Thomas Pynchon makes me giggle

By

Fred Zackel

As the 2011 Nobel Prize announcement nears (October 12th for our handicappers), the U.K. betting site Ladbrokes has posted odds for the prize–putting Thomas Pynchon at (give or take) 10/1 odds to win the prize for literature.

I got my fingers crossed.

First off, Pynchon is clever and that makes his playfulness most pleasurable. His favorite playground is America’s fondness for conspiracy theories. These theories, no matter how whacko they sound, summarize and reflect cherished American values and morals. Lots of us are alienated from official reality. We find it easy (and maybe self-defeating) to deny its validity. (As a student of mine once said, “I think a lot of the time we take for granted the history of the world.”) But what if our own conclusions are denied legitimacy? What Pynchon does that is so subversive is to deny them closure. And seeing how those well-intentioned wackos are left high and dry actually adds to my merriment.

I first discovered Pynchon as the best man for Richard Farina’s marriage to Mimi Baez. I was a big fan of Farina’s novel “Been Down So Long It Looks Up to Me,” and so I went looking for Pynchon’s first novel. “V” was a rabbit hole, or maybe an oubliette. I fell. Maybe I was pushed. One enigmatic woman may have been at the nexus of the great events of the 20th century? I also traveled decades and the world with a schlemihl named Benny Profane and with Herbert Stencil, questing after his father, who may have been a legendary British spy. Hunting alligators in the New York sewers? A living figurehead lashed to the bow-sprit of a boat? Jewish princesses getting nose jobs? Coeds with 72 pairs of Bermuda shorts? All culminating in the trash heaps of Malta a half-century before? A long, strange trip indeed. And I was hooked by a sideways look at how we perceive reality. And conspiracy. “They – whoever ‘they’ were – seemed to be calling the tune,” was one ominous thought. Later, “Any situation takes shape from events much lower than the merely human.” Most importantly I learned that progress was best imagined as only a new coat of paint on our xebec adrift.

I discovered Pynchon's second novel, “The Crying of Lot 49,” set in California, was much more accessible. Published in 1966, in addition to being in the detective genre, “The Crying Lot of 49” was a comedy. A comic book. A satire. Ominous and sinister. The New York Times review from 3 June 1966 called it a “streamlined doomsday machine.”

“One summer afternoon, Mrs. Oedipa Maas came home from a Tupperware party whose hostess had put perhaps too much kirsch in the fondue to find that she, Oedipa, had been named executor, or she supposed executrix, of the estate of one Pierce Inverarity, a California real estate mogul who had once lost two million dollars in his spare time but still had assets numerous and tangled enough to make the job of sorting it all out more than honorary.”

Oedipa Maas, our Great Detective, should have the skills needed to “solve the mystery”:

“Having no apparatus except gut fear and female cunning to examine this formless magic, to understand how it works, how to measure its field strength, count its lines of force, she may fall back on superstition, or take up a useful hobby like embroidery, or go mad, or marry a disc jockey. If the tower is everywhere and the knight of deliverance no proof against its magic, what else?”

She too has stumbled onto a conspiracy:

“You one of those right wing nut outfits?” inquired the diplomatic Metzger.
Fallopian twinkled. “They accuse us of being paranoids.”
“They?” inquired Metzger, twinkling also.
“Us?” asked Oedipa.

She wanders the California maze, and the plot must be labyrinthine. Preferably it must show incredible interconnections between disparate events and occurrences. So Pynchon throws at her a parody of a Jacobean revenge drama entitled “The Courier's Tragedy,” that introduces Oedipa to the conspiracy, which may or may not include a 1960s corporate conspiracy involving the bones of World War II American GIs being used as charcoal cigarette filters. Oh, and there is drug usage, both legal and illicit. Including dosing American housewives with LSD. To this mixture, Pynchon adds a wealth of references to science and technology and to even more obscure historical events and sinister locations. Including but not limited to entropy and communication theory, a secret library within the Vatican and Maxwell's demon. Oh, and Yoyodyne, the most infamous aerospace firm beloved by Pynchonmaniacs.

And all leads to a postage stamp auction where …

We have to stop here and consider conspiracy theorists. Some theorists are their own white noise. They can’t stop shouting their paranoia no matter what. This very morning, for instance, while I was getting an oil change, an older rural couple talked very loudly and non-stop for 45 minutes about their secret fears. They seemed happiest declaiming that Onstar™ which is standard on many new GM models enables the U.S. Government to eavesdrop on its citizens. They were happy because they had All The Answers. For a while all conspiracy theories are amusing. But their theorists being relentless and thus having All The Answers makes them … tedious.

Pynchon’s heroes do not get that far. On their quest they often discover they are trying to solve a puzzle that may have been created by their own paranoia and /or their disintegrated personalities. Sometimes the spots on the butterfly’s wings are just spots and not the handiwork of spies like Robert Baden-Powell before the First World War.

According to “The Crying of Lot 49,” Pynchon uses the symbol of the muted horn to represent the voices we don’t hear or the connections that have been cut. It also represents all those are silenced by Big America, or rather Our Postmodern Life. It means the pointless, the loveless, the inanimate. Those on the margins and the margin itself. Which also suggests they may or may not actually exist …

In any Pynchon book, paranoia is a social disease. We catch it from living in this post-modernist American society. “Only the paranoid survive.” Andrew Grove, the founder of Intell, said that. Yep, the founder of the Silicon Valley corporate giant said it. If you’re not paranoid, you’re … naïve. Only the paranoid believe in conspiracy. (Who killed JFK? Have we landed on the moon? Was Obama born in Hawaii? Your answers tell me where you stand.) Or as Doc thinks in “Inherent Vice,” “Paranoia was a tool of the trade, it pointed you in directions you might not have seen to go.”

Forty-three years separates “The Crying of Lot 49” from “Inherent Vice.”

His seventh book, his private eye novel, “Inherent Vice,” was published in 2009. Also set in Los Angeles, this book was part detective novel and part literary romp. Pynchon received many astonishing reviews. “This reader would go so far as to call it a beach read,” said Carol Memmott of USA TODAY. Memmott added, “It's worth the trip.” Wow. No kidding. A beach read? USA TODAY? Wow, that’s a giggle.

Why a private eye book? Well, the mystery genre is a rubric, an outline, a template, a skeleton, and as such is always a serviceable platform to riff on, to improvise with. (Consider “The Long Goodbye” by Raymond Chandler, for instance. Boy, did he wander off the reservation.) As with any genre, it has its conventions, its touchstones that are comfortable and immediately acceptable for its readers. (This past summer Harry Potter and his nemesis Voldemort did a Reichenbach Falls jump together in the series finale.) And then there is the love of the genre itself. Pynchon does love the genre. No smirky, snarky dilettante descending from an ivory literary tower.

Larry “Doc” Sportello is the central figure. Doc might be the metaphorical grandson of Philip Marlowe, born of the nastiness within the Big Sleep and he might be the metaphorical son of “Jake, it’s only Chinatown.”

“[Doc] understood for a second and a half that he belonged to a single and ancient martial tradition in which resisting authority, subduing handguns, defending an old lady's honor all amounted to the same thing.”

Doc is not a gumshoe, but a “gumsandal.” He lives at the beach in a dingy bachelor pad in Gordita, a sort of Manhattan Beach in the 1960s, by the way. He lives on gorditas and beer. “The sign on his door read LSD Investigations, LSD, as he explained when people asked, which was not often, standing for 'Location, Surveillance, Detection.'”

And then she walks in …

“She came along the alley and up the back steps the way she always used to. Doc hadn't seen here for over a year. Nobody had. Back then it was always sandals, bottom half of a flower-print bikini, faded Country Joe & the Fish T-shirt. Tonight she was all in flatland gear, hair a lot shorter than he remembered, looking just like she swore she'd never look.”

Shasta Fay Hepworth, a former lover of Doc’s, is here because of a plot to kidnap her new lover. A missing (possibly kidnapped) billionaire real-estate mogul is named Mickey Wolfmann, who makes “Godzilla look like a conservationist.” Mickey has a collection of pornographic ties, decorated with images of his lovers. But in that collection of pornographic ties, which lover is absent? Worst of all, Mickey want to give away his money and, if the idea caught on, that could tear apart the national economy and thus national security.

The femme fatale enters the private investigator’s life. “There’s this guy,” she says. And also, “I’m just the bait.” We have entered familiar territory. Doc is caught by how her face looks with the orange light of sunset catching it.

We are also on the dark side of the California dream that has always slid into the California Nightmare. Bittersweet as Hammett, Chandler, Macdonald and all the private eye tribe.

“There is no avoiding time, the sea of time, the sea of memory and forgetfulness, the years of promise, gone and unrecoverable, of the land almost allowed to claim its better destiny, only to have the claim jumped by evildoers known all too well, and taken instead and held hostage to the future we must now live in forever.”

Boy, doesn’t that image of claim jumpers resonate through the end of California Dreaming?

What is an “inherent vice?” A term out of the marine insurance business that describes breakage and damage you just can't avoid. An uninsurable defect of a cargo or vessel that will trigger its deterioration.

“Is that like original sin?” asks the detective.

Ah, well, could be. Or maybe entropy, a concept from physics to describe a system winding down or corroding that permeates other Pynchon novels.

“Inherent Vice” is both an homage to and parody of the classic private detective. It is also both an homage to and parody of the 1960s Southern California beach life. Most of all, “Inherent Vice” is savoring that lost moment in time. Yet, even more than being a simple exercise in nostalgia, it counts the cost of losing those tropes. And it still feels threatened by what replaced them. By the ending, we get “a visceral sense of sadness and fallenness,” to quote John Wilson of Christianity Today. (Not kidding. Christianity Today.) Yes, the book is about Original Sin and Redemption. (Basic American Lit tropes, right?)

Pynchon sees the roots of our vices in the vices of the hippie era. These “inherent vices” were there that long ago, had anyone recognized them. Why did the future ended up so sucky when the ‘60s seemed so bright?

Doc is frequently dismayed, “caught in a low-level bummer he couldn’t find a way out of, about how the Psychedelic Sixties, this little parenthesis of light, might close after all, and all be lost, taken back into darkness…”

Forget about the plot. You can catch up when you read the book for the second time. Remember that Leigh Brackett, William Faulkner and Raymond Chandler—both the original author of the novel and the scriptwriters adapting it—were unable to figure out who killed the chauffeur in “The Big Sleep.”

A private eye would not be conventional unless he has a nemesis within the police department. Doc’s nemesis is Detective Lt. Bigfoot Bjornsen, an LAPD detective who does Cal Worthington-like TV spots on the side. Celebrity is all, eh? Bjornsen is also a secret collector of barbed wire, who, when not chomping on his trademark chocolate-covered frozen bananas, can be found hanging out at the Waste-a-Perp Target Range in the “Urban, Gang-related and Hippie (UGH) section.” (Bananas are a big part of Pynchon; he had bazillions of them in his masterpiece “Gravity’s Rainbow.”)

Some readers aren’t amused by the drugs in Pynchon’s novels. Yet drug usage has always been at the roots of detective fiction. For instance, Sherlock Holmes needs to be drawn out of the purple haze of his seven percent solution just to work pleasantly with others, while Pynchon’s Great Detective “Doc” Sportello can resist the impulse to light a joint. I have always been amused that Sherlock Holmes was NOT incapacitated by his coke addiction. On the other hand, ol’ Sherlock made claims only a doper would make. He chain-smoked, but he could also instantly identify 150 different perfume. Uh-huh.

I can giggle at drug usage and their delirious effects because I can also see how dope usage can be a writer’s strategy to promote suspense or set up scenes or even work as a critique on a society. “Inherent Vice” has a lot of cheap jokes about dopers. “My mind’s been wandering again?” Or when “Doc started a file on all these reports, and hoped he wouldn’t forget where he was stashing it.” Who knows what happened when the private eye was stoned? “Here’s the second time you’ve been found asleep at a crime scene.” Doc … passed out. (Maybe.) Some one-lines are pure 1960s nostalgia: Two can score as cheaply as one. A cute retro one says, “Let’s light this up and pretend we came out to smoke it.” Pynchon links drug usage to other jokes, including one about Driver’s Ed: “All that stuff they wanted you to remember, man?” Pynchon’s language is lovely here, too: “a driveling of dopers…” At times he descends into just plain silliness: asking an Ouija board where we can score. When Doc comes across money with Nixon’s face, he thinks again, he thinks he is merely having trouble focusing. Or is that a prediction of Nixonian legacies?

I giggle over Pynchon’s sideways mania. The lost continent called Lemuria is known as “the Atlantis of the Pacific.” St Flip of Lauderdale is a mystic surfer who ventures out too far to catch impossible waves. Penny Kimball, an ex-lover of Doc’s, is a deputy district attorney who sets up Doc. (Bad Penny!) Rudy Blatnoyd is a drug-dealing dentist. A Japanese greasy spoon that offers the best Swedish pancakes in Los Angeles, for another. (I got heartburn there, I swear.) Counterfeit money with Nixon’s face on it? The jellyfish teriyaki croquettes? Vietnam is compared to your mother doing smack? A building in Los Angeles that is a six story high golden fang? The paranoia of a gated enclave inside the already gated community? A California blonde with store-bought teeth? And purple pork rind that glows in the dark? The bikers who roll past in military precision?

I read Thomas Pynchon because he's fun. Pynchon is shameless in his joking. Look for wonderfully silly names and goofy acronyms. There is also graphic sexual activity within the book. At the same time, his concerns are important, and his statements about the political underbelly of America have helped make his books sell, yes, in the millions.

Yes, there is plenty these days to giggle over. In the wake of Weinergate, a woman interviewed on CNN said we already live within a Surveillance State. Get used to it. Bad enough the cctv follows you around the room … does your smart phone know where you are? And for whom is it recording this data? Ever been profiled by the TSA? Wanna be patted down? Do you know who can access and has already accessed your medical records?

We live in a time when an algorithm can decide you’re a terrorist. So we Pynchon fanatics snuggle up with and find a temporary comfort in Pynchon’s narratives, knowing that he is sane and so are we and we can always set the book down and see that the world may never be again the way it seemed to be …

Pynchon’s books ask what is most frightening: That no one is in charge, that all is chaos and no meaning can be found. That someone unknown is manipulating for reasons unknown. (Princess Diana spoke of the Gray Men of the Palace. Hmm.) Conspiracies are a narrative fun, as long as you can abandon them. Those who cannot still want to see Obama’s birth certificate, or bin Laden’s corpse, or what’s under Trump’s hairline, or what makes Sarah run.

At the core, I love Pynchon’s suggestion that we quest after love. In Pynchon’s world, we are all lonely and looking for love. But we live now. “Kindness without a price tag …” Sounds deliciously tempting. If only …

God is a Tool and a Weapon

Fred Zackel

A pride of lions in the night is Chaos. Out of Chaos comes Order.

So … In God We Trust.

That makes a nice bumper sticker. There is more, of course, that cascades from that turning point in our evolution.

For example, what we triggered by imagining the Divine might be our way of saying we imagine that we’re getting noticed by the Cosmos. American naturalist writer Stephen Crane (1871-1900) wrote the following doggerel:

A man said to the universe:
“Sir I exist!”
“However,” replied the universe,
“The fact has not created in me
“A sense of obligation.”

That being the case, we humans invented God. Or the gods. Or the Goddess. As a night light.

I imagined you, God. You are a palimpsest of all the imagery my ancestors and family and culture could have imagined before me that they all slathered onto me like butter on bread.

The Divine is evolutionary technology. A weapon. Or a tool.

Being Human, we “imagineered” our Divines, all of them, to be extensions of us. To be solutions to our desperate straits.

As a sidebar, imagining the Divine validates us. We become real players by being seen by the Divine. I have self-esteem because You see Me, Lord. That this conceit is so one-sided, so vain, well, why should that be a problem? After all, I know YOU see ME. (Even better it’s great that YOU don’t put me on the spot except through my imagination.)

The world assaults me. Hell is other people.

But “In God We Trust” is printed on the Almighty Dollar.

We are creatures of the Herd. I am a social creature. I network. Without the Herd, we are lost in the white noise of our own tumbling thoughts. We are lost in our solitude.

Being Human, we suffer from chronic loneliness. Comes from being up an acacia tree on the beige savannah listening to our kin being eaten by lions and hyenas in the night, I suspect.

I always wondered how much of our imagination grew out of us being omnivores and not carnivores for all those millennia on the beige savannah. After all, omnivores have imagination. When you can eat anything, the possibilities are endless. And doubt and fear hold hands like children lost.

Solitude is dark. Being Human, we are scared of the dark. The beige savannah at night was always filled with monsters that could see and smell us. Hyenas, for instance. Human hairs were recovered from a 200,000-year-old clump of hyena dung found in Gladysvale cave, South Africa. Hyenas have the strongest jaws in the animal kingdom. By the way, listen closely tonight. Hyenas signal each other with what most observers say sounds like an asthma attack.

