Out of the Box

We were discussing the passage in Candide in which Candide asks the dervish for an explanation of the evil in the world.  Just before the dervish slams the door in our poor boy's face, the whirling magus shouts, "What does it matter...whether there's good or evil?  When his highness sends a ship to Egypt, does he worry whether the mice on board are comfortable or not?"  I noticed that my best student was smiling and shaking her head.

I pounced.  "So you disagree, XX?"

"Not exactly, but I don't like the metaphor."

"Why not? Do you believe in a good God?" I asked.

 "No," my student replied, "not in a 'good' God, but in a god of some sort.  And 'ships' and 'mice' are much too substantial.  God has put us in this unimaginably large box--the universe--and occasionally he watches us.  Sometimes he fiddles around with us, for his amusement or just to see what might  happen."

"So, can we influence him in some way--in order to get him to be nice to us as opposed to other creatures?"

"Nah" she laughed.  "We're much too tiny and insignificant.  God doesn't really have any emotional attachment to us--and by the way, there are lots of other life-forms on other planets in this box.  God can't even see us except through a very powerful microscope. We're a kind of science project for God."

"Well, isn't your belief just another version of 18th Century deism?" I continued.

"Maybe.  But didn't the deists believe that God had created some rules that would always apply--natural laws?  I don't think that the God who set up this box had any rules at all in mind.  He was just messing around with a bunch of stuff--and threw it all together (Big Bang).  It's possible, actually, that his experiment has got a little out of hand. You know--expanding universe, space/time continuum.  He may not have foreseen that and he might not know quite what to do with it, but I guess he continues to find it entertaining and basically harmless."

"In your view, then, what significance does this god have for human beings?" I was beginning to get exasperated.

"No significance, really.  There's a remote chance that Earth might randomly show up under his microscope.  And, in such a scenario, if the collective behavior of Earthlings seems in  any way "remarkable" or "interesting," there's an even more remote chance that he might jiggle things up a bit.  But basically, we're just in this alone."

"Should human beings be trying to accomplish anything collectively or individually?  Should we have some sort of common goal?"  The great existential question, at last.

She paused. "Well, it seems impossible, but I think we should do our best to devise a way to get out of the box.  Outside the box, we would be a little bit like God, wouldn't we?"

"Hmm." I replied. "But isn't it likely that we couldn't survive outside the box's environment?  And how can part of an experiment 'get out of' the experiment?"

"Dunno," she admitted.  "Well, I suppose the only other alternative is to work together with other Earthlings to try to transform Earth into something so 'remarkable' or 'interesting' that it might attract God's attention and, potentially, his curious 'messing around.'"

"But what if that 'messing around' made things worse rather than better for us?" I fretted.

"Sounds like you're a Republican.  Are you?" she laughed.

Dunno.

Bark Off

These gizmos are designed to stop dogs from barking.  Apparently, when activated, the "bark off" unit transmits a piercing high-pitched sound that yowling, yipping, yapping dogs find so painful that they are stunned into silence.

Like a mute button, but for real-world situations.

Why hasn't anyone invented something similar for use on human yappers?

The problem, of course, is to generate a sound frequency painful to the yappers, but undetectable to the innocent victim, who merely wishes to be left in peace.

Clearly, there would be no point in creating or acquiring a device that, when engaged, merely increases EVERYONE'S pain.  That would resemble rocking out at the Queen's Garden Party with a boom box blasting 50Cent, Adam Lambert or Tammy Wynette.  Ouch.

I suppose that, as long as all human beings belong, mas o menos, to the same species, we will never be able to discover a frequency that cannot even be discerned by sweet, refined homo sapiens like me--but that simultaneously induces severe auricular discomfort in noisy, loutish homo sapiens like Rush Limbaugh.

Gosh.  I have just admitted that I belong to the same species as Rush Limbaugh.  It's frightening to think it.

Frankly, I'd rather hang out with yowling, yipping and yapping dogs.  So much for Bark Off.

