My newest blog

** I'll be concentrating on my newest blog Godbert, which will focus on spirituality in the workplace. Though I'll be making entries here from time to time, Godbert will tend to preoccupy me.

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