People tend to identify with their handicaps

** This story by Kurt Vennegut has provided many lessons over the years.

Harrison Bergeron
by Kurt Vonnegut (1961)

THE YEAR WAS 2081, and everybody was finally equal. They weren’t only equal before God and the law. They were equal every which way. Nobody was smarter than anybody else. Nobody was better looking than anybody else. Nobody was stronger or quicker than anybody else. All this equality was due to the 211th, 212th, and 213th Amendments to the Constitution, and to the unceasing vigilance of agents of the United States Handicapper General.

Some things about living still weren’t quite right, though. April, for instance, still drove people crazy by not being springtime. And it was in that clammy month that the H-G men took George and Hazel Bergeron’s fourteen-year-old son, Harrison, away.

It was tragic, all right, but George and Hazel couldn’t think about it very hard. Hazel had a perfectly average intelligence, which meant she couldn’t think about anything except in short bursts. And George, while his intelligence was way above normal, had a little mental handicap radio in his ear. He was required by law to wear it at all times. It was tuned to a government transmitter. Every twenty seconds or so, the transmitter would send out some sharp noise to keep people like George from taking unfair advantage of their brains.

George and Hazel were watching television. There were tears on Hazel’s cheeks, but she’d forgotten for the moment what they were about.
On the television screen were ballerinas.

A buzzer sounded in George’s head. His thoughts fled in panic, like bandits from a burglar alarm.

“That was a real pretty dance, that dance they just did,” said Hazel.
“Huh?” said George.
“That dance – it was nice,” said Hazel.
“Yup,” said George. He tried to think a little about the ballerinas. They weren’t really very good – no better than anybody else would have been, anyway. They were burdened with sashweights and bags of birdshot, and their faces were masked, so that no one, seeing a free and graceful gesture or a pretty face, would feel like something the cat drug in. George was toying with the vague notion that maybe dancers shouldn’t be handicapped. But he didn’t get very far with it before another noise in his ear radio scattered his thoughts.

George winced. So did two out of the eight ballerinas.

Hazel saw him wince. Having no mental handicap herself she had to ask George what the latest sound had been.

“Sounded like somebody hitting a milk bottle with a ball peen hammer,” said George.
“I’d think it would be real interesting, hearing all the different sounds,” said Hazel, a little envious. “All the things they think up.”
“Um,” said George.

“Only, if I was Handicapper General, you know what I would do?” said Hazel. Hazel, as a matter of fact, bore a strong resemblance to the Handicapper General, a woman named Diana Moon Glampers. “If I was Diana Moon Glampers,” said Hazel, “I’d have chimes on Sunday – just chimes. Kind of in honor of religion.”

“I could think, if it was just chimes,” said George.

“Well – maybe make ‘em real loud,” said Hazel. “I think I’d make a good Handicapper General.”

“Good as anybody else,” said George.

“Who knows better’n I do what normal is?” said Hazel.

“Right,” said George. He began to think glimmeringly about his abnormal son who was now in jail, about Harrison, but a twenty-one-gun salute in his head stopped that.
“Boy!” said Hazel, “that was a doozy, wasn’t it?”

It was such a doozy that George was white and trembling and tears stood on the rims of his red eyes. Two of the eight ballerinas had collapsed to the studio floor, were holding their temples.

“All of a sudden you look so tired,” said Hazel. “Why don’t you stretch out on the sofa, so’s you can rest your handicap bag on the pillows, honeybunch.” She was referring to the forty-seven pounds of birdshot in a canvas bag, which was padlocked around George’s neck. “Go on and rest the bag for a little while,” she said. “I don’t care if you’re not equal to me for a while.”

George weighed the bag with his hands. “I don’t mind it,” he said. “I don’t notice it any more. It’s just a part of me.

“You been so tired lately – kind of wore out,” said Hazel. “If there was just some way we could make a little hole in the bottom of the bag, and just take out a few of them lead balls. Just a few.”

“Two years in prison and two thousand dollars fine for every ball I took out,” said George. “I don’t call that a bargain.”

“If you could just take a few out when you came home from work,” said Hazel. “I mean – you don’t compete with anybody around here. You just set around.”

“If I tried to get away with it,” said George, “then other people’d get away with it and pretty soon we’d be right back to the dark ages again, with everybody competing against everybody else. You wouldn’t like that, would you?”
“I’d hate it,” said Hazel.
“There you are,” said George. “The minute people start cheating on laws, what do you think happens to society?”

If Hazel hadn’t been able to come up with an answer to this question, George couldn’t have supplied one. A siren was going off in his head.
“Reckon it’d fall all apart,” said Hazel.
“What would?” said George blankly.
“Society,” said Hazel uncertainly. “Wasn’t that what you just said?”
“Who knows?” said George.

The television program was suddenly interrupted for a news bulletin. It wasn’t clear at first as to what the bulletin was about, since the announcer, like all announcers, had a serious speech impediment. For about half a minute, and in a state of high excitement, the announcer tried to say, “Ladies and gentlemen – ”

He finally gave up, handed the bulletin to a ballerina to read.

“That’s all right –” Hazel said of the announcer, “he tried. That’s the big thing. He tried to do the best he could with what God gave him. He should get a nice raise for trying so hard.”

“Ladies and gentlemen” said the ballerina, reading the bulletin. She must have been extraordinarily beautiful, because the mask she wore was hideous. And it was easy to see that she was the strongest and most graceful of all the dancers, for her handicap bags were as big as those worn by two-hundred-pound men.

And she had to apologize at once for her voice, which was a very unfair voice for a woman to use. Her voice was a warm, luminous, timeless melody. “Excuse me – ” she said, and she began again, making her voice absolutely uncompetitive.

“Harrison Bergeron, age fourteen,” she said in a grackle squawk, “has just escaped from jail, where he was held on suspicion of plotting to overthrow the government. He is a genius and an athlete, is under–handicapped, and should be regarded as extremely dangerous.”

A police photograph of Harrison Bergeron was flashed on the screen – upside down, then sideways, upside down again, then right side up. The picture showed the full length of Harrison against a background calibrated in feet and inches. He was exactly seven feet tall.

The rest of Harrison’s appearance was Halloween and hardware. Nobody had ever worn heavier handicaps. He had outgrown hindrances faster than the H–G men could think them up. Instead of a little ear radio for a mental handicap, he wore a tremendous pair of earphones, and spectacles with thick wavy lenses. The spectacles were intended to make him not only half blind, but to give him whanging headaches besides.

Scrap metal was hung all over him. Ordinarily, there was a certain symmetry, a military neatness to the handicaps issued to strong people, but Harrison looked like a walking junkyard. In the race of life, Harrison carried three hundred pounds.

And to offset his good looks, the H–G men required that he wear at all times a red rubber ball for a nose, keep his eyebrows shaved off, and cover his even white teeth with black caps at snaggle–tooth random.

“If you see this boy,” said the ballerina, “do not – I repeat, do not – try to reason with him.”

There was the shriek of a door being torn from its hinges.
Screams and barking cries of consternation came from the television set. The photograph of Harrison Bergeron on the screen jumped again and again, as though dancing to the tune of an earthquake.

George Bergeron correctly identified the earthquake, and well he might have – for many was the time his own home had danced to the same crashing tune. “My God –” said George, “that must be Harrison!”

The realization was blasted from his mind instantly by the sound of an automobile collision in his head.

When George could open his eyes again, the photograph of Harrison was gone. A living, breathing Harrison filled the screen.
Clanking, clownish, and huge, Harrison stood in the center of the studio. The knob of the uprooted studio door was still in his hand. Ballerinas, technicians, musicians, and announcers cowered on their knees before him, expecting to die.
“I am the Emperor!” cried Harrison. “Do you hear? I am the Emperor! Everybody must do what I say at once!” He stamped his foot and the studio shook.
“Even as I stand here –” he bellowed, “crippled, hobbled, sickened – I am a greater ruler than any man who ever lived! Now watch me become what I can become!”
Harrison tore the straps of his handicap harness like wet tissue paper, tore straps guaranteed to support five thousand pounds.