Semis

Yesterday, while driving home from Rochester, I spied a billboard advertising a roadside cafe, whose name I have forgotten because it was something like "Joe's" or "Del's".  But I DO recall the notice, in bold red letters, attached to the bottom of the sign, proclaiming that said restaurant was "semi-accessible."  Huh?

Somewhat rattled at the notion of a restaurant that potential customers could only partially enter, I braked and did a double take--a maneuver that nearly got me rear-ended by the big-rig "semi" in back of me.  A semi.  Ah, so THAT was what the puzzling sign meant:  accessible to big-rig trucks.  The cafe had an enormous parking lot, perhaps.  Or a drive-up window 10 feet high.  Semi-accessible.

Funny word, that:  semi.  Spontaneously, my mind began to churn out all the "semi" expressions I could think of:  semi-conductors, semi-solid, semi-automatic, semi-annual, semi-circular, semi-colon, semi-final, semi-literate, etc.  All of which seemed to mean "half" or "partially" something or other.  What, then, is a big mother of a truck "half" of?  Half of a train?  Half of a an even bigger truck that has 36 wheels?  Half of a warehouse?

Semi.

Gradually, as I drove past Eyota and then past St. Charles, this word began (as the TV commentators say) to "resonate" within my brain as a kind of mantra.  Semi, semi, semi, semi.

And then, about the time I was passing the Lewiston exit, my thoughts snapped back to the enigmatic expression I had seen twenty miles behind on the roadside restaurant billboard:  semi-accessible.

Suddenly, in a flash of  illumination that could have come from either God or a "Road Work Ahead" signal, I saw what all this meant.

Because, isn't everything in life "semi-accessible"--in both senses of the term?  Ordinary people (those like me in Camrys with accelerator problems) have only partial access to the things they desire and/or need in life.  We can't always get what we want, but sometimes we want what we get.  Like it or not, life is just semi-accessible to the people airline pilots call "folks."

Only those guys in badass trucks with 18 wheels, wind diverters and diesel smokestacks can go anywhere they want, anytime they want, for as long as they want.  Life's big-rigs (the French say "poids lourds") are people like Bill Gates, Donald Trump, Mitt Romney, Paris Hilton:  the plutocrats.  They don't seem to have any accelerator problems, do they?  In their semis, they get their access to Congress, Cannes and the Cabana Club.  Semi-accessible.

So, the question becomes:  how in hell do mere "folks" like us go about getting ourselves one of them there semis?

Phobes, Philes and Ugly Vampires

What foreign people do average Americans dislike the most passionately?  The Chinese?  The Mexicans?  The Pakistanis?  The Russians? No, no, no and no.  The clear answer is:  the French.

Yet, what foreign people inspires the most fervid, unconditional love in many Americans?  Again, the answer is:  the French.

What accounts for Americans' seeming inability to think of the French as they do of almost all other national groups:  with slightly smug but largely benign indifference?  Remember:  I'm not talking about "illegal immigrants" here.  Sure, Americans can get pretty agitated about Mexicans or Somalis who actually want to live in America--but they don't much care about these peoples as long as they behave themselves and stay in Guadalajara or Mogadishu.

The French, however--well that's a different story.  Whether a Frenchman is walking the streets of his native Paris or trying to take pictures of Ground Zero, he almost inevitably either angers or fascinates the Americans in his midst.  In Paris, he seems aloof and much too self-confident--insufferably oblivious to the manifest needs of American tourists.  At Ground Zero, he has the effrontery to ask annoying questions such as:  "What did America do to provoke such a dreadful deed?"

So again I ask:  what explains our love-hate attitudes toward the French?

Well, as an American with a longtime passion for France and the French, I'd like to advance a theory.  I wonder if both America's Francophobia and its Francophilia might be products of the the heightened awareness and the corresponding self-consciousness that the French seem to incite in us.  Because unlike most people with whom we share the planet, the French just won't let us be blissful, indiscriminate vampires.

