Episteme

Other Worlds

2008-11-29T03:52:33Z

So, here's the thing - I have never considered myself a superstitious person, but more and more I find myself making hypothetical statements about the otherworldly. I'll say things like, "Well, I completely do not believe in anything like this, but, just as an example, what if the ghost of my aunt was in here looking at us right now? What if she just wants to spend some time with us? Wouldn't that be okay?" In Mexico, they say dogs can see ghosts. Every once in a while in my apartment, my dog would start barking at an empty space - under the table, under the bed, on the couch, or just in an empty corner. I'd try to calm her down, bring her somewhere else, but she'd just move right back over to the space and start to bark again. The instruction at that time was to swear at the ghost. Admit to yourself that it's there, and start swearing at it - "Chinga tu madre, vete pinche fantasma!" Stuff like that. Well, I didn't feel quite right with it. I decided that if there was a ghost there, we could potentially coexist, even if the idea of the swearing was to help him or her to move out of limbo and on to a final resting place.

]]> I guess I have to say that, even if I am not entirely comfortable with it, and I'll keep making excuses, I kind of do believe in ghosts. Can you tell? I can't help it, I've just started feeling like they are all around. You can talk to them - they won't talk back, but you can imagine what they might say if they did, and my feeling is that you can pretty much get it right. Once, in my cousin's old car, which used to belong to my aunt, I thought she was there one day, right there in the passenger seat, and I let her be.

I'm sure many people wish ghosts did exist, but only so they could charge admission to see them. That's what Halloween is all about, and there's been plenty of exploitation of the idea of a ghost town.

In California, way the hell out there over the Sierra, practically in Nevada, there is a ghost town called Bodie, where I don't think that there really are ghosts, but since it was the premise for this post and I only got sidetracked into talking about real ones, I feel I must get back on topic. Bodie was a very, very late Gold rush town, populated so late that the guides are reluctant to even associate it with the Gold Rush - it was more of a last sputtering cough of the outpouring of sparkly stuff from the foothills of the Sierra.

It took me a long, long time to get to Bodie, and to tell the truth I did feel fear. I left in the early evening and used my GPS navigator to drive a black Jeep Wrangler in the dark over the Sierra very late at night. I started seeing signs for Lake Tahoe, and then started thinking that, you know, Tahoe is not on the way to Bodie from San Francisco. But my GPS is always right, so I kept going. And just like you I want human intelligence to triumph but it doesn't turn out that way. It had me go clear into the state of Nevada, where it gets all flat and gas costs a dollar less, just for crossing the border. I went to a 7-11 and looked at a map, and was horrified. The clerk and a random old guy buying gas said I should have gone through Yosemite, miles and miles and miles to the south of where I was. They told me how to get to a Best Western on Topaz Lake, still on the Nevada side, so I could find my way in the morning. But once I got there, the hotel clerk said that this was in fact the only way to get to Bodie from San Francisco, because the other highways I was looking at were closed after the year's first snowfall, which had been the day before. I was a little freaked out that my GPS knew that, or seemed to, but I figured it must have been programmed for November 1. Just to be clear, I don't think a ghost did that.

I got to Bodie the next day, mid-morning. I spent the day photographing it's freaky-ass empty buildings that have been preserved to look just decayed enough but not allowed to fall down. Some of the rooms had food containers and beer bottles and personal possessions left in them, but it just looked like people cleared out fast and no one cleaned up. I did not get the feeling that there were ghosts in Bodie, even after hanging around in the graveyard as the sun was setting.

But that doesn't mean that I didn't get to visit another world. On the way back, again at night, the Sierra, cloaked in that weekend's light snowfall, looked like sleeping whales illuminated in the starlight. I was alone again on Highway 88 after dark, and there were hardly any cars. At one point, even though you aren't supposed to stop on that road, I did. I turned off the engine and rolled down the window, and the silence hit me like a giant wave. There was no sound, but it was the farthest thing from silence I have ever heard. Finally I heard a car about a half mile behind me, so I rolled up the window and started the car again, and drove toward home between the majestic stands of redwood, cherishing that moment I stole out there in the middle of nature. It was something I didn't even know existed, and it made an impression on me that brought home the importance of preserving true wildlands. Maybe the greatness I felt was just in my imagination, but I don't think so. To me it was like a temple.

Election Night

2008-11-06T01:11:24Z

Election day in SF was amazing. I went to vote in the late morning and there was an elementary school across the street with kids playing outside and walking by on the sidewalk. Looking at the line of voters across the street, they started yelling Obama! Obama! Vote for Obama! I was amazed to see that nine-year-olds, or whatever they were, could be so politically enthusiastic. I can't help but think that it's a great thing for the country, whatever people's leanings are, to have a generation of children who have been engaged in civic life from elementary school. I had no idea who my parents were even voting for at that time! I think the amount of enthusiasm felt by people of all ages during this election is going to energize our typically apathetic country and help us to get on a path that more people feel comfortable with.

San Franciscans were very, very happy with the presidential outcome, and I can't imagine anyone who supported McCain was saying much about it last night. Cheering could be heard from apartment windows right after the results were called, and hipsters packed into bars to revel the night away.

But local propositions were a different story. Up to now, it looks as if gay marriage will be banned by a proposition defining marriage as a union between a man and a woman. Many gay couples were married in the days running up to the election anticipating this change, and sadness was in the air today from that camp. Proposition H, another big one for SF, would have had the city run by renewable energy by 2040, but the majority opposed it. So it felt a little contradictory that our country, usually known as center-right, elected a democrat and its first African-American president, while the state of California, known for its groundbreaking lefty moves, seemed to shift right.

