’s decline - moving from good to evil - and that was ancient wisdom!

Armchair naturalist redux

This week, readers, I am pausing those dreary dispatches from the imperial city, a doom scroll indeed, seeing no apparent effect on the insouciance of fellow passengers on the Titanic. Instead, I report again in the role of Armchair Naturalist. All the way down under Past Posts, you will find the first such item from January, when the neighborhood was encased in ice for weeks. Thanks to ice cleats, the retired doctor next door and myself were able to meet for coffee and enjoy the pageant of wildlife at his bird feeders. Uncommonly generous with sunflower seed, he attracts all sorts of creatures: squirrels, woodchucks, the local deer herd, even a variety of birds. That occasion had brought the rare sight of nearly a dozen bucks still with antlers, a veritable Boys Club of the Virginia whitetail as they are called. I will not burden you with the full Latin, but our deer are of the subspecies O. Borealis, meaning forest dwellers.

I consulted my friend the doctor again about another unusual sight concerning the deer, and he was happy to join me for coffee and to share the loosely fitting mantle of naturalist from an armchair. It was late July, nearly August, and I enquired whether he had seen the young buck with preseason antlers. He had, and like myself had never seen the like before, musing as to whether precocious puberty was in fact rare in deer. We referred to our authoritative source, Wikipedia, to learn that antlers begin to grow, in velvet, in late spring; however, the rutting season is not until October and November. I then described to him the following incident: Several does were at his feeders, when the sad young antlered fellow came up. At first the does scattered, but soon they came back and chased him away. 

Surely I was projecting, but to me the poor rebuffed chap seemed utterly bewildered, the storied “deer in the headlights.” My friend pointed out that until antlers appear the distinction of doe from buck is not easily discernible, so an assertive doe may in truth be male. Reading on in our definitive research, we find that a major factor in the intensity of the rutting season - perhaps even preseason antlers -  is air temperature. Aha! There we have it, another queer anomaly of climate change! As we adjourned, the good doctor promised to consult official websites on the matter. 

Dispatch VII: And other fairytales

I should come as no surprises that the masters of cinematic illusion who could make a movie of Homer’s “Odyssey” now have as their leader a rogue mogul and consummate bully of reality TV - ironical but not surprising. He and this fanciful followers believe in fairy tales: that the Middle East can be pacified with bombs; that all nations should be punished for trading with them; that measles will never kill their children; that the climate has not changed and anything destructive - drought, fires and floods - are the work of their political enemies, who should also be summarily punished. Never has there been such a zest for punishment since Salem. In my essay on tribalism in Ruminata, I wrote, “While liberal democracy fades… the tyrant represents one tribe intent upon dominating all the others. There ensues an era of violent purging.” That era began two years ago in America: the gutting of the federal workforce; purging of the military from the top down; deportation of great numbers of working people, and with them much of the tax base. All of this, I emphasize, in the service of a tribe. My essay continues, “… rival tribes go underground where tribal war resumes.”

Is the USA now in a civil war? Surely these divisions cannot qualify since the two tribes have been cleft for generations. They need only secure border crossings between states to restore sanity. Just recently there has been a spate of celebrities dying in their eighties. Might the new emperor of America be next? Do not wait for that shoe to drop, unless you believe in fairy tales. Moreover, his successor would be far worse, a chieftain along the lines of Attila or Genghis Khan, a bonafide cutthroat. There would be no more legal delicacy. Yet for purposes of plunder, the conquering Red tribe will need to manipulate the Blue, to pacify or terrorize. I humbly suggest that we all read up on Machiavelli for the blueprint of how this will be accomplished. I strongly suspect “The Prince” was the very template used by the nefarious Heritage Foundation. 

Saddest of all to me has been the opprobrium of all other nations that has fallen on the American people, when most of them did not choose this, and many who did now see the hideous consequence of their vote. They believed in a fairy tale - they got their worst nightmare.

Dispatch VI: The "common good"

From my perch in the grandstand of the imperial circus, I assure you I do not reference the latest distraction, i.e. the Grand Prix, yet the view is far worse. Street after street bordered in chainlink fence, tall cranes looming over the ruin of the White House, its lawn and that of the Mall trampled to death. In these dispatches so far, I have attempted to paint the political and psychological landscape that gave rise to this global calamity. There remains, however, the philosophical aspect. All the Western democracies are in upheaval, deeply in debt and thrashing about for better leaders, while dictators gloat upon the enslavement of populations. Self rule in democratic nations is expected to promote the common good. In autocratic countries there appears to be a strong current of belief that “common” people are inferior to the task, with a coincident appetite for a “strong man” to set things right, even though the long history of dictatorship demonstrates the opposite. The philosopher king of Plato’s Republic was only hypothetical, yet every dictator will rise to power by claiming to be the first. 

