Consciousness is not a symptom

This morning, to get away from politics- a frequent necessity in my line of endeavor- I went to the Lancaster City Library to read an excellent British journal, New Scientist. Like most science journals, New Scientist is, to some extent, under the influence of Mammon, but there are amazing things in it.  For instance, did you know that nostalgia was originally a disease?  It's main symptom was loneliness ("Wistful thinking," 9/24):

The word nostalgia- from the Greek nostros, to return home, and algos, meaning "pain"- was coined by medical student Johannes Hofer in 1688, when he described a disorder observed in homesick Swiss mercenaries stationed in Italy and France. Hofer saw nostalgia as a disease whose symptoms included weeping, fainting, fever and heart palpitations.  He advised laxatives, narcotics, bloodletting or- if nothing else worked- sending the soldiers home.

The article details the evolution of "nostalgia" to its current, pleasant connotation:

By the second half of the 20th century, the notion of nostalgia shifted away from one of illness.  In the past 20 years, researchers have come to understand that nostalgia is not some rare affliction, but an emotion found in all cultures.

Thanks, then, to the rigor of the scientific method, we now know that homesickness is caused by not having a home or having one but not being in it, possibly ever again.  Armed with this knowledge, we can suggest appropriate therapies (sending patients "home" has apparently been dropped).  The article reviews psychological terms bolstering the modern positive bias of "nostalgia," e.g. personal nostalgia, nostalgic memory, collective nostalgia and national nostalgia (this last being memories of how great your country used to be, employed in different ways by both Trump and Clinton).  These concepts lead to therapies urging people to think mainly about positive memories, because, as I understand the theory, that cheers them up.  I'm not sure I subscribe to this approach.  Wouldn't it be better for society's purposes to reinforce memories of a hellish, miserable past, compared with which our present is a near paradise?

There was an engaging concept towards the end of the article: anticipatory nostalgia, which happens "when people miss the present before it has passed." That could be a common symptom in the crazy-quilt of human cultures steadily losing definition in modernity's osterizer.  Too much thinking about the future brings it closer.  The present becomes memory.  Consciousness becomes memory.   In the final step, one we may already have taken, consciousness becomes a symptom.

This is how I unwind after a week of sweating the "real" world.  An absurd way to relax, you say?  I considered that, but then just to experience "action," and maybe "agency," I went home and made a picket sign reading, "Consciousness is not a symptom!", then took my protest down to Pearblossom Highway, where I stood like a nut on the side of the road, waving my sign and scowling at bemused motorists whizzing by.  Even Robert was appalled, and it takes a lot to appall a gila monster.  All I could explain to him was, sometimes you just have to do something.

Race and the modern world

What you are about to read is a science fiction story in reverse order, in which you'll be introduced to the Time Artists and my contact with them, Arthur, before you know who or what they are.

"Come with me," said Arthur, and before I could give informed consent I had already come with him to a vast hall that can best be described as "somewhere."  When I say the hall was vast, I mean it was big beyond my power to measure.  The walls looked like those of a gothic cathedral, columns streaming upwards and arching across the ceiling, but they looked miles high, the ceiling at cloud level. The distance between where I stood and the walls was maybe ten, twenty miles in any direction. There were crowds of people, worshippers perhaps, moving over the ornate marble floor, miles away, looking like ants.  A circular table in the apparent center of this floor space was occupied by fifteen Time Artists, appearing like a council of wizards.  Again I wondered, as I had with Arthur's appearance, if this was a show for me, based perhaps on their detecting my secret wish to be a wizard rather than a superannuated nightclub performer.

One of the Time Artists had obvious authority, judging by his bigger build, higher chair and taller pointed hat.  He gestured to me to sit in an empty chair next to him, which I did.

"Greetings, Harry the Human," said the imposing figure, "I am Fred, Director of the Time Artists in District 32."

"Fred?" I asked stupidly; "District 32?," I continued stupidly.

Fred cracked a brief smile.  Great bunches of gray hair flowed out below the brim of his hat.  His face, seeming both old and young, looked like it was peering through several dimensions.