Death comes like a cough in the night.

A lioness hidden in the long grass selects her target, leaps, attacks and kills a zebra, her sharp teeth crushing its windpipe as the animal is hauled squealing and suffocating to the ground. Then the lioness does not move: the impassive brutality of the carnivore. Stare into the lioness’ eyes: the impassive patience of the carnivore. (The abyss looks back at us.) She waits to dine. She has plenty of time until death comes.

In mid-November 2007, in the Maralal safari area north-east of Nairobi, Moses Lekalau, a thirty-five year old Kenyan herdsman, was jumped by a lion. He fought off the beast and killed it with a spear in a grueling half-hour long battle. But then, the poor man exhausted from his efforts, died after being attacked by a pack of hyenas. Wildlife experts point out that it is very rare for hyenas to attack people; hyenas eat leftovers from other predators. Mister Lekala was one such leftover.

Want some good advice? The kind of advice that has helped you and me and our species survive the past four or five million years? In the dark when you can see eyes winking at you, it’s time to fight or flee.

But I may be barking up the wrong tree.

Solitude is not part of the Herd. We have been culled, you and I, even if we did it to ourselves. Even if we took it up ourselves to move away from safety and security. That we did it to ourselves will not help us. Being alone drifts into loneliness and sometimes into fear.

The Book of Job says, “And I only am escaped alone to tell thee.”

At this instant, the abyss lies inside us. I am human; see me fear.

The Terror is the anonymity that comes with the abyss.

As a species, we saw our faces reflected in the waterhole and realized that we stood apart from the Great Scheme of Things. We were sentients aware of ourselves. We had a Theory of Mind, and we saw our own mortality and were scared shitless.

One sinister word for it, “abyss” — which comes from the Greek, “a” or “without” and “byssos” or “bottom” – lets us imagine a horrific image that perfectly evokes the dark infinities and the primal chaos.

The abyss is mesmerizing, and we do love being mesmerized.
The abyss suggests we all have an appointment in Samara, or rather, an appointment with despair, the goddess of empty rooms. The abyss is about death.

Who among us wants to face it?

Wanting to face death, well, you must be a refugee from something worse, right? And that’s your life. Something worse is … being alive. We must sympathize with our suicides.

Being human, we love being in control. Being human, we love being competent. The abyss threatens both illusions. Chaos is uncertainty, volatility and anxiety … and fear.

Anomie & chaos hold hands; they are enraptured of each other.

The uncertainty of an afterlife creates anxiety. I don’t want to die! What will happen to me? What we Christians call Original Sin is probably predicated by our Original Fear of Death.

Save us, we beg the Immortal Divine.

But no one returns from the Undiscovered Country.

Trust God on this one, okay?

For that reason alone, we need to have imagined a conscious being to have created us for His (?) Purposes. (You mean, for Our Purposes?) Either way, the alternatives are frightening to contemplate; they give us vertigo, as if we stood at a great height with a stiff wind at our backs over an never-ending abyss. Who will protect us?

In ancient Egypt, the Cosmic “order” is “maat.” Notice that these ancient gods care about the weight of the soul versus the weight of a feather. Yet this concept was not unique to the ancients. When the great Renaissance sculptor Michelangelo was alive, most Christians believed that Saint Michael the Archangel holds the scales that weigh the soul after death. He is the bridge between Life and the Afterlife.

Be amazed! Be astonished! The gods care about US. Astonishing, isn’t it, that with the entire cosmos as their bailiwick — a hundred billion galaxies! — the gods worry about the weight of our miserable souls. Not all the human souls combined into a gigantic blog, but each individual soul individually.

The Gods care about us on a one-to-one basis.

We’re so vain that we probably think this cosmos is about us.

The Ugarit god of chaos was Mot, or more formally, Mot-and-Shar, aka “death and the prince,” which was an in-joke among the Canaanites (aka the Ugarites) that had a multiple of meanings, including Death and the Prince of Dissolution or maybe Death and the Prince of Evil. (Death has a sidekick, a Doctor Watson to chronicle his adventures …? Hmm.)

When folks back then were feeling ironic, or maybe paranoid about the future, Mot got called “the beloved one,” which oozes more with resignation and outright begging than with the audacity of hope. Generally speaking, Mot served a lot of community needs. He was the god of sterility, death, and the underworld. In one hand he holds the scepter of bereavement, and in the other the scepter of widowhood. His jaws and throat are described in cosmic proportions and serve as a euphemism for death.

The Jaws of Death, eh? Hmm, I’ve heard that one before.

As far as most humans see it, the greatest battlefield is between Chaos and Order. As long as people go to work together, today there will be no revolution. (The Herd is a Cosmic Force, too. When the Herd is restless with too many obsolete ideas, it can stampede into revolution at the slightest noise. See Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Syria … Scotland?)

OTOH, human beings are basically lazy. This is not said in the derogative. Once we get past survival and the sexual replication of ourselves, we should enjoy life. Ordinary life is supposed to drift by. That’s what our ancestors for the past four or five million years dreamed about and prayed for sitting on ther branches of an acacia tree. They would treasure that we take all their hard work and sacrifice for granted.
We treasure continuity. Even in our courts, where what the higher courts call “stare decisis” means “let the decision stand.”

U. S. Supreme Court Justice Brandeis in his most famous dissent with the Court said in “Olmstead vs. U.S.” that the original framers of our Constitution “conferred, as against the government, the right to be left alone—the most comprehensive of rights, and the right most valued by civilized man.”

Give me a break. I vant to be alone.

But being lazy is also being passive.

Complacency is a biological luxury, mostly. Sloths pull it off with classic panache. That a sloth can grow moss on its belly from upside-down inactivity haunts me, I admit. With a mossy belly, even I would feel guilty. Oh, I can get over it in time …

We avoid choices. We vote for the incumbent. We never question the faith of our fathers. (Abraham did question the faith of his fathers; look where it got him. At the age of 99, he prowls the tribal tents at night, a bloody flint knife in hand, an old man bleeding at the crotch, looking for new converts to his new monotheism. A blood-drenched lunatic, Abraham became the common root of Jews, Christians and Muslims. Why do I have so much trouble with him? Why is he so terrifying?)

Being basically lazy and passive, we accept the default choice.
We do not like to take matters into our own hands. We do not like to change our behaviors. Inertia then dictates our behavior. We stay the course.

We thus take things for granted and assume somebody else will keep the machinery maintained for our listening enjoyment.

We have income tax deductions taken from our paychecks. We have social security taken from our paychecks. We want to be automatically enrolled in that Radically New System that Improves Our Lives without us asking for or filling out an application. We don’t want a federal health care program because it might fuck with our Medicare.

A lot can be said for paternalism.

Our Father up in Heaven … Love Me!

Yet the cosmos is not intrinsically random. The mechanisms replicate themselves in regular ways. The fluctuations themselves are random; the rules, once triggered randomly, then seem to work in orderly ways. In evolution, for instance, natural selection, sexual selection, mutation, genetic drift, gene flow, all contribute to these changes in human beings. Some triggers are infinitesimal in what changes happen, while others occur on a gargantuan scale. Some are successful, while others produce dead ends.

Serendipity is a goddess. She brings Order to Chaos. Same as her sister Entropy.

The abyss is inside us. It is not external. It is the fear that death brings nothingness. The Divine helps us keep the abyss at bay. The Divine is our imaginary friend. We imagined the Divine so we could cope with solitude. We crave solace, even if it’s deferred. Even if it’s denied, we will forgive Him.

Solitude is unsettling. Panic-inducing sometimes, too. Look around. What do you hear? Silence. Well, Silence is not sensory deprivation. But being human we don’t think so. Pascal wrote in his Pensées, “The eternal silence of these infinite spaces fills me with dread.”

We cry out, “I can talk to God in the silence.” Hear my echoes through the empty rooms. We imagine the Divine as our companion in order to have our fear of solitude dissipate. Be quiet! I am listening to God.

Yea, though I walk through the Valley of the Shadow of Death … I am not alone. Hey, I can get the Divine to walk with me; the Divine is my bodyguard, my safety, my security. Watch me. Please watch over me, Oh Lord.

I hate being alone. Sensory deprivation is too close to being thrown into the abyss.

As the fear fades, we may abandon our fears and gain a sense of frustration at how the Cosmos ignores our little bleats. Which brings us back to Stephen Crane. (See above.)

We are made in the image of God. We are a mirror’s reflection of Him. He looks at us to see Himself acting. Without us, He wouldn’t know who He is. We made Him who He is.

Our hostility is often incoherent. Infuriating, isn’t it, the Silence of the Divine?

Consciousness is ultimately personal; to paraphrase the British author Ian McEwan, we enjoy contemplating our brain. Consciousness when viewed from inside feels like a Las Vegas neon sign in the desert twilight: it feels brighter than it is. Consciousness lives within the bell jars of our skulls; we think more of it shines out than actually does. That may be why I treasure the time alone with my thoughts. (Cell phones were made to interrupt us, to distract us from being alone with our thoughts. Quick! Throw them out of your car!)

Some of us shine and light up the night. After her tragic death from skiing in March, 2009, film scholar David Kipen said: “(Tony Award-winning actress Natasha) Richardson radiated intelligence in everything she did.”

Let us ruminate over that notion: she “radiated intelligence.”

In terms of our species, is there any better epitaph?

We can be seen from Space also means we have usurped the Divine. We have his vantage point on ourselves. (Better than looking in a mirror, eh, Bunky?) Another reason what that Apollo 8 photograph of the blue and white ball of earth floating in black space is so wonderful. Us looking at ourselves; our first step into stellar narcissism.

The Apollo 8 photo is our largest mirror. Our greatest self-portrait. What comes second is our footsteps in the moon dust.

Our computers have lengthened our central nervous systems. Now we can reach out anywhere and touch everything, even if anything and everything are actually only virtually here and now. As we grow more global, as we evolve, will the Divine be more virtual yet more personal?

What god will we dream up next?

Boredom is the downside of having nothing to do. Idle hands are the devil’s workshop. I need stimulation. No, I cannot sit still. We are not yet adults in this Cosmos. Arrgghh!

On the beige savannah, part of me is always on alert for the beige lion moving through the swaying grasses. (No kidding, beige savannah is the most popular interior house paint in the world Four, maybe three million years we lived there. I live in my living room. I have a tan sofa and matching armchairs. We want the savannah still; it was our species’ Garden of Eden, after all. Perhaps that’s why we always want a white ceiling, when a sky-blue one might be more cheery.)

The supernatural overwhelms the rational, and the abyss is the chasm between them. But where the hell is the bridge? Oh, it’s there, just invisible, as if this were an Indiana Jones movie. Faith is the Bridge. Just sprinkle the sand and then step off. Faith helps us walk the bridge we cannot see. We are the bridge; the bridge lies inside us.

Without faith, without belief, we feel the phantom pains of the amputee. We know something is missing, but maybe not what it is. We have lost our grip, His hand to hold, our tool, our weapon against the Long Cold Night. We cannot walk that bridge so well.

We would fall forever. The abyss is bottomless.

But let me quote William James' almost infamous definition of religion in “The Varieties of Religious Experience”: “Religion … shall mean for us the feelings, acts, and experiences of individual men in their solitude, so far as they apprehend themselves to stand in relation to whatever they consider the divine.”

Wrestling with God is deciphering the mind of God.

Let us also tell ourselves that wrestling with God is searching our hearts for wisdom and the courage to go it alone without Him. Without a night light.

