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Rude awakening?

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The Egyptian army cracks down on the Muslim Brotherhood; the majority of the population approves.  Greece arrests members of the fascist Golden Dawn party, including members of parliament; their popularity crumbles.  Not much to go on, if you’re looking for a trend, but it’s enough to ask the question, are we getting tired of extremism?

Up til now, to be extreme has been the height of fashion.  Even the dullest events and pastimes have jumped on the extreme bandwagon.  Extreme knitting would not have raised an eyebrow.  No limits, all out, leave it on the field.

It’s my suspicion that all this tolerance, and even preference, for extremism is a by-product of the unprecedented prosperity of the two decades prior to the 2008 meltdown.  When things are going well, why impose limits?  Wasn’t “no limits” the mantra of the feel-good 90s?  It was fully entrenched by the time people were engulfed in recession; it must have seemed the right approach to bring the crisis to a close.  There was a lingering suspicion that the problems were caused by timidity, in any case, and all that was required was more bullishness.  It’s a commonplace that the first reaction to an ideological crisis is retrenchment.  We’re having problems?  We haven’t been true enough to our principles.  The Peasants are rebelling, reaffirm the authority of the aristocracy.  Religious fanatics commit mass murder, hurry off to church.  We see it time and again down through history.

Seen in this light, our devotion to the extreme looks less like a devil-may-care embrace of uncertainty, and more like a conservative retrenchment.

But in all such cases, there comes the creeping realization that not only are things not improving under this program, they are actually getting worse.  Retrenchment collapses under its own burdensome weight.

If what we are seeing abroad is the first faint glimmering of this collapse, we can only hope it reaches our shores before the lunatics destroy our government beyond redemption

Ah, youth

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Another tale from the annals of my splendidly misspent youth.  As usual, I have changed the names, out of a rather quaint sense of propriety.

Well, there we were, the lot of us squeezed comfortably into the crevices of a small, 5th floor pension a block from Plaza Cataluña in Barcelona.  What did we expect?  When you’re young, love blooms early and often, or at least what passes for love, some combination of lust and infatuation, I suppose.  Mother Nature gives us a double shot of hormones to get us making more of ourselves before we get distracted by life’s illusions.  For ordinary mammals, this is pretty straightforward; for us humans, anything but.

The Pension Fontanella was, above all, cheap, and the landlord easy going.  For 50 peseatas a day, about 75 cents in the exchange rate of the day, you got a bed in one of a half dozen or so rooms with anywhere from two to six beds each. In the morning was an included breakfast, of endless coffee, scones and butter, sometimes jam.  For another 30 pesetas, you could go down the street a ways to the worker’s cafeteria and get an enormous midday meal consisting, typically, of a giant bowl of paella, a grilled meat and potatoes course, and flan for dessert, all washed down with a Coca Cola bottle filled with cheap Spanish wine.  We thought Europe on $5 a Day, a popular guide book at the time, was woefully extravagant.

I won’t say the Pension Fontanella was a den of iniquity.  It was 1970.  The world was in one of its usual celebrations of youthful exuberance to accompany the coming of age of a postwar cohort, and the horrors of AIDS were nowhere on the horizon.  There were drugs, yes.  The landlord doubtless shared a portion of his profits with the local Guardia Civil.  It was 1970.  Mostly hashish, taken with a kind of connoisseurship: Moroccan blond, versus Lebanese red, etc.  Personally, while I had indulged lavishly while in military service, I had lost interest since my discharge.  I had come to find that while the first half hour or so of getting high was pleasant enough, after that I would often want to do something, and the hash haze became an obstacle.  Take whatever that says about the military as you wish; it was a different institution back in the days of Vietnam and the draft.

Anyway, as I said, there we were, merrily hopping from hash to hash and bed to bed, all bedazzled by the sheer possibility of life, blissfully ignorant of folly and its curses.  We played music; I imagined myself to be a competent guitarist and passable singer, mostly because of my friend Sid, who was so brilliant that when we played together, it made my amateurish thrashing about sound like intentional rustication.

Then, in walked Inga, and set it all a-tumble.

She wasn’t exactly beautiful, though her features were regular enough.  But, musically, she was head and shoulders above the quotidian, workmanlike talent we were used to.  It was the way she sang, with her eyes, gliding atop the effortless guitar lines with a sublime inevitability.  She made the trite seem fresh, and the fresh seem stunning; most of all, she made it seem personal to every male listening.  I was smitten.  So were we all.

She had arrived in the afternoon from nowhere in particular, and half the denizens of the pension sat far into the night under the spell of her singing and playing.  I fell asleep with the resolve that, in the morning, I would find her, and away from the rest of her admiring audience, I would have a chance at connecting.

Well, morning did come, and I found her, but not alone.  There she was at the reception desk, guitar and backpack all cinched up and ready to go.  Next to her was Billy, whom I had come to consider a good friend.  They were checking out.  Together.

Blap!  Just like that.  I lost my moorings.  I stammered a “good morning,” and asked, “What’s going on?  Are you leaving?”

“Yeah, Billy said, smiling broadly.  “We’re heading for Ibiza; the boat leaves in an hour.”  Inga beamed radiantly.  I was crushed.

“I gotta go,” I said lamely,  I could feel their quizzical stares as I headed for the staircase and out the door.

Well, it’s an old story, I guess, ruefully celebrated in many a folksong:

For courting too slowly you have lost this fair maiden
Begone you will never enjoy her
Begone you will never enjoy her
– I once loved a lass

I walked down the street to a pub we occasionally patronized for special occasions.  It’s bar, lined with tapas the length of it, was a major attraction that outweighed the price of the beer.  Inside, I found Will, Sid’s brother.  He looked up and saw my face.