Go little robot!

2008-07-07T00:19:40Z

Okay, if I ever have a boyfriend again, can he please be a human version of WALL-E?

I am going to be like everyone else here and admit that I am in love with this robot, a genius creation of animators who know just how to translate the little tiny movements of human body language that communicate to others so much of how we feel. It's funny that they can take those movements, apply them to creatures that don't even look too much like us, except for having vague versions of arms, shoulders, heads and eyes, and create what is really quite a romantic love story. I have to agree with the WSJ reviewer on the first 15-20 minutes, which are without words, being the best of the movie. It gets dicey when humans come in, not just because they are boneless and yucky, but because it takes you out of the entrancing world of Eve and WALL-E. Funny, they sound kind of like rappers.

Anyway, go see this movie with your BF or your BFF and learn how a real man should behave. And I don't mean the part about compacting and cleaning up all humanity's trash, although there is nothing wrong with that -- I mean the part about hooking himself onto the side of a spaceship and traveling to other worlds just to bring his main squeeze back to Earth. Now that's love.

Check out this cute trailer...

The Visitor

2008-06-25T02:29:36Z

My dad and I have started a relatively new but potentially lasting tradition of going to the Kendall Cinema in Harvard Square, and they do a good job of stocking up on arty flicks. The Visitor has been promoted a lot in the previews of films of the same type, and for that reason I felt a little bummed out that I basically already knew the plot. Strange person is staying in this professor's apartment, professor comes back after a long time away, they make friends, you get the idea. The end raises more issues but we can work around it without ruining the movie for anyone who hasn't seen it.

]]> I'll start by saying that I lived in New York for eight years when I was just a young thing, and you can call me names but I got a little tired of the whole Greenwich Village I-am-so-artistic-and-gifted-but-misunderstood-by-non-Manhattan-people thing. Just a little. I got the feeling the Tarek, a young Syrian musician played by Haaz Sleiman, was emphasizing his accent on purpose, when it seemed he was really, in life and even in the movie, we later find out, from a highly educated, if persecuted, elite, intellectual family. I would say it was a problem with the acting, but I think it is actually a problem with the character's identity and what the director is trying to use it to show.

Or maybe it's just my Village overdose during college. The girlfriend, Zainab, played by Danai Gurira, was great, lovely, cute, and nuanced. Richard Jenkins was brilliant as Walter Vale, and Hiam Abbass was lovely and convincing as Tarek's mother, Mouna.

But let's get to the actual issues that the movie brings up. Immigration - New York is made richer by the multitude of cultures that make up its social and artistic fabric. I totally agree. That was an easy one.

Second big issue - secret detention centers run by private companies. Very weird. Kind of makes you say, we have that here? Yuck. You feel ashamed, embarrassed, saddened by the way things have gone. Not that it's a new feeling, but still, you get it. I went to one of these once to visit someone and I must say that the way they depicted it was totally true to my experience. The entrance is totally unrecognizable as a detention facility, and it is in an industrial district where even if you were curious, you wouldn't spend much time looking around. A bunch of brick buildings you assume are warehouses, quite far from any store-lined streets. A white waiting room and byzantine rules enforced by people who aren't interested in explaining why they are so. Fluorescent lights and plastic furniture and white walls.

The guy I met at one of these places told me that he had been captured in an African country because of an article he had written about the oil industry. He was a journalist, and if I remember correctly it was a freedom of speech issue involving oil fires and a kidnapping and a jail cell beating and lots of other fun stuff. It had been impossible to get a lawyer, he had no one to help him, and he was afraid to go back home. He escaped in the middle of the night and made it to another West African country, flying out to the US from there with the help of a friend. I almost wrote an article about him but I couldn't find any information on him besides what he had told me and no one answered at the place he said was his employer. My first impulse was to believe him, but I needed proof. I still don't know what to think.

Of course there is something horrid about these detention centers. People stay in there for months when they are denied asylum and do not want to return home. Legal proceedings are slow and incomprehensible. I felt really bad for the people in there. But even in an ideal world, where you had tons of money for public lawyers for everyone who wanted asylum here, what if there were cases where you just could not corroborate what the person was saying?

It's easy to say that we have become xenophobic, isolationist, racist and the whole thing since 9/11, but let's try a little harder and ask, really, do we want super lax borders at this or any time? What should the screening process be? What are the consequences if there are loopholes in the borders or the paperwork that gets you through them? Even with the plunging dollar and the low esteem of the US in the eyes of the world, all that, a heck of a lot of people still want to be here instead of where they are. And one way to try it, especially when we are so into this us-them, developed-developing dichotomies, must certainly be to apply for political asylum.

Of course today it's all about people harming us, etc, watching out for that one bad apple in a million. And you feel bad for the people who are really nice, and hard-working, or well-educated, and deserve a spot here, even if it's becoming a less desirable place. And we are a nation of immigrants, proudly so. But I think that if we are going to criticize the way things are being done, then we need to approach the issue with better ideas for how to handle very real problems. More public money for speedy legal counsel for whoever jumps on a plane to New York without a visa? Comfier facilities for those who don't want to go home? If so, then we have to do it with open eyes and a willingness to address all the points involved.

Easy for some...

2008-05-09T03:31:47Z

This will be a follow-up entry to Life is Good in the Big Easy ... and well, I discovered that life isn't that good for everyone. Actually it isn't that good for most people, I'd venture to say. Because in New Orleans -- and I don't want to pick on New Orleans for poverty because all of our cities have it -- there is a lot of land that still looks like the hurricane just hit. There are a lot of abandoned houses where neighbors don't even know where the people have gone.

