technology – Arclist

America In The Squeeze

on April 18, 2025April 18, 2025 By remelcher

Guns versus smartphones

I’m just turning 75. My life has been formed, and is almost completed, throughout a breathtakingly brief and cataclysmic era in global history. In future accounts it may be referred to as ‘The Neoliberal Era’, ‘The Era Of American Hegemony’, ‘The Age Of Economic Globalization’, or perhaps, as the cataclysm intensifies toward its resolution, ‘Capitalism’s Final Crisis’. There will be a few references to something called ‘The American Empire’. It will appear as a flicker between the centuries, and one of the shortest lived empires that ever endured.

We are at the beginning of a 2nd American Revolution, one that is long due. Whatever the outcome, it will radically reshape the outcomes for global civilization. The age of the nation state is gradually going out of phase with the needs of the physical world. There will be times of breakdown and struggle. We must reintegrate with the workd. This will take some time and will never be at an end. I believe that in the next phase there will still be nations, and languages and cultural boundaries. The dimensions of power will be altered in structure and better managed, through education and the cultivation of respect. The flows of the twin rivers will be, at least until the next glacial scale disruption, in better harmony, as each distinctive part realizes its necessity to the whole.

Technology presents new perceptual models of the world much faster than anything we can control or even keep up with. We are continually confused. The time has arrived for us all to take a deep dive into questioning who we are and who we want to be, and what are the ultimate stakes. Complacency is deadly. We’d been so long buried in our own work, forgetting our reasons for working, or what makes up the whole mechanism of our survival.

We generally see and enterpret the word ’revolution’ to refer to specific cataclysmic changes in the procession of historical events. To understand what moves these events it’s necessary to go beyond specific dates and times and logistical patterns, and embrace the flowing evolutionary trends, ever constant, ever shifting, beneath the surface of what we see.

There are two constant revolutions/evolutions going on at any given historical moment. One is economic, and the other is cultural. They are woven together in close procession, at times in harmony, and at other times they appear to flow in opposing directions. The economic evolution is by nature conservative, its primary focus to preserve stability. Economics is a measure of the river of things, the movement of necessities and the produce of our desires.

Cultural evolution is something broader and more ephemeral, and yet central to our sense of well being. Something within us is driven by an impulse to break the rules, to advance, and to enter new territories. We are curious and inspired. Culture is the river of our perceptions. They are sometimes clear and accurate, and at other times only marginally connected to the world beneath the fog.

These twin streams never stop moving, never stop changing. They are inseparably linked, either energizing or obstructing each other, acting over and through us like the ancient gods in Greek tales about siblings and rivals.

It’s becoming abundantly and existentially clear to much of humanity that survival depends on a true understanding of the role we play as part of a bigger organism. Globalization is the political term for an economic transition. We go from centralized industrial production to widely distributed supply chains stretching across oceans and continents. At its essence, this is like the early evolution of the cell. A number of independent organisms come together as a cooperative community and eventually merge into a single complex organism. A process called symbioses.

Along with economic revolutions, cultural revolutions advance at an unprecedented rate, driven by the tides of information that flow through the system, reshaping at every instance our perception of the world.

We are currently engaged in a third world war, which is a new kind of war, fought with numbers and ideas and conceptual systems playing across screens. The handheld weapon in this war is the smartphone in our pockets.

Things are moving very fast, worldwide…one event or action leads to others. People find out who their allies are. They’re encouraged to become more boldly resistant. A major university resists a government takeover. Prominent financial managers begin speaking out. Republican Town Meetings get rowdy. People, in general, are educating themselves. All of this builds toward an ultimate breakdown of life as usual.

Kilmer Abrego Garcia, like George Floyd before him, like Alfred Dreyfus long before all of this (see ‘Dreyfus Affair), is an unfortunate victim of history. On April 19th, demonstrations, even more enormous than on the 5th, will expand the focus beyond Musk and Trump to embrace and defend Garcia, and his young family, and ourselves, against the fascist brutality that landed him in a living hell.

Trump and company are waiting for an opportunity to gin up excuses to go after dissenters, with fierce repression, just as they did during the George Floyd era. Just like then, only more so, there’s an international reaction to their policies and cruelties, and they now feel cornered.

The American economy is now riding in the back of a cybertruck, under the control of the madman we gave the wheel, heading toward a Thelma and Louise denouement. I fully expect that we will go over that cliff, taking a good chunk of the world with us.

There is, at present, a very thin line standing between democracy and fascism in America, and the next few weeks will determine whether that line is holding. I’m talking about the Law, the Courts and the the Universities.

The 5th Estate, the Press and the Media are barely functional, not even willing, for the most part (except comedians), to call out fascism by its real name (they use the academic term, ‘authoritarianism’ – it’s elite and vague and sounds less threatening).

Social Media has taken up the slack of what remains of democracy and free speech, performing the role that pamphleteering did between the first American Revolution and the Civil War. I find myself no longer getting my news and analysis directly from newspapers or television, and the marketplace of ideas is boundless and international. This is a completely different realm of media, with a whole new set of rules, evolving constantly, that govern behavior and trust.

The vessel of our freedom is still encapsulated in words and institutions inspired and put into action more than two centuries past. If these barriers are breached, we will be in a new state of civil war. At that point another line of defense comes into play. There’s the police, the national guard, the military, led by educated commanders who’ve taken pledges to defend the Constitution and the law. These are forces composed of people from communities most affected by the actions of this administration. We will be in unknown territory.

We are in a Squeeze.

America will survive. The world will survive. The relationships between us all will be radically altered. We will have been through a deep process of self examination. Perhaps for the first time since the last World War, since FDR and long after, we will be forced into revisioning our entire political and economic culture.

My generation won’t be around to witness the conclusion of that process. But we will have been privileged to see its beginning, and to have learned much on the ride along the way.

