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Look upon my works, ye mighty

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Among the privileges of a career  in archaeology is the great perspective it reveals on life and history, great and small.  Years of digging up abandoned settlements and graves of nameless, long-forgotten people leave one thing without doubt: all the fears and tribulations of the world we live in will one day be nothing but a mystery to any who might survive us.  Future archaeologists, if there are such people, will marvel at our occasional outbursts of technology amidst the overweening primitiveness.

The learned among them will imagine that they have come to understand us.  But whatever reconstruction of our cultures they will come up with would look bizarre to us, like some fun-house mirror image of what we hold to be reality.

They will give lectures in which they declare, with righteousness, that the 21st century wasn’t as bad as we seem to think, and point to evidence of some rudimentary technology.  Indignation at the prevailing opinion that we were savages will become trendy.

Or they will find, to their surprise, that there were empires and complex social structures, or that the one or two “great” civilizations of which they might be aware were not so great after all.  And all of this will be for reasons which we would find utterly perplexing today.

I will always remember looking down at the mummy of Ramses II at the Cairo Museum, in its controlled atmosphere glass case.  I looked down at the face of Ozymandias, hoping to gain some sort of empathy, some glint of recognition, some insight into that long ago place and time.  To my astonishment, only one thought came to me.

It’s just another corpse.

The way we (would like to think) we were

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People of a certain age, and of a certain background, when talking about poverty, have a tendency to minimize its impact.

“Hell, we didn’t have anything, but we didn’t even know we were poor,” they might say, and sage heads all around nod in agreement.

“We didn’t have television, or the internet.  We made our own diversion from stuff we found in alleys: a ball of tape for a baseball, an old broom handle for a bat.  We always had enough to eat, though.  We just made do.  We didn’t whine about our lives like the kids do nowadays.”

Two things strike me about such sentiments.  One is the inevitable filter of childhood memories.  We tend to remember things as much better than we thought they were at the time we experienced them; the farther away we get in time, the better things were.  Add the fact that, as children, we had a kind of natural optimism engendered by the fact that we weren’t responsible for keeping things above water.  It’s a certainty that our parents didn’t remember those times in such glowing terms.

Keep in mind we’re not talking about abject poverty; people who lived through that rarely even bring it up.  These are typically the lower middle class (working class, if you’re a socialist) reminiscing about days of yore.

The second thing that strikes me is the implicit sense of smugness, as if we were somehow superior to the young people of today.  I say “we” because I, too, come from that history; born in a refugee camp, I came to the US on the boat with my parents.

But what I feel, instead of smugness, is mostly good luck.

True, we didn’t have TV.  Hell, it was just invented.  Every block in my neighborhood had two or three houses with television; every other block someone knew of someone who had a color TV.  The internet simply didn’t exist.  There was radio, and the daily newspaper, and you could take in a movie twice a month or so.  Some of the theaters downtown even had AC, but you might pay a buck or more there; it was typically 25 cents elsewhere.  For anything else, you relied on the rumor mill.

The point is, we really had nothing to compare our lives with.  Like children everywhere, we looked around us, and thought that was what normal was.  You wore hand-me-downs because it was stupid to throw away perfectly good clothes.  You walked everywhere or took a bus because buses were ubiquitous and frequent, and cost pennies.  You’d cross the street to avoid some people, others would cross the street to avoid you.  Occasionally, if you saw someone coming, you’d turn around quickly, and hope you hadn’t been seen.  But nobody gunned you down (unless you happened to be black, and then it was open season).

I have to say, if I want to be scrupulously honest, that we whined as much as anyone today, though we called it grousing, or pissing and moaning.  There was one kind of angst, though, that we didn’t have a lot of, and that was class envy.

Rich kids, if we even knew of any, just seemed incompetent, had to have everything done for them, judging from stereotypes in the movies and comic books; we felt sorry for them, though we had no real idea of how they lived.  We envied guys with construction jobs, or steady work in a factory.

In today’s connected world we all know how everyone else lives, or rather how commercial interests would like us to believe everyone else lives, so we’ll want to buy their stuff.  We are probably the most propagandized and pitched bunch of humans in history, and, for the first time ever, we’re in it all together, all of humanity, pretty much everywhere.  As a result, it’s very easy to become envious of others, even if we don’t have it so bad ourselves, from an objective point of view.

Why is that?

It’s because we’re humans; it’s what we do.  We are the social species par excellence.  There are no authenticated cases of feral humans, that is, humans who have grown up without the company of any other humans, anywhere, at any time in history.  I say this with full knowledge of the alleged cases, none of which stand up to scrutiny.  We’re hard wired to be keenly aware of our situation relative to other humans around us, our place in society, if you will.  Add to that the fundamental concept of fairness (and not just human apparently!) that informs our moral and ethical rules, and poverty becomes a relative thing.

In short, we weren’t any better or wiser then than young people (or old ones for that matter) today, just less informed.

For the first 2.5 million years of our existence as a distinct species, we lived in groups of fewer than a hundred people, all of whom were of roughly equal status; when we interacted with other groups, they weren’t much different either.  Still, forget the paradise of the noble savage; the latest studies suggest hunter-gatherers lives were filled with conflict and jealousy as much as ours, but they didn’t see global disparities, and certainly nothing like the magnitude of the differences we see today.  That, and the hard fact that killing someone put a significant dent in the work force, which for them had an optimum size within a pretty small range, kept actual killing at low levels.