God is a Tool and a Weapon
Fred Zackel
A pride of lions in the night is Chaos. Out of Chaos comes Order.
So … In God We Trust.
That makes a nice bumper sticker. There is more, of course, that cascades from that turning point in our evolution.
For example, what we triggered by imagining the Divine might be our way of saying we imagine that we’re getting noticed by the Cosmos. American naturalist writer Stephen Crane (1871-1900) wrote the following doggerel:
A man said to the universe:
“Sir I exist!”
“However,” replied the universe,
“The fact has not created in me
“A sense of obligation.”
That being the case, we humans invented God. Or the gods. Or the Goddess. As a night light.
I imagined you, God. You are a palimpsest of all the imagery my ancestors and family and culture could have imagined before me that they all slathered onto me like butter on bread.
The Divine is evolutionary technology. A weapon. Or a tool.
Being Human, we “imagineered” our Divines, all of them, to be extensions of us. To be solutions to our desperate straits.
As a sidebar, imagining the Divine validates us. We become real players by being seen by the Divine. I have self-esteem because You see Me, Lord. That this conceit is so one-sided, so vain, well, why should that be a problem? After all, I know YOU see ME. (Even better it’s great that YOU don’t put me on the spot except through my imagination.)
The world assaults me. Hell is other people.
But “In God We Trust” is printed on the Almighty Dollar.
We are creatures of the Herd. I am a social creature. I network. Without the Herd, we are lost in the white noise of our own tumbling thoughts. We are lost in our solitude.
Being Human, we suffer from chronic loneliness. Comes from being up an acacia tree on the beige savannah listening to our kin being eaten by lions and hyenas in the night, I suspect.
I always wondered how much of our imagination grew out of us being omnivores and not carnivores for all those millennia on the beige savannah. After all, omnivores have imagination. When you can eat anything, the possibilities are endless. And doubt and fear hold hands like children lost.
Solitude is dark. Being Human, we are scared of the dark. The beige savannah at night was always filled with monsters that could see and smell us. Hyenas, for instance. Human hairs were recovered from a 200,000-year-old clump of hyena dung found in Gladysvale cave, South Africa. Hyenas have the strongest jaws in the animal kingdom. By the way, listen closely tonight. Hyenas signal each other with what most observers say sounds like an asthma attack.
Death comes like a cough in the night.
A lioness hidden in the long grass selects her target, leaps, attacks and kills a zebra, her sharp teeth crushing its windpipe as the animal is hauled squealing and suffocating to the ground. Then the lioness does not move: the impassive brutality of the carnivore. Stare into the lioness’ eyes: the impassive patience of the carnivore. (The abyss looks back at us.) She waits to dine. She has plenty of time until death comes.
In mid-November 2007, in the Maralal safari area north-east of Nairobi, Moses Lekalau, a thirty-five year old Kenyan herdsman, was jumped by a lion. He fought off the beast and killed it with a spear in a grueling half-hour long battle. But then, the poor man exhausted from his efforts, died after being attacked by a pack of hyenas. Wildlife experts point out that it is very rare for hyenas to attack people; hyenas eat leftovers from other predators. Mister Lekala was one such leftover.
Want some good advice? The kind of advice that has helped you and me and our species survive the past four or five million years? In the dark when you can see eyes winking at you, it’s time to fight or flee.
But I may be barking up the wrong tree.
Solitude is not part of the Herd. We have been culled, you and I, even if we did it to ourselves. Even if we took it up ourselves to move away from safety and security. That we did it to ourselves will not help us. Being alone drifts into loneliness and sometimes into fear.
The Book of Job says, “And I only am escaped alone to tell thee.”
At this instant, the abyss lies inside us. I am human; see me fear.
The Terror is the anonymity that comes with the abyss.
As a species, we saw our faces reflected in the waterhole and realized that we stood apart from the Great Scheme of Things. We were sentients aware of ourselves. We had a Theory of Mind, and we saw our own mortality and were scared shitless.
One sinister word for it, “abyss” — which comes from the Greek, “a” or “without” and “byssos” or “bottom” – lets us imagine a horrific image that perfectly evokes the dark infinities and the primal chaos.
The abyss is mesmerizing, and we do love being mesmerized.
The abyss suggests we all have an appointment in Samara, or rather, an appointment with despair, the goddess of empty rooms. The abyss is about death.
Who among us wants to face it?
Wanting to face death, well, you must be a refugee from something worse, right? And that’s your life. Something worse is … being alive. We must sympathize with our suicides.
Being human, we love being in control. Being human, we love being competent. The abyss threatens both illusions. Chaos is uncertainty, volatility and anxiety … and fear.
Anomie & chaos hold hands; they are enraptured of each other.
The uncertainty of an afterlife creates anxiety. I don’t want to die! What will happen to me? What we Christians call Original Sin is probably predicated by our Original Fear of Death. Save us, we beg the Immortal Divine.
But no one returns from the Undiscovered Country.
Trust in God on this one, okay?
For that reason alone, we need to have imagined a conscious being to have created us for His (?) Purposes. (You mean, for Our Purposes?) Either way, the alternatives are frightening to contemplate; they give us vertigo, as if we stood at a great height with a stiff wind at our backs over an never-ending abyss. Who will protect us?
In ancient Egypt, the Cosmic “order” is “maat.” Notice that these ancient gods care about the weight of the soul versus the weight of a feather. Yet this concept was not unique to the ancients. When the great Renaissance sculptor Michelangelo was alive, most Christians believed that Saint Michael the Archangel holds the scales that weigh the soul after death. He is the bridge between Life and the Afterlife.
Be amazed! Be astonished! The gods care about US. Astonishing, isn’t it, that with the entire cosmos as their bailiwick — a hundred billion galaxies! — the gods worry about the weight of our miserable souls. Not all the human souls combined into a gigantic blog, but each individual soul individually.
The Gods care about us on a one-to-one basis.
We’re so vain that we probably think this cosmos is about us.
The Ugarit god of chaos was Mot, or more formally, Mot-and-Shar, aka “death and the prince,” which was an in-joke among the Canaanites (aka the Ugarites) that had a multiple of meanings, including Death and the Prince of Dissolution or maybe Death and the Prince of Evil. (Death has a sidekick, a Doctor Watson to chronicle his adventures …? Hmm.)
When folks back then were feeling ironic, or maybe paranoid about the future, Mot got called “the beloved one,” which oozes more with resignation and outright begging than with the audacity of hope. Generally speaking, Mot served a lot of community needs. He was the god of sterility, death, and the underworld. In one hand he holds the scepter of bereavement, and in the other the scepter of widowhood. His jaws and throat are described in cosmic proportions and serve as a euphemism for death.
The Jaws of Death, eh? Hmm, I’ve heard that one before.
As far as most humans see it, the greatest battlefield is between Chaos and Order. As long as people go to work together, today there will be no revolution. (The Herd is a Cosmic Force, too. When the Herd is restless with too many obsolete ideas, it can stampede into revolution at the slightest noise. See Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Syria … Scotland?)
OTOH, human beings are basically lazy. This is not said in the derogative. Once we get past survival and the sexual replication of ourselves, we should enjoy life. Ordinary life is supposed to drift by. That’s what our ancestors for the past four or five million years dreamed about and prayed for sitting on ther branches of an acacia tree. They would treasure that we take all their hard work and sacrifice for granted.
We treasure continuity. Even in our courts, where what the higher courts call “stare decisis” means “let the decision stand.”
U. S. Supreme Court Justice Brandeis in his most famous dissent with the Court said in “Olmstead vs. U.S.” that the original framers of our Constitution “conferred, as against the government, the right to be left alone—the most comprehensive of rights, and the right most valued by civilized man.”
Give me a break. I vant to be alone.
But being lazy is also being passive.
Complacency is a biological luxury, mostly. Sloths pull it off with classic panache. That a sloth can grow moss on its belly from upside-down inactivity haunts me, I admit. With a mossy belly, even I would feel guilty. Oh, I can get over it in time …
We avoid choices. We vote for the incumbent. We never question the faith of our fathers. (Abraham did question the faith of his fathers; look where it got him. At the age of 99, he prowls the tribal tents at night, a bloody flint knife in hand, an old man bleeding at the crotch, looking for new converts to his new monotheism. A blood-drenched lunatic, Abraham became the common root of Jews, Christians and Muslims. Why do I have so much trouble with him? Why is he so terrifying?)
Being basically lazy and passive, we accept the default choice.
We do not like to take matters into our own hands. We do not like to change our behaviors. Inertia then dictates our behavior. We stay the course.
We thus take things for granted and assume somebody else will keep the machinery maintained for our listening enjoyment.
We have income tax deductions taken from our paychecks. We have social security taken from our paychecks. We want to be automatically enrolled in that Radically New System that Improves Our Lives without us asking for or filling out an application. We don’t want a federal health care program because it might fuck with our Medicare.
A lot can be said for paternalism.
Our Father up in Heaven … Love Me!
Yet the cosmos is not intrinsically random. The mechanisms replicate themselves in regular ways. The fluctuations themselves are random; the rules, once triggered randomly, then seem to work in orderly ways. In evolution, for instance, natural selection, sexual selection, mutation, genetic drift, gene flow, all contribute to these changes in human beings. Some triggers are infinitesimal in what changes happen, while others occur on a gargantuan scale. Some are successful, while others produce dead ends.
Serendipity is a goddess. She brings Order to Chaos. Same as her sister Entropy.
The abyss is inside us. It is not external. It is the fear that death brings nothingness. The Divine helps us keep the abyss at bay. The Divine is our imaginary friend. We imagined the Divine so we could cope with solitude. We crave solace, even if it’s deferred. Even if it’s denied, we will forgive Him.
Solitude is unsettling. Panic-inducing sometimes, too. Look around. What do you hear? Silence. Well, Silence is not sensory deprivation. But being human we don’t think so. Pascal wrote in his Pensées, “The eternal silence of these infinite spaces fills me with dread.”
We cry out, “I can talk to God in the silence.” Hear my echoes through the empty rooms.
We imagine the Divine as our companion in order to have our fear of solitude dissipate.
Be quiet! I am listening to God.
Yea, though I walk through the Valley of the Shadow of Death … I am not alone. Hey, I can get the Divine to walk with me; the Divine is my bodyguard, my safety, my security. Watch me. Please watch over me, Oh Lord.
I hate being alone. Sensory deprivation is too close to being thrown into the abyss.
As the fear fades, we may abandon our fears and gain a sense of frustration at how the Cosmos ignores our little bleats. Which brings us back to Stephen Crane. (See above.)
We are made in the image of God. We are a mirror’s reflection of Him. He looks at us to see Himself acting. Without us, He wouldn’t know who He is. We made Him who He is.
Our hostility is often incoherent. Infuriating, isn’t it, the Silence of the Divine?
Consciousness is ultimately personal; to paraphrase the British author Ian McEwan, we enjoy contemplating our brain. Consciousness when viewed from inside feels like a Las Vegas neon sign in the desert twilight: it feels brighter than it is. Consciousness lives within the bell jars of our skulls; we think more of it shines out than actually does. That may be why I treasure the time alone with my thoughts. (Cell phones were made to interrupt us, to distract us from being alone with our thoughts. Quick! Throw them out of your car!)
Some of us shine and light up the night. After her tragic death from skiing in March, 2009, film scholar David Kipen said: “(Tony Award-winning actress Natasha) Richardson radiated intelligence in everything she did.”
Let us ruminate over that notion: she “radiated intelligence.”
In terms of our species, is there any better epitaph?
We can be seen from Space also means we have usurped the Divine. We have his vantage point on ourselves. (Better than looking in a mirror, eh, Bunky?) Another reason what that Apollo 8 photograph of the blue and white ball of earth floating in black space is so wonderful. Us looking at ourselves; our first step into stellar narcissism.
The Apollo 8 photo is our largest mirror. Our greatest self-portrait. What comes second is our footsteps in the moon dust.
Our computers have lengthened our central nervous systems. Now we can reach out anywhere and touch everything, even if anything and everything are actually only virtually here and now. As we grow more global, as we evolve, will the Divine be more virtual yet more personal?
What god will we dream up next?
Boredom is the downside of having nothing to do. Idle hands are the devil’s workshop. I need stimulation. No, I cannot sit still. We are not yet adults in this Cosmos. Arrgghh!
On the beige savannah, part of me is always on alert for the beige lion moving through the swaying grasses. (No kidding, beige savannah is the most popular interior house paint in the world Four, maybe three million years we lived there. I live in my living room. I have a tan sofa and matching armchairs. We want the savannah still; it was our species’ Garden of Eden, after all. Perhaps that’s why we always want a white ceiling, when a sky-blue one might be more cheery.
The supernatural overwhelms the rational, and the abyss is the chasm between them. But where the hell is the bridge? Oh, it’s there, just invisible, as if this were an Indiana Jones movie. Faith is the Bridge. Just sprinkle the sand and then step off. Faith helps us walk the bridge we cannot see. We are the bridge; the bridge lies inside us.
Without faith, without belief, we feel the phantom pains of the amputee. We know something is missing, but maybe not what it is. We have lost our grip, His hand to hold, our tool, our weapon against the Long Cold Night. We cannot walk that bridge so well.
We would fall forever. The abyss is bottomless.
But let me quote William James' almost infamous definition of religion in “The Varieties of Religious Experience”: “Religion … shall mean for us the feelings, acts, and experiences of individual men in their solitude, so far as they apprehend themselves to stand in relation to whatever they consider the divine.”
Wrestling with God is deciphering the mind of God.
Let us also tell ourselves that wrestling with God is searching our hearts for wisdom and the courage to go it alone without Him. Without a night light.

Fred Zackel

Next week, on August 28, 2011, the National Mall in Washington D.C. will be unveiling the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial. This day will also mark the 48th Anniversary of the famous “I Have a Dream” speech.

America has been unimaginably lucky. Some of our Presidents were great writers, and some were great speakers. Dr. Martin Luther King, Junior’s writings, plus his speeches, stand with the best from our Presidents.

Martin Luther King, Jr. Check out his Letter from the Birmingham Jail. He wrote it on whatever paper he could find in jail. Read it aloud. Feel the rhythms on your tongue and hear his voice. See how wide-ranging his intellect was. The depth of his arguments. See how persuasive he was. And the breadth of his empathy for humanity.

Put yourself in jail, in his place, and imagine the best you could do under those same situations. He began writing his famous letter on strips of paper slipped to him in jail. More amazingly, he even apologized for its length: “I can assure you that it would have been much shorter if I had been writing it from a comfortable desk, but what else can one do when he is alone in a narrow jail cell, other than write long letters, think long thoughts and pray long prayers?”

America should be grateful a man like Martin Luther King lived, even if for such a short while. He gave us so much that has had such a great impact on our lives, on our national identity, even the direction our future might be taking.

In fact, we Americans are very grateful that MLK lived. That is what the national holiday of his birthday is about. He earned and thus deserves that recognition because –- in addition to his work in civil rights -– he was one of America’s greatest orators and one of America’s greatest writers.

On the eve of his assassination, King put aside his own doubts and fatigue, cast off threats against his own life, and rallied the crowd to the cause he had taken up so many years before.

“Well, I don’t know what will happen now. We’ve got some difficult days ahead. But it really doesn’t matter with me now, because I’ve been to the mountaintop and I don’t mind. Like anybody, I would like to live a long life. Longevity has its place. But I’m not concerned about that now. I just want to do God’s will, and He’s allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I’ve looked over, and I’ve seen the Promised Land. I may not get there with you, but I want you to know tonight, that we as a people will get to the Promised Land. So I’m happy, tonight; I’m not worried about anything. I’m not fearing any man. Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord.”

Do not take my word for this appreciation of the man, either.

As David J. Garrow wrote for the Los Angeles Times back in January, 2002, “The best source for appreciating (Dr. Martin Luther) King’s deep humility is also the most deliciously ironic: the hundreds and hundreds of King’s telephone conversations that J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI secretly taped and that have been publicly available for more than 15 years, thanks to the federal Freedom of Information Act. The FBI’s intent was to damage King’s reputation through evidence of either communist-affiliated advisors or sexual indiscretions, but instead the agency generated a documentary record that time and again attests to King’s selfless nobility.”

Martin Luther King wrote,

“I’m Tired of Violence. I’ve decided that I’m going to do battle for my philosophy. You ought to believe something in life, believe that thing so fervently that you will stand up with it till the end of your days. I can’t make myself believe that God wants me to hate. I’m tired of violence. And I’m not going to let my oppressor dictate to me what method I must use. We have a power, power that can’t be found in Molotov cocktails, but we do have a power. Power that cannot be found in bullets and guns, but we have a power. It is a power as old as the insights of Jesus of Nazareth and as modern as the techniques of Mahatma Gandhi.”

In this united-we-sometimes-stand nation, we need, for instance, to keep reminding new generations of Americans that hundreds of white Tulsans burned and looted the black Greenwood section of that city in 1921, leaving an estimated 50 whites and 150 to 200 blacks dead in their wake. No one was convicted for the murders, larceny or arson.

The Tulsa riot was not the only such event in this country. Similar episodes happened in Wilmington, N.C., in 1898, Atlanta in 1906, Springfield, Ill., in 1908, east St. Louis in 1917, Chicago in 1919 and Detroit in 1943.

Now add the sordid history of lynching in post-Reconstruction America. This mostly Southern pastime claimed the lives of nearly 5,000 people, the vast majority of them black, between 1882 and 1968 — an average of one lynching per week.

The rationale provided by apologists of this atrocious act, in which participants were known to mutilate their victims and keep body parts for souvenirs, was that outlaw blacks needed to be controlled for the safety of whites.

All are part of black history in America.

Supposedly colorblind conservatives love to recall a famous line from Martin Luther King’s most celebrated speech: ”I have a dream that my four children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.”

But in that same speech, King also talked about a ”promissory note” of unpaid rights due to America’s darker-hued citizens — a point reparation opponents don’t allow to get in the way of their efforts to co-opt ”the dream.”

Racism: that’s just the way things are in America. Nope. You’re imagining that. Much of who we Americans are stuck with (and wish we could get over with) started with Chris Columbus. This shaky structure we call “race” was constructed haphazardly, with inferior materials, by thieves who wanted to line their pockets without us catching on how they were manipulating us. Yes, racists were and are thieves ripping us off.

By 1770 in the state of Georgia, the white elite owned slaves at several hundred coastal plantations. The Governor and the Lieutenant Governor together owned 12 plantations, 50,000 acres and 800 slaves. Statewide, there were 15,000 Africans. In fact, the state population was 80% African.

Later on, after the revolution wherein all men were created equally, the glorious symbol of America, the US Capitol Building, would be built with . . . slave labor. The anguish still lingers.

Racism is a system of oppression. It has its own history and its own logic. It is self-perpetuating. Its goals are to dominate and to subjugate. Racism says where some individual gets “located” in a system. After all, “who you are” is who you say you are and where we have placed you. If you don’t “know your place,” then you are “an uppity (fill in the blank.)” If I am rich, and you’re not, then you are inferior in so many ways to me.

In the USA, sex and race have always been the major issues, the major categorizers, and then comes social class. Sex (gender) discrimination is fairly straightforward and often more easily understood and recognized. Males & females are polar opposites. Easy seeing how one could dominate and patronize the other. Harder justifying it, of course. The more we try justifying it, the weaker our argument becomes, and the goofier we sound.

Certain Americans “created” and “constructed” the “race issue” in order to enslave for financial reasons. Now we are all paying the costs of that racism.

In the same way, America was founded according to social class. In the earliest days of America, you needed to own property to vote. Consider how we still stigmatize “poor white trash” or “trailer trash.” Notice we added skin color to further humiliate the poor.

Racism is a social construction. It is political. There is no consistency to racial issues. In the past Europeans saw themselves as white, but at the same time Greeks were Orientals, while dark-skinned Spaniards were white. Under British rule in South Africa, Japanese were whites while Chinese were “colored.” In today’s America, we distinguish between (white) Cubans and (black) Haitians. Where one race ends, another begins. Race is amateur biology. Social Darwinism means that I am rich and you’re poor, so I belong to a superior race. Which is hogwash and nonsense.

In the United States the whites define who is black. In the United States, our views on race relations are very rigid, while in Brazil race relations are much more relaxed. (Unless you are dark and live there, of course.)

Racism has a long history of being used to rationalize or justify how the wealth has been distributed. “Show me the money!” often leads us right into the racists’ roost.

Contrary to the historical amnesia and revisionism of Congresswoman Michele Bachman and her BFFs, most framers of the Constitution were from the merchant class, were land owners and land speculators, and slave owners. They liked slavery; they got rich off it. George Washington was well-known as the richest man in the colonies. John Marshall and John Adams were slave-owners. As President, Thomas Jefferson signed the 1807 Importation of Slaves Act. He had inherited 100 slaves. More slaves imported in the colonies would lessen the value of his property. When he died, he had his slaves sold to pay off his creditors. Except his mistress and his children with her. (Can a slave be a consenting adult? Nope. Sally Hemings remains a slave.)

“Droit de signeur” was “the right of the lord” to take the new bride on her wedding night away from her husband. In the British Caribbean, the children of a black woman and a white man were “born free.” On the American mainland, mulatto children were born slaves and were slaves for life. Well, that seems fair, doesn’t it? Or did profit enter in? What a great idea! Sell off the evidence of rape and go to church on Sunday with a clean heart.

Yes, racism is also an integral part of our religious heritage in America. After all, Christians can be slave-owners. Check out the runaway slave in the New Testament book of Philemon. Using that text to build upon (but also many others,) back in the very early 18th century, slaveholders were told that, yes, they should convert and then baptize their slaves into Christianity. Luckily, the Pulpit Bullies said, the black slaves will have an equal but separate salvation. Oh, the slaves will go to heaven. Just not OURS. (Whew! Got scared there for a moment.) By the way, ministers could buy slaves; slaves were a sign of the church’s prosperity. Hallelujah!

We see this religious hypocrisy in Huckleberry Finn when he rejects turning Jim into the authorities as a runaway slave.