The question of which form of government is best suited for society is an ancient one, but today the overarching concern is defining the “common good,” when as the earth revolves around the sun the northern and southern hemispheres take turns being burned to cinders. The planet is dying. In these  conditions do we want freedom or tyranny? A true philosopher king would take measures to ameliorate the warming climate for the common good, disregarding critics. Instead tyrants on the rise, dismantling even the oldest democracies, follow the script of Machiavelli. In the Republic, Socrates famously says, “Until philosophers are kings, or the kings and princes of this world have the spirit and power of philosophy, cities will never have rest from their evils.” Machiavelli was a teacher of evil, his manual for tyrants, “The Prince,” refers to the virtue of inhuman cruelty compared with the vice of excessive mercy and advises aspiring emperors never to hesitate in their ruthlessness. Have the voters now freely choosing tyranny over democracy been tainted by that current of belief that the common people are inferior to the task of self rule? Do they expect the strong man to be a philosopher, to use his power to promote the common good? Or must we suspect their appetite is truly for the shade of Niccolò?

Dispatch V: Are they mad?

These days primary season here in this once great nation may be counted on to bring utter insanity. Before it fell into a tribal state, a consensus of the electorate reliably revealed common sense, but now “divided we fall.” What I am seeing from my front seat on all things imperial are what begin to look like forms of bonafide mental illness. On both sides, the Red and the Blue tribal camps, there is the Peter Pan syndrome, not unusual since consumerism has long sanctified it. Around the Red tribal bonfire is worship of the great man as he glowers at them wherever they look. He will protect them. They lose their farms, small businesses, workers, but he knows best. They are punished for their own good. Let the grandchildren die of measles, at least they were not autistic. As for Congress, their representatives are obliged to please the great man. They will vote for no one else. Surely here we see masochism, indeed a sadomasochistic ritual of begging to be chastised.

As for the Blue camp, a more clueless tribe of Peter Pans has never been seen. Oddly puerile as they are, they already show signs of short term memory loss. They seem never to learn from their failures, never to have faced the stubborn realities of human nature, or they would realize that no woman they might propose for office will ever lead this country. Were they so bored in history class not to have learned the fate of the soviet Union? Seeing how unpopular the great man is, they put forth a program offering over 300 million Americans all they need - for free - housing, healthcare, education, groceries. The wealthy will pay for all of it they say, pointing to Scandinavia. Ignorantly or deceitfully? But the bête noire that should fill us all with dread is too esoteric for Peter Panera. What will happen if the dollar losses its honored place as the reserve currency when the US Treasury is forced to default?

Of course, the closed primary elections are known to bring out a small number only of the wackiest voters, so that options in November often are the choice of lunatics. For that reason the moderates who pride themselves in being registered “independent” need to wise up and move immediately into the tribal territory of their choice, the only choice left. And so, here in the District of Chainlink, the imperial bulldozers of a mad emperor continue to rubble, while his side gig of governing is left to the courts. 

Fourth dispatch: Fate?

I daresay in these dispatches I have an excellent view of the ongoing ruination of a great democracy. The first of these reports I confess have been acerbic in the extreme, as I attempt to explain to a puzzled world how the catastrophe has come about. The why of course is always the knottier problem. For that I turn to Archangel in his last Dokusan with may friend Anna, which dealt with karma. I especially liked his final remark, “Karma is only cause and effect. Nature handles the consequences.” On this subject it is easy to become a fatalist. I tend that way myself. But was American democracy fated to fail after 250 yers? That and any matter of fate is a vexed question.

Archangel might have gone on at much greater length into the complexities of cause and effect, perhaps he will. For example, a young person, may be spared very bad karma if they realize in time they must save if they want a comfortable retirement. Still that goal may be thwarted by socioeconomic forces beyond their control. The warming of the climate is now another force beyond our control. The weight swinging that pendulum is human population. With less than two billion people during the industrial revolution, climate change was not an issue. Fast forward rapidly to over eight billion and it is indisputable and sadly inexorable.