Not us, more’s the pity.  Fortunately, we’re intelligent.

Aren’t we?

 

Where to put everybody?

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Just exactly how many of us are there?

Well, the world population is somewhere around 7.2 billion and rising.  At the same time, less than half of the earth remains in wilderness, much of that endangered.  It seems we need to to something, the sooner the better.  How much of the earth could we sequester from the likes of us?

Let’s see; if we give each of us a square meter to stand on, that’s about 7000 square kilometers we need, or about 2700 square miles to us colonial types.  Could we put the entire population of the world in, say, Rhode Island?  Not even close.  R. I. has only 2710 square kilometers.  How about Delaware?  Nope, just a little over 5000.

But don’t despair, New York City has 8633, enough for everyone, and more than 1600 left over for parking lots, and there’s some logic in putting everyone somewhere that’s already screwed up, wilderness-wise.  It’s the only city that qualifies, though; the next largest, Tokyo/Yokohama, at 6993, would leave 7 people out in the bay swimming.  Given Mothra and Godzilla and what-not, that’s probably not very safe.

Of course, we could go with industrial world tradition, and put everyone somewhere else.  Palestine is too small, and anyway, Israel is already building enough settlements there to use up all the available space.  Puerto Rico has as much room as NYC, but it’s technically part of the US (Territory?  Colony?  Never mind.)  Same goes for Akhazia, which may or may not be part of Georgia by the time we decide.

It looks like it’s New York City.  Too bad; the rent for a square meter there is already as high as a mortgage elsewhere, and just wait till Donald Trump gets wind of this.

The illusion of online celebrity

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A couple of quotes to ponder:

A politician riding on a wave of tweets feels as if the nation is cheering his every word, even when the nation is actually reading the sports page while a select splinter of hard-core supporters manically pound away on their smartphones. A hundred thousand people cheering you on in the social media feels like a mass movement. But this is a gigantic country.
— Gail Collins

…behavior online is too easily taken as a mirror of reality when it is nothing of the sort. What seems to be the voice of the masses is the voice of a self-appointed few, magnified and distorted.
— David Streitfeld

The reality is, even if you have 10,000 followers on Word Press, Twitter, Facebook, or God knows what else, most people have never heard of you.

We desperately need to get over ourselves.

Differently abled

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In the good old days, the little creek that ran through the city park near the house I grew up in ran a different color every day, depending on which upstream factory was dumping in it.  Nothing living was ever seen in it.  Its topography was littered with old tires and paint cans; it smelt vaguely of sewage.  We children played in it, none the wiser.  That parents warned us that it was “polio water” only made it all the more attractive.

Polio was an everyday feature of our lives in those days before the Salk vaccine.  Every neighborhood had its assortment of twisted limbs and funerals featuring disturbingly small coffins.  By the time I was seven, I knew what a corpse looked like.  The old man down the street had collapsed in the alley and died of something that would be routinely treated today; a boy in my first grade class perished of what I heard in my muddledness as “romantic fever.”   We were paraded in single file past where he lay in his open coffin, white and cold as the snow that was drifting outside.  It was what it was, and like children everywhere, we just thought that was what life was like.

Polio was a particularly haunting beast, because when it didn’t kill, it left its victims in varying degrees of disability.  The worst was the iron lung, a contraption that looked like a water heater laid on its side, the patient all but swallowed up in it, only the head protruding.  A mirror was thoughtfully placed to allow eye contact.  When it was operating, it sounded like Darth Vader; I’m certain that’s where Lucas got the inspiration.

Short of the horrors of that was every degree of disability.  As a teenager, my friend Jerry was one of the survivors who had managed a limited mobility.  His legs twisted like corkscrews, he rammed his crutches into the sidewalk with every step, muscles taut as wires on the verge of snapping.  All the same, he got around, as one does, even to the point of dancing in a strangely balletic series of jerks and realignments.

The dances took place on Friday or Saturday nights in a great neoclassical hulk of a building in the center of the park.  Whatever its original purpose, in my day it served as a community center, a place for youngsters from both sides of the park, sworn enemies, to come together and play basketball, pool, or ping pong.  Or, as often as not, for the boys to fight it out.  That boys would fight each other was considered so obvious as to not merit discussion; efforts at mediation were few and feeble, and usually involved trying to get the fighters to put on gloves.  The fights actually took place outside the building, in consideration of the generosity of the venue, and the disinclination to follow any rules, Queensberry or otherwise.

The dances were open, and generally peaceful.  On one particular night, Jerry was flailing away, dancing with one of the regular girls, who knew and liked him, when a boy from across the park began to taunt him, mocking his awkward moves.

Jerry swiveled around, raised a crutch, and caught the boy on the side of the head with a resounding “Thwack!”  The boy fell, the music kept playing, and Jerry and everyone else resumed dancing.

That boy got up, left the building reeling, and never was seen there again.  No one ever made fun of Jerry’s dancing after that.