From ’God, Human, Animal, Machine’ by Meghan O’Gieblyn

on February 9, 2024May 1, 2024 By remelcher

Donald Trump himself, a man whose rise to power may or may not have been aided by machines, is often included in this digital phantasm, one more emergent property of the network’s dazzling complexity. He is a politician, it is often said, who understands, or at least intuits, more thoroughly than anyone how to manipulate a system that runs on empty signifiers – a system that has become so unhinged from semantic meaning, so thoroughly reduced to syntax, that one can simply throw a bunch of meaningless phrases – what the journalist Masha Gessen calls “word piles” – into the ether and divert the narrative away from its original source. Robert A. Burton, a prominent neurologist, argued that Trump is so good at understanding algorithms because he himself is an algorithm. In a 2017 op-ed for The New York Times Burton claimed that the president made sense once you stopped viewing him as a human being and began to see him as “a rudimentary artificial intelligence-based learning machine. Like deep learning systems, was working blindly through trial and error, keeping a record of what moves worked in the past and using them to optimize his strategy, much like AlphaGo, the AI system that swept the Go championship in Seoul. The reason that we found him so baffling was that we continually tried to anthropomorphize him, attributing intention and ideology to his decisions, as though they stemmed from a coherent agenda. AI systems are so wildly successful because they aren’t burdened with any of these rational or moral concerns – they don’t have to think about what is socially acceptable or take into account downstream consequences. They have one goal – winning – and this rigorous single-minded interest is consistently updated through positive feedback. Burton’s advice to historians and policy wonks was to regard Trump as a black box. “As there are no lines of reasoning driving the network’s actions,” he wrote, “it is not possible to reverse engineer the network to reveal the ‘why’ of any decision.

https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/567075/god-human-animal-machine-by-meghan-ogieblyn/

Peter Zeihan As Clickbait

on May 11, 2023May 11, 2023 By remelcher

I was recently sent the recent Peter Zeihan book, The End Of The World Is Just The Beginning: Mapping The Collapse Of Globalization. Upon reading it I feel compelled to offer my critique. Aside from the rather dismissive and generally smart-ass style with which the author delivers his doom prophecies, the book is very informative in terms of outlining the complex systems and their interrelationships that currently run the world, and it offers valuable pointers toward highlighting the system’s strengths and weaknesses. At the same time it’s a vivid illustration of the trap of over reliance on statistical data when addressing complex systems. I’ve rarely encountered an argument that rests on so many facts that work against the very case that the book is making. Not only is it full of contradictory and sometimes questionable assumptions, the data that backs the world view the author delivers could equally support the likelihood of continued globalization as it can for its dissolution.

The fulcrum of Ziehan’s argument hangs on two assumptions:

1.) Aging populations and declining birth rates will result in a worldwide demographic collapse that will upset the patterns of production, distribution and consumption that fueled the economic boom times since World War Two.

A 1968 best seller by Paul and Anne Ehrlich,The Population Bomb delivered, in a similarly apocalyptic tone, a revival of the 18th century theory by Thomas Malthus, that the growth of population with the rise of prosperity, particularly among the poor, would inevitably exceed humanity’s ability to grow enough food. While Zeihan’s argument runs exactly in the opposite direction, both prognostications rely on a set of ever-shifting statistics to make their case.¹ Food production since the time of Malthus has continually outpaced the growth of population. Problems with global starvation and famine are due less to population increase than to the unplanned consequences of war and the inequitable distribution.

Over the course of my many decades of living on the planet under the constant threat of extinction, I’ve been presented with so many predictions of impending catastrophe that I’ve lost count. From the Rapture to nuclear war to DDT and Y2K and global anarchy, the predictable constant is that in times of anxiety and change these prognostications sell books and provide rich fodder for talk radio. Attempts to reduce enormously complex systems to fit into the terms of one or two basic assumptions invariably fail to meet anyone’s predictive timescales. Demographics are one single factor among countless others that can affect outcomes, leaving aside our ever shifting politics and human resourcefullness, our ever advancing technologies affecting the ways we live and work and talk to one another, and our dawning collective awareness of the effects of climate change, to name a few.

2.) Zeihan’s second assumption is that the American Empire will simply give up on the world ‘Order’ that it has helped establish and maintain since the World Wars. Apparently America will simply conclude that it’s simply too much trouble and expense to continue enforcing the peace and we’ll withdraw into our geopolitical fortress. After all, we’re geographically in a position to grow our own food and make our own shit and let the rest of the world go to hell. Aside from espousing an incredibly arrogant, if not popular view of American exceptionalism, the very fact that our economic prosperity has been fostered by our multicultural ties and the intricate trade and military relationships we’ve constructed over these many decades makes it extremely unlikely that we will or can turn away. Even if we attempted such a thing, undoubtedly other entities or alliances would take our place, and we’d be shuffled a little lower in the deck of international authority.

Which brings us to China². Having read and listened to a number of accounts from inside China. (I highly recommend the ‘Drum Tower’ podcast from ‘The Economist’ magazine for a more down to earth view of Chinese politics and culture.³) Zeihan spares no opportunity to dump on China, leaving an impression that its the very model of his overall thesis that most of the rest of the world is doomed in economic terms, while the USA and North America will pull through rather nicely. In reality, for anyone that takes a closer look through the paranoid cloud of American propaganda, it appears that China’s problems, both economic and demographic, are practically a mirror image of similar problems being felt in both America and Europe. In many cases the realities in China (the biggest crisis right now is too few opportunities for young people – not too many) are largely distinguished by the fact that, unlike the USA they are actually able to quickly respond in dealing with them. China ain’t going anywhere, and neither is America, or Europe, except perhaps in the fevered ‘click bait’ imagination of people like Zeihan. These major blocks of world power are so inextricably interdependent that the likelihood of any of them being left behind in the foreseeable future is vanishingly small.

For several years I was on the mailing list of ‘STRATFOR’, the organization that Peter Zeihan once worked for. Like Zeihan they have a world view that sticks closely to the ‘geography is fate’ interpretation of world history promoted by conservative scholars like the very prolific Robert Johnson (‘Modern Times’, ‘The Birth Of The Modern’, and histories of America, the Jews, Christianity, Ireland, plus biographies of Churchill, Jesus, Darwin, George Washington and others – a few of which I’ve read and been impressed by.). I agree that, so far, global history has been largely determined by access to the oceans. From the conquest of the great ‘pirate’ empires of the 15th – 16th centuries right up to the rise of ‘globalization’, this view has been accurate. However, we are all now swimming in a different ocean, one that’s linked by the instantaneous communication and management of economics and resources through the ubiquitous ocean of digital media. This is now where business is driven, wars are made, alliances are formed and broken.

I remember Stratfor’s frequent skepticism that Europe could ever manage to hold together. Virtually none of their predictions have held true over the years. The recent Soviet invasion has catalyzed an opposite movement toward increased solidarity rather than further fragmentation. America, meanwhile, is showing increasing signs of weakness as it breaks into regional conflicts and rising paranoia. It has made it almost impossible for the nation to deal substantially with basic problems like poverty, endemic racism and rising political violence. Meanwhile China not only holds together, it exerts increasing global influence as it steps into the weakening breach of American influence in Africa, South America and the Middle East.