"Our names are for you convenience," he explained, "and as for District 32, that encompasses your galaxy and several others nearby."

"'Fred' is an informal name in my culture, connoting little authority," I offered, emboldened at this point to speak to the Time Artists as, potentially, an equal.

"Maybe we have a sense of humor, too, Harry the Human."  At this all the Time Artists at the table chuckled.  I stared at Fred.

"Harry, we've had a chance to review your revelations about major political figures of Earth, and we feel, tentatively, that if you show some cognizance of the constraints that weigh on us, you might be able to assist us in running the time/history continuum in your sector of District 32."

"Gee, thanks!" I gambled and was much relieved to see the Time Artist's guffaw and nod approvingly.

"We have decided to give you an assignment requiring your telepathic powers, but you will need to discuss the relevant issues with us first.  Are you interested?"

"Yes, I'm very interested!"  That's what you say when expressing lack of interest might be the last thing you ever express.

"It's about the Chinese and the Russians," continued Fred, "America's two great rivals."

"Yes."

"We are tracking the interplay between the three powers and we see something distinctive arising."

Fred looked at me for a while before asking, "What comes to mind, Harry, when you think about the most important difference between American society versus Russia's and China's?"

"Race," I responded.  The Time Artists nodded and I realized they had already perused my head on this subject.

"Indeed," Fred resumed,  "The Russians and Chinese can roughly identify their respective nations with a relatively uniform race: Slavic people comprise most of Russia, and people identifying as Chinese comprise most of China.  Though the terms "Slavic" and "Chinese" include a variety of sub-groups, the unifying racial identity of each population with its country is strong, compared to the racial identity of the United States, which is too weak to be a unifying force, as you might expect in an empire of many races. Confusion arises here, since the states making up America are, technically, voluntary members of a republic, not conquered peoples.  American blacks are the exception, since many of their ancestors were captured, empire style. They do not see their race as the national race, but in this they are like the many types of "white," "brown" and "yellow" people who also have no image of a national race to identify with. America needs a few hundred more years of intermarriage to produce a national race, but don't expect that process to begin promptly in a culture formed by the British, who are fussy about their mates.  Harry, in your view what does this portend for relations between the three 'super-powers'? We know you've thought about this."

"I have," I responded.  "The United States' lack of a central racial identity makes it vulnerable.  Humankind's races formed over thousands of years with specific purposes, if UCLA anthropologist Jared Diamond is right.  Diamond maintains that racial awareness is essentially sexual.  To contain and promote distinctive mixes of strengths, both inherited and learned, along with a culture designed to be closely compatible and supportive of its lifestyle and dovetailing with the local environment, races developed and promoted sexual attraction between their members, discouraging mixed-race mating as a threat to competitive status.  

"Modern nation-states were created mostly to reflect and serve the primary races that founded them. So Sweden has racially identifiable Scandinavians.  Bulgaria has many of Bulgar descent, etc.  But America was designed to contain many races, even though most of its founders were from one race.  While America was growing and becoming dramatically more powerful, the ability to draw on the disparate talents of many racial groups was a major advantage.  But as America approaches the depletion of its windfall, it is turning inward and questioning itself."   

"We have doubts, Harry," interjected He of the High Pointed Hat,      "about the ability of American culture to survive without its surplus, as that culture was fashioned with consumption in mind."

I looked at the Time Artists for a moment, then ventured, "America's attempt to improve race-relations has serious limitations." I paused, not wanting to end up lecturing this high council, but Fred nodded and said, "Please continue, Harry."

