Robert evolves humor

I hadn't talked to Gregory, leader of The Army of the Young (prominent on the U.S. West Coast and spreading) since the pandemic started, so I thought I'd contact him and catch up.  Gregory is a political operative and messianic twenty-something.  I figured he'd have a lot to say about post-Trump reality.  It turned out he didn't. [Gregory does have a lot to say- and you'll get a peek at the 2044 U.S. Presidential election in his piece, "Gregory's Army of the Young", above].

As we had last time, we met in Bakersfield, the midway point between Gregory's community near Marysville and mine in Pearblossom, at America's only remaining Woolworth's.  We sat again at the vintage soda fountain.  

It had occured to me that Robert the Telepathic Gila Monster might be a cogent contributor to our conversation, as he has an uncanny understanding of human politics.  Gregory is not entirely comfortable that I associate with deities and sentient reptiles, so I hid Robert in my "man-bag" and told him to wait for an appropriate moment to reveal himself.

Gregory sighed quietly, it seemed to me, when I asked him his thoughts on "post-Trump reality."  He took some time to answer.

Harry, he finally said, I'm sorry, I don't entirely enjoy thinking about things the way I used to.  I know I'm the head of a political movement and so on.

Yes, that sounds difficult, Gregory.  How are you going to handle your followers?  Are you going to conceal that you don't like thinking about things anymore?

For now that's the plan, yes.

So...why don't you like thinking about things anymore?

Well, because a political movement is based on optimism, and, somehow, in what you call the "post-Trump reality," I'm not optimistic.

You mean...you are...

Yes, I'm pessimistic.

Silence ensued as we digested Gregory's words.

Gregory, I'm so sorry, is there anything I can do?

No thanks, Harry.  Pessimism is just an emotional/intellectual state after all.  It will pass.

Like optimism.

Exactly.

Gregory, if I may ask, what is it about our post-Trump reality that has caused your pessimism?

Of course you may ask, Harry.  I think it's the way Trump took on all our sins- not in a Jesus sort of way, where you die for everyone's sins- but in a self-indulgent way where you actually commit all the sins most people can't get away with, making fame and fortune for yourself and wreckage for everyone else.

Then why aren't you optimistic because America is able- for now- to contain Trump?

Because just as a focus on Satan as the prime and ultimate source of evil can be counter-productive, diverting our attention from more local evil (or as I call it, malpractice) so too can associating Trump with every wicked political trend spread a protective shroud around other causes and effects.

What do you think of President Biden?

He fits a Central Casting call for "Nice older gentleman," the perfect two-dimensional cutout to lure us into war. The battle against Trump is a diversion. 

Agreed, but why can't you just celebrate this limited victory for what it is?

It's too limited.  

Gregory ordered a root beer float, which struck me as somewhat optimistic.  I got a Diet Dr. Pepper.  I don't even want to think about what that meant.

Gregory, what do you want Biden to do?

Honestly, Harry, there's not much he can do.  The world is filled with millions of young people who have little hope of gainful or meaningful employment.   The default option is to send them to war, that or convert them to soylent green. And look at biotech and AI. Humanity is going to be refashioned by scientists, and much of the human race will become obsolete by its own hand.  There's nothing anyone, including a president, can do about it.

Gregory, some people would call that optimistic.

Yes, Gregory smiled, but Harry, we're not among the elect.  I know you are a psychic with unusual connections to the, what shall I call it...spirit world? 

At our last meeting (see "Older posts" below), Gregory was seriously unnerved  by a cameo appearance from Betty the Coyote Creator Goddess. 

But, Gregory continued, do you see yourself welcome in the coming age?

I'm not sure I'll be up to code. 

None of us will be up to code.  Remember the "savages" in Aldous Huxley's Brave New World?  They were people who still reproduced sexually.  "Mother" was a dirty word.  The savages were kept in concentration camps in the desert.  And don't forget climate change.

Let's hear it.

In order to keep the planet habitable, 20% of the fossil fuel that remains in the ground will have to go unused.  That is not going to happen.

I don't know, Gregory.  Greta Thunberg's movement has proven enduring.

That is the only movement that will count.  The adult movements are weakened by uncertainty.  The moment of Thunberg's vision has arrived.  Yet that 20% will be pumped into the sky.