The collapse of civilization is not a controlled demolition; the ruin of a great democracy is not one man’s doing. It requires a movement of enraged millions driven to sacrifice their own freedom out of hatred for the many other tribes. Read my essay, “Decline an Fall: The Tribal Mindset,” in Ruminata for the deep root of the process. Read how “civilization holds the seeds of its own destruction, and we are witness to their germination in our own time.” America is the perfect “hot house” to nurture tribalism, the prehistoric state of human society. Already segregated into red and blue, the warring tribes need only declare themselves. Is it a fate we might have been spared? Go back to the first essay, “The Sexual Theory of Everything.” Reversion to tribe is our fate for the same reason that birth control could not stop a burgeoning population: primal drives. Nature handles the consequences. 

Third dispatch: The games

Here in the Imperial City the summer sun rises like a bloodshot demonic eye through a veil of smoke that has drifted down from a thousand miles away where Canadian forests burn. A benefit of smoke is to moderate extreme high temperatures, and while the air is often comfortably dry, a greater risk of wildfire hangs over us. Notwithstanding, denizens of the Imperial City are giddy with multiple gaudy distractions rolling out one after another from the despot to distract them from the destruction he wreaks. We have seen a Ferris wheel on the Mall, accompanied with a bogus state fair, and a mixed martial arts fight-night on the White House lawn. The emperor’s own contractors will repair the damaged lawn, hopefully not the same ones who ruined the Reflecting Pool. Then the most distracting of all, the soccer World Cup. Never in the nation’s history has this event caused the least ripple of excitement. This summer it was hyped beyond belief. No doubt even those brown detainees in the concentration camps were gladdened. What’s not to love? Next up, a Grand Prix, for which pavement around the Federal Triangle must be resurfaced in advance. So while the hoi polloi have been jostled, uncomplaining, over potholes and crumbling asphalt for nearly a century, now their new master gives them entertainment, beguiling them from the many foreign wars he pretends to win on their behalf - and a mile of smooth road into the bargain. 

The talking heads will never keep up with it all, and so cleaving to the despotic intent, their media is saturated. Local news staff are heady with the chance to talk of nothing but games, assigning just one of the group, one with the most sober demeanor, to report the serious news. Even network personalities have been easily beguiled. Only on the public stations, despite having lost all government support, do we hear of perennial conflict in the Middle East that threatens to spread into world war. And so the demonic eye of the summer sun sets - so, so late - still bloodshot and veiled in smoke. Summer drags on and on and on, unrelieved, as we remain divided on the 250 year old American experiment, agreeing only on the verdict: it has failed us all. No matter, we will all have our turn at evacuating in the wake of wildfire or flood.

Second dispatch

Dispatch from the Imperial City: A sturdy foundation had been laid by that fraternity of hate, and their chosen emperor assumed his throne, empowered with all the levers of governmental control and authorized by that posse of credulous fools who had swallowed the vitriol, bought into propaganda. The emperor set right to work choosing the ministers for each department, each of whom would be the very person with the least experience in that field and bringing a resume of ineptitude seasoned with a groveling loyalty. The next step was to gut the federal government of all excess employees. Out went staff in charge of securing the nuclear arsenal, any tasked with disease prevention or food safety. With all the money saved by that, plus however much added from his treasury, his excellency looked around for ways to aggrandize himself, taking cues from old monarchies. The White House was obviously too lowly for his illustrious person. After trying to emblazon the interior with gold, in came the bull dozers. He must have a gigantic ballroom to overshadow the old humble residence. “L’état c’est moi!” he declared, thus taking possession of the entire capital city, available for his own personal use. In a jealous rage, he must have his own Arc de Triomphe, taller than that of Napoleon’s. Then in answer to those high falutin people of the Center for Performing Arts he had his name installed outside above that of JFK. Now who is more recherché?

Enormously gratified by his new omnipotence, he turned enforcers toward the civilian population, first to sweep all brown people off the streets into private prisons. Then he enlisted armed guardsmen from those supportive southern states to police northern cities, where they would remain to cast a chill on elections. But most dangerous of the emperor’s minions was his war minister, Hogsbreath by name, a juvenile delinquent gamester who could scarcely conceal his relish in the power to send real bombs to kill real people. The emperor was hard put to find enough remotely justified missions for this zealot. Having no use for alliances, perhaps he could conquer Canada and Greenland. No, Hogsbreath had to content himself with blowing up small fishing boats in the Caribbean, until the next big idea: decapitating dictators, first in Argentina then Iran. In the latter he ran afoul of an already much hated regime that retaliated by cutting off the supply route of the world’s oil. 

Here in DC, now the District of Chainlink, the emperor tries to distract us with games, but summers bring a sickly malaise of uncertainty, to wit: Is this what that posse of credulous fools wanted? What were they thinking? More importantly, what are they thinking now?