Every nation is an ongoing experiment in how to manage growth and change in an increasingly complex web of global relations. Not one gots it completely right or completely wrong, and every error is an opportunity to learn. Peter Zeihan grossly underestimates, in my opinion, the capabilities, creativity and ingenuity of people in general, especially anyone who isn’t living in North America. Unfortunately, in much of his writing I hear echoes of the Trump crowd, mindlessly shouting USA!!!USA!!!USA!!!

The proposition that America will withdraw from the world in some form of neo-isolationism is one that nearly every fact and trend sighted in Zeihan’s book actually makes less, rather than more likely. His theory of collapse, requires a kind of bunker mentality in which every nation stands essentially on its own and only the strongest will thrive or even survive.

History doesn’t tend to move backwards, and the sort of decivilization that Zeihan predicts, in a world as interdependent as the world he describes, no nation, especially one as central to the function of the whole intricate mechanism as the United States, can afford to go its separate way. America’s economy, as much as China’s or England’s or Argentina’s or the Philippines’ or Russia’s, is a ‘global’ economy. Oceans and hemispheres that once divided the world into separate kingdoms and empires are no longer effective barriers against the changes that affect us all.

No one can deny that there will be profound disruptions that will reshape the political, military and economic landscapes in the coming decades. To anyone paying attention, it’s evident that our modes of consumption and governance will be forced to adapt and evolve in ways that we only dimly imagine. We will face wars, famine, pandemics, climate events, natural disasters and shortages of things we’ve taken for granted. Every political entity will be confronted with its own contradictions. In the long run the question is whether these changes and challenges drive us, as global citizens, further apart or force us to recognize our absolute interdependence. Zeihan’s book assumes the former. I don’t necessarily disagree with his statement, “Shortage forces people – forces countries – to look after their own needs.” I would add that history also shows that in the face of shortages and disasters people, and perhaps nations, also awaken to their common needs.

(I have to add that Zeihan’s understanding of global agriculture is particularly weak. Statements like “You can have organic farming or environmentally friendly foods. You cannot have both”, are simply absurd. It’s been demonstrated again and again, in China and America and all over the globe, that the per hectare production of food grown using intensive sustainable methods on smaller scale farms generally exceeds that of the industrialized monoculture farming promoted worldwide and dominated by corporate culture, while leading to much less long term environmental devastation.)

The kind of hair-on-fire apocalyptic messaging delivered by Zeihan and others certainly sells books. Apocalyptic visions have aleways had an appeal in the popular imagination, and are guaranteed to gather attention from Joe Rogan audiences, talk radio hosts, and down various YouTube rabbit holes. The ‘paranoid style of American politics’ ⁴ has always had particular appeal in uncertain times, when folks are stirred up by the direction things are going.

As for American exceptionalism, that’s so much a refrain in Peter Zeihan’s view of the world, I’m reminded of the Sergio Leone quote:

“I began to understand that ‘America’ in reality belonged to the whole world and not just to Americans. The idea of America had already been invented by the philosophers, the vagabonds, the dispersed of this earth, long before the Spanish ships got there. Those whom we call Americans have only rented it for a time. If they behave badly, we can discover another ‘America’. The contract can be canceled at any time.”

Cities On The Sea

on November 6, 2021November 11, 2021 By remelcher

For a child a backyard can be the wilderness, or the ocean or an island of mystery. For a young person on foot or on a bicycle the city is almost infinite. For a grownup with a car the city is an endless maze of turns and corners, backstreets and cul de sacs and the lifeless arteries of freeways and bypasses. For those whose life is made mostly of flyovers the city is a patch on the landscape, part of a network of patches connecting airports and terminals and waiting areas.

At each level details are missed or lost.

The child never tires of the cracks in paving stones or the creatures found among the grasses. The mysterious realm outside of safe boundaries is overcome by imagination without limits. A porch becomes a spaceship or the ramparts of a castle. Every angle and corner is explored repeatedly and new wonders are constantly revealed.

The world beyond fences and borders opens to foreign lands and neighborhoods and secret haunts beside creeks and rivers and under bridges. In every direction the familiar gives way to novel possibilities and pathways. There are people and places that reveal themselves like secrets and anyone who dares can find the hidden spaces populated by teenagers and wanderers and sometimes the homeless poor.

Cars take us far away into foreign places while detaching us from what we know or what we can really call home. We are caught up in the proscribed flow of traffic designed to conduct us past the details of place and time. We become tourists or commuters, always just passing through to arrive somewhere other than where we are. We begin to live in bubbles and we call this freedom.

Those who flyover begin to look elsewhere for a sense of being unconfined. Living in prisons of wealth or notoriety we dream of another existence outside or beyond the worlds we know. We dream of space colonies and going to Mars and look upon the earth as a place to transcend or to escape. We look at situations as confrontations or problems to be solved and tend to forget about both the earth and the oceans as places in which to thrive or to simply be.

Meanwhile the waters rise.

Jeff Bezos sees the salvation of the earth in building vast cities in an environment entirely hostile to all biological life. I understand both the impulse and the fascination. I’ve been addicted to dramas about outer space since I was a small boy. I consider myself somewhat of a ‘trekkie’ for whom science fiction is one of my favorite literary genres. Perhaps this is because of the metaphorical value it offers in representing our moral quandaries against the frontier background of an imaginary universe. Maybe it’s merely an offshoot of the magical thinking that filled my adolescent fantasies.

The myth of the frontier we are told, is a necessary creation of the human urge for freedom and novelty. Ironically, the realities of survival in outer space run absolutely counter to all but a momentary sense of real freedom. Whether we journey in a small capsule or a giant artificial metropolis we will find ourselves confined within a tin can in an airless void bombarded by deadly radiation. The rules of existence are many times more restrictive than anything we face on the surface of our own planet. Even if we find other worlds ‘out there’ that are compatible with some form of life the odds are extremely thin that it would be compatible with our own. Ironically, my favorite novel by my favorite writer of ‘hard’ science fiction, ‘Aurora’ by Kim Stanley Robinson, offers a sobering argument questioning the likely success of such an endeavor.

True, the endless mysteries of the universe are irresistible to our insatiable curiosity and I look eagerly forward to their continued exploration and unraveling. However, the idea that we can save or preserve our species’ existence by launching a significant bulk of our population into outer space appears to me increasingly absurd.