I am sorry to say that I go caught up with my work in the Big Easy and then with more work at home, and I let the initial shock of what I saw saw sort of drain away. I regret that - I wish I'd caught my first impressions. Because the day I spent in the Ninth Ward was a time that changed me, like as if a connection was made in my mind, linking lots of things that were already there.

I think it was the stoops without the houses that got me. Have you ever seen a stoop without a house? It looks a lot like a gravestone. It looks lonely there, like a statue, a monument, a lost dog. It doesn't look right at all. I think there are a lot of ghosts in New Orleans.

]]> I saw the house where Fats Domino got caught in his attic with no food or clean water for three days until they cut the roof and got him out. I didn't even know that, and it was sort of a wakeup. I mean, if Fats Domino only got out after three days, what about the other people?

The answer is that a lot of them are dead. A lot of them are dead, and their pets are dead, and their family members had to move to places like Western Mississippi and Southern Alabama and Houston and Baton Rouge. I learned that after the hurricane a lot of the hotels didn't have enough people to keep things going, and other people came in, so there was this big shift in the population. Some people I met had left and come back, but lots of people weren't able to come back. Maybe they had no house anymore, or they had no job to come back to, or they just didn't want to risk another storm coming.

A lot of people received insurance money for their houses but the mortgage companies got it, so they just ended up with the deed of a wrecked, probably contaminated shell of a home. And the poorer the community, the lower the home values, and the lower the payout. So even though it should be proportional to the need, they say that's why there is more rebuilding in the richer communities that were flooded. Another thing that happened with the insurance is that if your house was flooded six inches above the floorboards, they gave you money to rebuild up to six inches above the floorboards. But that doesn't make sense since the flooding lasted three weeks and the rest of the homes were also contaminated and ruined by the standing water.

The houses that are still there, whatever the neighborhood as long as it was flooded, have big exes on them. A lot of people left them there on purpose, like a badge of honor. On the top is the date that the house was checked, on the left is the agency that checked it, on the right is the number of types of structural damages there were, like a gas leak, for example, and on the bottom is the number of dead people they found. I only saw zeros but obviously some were not zeros otherwise there would be no point to the numbers.

So it is all very sad. The week I went, McCain had just been there and was reported as saying the community should not rebuild. It's under sea level, after all. I feel the people's anger at his saying that, but I couldn't help getting the creeps when I looked up from where I was standing at the edge of the levee to see a giant ship practically floating over me. That levee was a big pile of dirt, as are most of them, but the ones that broke were just big concrete walls. When you see both you can see why you'd want a mound of dirt rather than a wall. I mean, that is a lot of water when it rises up.

People told me that the Ninth Ward of New Orleans was fine right after the storm. People were just picking up things that had blown over in the storm, cleaning up a bit. When the water started coming in, they realized that the levee had broken, but as it rose more and more they couldn't leave. A lot of them climbed up into their attics and had no way out. Now they are building attics with escape hatches. But who would have planned it like that in the first place?

The things is, New Orleans is on a delta of silt from the river, and it is supposed to be getting replenished by natural deposits as the downriver side flushes away, year after year. The early parts of the city, like the French Quarter, were built on higher land, but as the city grew they built in lower areas, and at the same time the levees prevented new sediment deposits. So they have to just keep getting higher and higher. It is kind of doomed place.

But then at the same time, all this crazy cultural stuff has originated there, as if in defiance of the forces of nature, blossoming up out of the swamps. Next time I'll write about the music...

Life is good in the Big Easy

2008-04-24T03:18:06Z

Have you ever been walking down the street looking for a candy store, looked down at a text message and then looked up just as a marching band rounds the corner and starts to play, grooving down the street with giant dolls waving in your direction, as if it were all just for you?

No, this is not Manhattan on LSD -- it's New Orleans!

I had a magical afternoon just after arriving in the Big Easy. All in a day's work, I saw the classic streetcars, Spanish-style homes and crazy Bars of the French Quarter before filling up on shrimp etouffe, jambalaya and red beans and rice. Through the details of my crazy life I was offered a book of free food and activities, and I tried to eat as much as possible on the first day (which I promise I will duly work off in my hotel's awesome gym). So after all that classic NOLA fare at Mother's Restaurant, a down-to-earth diner where people line up at a cafeteria-style serving counter as they drool over what they wish their moms had known how to cook, I went searching for more goodies.

]]> I have to say that, in spite of all the magic that continually directs itself in my direction, the candy shop was closed and my box of free pralines had to hold off until tomorrow. But all was not lost! This mild misfortune got me to seek out a free cocktail at the Bourbon Cafe, where I had to sit alone at the bar but made it quick, and then got a lovely lemon tart at classically upscale-but-homey Galatoire's.

The only thing I'm regretting as I find out more about the city is how much I'll miss - the steamboat tour, the haunted house and cemetery and culinary tours..... there's so much going on! And although according to my calculations like 20% of the people in this city at any given time are tourists and there is plenty of cheese to be found amongst the kitsch, I am loving the party feel.

There aren't that many places I've met people who grew up there who say they've left and came back and would never choose any place over home. Today while watching the marching band I met a guy who said he'd tried another southern city but couldn't see living anywhere else but here. He described the band we were watching with pride - it was a high school marching band that traveled all over the world. They weren't in perfect sync as they marched, and the music had a bit of the "joyful noise" quality to it, but it sure could get you tapping your feet.