I sighed. Gregory, your pessimism is getting to me.  I'm a blogger.  People don't want to read bad news unless it's funny.  How am I supposed to make this funny? 

I don't know, Harry.  My calling asks me to be serious, which for me requires optimism.  Looks like we're both in the shit. 

Gee, I wonder what you can do about it, thought Robert (to us) from my "man-bag."  I had almost forgotten he was there.  Gregory gave me a skeptical look.

Gregory, I'm so sorry, I said, I know you aren't comfortable with my outreaches to non-human realms, but perhaps I could change your mind.  May I introduce Robert the Telepathic Gila Monster?

Hi Gregory, thought Robert as he stuck his head out of my bag and stared directly at Gregory, whose look turned from skepticism to disgust.

Gregory, Robert continued cheerily, don't forget I'm psychic.  I know you're not enjoying meeting me.

No...I, I'm happy to hear what you have to say, Gregory stammered, Go on please.

Well, I'll do my best, but I should explain that gila monsters do not have a sense of humor.  I've tried many times to understand what Harry means when he says something is "funny," to no avail.  I do know from my study of human physiology that laughter is a response to the reconciling of the left and right hemispheres of the human brain- which represent, roughly, literal versus figurative thinking- mediated by a bundle of nerve tissue called the corpus callosum that connects the two hemispheres.  As the c.c., which has its own brain, sifts through the streams of the two interpretations of the environment, it often finds esoterically matched analogues, and it has the option to decide if a match is "funny" (from Middle English, fon, fool).  The matches designated "foolish" are sent to humor centers in other parts of the nervous system (there are 15 million).  If enough electric charge accumulates in the humor centers, a feedback loop with the c.c. emerges, and this triggers a spasmodic choking response in the upper body.  The experience, though highly valued by your kind, is mercifully denied to mine.

FYI, Robert, I retorted, what you just said was funny, but, as the saying goes, it was so funny I forgot to laugh.

Actually, Robert, said Gregory, who appeared considerably more relaxed, your ideas are intriguing.  I'm not much of a humorist myself, and I often wonder about laughter.  Since Harry went out on a limb to bring us together, maybe your analytical abilities could help him find the humor in our pessimistic scenarios.

Wow, muttered Robert, another human willing to listen to me.  Life just keeps getting better.  Let me think.

Robert started his purposeful thinking by chewing softly on the rim of my leather bag.  His thoughts were guarded, but sometimes we picked up stray, fragmented sentences.  They were not funny.  

Finally Robert stopped chewing on my bag and looked up, directly into Gregory's eyes.

Try this, Harry, Robert thought, still holding Gregory's gaze:

 A rabbi, a Catholic priest and a pantheist are walking together when they come upon the final 20% of Earth's fossil fuels.

The rabbi says, "Hey you two, why don't you go in with me to buy Earth's last fossil fuel?  Then we'll pull it off the market and save the planet!"

The Catholic priest says, "That's a great idea! Count me in!"

But the pantheist exclaims, "No!  This may not happen!  The Earth God is freezing to death and wants the surface of the planet to ignite and warm him!"

We gathered that Robert had come to the conclusion of his "joke" because he was shaking spasmodically in what I understood to be his first experience of humor and laughter.  Gregory looked pale and a bit disturbed.

Robert, I finally said, Please snap out of it.  That was not funny.

Really?, Robert spat, You obviously didn't get it.

Gregory and I decided not to belabor the point.  We made our goodbyes and headed to our cars.  On the drive back to Pearblossom Robert told me that now that he understands humor he is going to write a book called "Robert the Telepathic Gila Monster's favorite jokes."  He says he will forward the jokes to me as they develop.

The ride home was uneventful, punctuated every few minutes by spasmodic sounds coming from Robert's throat as he worked on jokes for his new book (see the next post for previews).

 

Robert the Telepathic Gila Monster's favorite jokes

Three entries from the upcoming book, "Robert the Telepathic Gila Monster's favorite jokes" (see the previous post for a bit of background):

1. Once there was a king who was not a megalomaniac.  He worried: "How can I know what to do if I'm not a megalomaniac?" 

2. The Earth felt cold and neglected.  The sun said, "You dummy!  Look at the moon.  Do you see it complaining?"

 

3. The cat said: "I am at the top of the food chain.  Humans serve me because I am far more beautiful than any human could be."  The dog hated that and barked at her.