Harrison’s scrap–iron handicaps crashed to the floor.

Harrison thrust his thumbs under the bar of the padlock that secured his head harness. The bar snapped like celery. Harrison smashed his headphones and spectacles against the wall.

He flung away his rubber–ball nose, revealed a man that would have awed Thor, the god
of thunder.

“I shall now select my Empress!” he said, looking down on the cowering people. “Let the first woman who dares rise to her feet claim her mate and her throne!”
A moment passed, and then a ballerina arose, swaying like a willow.
Harrison plucked the mental handicap from her ear, snapped off her physical handicaps with marvelous delicacy. Last of all, he removed her mask.
She was blindingly beautiful.

“Now” said Harrison, taking her hand, “shall we show the people the meaning of the word dance? Music!” he commanded.

The musicians scrambled back into their chairs, and Harrison stripped them of their handicaps, too. “Play your best,” he told them, “and I’ll make you barons and dukes and earls.”

The music began. It was normal at first – cheap, silly, false. But Harrison snatched two musicians from their chairs, waved them like batons as he sang the music as he wanted it played. He slammed them back into their chairs.

The music began again and was much improved.

Harrison and his Empress merely listened to the music for a while – listened gravely, as though synchronizing their heartbeats with it.
They shifted their weights to their toes.

Harrison placed his big hands on the girl’s tiny waist, letting her sense the weightlessness that would soon be hers.

And then, in an explosion of joy and grace, into the air they sprang!
Not only were the laws of the land abandoned, but the law of gravity and the laws of motion as well.

They reeled, whirled, swiveled, flounced, capered, gamboled, and spun.
They leaped like deer on the moon.

The studio ceiling was thirty feet high, but each leap brought the dancers nearer to it. It became their obvious intention to kiss the ceiling.
They kissed it.

And then, neutralizing gravity with love and pure will, they remained suspended in air inches below the ceiling, and they kissed each other for a long, long time.

It was then that Diana Moon Glampers, the Handicapper General, came into the studio with a double-barreled ten-gauge shotgun. She fired twice, and the Emperor and the Empress were dead before they hit the floor.

Diana Moon Glampers loaded the gun again. She aimed it at the musicians and told them they had ten seconds to get their handicaps back on.

It was then that the Bergerons’ television tube burned out.
Hazel turned to comment about the blackout to George.
But George had gone out into the kitchen for a can of beer.
George came back in with the beer, paused while a handicap signal shook him up. And then he sat down again. “You been crying?” he said to Hazel.
“Yup,” she said,
“What about?” he said.
“I forget,” she said. “Something real sad on television.”
“What was it?” he said.
“It’s all kind of mixed up in my mind,” said Hazel.
“Forget sad things,” said George.
“I always do,” said Hazel.
“That’s my girl,” said George. He winced. There was the sound of a riveting gun in his head.
“Gee – I could tell that one was a doozy,” said Hazel.
“You can say that again,” said George.
“Gee –” said Hazel, “I could tell that one was a doozy.”

Most moral show on TV?

** ** Saw an ad in Newsweek for a new television series called Random1. As I was programming the info into my Tivo I noticed that the show would be starting just five minutes later. So I watched.

Amazing concept: people helping people unselfishly. One of their (many) tag lines is: “Making a difference is what they “try” to do.” I like the honesty of that. As their logo also states: “No ordinary mission – No contrived endings”

There are just too many good things about the show to list here, but here are a couple of the strongest:

1. Sometimes you have to break the rules in order to help. This goes against all rigid views of morality, but the show demonstrated the kind of exception that is more moral: An alcoholic they were trying to get admitted to a detox center started shaking and needed a drink to settle down while his helpers searched for a place that would take him in. So they stopped at a convenience store and bought him a big bottle of beer. They did this twice. He eventually not only got de-toxed, he went into a treatment home and by show’s end they noted that he had been sober for 80 days and was working again and seeing his kids. Today, they posted an update on the guy and he's still doing fine. As Saul Alinksy said in essence: “If the end doesn’t justify the means, what does?”

2. The guys openly admit they don’t know squat about what they’re doing. They’re not professional sociologists or care givers. Just ordinary guys (luckily, one of whom happens to be a documentary filmmaker) trying to put into practice the dictum: “Practice random acts of kindness.” The show obviously has substantial financial and technical backing but it’s amazing that they can keep their honesty during this process. This helps the rest of us civilians see possibilities in ourselves for this kind of generic, unconditional love.

I find the show, so far, very Christian in its approach, but certainly not in any way up front about it. (Just once, Mark, the alcoholic, comments about his transformation: "It must have been a God thing.") That’s also refreshing. True Christianity is in the practice not the preaching, in ordinary life, not temples and churches.

Here’s a sample from their mission statement:

The mission of Random 1 in real life, on television, and on the web is to make a positive difference in the lives of strangers picked “at random”. Random 1 LLC is a media production company that documents the stories of helping people.

Currently, Random 1, LLC is preparing ten one-hour television shows that will air on A&E Television Networks beginning in November 2005

I just like this poem and want to share it

** I couldn't find this anywhere on the Internet, so here it is:

Seen Through a Window
David Ferry

A man and a woman are sitting at a table.
It is supper time. The air is green. The walls
Are white in the green air, as rocks under water
Retain their own true color, though washed in green.
I do not know either the man or the woman,
Nor do I know whatever they know of each other.
Though washed in my eye they keep their own true color.

The man is all his own hunched strength, the body’s
Self and strength, that bears, like weariness,
Itself upon itself, as a stone’s weight
Bears heavily on itself to be itself.
Heavy the strength that bears the body down.
And the way he feeds is like a dreamless sleep;
The dreaming of a stone is how he feeds.

The woman’s arms are plump, mottled a little
The flesh, like standing milk, and on one arm
A blue bruise, got in some household labor or other,
Flowering in the white. Her staring eye,
Like some bird’s cry called from some deepest wood,
Says nothing of what it is but what it is.
Such silence is the bird’s cry of a stone.

Maybe it'll stop being crazy after all these years!

** I went to bed early last night, before the California election returns were fully counted. At that point it looked like the Governator's propositions, that I voted against, were winning, and the two I voted for were losing. It was depressing - having endured the incredible insult of the Bush second term and its slow, tortuous unravelling - like a desecrated mummy - I just couldn't imagine surviving in a world where official insanity continues to parade around like a naked emperor.

I woke up just a few hours later from a scary dream in which a crazy man was out to slash me. The words of Paul Simon's great song "Still crazy after all these years" then started going around and around in my head:

Now I sit by my window and I watch the cars
I fear I'll do some damage one fine day
But I would not be convicted by a jury of my peers
Still crazy after all these years
Still crazy, still crazy, still crazy after all these years

Then I read a couple of blogs that commented on the West Wing episode last Sunday, which broke some new TV ground by having its characters, presidential candidates, have a "live" debate. I had been thinking about how brilliant Alan Alda (in real life a Liberal) was in that role, so smoothly and intelligently articulating a political stance that I find abhorrent. It further depressed me that there are no Democrats with similar skills - although Jimmy Smits did a creditable job of articulating the Left's positions - and the audience that voted agreed he'd won the debate. Read these two blogs for a good description of the event: Russell Roberts in Cafe Hayek and George's at seixon.

It laid another stone on my depressed head. The crazies have got all the power, the style, the opportunity!

And then at 2:30AM I checked sfgate.com for the election results: All eight ballot initiatives fail! Even though the two I voted for didn't make it, the failure of the Governor's props lifted my mood. Hope is stirring (barely) - the whole bad dream may be dissolving. (Ah, dreamer!)

If Fox News Had Been Around Throughout History

** At the start of the Iraq war I found myself drawn to watching Fox news on TV. It was very seductive and when it started casting aspersions on NPR and BBC I found myself being suspicious of those long-admired institutions. I even started getting into the O’Reilly hate-fest. But gradually, I started to feel annoyed by the pushy, aggressive nastiness of every one of the on-air personalities. Somehow I pulled out of it and went back to my usual sources of news, including CNN.