To hear this man talk about his town, It reminded me of a fishermen I met in the town where I live who told me he'd lived six months less than a mile out of town and couldn't stand it, he had to come back home. It's good to love your roots, and it shows when a community feels so proud.

More on meaning

2008-04-18T02:48:10Z

It's funny that Jeff should bring up pigeons when it comes to the meaning of life. I don't say that flippantly, er- not too flippantly - because a long time ago I got to asking the same question, and the answer was in the bird. I'll explain - I was in Boston, near the MFA, actually, and I watching some birds pecking at the ground. Simultaneously I was thinking about the meaning of life, and it occurred to me that the birds had something figured out. The answer - just do your thing. They were birds, and their job was to look for seeds and worms and things like that. I'm a human, and my job is to go to school, then start working, then - oops - then what?!

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That gets to the second issue I'd like to address today. When you get to a certain age, and that age is in a lower entry if you haven't been reading along, but I'm not going to repeat it, you start thinking about your life in a different way. In your teens and early twenties, it's about school, if you've got that opportunity, and starting to forge a path in a career that you feel good about. When you get a little older, you wonder, well, what was all the fuss? If I am already there, what do I do next?

Do I pursue the white picket fence and the perfect family, when that aspiration has already been shown to be a myth for most? Do I try really hard to get lots of money? Do I sit at home and meditate? What would be the young American woman's equivalent of the pecking pigeon that so inspired me then, pursuing its daily fill?

Being a human makes things so much more complicated, and having a certain number of choices due to what are essentially economic opportunities make things still more complex. When you are in need of the next meal, the meaning of life is to get the next meal. But when Americans are glutted with too many meals, going so far as to pay people to get them to eat less and to burn off excess calories, we seem to need a hierarchy of things to pursue.

If I were to write one, it would go something like this:
Food and shelter
Social interaction
Meaningful work
Love
Spiritual well-being

So food, shelter and a few good friends would come first, and as you get each thing you'd move on to the next. But the problem is that as you get further along, the definition of each thing get vaguer and more personal. What is meaningful work for you? Is it a job that brings you money to enjoy or spend on someone you care about? Is it working at a soup kitchen for minimum wage plus a good bit of personal satisfaction?

Okay, say you get the right job, whatever it is for you.
Then you move on to the next thing. What is love, anyway? Haven't we reduced it to a bartering of qualities, from looks to education to the size of your salary? Is the romance of the heart gone, as few of us even experienced parents who stayed married and many of us have had trouble finding that fabled One?

Anyways, say you find him or her.
Then you move to spiritual fulfillment. What if sitting on a cushion for hours everyday doesn't do it for you? It hurts your back. You feel the need to check your email too often. You're not sure you want to give up your sense of individuality, even if it is an illusion that will end when your heart ceases to beat. Well, yes, now we are up a creek.

Sometimes I think we've evolved a step or two too far, because beyond simply staying alive, none of it seems very clear. Even reproducing ourselves is no longer the obvious way to have a good, successful life - I mean, I didn't even think to put it in my list!

After all this discussion, I think I will just go back to the pigeon's message, as vaguely as it applies to the slice of human life that I am living - Just do your thing. Do it everyday, enjoy it, and do it until you die.

Turtles of Happiness

2008-04-13T00:20:39Z

(1)

The other day I was chatting with someone special who hit me with the ultimate question.

You know, the kind of question you’d hear in a movie when a supercomputer has taken over the world and the hero saves the day by asking one question that melts the computer's brain into a little brick of cheese.

It’s the question that goes like this: “What’s the secret to happiness?” (AKA: "What is the meaning of life")

I considered the fundamental nature of the universe. I considered the human soul. I considered the power of love. I rifled through all of my memories, grasping for any enduring, solid handhold to break the fall down the elevator shaft of logic.

In that moment my questioner was upon me like a street-sweeper on a distracted pigeon.

Being more vigorous than the average pigeon, I fluttered about seeking something solid to hinder my pursuer.

]]>

Finally Stephen Hawking came within arm's reach, so I will throw him "under the bus":

"A well-known scientist (some say it was Bertrand Russell) once gave a public lecture on astronomy. He described how the earth orbits around the sun and how the sun, in turn, orbits around the center of a vast collection of stars called our galaxy. At the end of the lecture, a little old lady at the back of the room got up and said: "What you have told us is rubbish. The world is really a flat plate supported on the back of a giant tortoise." The scientist gave a superior smile before replying, "What is the tortoise standing on?" "You're very clever, young man, very clever," said the old lady. "But it's turtles all the way down!""
-Hawking, Stephen (1988). A Brief History of Time. Bantam Books. ISBN 978-0553053401.

It is in our nature to wonder why. All of us wish to be happy (though we may define happiness differently), and it is natural to wonder "What makes me happy?" (so that we can get more of whatever that might be).

We ask what causes happiness, and what causes the cause, and what caused that, and so on until we find ourselves staring down an infinite column of turtles of happiness, extending as far as the mind's eye can see but not seeming to have any visible root.

The thing about happiness is that unlike astrophysics, which needs to be universally true, happiness is inherently personal and needs to be personally true.

For the old woman in Hawking's story the turtles were an equally believable and more useful explanation of her world. In terms of how it affected her day-to-day life the turtle example was equally if not more functional and hence was best for her.

We are fortunate to live in a time and place where we have the responsibility to create our own definition of happiness; I am thankful to have the choice.

(1) (picture credit: http://thecword.files.wordpress.com/2007/03/turtle.jpg )

Enviro-Dandy: Do you suffer from ED?