"Thank you," I said, aiming to stay polite in consideration of the vat of molten lead Arthur had, the day before, threatened to drop me in. "Liberals can be faulted for overlooking the sexual aspects of what we call 'integration,' the legally mandated placement of racial groups with a tense history in close proximity to each other, often in residential, recreational, educational and work settings.  Diamond's evolutionary model is corroborated by the American experience with mandated integration, which frequently produces sexual tensions resulting in behaviors ranging from violence and alienation on one side to the dissolving of racial boundaries, both emotional and sexual, on the other.  The latter leads to mixed-race children and ultimately the creation of new races, not historically a bad thing, since such integration processes have contributed to the formation of everyone. Contemporary people, however, as the outlines of past cultures are worn away by modernity, often experience intense anxieties about fundamental change, and it's not enough to throw them together and say, "Figure this out."  Our government, which forms the pressure cooker of integration, is silent on its dynamics, offering only centuries old Enlightenment generalizations as guidance.  Liberalism is essentially an economic theory, not a psychological one.  Economics can accurately describe certain aspects of life, but its description of race relations is incomplete and has produced a liberal mindset that is almost Puritanical in its refusal to acknowledge the role of sexuality in race relations and evolutionary history.   Humans tend to have half-theories like this, because much of the time they can’t handle talking and thinking about the true nature of things.”

"What about the role of conservatives in America's race relations?" Fred asked.

"Conservatives," I answered, "have avoided discussion of the same sexual dynamics that liberals have.  Basically no one anywhere is discussing race in a rational way because sexual psychology is not considered."

"Ok," said Fred, "Let's proceed to the dramatic and abrupt future that awaits your species and indeed all of earth's biosphere."

Fred paused and looked at me, waiting for me to intuit his direction.

"You mean the bio-engineering and artificial intelligence revolutions?"

"I do indeed," said Fred.

"Well," I began, "those revolutions, which are in their preliminary stages, spell the end of traditional races and cultures, as they involve re-engineering humans from the chromosomal level, and re-engineering human cultures too.  In a couple of years there won't be much point in agitating for your own race or culture in competition with other races and cultures.  More likely, traditional races will need to band together to resist the planned obsolescence of the species as we've known it."

"You also have a theory," Fred interjected, "which we've read on your blog, that the 'managers' of humanity, as you call them, are manipulating people of all nations and races into a global war, the purpose of which is to wreak devastation and chaos, to serve as cover for the introduction of a synthetic human genotype as well as new software-based human cultures.  Inserting a new humanity under cover of war would avoid the appearance of a hostile purge of the old order, as the new order could be presented as the savior of the old, offering for instance cures for diseases introduced in biowarfare, robots to work in poisoned wastelands that were cities, etc."

"Yes," I responded, "I do have such a theory."

"Well," said Fred, "I see why Arthur finds you a possible candidate for an adjunct position with us.  You have an intuitive streak, but, as a...(looking at Arthur) what's the term....?"

"Mortal?," Arthur suggested.

"Yes, as a mortal," Fred continued, "there is no way you can see the big picture that we see.  You would need to take direction from us most of the time."

I felt the first stirring of resentment since overcoming my fear of molten lead. 

"Fred," I argued, "maybe I can comprehend more than you think, if you would just try me."

There followed a silence.  Fred looked at Arthur, who returned his gaze.  Then all the Time Artists looked at each other, conducting a telepathic discussion to which I was not privy.

Finally Fred looked back and said, "You be the judge, Harry.  Open your mind now, please.  I'm sending you a vision."

I relaxed my defenses and suddenly felt a draft of fear- something unknown was approaching.  It entered my mind, causing immediate disruptions at many levels.  On the conscious level, I saw humanity, indeed all of earth's "life" as a sort of burn-off of escaped planetary gas, like those flaming exhaust pipes you see on the beach by the offshore oil rigs around Santa Barbara.  Fred's vision was of random chemical reactions, in place of the accustomed grand pageantry of our species. I saw that our definition of life is pinched into a biased and fearful little space. We are just one kind of life, a very fleeting kind, byproducts of a planet whose surface is fracturing as internal chemical imbalances climax.  All human history and culture- from the rise of the agriculture/architecture based death-cults to the enlightened making of money- is basically a kind of oil spill on fire. The Time Artists were dispatched here to clean it up.  Oh shit.