Even in terms of mysteries, not to mention frontiers, we live on a planet that’s more than 3/4 covered in water, and we know less about the depths of the oceans than we do about other planets in our solar system. Yet, water is not only the element that makes our carbon based life possible, it’s teeming with the material that makes it sustainable. Our rapidly rising crises of global warming, population density and urban decay are most profoundly influenced by conditions in the oceanic environment. The oceans, congruent with a thin layer of atmosphere, not only generate and regulate global climate conditions, but are the essential medium for the rise and spread of our civilization. It’s the impending rise of sea level that may be responsible for our eminent decline.

Given this rise, which we apparently have little collective will to do anything about, many of the world’s coastal urban areas and a not a few nations and principalities will be underwater by the end of the century. The rise in global temperature has already lead to long term drought, increasingly devastating weather and extreme weather events. The collapse of whole agricultural systems leads to the migration of populations and the civil unrest and wars that result. We are now forced to look toward shorter term and perhaps less visionary solutions than building inhabitable colonies in outer space.

Closer at hand, requiring less expenditure of energy and investment and more attainable with our present levels of technology are solutions that take advantage of the very environmental circumstances in which we are enmeshed. We can build cities on the seas.

While Bezos, Branson and Musk compete to leave the earth completely and Zuckerberg urges us to leave our bodies, current pioneers in the field of cohabitation with the seas are citizens of Africa, Japan, the Netherlands, and Kuwait. The Africans see the promise of the oceans, the Japanese are simply running out of room, the Dutch live in a nation below sea level and the Arabs have an excess of wealth to invest in massive engineering projects to extend their real estate to incorporate ocean, marsh and desert. These are just a few examples of the imagination going into claiming the ocean for future real estate. Similar and diverse projects like this are being proposed or built in many other places.

The problem is that many of these habitats are being built for the very rich as suburbs on the sea, with high end shopping malls, vacation villas and places where the winners in capitalism’s lottery can park their yachts. So far the largest man made presence in the ocean is the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. What needs to be conceived, designed and built should house, clothe and feed many of those displaced by the widening deserts, increasing floods and the resulting migrations and wars over shrinking territory. It’s precisely the widening divide between rich and poor that’s the corrosive leading to society’s unrest and failure.

The oceans are both the source of our lives and the life of our civilizations, and is the one resource that can never be fully subjugated or tamed. Desperate and afraid of what we’ve done to our earth we turn our wealth toward the heavens and are apparently willing to risk everything to escape our collective fate. We spend centuries hunting the keys to the mystery of life and death only to find that the mystery will never surrender to our terms and every attempt to transcend it leads us closer to our inevitable demise. Many of us feel helpless, so we build walls against the rising tides.

To those who wish to escape, I wish them well. Perhaps when they’ve travelled far enough they’ll find and bring back elements that can help us to thrive. To survive they’ll have to carry with them fragments of our living earth, the water and plants and air. Perhaps they will someday return with other treasures. In the process of their cold journeys maybe they’ll uncover secrets that will help us all to live. Will they ever find another place that feels like home? Not likely.

So flee you brave and wealthy men. You’ll remember us and the blue earth, and when you are drawn to return by the ocean’s breath perhaps you’ll be able to teach us the value and necessity of preserving our home. When William Shatner, one of the early captains of our imaginations, returned from his brief journey (via Bezos’ Blue Origin) beyond imagination and into the edges of the real void his tear filled comment was, “This is life and that’s death.”

Decades ago in the late sixties the Italian architect Paolo Soleri proposed the construction of aquatic cities, both free floating and adjacent to continental coasts. His designs are essentially modular in both vertical and horizontal directions. Starting from a central core that incorporates basic living, manufacturing and food production facilities, these cities would grow outward organically in concentric rings around a common core, to incorporate expanding populations and ever evolving priorities.

From his book on urban theory and design,

‘Arcology: The City In The Image Of Man’

”Life came out of the sea when the time was ripe for a next step toward complexity. Then the ecological flood came to cleanse the earth and let the “elected” few re-engage in the homogenesis of the earth. The biological flood invested in the human species is now edging man toward the same seas that eons ago saw the exodus of some of his creatures.”

”Ecologically the seas behave as a many layered medium. One could almost say that the earth has one layer of ecologies and the seas have a whole thickness of ecologies wrapped one around the other. It could also be observed that it is the element itself, water, that makes the biological “thickness” of the seas possible and that it is also the cause of their great homogeneity, stability, balance and diffusion. These elements of relative homogeneity, stability, balance and diffusion are the characteristics that, combined with fluidity, make sea arcology relevant.”

Once I lived on a beach along the west coast of Florida. There was a house, like a shack that had survived hurricanes and floods and now stood alone amid the retirement cabanas and motels. I would sit out on the porch in the shade under a billowing parachute awning and look out at the Gulf that every day showed a different color and mood, sometimes restless, sometimes calm, the warm ocean currents bringing close to shore the food for seagulls and pelicans. Sometimes I would wade out among the waves and look out over a seemingly endless expanse of water and sky, feeling humbled before the face of the deep.

Now I walk beneath the desert sun and think about the ocean. It’s as if it calls me back across these millions of years and many thousand generations. The desert plants echo the shapes of coral and anemone, and I reflect upon the life we lived before learning to scratch out our lives across the land. Now the land needs to heal and we need to relearn the lessons of the sea, of change, and of a life that’s forever born out of water.

R.E.M.

Weird Tales

on September 15, 2020December 31, 2020 By remelcher

I became dismayed and extremely frustrated the other day when somebody for which I carry a lot of respect and affection parroted to me the same right wing propaganda that constantly proliferates on You Tube and Facebook. Both sources are essentially ‘Rabbit Holes,’ programmed to drive gossip, controversy and sensationalism while selling ads.

Between the paranoia and the propaganda, much of it not even generated in this country, our adversaries have gotten America’s number. We are a society that appears to be coming apart at the seams. Only the slightest encouragement is required to cause us to turn on one another like frightened dogs. Since Americans tend to trust our screens more than our actual experience we are VERY ripe for programming and manipulation. Tell a good yarn and it’s certain you’ll create a following. Provide a cliffhanger or sense of constant crisis and you can, like Trump, create a cult.

A cult functions like a cancer on the collective consciousness. Ideology is substituted for facts, programming takes the place of thinking, Individuals begin to function like robots. People once regarded as intelligent humans begin repeating the currently circulating memes and claims in a kind of science fiction nightmare that features suffocating hordes of mindless clones.

When a sufficient number are pulled into the myriad belief systems and ideologies that offer alternatives to the actual processing and evaluation of information, collective decision making becomes almost impossible. There can be no accord, because every position becomes an absolute. The quest for solutions becomes a battle between religions.