“I was a-trembling, because I’d got to decide, forever, betwixt two things, and I knowed it. I studied a minute, sort of holding my breath, and then says to myself, “All right, then, I’ll GO to hell.”

Remember the Alamo! The Mexican government abolished slavery in 1829. The Southern white colonists in Texas hated this. They formed their own racist republic. For many blacks in Texas, Juneteenth is the real Independence Day. That day commemorates June 19, 1865, the day slaves in Texas learned of their freedom — more than two years after President Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation. The news came from Union troops who landed in Galveston. (What? Tell our slaves they’re free?)

Racism is a cruel agenda to perpetuate nonsensical bullshit. Believing that you can equate “nation” and “race” is absurd and arbitrary, pseudo-science, what Hitler tried. Is Winston Churchill an American because his mother was?

Cultural historian Jacques Barzun writes in “From Dawn to Decadence,” that “Equating nation with race defied the most elementary knowledge of history. From time immemmorial, Europe and America have been playgrounds of miscegenation. Celts, Picts, Iberians, Etruscans, Romans, Latins, Huns, Slavs, Tartars, Gypsies, Arabs, Jews, Hittites, Berbers, Goths, Franks, Angles, Jutes, Saxons, Vikings, Normans, and a host of lesser tribes once thought distinct mingled in and around the Roman empire, a vast mongrel population.”

King Baudouin of Belgium (1930 – 1993) said, “America has been called a melting pot, but it seems better to call it a mosaic, for in it each nation, people or race which has come to its shores has been privileged to keep its individuality, contributing at the same time to the unified pattern of a new nation.”

Barack Obama is not our first black president. He is also half white. He is our first biracial, bicultural president. At Barack Obama’s first press conference as president-elect, when asked what kind of dog he was considering for his two daughters, he mentioned shelter dogs, many of which, he said, “are mutts, like me.” Obama is a true American mosaic.

Racism can often be especially cruel and unusual because it is a sneak attack. Those subjected to a racist’s attack most often don’t do anything about it. For one thing, they’re almost always caught off-guard. When it is minimally offensive, racism can feel like a bucket of ice water thrown on you. (More often, a stab in the back.) The episode is over quickly. Time to move on. Victims don’t necessarily talk about it, either. Facing racism is a private pain, mostly. Usually it’s not the first time, either. That too is the realities of race in America.

Yeah, yeah, old news. You’re yawning. I’m wasting your time.

Yet, three weeks ago, in Jackson, Mississippi, on June 27th (a Sunday morning just before dawn) two carloads of white teenagers, saying “let’s go fuck with some niggers,” according to law enforcement officials, drove from a nearby (and predominately) Rankin county to the west side of Jackson. There they found and then attacked James Craig Anderson, a 49-year-old black man, an auto plant worker who was standing by his car in a parking lot.

First the teens beat Anderson repeatedly, yelled racial epithets, including “White Power!” according to witnesses. Then they climbed into their large Ford F250 green pickup truck, floored the gas, and drove the truck right over Anderson, killing him instantly.

What the gang of teens did not know was that a surveillance camera was focused on the parking lot that night, and many of the events, including the actual murder of Anderson, were captured live on videotape.

Afterwards they gloated. The leader of the thugs, an 18-year-old Deryl Dedmon, Jr., of Brandon, Mississippi, allegedly said, “I ran that nigger over,” in a phone conversation to the teens in the other car. He repeated the racial language in subsequent conversations, according to the law enforcement officials.

Yes, Dedmon has been charged with murder and could face two life sentences in connection with the killing.

I know; it’s just a fluke. A criminal aberration.

Since then, on August 2nd, Rep. Doug Lamborn, R-Colorado, sent a letter to Obama “apologizing for using a term some find insensitive.” In specific, Lamborn apologized after saying that being associated with President Barack Obama would be similar to touching a “tar baby.” He made the comment during an interview on a Denver radio station about proposals to raise the nation’s debt ceiling in exchange for spending cuts. This slip of the tongue of course is not symptomatic of our nation’s abiding agenda fostering racism, some might say.

Since then, after President Obama’s private 50th birthday party at the White House, “Obama’s Hip-Hop BBQ Didn’t Create Jobs,” read the headline on an article on The Fox Nation, a conservative arm of FoxNews.com, which is owned by the News Corporation. Below the headline were photos of Mr. Obama and, separately, three black celebrities who attended the party, the basketball player Charles Barkley, the comedian Chris Rock and the rapper Jay-Z. Not pictured were any attendees of other racial backgrounds, like the actor Tom Hanks or Mayor Rahm Emanuel of Chicago.

The children visiting in Washington, D.C. today will lead America tomorrow. Our kids need this statue of Dr. King so they can repeal the devil’s merriment.

“Top Five Penises of the Gods”

Fred Zackel

Does your god have a penis?

No, really. Yes, I am going somewhere with this train of thought. See, for example, if Jesus was married, then He had to use His penis, or He really wasn’t married, was He? Oh. You don’t like the image in your imagination. Geez, you got a naughty mind.

A question of morality, you say? If we think it’s disgusting, then we mean it’s immoral. A good working definition right out of Evolutionary Psychology for a world of relativism.

Think of Osiris. In one version, he got chopped piece by piece by his enemy Set, who scattered the god’s pieces everywhere on the planet. Isis, who was Osiris’s sister and wife, scrambled around on all fours and found all the pieces of Osiris, save one. You guessed it. Her spouse’s penis. Think about it: Isis, the goddess of fertility with an impotent husband. Sheesh. That is the very definition of irony, right?

(I have noticed the God of Irony always seems to trump the God of Justice. I always wondered: Was Oedipus alive just to entertain the gods?)

I bring up Isis because wives are linked to their husbands’ penises; she cannot be his wife if he has no penis, right? Well, conventional wisdom says.

The Greek god Dionysus is a sort of variation on the Osiris theme. He got ripped to pieces, too, and once he got recombined, he too was missing his penis. So there is precedence here. And what can you say about him that everybody doesn’t already know? That he is the other side of the coin to the sun god Apollo? That he represents Wine, Theatre, Madness, Irrationality, Animalism, Debauchery, Bestiality …? Well, I suppose we can say that the Greeks borrowed him from the Egyptian pantheon, proving we humans are adaptive creators because, yes, we create our Divines according to our own situational needs and wants.

So the gods we create must have a penis like ours, right?

Moving along, the divine Uranus is flat-out boring. Important only because he was the first of the gods, and his son Cronus (or Cronos) sliced and diced him, which is how sons often assume their fathers’ thrones. I suppose the penis is equivalent to the crown or the throne or the scepter or …

OTOH, the Furies had an interesting genesis. When the titan Cronos castrated his own father Ouranos (or Uranus) and threw the bloody package into the Mediterranean, well, the Furies emerged from the drops of blood from the severed dingus. Mutilating your old man’s crotch was not righteous, we all seem to agree, so the Furies pop up in mythology whenever some event is horrible … and not righteous … and they actively demand blood revenge.

An eye for an eye, or a dingus for a dingus, or …

As a sidebar, Aphrodite, the goddess of love and beauty, was born when Uranus got castrated by his son Cronus, who pitched his severed genitals into the sea. “Aphros” means “sea foam” (more like “sea milk”) in Greek, and thus the snickering ancient Greeks claimed that the erotic goddess of love and beauty arose from the churning surf off the coast of Cyprus. No, I will not tell you what “sea foam from Poseidon” they were snickering about. The children might be listening.

(Shsshh. Aphrodite was also Yahweh’s girlfriend. But I’ll tell you more later.)

BTW, in the Late Bronze Age (c. 1400 BCE) when the city of Ugarit flourished, Cyprus was the main exporter of copper, the base of Ugarit's economy. Ugarit's favorite goddess, “Lady Asherah of the Sea” aka “She who walks upon the sea,” stepped off a boat in Cyprus, strode magnificently, if nakedly, through the milky sea foam, and over time and crossing various cultures became Aphrodite. Just ask Sandro Botticelli. Or Kurt Vonnegut, Junior. Or Thomas Pynchon. Don’t ask me what the sea shell represents. Kids might be reading this book.(I blame the teachers for corrupting our youth. We should make them chug poison.)

“The Castration of Uranus” is one of greatest works of the Renaissance (co-created by Giorgio Vasari and Gherardi Christofano.) It is a very violent, vivid and lucid depiction. It seems to roam the dual arena of hard-boiled and noir. A great painting, of course. (But what’s with the woman off to the right watching and tweaking both of her own nipples?)

The title of the painting has an alternative translation from the Italian: “The Mutilation of Uranus by Saturn.” And those two graphic titles say a lot about what we humans actually want to do to our Divines. Could be we subconsciously want to get back at God for what He demanded from Abraham, for example?

(Yahweh wants us to do what to our penis? Yikes!)

When Osiris got reassembled, his penis became the problem child.

That image makes metaphorical sense. The penis is like the Prodigal Child, wayward, restless, squandering its inheritance, and inevitably it returns home with its tail between its legs, fully expecting to get a whupping for what it’s done on its night on the town. (Ask any politician. Well, it depends on what the meaning of the word “is” is.)

That’s when it’s been a (relative) good boy, of course. Consider the penis when it’s been bad (or worse, when it’s wicked and evil.) Oh, the rage. Oh, the lust. Oh, the shame. The penis should hang its head in shame. I mean, really, can we even talk about the penis without mentioning shame? I don’t think so. Which leads us to the silly side of the Divine Penis.

Well, yes, of course, the penis is a silly cosmic force. After all the ‘lil prick has a mind of its own. Instinctually men understand this. Or at least proclaim it. On the other hand, when women hear that, they groan and roll their eyes over the vanity and silliness of men. The Pride of Man always challenges the Gods, if you ask the guys. Women just think it's male ego barking at the moon. Because men cannot sustain the argument that God wills the penis to be erect. But it is of the Divine. Therefore, men point out, “the devil made me do it.”

Some gods, once imagined, lingered just for the dangerous fun of giggling over them. In short, find a need and then get a chuckle as a sidebar. Priapus served the ancient Romans as a scarecrow in the gardens, his long red rod pointing straight outward and onward to scare off the birds and thieves. Yes, he was grotesque. But then the Roman males were heavily into bawdy irony. Let us laugh and slap a leg about poor Priapus’ discomfort when a jackdaw roosts. Satyrs were half-men and half-goats; they too were for comic relief.

We all know males who act like that. Comic relief, right. (Like some recent Congressmen.)

The Romans had a bawdy sense of humor about the penis. That’s one reason they loathed the Jews, who in piety mutilated theirs as a symbol of their covenant with their Divine Yahweh. Yes, anti-Semitism does begin at the penis. Circumcision, when it’s misunderstood or practiced religiously by strange desert peoples, is frighteningly barbaric to those cosmopolitans who revere urbanity.

Fifteen centuries later Michelangelo sculpted David … the first great King of the Jews … and left him uncircumcised. Should we believe the thought never crossed his mind? Or was M. making a religious criticism?

So we don’t like thinking about Osiris’s penis. Or anybody’s penis, really. Too many sharp edges in that bag of knives. Sticking our hands into that dark realm means they’re coming back bloody. Like thinking about our parents having wild and crazy sex. Only worse ‘cause it’s us imagining the Divine’s Penis.

By the way, if you ever get back in the basements and warehouses of our Western museums, you will notice that many, if not most, of our ancient Egyptian, Greek and Roman statues of male divines are missing their … cosmic members. Seems that Christians and / or Muslims deliberately and consciously lobbed off the divine members – to slice away at their powers.

By the way, would you eat Oxyrhynchus? In a different version of the Osiris myth that the one mentioned above, he’s the little “sharp-nosed” fishy (i.e., the sturgeon) who ate Osiris’ penis after it got hacked off by his maniac brother Horus. Depending upon where you lived along the Nile, the fishy got eaten because it had eaten the god’s penis or because it wasn’t eaten because eating a divine penis would be sacrilegious. Not surprising, the oxyrhynchus fish is never seen in funeral art for the Egyptians. They figure it was…well… bad taste.

OTOH, does your god have a vagina?

Why? Is that important somehow? What’s wrong with asking? We have God the Father and God the Son. Where is God the Mother? God the Daughter? God the Sister? Where is “the Sacred Feminine” in our Judeo-Christian-Islamic Divine? Half the population of our world insists that the Divine has a gender, a word applicable solely in our limited reality. Why are the Pulpit Bullies so anal?

Pope John Paul I, whose real name was Albino Luciani, was born 17 October 1912 and died on 28 September 1978, having spent about a month as Pope. Some say he was murdered.

Anyways, he was reported in the press that we should see God not only as Father, but also as Mother. This remark reinforced the image of a pastoral pope.

He died too soon. I wonder what he could have changed. I wonder if he got whacked for saying God the Mother. We kill heretics, don’t we?

Speaking of Jesus H. Christ …

Holy Foreskin!

Yes, it does sound like something naughty Robin might have said to a leering Batman back in the 1960s television shows. No, I’m not being blasphemous, either. Because Jesus was a Jew, so the story goes, He had to be circumcised shortly after birth. (Check your crucifixes.) Eight days later, in fact. And when He ascended into Heaven, He left a few of His Favorite Things behind.

And some of His Favorite Things we might think there was only one of, turns out there were lots of. In fact, there may have been as many as eighteen (yes, 18) foreskins (or prepuces) as relics in medieval European churches.

Eighteen foreskins. Wow, was He … ! (Better than a three-headed dog. Or the three Holy Heads of John the Baptist that still survive in churches and mosques.)

His foreskin was all He left behind. Not counting any cut hair, spilled blood, sweat and tears, fingernail and toenail clippings, dandruff, and well … sacred coprolite. (Somebody must be selling it on Ebay.)

Charlemagne gave his relic to Pope Leo III who had crowned him the Holy Roman Emperor in 800 AD. (Might have been a pay-off.) One story claims he got it directly from an angel of god at Aix-la-Chapelle, while another said he got it from the Empress Irene of Byzantium. Another foreskin was bought during the First Crusade. (I hope King Baldwin I of Jerusalem got a good deal on it.) About five hundred years ago Pope Clement VII promised to forgive ten years of a person’s punishment in the Afterlife just for making a pilgrimage to another foreskin in the 11th century abbey of Charroux. A fourth, by the way, was stolen in 1983 from a jewel encrusted box in the Church of the Most Holy Name of Jesus in Calcata, Italy, north of Rome. A fifth may have been sent to King Henry V of England in 1421 so that his wife Catherine of Valois could smell the “sweet smell” of the foreskin and thus have an easy childbirth. (Some guys, geez!) Perhaps a sixth might have been carried off in the Sack of Rome in 1527, but I might have gotten confused; there were so many foreskins loose.

I also keep hearing that Saint Catherine of Sienna (one of my favorite saintly whack jobs) said that Jesus wrapped his foreskin around her third finger left hand when they were “married.” Their “wedding ring,” I suppose. She was a very strange woman, by the way. People at that time thought so, too.

In Latin, the language of the Church, it was called the præputium or prepucium. In Italian, its name is “Il Santissimo Prepuzio.” In English: “The Holy Foreskin.” Not only did the Blessed Virgin Mary have the prescience to save it for posterity … she knew how to preserve it. (No, don’t imagine its condition after several centuries of preservation.)

And the Holy Foreskin is miraculous, too. Rubbing the sacred foreskin against a blind man’s eyes heals him! Healing a blind man, that’s what I figure the thieves in Calcata, Italy, stole it for. OTOH, I’m not sure a blind man wants his eyes rubbed with some ancient gnarly ol’ foreskin. (I told you not to imagine it.)

Curiously enough, the day of Jesus’ circumcising was January 1st. Well, it is exactly seven days after Christmas. Someday I must do research to see if the 1st of January was named the 1st because a boy child’s life begins when he is circumcised.

Now the Church celebrated the Holy Foreskin for eleven centuries, but around La Belle Époque (that is, 1900) the whole story had such a sleazy feel to it, that the Church officially shut down all festivities and said anybody who speaks or writes about the Holy Foreskin would be excommunicated. A half-century later the penalty was hoisted higher: excommunication with serious circumstances (or something equivalent.) Around 1960 the Feast got wiped off the Catholic calendar.

Every single one of the Holy Foreskins has disappeared, by the way. The signs point to the Vogons from the Vatican surreptitiously having snatched them all up in the dead of night. Having both read the book and seen the movie, I believe that Opus Dei and an albino monk pulled off the heists and then hushed it up. (Was that Holy Foreskin the Lost Symbol Dan Brown is always chasing?)

If we get any of those 18 foreskins back, in a few years we can clone the Christ.

Wouldn’t that be Divine? And wouldn’t that be a great movie?

Wha? What did I say?