"I see what you mean," I said, "this is like Douglas Adams' Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy when Zaphod Beeblebrox enters the Total Perspective Vortex to see if he can handle how tiny and peripheral humanity is, only worse."

At the name of Douglas Adams the whole table lit up in animated discussion.  Fred and Arthur looked at me kindly.

"Let's give this puppy a try!," said He of the High Pointy Hat.

And in a flash I was back in my Pearblossom shack, sitting in the kitchen looking at the small TV on the linoleum table.  It suddenly turned itself on and there were President Obama and Chinese Premier Xi Jinping at the end of the G-20 Summit, live on CNN taking turns at a mike and looking strained, as if the irrelevance of their official words were a source of exhaustion.  Making use of my techniques for telepathic intercept via broadcast waves, as well as new directional brainware that Fred, I suspected, had downloaded into my head, I picked up the following non-verbal conversation streaming from Obama's and Xi's "subconscious" minds:

Xi: The Americans have no central racial cohesion, no race-based culture to pull them together, only ideology.  

Obama: The Chinese have no national ideology like we do, ever since their communism morphed into state-capitalism.  But with their central racial consciousness to provide cohesion, they don't need an ideology as much as we do.

Xi: America's ideology is weakening as trust in its institutions weakens, not good in a country that lacks racial solidarity. Americans think they need better weapons.  What they really need is an updated ideology, one that anyone believes in, to make up for the racial solidarity they lack.

Obama: The Chinese ideology is that the Chinese must succeed in whatever direction they can via whatever ideology is available.  How do we compete with that?  

It goes on like this.  As noted, the Time Artists directed me to post my findings as an experiment, to see if the effects I have on my readership support the Time Artists' far-reaching plans.  "My readership" means you.  In other words, I have made you part of an experiment to see if self-awareness in humans leads in a good direction according to extra-terrestrials who secretly control our history.  I hope you don't mind.

A war against time

Sorry about the sensational title, but what I'm doing is a sort of war against time.  As will be recounted in the next installment, I defied the Time Artists who control history.  Maybe control is too strong a word for what they do. They tweak events here and there in pursuit of how they want things to turn out, though according to Arthur, my contact among the Time Artists, they don't care how things turn out so much as they care about style.  They believe, as Churchill said, that "the pudding should have a theme." You might say they are not postmodern; they like a beginning, middle and end, a plot and story.

That part is not what has put me in opposition to the Time Artists.  I want a story too, but with a happy ending, that being, in my story, a human race that overcomes the disadvantages of its birth to figure itself out.  That sure would make me happy.  The Time Artists, sad to say, do not appear to consider humans a priority. Should they?  I'm not even sure what the Time Artists are, or what they look like.  Arthur appears as a wise and kindly wizard, but he may just have picked-up on my fascination with Gandalf. Arthur in fact may look like a crazed amoeba with strobe lights for eyes.

Watching the Time Artists peck away at the edges of the current preliminaries to World War III, it has become clear to your correspondent that they are doing little or nothing to increase human awareness of the war preparations, allowing us, without self-knowledge, to will the war into existence ourselves.  My happy ending, however, requires awareness.

So against Arthur's wishes, I read Secretary of State John Kerry's and Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov's minds during their meeting last week and observed the cynical thinking involved in what the network news blithely calls "diplomacy." The twenty seconds devoted to the story glossed over the real story, about our being led up the chute to slaughter.  The Time Artists were not even thinking about the war that day; they were busy arguing about the Rio Olympics.  So I acted.

Arthur's response was swift and brutal.  As soon as I posted the story he grabbed me, like in our first encounter when I flew out the bedroom window to meet him in the Devil's Punchbowl, though this time instead of arriving in a euphoric dream I found myself suspended over a vat of molten lead, held up only by Arthur's hand around my left ankle.

"You have caused us more trouble than you're worth, you little turd!" Arthur hissed, has face red and strained, all Gandalfian benevolence gone.