But nothing set me against this poor excuse for a news organization more than the film “Outfoxed.” It reveals the anti-journalistic basis of the whole organization, its malevolent influence on the country. I hope you can see it.
So it’s with pleasure that I refer you to this site:

More on Bennett's racism

** A little discussion is happening over at salon.com about the Cecelie S. Berry article (cited here on September 30). I think this comment is well said (of course, it agrees with mine):

Once again a virtue-crat has stepped in it, and once again he has proceeded to defend himself by mischaracterizing his critics' arguments. Obviously he wasn't advocating the abortion of black babies. He's against abortion, period, so he'd hardly be in favor of even hypothetical abortions. Just as obviously, when reaching for a counterexample involving demographics and crime rates, he came up with "black," as opposed to, say, "poor." He still doesn't understand what he did wrong, and no wonder. All the best people -- all his virtuous, high-placed colleagues -- talk this way as a matter of course. (Not in public, though, Bill.)

-- Jincy Kidd

Ummmm….lemme guess…YOU’RE a real racist!

** Responding to aramis comment a couple of entries back:

Charlotte Hays in her “loose canon” blog of September 30, 2005 – “Guess Who the Real Racists Are” – implies that Bill Bennett was only refuting a thesis put forward in the popular book "Freakonomics” that the crime rate dropped because of the effects of Roe v. Wade, the law legalizing abortion. Because Bennett is against abortion he is against the thesis, of course. But in interpreting it for us he specifically uses the term “black baby” in describing how the crime rate would certainly go down. Here’s what he said:

I do know that it's true that if you wanted to reduce crime, you could, if that were your sole purpose, you could abort every black baby in this country, and your crime rate would go down.

Hays claims the Freakonomics thesis is “inherently racist” because “black males make up a disproportionate segment of the prison population.”

But as always, it’s good to read the book before you comment on it. The book never mentions race as a factor. It cites poverty and poor family conditions as the factors in the creation of a criminal class. Here’s the verbatim from the book:
P. 6 Freakonomics

So, how did Roe v. Wade help trigger, a generation later, the greatest crime drop in recorded history?

As far as crime is concerned, it turns out that not all children are born equal. Not even close. Decades of studies have shown that a child born into an adverse family environment is far more likely than other children to become a criminal. And the millions of women most likely to have an abortion in the wake of Roe v. Wade—poor, unmarried, and teenage mothers for whom illegal abortions had been too expensive or too hard to get- were often models of adversity. They were the very women whose children, if born, would have been much more likely than average to become criminals. (For author Steven Leavitt's respone to Bennett's remarks see this in the Freakonomics website.)

A post in the Hays blog (rea 1219) sums it up:

Well, of course race isnt itself a factor. Its poverty. The culture of poverty (and need and hopelessness) breeds criminals. Our black communities often times are also our poorest. Thats a reality, and thats why there is a correlation. And of course there are several reasons for this (stemming from racial inequality) but none having to do with skin pigmentation, (unless we include others' perceptions of it.)

Even if the statistics are skewed, it’s important how you choose your words. And Bennett’s words are the words of a racist – maybe even in spite of his intentions.

BTW, it's "Banned Book Week"

** The American Library Association reminds us that it's the last week in September. So grab a banned book and sin away!

Some families devalued

** Bill Bennett's remarks about how aborting every black baby would effectively reduce the crime rate (see previous post) brand him as a flaming racist, albeit a sanctimonious one. This former government official whose reputation was built around "family values" blatantly acknowledges that he believes some families have no value at all. The religiosity he, and the so-called religious right, espouses apparently doesn't include the biblical description of man being created in the image and likeness of God (Gen 1:27). Or else it attempts to correct God's sloppy handiwork by eliminating a few duds, huge batches of them - 10% or more of the US population. Crimestoppers like Bennett certainly know the efficient ways to manage it - using the tools of genocide. Why does this moral idiot have a radio program - and who listens to him? And why? Could it be that we are truly sinking into a moral tar pit, led by swaggering moralists like Bennett - and his audience?

Cecelie S. Berry delivers eloquent but reasoned excoriation in this Salon.com article, excerpted below:

There has been among African-Americans a lurking suspicion that the family values movement is not about values but about how some groups, blacks in chief, are morally void, and therefore expendable. Is it any wonder that we postulate, when this view is popularized by conservative leaders, that it might help explain why inner-city schools remain segregated, underfunded breeding grounds for delinquency; why government policies make prisons a better investment than early education programs; why the death penalty, though embattled by DNA evidence, still remains unbowed in many states? And is it so surprising for us to ask whether the racist assumptions of Bennett and men like him were behind the federal government's dilatory rescue of the overwhelmingly black and poor residents of New Orleans?

Now THAT'S a racist!

** I'm still trying to catch my breath! Hard to add anything to what Salon's Tim Grieve reports below. I didn't think anyone had the nerve to come right out and say something like this - but then again, the guy saying it is an admitted compulsive gambler - so maybe he just took a chance!

If Republican National Committee chairman Ken Mehlman is serious about wooing African-American voters, he can throw all his energy into speaking to African-American groups and recruiting African-American candidates. Either that, or he could just ask Bill Bennett to shut up.

Bennett, who served as secretary of education under Ronald Reagan before writing the beloved-by-the-right "Book of Virtues," explained on his radio show yesterday that America could reduce its crime rate by eliminating African-Americans.

Media Matters has the audio. The gist of it: A caller to Bennett's radio show suggested that the Social Security system would have money to spare if the nation hadn't aborted so many wage earners over the years. In the course of raising questions about that theory, Bennett said you can't make too many assumptions about the kind of adults aborted fetuses might grow up to be.

There is "just too much that you don't know," Bennett said. "But I do know that it's true that if you wanted to reduce crime, you could -- if that were your sole purpose -- you could abort every black baby in this country, and your crime rate would go down. That would be an impossible, ridiculous, and morally reprehensible thing to do, but your crime rate would go down."

-- Tim Grieve

Depression and spirituality

** As someone frequently overcome by depression, I found most interesting an article from the October 2005 issue of The Atlantic Monthly (subscription required for online viewing). It’s about Abraham Lincoln’s little-noted - at least not since the 1940s - almost constant state of “profound melancholy.” Toward the end of the article by Joshua Wolf Shenk, are some insights into Lincoln’s spirituality, and its relation to his struggle:

Throughout history a glance to the divine has often been the first and last impulse of suffering people. "Man is born broken," the playwright Eugene O'Neill wrote. "He lives by mending. The grace of God is glue!" Today the connection between spiritual and psychological well-being is often passed over by psychologists and psychiatrists, who consider their work a branch of secular medicine and science. But for most of Lincoln's lifetime scientists assumed there was some relationship between mental and spiritual life.

Lincoln, too, connected his mental well-being to divine forces. As a young man he saw how religion could ameliorate life's blows, even as he found the consolation of faith elusive. An infidel—a dissenter from orthodox Christianity—he resisted popular dogma. But many of history's greatest believers have also been its fiercest doubters. Lincoln charted his own theological course to a living vision of how frail, imperfect mortals could turn their suffering selves to the service of something greater and find solace—not in any personal satisfaction or glory but in dutiful mission.

An original theological thinker, Lincoln discounted the idea, common among evangelicals, that sin could be wiped out through confession or repentance. Rather, he believed, as William Herndon explained, "that God could not forgive; that punishment has to follow the sin." This view fitted with both the stern, unforgiving God of Calvinism, with which Lincoln had been raised, and the mechanistic notion of a universe governed by fixed laws. But unlike the Calvinists, who disclaimed any possibility of grace for human beings not chosen for that fate, Lincoln did see a chance of improvement. And unlike some fatalists, who renounced any claim to a moral order, Lincoln saw how man's reason could discern purpose even in the movement of a vast machine that grinds and cuts and mashes all who interfere with it. Just as a child learns to pull his hand from a fire, people can learn when they are doing something that is not in accord with the wider, unseen order. To Lincoln, Herndon explained, "suffering was medicinal & educational." In other words, it could be an agent of growth.