First dispatch

Dispatch from the Imperial City: People all across the globe were thunderstruck two years ago when the world’s most successful democracy chose of its own free will to become an empire, to return to ancient times when great empires fought great wars for dominance on blood soaked battle fields. Perplexity ran deep. Howls of lament rose to the heavens from all quarters: How could this happen? From drought stricken Africa where starving people were cut off from aid; from any charity or institution which had served the commonweal, likewise suddenly stranded. The business of a rising empire clearly is not philanthropy. As an old man who has had a front seat here in the capital, I report in this dispatch something of how this calamity came about.

First of all the groundwork had to be laid long ago. This was accomplished by a fraternity of supremely arrogant, wealthy white men who shared a hatred of women, colored people, homosexuals and non-Christians. Their first step was to insinuate cronies into key institutions, which enabled them to have a chokehold on power. Next they chose a standard bearer, another wealthy man, a television celebrity who shared their grievances against the world. This was not be be a military coup. The demographic targeted to eagerly select the standard bearer was old white men in the rust belt still pining for their old union jobs in rusted out factories, whose children and grandchildren had been ruined or killed by opioid addiction. Added to that group, the population of the rural South, a rural environment being the notorious hotbed of superstition, sophism and conspiracy theory. To fire up this group, they simply tightened their grip on the purse string to ensure their only access to media would afford them nothing but vitriolic propaganda. 

Such was the careful, farsighted masonry of that fraternity in laying a foundation for, as they saw it, centuries of imperial rule. They supported the future emperor with expensive rallies, where despite his whining, singsong delivery, he resonated with crowds of hardscrabble cowboys. From the start, the insensible complacency of the opposition only served to underscore the failure of democracy. The mere sight of their refined, genteel candidates, signaled loudly the fragility of their gender. And so the all powerful emperor took his throne, lacking only the laurel wreath.

Passivity

Let it be said first that it was our resilience in prehistoric times which allowed our species to win out over others in the genus. We were able to adapt cleverly to a wide variety of habitats and speedily to changing environments. We must now, however, be alert to the dangers when this reliance means growing inured to unhealthy, destructive developments, especially any that build up gradually when, like the boiling frog, we scarcely notice how hot the water is. These thoughts came to mind on July 4 as I watched in consternation hordes of people, who had flocked to the capital city to celebrate 250 years of American independence, standing in ghastly long lines despite killing heat to pass through security checkpoints guarding the festive events. Their passivity resembled nothing less than apraxia. 

Since the notorious terror attacks of 2001, a generation has grown up passing through security at airports several times a year. This was deemed absolutely necessary because their parents had moved a continent away from their grandparents and despite the distance felt a persistent compulsion to spend every holiday at grandmother’s house. Her grown up grandchildren, and some older generations as well, expect to be herded like cattle through fences, barriers, jersey walls, wherever people gather in great numbers - every ball game, every rock concert. It is normal life. In fact it is human nature to be timid of standing out in a crowd, and so passivity turns to paralysis. No one wants to be the one raising a disturbance; in some countries, where life or liberty is at risk, it takes remarkable courage.  

Still the crowds who flooded the capital city on July 4 and sweltered in long lines for hours made a foreboding sight. They had come eagerly, stood willingly, submitted to herding, never thinking about the destination of herded cattle. Will this inurement drive them next into gas chambers? In order to sample the reactions of these participants, reporters buttonholed a few of them. Accosted with a microphone, one man from a midwestern state said he had traveled a long way at great expense and should have spared himself the trouble. He added it was the first time he had used a Porta-John. I suspect he is a man familiar with herding cattle.

The gender pendulum

My readers well know my fondness for the pendulum as a metaphor, ever since a Christmas Eve long ago when I wandered through the village of Matlock waiting for an old friend and came upon a clock shop. The pendulum is indeed the perfect metaphor for the dual realm, where all reality exhibits polarity, from electrical current to moral standards. But the pendulum in its role as metaphor carries far weightier concerns than simply keeping time. I have used it to warn partisans that as far as they push its amplitude in their direction, it will inevitably return in like degree the other way. My last post on the subject of the political pendulum indeed wondered if we might now call it a trebuchet, lobbing stones at one another.