My soul wet its pants, but from some quarter I found courage.  I've wondered what that corner was.  Was it the racial memory of our species, which for so long has considered itself either a free agent or potentially free? Arthur's was the face of negation, of an inevitable cul de sac awaiting the hopeful.  I think the sense that there was nothing to lose is what empowered me.  That and the hope that the molten lead would kill me so fast I wouldn't feel pain.

I looked up at Arthur and shouted, "Whatever you are, you are false! Humans are livestock to you, interesting specimens. Go ahead, drop me!  I want nothing to do with your 'history'!"

There followed a pause which could only be described as interminable, though it did terminate- with a deep sigh from Arthur- followed by another interminable pause, followed by Arthur's voice, now quieted and mournful: "Thank you, Harry, for presenting yourself to me in this honest fashion.  That's what we respect.  I'd like to make you a deal."

"Huh?...Ok....," I stammered through the fumes and heat, suddenly wondering where I'd got the idea that sinking in molten lead wouldn't hurt.

Noticing my discomfiture, Arthur gently spun me into the dark void- the blazing vat gone.  After a pleasant few moments of cosmic massage, I landed softly in a big stuffed chair, a snifter of brandy by my side, a fire roaring in a huge stone hearth, galaxies swirling around where there should have been a room and Arthur sitting across from me in full Gandalfian persona.

"It's difficult to be a Time Artist, Harry," Arthur began, "so many things happen everywhere every moment, so many forms, antithetical yet synonymous, discordant yet harmonized, sane yet insane. We're not that powerful, you know."

"You could have fooled me," I said as I sipped the brandy and felt an immediate warmth right down to my molecules.

"We appear powerful to humans because we can change things, but we're only allowed to change certain things.  We're not supposed to be after what you're after."

"What am I after?"

"You are a special interest, Harry, a faction, one in an infinity of other factions.  Sometimes against high odds a faction gets through to the Time Artists.  All it takes is for someone to actually talk to us. That's all it ever takes."

There was silence in the room.  The brandy or whatever it was engendered a grand and only slightly false sense of euphoria.  I stared at Arthur dumbly, happily.

"The Time Artists, after discussion and debate lasting months...."

"What, I've been away for months?"

"No, we slip in and out of time, remember?  You'll go back to the same moment you left.  Anyway, we've decided to let you try your hand at creating something, in this case a reason why your species should be saved after the wretched mess it's made of its own home and the mess it threatens to make beyond earth.  Harry, listen to me.  You have to do more than impress yourself.  That's easy.  The hard part will be to impress the Time Artists, who now see your species precisely as you see captive chimpanzees throwing shit at each other.  We will let you try, on a limited, case by case basis.  When you return, read some minds in the news and post your scoop. We'll evaluate the results.  If we see something hopeful, a bit of mind to counter the trending mindlessness, we'll recommend revision to the higher-ups."

"The higher-ups?"

"You don't want to know."

"Why not, are they terrible?"

"I don't mean that.  I mean, literally, you don't want to know."

"I don't?"

"No, or you would.  The truth is right in front of you."

And on that ambiguous or perfectly clear note, depending on your perspective, the room dissolved and I sat at my linoleum kitchen table in Pearblossom, the evening news on the TV.  The lead story was Donald Trump's meeting with Mexican President Enrique Pena Nieto in Mexico City.

I rummaged around quickly for a Sweet 'n Salty bar, found a stale half and chomped it down, then put everything I had into the TV set.  Here's what I got.  If readers react to this, I'll try to argue my case with the Time Artists. If not, well, maybe we're not supposed to be sentient.

The inner thoughts of Trump and Nieto during thier meeting:

Trump: What a putz!  How easy was it to get this guy to do my bidding!  It's like, I have to be respectful to a CEO, but I can dominate any head of state. It's almost spooky.

Nieto: God damn this miserable boor for setting me up like this!  He's making me look like I respond to brute political force rather than to what's right.  I hate looking like that.

Trump: Jesus, this is the leader of a narco-state?  He's like a reflection, an actor in a movie.  If I were the head of a narco-state, I would look like one!