In The Varieties of Religious Experience, William James writes of "sick souls" who turn from a sense of wrongness to a power greater than they. Lincoln showed the simple wisdom of this, as the burden of his work as president brought home a visceral and fundamental connection with something greater than he. He repeatedly called himself an "instrument" of a larger power—which he sometimes identified as the people of the United States, and other times as God—and said that he had been charged with "so vast, and so sacred a trust" that "he felt that he had no moral right to shrink; nor even to count the chances of his own life, in what might follow." When friends said they feared his assassination, he said, "God's will be done. I am in His hands."

Some articles about depression and spirituality:

Out of the prison of depression

Depression's hold released by the Word of God

Stay right here -- God needs you

Racism alert

** The attached document was forwarded to me so I can't verify its authenticity. The document says the author, Anne Gervasi, is a licensed psychologist who worked with Katrina refugees in Dallas. It is strident and harsh but nonetheless, it contains some points worth pondering. Among them:

Katrina kicked the top off of a racist and social termite's nest that has been growing beneath the ground since Reconstruction. These were deeply religious people who have lost God and for that matter, faith and hope. Hope has been replaced by magical thinking that augurs a second and more terrible level of social disruption and anger not far down the road.

Since it doesn't look like the present administration is going to address this and Gervasi's other issues promptly or wisely, it's important that spiritually-inclined people consider focusing on them. In fact, maybe the government's very failures are a wake-up call to individuals to use their spiritual resources to get in where politics and bureaucracy fears to go. Anyone who lived through the race riots of the 60s and 70s should think hard about taking some responsibility for preventing those disruptions.

11 Sep 2005
Anne Gervasi is a licensed psychologist. She donated her time and her talent working with Katrina refuges at first, Reunion Arena and then, the Civic Center. This is her first hand account and reaction to what she had to deal with.

First-hand reaction to Katrina refugees

There are so many words that come to mind. As a scholar I am thinking Diaspora, social displacement, systemic disruption, mass trauma, pandemic and unbelievable chaos. As a clinician, I am looking at something that we have never been trained to handle in this country—a level of victimization and its resultant psycho-social ripples that mandate a whole new field of clinical practice-mass victimology. Katrina kicked the top off of a racist and social termite's nest that has been growing beneath the ground since Reconstruction. These were deeply religious people who have lost God and for that matter, faith and hope. Hope has been replaced by magical thinking that augurs a second and more terrible level of social disruption and anger not far down the road.

Over and over, I kept hearing a framing of self that puzzled me until I realized that this is how it must have been for blacks after Reconstruction. Over and over, people said, "everyone has been so wonderful, thank you, thank you." When I said, "there is no need to thank us, you are our fellow citizens and we want to help you—American to American," there would be a long pause as if the idea of being the same never struck them before.

They are angry and it is growing. The system failed them. For that matter, there is no system because all the safeguards and preparations that we thought were in place aren't there. I have been begging anyone who would listen over the past two years for a program in mass victimology to prepare for the next tragedy after 9/11. Now it is here and the lack of organization, science, and preparation are going to result in terrible consequences for us as a nation.

Imagine sending people who have been assimilated into the most stable demographic population in America into cities and towns all over the US who are as unprepared as the victims to understand their sense of dislocation and their support needs. The lower Gulf States have a language, a history, a social dynamic, a faith, a societal structure, and a ritual system unlike any other in America. These people have lived in and been acculturated to this system for generations. When the dust settles and the mud dries, we are going to see all over America, a nation that will lose patience with the needs of a foreign refugee population. Abandoned once again, the fury and the trauma that have been momentarily quieted by the outpouring of empathy and support post-crisis, will arise larger and more terrible than we have been equipped as a nation to handle. I hear it now, over and over, in the survivor stories, in the loss of self, and the need to reclaim dignity and power.
Right now, numbness is being replaced by magical thinking. "People want me here—here is better. I think I'll stay here." What is going to happen when reality sets in? The bulk of people who are planning to stay don't understand the system here. Even though we abut borders, we are a vastly different nation. At least we are southerners. What is going to happen to the thousands being sent to Connecticut or Illinois or New Jersey? They are being offered free apartments, furniture etc., by generous and well meaning people who haven't thought the long term consequences through very well. A lot of the apartments are in areas where they won't have transportation or jobs. What is going to happen six months down the road when the magic wears off and the help slowly fades? How about the holidays for a people who thrive on ritual, tradition, and celebration?

The trauma they are experiencing is so profound that we have no cultural term or machinery set up for it. The dead and nameless bodies by the thousands rotting in the water, arriving dead on the buses with them, or dying next to them in the shelters are a huge festering wound that no one dares mention. This is a true Diaspora the likes of which we haven't seen since Reconstruction. The immediate needs that are being addressed ignore the greater traumas yet to be spoken. No governmental system can survive the number of wounded and disillusioned people that we are going to see sprouting up all over America. Something far greater and more organized has to be done.

Then to the helpers and what is happening there. Turf wars have already sprung up. In the name of "I know better than you do," chaos and wasted energy are multiplying. The Red Cross was initially in charge of certifying the credentials of the helping therapists. After Oklahoma City and the pretenders who arrived there, this seemed like a wonderful clearing house. Everyone who wanted to help had to go through a brief orientation and a thorough checking of credentials. Only licensed professionals were allowed. Driver's licenses were checked for criminal records. This seemed to be a common sense excellent approach to the question of rapists, pedophiles, and other thugs being denied access to a vulnerable population. Actually, things ran better than I expected at the beginning. Then in came the physicians who I guess felt that their non-existent coursework in this area qualified them to better run things. Immediate chaos, disorganization, and all sorts of ersatz "helpers" began running around. They grabbed our current Red Cross badges and then stopped us from going back on the floor to finish seeing our patients without the new badges, which they just happened to be out of. We had an optometrist with prescriptive lenses but no glasses or readers and no idea when he'd ever see any. We had a deaf booth but no deaf helpers. In the midst of all this chaos, thousands and thousands of the walking wounded mixing with the powerless well-intentioned came the whispered word, pandemic. Lots of people are suddenly getting sick, and we have to have precautions. Don't eat or drink or touch the patients. We only have one bottle of disinfectant in the mental health section, so come back here—the length of the Convention Center—after each patient. "What of the people who are being cycled out of here?" "What are we sending into the population?" If people are sick and contagious, where are the precautions to separate the vulnerable? What of precautions such as masks and gloves to keep the medical professionals and first responders safe? All the here and now is suspended in the hope that maybe tomorrow will take care of itself and the worst won't happen. Those are the question we asked on the first day. NO ONE IS IN CHARGE.

Therefore, there is no consistent answer or approach or forethought. I am no infection guru but as soon as I heard on day one that people with no water were forced to drink water with bloated bodies, feces, and rats in it, the thought of cholera, typhoid, and delayed disease immediately occurred to me. What if the fears of disease are correct? People are fanning out throughout America. Where is the CDC?

In the age of computers, we are doing worse than the pencil squibs and the rolls of paper to log in the displaced after World War II. Literacy and computer access seems to be considered as a given for people who have lost it all. Accessing FEMA is through a website. People are in shelters waiting for FEMA to come "in a few days." "Be patient." The Lieutenant Governor of Louisiana pumped my hand and replied to my desperate queries about how to help people find their parents and babies, "Be patient—give us a few days."
The mothers who have lost their children, and there are many, and the children who have lost their parents, have had it with the "be patient" response. The shelters are surprisingly silent. It is hard to find the traumatized mothers because they cry silently. One mother asked how patient I would be if my five-month-old was somewhere unknown for over a week. Over and over, others would ask, "Do you think my baby has milk and diapers?" "Do you think they are being kind to my baby?" And then, so softly that I would have to ask them to repeat, "Do you think my baby is okay?" My response—the convenient lie. Every time I said, "of course," I prayed to God that it was true.