Oh, you know what I mean.  Secretly or overtly, you've been reading the Twilight books and drooling over those shirtless / blood-deprived studs in the movie versions.  Vampires can't see themselves in mirrors, right?  So they don't have to worry about their poor complexions or sickly countenances:  they can troll along in blissful ignorance, regarding themselves as lovely and loving love-interests.  And so it is with most Americans.

Not surprisingly, I suppose, we are generally quite content being such unknowing vampires with no unflattering reflections--and, fortunately for us, most foreigners just leave us alone--perhaps avoiding us or keeping out of our way, but rarely caring enough about us to, well, draw us pictures (since mirrors don't work) of how we really appear.

But zee French, zay are arteests and zay DO care (zat's zee eenteresting zing).  Alors, zay draw some preety unlovely (i.e., honest) peectures sometimes.

For instance, they remind us that we are bloodsuckers.  They remind us that we are FAT bloodsuckers.  They remind us that we eat weird food, consume weird drinks, play weird games, fight weird wars, make weird movies--and, quelle horreur, see nothing at all wrong with going to the market in a striped top over polka dot Capri pants and Nike tennis shoes.

Worse, after they have drawn a picture of us, they sometimes LAUGH at it.  Really, this is most unpleasant.

So, let's face it:  the French make us squirm uncomfortably in our Calvin Kleins. Because, what if THEY are right?  What if hard work ISN'T the meaning of life?  What if Anglo-Saxon free enterprise ISN'T the best economic system?  What if the U.S. Constitution ISN'T the ultimate expression of humanity's political aspirations?  What if--and this is an awful thought--Jerry Lewis ISN'T a mere buffoon but, in fact, a talented comedian?

For Americans, France is the world turned upside down:  no eggs at breakfast, fast trains all day, public transportation everywhere, waiters who don't smile because the tip is already included, 360 kinds of cheese (most of which smell bad), strikes instead of tailgate parties, pedestrian shopping zones where only feet provide mobility, men peeing and/or jacking off in the street, old ladies in impeccably tailored suits and heels sniffing melons at an open-air market, thieves with no guns but really vile language, rabbit stew or goose gizzard salads for lunch, thousand year old churches that no one attends or dusts, bathrooms that have bidets but no toilets.

And that's only a partial list, of course.  But my two preceding paragraphs summarize why many Americans just get itchy about the French--and decide to hate them without even trying to know them.  And, conversely, these two lists provide a clue as to why Americans like me are so thoroughly intoxicated with France.  Because, frankly, I feel a whole lot less like an Ugly Vampire when I have a chance to see myself through the eyes of the French and, to some extent at least, experience the world as the French experience it.

Oh, I know that I will always be American--and I accept that fact without any rancor and even, when the CNN news is good, with a measure of gratitude and good cheer (we still suck up about 25% of the world's blood, after all).  But I figure that, as long as I'm a bloodsucker by birth, I might as well ACKNOWLEDGE  it and GET THE MOST OUT OF IT.  So, like my fellow Francophiles all across the U.S., I heartily rejoice in the opportunity that my French friends and my Francophilia have afforded me:  to be served life's red meat succulent and really, really saignant.  

Miam miam.

What Do All These People Have in Common?

You're absolutely right!  THEY ALL HAVE BAD HAIR!

Killing Me Softly

When I was a kid and had to memorize the Ten Commandments, number 6 (Protestant version) of the Decalogue stated, in absolute, albeit archaic, English:  "Thou shalt not kill."

No one bothered to ask what, exactly, should not be killed.  Certainly we didn't worry about killing insects or rodents; most of my classmates lived on farms and routinely helped slaughter livestock.  All of us enjoyed the (well-cooked) flesh of domestic animals.

And no one questioned the moral legitimacy of killing other humans in cases of self-defense, in judgments involving "capital" crimes, in wars against national enemies.