I got a bit restless at these thoughts because I'm mainly interested in the war.  The Sweet 'n Salty bar kicked in and I dug aggressively into the two men's minds, where I found not a thought about Syria or the world war by proxy fought there.  They didn't particularly care about it.

Later in the evening Trump told an audience in Arizona, who had been led to expect a "softening" of his mass deportation idea, that he advocates priority deportations for undocumented felons, with everyone else coming later, thus dodging the logistics angle.  Fishing in Trump's mind I found random inner thoughts (e.g.,  Like taking candy from a baby!) but, again, no thoughts about the war.

For purposes of balance, I checked Trump's opponent Hillary Clinton and found her similarly without care regarding the war.  In her case, she did not care because the only person calling her out for her support of the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq (at the conclusion of which, it turns out, U.S. policy did create ISIS) is Trump, but he delivered the ISIS charge so crudely, without corroborative information, that no one paid any attention.

Note to Time Artists: This post is not particularly revelatory of war machinations, but it does try to convey the idea that the spoken "policies" of the major candidates for U.S. president are irrelevant to the direction our species will take. We don't want to see this. The idea that there is no leadership makes us lose faith in our fatalism, robbing us of significant comfort.

In the cave (Guest essay by D.L.)

Harry the Human, whose work I edit, has been a bit on the emotional side lately.  He asked to borrow my car and last week and drove nine hours straight up the California coast to Mendocino, an isolated peninsula of western/gothic structures that juts into the cold and stormy Pacific.  On his way up Harry texted me a series of agitated messages like, "Thank God I'm on my way!  Humanity is too much!," or, "If I have to hear one more human thinking something I'm going to go insane!"

After a day in Mendocino he calmed down: "No one is playing the news on radio, TV, anything.  They seem dedicated to healing my soul!"

Meanwhile, Harry asked me to share some video clips from Mendocino (see links below).  D.L.

Harry's Mendocino vacation:

Mendocino moment: https://youtu.be/p8N9T4z8PbM

I find a cave in Mendocino: https://youtu.be/k5oQ2iddybQ

In the cave: https://youtu.be/aHDIhh64aWE

We need a good story

While I negotiate my freedom of speech and mentality with Arthur the Time Artist (see "A peek at Infinity" below) I'll be posting essays I wrote in recent years that may be relevant today.  This piece was written shortly after the killing of Osama bin Laden in 2011.

Harry the Human

What do people demand from government?  Jobs?  Prosperity?  Those come to mind, but during the early post World War II years there were jobs and prosperity and discontent was rampant.  Did people want something else?  When the Boomers came of age in the 60’s, the country’s prosperity seemed to heighten their discontent.  What were so many Boomers mad about?   I believe we were mad because there was no strong national story that pertained to our generation.

In addition to clamoring today for jobs and a return to prosperity, the Boomers and succeeding generations have continued to yearn for a good national story.  Now we have the makings of the sort of compelling story we lacked before, though stories can be too satisfying for our own good.

For purposes here I'm revising our concept that a story is either fiction or nonfiction.  The words “history” and “story” share the same root.  This is not to say that stories and history are equally non-fictional- they may be equally fictional.  Their truth or falsity is beside the point.  We eagerly adopt stories of either kind to underwrite our lives.

Hitler is relevant to this discussion as he was the most strident and successful storyteller of the generations just before the Boomers.  He told different stories to different people, and everyone believed him.  He told Germans that Jews and much of the rest of the world had conspired to thwart the destiny of the German people.  This story was a bestseller, so to speak.  Great swaths of German society devoured it as precious mental nourishment, because it made them feel good, made them feel part of something important and justified, the way a good story should.  Then he told the rest of the world that he was a ferocious megalomaniac, poised to take over and punish all states and societies that were not in his thrall.  That story too was a great hit, in the sense that people followed it and adopted it as their story.  The story told by Roosevelt and Churchill was predicated on Hitler’s story: We were the defenders against Hitler, the homicidal maniac.  Of course Hitler was a homicidal maniac, but as I say my use of “story” connotes neither fiction nor non-fiction.   It was Hitler’s storytelling capability that put him on the map.  