I am sure that there is a special ring of hell for the media: The survivor stories end-on-end for the titillation of the public. I heard Soledad O'Brien say something about the still unrecognized need to address the psychological trauma. I sent a response to the CNN tip-line that there were hordes of every manner of mental health professional working 24/7. CNN's response? Dr. Phil and the stories of the survivors" on Larry King. They went to the guy who lost his clinical license for serious professional infractions to tell the stories? I could see the "entertainer" down there gathering tales of the already exploited so that he and Larry could both pimp their ratings. The real unsung mental health heroes, the counselors, psychologists, social workers and psychiatrists dealing with un-medicated psychosis and severe traumatic responses were represented by Dr. "Keep-It-Real"? We don't need tabloid help from the media. Scream about accountability and point fingers for those who can't. Where is the real help from the media? Help us find those babies and parents and missing family. We have a man in one of the shelters who is caring for four kids. They call him uncle. He is actually the cousin of the fiancé of the mother who is probably dead. The children are silent. They sit and play and weep with open mouths that can't scream. Where is the media to scream for them?
Finally, to hell with this "no blame game." The stories that I know to be true are enough to make me boil. The compassionate foreign doctors who can't find anyone to validate their credentials, the expensive mobile hospital still sitting parked waiting for federal paperwork to move into Louisiana, the five C130s sitting on the Tarmac in San Diego since the night of Katrina, still waiting for orders to move. Where the hell are the beds? We have some old people sleeping on hot plastic pool floats with no sheets. They are still no showers for people who have walked for hours through fetid waters. Their skin is breaking out in rashes. Still no showers. Where the hell are the DeCon showers bought with Homeland Security money that can shower 30 people at a time. The convention centers have no bathing facilities so the filth and skin reactions are getting worse. What of lice? There are no clothes for the really heavy and large. I was reduced to writing the women I knew who went to Weight Watchers to comb their attics for "before" outfits. When I arrived with the sack of my gatherings, I had to engage in a full scale battle and puff myself up to all my red-headed doctor fury to get them distributed to the women still sitting there in their stinking clothes.

The survivors are like the Mayor of New Orleans who apologized to George Bush for his anger. "If we tell the way we feel, maybe help will stop." All the apologists on the air distancing George and his co-vacationers and idiot appointees should be impeached. I liked Nagin when he called it all bullshit. He was right. How about Haley Barbour complaining about the lack of support for his state? Did he so soon forget his past life and what he did to set up this government of spin artists? If they had acted like a government the body count would be less. The aid would be better managed. The days of filth, and feces, and death would have been ended sooner. God help all of the poseurs in charge when these folks finally get in touch with their justifiable rage. Did you see the White House's logo for the hurricane? George and some asshole in a ball cap against a background of Katrina waving the flag. They had the energy and time for a nice logo but no time to get the elements of help in gear?
The tragedy is leavened by some moments of farce, the guy who arrived with a case of Gucci shoes in various sizes that he "saved" from his closet. The man wearing twelve expensive watches up his arm. I guess he is a punctual sort. There are the too-poignant-for-words vignettes. I saw a lady sitting on a blanket holding a photo of two children that she had pulled from the water. She kept crying and looking at it. I thought they were her children. She didn't know whose they were. They were just losses and she mourned them.

Of course there were the criminals, thugs, and mobsters. One of the greatest indictments of the "spin machine" that is going to come from this situation will be the repeated characterizations of the victims as lawless and criminal. Over and over I heard people tell me about how ashamed they were to be portrayed that way. Ninety-nine percent of these people never were characterized as anything but lawful and good citizens. In their most desperate hours to be reduced to taking food and water to survive and then to be lumped with the television thieves and the shooters is too shameful for most of them to bear. I heard from hospital employees that survived on a cup of watered grits so that the patients could make it. And then I heard had they had to hide the ones that didn't in closets to keep up the morale of the others.

The people that survived this tragedy and the people who help them all know one truth. The help and the love and the care that has been extended to them have been on a citizen-to-citizen basis. The churches, doctors, therapists, and ordinary citizens who are giving all they can in time and resources are managing to band-aid at the most elementary level-neighbor to neighbor. The government has failed. We are more vulnerable now than before 9/11 because faith in the system is gone. No system can sustain itself as a viable entity when the citizenry are the walking wounded. Victims implode a system from within and expose its decay. This is the beginning of the end unless we can get a drastic change of philosophy and restore the government to a system "by the people for the people." Right now nobody down here believes we have that.

Anne Gervasi
agervasi@sbcglobal.net - gervasi@dal.devry.edu Euless, TX 76039

What would I be without my STUFF?

** These days I’m thinking a lot about THINGS, because we have been surrounded by and have been handling a plethora of STUFF from our previous locations (most of it from thirty years' worth of living together). But then we go out to Costco, Home Depot, and Target and see tons more things.
Not complaining that they’re there, but what’s bugging me is that I’m SEEKING and BUYING more and more things and bringing them home. On the surface, and perhaps for real, there are new things to accommodate our new home. But there’s also this APPETITE for acquisition that seems so obvious these days.

So many things we have been trying to find “homes” for here are not part of our active life these days. They are artifacts from other periods – kind of like an archaeological dig that chronicles a past civilization by its discards and detritus. But is that who we are today?

No, but it could be argued that these things have contributed to what we are today. But why keep them? One obvious reason is that they may be needed in the future as references, documentation, tools and they may be part of some rekindled interest. And yet, one wonder if it would be all that tragic not to have them.

A friend said today that the people of New Orleans are really feeling the loss of their “stuff.” While it’s easy to empathize with the sense of loss, the complications that ensue when certain stuff is lost, and the emotional burden of losing track of the sentimental things that put us in touch with each other and with states of mind that are pleasant and meaningful, still, what is all that compared to the vast treasury of talents, skills, cognitive and physical functions that still remain? True, the effort of rebuilding and replacing one’s “home” is sad and hard, but perhaps it wouldn’t be so difficult if we lived more consciously in the fullness of our innate abilities as spiritual creatures.

A spiritual base in consciousness would affirm that all that “stuff” is just a poor approximation of the wealth of goodness that constitutes and surrounds us. As emanations of the one Source of all reality, all identity and all goodness, we already possess all we need in order to make life worthwhile. And while the past may not feel as near as a lost sentimental object might suggest, we still have our intelligence, our drive, our creativity and our expectation of good to make us feel whole and useful.

We need not – indeed cannot – be defined by the objects we possess – or don’t possess. We must be defined by our Source, which is never lost, never depleted or destroyed. The light that shines us forth is inextinguishable, and the sooner we grasp and embrace this fact the sooner we can recover from the separation from our material things

With God on their side

** Scary to think how many people would love to see this happen. From Slate.com


The Parable of Jesus and the Rubber Chicken
What if Christ spoke at a Republican Party fund-raiser?
By Tom Peyer
Posted Thursday, Aug. 25, 2005, at 4:21 AM PT

TRANSCRIPT OF JESUS CHRIST'S REMARKS AT A REPUBLICAN PARTY FUND-RAISER, CRAWFORD, TEXAS, AUGUST 2005

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I'm going to have a hard time living up to an introduction like that. (LAUGHTER)

First, let Me express My gratitude for your support over the last few years. It's nice to be thought of as a winner for a change. If I had known we'd get the House, the Senate, and two consecutive terms in the White House (APPLAUSE)—if I'd known all that, I would have had an easier time that Friday on the Cross, let me tell you. (LAUGHTER, APPLAUSE)

Read the rest here

Flattening the church

**Tom Friedman, in his book “The World is Flat” describes a world that has been transformed by what he calls the “ten flatteners,” mostly technological innovations that are tearing down the barriers that seemed so permanent not all that long ago. Space, time and matter are all being downgraded by the emerging of a new kind of intelligence. (See also Dan Pink’s “A Whole New Mind.")

As someone who has watched a church attempt to cope with the changes, I find Friedman’s views illuminating. Though what follows is a description of what’s going on in business, it also applies to churches:

"Globalization 2.0 was really the era of mainframe computing, which was very vertical - command-and-control oriented, with companies and their individual departments tending to be organized in vertical silos. Globalization 3.0, which is built around the convergence of the ten flatteners, and particularly the combination of the PC, the microprocessor, the Internet, and fiber optics, flipped the playing field from largely top-down to more side to side. And this naturally fostered and demanded new business practices, which were less about command and control and more about connecting and collaborating horizontally." (pp 178-179)

Friedman quotes Carly Fiorina, late of HP:

"How you collaborate horizontally and manage horizontally requires a totally different set of skills."