2008-04-06T01:20:04Z

Here am I, reft of modest pretense! ;-) I'll just have to fall back on my reputation as the humblest man in any crowd and try not to descend into conceits of vanity.

But I digress...

-------------

So, what is Eco Dandy-ism [ED]? How common is it? Could it be treated? Could it be you?

Eco Dandies are simply the next evolutionary step for this organism:

You know, the types of people who are so amazingly fashionable that grooming goes right past the wardrobe and into the soul as well. The ones who will casually admit that their nonverbal presence has, on some particularly good days, caused blindfolded observers to mistake them for the Dalai Lama.

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Check yourself: Are you wearing enough hemp? Do you drink free-range coffee (so the beans can frolic in the breeze)? Do you breath *only* Fair Trade air? (don’t laugh, there’s bottled oxygen on sale at convenience stores everywhere)…

Why are we so green all of a sudden? The environment isn't new but in recent years it's suddenly become a whole lot more fashionable.

How can we as a culture switch so effortlessly from chanting "Green is God" to "God is Green"?

It is awesome to want to improve the world around you. On the other hand, it is somewhat less awesome to invoke the image but not the reality.

Personally, I'm not here to judge whether you emit more carbon with your car or your bong.

You may arrive at WalMart in a mammoth SUV

Or pedal your Dandy Horse all the way to Trader Joe's

For all I know you could be running your vehicle on solar derived hydrogen, or getting your pedal power from unsustainable aquifer depleting organic agriculture. Appearances really don’t matter; the underlying chain of cause and effect does. And that’s the problem with a society increasingly driven by focus groups, polls and crowd-sourced inspiration: we have become ever more reliant on superficial intellectual fashion as a bellwether for truth.

So many people are singing that old, old song from Gilbert & Sullivan’s Patience:

If You Want to Shine in that High Aesthetic Line (Gilbert & Sullivan, 1881)

If you’re anxious for to shine in the high æsthetic line
as a man of culture rare, 
You must get up all the germs of the transcendental terms,
and plant them  ev’rywhere.
 You must lie upon the daisies and discourse in novel phrases
of your  complicated state of mind,
 The meaning doesn’t matter if it’s only idle chatter
of a transcendental kind.
 And ev’ry one will say, 
As you walk your mystic way,
 “If this young man expresses himself in terms too deep for me, 
Why, what a very singularly deep young man
this deep young man must be!”

 Be eloquent in praise of the very dull old days
which have long since passed  away,
 And convince ’em, if you can, that the reign of good Queen Anne
was Culture’s  palmiest day.
 Of course you will pooh-pooh whatever’s fresh and new,
and declare it’s crude and mean,
 For Art stopped short in the cultivated court
of the Empress Josephine. 
And ev’ryone will say,
 As you walk your mystic way,
 “If that’s not good enough for him which is good enough for me,
Why, what a very cultivated kind of youth
this kind of youth must be!”
 
Then a sentimental passion
of a vegetable fashion
must excite your languid  spleen,
 An attachment a la Plato for a bashful young potato,
or a not-too-French French  bean! 
Though the Philistines may jostle,
you will rank as an apostle
in the high  æsthetic band,
 If you walk down Piccadilly
with a poppy or a lily
in your mediæval hand.
 And ev’ryone will say,
 As you walk your flow’ry way,
 “If he’s content with a vegetable love
which would certainly not suit me,
 Why, what a most particularly pure young man
this pure young man must be!”

Really puts vegans in a new light, huh?

If we live in a world where majority rules, does anything else matter? People buy hybrids that aren't economically self sufficient. They buy organic foods that require more acres of land to support a given number of people. Some folks even manage to work up a bit of scorn for impoverished 3rd worlders who would cut down virgin forests (though many years ago we laid ours upon the altar of our globally hegemonic materialism).

But what does disingenuity matter? Isn't it a harmless elegance of fakery?

Is there even another side to this debate?

Galileo had this to say: "In questions of science, the authority of a thousand is not worth the humble reasoning of a single individual"

Now before you get (rightfully) irritated because you think I'm claiming to have all the answers, please know that I’m not championing my own views; I’m embracing a healthy blend of optimism and skeptical independent reasoning. You know, “Made with Whole Brains & High in Moral Fiber”

Let us probe beyond the outward appearances of these trends and into the underlying interactions of cause and effect.

The impetus for this observation arises in small part from the need to prevent the counterfeiting (and consequent devaluation) of crucial social attributes. Far more prescient is the inherent danger of obfuscating the truth.

Consider Michael Crichton's remarks in 2003:

I have been asked to talk about what I consider the most important challenge facing mankind, and I have a fundamental answer. The greatest challenge facing mankind is the challenge of distinguishing reality from fantasy, truth from propaganda. Perceiving the truth has always been a challenge to mankind, but in the information age (or as I think of it, the disinformation age) it takes on a special urgency and importance.
We must daily decide whether the threats we face are real, whether the solutions we are offered will do any good, whether the problems we're told exist are in fact real problems, or non-problems. Every one of us has a sense of the world, and we all know that this sense is in part given to us by what other people and society tell us; in part generated by our emotional state, which we project outward; and in part by our genuine perceptions of reality. In short, our struggle to determine what is true is the struggle to decide which of our perceptions are genuine, and which are false because they are handed down, or sold to us, or generated by our own hopes and fears.