If you think I am being outré, in one of the Left Behind novels, or maybe one of The Jesus Chronicles, Jesus slaps a biting insect on his neck and then resurrects it. He just can’t stop being Himself, eh? And you’re worried about Him having a penis? Sheesh.

Or was this story just Imagination running off at the mouth?

Does your god have a vagina?

Then she is a goddess.

Tis the Season We Commence

Fred Zackel

(I have always wanted to write my own commencement speech.)

Congratulations, graduates! All the hard work and sacrifice has paid off.

I think everybody here should applaud you again for all you did and had to do to get here. No, seriously, give them another round of applause.

Hey, guys, I got a pop quiz for you. Yeah, your last one.

I call you guys because until recently I had two of my own kids in college, and I see you as being the same wonderful guys as them. And I am as happy for you, I am as proud of you, as I am of them. (Mostly.)

I say “guys” because saying “guys and gals” all the time sounds awkward as hell, and I hear women all the time on campus saying “guys” as a rallying cry. “Hey, guys, it’s get it together timer, so let’s focus and do it!”

This pop quiz has only one question.

What do you call the top one percent of any population?

Are they the ruling elite? The Ruling Class?

One percent of the population of this world are college graduates.

Congratulations on joining the Ruling Elite.

Being as how I am on the margins of society, if not clinging by the fingernails to the rim of the cliff, dangling in the abyss, I never expected I would get this opportunity to be a commencement speaker.

So, out of pure cussedness and flippancy, I decided to tell all you guys (and gals) this truth.

Some years ago I met a Brit. When I asked this Englishman how his day was going, he barked a laugh, slapped his leg, and said, “Absolutely standard!”

Took me a moment to realize he was pulling my leg.

How’s your day going?

Absolutely standard means absolutely ordinary.

This year there are about 20 million college students taking, maybe even attending, classes.

What you graduates are doing today is Absolutely … Standard. Few things in life are more routine than a commencement. Today is run-of-the-mill, folks. We do hundreds, no, thousands of commencements every year.

Isn’t that Absolutely Wonderful?

Some of you are yawning already.

Scientists think yawning is how human beings get a jet stream of energy to the brain. Notice how refreshed we are after we yawn. Well, that refreshed feeling is all that new energy jump-starting us again.

Yawning makes us more alert.

So I look out at all the yawns out there as celebrations of you and your folks waking up and paying attention to my words.

Today’s ceremony is one Big Yawn.

Do you guys buy that?

How ‘bout you folks in the bleachers? You guys in the folding chairs?

Today is a palimpsest of Yesterday. That means, what we know today comes from yesterday, and what we know today is fragmentary and imprecisely translated and then even less understood than yesterday was.

A “palimpsest” is a manuscript which has been re-used by scraping off the original text and writing over the top. A “palimpsest” is therefore “a recycled book.”

If you and I go to San Francisco tomorrow, we will buy a couple books, get a map maybe from the car rental agency, and even look online to find out the Greatest Adventures we can have in San Francisco.

And when we get there, we erase everything we know about San Francisco and we go out and make it Our Town.

Our San Francisco is a palimpsest of what others before us did in San Francisco.

I wish I could say that idea was mine. But it is not. That’s my take of what somebody else said that I erased and made mine.

We scrape off the old and print our own words on it.

I love the word palimpsest. Once anybody learns its meanings, how can anyone resist not using it at least once a week?

Palimpsest is a word we need in our daily life.

We build today on what we learned yesterday. That is what you guys are going to do. At least you better think that you will do better than what we did before you.

Off and on over the past few years the Taliban of Afghanistan machine-gunned little schoolgirls for going to school. And then they gut-shoot them, standing over their fragile bodies. The Taliban also burn, bomb and behead. So much for their visions and values.

Did you graduates know that “Taliban” means “students of theology” in Arabic?”

Yeah. Students of theology. If I were their teacher, I’d flunk them all to Hell for killing little girls who want to go to school. But that’s just me. And every religion has wacko teachers who pervert the teachings and make them ugly and wicked and evil and …

Remember going to school for the very first time? How you were scared of meeting your teacher and all those new guys. How would they look at you? How would you get along? Would you be able to do okay in first grade, second grade, high school? In college? In university?

The last time I looked, only half the children of Afghanistan are able to attend school. A third of that half are the girls.

Goofy enough, Afghanistan has never before had such gloriously high enrollments. It is an Afghan tradition that girls don’t go to school. Killing little girls is new. The Taliban made that up.

But never before have so many Afghan boys and girls been in school. Even without the lunatic wackos that kill little girls because they go to school.

Afghanistan is learning that going to school is Absolutely Standard.

Like this commencement.

The Taliban, the jihadists, al Qaeda, all of them are dangerous losers on a global scale. Nobody wants to hear their Side of the Story. Their zealotry has made them heartless vermin. They deserve extermination.

We kill a mad dog on the streets because we don’t want it mauling little kids.

I don’t know much about their women folk. I don’t know what permits women NOT to raise a stink when their men folk shoot little schoolgirls. I find it incomprehensible for any woman to stay with so vile a man. My guess is those women can’t see how to escape. That there’s a better life without those bums.

Consider this news just in from the outskirts. The New York City public school system alone has 80,000 teachers. I consider that small number in just one big city to be a great tribute to our Civilization.

This Civilization we have around the world is the worst of all cultures and societies, except for all the rest that came before. (Mostly.)

A most astonishing thing about Our Civilization is that we permit the hearts and minds of our children to be stolen from us. Yes, for instance, here in tiny, faraway Ohio, we can be truly grateful for the State of Ohio, the State Board of Regents, the University faculty and staff.

Woodrow Wilson once remarked that the purpose of a college education is to make a man as much unlike his father as possible. What an astonishing thing to say.

We send our kids, you guys, to college where we want you subjected to every weird, wacko, lunatic, bizarre, and downright dangerous Idea that Human Beings ever came up with. We want you to take quizzes and write essays and do research projects on all those dangerous ideas that might threaten Our Way of Life.

We send our kids, you guys, to college because we are positive that Our Visions and Values are so strong, so durable, so valuable, so useful, so enduring, that we will let our kids, you guys, put them on trial and up against Every Other Vision and Value our instructors can lecture upon.

We believe Our Visions and Values will prevail in the Marketplace of Ideas.

Even when we despise the whole idea of a Marketplace of Ideas.

And we figure if … when … you come up with new ideas … we will all be the better for them.

You parents in the bleachers, in those folding chairs, tell me if I’m wrong.

I didn’t think much of our previous president. When I think of what his ideology has done to my country and the world, I can only quote Emilia when she gets stunned by Othello’s stupid stubbornness. “O gull! O dolt!” she cries. “As ignorant as dirt!”

But I thoroughly support what we are doing in Afghanistan.

We are playing Whack-A-Mole in Afghanistan. And sometimes Pakistan. And sometimes Yemen.

When I hear that some terrorist training camp got splatted into nothing by rockets from a drone, I think about school girls sitting in school safely.

Little girls not having their heads chopped off for reading books.

Some years back British Prime Minister Tony Blair gave a speech about on foreign policy to members of his Labour Party. (Yeah, I know them Brits spell it weird.)

The one thought that Mr. Blair would probably like remembered most is: “This is not a clash between civilisations. It is a clash about civilisation.”

Civilization versus barbarism.

Barbarians target schoolgirls. AK-47s. Chopping off their heads.

Tony Blair also said, and most have of us forgotten this, is that most of the victims of terrorism were Muslims.

Like schoolgirls in Afghanistan.

Think of their courage going to school and sitting in their classrooms. Think of the courage of their parents sending their little girls to school in a country slathered in bloodshed.

Barbarians don’t want school girls sitting in school.

The happiest sounds human beings make is school kids playing in school yards. It is not always the most pleasant sound to adult ears, but it is the happiest sound we humans make.

I can tell you I hope this commencement is subversive, a great word that means “another voice is heard from beneath the table.”

According to the French philosopher Albert Camus, rebellion is rage against an idea, while revolution introduces a new idea.

God bless what ideas those little girls can add to the Arab Spring.

Listen to those other voices. They have a lot we can and should listen to. Help them if you can.

As you leave this auditorium, listen to other voices and look for tricks people might want to pull on you in the name of their own personal agenda. Maybe they’ll say God wants you to obey them. But they’re lying.

See how I am manipulating you right now, if you need an example, but most of all always value your own beliefs, your own knowledge, your own talents and skills, your own successes and, yes, even value your failures.

The most important book you will ever read is the first one after your graduation.

The hardest, most difficult part of being out in the real world is finding time to sit down and read. Once you graduate — you should sit down and read. As often as you can. Read whatever it is that pops up in front of you. Look how far reading has gotten you already. Think how far reading will get you in the future.

Consider this commencement as just a scaffold on a journey.

When you go visit the Real World out there, you might feel overwhelmed by how much material you will be expected to get through.

That is an optical illusion.

The material in the Real World will be dealt with bit by bit. Just like the material in your chemistry or philosophy courses got dealt with bit by bit.

As you go through life, you now get to set your own pace. I recommend for a while that you start off and go slow. At least first, until you read the instructions that come with your life.

Please do less with your life until you feel more comfortable doing more. Then throw yourself under the roulette wheels of life. Go for it. See what you get away with it.

Enjoy the pretty pictures, too. You might not get back here again for a while. Be flexible, too. And be nice to others. Hey, how can it hurt?

Also, leave your fingerprints and footprints out for the rest of us to see them.

That’s called leaving your mark on the world.

That’s how we get things done around here.

By the way, guys, this adult life you’re getting into, this real world you’re waltzing into, well, it is especially designed for adults. Sexually explicit language & topics will be used regularly throughout the rest of your days. If you are upset by, or made very uncomfortable by sexually explicit language or depictions of human sexual behavior, you may wish to reconsider whether you really want to be an adult.

Let me know how that works out, ‘k?

If there is an obstacle like this in your path, go around the obstacle. Drive around it, like you would in a car. Then it’s behind you, in your rear view mirror. You can forget about it.

Congratulations, graduates.

Celebrate — and remember — this commencement.

This commencement brings more of us to the table on a more equal footing. It is a leveler upward for more of us than ever before. And, because we value what you graduates have been through and what you are going to do next, we make it Absolutely Standard.

The best part of Commencement is how Absolutely Standard they all are. God bless the fact that we have Commencements all the time, that we promenade hundreds of thousands, nay, millions of students through Commencement practices.

That is a sure sign we are transmitting Our Civilization to future generations. Which means that, odds are, we will survive and endure, god willing. Our Story will endure.

Consider this commencement just a palimpsest for some future graduation.

They will erase all that came before and make it theirs.

Oh, speaking of stories, in “The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy,” an absolutely brilliant, absolutely hilarious novel by the Englishman Douglas Adams, for example, he postulates that civilization goes through three stages: the “How?”, the “Why?” and the “Where?”

Adams wrote, “The first phase is characterised by the question, How can we eat? The second by the question, Why do we eat? and the third by the question, Where shall we have lunch?”

Today is Commencement, and I guarantee you that every restaurant in town will be very busy.

Where shall we have lunch?

Let me finish by saying, To those of you graduating this weekend, I wish you lots of laughter in life and someone to share that laughter with. All the rest comes in second place.

Good luck & best wishes.

Vaya con Dios, mi amigos.

By Fred Zackel

In Louisiana, Chinese were “expressly counted as white” until the 1870 census.

Ideas evolve over time. What used to be de rigueur can look stoopid and wicked.

In the Symposium, the guru Socrates thought that true desire is about giving birth to ideas.

The Greek word “paideia” pops up in mid 5th century BCE. It means “education” or “instruction.” The word (pronounced “py-dee-a”) comes from the Greek word “pais, paidos”: “the upbringing of a child.”

Academia world-wide stresses a program of Gen Ed courses to make us all better citizens.

“Know Thyself” and “Nothing in Excess” become our global starting blocks.

The word “Encyclopedia” is a combination of the Greek terms “enkyklios” or “complete
system/circle” and “paideia” or “education/learning.”

The Greeks expected our best efforts in Literature as well as in the Olympics.

The Humanities as a concept was formulated during the Renaissance, which means “rebirth” or “born again.” The phrase “studia humanitatus” becomes a touchstone then.

We study the Human to understand more fully what Being Human means.  Being Human is thus the yardstick of the cosmos.  We measure ourselves against the Divine (includes the Cosmos,) against the animal kingdom (of which, yes, we are still a part,) and against the Rational.

Being Human, we think with our guts. (We have learned this through brain imaging.) Then we find a reason to justify what we already believe and decided.

“Compare & contrast” is collegiate standard for proper the problem of gainsaying a proper distance with a fresh new idea. It is a tool, a weapon, how we gain perspective.

Let us ruminate.  Consider our thumb, for instance. Our Opposable Thumb does most of our hand’s work. So we should celebrate our thumb.  To ruminate is to let our thoughts gestate, percolate, inculcate, although not necessarily in that order.

Ideas are shiny things for the mind to gnaw upon.  To ruminate is a sort of extended coda.  Camels and giraffes, by the way, ruminate. They chew the cud.  Coda comes from the Latin “cauda.” It means “a tail.”

All animals seem to be able to perceive and deconstruct the messages their senses give them; survival depends upon this ability.  Being Human, we are problem solvers. Three problems top our list. First is personal survival.  Second is the survival for the next generation. Third is, how do we better our immediate circumstances?

To ruminate is to digest and adapt.

Most critters do not think. They do not need to think. They get by, eat when they can, live their lives and reproduce as often as they can, and as far as evolution is concerned, getting by is good enough.  Run quick enough to do both, hey, and not get eaten by predators, your species is prospering.

Most animals are into short-term gratification.  The two-second rule kicks in.

Evolution has no memory. It does not need one. It uses trial and error, random interactions and blind luck, to find something that is self-replicating. What worked yesterday is good enough for today and we will see what tomorrow can bring. “What works good enough” is the key phrase, by the way.

Evolution is neither linear nor predictable.  Evolution experiments in every direction, like spilled water flows in every direction, looking for its limits. And nothing is predestined.
Indifferent, uncaring, unemotional, evolution is. Maybe it will work this time. Maybe it wouldn’t work this time.

Our memory has a two-second buffer.  The immediacy of the present moment defeats our chances of discovering meaning. Two seconds after taking a product off the shelf, the consumer has at best a fifty-fifty shot at correctly remembering what product we have.
Thinking is tough. It takes protein. A third of our calories goes right to our brains.

But, Being Human, we can build on what recently worked.  For one thing, we developed pattern recognition, which is a fancy way to say “I see a lion in the grass over there. It’s the only beige thingie not swaying with the wind.”  We intuit from these patterns and act upon them by creating a narrative, and then we realize on a conscious level. We are made aware. Epiphanies are the punch line to narrative.

“Run, sucker, run!”

Rumination can lead to self-exploration. Self-exploration can lead to self-improvement. And we haven’t talked yet about memory, which isn’t that important in a random universe. We can get by on autopilot. 

Ever drive to Los Angeles from New York without noticing the road?  Truckers do it every day.  We can trust the reptile brain to get us there.  In fact, when we were younger, we could drive straight through from New York to Los Angeles and get there refreshed and vigorous enough to go see that cutie whose image took the place of the road in our thoughts.

Working memory = making a phone call and remembering all the numbers.

Fluid intelligence = innate problem solving.

We need to celebrate problem solving.

We need to reinforce critical thinking.

You haven’t already forgotten Humanity’s Three Problems, have you?

We teach to get more thinkers in the Herd.

My three goals (for “studia humanitatus”):

    To goose critical thinking
    To goose empathy
    To goose world citizenry

The Greek word “philosophy” means the “love of wisdom.” We love wisdom like a brother loves his sister. Wisdom is a butterfly and not a gloomy bird of prey, as Yeats once wrote.

The Greek philosopher Plato said, “Thinking: The talking of the soul with itself.”

According to the French philosopher Albert Camus, rebellion is rage against an idea, while revolution introduces a new idea.  What makes us human? What makes us better humans?  What is the Arab Spring?

Individuals who ruminate soon discover that thinkers have trouble reconciling their thoughts with their Herd’s desires / intentions / hidden agendas.

Who knows what part of our precious heritage we must sacrifice in order to survive as a species?  Or survive as an individual?

Today’s solution is tomorrow’s problems.

Let us say that lower animals follow the two-second rule.  Higher animals have memories which extend the Two Second Rule.

Rumination can only take a being so far. Rumination depends upon memory. If you cannot remember the past two seconds, how can you ruminate?

We get part of our freedoms by possessing memories. We can compare and contrast our immediate times with what happened in the past.

Memories are at best fragments of experiences cued into being by new stimuli. Memories are always incomplete. We recycle and then reconstruct and then reinterpret.  But the Here and Now is terribly insistent. Our receptors can easily be overwhelmed, swamped by sensory data that demands immediate processing. So we get distanced from what just happened. We lose the train of thought. We stay stuck between train stations.