So, here we are America, trapped in our own tar pits of misinformation and increasingly obsessive fanaticism. As a nation we appear to be suffering various forms of mass psychosis, shouting at one another from totally different perceptions of reality.

The anxiety of the final days and weeks leading us toward our fate is that we don’t really know how bad is the disease. We know it’s pretty bad, and it’s spreading in waves, mostly driven by social media and those who profit from chaos. Everyday the stories and rumors get more imaginative and ridiculous, while people huddle in groups formed mainly to reinforce their own fears and premeditations.

Perhaps there are still enough Americans out there who are capable of rational decision making, who aren’t afraid of facts and data, who can make the mental leap to figure out that voting out of fear and insecurity will only lead to more of the same.

It’s hard to tell. Rational people find themselves trying to be heard above the noise, and the noise is everywhere. In the year 2020, with pandemic, racial tensions, climate change and election fever all appearing to peak at once, we will be forced to see more clearly, once the dust settles, just who and what peers back at us in the mirror.

Continue reading “Weird Tales”

Stretching

on February 5, 2020February 5, 2020 By remelcher

I’ve in the last week picked up a copy of a book composed by Timothy Leary and associates back in 1994, two years before Leary’s death in 1996, and around the time when I was imbedded in the post-psychedelic New Age culture of art and speculation that nested in and around Santa Fe, New Mexico. I’d actually passed by Doctor Tim in person as he toured as guest speaker and celebrity for some sort of exploratory consciousness fair that took place at the city’s main Convention Center.

I am certainly no stranger to Leary’s thought and his writings. From the time when he was advocating from an eminent platform at Harvard for boundary breaking explorations of consciousness via LSD and Psylocibn, to the time when I spent days trying to process my own headlong perceptual journeys out to the boundaries of consciousness and beyond. I travelled along parallel paths while Leary made his way through prison and exile and paranoia and the trials that came along with pop stardom and self deification.

When I walked into my dormitory room at Case Western Reserve one night, getting off on some form of chemically induced revery I heard Leary’s voice come over the radio, telling me to, “Sit down Ralph.” He then took me on a guided verbal tour of my brain, the universe and the whole history of human DNA. It turns out that the ‘Ralph’ in the recording, played that night over the student station was of Leary at Harvard conducting an LSD session with one of his grad students, Ralph Metzner. I didn’t learn this until years later, and in the meanwhile carried it around with me like the inner knowledge of some secret synchronistic initiation, a mystery for which I sought no further solution.

The book I’m reading is one I wasn’t particularly familiar with, lent to me by a friend. It’s called “Chaos & Cyber Culture.” By 1994 Leary as visionary prophet had been largely discredited by both popular and serious academic culture. He had spent time in prison, in Europe and in North Africa, in flight from the American police, hobnobbing with revolutionary elites and movie stars and science fiction writers, hounded by governments and ideologues of the Left and the Right. The 60’s dream of storming the barricades of capitalist/consumer culture had long ago faded or been absorbed and replaced by the high octane quest for new meaning and new wealth accelerated by revolutions in technology and communication.

Society was itself going through the initial stages of the sort of destabilization one encounters on an acid trip. Timothy Leary, along with many former prophets and outlaws and explorers were now mere flotsam in massively circulating currents of change. He was gone before the currents would peak and then break into fading fragments after September of 2001.

The book is a collection of words and images splattered across pages designed in the mode of a psychedelic version of The Whole Earth Catalog. There are dozens of typefaces in all sizes floating in the form of giant quotes and poster graphics and images from the past and the future. There are interviews and conversations with the likes of William Gibson and William Burroughs and David Byrne and all sorts of artifacts assembled around a political documentary and summary of sorts of Leary’s broad visions of past, present and possible future.

Other than in worlds of extreme science fiction I haven’t read anything like this in years. Drawing on history, art, mysticism, biology, psychology, computer science and literature, framed with over-the-top optimism regarding the future of civilization and human consciousness, Leary’s vision has no boundaries, and in reading I grow increasingly aware of how much my vision and that of my culture has narrowed over these past four decades. As a nation and as a world we’ve become increasingly ruled by fear and apprehension, which by nature is a narrowing of consciousness to the primitive state of flight or fight that responds robotically to a wider and wider range of stimuli.

We sit in our cocoons of political power and economic anxiety and anticipate the worst. We are a shell-shocked population with eyes and ears open to more and more information but with less ability to integrate it into something that makes sense. We live in a world of chaos, awaiting signs of the next real ‘strange attractor’ that we hope can assemble all of this mess into meaning. We’ve entered a historic and geological period where the shocks come in accelerating waves of war, recession, natural disasters and forced migrations, and our response is to reach out to the person who promises to protect us and shield us and make it all right. Increasingly we realize that the future can’t be controlled by any power wielded by the few for the supposed welfare of the many. Individually we awake once again to the knowledge that the portraits we perceive of the world around us are painted mostly by ourselves.

At first this makes us all feel incredibly alone, until we make an effort to explore and find new ways to make contact with one another, not as crowds or constituents or mobs or armies, but as fully responsible human beings. Our challenge always, is to create entirely new realities for ourselves, through our storytelling and our imagining, that are fluid and adaptable enough to deal with the constant change that our world throws at us. We have the tools to do it, and our task is to awake to our possibilities and to summon the courage to face and dismiss those who would build walls out of our fear.

To the Super Bowl

on February 4, 2020February 4, 2020 By remelcher

So, this evening (Monday, Feb. 3rd) the REAL Super Bowl begins. Now that all of the Impeachment drama is coming to a close and the football drama is over for a year and we’ve watched the most expensive commercials ever made, perhaps we can get down to business of moving forward.

For the year’s total anticlimax there’s the State of The Union embarrassment taking place tomorrow, in which the Donald will…who knows what the Donald will do or say? The best approach in dealing with our Asshole in Chief is to ignore him as much as possible and go forward with our lives, using our thoughts and imaginations to conjure more palatable futures.

Rush Limbaugh is dying of lung cancer. That’ll take some of the wind out of the sails blowing toward oblivion. While Senators bloviated, the biggest news this week is that the Thwaite Glacier is getting ready to drop and could quickly raise the ocean levels by up to 3 feet. The impending drop of what scientists have dubbed the ‘Doomsday Glacier’ will only be the first of many. There goes one civilization, to be replaced by necessity with another.