As an example of this challenge, I want to talk today about environmentalism. And in order not to be misunderstood, I want it perfectly clear that I believe it is incumbent on us to conduct our lives in a way that takes into account all the consequences of our actions, including the consequences to other people, and the consequences to the environment. I believe it is important to act in ways that are sympathetic to the environment, and I believe this will always be a need, carrying into the future. I believe the world has genuine problems and I believe it can and should be improved. But I also think that deciding what constitutes responsible action is immensely difficult, and the consequences of our actions are often difficult to know in advance. I think our past record of environmental action is discouraging, to put it mildly, because even our best intended efforts often go awry. But I think we do not recognize our past failures, and face them squarely. And I think I know why.

I studied anthropology in college, and one of the things I learned was that certain human social structures always reappear. They can't be eliminated from society. One of those structures is religion. Today it is said we live in a secular society in which many people---the best people, the most enlightened people---do not believe in any religion. But I think that you cannot eliminate religion from the psyche of mankind. If you suppress it in one form, it merely re-emerges in another form. You can not believe in God, but you still have to believe in something that gives meaning to your life, and shapes your sense of the world. Such a belief is religious.

Today, one of the most powerful religions in the Western World is environmentalism. Environmentalism seems to be the religion of choice for urban atheists. Why do I say it's a religion? Well, just look at the beliefs. If you look carefully, you see that environmentalism is in fact a perfect 21st century remapping of traditional Judeo-Christian beliefs and myths.

http://www.perc.org/publications/articles/Crichtonspeech.php

Environmentalism = far-out religionists? Hmmmmmm.....

Um, yeah, no resemblance whatsoever... Um... Anyway, man does not believe by beard alone...

Besides, I think freedom of belief is the sine qua non of advancement for modern civilization.

Nonetheless we see that environmentalism is both fashionable and quasi-religious, and that therefore we should regard it as subject to the fickle winds of popular favor and require that it exercise a degree of parsimony of belief.

That shouldn't be a problem in and of itself, right?

Well, what if there are other influences, such as good old fashioned greed?

"But wait!" you argue, "environmentalists are pious, abstemious folk, the salt of the earth, the very heart of altruism! They would never act on selfish motives!"

"Aspects of environmentalism have long been criticized as using ostensible concerns about nature to serve private purposes such as property values."
– Gregg Easterbrook, “The case for sprawl”, The New Republic, March 15, 1999

Any, any, *ANY* time you give people the opportunity to slight their neighbors and chalk it up to some kind of higher power or greater good, you're setting the stage for conflict of some sort. Take the case of the purportedly religious witch trials in colonial Salem:

In 1692, Salem was divided into two distinct parts: Salem Town and Salem Village. Salem Village (also referred to as Salem Farms) was actually part of Salem Town but was set apart by its economy, class, and character. Residents of Salem Village were mostly poor farmers who made their living cultivating crops in the rocky terrain. Salem Town, on the other hand, was a prosperous port town at the center of trade with London. Most of those living in Salem Town were wealthy merchants.

For many years, Salem Village tried to gain independence from Salem Town. The town, which depended on the farmers for food, determined crop prices and collected taxes from the village. Despite the three-hour walk between the two communities, Salem Village did not have its own church and minister until 1674.

But there was also a division within Salem Village. Those who lived near Ipswich Road, close to the commerce of Salem Town, became merchants, such as blacksmiths, carpenters, and innkeepers. They prospered and supported the economic changes taking place. But many of the farmers who lived far from this prosperity believed the worldliness and affluence of Salem Town threatened their Puritan values. One of the main families to denounce the economic changes was the Putnams—a strong and influential force behind the witchcraft accusations.

Tensions became worse when Salem Village selected Reverend Samuel Parris as their new minister. Parris was a stern Puritan who denounced the worldly ways and economic prosperity of Salem Town as the influence of the Devil. His rhetoric further separated the two factions within Salem Village.

It is likely that the jealousies and hostilities between these two factions played a major role in the witch trials. Most of the villagers accused of witchcraft lived near Ipswich Road, whereas the accusers lived in the distant farms of Salem Village. It is not surprising that Reverend Parris was a vigorous supporter of the witch trials, and his impassioned sermons helped fan the flames of the hysteria.

So where are the witches? Who gets to sit in the dunking stool?

Consider this:

-Data source: BP's Statistical Review of World Energy 2007 http://www.bp.com/multipleimagesection.do?categoryId=6840&contentId=7021557

"But hey," you say, "that implies that increasing consumption is to blame, and it's probably bad for global warming too, so the Chinese must be witches!"

That might be true, but you're going to have to pedal the Dandy-Horse around a heck of a lot before you can come up with a billion dunking stools. Let's try for a more reasonable number, say 5:

With gasoline selling at well over $3 a gallon, it's easy to point fingers at the oil companies. And so, with the cameras rolling, top executives of five major oil companies were hauled before a committee of Congress on Tuesday for a public grilling.

http:////www.sltrib.com/opinion/ci_8816055

"Great!" you say, "We're giving those excessively prosperous clowns exactly what they deserve for trying to bring oil when we ask for it. Still, we're running out of oil anyway..."

Are we really? At the risk of being called a witch (or more technically a warlock), I'll point out the fact that last year we discovered 80 barrels of oil *every second* in the USA alone.

-Data source: BP's Statistical Review of World Energy 2007 http://www.bp.com/multipleimagesection.do?categoryId=6840&contentId=7021557

You may even have noticed the trend line showing that we are starting to discover new oil even faster? How is that possible? Find out next time in: "School Buses and Stripper Oil"

Introducing Jeff the Thinker

2008-03-31T01:05:12Z

Ok loyal readers, I would like to present my cousin and good friend Jeff. He will be a guest writer for the next couple of weeks. He is an economics student and all-around inquisitive guy, and I know you will enjoy his musings on oil, ethanol and all the good reasons to ride your bike like Dawn (and not like a crackhead).