But politics are not isolated in human society from other strands, a crucial one being gender dominance. After the Second World War, when solders returned home to their families, their jobs, women were happy to stand aside, to stay home and raise the many children. It was an era when “father knew best,” when male crooners, Sinatra, Crosby, Perry Como, ruled the radio waves, women wore skirts that became shorter with every fashion show. By the 1960s and the civil rights movement the bob of that pendulum had crossed the point of equilibrium. Women began pushing. They returned to the work force, demanding fair pay and promotions. They took to wearing pants and running for office. In the land of John Wayne, two won nomination for the presidency. The pinnacle of this ascendancy was reached by the “Me too” movement. We all know what dogs men are, but now the perennial slap in the face is replaced by the slap of a law suit. We felt the pendulum hit the pivot as Hillary was stalked by the merciless silver-back on the debate stage. With dizzying speed we now swing back toward toxic masculinity. Even women want to be “trad wives.” A curious sign is the Rapunzel locks, easily produced by those ubiquitous hair irons supplied by China. Ironic because long hair was always considered feminine, until you recall the role those long locks served in the fairy tale. The reversal will grow more and more ugly, leaving a society shorn of refinement, spurning the arts and education. Those of us still standing at the point of equilibrium will lose our heads.

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Simpleminded

Merriam-Webster gives the laudably succinct definition of simpleminded as “devoid of subtlety.” Everyone must know people to whom this adjective applies. Indeed even a casual consideration of current world leaders tells that their numbers are legion. In the autocratic nations they have chosen themselves through fear and violence; more startling are the democracies, where they have banned together to elect the most cretinous among them. Intelligence in homo sapiens, of course, has many facets: it may be physically innate, a factor of one’s DNA, but nurture - education, character - may be equally as important. Since we have recognized autism as a spectrum, we more easily see a simplemindedness we can explain. Even those professionals at the high end, supremely gifted in a few arenas, can be astoundingly doltish in many another. At the other end to the spectrum, simplicity can be near to wisdom, just as madness is close to genius. Media offers the example of Tom Hanks’s Oscar winning performance of Forrest Gump, or the incomparable Peter Sellers as Chauncy Gardiner in “Being There.”

But even the average person in the middle of any spectrum in the human genome may exhibit facets of simplemindedness: Unable to understand a complex subject, they will deny that anything is beyond their own comprehension. They are paranoid; if their candidate loses the election, there must have been a conspiracy. And they are supremely gullible to any fatuous conspiratorial idea, finding it indisputable if it involves their enemies in any sort of sexual misconduct. They are the people, not only in America but around the world, who are choosing simpleminded leaders, devoid of subtlety, their own ignorance having combined with arrogance to bring violence and destruction. Surely fools are not innately arrogant. Many are accepting of their failings and recognize their limitations. It is only when they are driven by whatever negative forces, from poverty to hijacked news media, to ban together in a toxic state of jealousy and resentment. Then comes revolution. The French endured the abuses of a profligate monarchy for centuries until their children were starving due to severe food shortages. They stormed the Bastille in 1789. “Allons enfants…”

Shades of P.T. Barnum

P.T. Barnum of circus fame, to whom is attributed the saying, “There’s a sucker born every minute,” would today feel very much at home in Washington D.C. It is a three ring circus worthy of Barnum and Bailey’s Greatest Show on Earth. Indeed he would doubtless be proud that his ilk has taken over the White House and all the parks and monuments of a once free nation. The audacity of the current ringmaster exceeds that of any predecessor, perhaps even of Attila the Hun. The nation’s capital is his construction site, though it looks to all appearances more like a war zone, reduced to rubble. On the South Lawn of the peoples’ house, he has built an amphitheater centered around a caged ring where gladiators met in combat on the birthday of the Greatest Man on Earth, himself. Of course the ancient gladiators were also known to fight wild animals for the amusement of audiences in Rome’s Colosseum. Millenia ago the Empire had its “bread and circuses,” so styled by its contemporary poet Juvenal to mean superficial appeasement “to generate public approval not by excellence in public service or policy but by distraction.” And thus all of human society joins America in gross distraction. In ring one, bloody battle at the White House; in ring two, we host the World Cup, emblematic obsession of Hispanics; and in the center ring punitive tariffs and wars, retribution against your enemies at your own expense. Are you having fun yet? Sadly, yes.

The spectacles have become so brazen, so repugnant, that I am driven to redundancy in calling them dissonant hypocrisy. By definition, hypocrisy is inconsistent, but this audacious hypocrisy goes further: It is a clangorous fakery, feigning to believe what one clearly does not. Examples abound: hosting the World Cup, the aforementioned mania of the Spanish speaking world, while thousands of Latino migrants languish in private prisons; claiming to champion justice, while seeking only retribution; promising to help farmers and small businesses, then sending them into bankruptcy; expressing disdain for foreign wars and giving leave to a bloodthirsty war secretary to go about the world satisfying his foul bloodlust; bragging of improvements to the capital city when the clear intent is to leave it in ruins. The question remaining is whether it is already too late to refute the ghost of P.T. Barnum.