Mental wards are full of crazed megalomaniacs whose stories are listened to by no one but bored staff.  Hitler might well have been one of these isolated souls, but as a powerful storyteller who landed in the appropriate crack of time, his story was adopted and became "real."

Then what was wrong with post-war America’s story?  First, the triumphal war story that our parents lived was not available for Boomers to identify with because the war had not happened on our soil, and because the '50's and '60's were so prosperous and definitively post-war.   Nor could we derive self-esteem from the earlier Depression, with its tales of injustice and endurance, awash as we were in surplus.  For our coming of age rituals we had, not challenge and heroism, but endless exhortations conveyed via the new wonder, TV, to spend our parents' money on keys to popularity like Brylcream (A little dab'll do ya!).   In our story we were consumers of the accoutrements of life, nothing more- handing Tom Brokaw an easy angle to label my generation, "The Not Greatest."

When we entered the hormone driven mania of adolescence we had no state-sanctioned relief, no righteous cause leading to carnal fulfillment and medals of honor.  Marijuana, which had been confined to marginalized Hispanic and Black cultures, was suddenly accepted by middle-class whites to assuage their stifled impulses, and the government, though it benefited from youth's distracted state, kept marijuana illegal to engender in us a feeling of revolution, of a sort of war which we could think we were part of, and this became, on the government's side, the fantasy “War on Drugs.”

The government detected, as governments do, the people’s unsettled need for actual struggle, and it had a military establishment to keep busy, so it (along with other governments facing the same problem) gave us a series of wars.  The Korean War was the first, but the Boomers were not old enough to understand it.  Too bad, because since it involved a Chinese invasion of Korea there was at least a credible foe. 

Not so the Vietnam War.  The Chinese, conniving to wreck our story (playing chess to our poker), cleverly did not invade Vietnam, leaving us with a highly questionable story in which we attack a peasant nation that has not attacked us and poses no obvious threat, and that ends up beating us.  I marched carrying signs proclaiming lofty ideals, but looking back my sign should simply have read, “Give us a good story!”

As the Vietnam War was developing we also had the Bay of Pigs and the Cuban Missile Crisis.  No one will claim the Bay of Pigs was a good story.  One could make an exception for the Cuban Missile Crisis, which had enough substance for a decent movie, but it was over quickly with no real action.

Our interventions in the Gulf might have provided fulfilling stories had they been better told, particularly the only potentially effective one, involving Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait, with its promise of a heroic U.S. response to the plight of dispossessed Kuwaitis taking refuge in European nightclubs, but, as with most of our Mideast adventures, we ruined the narrative with our inability to acknowledge the importance of oil.  Because the American creation myth involves so much human virtue, we feel everything we do must shine with righteousness (the British in building their empire had no such problem), but leaving out so obvious a motivator as oil sends all our Mideast war stories into hopeless spirals of cognitive dissonance.

Things changed with 9/11, a compelling and defining story- the first since World War II.  So timely (coming at the end of the Cold War) was this story that its appearance spawned a world of conspiracy theories.  I’m going to stay away from these, however, as they do not pertain to my thesis, that people need stories.  Whether those stories are essentially true or concocted in a shadowland where truth and fiction intertwine will not be determined until a hypothetical future when the public has access to the relevant information (don't hold your breath).

What we do know is that since 2001 we have been run by the story of 9/11.  It is now our central myth, re-confirming our belief in the military as the essential element of the American character and uniting us as a coherent nation. 

Stories need reinforcement and updating, and even 9/11 can flag, its memory submerged in the daily aggravations of modern life.  Just imagine, only a few short weeks ago people in airports were complaining about having to stand in line, take off their shoes and present facsimiles of their naked torsos to federal agents.  More ominous still, much attention was being paid to the fact that the American public school system is collapsing in insolvency, along with the dream of owning a home. 

