This week’s Time magazine cover story is a chilling reminder that those mad hatter’s sipping their insanity-laced tea are no laughing matter (http://www.time.com/time/magazine/0,9263,7601101011,00.html). The number armed and very dangerous militias, training to defeat all of us not-completely-insane (sometimes inexcusably Jewish or African American or Hispanic) people who are to them the devil incarnate, with live rounds, and grease paint, and enough loose screws rattle a civilization.
The number of active anti-government militias in America trippled in 2009, from 42 to 127. In one recent training exercise in Ohio, the scenario at which they shot live rounds, including from a belt-fed M-60 machine gun, was that Islamic terrorists were marauding over America because the current pro-Muslim president “had ordered a stand-down against Islamic troops”. One of them opines that he doesn’t know who the Redcoats will be; could be U.N. troops, federal troops, or Mexicans coming across the border (okay, he said “Mexican troops,” but given our current southern-border-xenophobia, and his complete insanity, if I were a bit more Chihuahuan in appearance, that statement would make me even more uncomfortable than I would undoubtedly already be).
These people are linked by “self-described Patriot beliefs,” including the notion that the federal government is a foreign tyrant. Some groups are white supremacists, some are members of a violent branch of Christianity. Obama the non-white, “non-American”, “non-Christian”, non-Neanderthal alien is their catalyst, their symbol of having lost ground to the “other” that they rally, and rail, against. Some end up walking the walk, as well as talking the talk.
James Von Brunn, the 88 year old white supremacist who shot and killed a security guard at the Holocaust Museum in Washington, was also an anti-government “patriot,” who had taken hostages at the Federal Reserve in 1981, had complained on his website that “the American right-wing (is) nothing but talk”, had originally intended to assassinate David Axelrod, President Obama’s senior White House advisor. Von Brunn had written “Obama was created by Jews. Obama does what his Jew masters tell him to do.”
The Time article has more stories of similar wackos, of swastikas and proclaimed desires to assassinate Obama, all simmering and seething through this morass of hatred and ignorance. Most of the Tea Party isn’t so extreme, so violent, though they speak in the metaphors of war and violence. But, to me, they are implicated in this, because they too are a coalescence of ignorance and anger, of a senseless rage toward some despised “other” (see “The Mad Hatter’s Tea Party,” posted just before this).
America, for all of its very real wonders and triumphs as a society and a nation, has always had a certain defective cultural gene, one not quite matched (though not entirely avoided, either) by the post-World War II Western European nations (maybe because they had seen that gene come to fruition right in their midst immediately before and during World War II, and were shocked into enough sense not to let it fester into malignancy again), whose right-wing extremists were never quite what defined them, as they too often are in America.
As absurd as the folks with misspelled signs and internally inconsistent beliefs, relying on a semi-informed “constitutional idolatry,” railing against the government whose services they are relying on to do so, they, and the frothing crests of the waves atop their sea that form these militias and plot these acts of domestic terrorism, are no laughing matter. We need to figure out how to restore some measure of rationality to this country, and we need to do it soon.
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The October 15 issue of Rolling Stone includes a nice little article which explores the tangle of internal inconsistencies, pure irrationalities, simmering hypocrisies, and just plain random folly of the ultimately elusive Tea Party “ideology” (http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/17390/210904?RS_show_page=0). The Kentucky seniors community, many blithely mounted on Medicare funded scooters or sucking on Medicare funded oxygen tanks, raptly worshiping at the anti-government alter while suckling at government’s teat; Rand Paul followers not batting an eye at their candidate, who wants to cut every government program but is indignant that the government might cut Medicaid payments to doctors such as himself, because, after all, “physicians should be allowed to make a comfortable living”; the life-long government employee who thinks it’s okay that he’s taken money from the government all his life (but that it’s not okay for anyone else to) because he doesn’t earn too much. All willing to take their share of the pie, but all eager to deny it to those far more in need.
But the author sums this mess up with a very cogent observation: The Tea Party isn’t really about issues; it’s about “us-versus-them,” about opposing those out-group members that they revile because they revile them, those “socialists” who are somehow inchoately evil and committed to a policy that will cause all that is good and holy to shrivel up and blow away. They are about “taking back their country” from whoever stole it, from whoever contributed to the discovery of electricity and the freeing of the slaves and the relative equality of women and, most of all, the invention of Velcro. It’s just blind, irrational, angry, ignorant rage. And it’s coming to a theater of culture war near you.
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No sooner do I write and post an essay on the literally evolutionary nature of modern information technologies (http://coloradoconfluence.com/?p=577), then I come across an article in The Economist zeroing in on one aspect of exactly what I’m talking about (http://www.economist.com/node/17091709?story_id=17091709).
In my novel (http://coloradoconfluence.com/?p=126), a wizard ruminates that “the genius of the many is a captive giant, whose freedom is the ends and the means of all other things.” Wikinomics is about another large step in the liberation of that captive giant, by reducing the transaction costs involved in massive decentralized network communications. Ronald Coase famously said that in the absence of transaction costs, we would bargain our way to maximum utility. Some have interpreted Coase’s Theorem to be more about the formidable obstacle posed by transaction costs than the efficacy of bargaining our way to paradise. But, in either case, the internet has dramatically reduced the size of that obstacle.