I’ve spent the past three years stewing in the juices of my own anger and it has gotten me nowhere. The daily disaster has driven me to forget that the best way to observe the ongoing bombardment and spectacle of news and information is to step as far back from the sheer noise and confusion as possible. The news of the ‘moment’ is mostly made to sell personality and product rather than offering much in the way of useful information. What happens in the moment isn’t as important as our collective mediated response to it. The Reality we perceive in this digital world is of necessity always second hand.

We are each in the business of assembling a world that corresponds to our own predilections. For myself I’ve chosen to accept information primarily through online digital conversations, rather than merely accepting what is ‘broadcast.’ Avoiding antiquated mediums like television and radio or newspaper, I seriously engage with information only after it’s been processed through trusted networks of intelligence and discrimination, carefully evaluating the materials with which to assemble my own picture of the world. I’m a subscriber to reality, mostly through print and podcasts, and an occasional glance at headlines from selected inputs on Apple News or Flipboard or the front pages of newspapers.

When I encounter, as in the laundromat, televised news formats in real time I’m conscious that what I’m receiving is an agenda that has more to do with commerce than truth. This stuff, including all forms of mass public broadcast, from out and out propaganda to public radio, is safe to consume only to the degree that one is aware that every broadcaster has their own agenda. Whatever presents itself as absolute truth is only ideology.

Everyone I know who merely consumes ‘The News’ on television or radio appears to be driven crazy by it.

As a consuming culture many Americans are being consumed by cynicism, doubt and despair. The world we’ve constructed in our minds is one in continual emergency, to which we must react without being given a trusted set of tools to react with. Too many of us are swimming and drowning in a pool of helplessness where new alarms are shouting every day, “Danger! Danger!” After years of daily bombardment we are shell shocked and numb, unable to pierce the fog that obscures the future. Christians and New Agers await the Apocalypse, white supremacists look forward to their ‘boogaloo,’ conspiracy fetishists obsess over every revelation while screwing themselves into increasingly paranoid fantasies, and the rest of us deal with a growing sense of apprehension and dread.

Meanwhile, the world trundles on within webs of mind boggling complexity and we are swept along in rushing rivers of karma and consequence. So easy to imagine that we are either victims, or else we are fighting a constant war for particular outcomes. So easy for me to spew words into the void like weapons, effecting only to increase the chaos instead of offering clarity or hope.

Well, it’s a new year and I’ve been mostly silent lately, after what has felt to me like constant struggle against overwhelming odds. It’s true that there is struggle. The need for change is obvious. The change that’s needed however, can only come about through a change of channels. I’ve been paying too much attention to the idiots waving the flags, and too little time spent in a world where human beings are meant to live, one that’s woven through our minds and our imaginations, where we tell each other stories and look at dire situations as problems to be solved. This is the only kind of world where we have a chance to live beyond our fears. It’s the only world where we can construct the necessary bonds that will hold this ship together.

Let’s try something different for a change.

In Defense Of The OSCARS

on March 7, 2018March 8, 2018 By remelcher

One of the most prominent features of OSCAR season is the sheer volume of snarky commentaries by everyone from the film snobs of academia and the New York media to the ideological ranting of political junkies on Crooked Media podcasts. Now, I admit I’m a film junky if there ever was one. I fell in love with film in High School and watching Jean Luc Godard movies in college. I’ve been to film festivals. I even helped to get a couple off the ground. I subscribe to MUBI. I live in one of the best little towns in the USA for viewing the full range of diversity in the world of film. I’ve rubbed shoulders with filmmakers and with the snarky elite and have myself been among the snarkiest.

Every year we read and listen to dozens of movie critics complaining about the terrible choices the Academy makes in terms of the ‘art’ of film. Traditionally, reviewers focus on how the nominees are chosen more on the basis of popular taste and promotional hype rather than on true and timeless artistic value. They point out that the awards are more a self-congratulatory celebration of the mainstream industry than a tribute to true quality. More glamour than grit.

Fair enough. The awards are after all a mainstream Hollywood event, and the voting is been done by predominantly male and mostly white industry insiders. The spectacle of wealthy Hollywood royalty in gowns and tuxedos frolicking on the carpet brings up for some a bit of class resentment. Yet, for anyone who enjoys the movies on almost any level the Oscars are like the Super Bowl. (It’s a long ceremony and I confess that I just watch the highlights on YouTube the next day.)

Notably in the past couple of years, and this year in particular the selections have been deliberately widened to include a bit more diversity. In the top categories are films directed by women and minorities, films including both spectacular Hollywood extravaganzas and more modest independent productions, films by old Hollywood hands and first timers, films about both gays and straights, and even that touch the edges of politically sensitive subjects.

But in the year of Trump, to venture into politically relevant waters is to open the doors for even greater explosions of criticism and pent up resentment directed against an industry that has done much to support and maintain a status quo that we’ve all grown uncomfortable with. The movies and television after all are the mirror and lens through which a culture sees itself these days and most of us are addicted to the screen in one form or another.

This is one of the years when I actually managed to see most of the films nominated for major Academy Awards (7 out of 9) and enjoyed all of them to various degrees. Of those nominated for Best Picture my personal favorites were ‘Dunkirk’ and ‘The Shape of Water.’ My favorite performance was Sally Hawkins in ‘The Shape of Water.’ This isn’t what I want to write about.

When I opened my ‘New Yorker’ app the day after the ceremony I came across what struck me as a bitter diatribe against the Oscars by their film critic, Richard Brody. I confess that I found it mostly appalling, and now It’s my turn to snark back. Brody’s essay to my mind appears to abandon an appreciation of the art and spectacle of film to replace art criticism with ideological rant. It struck me as little more than an ideological tantrum filled with invective and spite, perhaps triggered because the author’s choice of best film didn’t get the prize, or maybe it was just part of the collective hangover we all have after a year of Trump, looking for a convenient outlet for letting off steam.

To begin Brody goes after the winners for being ‘flashy’ and ‘showy’ and “flaunting design…and drama.” This represents to him “…the Academy’s brazen self-celebration of the old-school pomp of classic moviemaking, as well as the Academy’s general obliviousness to the moment.” I wonder exactly to what ‘moment’ he is referring, and what, beside ‘design and drama’ is the missing element by which we should judge these films. Movies, after all, are artifacts of design and drama that attempt to evoke feelings of empathy and emotion and maybe a little intellectual awakening. These are the elements of a visual medium that differentiates itself from unpolished ideological bluster. As a popular art form, like opera or theater, it avails itself of whatever formal means is at it’s disposal. Even a director like Godard, who attempted more than anyone to blend film and political discourse, understood that his audience comes to be entertained as well as enlightened. No matter how modest the production value or unpolished the performance, film is an inherently spectacular medium when seen in a theater where the lights are low and the figures on the screen are 15 feet tall.