“You too?” he said.

I nodded and let out a sigh, and sat down next to him.  It was beer and calamares for a long, long brunch for us.  Not quite equivalent to true love, but it would have to do.

Killers

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John Coyote has written a raw and powerful poem, Killer on the Road, about being a soldier.  The style is terse, the language rough.  The odd grammatical lapses, whether from art or habit, lend the poem a particular ragged urgency, like the sharp edge of a rusty piece of scrap metal.  This comes just in time for the latest debate, about whether or not to bomb something, anything, in Syria.

We suffer no shortage of moral pronouncements from either side, each more strident than the last; Coyote gives us something more precious, and far more useful: a portrait of a human being caught in the crosshairs.  In fact, it’s two human beings, caught in each other’s crosshairs, colliding, willy-nilly, in a reality of neither’s choosing.  For once in our most recent polemics, we see the enemy,  a suicide bomber, in his full humanity:

They killed his brothers.
They came to his country and torn it down to rubble.

He believed in a eye for a eye.
He will be in paradise soon.
Tears fall from his eyes as he think of his wife sleeping alone.

Suddenly, the suicide bomber is no longer a symbol, a cause, but an ordinary man, steeling himself to do what he believes he has to do, however delusional that may be.  Coyote makes no excuses here, pushes no particular agenda.  He simply points us to a reality we routinely choose to ignore: beneath the bomb filled jacket beats the heart of Homo Sapiens, one of us.  It doesn’t mean he’s justified in his actions.  It’s a mirror, pure and simple.  This is not a particularly new insight; battlefield correspondence from soldiers down through the ages reveals the same.  What’s new here and now is the permission to see it while we are still engaged in the conflict.  The soldier who, reacting instinctively to a threat, kills this man, ends up looking into this mirror, too long, perhaps, for his own good:

He hold pictures of a man’s wife  with two children.
He wonder why he has to kill this man?

He should of been home tossing a football with his brother or something.

He cries for the Iraqi he killed.
Old Sargent said he was a hero.

At this point, it’s too late for redemption:

He would do his duty and go home.
He don’t talk of God or Jesus anymore.
He just wishes for the blood to leave his hands.

There is no happy ending here, no satisfying resolution.  Scales drop from the eyes, but a lot that’s good in human values drops with them.

It’s a picture we need to hold onto while we’re making decisions that can kill not just bodies, but human spirits as well.  Coyote is clear about where he stands: stay home, no more killing.  Others might come to a different conclusion; there is the matter of precedent concerning chemical warfare to consider.  Either way.  Just let’s go into it with eyes wide open.

What

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Whatever is, is.  Can we know it?  Possibly, but we will never know if we know it truly.

Why we’re (not) all brilliant

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ID-10053123

By Africa. freedigitalphotos.net

It seems to me that the proliferation of know-it-alls (I have to include myself, unfortunately) in world culture is directly traceable to the rise of Wikipedia.  There’s the obvious point that we can get information on almost anything at a click, but there’s also the less obvious inference from the fact that it’s crowd-sourced.

Anybody can add his/her two cents worth, or so the myth goes.  That may have been true at the inception, but try it now, and see how far you get.  That whole wisdom-of-crowds thing got a pretty good thrashing, as it became clear in the early days of Wikipedia that a lot of garbage was being put up.  Eventually, the Wiki-editor was born, and now you need credentials to post, or even revise.

But the myth lives on, and the prevalent, if dubious, implication that one opinion is as good as the next.  Politically attractive as such egalitarianism is, it just ain’t so.  Ironically, everyone seems aware of this in regard to someone else’s opinions; we’ll have to look elsewhere for the root of our narcissism.

The other part of this illusion of expertise is the instant accessibility of information.  This goes back to a very common misconception of long standing: the idea that an expert is nothing more than a repository of data.  There have always been two stereotypes of genius.  On one side is Einstein, standing before a blackboard filled with utterly incomprehensible symbols, and on the other is Ken Jennings, the record Jeopardy winner.  To me, the two represent complementary aspects of genius: Jennings the large working memory, and Einstein the ability to see patterns and implications.  Somehow, in the popular mind, this has gotten reduced to access to large databases.  Presumably, in this view, Einstein simply knew the encryption key which made all those facts available to him.

A recent cartoon has a character saying, “I’ve outsourced my memory to Google.”  Would that it were so simple.  Having all that information accessible in your brain is inherently different from being able to look it up quickly on your computer.  It is where the Jennings and Einstein stereotypes merge; you simply cannot see the pattern in a dataset if you can’t see the dataset all at once, and that requires a large working memory, inside your calabash, not on your desk.  Worse yet, you can’t see the fallacy in any given proposition if you can’t quickly compare it to other propositions.

My students used to ask me how you can choose between two plausible, but contradictory propositions.  Well, googling it will not help.  You need to closely examine the underlying assumptions of the two ideas, as well as the implications.  You also need to see how compatible they are with other propositions.  This is possible without a good working memory, but very difficult.

Much easier to pick a side, and stick with it.  You see this mirrored all the time in online “discussions.”  A makes an assertion; B makes a counter-assertion.  From that point, it’s either alternating re-assertions, or ad hominem, frequently both.  There is an appalling scarcity of any relevance from one comment to another.  If an adversary’s point is acknowledged at all, it is only as a prelude to insult.  “You say x; you’re hopelessly naive.”

Internet knowledge is very broad, but shallow as a puddle, I’m afraid.  Add to that the fact that most search engines will give you what the algorithm says you want, and online genius can be summed up in one word:

Fool.