So we devised memorization for information retrieval.

“On the twelfth day of Christmas my true love gave to me …”

But History, they say, is whatever happened fifteen days ago.

We needed better retrieval.

We take notes as we ruminate so we can retrace the train of our thoughts.

Often we ruminate to rationalize our own preconceptions. Thus we reinforce our beliefs and do not examine them.

We can rationalize and make any interpretation palatable.

William Safire wrote, “In 1957, Leon Festinger came up with a theory of ‘cognitive dissonance,’ in which he posited the opposite of buyer’s remorse: Most of us tend to embrace the choice we make, so as to reduce the self-critical dissonance in our minds. When we buy a Ford, we read Ford ads and shy away from reading the ads of Toyota.”

Being Human, we also have an innate Necessity for Curiosity.  Is that a lion in those bushes? Is that a banana in your pocket? Do you love me? What’s your name again, sailor?  A study guide helps organize POVs.

OTOH, rumination: reflection can lead to doubt. Doubt is part of the essence of being human. Doubt is linked to distrust. My vote for the universal bumper sticker for all humanity reads: Can we do better somewhere else?

If a lover thinks it once, the affair is already almost over.

“The whole point of science is self-doubt,” Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School Jerry Avorn says, “and asking could there be another explanation for what we’re seeing.”

Ideas linger …

Shamash was the ancient Sumerian Sungod, and in modern Arabic the word “sun” is “shams.”

The land is “always overwhelmed by your terrible brilliance” (from the hymns of Nineveh.)

The sun is the Divine Judge. Under the sun all men are equal. The laws of humans always descend from the Divine; who else can cover us all? (Like an umbrella?)

Ruminating over a problem is like a beaver chiseling with a tree.  Rumination is NOT about math. A petaflop, for instance, is a measurement of computing speed equivalent to one thousand trillion calculations a second. Yeah, Being Human means we make the machines that do the grunt work for us.

I love showering in the dark. You know, with the lights off and the door closed. I do not shower in the dark very often, for then I would be weird, and sadly I am absolutely ordinary and no weirder than you are.  A couple times yearly is enough. I luxuriate and only the word “luxuriate” can imply my pleasure. And I ruminate, too, under the hot stinging water, letting serendipity decide my train of thought.

Rumination lets us speculate. Not only do we improve our lots but we can raise the stakes. At the risk of sounding like some marketing nerd, rumination helps us harvest, integrate and prioritize our insights and ideas and issues.  We can rate them according to our values and our priorities.  When we ruminate, concepts like economy and efficiency have currency (i.e., we can spend them.)

Science: collecting, observing, experimenting, theorizing.  Charles Darwin wrote “I think” in the margins of his notes about the Tree of Life.  The Eureka Moment is when we find a solution to a problem, too. We may not like the solution or our position related to it, but the moment is notable.  Epiphanies are unpredictable … but they like coming after really hard work. We can construct for epiphanies. But we cannot predict them.  When we ruminate about our future, we improve our memory.  We can improve our memory by planning consciously and deliberately for our futures. Writing down what we ruminated about improves our memory even more.

Rumination according to Confucius: “To review knowledge is as important as learning it.”

“Zhi yuan” is Chinese for “reach further.” The phrase dates back to the Han dynasty and really, well, doesn’t look like much. But “Zhi yuan” is shorthand for “Be still and your mind can reach farther.”

Rumination proceeds from detachment and perspective.

We ruminate to be able to interpret data.  Over time, our abilities to interpret improve.  Can you see the stages? Each one is a leap above the previous one.

I wonder when the first Homo sapiens first got curious. Big step sideways for one of the great apes. BTW, that tag “Homo sapiens” translates from the Latin verb “to know” or “to taste,” and that ability to discriminate conjures up “wise man.”  We are capable of showing wisdom. Not that we automatically and at all times are wise enough to come in out of the rain.  We are capable of language, of symbolic thought, of cooperating with each other, all of which help us discriminate between One Thing and the Next Thing.

That’s why we dominate this planet.

Ruminate long enough, and maybe we can determine what it means to be real.

Children and moneys aren’t good with reason, persuasion and logic. Being Human, children can grow into those abilities. Monkeys stay behind.

Monkeys do not have the patience to ruminate. (As a corollary, the uncivilized are easily infuriated by civilization. Cultures evolve, too.)

Desperate people make the best stories. “Darling, I missed you,” she cried, and fired again.

“I need time to ruminate!” he said, fleeing for his life.

A teenager is a gargoyle on a cathedral perch, his back to Authority, his teeth bared against the cold winds of the indifferent world, hunkered down by the burden of his raging emotions, a child with grown-up hormones threatening his anchorage.

Teenagers have only half the critical thinking skills of adults, behavioral scientists have discovered. That’s why teenagers get into trouble.

A sense of Consequences needs to evolve. Within individuals it grows. (Societies, too, but that’s for another time.)  Consider that the young (and the terminally foolish) can be tempted by risks. They need fewer opportunities to be young (and terminally foolish.)

One must imagine the consequences of an action.  The parents can scream all they want: “Didn’t you think of the Consequences?” The answer is unchanging: “Ah … no.” I am not yet capable of that; I am still a child.

Ruminating is an acquired skill.

Geography and climate made us make choices. Hmmm, should I stay here or should I try seeing if the grass is greener on the other side of that hill?  Oh, decisions, decisions, decisions.

Thinking trumps instinct.  Being smart enough to come out of the rain, for instance.

We start where we stop. When we stop, we collect our thoughts. Imagine thoughts as discrete globs. Rocks, maybe. Better yet, Kraft caramels. (Okay. Too tattering and tempting.)

We collect our rocks. When we ruminate, we gnaw our thoughts. An idea is a pebble in our mouths. Three beasties now emerge: implications, significance, reverberations. 

Calculation leads to manipulation.

I predict my future. Being Human, I can …

by
Fred Zackel

Once at twilight I was Zorro. My neighbors called my mom. She called me into the house and explained how a ten year old with a black mask and a Daisy air rifle prowling through backyards at twilight in our neighborhood might be seen as something different in an adult’s eyes.

The astonishing amount of mythological stuff just goes to show the ancients had a ton of time to ruminate on odd, perhaps deviant, human behavior. These peoples are curious and imaginative and undogmatic, even without the precise knowledge of what they were describing, and they dreamed up stories to tell adults when the kids were in the room and listening.

We always lie in front of the kids. To hear some children’s animal shows, we tried giving the dodo bird mouth-to-mouth resuscitation … and it didn’t work. No. We extincted them. Some for food. And most for fun. Because we like hearing the discharge from our guns as we slaughtered them. Because we felt powerful killing from a distance. But mostly for the fun.

I saw a lovely silly wise-ass joke earlier this week. “Vegetarian is an old Indian word for lousy hunter.”

Remember hearing Aesop’s tale about the Fox and the Grapes? The tale goes over our heads these days, but twenty-six centuries ago, folks who heard it understood the gnawing hunger, despair, and denial of imminent death by starvation. The ancients didn’t have the massive amounts of cheap food that we have now.

Think again of the desperation within Aesop’s Fables. Foxes do not eat grapes unless no other food is available. The hunger of the fox for the grapes is impervious to reason. How loudly is your stomach growling? Sour grapes? Naw, that’s not what it was. In fact, the fox was too weak to jump high enough to reach a cluster of grapes on a trellis. As the fox walks away, regardless of what it says, starvation rules its future.

The fox walks off to die.

Aesop is noir, baby. Noir.

Aesop’s Fables are a matter of Life and Death, and desperate foxes tell the best stories. The ancient Ethiopians knew this from millennia of village life. Aesop’s fables were really African animal tales transported (via slavery) to the children of Greece. The name “Aesop” (who actually was a real person and, yes, an African slave) is derived from the Greek “Ethiopia,” which translates best from the Hellenistic as “dark and dusky skin like a sun-baked river bed.”

I love the sagas about the blind poet Tieresias. Because he got into a no-win situation as a reluctant judge in a pissing contest between a god and a goddess, he was forced to live half his life as a man and half of his life as a woman. Thus Tieresias is the only person ever to live who knows both sides of the Battle of the Sexes. But that tale is just the start of the narrative fun that the ancient Greeks had with him. My personal favorite is told about him in Hades. Yes, he has died and now must spend eternity among the dead. Now, to hear the Greeks tell it, every dead person in Hades had been dipped in forgetfulness when he or she arrived. (The opposite of “lethe” by the way is “aletheia,” or “truth.”) But the gods and goddesses had one last trick (ah, reward) to pull on our luckless poet, and we can tell this in front of the children. See, Tieresias was the only one in Hades who knew and understood everything. He was never dipped. To ever-curious yet naïve children, oh, what a great reward: he gets it! To every adult who contemplates that, aw, geez … poor bastard. He was never dipped.

The practice of lying to our children is common, if not ubiquitous in our species. In front of children, the ancient Egyptians, when talking about having sex, called it “traveling through the marshes.”

Hey, sailor, wanna slog the murky bog with me?

In our own times,The Da Vinci Code says Jesus got married to Mary Magdalene and they had a kid and Mom and the kid moved to the South of France. According to the Koran, which counts Jesus as a prophet, that doctrine is blasphemous. Which is why the book and the Ron Howard movie are both banned in several Muslim countries. Me, I giggle over the reaction in the Philippines, where the book and the movie are “for adults only.” Sshh, the children might be listening. (Or reading?)

Ever see the Hollywood film Sodom and Gomorrah (1962) starring Stewart Granger and Pier Angeli? It was directed by Robert Aldrich. No? Well, it was marketed at “Not suitable for Children.” Too bad, the adults who attended were so disappointed. Boy, I know I was. I snuck into the theater to see that puppy. I was ‘way under-aged. Geez, under-aged and disappointed. I was robbed.

Some myths turn out to be horror stories when we get them in context. Most folks have heard the story of Orpheus and Eurydice. Most of us who have think that this story was about love, romance, and the foolish impetuosity of the impatient heart. But the story continues and becomes much darker.

Eurydice was dipped in forgetfulness. This was the Greek way of saying that the blessings of death are that the sorrows of our lives are forgotten. (Remember that from above?) That forgetfulness that Eurydice experienced includes the grief and sorrow engendered by Orpheus’ disgustingly inhumane and insensitive macho attitude. He cannot confront his own revulsion that she was raped. His bride was raped. So she was dead to him.

Yes, the bride Eurydice had been raped. To her lover in that ancient patriarchy, that meant she was (socially) dead. He returned to her. But in his eyes she was still dead to him. When he left, she did not follow.
Call it a happy ending: she gets dipped in forgetfulness as a sop.

The Ruler of Hades tells Orpheus, “Don’t look back.” Once raped, Eurydice might as well be dead. If she has forgotten it, well, all the better for the Patriarchy.

Now does Tieresias seem like he got the Divine Shaft?

Stories often get told in front of both children and adults, and thus the same story can be viewed in two very different versions. These stories help us pose problems in situations even our kids could ruminate over. At the same time, these stories help us bond together as a clan or tribe. These stories teach us all, Don’t be a chump! Or don’t be a Jerk! (Substitute “naïf” or your favorite word; it all works for me.)

The ancient Greeks spoke about Ariadne, for instance, the daughter of King Minos of Crete. Depending which myth we hear, and there are several, she may have been a high priestess or maybe even the Snake Goddess of Minos herself. (In myth, the snake is hidden desire. Is that a snake in your pocket, lady, or do you love me?)

In one version, Ariadne falls in love with the Athenian hero Theseus, giving him the thread that transverses the labyrinth, and thus she betrays her father, her nation, her religion, and her half-brother the Minotaur. Now she was supposed to sail off with Theseus, but he abandoned her and sails off without her. The story then says that the gods took pity on her and Dionysus married her. Much later she dies in childbirth and receives a noble burial.

Well, not a very happy ending, but we of the 21st century don’t feel that bad for her. True, she suffered with great sorrow for her crimes. But after all we don’t blame Theseus for abandoning her. Nor is she blamed for her betrayals in the name of love. After all, she did get married and thus it is implied that she lived, well, reasonably happily ever after. The many statues and vases which show her with Dionysus make her look like she’s having fun with her Divine lover.

But we are the children in the room. Adults in the ancient world heard a different story.

Dionysus was the god of theater and madness and wine. The god of coma, you know, unconsciousness. The amphorae of wine were sealed with lead solder, which can lead to lead poisoning. Poor Ariadne, abandoned and despairing, hit hard the juice of the amphora, and then lost her mind. Somehow she got preggers. (If we can’t name the father, it was Divine Penetration.) Insane, she died in childbirth. Covenient, of course, to the Patriarchy. And Theseus, ah Theseus, has long shadows. He broods over the girl he left behind. (Not that he goes back for her, of course. Or ever shows remorse.)

The adults got the message; it went right over the heads of the kids.
Being the most beautiful of all mortals, golden-haired Trojan prince Ganymedes was frequently represented as the god of homosexual love and as such appears as a playmate of the love-gods Eros (Love) and Hymenaios (Marital Love).

The god Eros, btw, was known as the greedy boy. Uh-huh.

The philosopher Plato in his Phaedrus 255, writes, “The fountain of that stream [homosexual desire], which Zeus when he was in love with Ganymede named Himeros (Desire).”

One almost familiar story says that Ganymedes was carried off to heaven by Zeus, or his eagle, to be the god’s lover and cup-bearer of the gods. The boy’s name was derived from the Greek words “ganumai” which might get translated bast as “gladdening” and “mêdon” or “medeôn,” which means either “prince” or “genitals.” The name may have been formed to contain a deliberate double-meaning.

But all Greek myths can be read in different ways. For instance, one side of the Ganymedes story says that he was not carried off by any god, but either by Tantalus or Minos, that he was killed during the chase, and buried on the Mysian Olympus.

Another sidebar says he was raped by the god. The god was an eagle “holding the terrified boy with claws that tore not.” (Which lets some mortal off the hook.)

A gay guy gets raped and killed and carried off by the gods. He died and went to heaven, eh? Oh sure. Twenty years in San Francisco and I know better.

Always a part of the story is that Zeus paid for the boy with a brace of horses. That the boy’s father would end his grieving. Uh-huh. Small price to pay for the death of your son killed by Divine Rape. Unless we can imagine a mortal and a Divine having consensual sex, which seems horribly one-sided to me.

No, this story was about not consenting adults in a consensual act. We can smell there were pay-offs and cover-ups. Somebody very powerful got away with rape and murder.

Cup-bearer to the gods, eh. Uh-huh. The eternal waiter. No promotion, no change in job title, living off the trickle downs from the gods. Uh-huh.

Apuleiu writes in The Golden Ass that, “With a Phrygian woven cap and saffron dress, looking like the shepherd-boy Catamitus [Ganymede] carrying a golden cup.”

Sometimes not even a shepherd, but a cowherd, a farm hand. A country clown, by one account. Not even a cowboy.

Oh yeah. The beloved and favorite of Zeus, eh? By the will of Zeus, Ganymedes had become immortal and exempt from old age. Well, that is bilious poop, a sop, and a happy ending.

The Roman poet Ovid wrote in his masterwork Metamorphoses,

But now I need a lighter strain, to sing of boys beloved of gods and girls bewitched by lawless fires who paid the price of lust. The Rex Superum (King of Heaven) once was fired with love of Ganymedes Phrygius, and something was devised that Juppiter [Zeus] would rather be than what he was. Yet no bird would he deign to be but one that had the power to bear his thunderbolts. At once his spurious pinions beat the breeze and off he swept Iliades [Ganymedes of Ilion]; who now, mixing the nectar, waits in heaven above, though Juno [Hera] frowns, and hands the cup to Jove.

Hera, the God’s wife, hated Ganymedes always. I wonder why.

Another side of the story says that King Minos of Crete, on a state visit to Troy, kidnapped the youth, the son of the King of Troy, and fled with him back to Minos, where the boy committed suicide over his fate. Minos buried the body in the temple, and from that came the notion that the boy was taken in by the god Zeus.

The bitterness, the brutality, and the violence got turned into myth.

We can’t tell the truth when the kids are listening.

So they all lived happily ever after. Uh-huh.

By Fred Zackel

Didja hear that Senator John Ensign, the two-term Nevada Republican caught up in a sex and ethics inquiry, won’t run again?

As Carl Hulse of The New York Times reported it, “As I have learned through the mistake that I made, there are consequences to sin,” Mr. Ensign, 52, said at a news conference in Las Vegas as his wife, Darlene, stood at his side.

Hulse continued, saying:

“Once considered a future presidential contender, Mr. Ensign has seen his political fortunes plummet since he admitted in 2009 to an affair with a former campaign staffer who was also the wife of a top aide. A Senate Ethics Committee investigation, still under way, began after disclosures that Mr. Ensign’s parents paid $96,000 to the aide, Douglas Hampton, who also said the senator had helped him line up lobbying clients after Mr. Hampton left his Senate job.”