Abortion was never mentioned, not even in whispers.  Remember:  those were the times when the word "pregnant" was banned from our black and white TVs.  Lucille Ball was "expecting"--and, until rather late in the "I Love Lucy" series, I think, she and Ricky slept in separate twin beds.

Presumably, then, since it was so damned hard to MAKE a fetus, no one wanted to think about destroying it.

But I have digressed a bit.  My central thought is one to which I frequently return:  the assertion of many of my friends--people whom I love--that "life is sacred."  I understand what they mean:  they mean human life is sacred.  And they base this belief upon that Commandment I cited earlier.

Furthermore, they (unlike the Lucy and Ricky watchers) are, quite specifically, thinking about human fetuses.  When they say "Life is sacred", they actually mean "Thou shalt not kill human fetuses."

Their interpretation of the moral imperative is absolute in this case.  Yet it is NOT absolute in the other cases I mentioned above (self-defense, capital punishment, war).  Why not?

Regular readers of this blog know that I am not a great fan of biblical literalism--or indeed, of the Bible itself as anything more than an anthology of mythology (valiant attempts to explain the unexplainable) and spiritual reflections / exercises.  So I do not feel intellectually or morally compelled to accept as binding the strictures of  Exodus 20 or Exodus 34 or Deuteronomy 5.  Still, since so many people DO base their attitudes on these chapters, it might be worthwhile to explore what the ancient writers actually intended when they wrote the Sixth (or the Fifth) Commandment.

Christian conservatives, of course, insist that Yahweh (shrouded by more smoke than the Wizard of Oz in his command booth) actually hand-delivered the Commandments to Moses sometime around 1500 BCE (The New Living Bible says 1445 BCE exactly).  Most serious biblical scholars, on the other hand, believe that the Commandments were first codified in the 8th Century BCE (between 950 and 750 BCE)--and that they represent a kind of compilation of traditions from several sources (usually called J, E, and D).  The "truth" of their origin can probably never be definitively proved.  Never mind.  What matters is what they meant.  


There is, for instance, considerable discussion about the verb "to kill."  Some contemporary translations of Commandment 5/6 prefer "murder" to "kill."  "You shall not murder," says the New Revised Standard Version.  And, in his book And God Said, Hebrew scholar, Joel Hoffmann, maintains that even "murder" is too vague a term.  Hoffmann asserts that the original Hebrew means something like "to kill illegally."

In other words:  "You shall not kill illegally."

Which would conveniently leave the door open for legal killing.  Such as, perhaps, self-defense, capital punishment, warfare...and...and...abortion????

Goodness knows (I was going to write "God knows"), the Old Testament certainly authorizes plenty of legal killing (for offenses ranging from prostitution to masturbation (Onan) to proselytizing to worshiping false gods to premarital intercourse to communicating with the dead.  And let us not forget "men lying with men."

In ancient Israel, who was responsible for deciding what was "legal" killing as opposed to "illegal" killing?  If it was GOD, then shouldn't the same rules apply today?  One assumes that GOD'S laws do not change.  Obviously, however, the legal killings I enumerate above are no longer acceptable--and I doubt that many of the "Life is Sacred" people would disagree.

Is it possible, then, that the Commandment is saying nothing more than this:  "Don't kill anyone if your society and your society's lawmakers tell you it's illegal to do so"?  Or, contrariwise, it's OK to kill other humans if such killing has been legalized by the authorities?  I suspect that my Life is Sacred friends would have trouble with this interpretation also.

Still, that IS the way human culture works, isn't it? Throughout history, human beings have obligingly killed other human beings when authorized to do so by either rulers, laws or general consensus.  Dang, this is a somewhat unsatisfying relativism, for me as well as for my friends.  I wonder if we can build a system of ethics on something OTHER than these maddening (and self-contradictory) thou-shalt-nots.  To be continued sometime...when my puzzler is less sore.

Memorial Day Lies

It was a gorgeous weekend.  Memorial Day.  Bratwursts on the grill, tractor pulling contests, marching bands, patriotic speeches, the beginning of summer.  Now we can all wear our white shoes again.  Life is good.