Churches tend to be very top down organizations – and the thinking tends to mimic it. All ideas, authority, permissions and initiatives must originate at the uppermost levels and be channeled down to those below. It’s hard to see how such thinking can survive the “ten flatteners.”

But churches don’t have to be organized in this obsolete way. Exactly how they should be organized and run is still unclear, but it seems obvious that what is going on in business and society in general will have to be taken into account.

There are many formerly churched folks who are distributed out into this ever-flatter world and they are carrying on the basic research that will be needed if and when their churches finally admit to a need for change. They are working “side to side” and in some cases side-BY-side in small groups, implementing the spiritual vision of church founders in a context that seems so toxic to the traditional model.

The primary ingredient in this research process is their CONNECTIVITY. Not just email but Instant Messaging, Voice-over-Internet Protocol (VoIP) like Skype, cell phones, Web groups, and an ever-expanding array of connectors are enabling this “Diaspora” to share ideas, test new approaches, and generally build the Wiki-like wisdom that will be so necessary in the New Church.

Those Freakonomics guys at Google U

** The authors of Freakonomics, Steven Leavitt and Stephen Dubner, paid a visit to Google headquarters. Interesting report.

This wasn’t a presentation; this was a presentation. It was a Sally Field moment: They like us! They really like us! (We realize, of course, that the average Googler is far too young to catch this reference. Don't worry; it's not very funny anyway.) As we picked our way through the floor-sitting Googlers, it felt like we should have been carrying a couple of Telecasters; it was likely the closest that either of us will ever get to having a rock-star moment (in truth, Dubner was a minor-league rock star, but that was in the late 80s, so it doesn't really count)....

Overcome: the one stupid thing about a Mac...

** New mouse for Macs has multiple buttons
BusinessWeek
AUG. 2 3:50 PM ET Apple Computer Inc.'s neglect of the humble mouse is over. It now offers a model that's nimble. Apple introduced on Tuesday its first computer mouse with multiple buttons, including four sensors and a tiny scroll ball.

Recommended reading

** Here are some books I've read that I think you'd enjoy.

FICTION
Neal Stephenson:
Snow Crash

Editorial Reviews
Amazon.com
From the opening line of his breakthrough cyberpunk novel Snow Crash, Neal
Stephenson
plunges the reader into a not-too-distant future. It is a world where the Mafia
controls
pizza delivery, the United States exists as a patchwork of corporate-franchise
city-states,
and the Internet--incarnate as the Metaverse--looks something like last year's
hype would
lead you to believe it should. Enter Hiro Protagonist--hacker, samurai
swordsman, and
pizza-delivery driver. When his best friend fries his brain on a new designer
drug called
Snow Crash and his beautiful, brainy ex-girlfriend asks for his help, what's a
guy with a
name like that to do? He rushes to the rescue. A breakneck-paced 21st-century
novel,
Snow Crash interweaves everything from Sumerian myth to visions of a postmodern
civilization on the brink of collapse. Faster than the speed of television and a
whole lot
more fun, Snow Crash is the portrayal of a future that is bizarre enough to be
plausible. --
This text refers to the Paperback edition.

The Diamond Age

Editorial Reviews
Amazon.com
John Percival Hackworth is a nanotech engineer on the rise when he steals a copy
of "A
Young Lady's Illustrated Primer" for his daughter Fiona. The primer is actually
a super
computer built with nanotechnology that was designed to educate Lord
Finkle-McGraw's
daughter and to teach her how to think for herself in the stifling neo-Victorian
society. But
Hackworth loses the primer before he can give it to Fiona, and now the "book"
has fallen
into the hands of young Nell, an underprivileged girl whose life is about to
change.

Cryptonomicon

From Library Journal
Computer expert Randy Waterhouse spearheads a movement to create a safe haven
for
data in a world where information equals power and big business and government
seek to
control the flow of knowledge. His ambitions collide with a top-secret
conspiracy with
links to the encryption wars of World War II and his grandfather's work in
preventing the
Nazis from discovering that the Allies had cracked their supposedly unbreakable
Enigma
code. The author of Snow Crash (LJ 4/1/92) focuses his eclectic vision on a
story of epic
proportions, encompassing both the beginnings of information technology in the
1940s
and the blossoming of the present cybertech revolution. Stephenson's
freewheeling prose
and ironic voice lend a sense of familiarity to a story that transcends the
genre and
demands a wide readership among fans of technothrillers as well as a general
audience.

Quicksilver

Editorial Reviews
Amazon.com
In Quicksilver, the first volume of the "Baroque Cycle," Neal Stephenson
launches his most
ambitious work to date. The novel, divided into three books, opens in 1713 with
the
ageless Enoch Root seeking Daniel Waterhouse on the campus of what passes for
MIT in
eighteenth-century Massachusetts. Daniel, Enoch's message conveys, is key to
resolving
an explosive scientific battle of preeminence between Isaac Newton and Gottfried
Wilhelm
Leibniz over the development of calculus. As Daniel returns to London aboard the
Minerva,
readers are catapulted back half a century to recall his years at Cambridge with
young
Isaac. Daniel is a perfect historical witness. Privy to Robert Hooke's early
drawings of
microscope images and with associates among the English nobility, religious
radicals, and
the Royal Society, he also befriends Samuel Pepys, risks a cup of coffee, and
enjoys a
lecture on Belgian waffles and cleavage-—all before the year 1700.
In the second book, Stephenson introduces Jack Shaftoe and Eliza. "Half-Cocked"
Jack
(also know as the "King of the Vagabonds") recovers the English Eliza from a
Turkish
harem. Fleeing the siege of Vienna, the two journey across Europe driven by
Eliza's lust for
fame, fortune, and nobility. Gradually, their circle intertwines with that of
Daniel in the
third book of the novel.

Yan Martel

Life of Pi

Editorial Reviews
Amazon.com
Yann Martel's imaginative and unforgettable Life of Pi is a magical reading
experience, an
endless blue expanse of storytelling about adventure, survival, and ultimately,
faith. The
precocious son of a zookeeper, 16-year-old Pi Patel is raised in Pondicherry,
India, where
he tries on various faiths for size, attracting "religions the way a dog
attracts fleas."
Planning a move to Canada, his father packs up the family and their menagerie
and they
hitch a ride on an enormous freighter. After a harrowing shipwreck, Pi finds
himself adrift
in the Pacific Ocean, trapped on a 26-foot lifeboat with a wounded zebra, a
spotted hyena,
a seasick orangutan, and a 450-pound Bengal tiger named Richard Parker ("His
head was
the size and color of the lifebuoy, with teeth"). It sounds like a colorful
setup, but these
wild beasts don't burst into song as if co-starring in an anthropomorphized
Disney
feature. After much gore and infighting, Pi and Richard Parker remain the boat's
sole
passengers, drifting for 227 days through shark-infested waters while fighting
hunger, the
elements, and an overactive imagination. In rich, hallucinatory passages, Pi
recounts the
harrowing journey as the days blur together, elegantly cataloging the endless
passage of
time and his struggles to survive: "It is pointless to say that this or that
night was the
worst of my life. I have so many bad nights to choose from that I've made none
the
champion."
An award winner in Canada (and winner of the 2002 Man Booker Prize), Life of Pi,
Yann
Martel's second novel, should prove to be a breakout book in the U.S. At one
point in his
journey, Pi recounts, "My greatest wish--other than salvation--was to have a
book. A long
book with a never-ending story. One that I could read again and again, with new
eyes and
fresh understanding each time." It's safe to say that the fabulous, fablelike
Life of Pi is
such a book.