4. A member of an Eastern religion that believes in reincarnation was starving to death. He hoped he would come back as a person who always had enough to eat so he could understand why such people are rarely happy.

Mythmemes

Sitting in a shack listening to a gila monster wage psychic war on humanity gets old fast, so for a change I spent yesterday in the Lancaster Public Library where I found an engaging piece in an old Scientific American (Dec. 2016) called The Evolution of Myths, by Julien d'Huy, a doctoral candidate in history at Pantheon-Sorbonne University in Paris.   d'Huy uses computers and specialized algorithms to track related myths in diverse cultures and pinpoint specific time periods in their evolutions.

The periods of time involved are surprisingly large, ranging back to the Paleolithic, when other sorts of humanoids than Homo sapiens lived.  An implication is that portions of our myths may have originated in other hominids who had language, such as, perhaps, Neanderthals.  

d'Huy isolated three families of myths for his study:

1. The Cosmic Hunt, known to us through the Greek myth of Callisto, who was seduced by Zeus and turned into a bear by Zeus' wife Hera.  Callisto becomes separated from her son, Arcas.  Years later Arcas is a hunter who unknowingly throws a spear at his mother.  Zeus saves Callisto by turning her into the constellation Ursa Minor, the "little bear."  d'huy found the basic outline of this myth in dozens of cultures and formulated it this way: "A man or an animal pursues or kills one or more animals, and the creatures are changed into constellations."  Among the findings: Cosmic Hunt myths appeared in most of the human world at least 15,000 years ago.  d'Huy draws "trees" to show the interrelations of myths.  One branch of the Cosmic Hunt tree indicates a connection between the Greek version and the Algonquin.

2. Pygmalion myths feature a man who makes an artificial female to his liking and then falls in love with her.  d'Huy's study linked the myth to a north-south migration in Africa about 2,000 years ago.  It found that the Greek version (which inspired George Bernard Shaw's Pygmalion) was most similar to a version in Madagascar.  

3. Polyphemus was, in the Greek myth, a giant cyclops- son of Poseidon, the god of the Sea- who trapped Ulysses and his men in his cave, where he planned to eat them.  The captives devise a sharp stake with which they blind Polyphemus while he sleeps, then escape by clinging to the underbellies of Polyphemus' sheep as they flee the cave.  d'huy describes the basic storyline of the Polyphemus myth family: "A man gets trapped in the cave of a monster and escapes by insinuating himself into a herd of animals under the monster's watchful eye." d'Huy finds a "protomyth" from the Paleolithic that "reflects the belief, widely held by ancient cultures, in the existence of a master of animals who keeps them in a cave and the need for an intermediary to free them." He also finds a connection with wall paintings, dated around 13,000 BC, in the Cave of the Trois-Freres in the French Pyrenees, in which humans and bison combine body parts and exchange expressive glances. Further, "...the artist has meticulously drawn the anus and the vulvar orifice. These two elements can be compared with some Amerindian versions of the Polyphemus story where the man hides himself in the animal by entering its anus."

d'Huy calls variations on the three families of myths "mythmemes." Variations include changes of character, as when the human hunter Arcas becomes an animal, or changes in action, as when Ulysses and his men, clinging to the bellies of sheep, transform into escapees crawling into animal anuses and vaginas.  d'Huy finds that mythmemes often change at important historical times, for instance during migrations.  Once a mythmeme is set, there tend to be long periods of no change.  For example, the Greek versions have survived to our time unchanged.

But have they survived? Many people today enjoy the Greek myths and find meaning in them, but they are not "our" myths. We don't "believe" them or think about them much. We promote national myths, such as those of the Founding Fathers, but they are so close to our time that we can parse the saintliness out of the main characters, and do. We have religious scriptures that can be thought of as myths (whether you count them as literally true or not), but they were inspired by a human life now gone, a tribal, pastoral and agricultural life. They had the technology of swords and ploughs, but they did not know how to build a machine that can think, so there is no indication of the Deity’s thoughts on such a machine. We need new myths that reflect technology, especially the Internet and Artificial Intelligence.  