Like a lot of folks, I love reading noir. Watching interesting people make one dumb decision after another. Like watching them falling down a staircase, going faster and faster until they go splat.

Noir is Inexorable and doom is Inevitable.

Methinks, a noir protagonist thinks with his willie, or rather lets his willie think for him, and that dooms him.

“Heaven be damned! I’m gonna think with my willie!”

A small film crew went down to the Tough Town, the toughest part of the Cold City; they were slumming, hoping to get some gripping footage to shock and awe the straights who lived Uptown.

Blondie Fatale, femme lead in this low-budget indie flick, got snatched by some ignorant savages who needed a patsy to get the heat off them, and she got tossed into the dark shadows.

Harry Dick, the toughest monkey in Tough Town, saw her and fell for her goldie locks. Now, Harry Dick lacked all self-control; he’d kill you just as soon as look at you; he took what he wanted when he wanted it; he had zero morals, too; he was that kind of guy.

Anyway, he didn’t rescue her. No, he snatched her up, didn’t cut her loose, man-handled her and kept her in shackles, and took her to his pad to do with her whatever he wanted.

Before he gets to let his animal nature run amuck, she cuts herself free during the night and escapes, and then he goes after her.

Meanwhile some big teeth baddies are chasing her, too.

Only when he has to rescue her from some big-teeth baddies does he realize, hey, I like this Blondie Fatale. I want to set up housekeeping with her.

Her buddies from film school save her butt, and bring down Harry Dick, knock him flat on his keister, helpless, and then they decide to show him off to the straights that live Uptown.

But Harry Dick busts free, snatches the Blondie Fatale again, and wastes a bunch of straights on his way out of Uptown.

But the cops are on to him, too.

Cornered by John Law, Harry Dick gets blown away, and Blonde Fatale gets free.

King Kong is noir.

The moral of the story: The biggest testicles have the smallest brains.

Ask any woman. As the bumper sticker in Wyoming states, “If it’s got tires or testicles, you’re going to have trouble with it.”

Recently Matt Lauer of America’s The Today Show was publically accused by his Dutch-born model wife of having cheated on his wife. And the National Enquirer reports that the 52-year-old Lauer, the father of three, has moved out of the family home.

Bones star David Boreanaz, 40, is just one of the more recent Hollywood stars to confess that he has been unfaithful to his wife of nearly nine years, Jaime Bergman. Meanwhile an extra is suing that he made Promises to get her on the Casting Couch.

What’s going wrong?

Our society celebrates -– DEMANDS — male self-control.

And noir is a morality tale about men who can’t control themselves.

A man enters the Universe of Noir when he lets his willie do his thinking for him.

Think Bill Clinton. Eliot Spitzer. South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford. Mark Foley. Newt Gingrich. John Edwards. Jesse James. And what was the name of that Congressman? Whadda mean, which one? The one the other day. No, yesterday’s. And now John Ensign throws in the towel.

Tiger Wood anybody?

Remember Tiger Woods’ “Confession?”

“I have let my family down and I regret those transgressions with all of my heart. I have not been true to my values and the behavior my family deserves. I am not without faults and I am far short of perfect.

“Although I am a well-known person and have made my career as a professional athlete, I have been dismayed to realize the full extent of what tabloid scrutiny really means. For the last week, my family and I have been hounded to expose intimate details of our personal lives. The stories in particular that physical violence played any role in the car accident were utterly false and malicious.

“But no matter how intense curiosity about public figures can be, there is an important and deep principle at stake which is the right to some simple, human measure of privacy. I realize there are some who don’t share my view on that. But for me, the virtue of privacy is one that must be protected in matters that are intimate and within one’s own family. Personal sins should not require press releases and problems within a family shouldn’t have to mean public confessions.”

The NY Times ran this transcript and within 36 hours the public made … 11,896 comments at the NYT website.

Wow.

I sorta figured Tiger was just going through the Evolutionary Mandate: score with as many women as possible to pass on as many sets of his genes. Things today are different. Maybe Evolution got bumped by The Pill.

Just imagine: for the past dozen years, in every clubhouse across the country, some guy at the bar was leaning over to the next barstool, crudely saying, “If I were Tiger Woods, I’d be getting every piece of tail there was in the world!”

Guess what: Tiger was.

Now he’s just one of the guys. Except he’s a billionaire. Which means even with a bad pre-nupt agreement, he’s okay for retirement. Hey, he can retire and move to Florida and spend every day playing golf.

Oh. Right. That’s what he’s doing now.

Oh, and the “pundits” in the media? Oh, they’re routering his crotch like, like, like … he committed a crime. Which … he didn’t. Unless adultery with a dozen or women is a crime.

What he did was a sin. In some people’s eyes, anyways.

Now & then I get …. sorta religious. I always liked Jesus telling the adulterous woman, “Don’t do it again, okay?” Just nobody here practices my form of Christianity. Oh well.

I’ll bet not a single guy in this country envies Tiger today.

The most important part of these Clinton-Letterman-Woods-Ensign stories is not that these guys thought with their willie wonkas. Not that they thought they could get away with it, either.

The most important part is that they thought they could trust the Other Woman. Twitter twitter twitter … iggle giggle wink wink nudge nudge.

“My life would have been so different if I hadn’t taken off my underwear.”

Eamon Casey, the former Archbishop of Galway, didn’t actually say that. But I bet he thought it.

For giggles, google Casey. He gives you good faith in religion as a moral compass, speaking of loose gimbals.

Check out the journalism book, “Write It When I’m Gone: Remarkable Off-The-Record Conversations with Gerald R. Ford,” by journalist Thomas DeFrank.

DeFrank writes, “(Jerry Ford) thought Bill Clinton had a serious addiction here and he needed help.”

Bubba let his willie do his thinking in the White House.

What the hell was he thinking? Well, he wasn’t.

What was he thinking with? Ah, there’s the rub.

True fact: Monica never knew Bill was married. He never told him, the cad. That’s why Monica showed him her thong in the Oval Office. If she had known he was a married man–

Wait! Was the whole deal a set-up? Did the Femme Fatale frame Bill’s Willie?

How hard-boiled are you to hang onto a semen-stained dress?

How soon do you stop looking like an innocent and more like a blackmailer?

OMG! HER MOTHER WAS IN ON IT WITH HER!

Naw, that’s not how it happened.

The femme fatale is fatal to the willie.

Yoko Ono was a femme fatale. She broke up the band, right? She got John Lennon to pose naked for an album cover.

Noir is about morality, as John Ensign came to realize. The inevitability of the Denouement is, well, Judgment Day. I look at noir writers, and I see old-fashioned Old Testament religion oozing from them like January maple syrup.

Dashiell Hammett was a former Catholic, James Cain was a gloating Catholic, Mickey Spillane created the (Mike) Hammer of God, and so forth.

The Maltese Falcon is not at center a whodunnit, but a novel about people — about one man, Sam Spade, especially — caught up in a world of crime. It offers a peculiar point of view to accompany this vision, the detached-viewpoint story, where we never get into the head of any character. We are simply floating, invisible observers, and the narrator has disappeared.

We see and hear the events as they take place, as if we are present, but invisible in the room. This is not quite “the camera’s eye.” That’s where the reader is allowed to see and hear only what a camera sees and a microphone hears. In The Maltese Falcon there are comments and interpretations. We become invisible observers in the room.

In The Maltese Falcon, murder is still represented as a game of Good versus Evil (although most of the violence is off-stage). The gamester here is the Ace of Spades, Sam himself. The ambiguity of his character is central to the story. In this world where all is corrupt, where all can be corrupted, Sam Spade knows the score.

“Most things in San Francisco can be bought, or taken.”

Hammett created Spade, a blonde devil. Spade is also Sisyphus before Camus tinkered with the myth. The Falcon begins with Spade in his office and ends with Spade in his office.

And when Miles Archer, his partner, is killed, Sam Spade pushes himself squarely into the center arena and the struggle for the Black Bird (i.e., temptation.) He wheedles and cajoles and threatens and lies and taunts and bluffs to find out who killed Miles Archer.

Hammett’s misdirection is marvelous. Archer’s death very quickly becomes a subplot. Finding the Black Bird becomes the main plot. And yet once the Bird is found, Archer’s death is resolved.

Spade describes his dead partner Archer:

“He was a sucker for women. His record shows that—the only falls he took were over women. And once a chump, always a chump.”

The leopard can’t change his spots.

Fantasy is about power. For men, it’s the sword battle with the Dragon over the Maiden in Distress. Very Freudian. The dragon is the Authority Figure, the Maiden represents the Sexual Conquest, and the sword is the penis. The Quest is about getting your first sexual experience.

Women tell Quest stories, too, although minus the sword. The Bridal Quest. Wherein the woman watches (“witnesses”) the Male Quest to see if he might be suitable marriage material.

Probably the most obvious example of this was the 1985 movie Witness with Harrison Ford and Kelly McGinnis. Once we realize she is “witnessing” which suitor (Harrison Ford’s character or Alexander Godunov’s Amish counterpart) will be best for her and her eight-year-old boy.

Fifty percent of all books sold in the USA are romances. And I mean that in the old 13th century definitions. Adventures with marriage at the end of the book. Women are on the Bridal Quest to find a monogamous mate.

Pornography is about power, too. Male fantasies are great equalizers. Their “swords” perform with legendary adeptness. And the women in porn are dumb enough to agree: “Oh, how long your sword is!”

In real life most women recognize the irrational, unreasoning power of the fantasy, and they justifiably feel the threat.

(For a variation on the theme read a batch of the Coyote stories from Native Americans — very anchored in sexual adventures and misadventures. See Coyote as Yuppie Stud: “Wanna see my sensitive side?” And the Old Women laugh at him. “Oh, that’s just Coyote playing his tricks!”)

But consider another ubiquitous fantasy, the Cinderella story: That fairytale has over 750 variations and is told in every culture in the world. You’ll notice the Cinderella story is the secret story behind almost all of Oprah’s monthly Book Club Choices. Hmmm. Wonder why??? Do you think Oprah sees herself as a Cinderella?

The story goes like this: Once upon a time — that means it happened once in all time and will never happen this way again — a girl relegated to being a Kitchen Bitch for her entire life gets help from her Fairy Godmother — an old crone witch who befriends lonely single girls — and Cinderella can now “bewitch” a Prince Charming — who is so stupid, the only way he can tell women apart is by seeing their shoe size.

Think of Prince Charming. He wants a woman who fits the glass slipper.

In the original French version, the glass slipper was fur.

The furry slipper. Can she get her foot into the furry slipper?

He never saw his True Love’s face? What was he looking at?

Prince Charming is so dumb, he can’t tell two women apart except by their feet?

Cinderella gets rich, moves to the castle, where she harasses all the Kitchen Bitches who didn’t get lucky and find the Right Guy.

Look at the Maltese Falcon story again. Brigit O’S thought she was Cinderella. She thought all Prince Charmings are stupid fools who would walk up Burritt Alley with their tongues hanging out of their trousers.

Spade — the Blonde Devil — The Warlock? The Gamester? The Trickster? — almost fell for it too.

Compare Brigit’s description with the Woman playing dice with Death in the second boat of Coleridge’s Rime of the Ancient Mariner. They are identical! Both are archetypical. Both are myth.

“Her lips were red, her looks were free
Her locks were yellow as gold,
Her skin was white as leprosy.
The Nightmare Life-in-Death was she,
Who thick’s man’s blood with cold.”

~ Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner

Imagine Sisyphus with a gun.

Is that a gun in your hand or do you love me?

Camus wrote The Stranger after he read The Postman Always Rings twice.

Spade’s only moment of freedom is sending Brigit over. Archer was doomed; he thought with his willie. But Spade can transcend his willie. Temporarily.

Brigit counted upon Spade being just another guy who never stopped thinking with his willie.

How smart was Spade fouling his own nest by balling his partner’s wife? Spade is nuts about pussy but a real wussy around women. Anytime he needs advice, he asks Effie first.

Spade KNOWS the only reason Archer died in Burritt Alley is because Archer talked faster than he did into taking on the new client and following her scent across the city.

Ah, the scent of a woman right up a blind alley.

Spade goes after Archer’s killer because he recognizes HE should been the poor dumb slob dead with his gun in his holster.

Spade knows he is no match for a hungry Cinderella.

He strip-searches Brigit to see if she’s carrying weapons.

Well, of course she is; all women got them.

Sam Spade’s comment at the end: “Next, I’ve no reason in God’s world to think I can trust you and if I did this and got away with it you’d have something on me that you could use whenever you happened to want to.”

Oh, he’s sweating, afraid, and desperate all right.

The ancient Greeks had a story about the wolf and the farmer’s dogs. The wolf comes by the farmer’s place, sees the farmer’s dogs all running wild and jumping around the meadow, having the time of their lives, partying like crazy. The dogs see the wolf, come running over. “See how free and wild we are,” the dogs all tell the wolf. The wolf doesn’t say anything.

In truth, the wolf sees the collars on the dogs’ necks.

The last lines of The Maltese Falcon read:

“Spade, looking at his desk, nodded almost impreceptably. ‘Yes,’ he said, and shivered. “Well, send her in.'”

And the last thing Spade does in the book is “shudder” ’cause Archer’s wife wants to see him. After that we get The Silence of the Lambs from Spade.

I think it was Esquire magazine some years ago who claimed Sam Spade was murdered on the very next page. Iva, of course.

Spade, the lone wolf. Thinking with his willie once too often.

That’s noir, man.

Let’s turn on the news.

Let’s see who’s next to discover the consequences of sin.

How’s Tiger doing this weekend?

Maybe he just needs to get lucky.

Parts one and two. (Wherein we dump the obsolete Adam and Eve tale of the Advent of Consciousness for a more radical and contemporary one based on evolutionary psychology and cognitive neuroscience.) by Fred Zackel “Something fell out of the mirror.” “Did you hold it upside down?” “Yes.” “Did you shake it?” “Yes.” “After I…

(Wherein we dump the obsolete Adam and Eve tale of the Advent of Consciousness for a more radical and contemporary one based on evolutionary psychology and cognitive neuroscience) by Fred Zackel “Something fell out of the mirror.”“Did you hold it upside down?”“Yes.”“Did you shake it?”“Yes.”“After I told you not to?”“I got curious.” We must congratulate…

by Fred Zackel, Ph.D.

Didja hear?

This February, NewSouth Books will publish “Tom Sawyer” and “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” in a single volume, removing the “n” word and the word “injun” from the text. The word “slave” will replace the “n” word.

Mark Twain must be twirling in his grave.

Last year 2010 marked the 175th anniversary of his birth, the 100th anniversary of his death and the 125th anniversary of the American publication of “Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.”

This book “Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” is, as Lionel Trilling said, was “America’s most eloquent argument against racism.”

If you never read it, don’t wait for some instructor to force you.

As Twain himself said, “I never let schooling interfere with my education.”

But let’s look at what else we can “hear” from Twain, the First Great, Internationally Famous California Writer.

Oh yeah. Mark Twain was a California writer.

Listen to the Voice in this 1865 yarn, “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County,” his earliest success.

“I’ll risk forty dollars that he can outjump any frog in Calaveras county.”

And later …

“I don’t see no p’ints about that frog that’s any better’n any other frog.”

The Jumping Frog was the first California International Best-seller. It made Twain famous. The story was spawned in the Gold Country. It traveled the world.

The story is about a con man getting conned. And what could be more All American?

Mark Twain said about the American art …

“To string incongruities and absurdities together in a wandering and sometimes purposeless way, and seem innocently unaware that they are absurdities, is the basis of the American art, if my position is correct.”

Yes, he was the first great California writer. Hard to believe, yes.

In San Francisco Twain met Bret Harte, who first printed the Jumping Frog. The two men started their feud. Harte was not a racist, but he was not opposed to using racism to boost his career. Twain was a casual racist at first. He was a Southerner, after all, had even spent time with the Confederate militia, but the treatment of minorities, especially the Chinese, in San Francisco opened his eyes and helped change his heart.

In San Francisco Mark Twain had his first earthquake, almost committed suicide, and found his voice. Oh, and he surfed naked, too. Really. In Hawaii, actually.

In San Francisco and Hawaii he was a young man. A redhead, by the way.

Twain spent the first two decades of his writing life NOT writing a full length manuscript.

Starting at 18, he wrote sketches and skits. Gradually he moved into tall tale fantasies and travel letters.

Out west (both Virginia City and San Francisco,) he was a reporter with feature stories, political news, and sketches. He wrote the tall tale and the burlesque.

His first full length book was “The Innocents Abroad,” but it was merely a collection of travel letters.

His 1870 “Roughin’ It” was his first real book, and it was his recollections from Nevada, California, and even Hawaii. It too was short pieces.