NON-FICTION

Dan Pink
A Whole New Mind

Editorial Reviews
From Publishers Weekly
Just as information workers surpassed physical laborers in economic importance,
Pink
claims, the workplace terrain is changing yet again, and power will inevitably
shift to
people who possess strong right brain qualities. His advocacy of "R-directed
thinking"
begins with a bit of neuroscience tourism to a brain lab that will be extremely
familiar to
those who read Steven Johnson's Mind Wide Open last year, but while Johnson was
fascinated by the brain's internal processes, Pink is more concerned with how
certain skill
sets can be harnessed effectively in the dawning "Conceptual Age." The second
half of the
book details the six "senses" Pink identifies as crucial to success in the new
economy-
design, story, symphony, empathy, play and meaning-while "portfolio" sections
offer
practical (and sometimes whimsical) advice on how to cultivate these skills
within oneself.
Thought-provoking moments abound-from the results of an intensive drawing
workshop
to the claim that "bad design" created the chaos of the 2000 presidential
election-but the
basic premise may still strike some as unproven. Furthermore, the warning that
people
who don't nurture their right brains "may miss out, or worse, suffer" in the
economy of
tomorrow comes off as alarmist. But since Pink's last big idea (Free Agent
Nation) has
become a cornerstone of employee-management relations, expect just as much buzz
around his latest theory.


Virginia Postrel

The Future and its Enemies
Editorial Reviews
Amazon.com
Virginia Postrel smashes conventional political boundaries in this libertarian
manifesto.
World-views should be defined not by how they view the present, she says, but
the future.
Do they aim to control it, as many conservative reactionaries and liberal
planners want to
do? Or do they embrace it, even though they can't know what lies ahead? Postrel
(editor of
Reason magazine) firmly places herself in this latter category--the dynamists,
she calls
her happy tribe--and urges the rest of us to sign up. The future of economic
prosperity,
technological progress, and cultural innovation depends upon embracing
principles of
choice and competition. The downside of this philosophy, Postrel readily notes,
is that it
doesn't allow us to manage tomorrow by acting today. And that's exactly the
point: we
shouldn't want to. A future constructed by an infinite number of individual
decisions,
made privately, is one she believes we should encourage. The Future and Its
Enemies is at
once intellectually sweeping and reader-friendly; it has the potential to join a
pantheon of
books about freedom that includes works by Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman.

Malcom Gladwell
Blink
Editorial Reviews
Amazon.com
Blink is about the first two seconds of looking--the decisive glance that knows
in an
instant. Gladwell, the best-selling author of The Tipping Point, campaigns for
snap
judgments and mind reading with a gift for translating research into splendid
storytelling.
Building his case with scenes from a marriage, heart attack triage, speed
dating, choking
on the golf course, selling cars, and military maneuvers, he persuades readers
to think
small and focus on the meaning of "thin slices" of behavior. The key is to rely
on our
"adaptive unconscious"--a 24/7 mental valet--that provides us with instant and
sophisticated information to warn of danger, read a stranger, or react to a new
idea.
Gladwell includes caveats about leaping to conclusions: marketers can manipulate
our first
impressions, high arousal moments make us "mind blind," focusing on the wrong
cue
leaves us vulnerable to "the Warren Harding Effect" (i.e., voting for a handsome
but hapless
president). In a provocative chapter that exposes the "dark side of blink," he
illuminates
the failure of rapid cognition in the tragic stakeout and murder of Amadou
Diallo in the
Bronx. He underlines studies about autism, facial reading and cardio uptick to
urge
training that enhances high-stakes decision-making. In this brilliant,
cage-rattling book,
one can only wish for a thicker slice of Gladwell's ideas about what Blink Camp
might look
like.

** The Bush victory in November was followed by victories of other bad guys and I'm still holding my breath to see if there will be a dawn. So in the dark night of institutional ignorance that surrounds my little world these days, it's good to hear that things aren't that way everywhere. The Wired Web site carries an adapted excerpt from Daniel H. Pink's new book, A Whole New Mind: Moving from the Information Age to the Conceptual Age. It points to the emergence of spirituality and its colorful sidekick, art, into daily life.

Pink argues that throughout history progress has been lifting onerous burdens from humanity in order to allow the songbird of spiritual consciousness to more easily take flight. Those burdens have been anything that can be reduced to a set of rules. Automation has taken on that task in order that intuition and other ways of knowing can come to the forefront.

Virginia Postrel's "The Substance of Style" makes note of the widespread acceptance of aesthetics as a "solid" value in today's world.

As a proponent of spiritual healing, I see these as harbingers of an age where goodness will dominate human life and problems will be solved not with technology but with love.

Revenge of the right Brain

As the forces of Asia, automation, and abundance strengthen and accelerate, the curtain is rising on a new era, the Conceptual Age. If the Industrial Age was built on people's backs, and the Information Age on people's left hemispheres, the Conceptual Age is being built on people's right hemispheres. We've progressed from a society of farmers to a society of factory workers to a society of knowledge workers. And now we're progressing yet again - to a society of creators and empathizers, pattern recognizers, and meaning makers.

We hear you...dammit!

** Remember when we used to take pity on people who would walk down the street shouting? Now we just get pissed off because the only mental problem these people have is incredibly unconscionable stupidity.

It's an epidmeic -- people talking so loud on their cell phones that live conversations often have to stop. The problem is so widespread that if you take the Acela to New York City, people scramble to get into the QUIET CAR where no cell phone conversations -- in fact not even loud face to face conversations -- are allowed. The Loewes chain of movie theaters has a singing pre-show spot portraying the many venues of "Inconsiderate cellphone man" -- although I've noticed that women are just as likely to be afflicted with this social disease.

Well, Draplin Industries Design Company in collaboration with Coudal Partners are sick and tired and they're not going to take it anymore! And you're invited to join them in fighting cell phone boorishness. They created SHHH - Society for Handheld Hushing. They supply you with printed cards that you can drop on these sociopaths. You can download a PDF and print out your own, some of which are quite funny.

As the mud slides

** …those who want the best for me,
Let them have the last word--a glad shout!-
and say, over and over and over,
"GOD is great--everything works
together for good for his servant."
—Psalm 35 (The Message)

Mudslides, tsunamis and earthquakes aren't just happening in the earth. These are days of tectonic mental change. It looks like the bad guys everywhere are having their day. Paul Krugman thinks it’s “Worse than fiction” in a New York Times Op Ed piece on January 7, 2005 (see below.)

In my own world, five years of development on a breakthrough Web product appear to have been summarily trashed by our venture capitalists. Not just trashed but trashed with an edge of resentment as though the project was a personal affront to the backers.

It would be easy to see these victories of the bad guys as the end of the world. But it isn’t. There’s a poem by Whittier I like that has the words “All the good the past hath had, remains to make our own time glad.”

I believe that. I know there’s no going backward, even when the bad fiction of “our own time” screams reaction and reversal. The poem continues:

Through the harsh noises of our day,
A low sweet prelude finds its way;
Through clouds of doubt and creeds of
A light is breaking, calm and clear.

The turning of the earth teaches us that the “low sweet prelude” is our faith in the Principle that mandates darkness to be only a temporary condition predicting a new dawn on the way.

Worse Than Fiction
by PAUL KRUGMAN
I've been thinking of writing a political novel. It will be a bad novel because there won't be any nuance: the villains won't just espouse an ideology I disagree with - they'll be hypocrites, cranks and scoundrels.

In my bad novel, a famous moralist who demanded national outrage over an affair and writes best-selling books about virtue will turn out to be hiding an expensive gambling habit. A talk radio host who advocates harsh penalties for drug violators will turn out to be hiding his own drug addiction.

In my bad novel, crusaders for moral values will be driven by strange obsessions. One senator's diatribe against gay marriage will link it to "man on dog" sex. Another will rant about the dangers of lesbians in high school bathrooms.

In my bad novel, the president will choose as head of homeland security a "good man" who turns out to have been the subject of an arrest warrant,who turned an apartment set aside for rescue workers into his personal love nest and who stalked at least one of his ex-lovers.

In my bad novel, a TV personality who claims to stand up for regular Americans against the elite will pay a large settlement in a sexual harassment case, in which he used his position of power to - on second thought, that story is too embarrassing even for a bad novel.