]]> And to put in my own two cents ....
I would like to say that after almost twelve years of barely driving, except the 1.5 that I spent in California, I lost a bit of my driving mojo, meaning I find myself extremely non-skillfull when in charge of four wheels and a potentially lethal hunk of metal. That is not altogether a bad thing, given the price of gas, and the fact that I've found myself with an excellent set of reasons to use public transportation. I would like to say a word of praise here for the northeast, because even though it is as cold as he** here and we need a lot of fuel to heat our homes, there is pretty good public transportation in and around many of our cities. I am near Boston, and I've started to park my car at the T station nearby and take the subway into town. Another cool thing I can say about Boston is that since it is a port city, a lot of towns are accessible by boat, and I have been enjoying that option, offered by the MBTA, our local transit authority. I can think of no cooler way to commute to work than in a cozy heated shuttle boat and it might be enough to make me give up my dreams of San Francisco.... Forgive me, oh shining little Western City, center of beatnik-inspired coolness and Dawn-like imaginings, I'm sure you've got cool commuter boats too!

The Problem With Just Two Wheels

2008-03-19T02:16:45Z

Some times it's hard to ride my bike around town because where I live is a medium size town where everybody drives cars (alone), lives in single-family detached homes, and wouldn't ever ever ever take the bus even if they were given a lifetime supply of Twinkies and a million dollars. Because of that, everyone drives their cars, even though a barrel of oil is trading at $112 a barrel (I saw that on the CNN news scroll at the gym around 0630 today), we have a small problem called global warming promising to end civilization as we know it in like 20 years, Americans are fat, and all the other bad stuff that comes with driving (cell phones - please why??), the only people who ride their bikes around towns are elementary school kids and crack heads. And me. Because I live down the street from a half-way house where men on parole are getting a second chance at something (which for the most part is OK because they mostly keep to themselves) and because everyone who isn't 8-years-old or a junky drives their car every where, I usually get cat calls or someone in a car who doesn't know how to drive with a bike practically runs me over.

]]> Given, most of this is in my mind. A very scary place, but nonetheless it exists. And there's just no respect for cyclists, unless I lived closer to the coast and then I could join a bike club. But I don't. I try to ride my bike around town because gas is so fucking expensive and I hate my car. My Canadian friend observed the same thing in her town - drivers rather hostile to any cyclist because they are used to junkies weaving around the road on bikes, spaced out or angry at the world (whichever), and they just think, If run this crack head over the world will be a better place. She likes to ride her bike, too, and now that she doesn't live in suburban hell, it's become a better experience. I love cities. I don't like small towns. I've decided that because people don't really care if a single woman walks down the street after dark or rides her bike to the gym. I miss that even after 2.5 years not in a city. The Netherlands is cool too because everyone bikes there and I did once after imbibing and it was one of the greatest experiences I've ever had.

Election Mania From the Other Side

2008-03-10T00:14:31Z

In Mexico and much of Latin America, the US is called "El Otro Lado," or "The Other Side." To me that name always sounded mysterious and exciting, somewhere between paradise and a terrifying abyss. But now I am here - I came back home from Mexico almost two months ago and I have been successfully re-integrated. Yes, except for the fact that I stink at driving now and keep getting nearly escaping disaster. I've done everything from leave the keys in the locked car to leaving the lights on, to... well, never mind, this is getting embarrassing and potentially incriminating. My point is that I'm back, and I've been observing everything with fresh eyes, although I'm beginning to feel settled in again. In a way don't want the freshness to go away and I wish I could keep it and let the overwhelmed-ness fade, but they kind of go hand in hand.

Being back for more than a week or two is different. You feel a part of things again. And the main thing for me has been being here in an election year. It's exhilarating to be here at a time of such change - when it looks like my country might go back to being something I could be proud of when I am abroad. I lived in France for a year 13 years ago, and there was of course anti-American sentiment - there was talk of the GATT and a "pays sans paysans" (country without countrymen/farmers). I got a lot of questions about Michael Jackson - did I think he was guilty? OJ ran off with the white SUV and we saw that on TV. The WTC got bombed. People didn't like us, but I was not embarrassed to say where I was from. Things have changed a lot.

]]> I noticed a difference after 9/11. I mean of course, we all did - but there was this mix of sympathy and a sort of mean smugness. I went to Chile to learn Spanish and when the subject came up this cameraman said to me "Lo merecian." "They deserved it." I was living in New York at the time and I literally almost fainted. Anyway I had to sit down and I wanted to cry. I didn't talk much that night and then I left the dinner with the girl I was staying with. Today I'm much less naive. I see my country through a wider lens, and it's not a pretty picture.

That's why it is so important for me to be here now. I was watching TV shows from Mexico about the race, but it's exciting to see it, to be here, at a time when the country is actually hopeful. Yes, we are in the middle of a real estate meltdown and on the brink of an impending economic crisis, but I feel like we may get a president next time around who is willing to confront the country's economic and foreign policy problems with a fresh approach and a dash of humility. Hope it works.

So that's where I'll leave this for today - feeling hopeful while trying to be realistic. Watching political wrangling and thinking there might be a visionary somewhere within each of them.