All that kvetching has faded now, however, because we’ve killed Osama bin Laden.  Who could have guessed that the next chapter of the story would be so compelling?  I’ve quite forgotten that the high school from which my youngest son is graduating in June is laying off a third of its teachers.   Really, who cares?  Bin Laden is dead!

I hasten to emphasize that I’m not knocking the role of stories in human society.  We need stories, whether personal or communal, because we need to be part of a meaningful narrative, with cause and effect and a plot, so we can be more than mere metabolizing blobs of protoplasm.   

But we should keep in mind that certain types of stories tend to have certain types of outcomes.  Hitler’s story not only destroyed countless lives around the world, it destroyed his own society and him as well.  

Maybe we should take a second look at the latest chapter in our story, the killing of bin Laden, in which we are victorious and morally great heroes, like Perseus striking down Medusa with one mighty blow of his divine sword.  It’s an enthralling image, but that’s the problem.  Our breast-beating and moralistic crowing will stimulate more story writing by the losers, so that when bin Laden is replaced, which is a certainty, his war will continue.  When Hitler was dead, he was really dead; we had won.  Bin Laden's summary execution is not the end of a war, but the beginning, and the narrow scope of the world-view we’re fed makes it more like the disingenuous War on Drugs- designed to drag on forever- than the more real War on Hitler.  The only obvious contribution of bin Laden's assassination is a momentary blip in the President's ratings.

Speaking of which, and to end on a sober note, there is over a year until the next presidential election, and the warm glow of Osama bin Laden’s death will not last that long.

A peek at Infinity, Chapter 18: Our beginning is our end

This chapter begins and ends my highly experimental and risk-taking eighteen chapter science fiction novel, A peek at infinity, which is designed to be read chronologically backwards, from here to the prologue, which is also the introduction.

People reading the other way, from the prologue to here, might be thinking: "He's got one chapter left to justify the cheesy title.  I haven't seen too many peeks at infinity!"  Here's the justification: As the great mystics know, a peek at anything is a peek at infinity.

The real question is, what could possibly happen in this, the 18th and final chapter that would tie up all the questions about Gregory, whose teachings become the basis for post-WWIII political thought (Ch. 1), or Anthony and Rebecca, acolytes of Gregory who in 2044 oppose each other in a bitter race for President of the United States (Prologue)?  That seems too much story to end so quickly.

What happened is that the story got sidetracked by the Time Artist, Arthur, who realized there was no way to maintain a smooth flow in the time/history continuum while any of us knew the future.  That's right, in addition to the mind-wiping Gregory, Rebecca and Anthony underwent in previous chapters, now my mind is to be wiped as well, directly after I post this chapter.  This means that, although I will retain my knowledge concerning the ongoing manipulation of the American public into involvement in a Shia/Sunni civil war, I will no longer know anything about the future, and my collaboration with Gregory, Rebecca and Anthony will be suspended.  I will be permitted to retain my memory of the CIA's secret Telepathy Unit (TU) which attacked and tricked me and my partners several times (Chs. 15 and 16), if only for my own protection.

What if I read this book and it reminds me of everything I'm supposed to forget?  That won't happen because the book will not be released in all earth-centered dimensions (if you are reading it you are in a "safe zone," which I will not be).

You can imagine my upset when Arthur first described the deal.  He promised I would have no sense of loss after the amnesia, but he knew I would be uncomfortable at the thought of cutting my personality in half, so he told me that for one hour every evening he will restore my memory and talk to me about things to come.  After the hour I'll be wiped again, before I can write about anything and change something that isn't supposed to change.

Arthur told me that in my way I have been effective.  Although obviously I couldn't stop the war machine (as if anyone could) my novel, Arthur said, is planting seeds in people's minds.  

Arthur will permit my continued practice as a private telepath, but I expect to be monitored and probably censored.  The essays below, which Arthur has shown an interest in preserving (Time Artists walk a complex path in human affairs) may well be my last uncensored work.  Please help spread the word by passing this site along!  

Best, Harry