Population bombed

Way back in 1968, The Population Bomb exploded into print, if you will, with predictions of worldwide famine looming in the immediate future. It is an alarmist Jeremiad co-authored by Stanford professor Paul Ehrlich and his wife Anne, using numbers and projections compiled by the United Nations. The idea that human numbers will someday overwhelm planetary resources is not new, indeed most famously set forth by economist Thomas Malthus in the nineteenth century. Like Malthus, the Ehrlichs were sharply criticized for their gross overstatement. The predictions did not come true. There was not global starvation in the 1970s, and the matter was laid aside as it always is, even as the climate continued to change and extreme weather became common. 

When Paul Ehrlich died just this past March at the age of 74, his critics took note and showed no mercy, even postmortem. By this time populations in the developed world had begun to fall, raising a quite different alarm: how can a modern economy be sustained when numbers decline? Leaders are desperate, like bucks in a deer herd, to see that every female is impregnated. Having lost trust in science, even intelligent people no longer trust nature, and doom is a moving target. There have been agricultural advances and promising technologies to replace fossil fuels, albeit with begrudging acceptance. As modern medicine prolongs life into conditions of greater decrepitude, it appears that China will come through with amazing robots for elder care. 

But population numbers should not be the focus. They are controlled by nature, as shown by the experiments of John B. Calhoun, American ethologist, designed to isolate for study the effects of overcrowding. In the mid-twentieth century, his “Mouse Universe” started as a mouse utopia for four pair of mice. In less than two years, it became a mouse hell for 2200. They did not starve to death. The relevant fact, though, is that before they all died they had stopped breeding. Nature will out. Consider the most populous places, the cities, and their commonly intractable problems: homelessness, food insecurity, crime, gangs, drugs. But for the wealthy few, urban dwellers today have experience of what Calhoun’s mice endured. And while numbers continue to rise slowly, the rate declines - naturally.

Parrots

I hope readers enjoyed the bit of levity here last week, tweaking Dickens. As Anna aptly reported in her post, however, it is passing hard to rouse the muse of humor when the world is going to the dogs. Notwithstanding, I aim to give first hand evidence, while I am yet allowed, on what it is like to watch as a once great world power commits slow suicide. With that intention I propose a thought experiment: 

Imagine you are foolish enough to have a parrot as a pet. I say foolish because parrots can live a very long time and have been known to learn offensive language. You are going on vacation, and to keep Polly from missing you, you put a timer on the television to play during daylight hours, set to your favorite news channel. Depending on the length of your vacation and your pet parrot’s language skill, there follow a number of words and phrases she may have added to her vocabulary, through constant repetition, in your absence: “Violate the ceasefire; peace agreement; drug boats bombed; Strait of Hormuz; greatest in history; ripping us off; lethality; I’m Jesus; losers; federal court case; hog’s breath. (She may have misperceived that last.) If Polly is linguistically apt, she may have learned several of these short phrases, and in true parrot fashion will regale you with constant repetitions. The evening news will be especially stimulating of this behavior. 

If she was trained by any of the right leaning Murdoch stations, her language is now replete with expletives, in perpetuity. Oddly, even the news on public broadcasting is repetitive of the above phrases, minus profanities, in the misguided goal of fairness, when in truth there can be no balance between shameless fakery and rectitude, no matter how scrupulous. Even there the party line of the dictator is given air, in quotes word for word, and the tyrant’s face dominates the hour. Polly is more interested in sounds than in faces, of course, and may even be proud of her mimicry. We might consider the parrot a natural example of “artificial” intelligence. They speak words without knowing the meaning. And once your parrot has a cache of the repetitive phrases aforementioned, you need never again turn on the evening news. When you are sick to death of these repetitions, give Polly a cracker to shut her up. 