In my bad novel, apologists for the administration will charge foreign policy critics with anti-Semitism. But they will be silent when a[JEO] prominent conservative declares that "Hollywood is controlled by secular Jews who hate Christianity in general and Catholicism in particular."

In my bad novel the administration will use the slogan "support the[JEO] troops" to suppress criticism of its war policy. But it will ignore repeated complaints that the troops lack armor.

The secretary of defense - another "good man," according to the[JEO] president- won't even bother signing letters to the families of soldiers killed in action.

Last but not least, in my bad novel the president, who portrays himself as the defender of good against evil, will preside over the widespread use of torture.

How did we find ourselves living in a bad novel? It was not ever thus.
Hypocrites, cranks and scoundrels have always been with us, on both sides of the aisle. But 9/11 created an environment some liberals summarize with the acronym Iokiyar: it's O.K. if you're a Republican.

The public became unwilling to believe bad things about those who claim to be defending the nation against terrorism. And the hypocrites, cranks and scoundrels of the right, empowered by the public's credulity, have come out in unprecedented force.

Apologists for the administration would like us to forget all about the Kerik affair, but Bernard Kerik perfectly symbolizes the times we live in. Like Rudolph Giuliani and, yes, President Bush, he wasn't a hero of 9/11,
but he played one on TV. And like Mr. Giuliani, he was quick to cash in, literally, on his undeserved reputation.

Once the New York newspapers began digging, it became clear that Mr.Kerik is, professionally and personally, a real piece of work. But that's not unusual these days among people who successfully pass themselves off as patriots and defenders of moral values. Mr. Kerik must still be wondering why he, unlike so many others, didn't get away with it.

And Alberto Gonzales must be hoping that senators don't bring up the subject.
The principal objection to making Mr. Gonzales attorney general is that doing so will tell the world that America thinks it's acceptable to torture people. But his confirmation will also be a statement about ethics.

As White House counsel, Mr. Gonzales was charged with vetting Mr. Kerik.
He must have realized what kind of man he was dealing with - yet he declared Mr. Kerik fit to oversee homeland security.

Did Mr. Gonzales defer to the wishes of a president who wanted Mr.Kerik anyway, or did he decide that his boss wouldn't want to know? (The Nelson Report, a respected newsletter, reports that Mr. Bush has made it clear[JEO] to his subordinates that he doesn't want to hear bad news about Iraq.)

Either way, when the Senate confirms Mr. Gonzales, it will mean that Iokiyar remains in effect, that the basic rules of ethics don't apply to people aligned with the ruling party. And reality will continue to be worse than any fiction I could write.

Cat got my tongue

** I admire my friends who have started blogging. I started a couple years ago but slacked off for a while. Then I got all bloggy during the election campaign and immediately thereafter went silent again. Since Grits and Kathleen Ream have gotten active I think about it again.

And then I remember why I go silent now and then. I am part of a culture that doesn’t like independent “publishing.” It’s seen as too “personal” and therefore not very spiritual. So my blog has usually consisted of posting pieces from other sources with a brief comment or two. What I envy about Grits and KR is their freedom to lay it all out there. I feel inhibited about that.

Several years ago I made a commitment to be the ward of a group of spiritual students and the organization that authorizes me has strict rules about what people like me can do. If I don’t follow them they could disband my group, which would really hurt their feelings and make some things inconvenient for them. So my loyalty to my students keeps me reticent. In public. Because in private most people, including many students, know I'm bursting with ideas and opinions, many of which are contrary to the culture.

So until I figure out what to do about this I guess I'll just keep envying my blogging friends, none of whom envy me for the responsibilities I bear for my small band of students.

Daily life - just an icon?

** NY Times, Jan 4.2005. John Brockman, publisher of Edge, a Web site devoted to science, asks a new question at the end of each year. This year's question: What do you believe is true even though you cannot prove it?
Donald Hoffman, a Cognitive scientist from U. of California, Irvine, author of "Visual Intelligence" wrote:

I believe that consciousness and its contents are all that exists. Spacetime, matter and fields never were the fundamental denizens of the universe but have always been, from their beginning, among the humbler contents of consciousness, dependent on it for their very being.

The world of our daily experience—the world of tables, chairs, stars and people, with their attendant shapes, smells, feels and sounds—is a species-specific user interface to a realm far more complex, a realm whose essential character is conscious. It is unlikely that the contents of our interface in any way resemble that realm. Indeed the usefulness of an interface requires, in general, that they do not. For the point of an interface, such as the windows interface on a computer, is simplification and ease of use. We click icons because this is quicker and less prone to error than editing megabytes of software or toggling voltages in circuits. Evolutionary pressures dictate that our species-specific interface, this world of our daily experience, should itself be a radical simplification, selected not for the exhaustive depiction of truth but for the mutable pragmatics of survival.

If this is right, if consciousness is fundamental, then we should not be surprised that, despite centuries of effort by the most brilliant of minds, there is as yet no physicalist theory of consciousness, no theory that explains how mindless matter or energy or fields could be, or cause, conscious experience. There are, of course, many proposals for where to find such a theory—perhaps in information, complexity, neurobiology, neural darwinism, discriminative mechanisms, quantum effects, or functional organization. But no proposal remotely approaches the minimal standards for a scientific theory: quantitative precision and novel prediction. If matter is but one of the humbler products of consciousness, then we should expect that consciousness itself cannot be theoretically derived from matter. The mind-body problem will be to physicalist ontology what black-body radiation was to classical mechanics: first a goad to its heroic defense, later the provenance of its final supersession.

The heroic defense will, I suspect, not soon be abandoned. For the defenders doubt that a replacement grounded in consciousness could attain the mathematical precision or impressive scope of physicalist science. It remains to be seen, of course, to what extent and how effectively mathematics can model consciousness. But there are fascinating hints: According to some of its interpretations, the mathematics of quantum theory is itself, already, a major advance in this project. And perhaps much of the mathematical progress in the perceptual and cognitive sciences can also be so interpreted. We shall see.

The mind-body problem may not fall within the scope of physicalist science, since this problem has, as yet, no bona fide physicalist theory. Its defenders can surely argue that this penury shows only that we have not been clever enough or that, until the right mutation chances by, we cannot be clever enough, to devise a physicalist theory. They may be right. But if we assume that consciousness is fundamental then the mind-body problem transforms from an attempt to bootstrap consciousness from matter into an attempt to bootstrap matter from consciousness. The latter bootstrap is, in principle, elementary: Matter, spacetime and physical objects are among the contents of consciousness.

The rules by which, for instance, human vision constructs colors, shapes, depths, motions, textures and objects, rules now emerging from psychophysical and computational studies in the cognitive sciences, can be read as a description, partial but mathematically precise, of this bootstrap. What we lose in this process are physical objects that exist independent of any observer. There is no sun or moon unless a conscious mind perceives them, for both are constructs of consciousness, icons in a species-specific user interface. To some this seems a patent absurdity, a reductio of the position, readily contradicted by experience and our best science. But our best science, our theory of the quantum, gives no such assurance. And experience once led us to believe the earth flat and the stars near. Perhaps, in due time, mind-independent objects will go the way of flat earth.

This view obviates no method or result of science, but integrates and reinterprets them in its framework. Consider, for instance, the quest for neural correlates of consciousness (NCC). This holy grail of physicalism can, and should, proceed unabated if consciousness is fundamental, for it constitutes a central investigation of our user interface. To the physicalist, an NCC is, potentially, a causal source of consciousness. If, however, consciousness is fundamental, then an NCC is a feature of our interface correlated with, but never causally responsible for, alterations of consciousness. Damage the brain, destroy the NCC, and consciousness is, no doubt, impaired. Yet neither the brain nor the NCC causes consciousness. Instead consciousness constructs the brain and the NCC. This is no mystery. Drag a file's icon to the trash and the file is, no doubt, destroyed. Yet neither the icon nor the trash, each a mere pattern of pixels on a screen, causes its destruction. The icon is a simplification, a graphical correlate of the file's contents (GCC), intended to hide, not to instantiate, the complex web of causal relations.