In his next paragraph Brody credits the Academy for honoring those in the industry that have been subjected to sexual harassment and violence, and then criticizes the presentation for “…keeping the tone of the proceedings cheerful, optimistic, and, above all, commercial.” Then he dumps on Kumail Nanjiani’s “…exhortation of Hollywood professionals to pursue diversity not only because it’s the right thing to do but because it’s profitable to do so.” The real crime of Hollywood is “…the intersection of doing good while getting rich.” When reading this I thought of one of Sam Rockwell’s comments about being in a lot of ‘indie’ films and being happy to have been in one that people actually come to see.

So now we get to the nitty-gritty of Brody’s objections: Hollywood is corrupt because while it may tell some valuable stories, it makes money while doing so.

After praising Francis McDormand for her acceptance speech and tribute to women in the industry, he goes on to dump invective on the film she starred in, Three Billboards in Ebbing, Missouri, which he characterizes as “…cavalierly, brazenly racist, not because it depicts racists but because it treats the very subject of race and the political effect of race on black individuals as a mere backdrop for the personal growth of white characters.” Yes, the film was a drama about angry white people in Missouri, and black characters, although treated sympathetically, were marginal to the plot revolving around three white central characters. Is this now the criteria for ‘blatant’ racism in film? Have you ever been to a small town in the Ozarks?

Then he goes on to stomp on The Shape of Water, which won the Best Film Oscar.

“It’s a movie that struggles, by means of ludicrously and garishly overwrought decorative and narrative complications, to endorse an absolutely minimal baseline of recognition of the “other.” It’s exactly the sort of wan and impotent message of bland tolerance that gets Hollywood to join hands in a chorus of self-congratulation.”

This is to me exhibits a degree of obliviousness to the actual nature of the film medium that I find astonishing. Brody attacks the director, Guillermo del Toro, essentially for his style of addressing current social issues through allegory and fairytale, claiming that this adds a level of sentimentality that avoids the seriousness of real issues. The writer is so wrapped up in his ideological cocoon that he apparently isn’t able to actually see the film he’s watching. The ‘fairytale’ elements of this movie, instead of obscuring the issues, make them more universal and timeless. The ‘sixties’ in this film are a stylized version of the film images of that time, not of the ‘real’ sixties, and by juxtaposing romantic images of our film memories with characters and situations that would not then have been portrayed so plainly del Toro subtly ‘tricks’ us into a fresh way to view the present. And aren’t all movies in some sense ‘fairytale’ reconstructions of real life?

Of course to Mr. Brody this summons a vision of that ‘classic’ Hollywood filmmaking that he apparently abhors. This is a style that approaches its themes much like Opera, incorporating elements of fantasy, stylization and pure emotion in order to construct something that conveys universal feelings and values and stands up to time. He criticizes del Toro’s film for being a ‘surrogate’ version of Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, which is somewhat ironic given that the movie on the top of his own ‘year’s best film’ list, Gordon Peele’s Get Out pays deliberate homage to that very film, portraying the situation of an interracial relationship, albeit with radically different consequences.

I saw Get Out and liked it. It was an outstanding film, particularly as a first film written and directed by director Gordon Peele. I didn’t think it was one of the best movies I’d seen all year, though I particularly liked the performance by actor Daniel Kaluuya. (I first saw him in the Fifteen Million Merits episode of the series, ‘Black Mirror,” one of the best things I’ve ever seen on the small screen.) “The predatory destructiveness of white people’s self-love for their good feelings…” may indeed be the subject of the film, as Brody claims, challenging white folks inherent sense of privilege and an inability to see the humanity in the “other,” but at the same time it avoids taking itself too seriously. I would also add that by the writer/directors own admission it’s an homage to the Hollywood tradition of Grade B horror films that he grew up with.

We come back to the problem of the movies themselves. “The history of Hollywood is, in part, a history of depredation, of abuse, yet the celebration of Hollywood’s traditions and the assertion of continuity between the classic era and today’s movies was on view in the ceremony from the outset…” Well, yeah. The history of Hollywood is also the history of the evolution of an art form and a mode of storytelling that involves whole communities of artists, technicians, promoters and business people. As with every business in America, there has been and continues to be abuse and injustice, the disenfranchised having to struggle for rights and representation, and its share of the good, the bad and the ugly. There has also been progress, not only in the world of film but in the world that it attempts to mirror.

Finally, Brody refers to the real root of all this resentment, which arises out of “the…shock of life under a depraved new Administration…” and what he perceives as Hollywood’s weak and misdirected response to the depredations that we all now face. Instead of making films that are a direct assault on all of America’s failings and injustices it continues to make movies with the intention of making money. “Ultimately, the self-deception that Hollywood fears most involves the box office, which dropped six per cent in 2017.” The “most frightening foe” for Hollywood, he claims, is Netflix.

True, the structure of the industry is being radically challenged. Streaming services are threatening the Multiplex and the mainstream theaters are seeing a decline in attendance for everything but the cgi blockbusters. At the same time more movies are being made than ever before on every scale and are being seen by many more people in many formats, both inside and outside of Hollywood. The long form of extended television series has given actors and directors a whole new narrative structure to explore. The transport and projection of movies is evolving exponentially. Some aspects of the business will fail and some will thrive, but the people who love and make movies are creative and resilient and what inspires them is a uniquely human endeavor, the telling of stories, and this will always endure.

So if the people who make the movies indulge in a little ‘brazen self-celebration’ in between telling our stories, and they try and entertain us in the process, I don’t begrudge them. Tomorrow a lot of them will get up early and start setting up the lights, the cameras and the magic.

Hollywood’s Brazen Self-Celebration at the 2018 Oscars

Sex and Politics: The Resistance

on April 19, 2017April 20, 2017 By remelcher

Fox News is, more than anything else media headquarters for patriarchal resistance and institutional racism in America, just as the Republican Party is headquarters for it’s political arm. In the past few months Fox has lost their former ringleader (Roger Ailes), their leading female commentator (Megan Kelly), and now their biggest moneymaker (Bill O’Reilly) due to a pervasive climate of inappropriate sexual behavior and harassment.