Juno

2008-02-18T16:43:51Z

I loved this movie and it made me cry. It did! But seriously, I was really impressed with how Ellen Page, the lead actress, interpreted the screenplay to describe a real situation in an engaging way. The movie's reach is remarkable - from talking to people who have seen the film and reading reviews, people of all ages seem to be able to connect with Juno and/or the other characters in the movie to understand and identify with the situation. Many of us at least know someone who has had to make a decision on what do do with an unexpected pregnancy, so the issue of abortion is there. But the movie is far from a moralizing rant on what or whether to choose. Juno chose not to abort, but that doesn't make her stance ideological - it's purely personal, and I'd venture to say that she was glad to have been able to make the choice for herself. I think the film gave this issue in the delicate and multifaceted treatment that it deserved.

]]> Ellen Page was great, though some criticized her (and her lines) as too snappy and smart, to the point of being unrealistic. I felt like it was more noticeable at first, when her language was a little too smart and biting, but after a while you get used to her take on things. It becomes less about her being capable of taking care of it all and more about her realizing that she might need some help, so the whole approach gets toned down as the viewer gets used to hearing her use of language.

Page takes the cake, but I also loved the entire cast. Jennifer Garner was excellent as the hopeful adoptive mother, and the way she deals with her husband, played by Jason Bateman, I found to be very real. She is overly controlling, but he's also unrealistic and stuck in the past. She knows what she wants and when she wants it, while he feels stuck in a suburban nightmare that doesn't fit who he really is.

I also loved Juno's father and stepmother, played by J.K. Simmons and Allison Janney. I though they were very real, and I especially liked watching Juno's relationship with her stepmother evolve. At first Juno wouldn't let her in, but as time went on she found in her a real source of support.

I saw Juno in a little arty theater in a small town in Massachusetts long after it had left the larger theaters. It had been there as the only film for about six weeks, but there were still people in there when I saw the movie with my mom on a weeknight. I think that says something about the attention and regard this movie will get in the long term. People are hearing about it by word of mouth, and they'll keep seeking out this unique film in the years to come because of its sensitive take on a tough issue.

The End of the Affair

2007-12-26T05:02:38Z

Ending something hot and steamy is never quite as easy as slamming the door in the face of an ugly stalker. But what if the former becomes the latter?

For a case in point, go to Graham Greene's 1951 classic, The end of the Affair. You'll understand why Julianne Moore and Ralph Fiennes were psyched to play this lurid drama on the big screen, and you might even identify with parts of it if you have ever been through a terrible breakup.

Maurice Bendrix is obsessed with Sara Miles, who is the wife of Henry Miles, a civil servant. Maurice and Sarah have a history together - they enjoyed a long affair, including having sex in the married couple's house when Henry was there and actually walked right by the door. So they got pretty obvious at times and of course the loser husband ended up finding out.

]]> Sarah loved Maurice, but left him after they were in a bomb attack during the London Blitz of WWII and she prayed to God to save him in exchange for her ending their sinful relationship. Maurice didn't realize this until he got a private detective to follow her and steal her diary. The private detective part came after Henry suspected her of cheating and Maurice graciously volunteered to get involved because he was jealous she'd taken up with someone else.

Poor Henry. It's hard to get why he was such a tool. He just sat at home and did nothing, no romance, no action, nothing. Poor Sarah, you can't really blame her. She needed a psycho who would track her down with a PI only to find that she had always loved him. Are all our lives so tragic and pathetic, searching for love but never finding the right circumstances? Or are we just attracted to the exotic and the impossible? I'm beginning to think it's a bit of both!

Clean Life

2007-12-06T03:59:02Z

Jamie Tarabay is leaving Baghdad after two years there. She runs the bureau for NPR. I like listening to her because despite whatever awful conditions exist for her, she manages to uncover these really great stories about friends trying to save each other from death squads, sons raising ransom money to save fathers they will never see again, the hell, basically, that Iraqis live since the U.S. can to "liberate" them, or whatever the U.S. came there to do. I heard that she is living and I'm surprised she lasted so long without getting killed, but maybe I'm just under estimating her or I'm speaking about something I don't really know much about. I wonder what news from Iraq will sound like now. She is pessimistic about the future Iraq, though, and doesn't think much good is going to come from the Bush Administration's little experiment of implanting democracy in the Middle East. Busy, busy busy.

But when I heard that Jamie is pessimistic, I realized I am too about a lot of things. But should I be. The fact that being "green" is in vogue has only added to my anxiety about the future and the world and whether civilization as we know it will remain for the coming generations. The fact that environmental preservations has been honed so perfectly to the individual makes me feel increasingly helpless about actually working for a cleaner world. To think that one person's actions make any difference is just absurd. Governments, corporations, these entities hold the key to reversal in climate change or clean water for everyone or clean oceans. I think the message of individual action - using more energy efficient light bulbs or recycling everything - comes at the expense of aggressively demanding government to fund research programs into alternative energy or ratify Kyoto, or better yet write the next pact on global climate change. If we all switched to Priuses tomorrow and only shopped at Whole Foods it wouldn't make much difference because the rest of the world wants to consume like we Americans have for the past 50 years.

]]> Consumer culture and its attendant decadence are the real weakness in Western culture and how we live in the United States. It's a mirage of freedom because we are all carefully condition to believe through advertising, media and our environment that consumption of things and buying expensive items is a sign of freedom. You work hard and can get whatever you want because of it. But really working becomes the means to afford the lifestyle, bereft of meaning and any higher calling. It's just buy a new car, bigger TV and expensive watch. I do it. I buy things I don't need because I think that somehow it's going to make me...a better person? More fulfilled? I don't think we're al meant to live ascetic lives or like jihadis in the mountains of Pakistan. I just go back to thinking about rising global temperatures, Hurricane Katrina, the presidential elections, and I feel completely lost for the answers.

But I like to think that the world has always seemed a confusing, miraculous place, even to the Medieval serf.