The infamous case of April vs. May

Having gone through the entire library of Victorian novels, and refusing to entertain anything written since, I am rereading Dickens’s Bleak House for it's inimitable hero, John Jarndyce, and of course the infamous case, based on fact, of Jarndyce vs. Jarndyce. Doubtless for this reason I was charmed by Anna’s suggestion that we infuse the blog with a bit of levity by taking up the conflict which arose this spring between the months of April and May. We are not partisan. There follow thus the facts:

It began when April, allegedly under the pressure of climate change, was forced to borrow a number of days from May, terms of the loan requiring the latter to pay day for day. The time came along in due course and May, ever the honest if precipitate broker, repaid April all of his first week. The dispute arose over the number of days April had sacrificed of her signature weather. While the two parties quarreled over the terms, climate deniers weighed in, contesting April’s rationale for the loan, claiming that there was no good reason for her to have borrowed days from May, that climate change is a hoax.

Time was wasting, and the deadline on the contract, filed in Chancery Court, was the first of June. Witnesses were deposed, and while exhorted to be precise, could only testify that they had needed summer clothes and bedding in April only to put them away again in May. But the case was in abeyance awaiting the Lord Chancellor to bring it up. April continued to squeeze May for more days of chilly rain, and the latter was forced to yield or risk his stellar credit rating. Anonymous sources close to both parties reported increasing rancor in their cloud-based digital exchanges, May reminding April of her notorious fickleness in the temperate zones. June was approaching, and with May set to lose the last two weeks of his annual tenure, ill-will grew even more intense. In a rant posted on X, with just three days to go, he lashed out at April, calling her a “d—n French woman.”

Finally, May was forced to concede as June waltzed in, sunny and gay, dressed in all shades of green, and careless of warnings from her predecessors. She blew them off with her breezes, asserting that her climate will always remain the same. She would never allow herself to be forced to borrow days of killing heat from July. Echoes of Miss Flite, or Richard Carstone, or Tom Jarndyce, from whom nephew John inherited Bleak House after his uncle Tom blew his brains out at the pub opposite Lincoln’s Inn.

Learned helplessness

As soon as it became clear in America that millions of its citizens had opted for a dictator and his party to assume all powers of governance, deciding presumably that the other option was by far too fanciful, I began to hear or read the phrase “learned helplessness.” In the face of the daily outrages that followed - migrant workers dragged away from their jobs where they had done valuable work here for decades, the White House ravaged, other public buildings in the capital defaced, plans for grandiose monuments worthy of Versailles to honor the narcissist in chief - what was anyone to do? Immediately it became clear that there would be no checks, no balance. The other branches of government were happy to let their prize bull loose on a rampage through the china shop. We wait, learning helplessness, with only the faint hope of the next election.

Of course a hallmark of the dictator is to suspend elections or to undermine them, to retain power by any means. The danger grows as the tyrant captures the military, replacing honorable, ethical leaders with those who will obey any order, no matter how heinous or diabolical. Enter stage right the most arrogant boar in the pig sty. Fittingly his name rhymes with “hog’s breath.” Trusting to the dubious competence of this childish sycophant, the tyrant looks about for the small fry of nations to take on, first declaring them, “failed states,” dictatorships, which he will liberate. Clearly this intention cannot be trusted, since he himself refuses to be held accountable to his own citizens. Regimes will not be changed, only replaced. 

These circumstances come at a time when the ranks of the elderly are growing apace, and aging is a very personal process of learning helplessness. More and more infirmities are sustainable - heart disease, cancer - but nonetheless bring unrelenting exertion through fatigue, weakness, painful arthritic joints. We do our best to be accepting of this cruel training realizing that ahead of us is the ultimate moment of helplessness. In a free country, people can lead their young lives feeling personal agency, helpless only rarely. Under a dictator, they are taught from birth that they are helpless and must fear constantly for their very lives. No one is surprised that immigrants clamor to go to free countries. In fact, Russia is funneling refugees from the global south into Poland through Belarus to destabilize that NATO member. No on wants to go to Belarus. 

"Great again"

Welcome evidence that my morning paper has not been totally overtaken by troglodytes, a column today by Mitch Daniels, former governor of Indiana and a conservative by the true definition, warns of the enormous debt of many trillions that continues to build here in the States, going on to debunk the notion that the expected economic growth from artificial intelligence will erase that burden. On the same page is information about the election shenanigans, known by the quaint term “gerrymander,” instituted by his excellency in order to indemnify the party’s total control. This article offers the grim possibility that the opposition may win a majority but not control of the legislature. This begs the question of voters in those gerrymandered districts whose votes are being taken for granted. Will they never rebel, no matter now they suffer as a result? Perhaps not. 