But something about official Memorial Day celebrations always makes me uneasy.  From Arlington National Cemetery to the Lake Park Bandshell in Winona, Minnesota the air and airwaves are bombarded by a jumble of grandiloquent discourse and rousing, flag-waving music--punctuated, but only occasionally--by sincerity, sorrow and genuine remembrance of real people.


The prevailing theme of the day is both trite and cruel:  Thank God for all those soldiers who died so that I can grill my bratwursts "in freedom."  In other words:  I feel a little guilty about never giving a rat's ass about anyone else, especially about "those" people down the street (is there some way we can get them deported?).  So, to assuage my conscience, I'll join in a nice little party to honor those poor bastards who had the bad luck to "give their lives for freedom."  I'm so glad it was them and not me.


God bless America.  Fourscore and seven years ago.  The land of the free and the home of the brave.  Life is good.


Well, not for those guys in the cemetery, of course.  Who were they again?  OK.  Let's try to remember.  They were good guys, all of them.  All of them went to war to make the world safe for bratwurst, American style.  All of them.  Yeah, even LeRoy and Jose, I suppose.


And think about all the noble causes they advanced:  they freed us from the tax-and-spend British; they emancipated the slaves; they liberated the Nazi concentration camps.  They did the Christian thing:  they laid down their lives for their friends (us).


Only, only, only.  Most of them DIDN'T.  Most of them had no desire or intent to lay down their lives for anyone, least of all us sons of bitches.  Probably most of them intensely disliked great numbers of people in their hometowns, just as intensely as those fellow citizens hated them.  And undoubtedly, most of them were in the army/navy/air force because they either HAD to be or because they needed the money.  Most likely they weren't our friends.  And even if they were, they didn't want to die for us. What a crock. 


Nor should we forget that our armies also fought to exterminate the Native Americans, defend slavery, build a colonial empire in the Philippines, prop up a corrupt government in Vietnam, ensure an unrestricted flow of oil from the Middle East, etc., etc.  


Let freedom ring.  Life is good. 


I hope you see that I'm NOT denigrating these "noble dead."  Rather, I'm criticizing the inauthenticity and the hypocrisy of the living--who lie to themselves and to each other in order to justify that which, in the end, is rarely justifiable. Soldiers die for all kinds of causes, most of them having nothing whatsoever to do with high ideals.  Once in a while, when the politicians themselves are high-minded, the wars they get us into are also, in some sense at least, "noble."  (I concur with Winston Churchill, for instance, that the American Civil War was "the noblest and least avoidable of all the great mass-conflicts of which till then there was record."  Probably a similar thumbs up could be given to World War II.)  But it's just disingenuous to assert that most soldiers died for "freedom" or for much of anything meaningful at all.


They died because of human greed, fear, incompetence, prejudice--and above all, because of human tribalism:  our way rather than your way.  The "freedom" that they fought for was, by and large, nothing more than the freedom to cook our brats OUR way.  Who cares if the Germans invented the damned things.


And now, what about "freedom fries"?  Down with the French!


Memorial Day, thus, often makes me sad.  I'm not really mourning the individual soldiers--that's hard to do unless one actually knew them.  Rather, I'm mourning the horrible LOSS, the horrible STUPIDITY, the horrible WASTE.  And my skin crawls as I listen to the sanctimonious, self-justifying speeches about how the noble dead did not die in vain.  Yada, yada, yada.  Pass the bratwurst.


Do we, the living, REALLY (to quote Lincoln) "highly resolve" to do anything at all?  If so, we should highly resolve to overcome tribalism and stop glorifying war.  Yes, by all means, let's try to remember why those poor bastards died:  they died because WE, the living, were too stupid to figure out how to keep them alive. They died and it's OUR fault. Shame on us.


LIFE is good, not death.  So can we please stop celebrating death on Memorial Day?