Oh, btw, I find my own favorite Twain pieces, too, in “Roughin’ It.” When you get to Twain’s Coyote essay, go ahead and read it aloud. Get a western drawl in the side of your mouth and read Coyote aloud. The slower the better. I swear we grab a time machine and go back almost 150 years when we say it aloud.

Most of his life’s work as a writer was episodic, anecdotal, and often not in context.

(I blame the lack of MFA programs in Creative Writing after the Civil War for that.)

Clemens only had nine years of true schooling, one of his deepest regrets.

In 1863 he took on a pseudonym to save himself from a gunslinger and a duel.

“The Celebrated Jumping Frog” was his earliest masterpiece. After its first publication, he revised it many times; five times by my count alone.

Twain was a thoughtful, painstaking craftsman. In all his work, he wrote from scratch, without an outline or a plan, as if writing a personal essay and then building towards an ending still unknown to him.

In all those revisions, he was searching for the scheme to the story, devising the pattern to each work while he endlessly revised it, searching for what made the work sing.

He once claimed the secret to discovering the story was discovering the proper “point of view.”

Mention “Point of View” and we can hear …

Huck Finn talking just to us.

Huck Finn, by the way, a fifteen year old, semi-literate victim of child abuse from his Pappy, says the most amazing thing about his American heritage in Chapter 31 of that wonderful book NewSouth is going to butcher, after he discovers “there’s a two hundred dollars reward on” his companion Jim.

If he turns Jim in for the reward, that action will “make him a slave again all his life …”

Now let me apologize in advance for Huck’s language, the only language he ever knew, the language of racism:

“And then think of me! It would get all around, that Huck Finn helped a nigger to get his freedom; and if I was to ever see anybody from that town again, I’d be ready to get down and lick his boots for shame. That’s just the way: a person does a low-down thing, and then he don’t want to take no consequences of it. Thinks as long as he can hide it, it ain’t no disgrace. That was my fix exactly. The more I studied about this, the more my conscience went to grinding me, and the more wicked and low-down and ornery I got to feeling. And at last, when it hit me all of a sudden that here was the plain hand of Providence slapping me in the face and letting me know my wickedness was being watched all the time from up there in heaven …”

In case you never heard this, the N-word is used 283 times in the novel. Its usage is casual, constant. It was part of the koine of America. Yes, it is racist and vile and reprehensible … but it was common currency back then.

So the only Universe Huck Finn knows demands he turn Jim in. Even his religious upbringing says he must turn Jim in. He will get handsomely rewarded, too, for this betrayal.

“And I about made up my mind to pray; and see if I couldn’t try to quit being the kind of a boy I was, and be better. So I kneeled down. But the words wouldn’t come. Why wouldn’t they? It warn’t no use to try and hide it from Him. Nor from me, neither. I knowed very well why they wouldn’t come. It was because my heart warn’t right; it was because I warn’t square; it was because I was playing double. I was letting on to give up sin, but away inside of me I was holding on to the biggest one of all. I was trying to make my mouth say I would do the right thing and the clean thing, and go and write to that nigger’s owner and tell where he was …”

Huck writes the letter: “Miss Watson your runaway nigger Jim is down here two mile below Pikesville and Mr. Phelps has got him and he will give him up for the reward if you send. HUCK FINN.”

And in the first great act of empathy in American literature, this abused child says:

“I took it up, and held it in my hand. I was a trembling, because I’d got to decide, forever, betwixt two things, and I knowed it. I studied a minute, sort of holding my breath, and then says to myself: “All right, then, I’ll go to hell”- and tore it up.”

My word, what an astonishing moral development. He rejects racism!!

“All right, then, I’ll go to hell”

Yes, Mark Twain is the author whom William Dean Howells once called “the Lincoln of our literature.”

As Twain himself once said, “I don’t believe in Hell but I’m afraid of it.”

Let’s go back up that page in Chapter 31.

“We catched fish and talked, and we took a swim now and then to keep off sleepiness. It was kind of solemn, drifting down the big, still river, laying on our backs looking up at the stars, and we didn’t ever feel like talking loud, and it warn’t often that we laughed—only a little kind of a low chuckle. We had mighty good weather as a general thing, and nothing ever happened to us at all—that night, nor the next, nor the next.”

As I said, my own personal belief is that Huck’s two sentences that come next are the most powerful, most valuable sentences in the American canon.

“I was a-trembling, because I’d got to decide, forever, betwixt two things, and I knowed it. I studied a minute, sort of holding my breath, and then says to myself, “All right, then, I’ll GO to hell.”

Those two sentences are why Ernest Hemingway said all modern American literature starts with Mark Twain.

Twain wrote once, “The difference between the right word and the almost right word is really a large matter — it’s the difference between a lightning bug and the lightning.”

But if you do not know the context in which Huck Finn said those two sentences, then you will never get a grip on race relations in America.

Twain wrote the first half of the novel, got stuck, and set it aside for almost ten years.

Think about that ten year gap. How much of your OLD SELF must you crawl out of and throw away in order to climb into your NEW SELF?

A fifteen-year-old throwaway, a victim of child abuse, says, “All right, then, I’ll GO to hell.”

Huck Finn ends his story by saying he’s going west.

Horace Greeley said, Go West, Young Man, and grow up with your country.

Huck Finn becomes one of the Best Americans ever, in my book.

As you read Twain, pay attention to his art.

His narrator, Twain insisted, is an actor’s art rather than a writer’s art. Please notice the stage directions, for lack of a better phrase, in Twain’s writings. Written speech counterfeits impromptu oral speech.

“To string incongruities and absurdities together in a wandering and sometimes purposeless way, and seem innocently unaware that they are absurdities, is the basis of the American art, if my position is correct.”

Huck Finn is still one of the most banned books in America. John Steinbeck’s “Of Mice and Men” is another. Look for others while you are at it.

Read a Banned Book Today. With all the terrible words.

It’ll make you a better person for it.

(Wherein we dump the obsolete Adam and Eve tale of the Advent of Consciousness for a more radical and contemporary one based on evolutionary psychology and cognitive neuroscience)

by

Fred Zackel, Ph.D.

“Something fell out of the mirror.”
“Did you hold it upside down?”
“Yes.”
“Did you shake it?”
“Yes.”
“After I told you not to?”
“I got curious.”

We must congratulate ourselves. Name another animal capable of creating its own meaning for its existence and then imposing it on the universe. We might even be the ones who most delay their own extinction.

Yet inside the mirror is the abyss inside us.

Let me tell you about Gregory of Nazianzus (330 – c.390) who later became Gregory, the Archbishop of Constantinople. He was known as “the Trinitarian Theologian” for his preliminary work with the emperor Theodosius on imagining the Trinity at the Second Ecumenical Council of Constantinople in 381 AD.

What? You think this Trinity popped out of the Church’s head full-blown like Athena out of Zeus? You think the Word became Flesh (snap!) just like that?

Gregory of Nazianzus argued just as we cannot look directly at the sun, we can know about it by seeing it reflected in water. So too we can know the Divine.

Our species may have gained self-awareness this way. We saw our reflection in the water hole. The word “epiphany” means seeing our place in the Great Scheme of Things.

∞

One day many millennia in the past, we human beings, each of us, one after another, saw our reflections at the water hole and for the first time. Oh, not all at once, of course. Each of us saw it independently. Some of us much sooner than others. And some of us needed it pointed out to us. But each of us saw ourselves and at that moment each of us became aware of our Self. Each of us, one after another, discovered self-awareness. Each of us had an epiphany and we learned we had individual identities, and thus, one after another, we saw our place in the Great Cosmic Scheme of Things.

What we saw was either a mirage or a miracle.

The Latin root for each word is “mirari,” which means “mirror.” An earlier root to our word “mirage” can be found in Indo-European; that word is “mei,” which means “to smile.” To look at and smile, well, that works for me. Smile for the mirror, eh?

Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?

On the other hand, seeing the face of Jesus Christ in a taco shell is not proof of Intelligent Design. For example, my dentist says all mammals get cataracts. So much for Intelligent Design.

Evolution does seem the ONLY invisible hand guiding human beings, often against our own inclinations, toward any sort of moral universalism. It moves in fits and starts, is inherently flexible, takes side trips, doubles its bets whenever it sees a niche, and nothing is inevitable except extinction. As best as I can figure it, there is no “design” and “goals” and “purposes” in human history or in the greater Cosmos, except for the ones we humans have imagined and designed for ourselves.

Evolution constantly reshapes our POV on the Divine.

There is always a new god in town. Maybe not yet visible yet, but percolating beneath the surface, we could say. Today’s solutions are tomorrow’s problems. And a new god may be Tomorrow’s Solution because the one we got now won’t be elastic enough to take us through the overnight.

∞

All great apes recognize themselves in a mirror.

Now recognizing yourself in a mirror is fantastic. That self-recognition is critically important, while it may mean little to most of us at first glance.

All the great apes have passed the “mirror self-recognition” test and soon begin checking their teeth or examining parts of their body they couldn’t see without the mirror.
This self-awareness suggests that they know they exist.

On the other hand, let’s not get too cocky. Being Aware of Yourself in a mirror, well, elephants and dolphins show similar self-awareness. Whales may, too, although we have trouble finding big enough mirrors. Rats might recognize themselves … but they may also be deceiving us that they aren’t. Although why they might want to hide the fact … is truly disturbing.

We also have empathy. Empathy is the aerial view, seeing another’s world through their eyes. We learn “to walk a mile in their shoes.” We learn that, “there but for the grace of God, go you and I.” We learn compassion for others. Empathy in human beings begins around four or five or six years old. Which is just before the age of reason. Nope, this age of reason is not connected to the Enlightenment of the 18th century. This age of reason is connected in Roman Catholic terms to the age when a child is said to know the difference between right and wrong.

I like that connection, don’t you? Empathy and knowing the difference between right and wrong develop around the same age in a child. They click in; we are hard-wired for both.

∞

We started imagining the Divine as soon as our species was capable of symbolic thinking. Some evolutionary psychologists and some cognitive scientists suggest that our discovery of mirrors – or our reflections in the watering holes of the savannah led almost inevitable, almost inexorably to self-recognition and self-consciousness — and thus to our imagining of the Divine and thus we saw ourselves attaining a more secure position within the Universe.

Oh, there’s no evidence yet this story happened.

Evolutionary psychology, just to mention, has a huge problem. It often offers a very plausible theory but one that is difficult to test with experiments. Evolutionary psychology is story-based. Too damn anecdotal for many people.

But as a storyteller myself I love its possibilities.

But let me raise the stakes, as all writers love to do. An old bumper-sticker among creative writers says, “Desperate people tell the best stories.”

The novelist Stephen King, a fair arbitrator of the Herd’s inmost anxieties, once said, “I put a group of characters in some sort of predicament and then watch them try to work themselves free.” To which the short story writer Raymond Carver might have added, ”I think a little menace is fine to have in a story.”

Consider the story of our species as the Greatest Story ever told on Earth.

Let’s look at every story we tell with more than a hint of desperation.

How desperate are we for the Divine to intervene?

∞

Perhaps we saw our reflections in the waterhole.

Well, maybe one of us did and then called the rest of the herd to take notice.

Hey, guys, check this out!

Did we drag all the members of Our Herd (however that herd is comprised) down to the waterhole to show them their individual faces in the water? Did they all, one after another, have their ah-ha! moment? Did they discuss among themselves the revelation the implication, its significance, the ramifications, the reverberations …?

Well, probably not. But we should consider them, eh?

I’m sure some of us would feel threaten by and thus might deny the waterhole episode has any intrinsic meaning or any impact on our species. Think Cardinal Roberto Francesco Romolo “Robert” Bellarmine, for one, or those who deny that the Apollo missions landed on the Moon. There is a long-standing tradition among human beings that refuses to take someone or something at face value. That resists the next quantum leap onward and upward.

Also interestingly, what did we think of those among us who DID NOT recognize themselves in their reflection? Did we think, ah-ha, he’s not as evolved as you and me? She’s not as good as you and me? Did class distinctions begin around the water cooler, oops, the waterhole? Well, he’s so dumb that he doesn’t even recognize himself in a mirror.

How was that earliest Herd comprised? Was the Herd all the members of our hunting party? Did it include our significant others? Our kin folk? Those we shared last night’s campfire with? Those we were about to leave behind? Or all of the above.

After all, Being Human, all of us today can see our faces in the mirror. (Well, maybe that bimbo over there. I’ve always had my doubts about her.)

Recognizing ourselves is a tribute to our species. (Maybe. Sort of. Possibly.)

Let us also consider that seeing our reflections in the waterhole happened independently around the world, although at different times and places to different individuals. But that the next result was an Epiphany for Our Species.

∞

Frankenstein’s Monster speaks for us all.

“Who was I? What was I? Whence did I come? What was my destination? These questions continually recurred, but I was unable to resolve them.”

Note the progression, the implied evolution.

I view this suggested narrative as a new creation myth, merely a new way of describing who we are and where we came from. Even a suggestion where we as a species might be headed, should we decide we want to become our own Helmsman.

As such, this “reflection at the waterhole” theory is a valid as any other creation myth put forth by any other Herd. What makes it better than others is that it updates our current situation. It feeds off recent advances in cognitive neuroscience and evolutionary psychology. That alone might give us better guidance towards an otherwise unknowable future.

Consider how we update our GPS systems. No difference, folks.

How serendipitous has natural selection been for us!

But Darwin, Hubble, the eagle has landed…

Our triumphalism stopped dead in its tracks.

Look at the face of the man in the Moon.

We stood there. Where do we go from here? When will we go?

∞

I would add more to the Epiphany at the waterhole. Our earliest epiphanies showed us the desperate situation Our Herd (*) was in at that Moment.

An Epiphany is a Cosmic Pie in the Face. Here is our real place in the Great Scheme of Things, it tells us. We sprang back from the first one, horrified, saying, Aw, there must be a better place somewhere else! Oh, we can do better than this! Geez, I want something better for my kids! A better life for my grandkids!

Oh, we gotta get outa this place!

If it’s the last thing we ever do!

Self-awareness – consciousness — made us desperate.

We were subject to lions and tigers and bears, oh my!

Awareness and Desperation are Kissin’ Cousins that arrived in the same instant.

Once we realized the Spot we were in, once we recognized both our Awareness and our Desperation, we tried desperately hard to take control of our destiny … and we lurched ahead at full speed.

∞

Relax. Have a cup of coffee. Notice the (*) above? Saying “Our Herd” could mean saying Our Family … Our Clan … Our Tribe … Our Society … Our Culture … Our Nation … Our Religion … even Our Species. Could even be Our E-Herd … or Our E-Hive, depending how Internet-savvy we are and where we individually may wish to draw the line. (Beyond this line in the sand, I don’t think of you as My Brethren.)

Our best-loved stories are meant to be sensational because we must wake up our repressed, conformist society. (See “Our Herd” above.) Our best epiphanies must be sensational so that we take notice of them.

By definition, all societies are repressed and conformist. (Just ask that teenager over there, yes, the other scowling like a gargoyle in Paris.) No matter what you and I might think, tradition and conservatism can rapidly become stagnant.

Consider the power of Tradition has had over the past ten thousand plus years. Only since the Enlightenment was followed up by the Industrial Revolution has the Audacity of Hope been vindicated by the Benefits of Progress. Only since the Enlightenment was followed by the Industrial Revolution has Organized Religion taken any real hits at all, and Organized Religion is both repressed and conformist.

Seeking change has never been a societal goal. An individual goal, always – for a minority who believe that the grass is greener somewhere else. Think over that last cliché. That cliché had been the foundation of every society until the past three or four hundred years. To the older voices among us, it has been a derogatory phrase, a deliberate insult to those younger voices who want … Different. (“You think the grass is greener somewhere else. You’ll find out, like Dorothy did, that there’s no place like home.”) It posits Anybody Who Thinks Differently as a loser who will die from that folly. You don’t want to be a loser so stick around and keep quiet and be a part of Our Herd. Live long and prosper as one of us.

Societies have always hated Change.

The Herd is always fear-based. That’s why it congregates.

Until now. And the 21st century world looks weird!!

To be blunt: we got global vision and we saw benefits and now we won’t go back.

Consider our current greatest enemy. Those losers who believe in the Caliphate and want to go back to the 12th or 13th century. Luckily, there are no enough of them in the world to send us backwards. That they live in caves in the poorest regions or the world, that they promote their agendas with suicide bombs, points out that they and their ideologies are doomed to fail and disappear. They had to hijack a religion and its conception of the Divine to get any traction in this world or with other whackos.

Thanks to the mirror at the waterhole, our species rose above its biological condition. We saw who we were, how desperate our situation was, and we fought, struggled and sacrificed to make a better life for our offspring.

We have always been refugees from something worse.

Oops. We may not be alone on this evolutionary journey.