The motto of their rearguard movement holds the words “great again,” the inference being that former times were superior to the present. Anyone who believes that has never read any of the Victorian masterpieces of literature. There was no middle class to speak of in those former times, only the “haves and the have nots.” Now in America, the middle class in red states, mesmerized by the whining cadence of an old and very wealthy man to give him absolute power, hopefully are seeing the veil lifted on that party’s real intentions. In just two years the regime has barreled toward their aim to decimate the middle class. The “greatness” they promise to restore is that of Sir Leicester and Lady Dedlock of Dickens’ Bleak House, the landed gentry of inherited wealth passed along for centuries. Few will enjoy the splendor; those who cannot afford it will quickly slip back into servitude, among them the dolts who voted for this option. 

In England the injustice of this wealth gap, the status quo since the Middle Ages, was corrected only after two world wars. After the second existential battle, the enormous debt incurred brought years of crippling taxes, and the great estates - the manor houses, the plantations - collapsed. Do we need another world war to persuade those dolts to be more circumspect in choosing a leader? Is the high cost of living, climate disasters forcing them into shelters, their sons dying in foreign wars, will these not be enough?

Nature or nurture?

What is it about the Italians? The most deeply passionate people ever to arise in our species, they are the only ones, in my opinion to have succeeded in writing opera, which at other hands has only resulted in an awkward union of music and drama. Is it that same passion that enabled them to dominate so much of the ancient world for so long? The question brings up the discredited notion of biological determinism, used at various times in modern history to rationalize white supremacy and racism. The danger of such pseudoscience is the grain of truth it often contains. There are of course inherited traits passed on to us in our genetics: skin, hair and eye color, and sometimes unlucky disease conditions. Physical differences of races came about in prehistory from the long isolation of populations in distinct geographical latitudes. None of these genetic differences may be said to impact behavior or intelligence. These are cultural, in which we see a multitude of influences on the young.

Vagabonds by nature, tribes came together, whether in trade or by force, to form civilizations, a mingling of cultures, sometimes happily, other times in fiery discord. Such is the engine of human history, moving forward in the happy times, and falling backward in others. The latter case is where we now find ourselves. It is no surprise, really, that the leader of the movement which brought the wrecking ball upon the “capital of the free world” is from the very place where La Cosa Nostra took hold in communities of Italian immigrants. He and his equally wanton enablers now wield that wrecking ball recklessly upon the world.

Superseding our physical and cultural legacies, is indeed a genetic trait we all inherit and ignore at our peril, which is human nature. Its default setting is the tribal mindset. Within that there seems to me a gene that humanity has never lost, one that produces the megalomaniac, a person who refuses to live and let live, imagining that he can conquer and press into servitude the entire population. The gene is sex-linked. In the age of mutually assured destruction through nuclear war, and tyranny ascendant, I postulate that tyrants are the death gene of our species, biologically determined. 

If I am still alive, meet me On the Beach - I will be singing that haunting aria from Tosca, Act 3, “E muoio disperato! E non ho amato mai tanto la vita!”

The royal visit

To all those of my compatriots in Great Britain who harbor the opinion that the monarchy is but a costly anachronism, a warning: without the King of England you would be in the same boat with the Americans. And by now you surely recognize that the grass is not greener on this side of the pond. The state visit of Charles III last week has been a delight from first to last. First in the spectacle of a real king beside a wannabe. His address to the Congress was nuanced, tactful, hitting all the right notes in just the proper tone. Here to honor the semi- quincentennial of the erstwhile colony’s bold breakaway from his nation, he was the perfect diplomat. If only he had found a way to exculpate that old sin in recognition of our apparent remorse, but of course not. The speech was positive, emphasizing that we are stronger together, that the defense of democracy lies in the Ukrainian fight against territorial aggression by the Russian bear, not in bludgeoning Iran at great cost and to no avail. There were multiple, bipartisan, standing ovations from the floor.

The King reminded his audience that it was the Magna Carta, signed at Runnymede, that first introduced limits to royal power. To the several modern tyrants now pining after the grandeur of hereditary monarchy, not least the imperialist host of his visit, he might have mentioned Oliver Cromwell, who succeeded in having the first King Charles tried and beheaded, leading the nation into Puritanical oppression until his death. When the Stuart monarchy was restored in 1660, bringing Charles II to the throne, Cromwell’s body was exhumed and hanged posthumously. His head was cut off, and according to one Wikipedia article displayed on the roof of Westminster Hall until 1684. He usurped the king’s power and left only a legacy of horror. 

It was the genius, the wisdom, of those Englishmen who came together in 1776 to lead the American colony to independence, realizing that no one person or party should have absolute reign over a nation. Without recourse, the people will turn to violence. As another wise Englishman declared much later, “Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others.”​​

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

(32)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?

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!

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.