Given that the prevailing attitudes at Fox and in the Republican Party are basically throwbacks to an era of ‘Madmen,’ which educated and aware Americans have grown out of, but Fox/Republicans and their constituency have not, this should be no surprise. While commentators like O’Reilly rail at manufactured bugaboos under the banner of attacking ‘political correctness,’ women broadcasters at Fox are evaluated according to their measurements and how closely they match some male’s beauty pageant ideal. Intelligence and competence must be overmatched by ample exposure of ‘legs and cleavage’ and the job description should read: Applicants preferred: blond and buxom (and very white).’

When news becomes a front for sensationalism and entertainment and government becomes nothing more than performance art the abuse of persons follows inevitably out of the abuse of truth. We have gone very far down that road, but the dumping of Bill O’Reilly demonstrates that the popular and political resistance in the Age of Trump is mounting and is indeed effective. While the forces of reaction circle the wagons a wave is growing with every abuse, every revelation of corruption and every broken promise.

New York Times: ‘Bill O’Reilly Is Forced Out’

A Hard Rain Falling

on December 15, 2016December 15, 2016 By remelcher

I’ve finished Slavoj Zizek’s book “Living in the End Times” and have gone back to reading William Irwin Thompson. I find both of them valuable in aiding the acquisition of a longer view of history that puts the almost universal hysteria and despair of the present in clearer perspective. Even though their respective points of view might appear to be in opposition, Zizek being a materialist and Thompson being more of a mystic, for me the two of them round out the circle of my own understanding about where we are and what may be an appropriate response.

Zizek is a rationalist and a materialist. His understanding of the trends and movements going on in society are strictly derived from a process of carefully weighing alternative ideologies and critiquing them from the platforms of philosophy and psychology. Although his revelations can be both down-to-earth and fairly esoteric, drawing as he does from the traditions of Hegelian Dialectics and the European penchant for seeing signs and symbols, they are unmatched in pointing out the repetitive habits of mind and social behavior that keep us locked under key and most often asleep at the wheel. I find his critique of the Left particularly valuable, as he asks the most important question, “What do we do the day after the revolution.”

Thompson, although partaking of an equally rational tradition steeped in the scholarship, philosophies and science of the West, brings in another level of understanding, one that takes in the background to all of this noise and calls it Myth. His analysis owes much to the radical dissection of media by Marshall McLuhan, the understanding of archetypes and their influence by Carl Jung and leading edge explorations in the studies of biology, brain science and cognition. More importantly Thompson acknowledges the ongoing interplay of myth with history in the spiritual and mystical traditions of both East and West. Zizek would undoubtedly dismiss him as a ‘mystic’ who dabbles in the muddy realms of the unconscious trying to draw meaning from chaos. For me Thompson offers a method for penetrating the fog of time that more fully acknowledges and embraces the irrational and creative forces upon which we all float.

Several recent exposures and references to China brought me back to “Pacific Shift,” a book by Thompson published in 1985, in the years just after his “The Time Falling Bodies Take To Light” was nominated for a National Book Award. It’s based on a series of lectures given in Europe and is the most concise summary of his major ideas that I’ve read. These lectures were given during the Reagan years and it’s remarkable how well his analysis is both fitting and prophetic.

Here he compares the rise of the Rock concert, with its almost unendurable level of noise and its celebration of the collective, with the similar rise (at that time) of televangelists like Jimmie Swaggart. So, here’s the quote:

“The rise of paranoia, from right-wing fulminations against the Trilateral Commission to Lyndon LaRouche’s hatred of the British Secret Service, is an important signal that the literate, rational citizen of the post-Enlightenment era is being replaced by the subject in a shift from identity through logical definition to identity through participation and performance. In one form of consciousness identity is seen through similar logical predicates; but in paranoia, identity is seen metaphorically as the participation mystique of common subjects. Looking at the erosion of good pietist values fro electronic evangelical broadcasting, and looking at rock festivals, we can see that democracy is in for some hard times.”

And what have been these past three elections, since the rise of the personal computer, other than a battle between competing rock festivals in a reversion from the rational liberal democracy envisioned by the Greeks to outright civil war between tribes. As with every stage of our technological dream the ‘liberation’ of media from the control of an extremely limited number of channels with similar ideologies has released the dark tides of the mob. Nowadays, every person with a computer or smart phone can tailor the reporting and interpretation of ‘facts’ in any way that appeals to their sense of paranoia or hope.

Among other casualties in this evolution, one that became obvious with the unanticipated (by most in the media) victory of Donald Trump was journalism as it has been practiced for more than a century. The assumption that one can report the news dispassionately, from an objective perch (as much influenced by ideology as any other) has ended the pretense that we are all ‘on the same side’ and that only the ‘truth’ will set us free. For most of us the truth is something that lies behind the facts, something which echoes in a very particular way our own experience and something that offers some hint as to our next step toward the future.

Until we have a firm vision of the society we want to live in we can be bombarded with endless quantities of fact and figures and yet these will never penetrate beneath the surface. Conservatives, in calling up the past as an ideology have made channels like Fox and Conspiracy Theorist websites an extremely compelling destination for those who want to know what’s going on. Liberals and the Left appear to be stuck in cataloging the crimes and misdemeanors of the present and calling for resistance to the ongoing march of ideology, while offering nothing much in the way of an alternative vision for the future. This is simply not enough to carry out a revolution. This is why many more people pay attention to Fox News than to Democracy Now.

I’ve no idea how we will get to where we need to be as a surviving and possibly thriving species although I’ve witnessed some bold and convincing experiments in my day. Slavoj Zizek points to the scientific community at CERN in Switzerland as a remarkable model of the possibility of a civil society that transcends ideology and national boundaries (I recommend the film “Particle Fever” as a truly inspiring journey.) Thompson points to new studies at the edges of biology that show us more and more how each of us is a permeable membrane where the individual and the environment are never really separate. Personally I’ve long admired the artistic and architectural visions of Paolo Soleri.

Perhaps the most we can do in these next four years, when ignorance and demagoguery rule, is to offer continual resistance to the forces that place the survival of capitalism over the survival of the planet. Perhaps this election was needed to more sharply define the stakes we are facing. Perhaps it will force us to get beyond our petty ideological disagreements and recriminations to find common focus and intent and to imagine a new world beyond capitalism. Whatever we do, the unraveling of a system that cannot possibly last will certainly accelerate, as our elected leader and mascot has little apparent respect for the fragile network of agreements that hold it together.

We should resist and prepare.

A hard rain is falling.

R.E.M.

* * * * * * * * * *

“If you want to find pure gold, you must see it through fire.” – Mumonkan

“You’re part of my crew. Why are we still talking about this?” – M.R.

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