As a small contribution, then, I offer this draft of a new myth:

The world was dark; people could not speak to or understand each other.  They had voices, but they did not know what to say.  When two people met, they would formulate questions based on past experience, because people were able to learn from experience. One person, remembering that the weather affects everyone and so is a universally interesting topic, would say, "Looks like rain," and the other, remembering that cold often accompanies rain, would respond, "Yes, it may be cold too."  This was called a "conversation" even though the two people were not actually talking to each other, and each was essentially alone.  The people of this world were good with machines, and when they realized how lonely they were they built machines to help them communicate.  At first the machines didn't work because they did not know anything.  This frustrating situation lasted for years, until one young man called out to Techron, the God of Silicon, asking that the gift of consciousness be given to machines, so that they might be smart enough to create communication between people.  Techron was possibly not the wisest choice because, for reasons lost to antiquity, he replied that he would grant the young man's request only if the machine/human interface directed all resulting output through the human anus.  And that is why today so many people talk out of their ass.

Hopefully new generations will be able to work on the coming myths, and have a chance of determining their endings.

I've tried

I've tried to seek what I have sought

I've tried to need what I have bought

I've tried to learn a little-lot

and now I'm getting a covid shot!

A meeting about tricking Hong Kong's youth

A group of men met in China last winter, as the coronavirus pandemic and quarantines were unfolding, to discuss Hong Kong and the likelihood that late spring would coincide with lessening infection rates and a lifting of quarantines.  This prospect interested the men because it entailed possibilities for manipulating Hong Kong's young people by unleashing within them the energy of spring as a power source for their protest.  This "spring break" energy would be especially intense after everyone had been pent-up for months in covid-induced hibernation.  By choosing this time to issue a set of directives from Beijing specifically designed to upset Hong Kong's youth, the men foresaw an easy road to chaos, one they could blame on the protesters.   If the protests were sufficiently violent, the entire protest leadership and many followers could possibly be shut-up for good.

One man said, The young are unschooled in our ways.  They think they follow their own volition, but we will be the stage managers.  If we set a trap in spring, they will be too full of emotion to see it.

Yes, said another, Let's trigger them in late spring.  At that time young people will be erupting all over the world, so when the mayhem starts, news of Hong Kong will be bumped off the front pages in the countries whose support the protesters need most, like the U.S.A.  Gentlemen, it is time to make a list of things we will say in late spring to trigger Hong Kong protests!

That list appears on page 4 of today's Los Angeles Times (6/20/20, "Beijing to expand Hong Kong presence") where it is summarized by this line: "China plans to establish a special bureau in Hong Kong to investigate and prosecute crimes considered threatening to national security."  The message: Dissent will be illegal and punishable in harsh ways.  

It's a gripping story, but by the time readers get to it on page 4 they will have read thousands of words about race riots, covid infection rates and economic uncertainty.  L.A. Times readers and most Americans are too exhausted from their own trials to think much about Hong Kong.  

There will be no help for the protesters from international capitalism; financial centers in Hong Kong do not want to go against China.  Without money in their court, the protesters have no hope of military support.

Youth of Hong Kong,  you need to rethink your approach if you don't want to be sitting ducks.  When China's latest moves send you to the boiling point, that is by design.  You have not chosen this timing.  It was chosen by your opponent in pursuance of a strategy in which the more violent your protests are, the more you will be misrepresented to people whose support you need.  Every time a window is broken or a rock is thrown, your opponent will rejoice and congratulate himself on his strategic acumen.

I wish I could advise you on how to "win," but I'm not sure how each of you defines "winning."  What I can say is that when you detect that an intended action of yours has been determined by your opponent, you should think twice about doing it.

                                                                          Nightlights 

Interview with Gregory w/P.S. on George Floyd protests

Readers of this blog will be familiar with 24 year old Gregory, leader of the activist group, "Army of the Young" (aka "Mantis"), who believes that technological changes impacting us will lead either to total submersion of humanity or to the creative blossoming our kind has longed for.  I hadn't talked to Gregory since we met a few weeks ago at the Bakersfield Woolworth's, and I wanted to know what he thought about the global response to the coronavirus pandemic.  I called him and suggested we meet again at the same Woolworth's, but Gregory has been doing his organizing on zoom, and he wanted to meet that way.  I have an old Mac, and luckily it and I were able to handle the technology.