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Susan Greene’s column in today’s Denver Post (http://www.denverpost.com/greene/ci_16114434) discusses the current CU Board of Regents, and the choices Coloradans have. Sue Sharkey, a Republican reactionary in the 4th Congressional District running for regent of our flagship university, states that “[c]ollege graduates are more likely to be liberalized than non-college graduates.” Her solution to this unacceptable result of receiving a higher education is to impose upon it her ideological agenda. Steve Bosley, a current regent, was one of four to vote no on “Preserving the Independence of the Board of Regents,” a vote on whether to appeal an appellate court decision that regents cannot ban concealed weaons on campus. At a Tea Party rally, Bosley said, “We’re the storm troopers. The storm troopers are going to take back America.”
One important measure of a civilization is how much it appreciates and cultivates the gift of human consciousness, and how sincerely it aspires to be a bastion of wisdom and compassion. The term “a liberal education” refers to our tradition of striving to ensure that as many of our young people as possible are guided through an exploration of human knowledge, learning about humanity, who we are, where we come from, and where we’re going. Our universities are indeed our temples of human knowledge and thought, where we go to learn and to create new knowledge, to investigate the complexities and subtleties of our world and universe, to improve our ability to act wisely.
Not only is America under attack by self-proclaimed “storm troopers” admittedly determined to undermine our commitment to providing a broad and comprehensive education to our young people, but they are currently the majority on the Board of Regents of Colorado’s flagship university. When a large and vocal minority, passionate, angry, militant, motivated by the desire to catalyze and assist the contraction of the human mind and the human heart, by the rejection of wisdom and compassion, by the advocacy of ignorance and belligerence, succeed in taking over our temples of wisdom, our institutions for cultivating human consciousness, it is not hyperbole to suggest that this is a threat to the very foundation of what it means to be a civilized nation.
Coloradan’s do have a choice this November. As Susan Greene wrote, “The at-large race is a statewide referendum on what we want the regency to be.” By extension, it’s about something more than that as well: It’s a statewide referendum on what kind of a people we want to be. Melissa Hart, the CU Law professor who is a Harvard Law graduate and former U.S. Supreme Court clerk, represents the choice to be a civilized people committed to wisdom and compassion. The alternative is to allow one more victory of a movement determined to force America to worship at the alter of ignorance and belligerence. Let’s not falter in the face of this truly consequential challenge.
Today’s Denver Post carried an interesting story about the Southern Utes having transformed themselves into a successful mineral extraction corporation (http://www.denverpost.com/opinion/ci_16039376). It is a fascinating story of how one form of organization (tribal) can be deployed in innovative ways (commercial and industrial), and of how the innovation can serve the interests of the members of the organization. But what does it mean for the identity of the Southern Utes? How much of their traditional identity will survive such a transformation, and does it matter if the answer is “not much”? As in all such stories, the underlying question is “how much is gained, and how much is lost?” And how does this transformation fit into the existing social institutional landscape? Are tribal tax exemptions and paternalistic federal policies under such circumstances relics of the past, exploited and suffered in the present?
These kinds of questions, and the questions of how to keep up with social institutional transformations on the ground, so that our public policies do not address the conditions of the past but rather the conditions of the ever-changing present, represent a critical underlying challenge to our policy makers and, as the ultimate sovereign, to each and every one of us. Our fixed beliefs and stagnant certainties do not meet that challenge: We need to constantly strive to apply a broadly applicable system of analysis to a constantly changing world.
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In the spirit and form of classical mythology, but informed by a synthesis of complex dynamical systems (“chaos”) theory and an amalgam of relevant social and biological (and even physical) theories, this is my attempt to capture the essence of our existence in a work of intellectual art. This is an exploration of the underlying dynamics of human existence, rendered in a tapestry of magical story-telling woven from threads of ultra-violet prose. Now if that doesn’t make you run hard in the other direction…, read on!
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The theme:
The interplay of chaos and order, which are sometimes perceived as opposites, are in reality complementary (reminiscent of the motto that Danish Physicist Neils Bohr chose for his coat of arms when he was knighted: “Contraria Sunt Complementa” [opposites are complementary], beneath the Taijitu [the symbol of yin and yang]). Disordering and ordering forces interact to produce complexity, revealing the universe to be more organic than mechanical in nature. Applications of this theme to physics, ecology, human history, and the nature of individual lives are laced throughout the story. A secondary theme involves human consciousness of these systems, and how it grows by finding order, discovering increased complexity, and finding a subtler order within that complexity, in an endless process of cognitive and spiritual refinement.
The story:
To a backdrop of a millenial struggle between the Loci (mischievous chaos-loving imps with the magical ability to make tiny changes with enormous consequences, such as moving a twig an inch to the left, and thus providing the necessary link in a chain of events that lead to a forest fire that would otherwise not have occurred) and the Vaznallam (serene order-loving semi-divine beings that live in an ice city high in the Vaznal Mountains), a host of characters on intertwined adventures find themselves involved in the fulfilment of a phrophesized “Realignment”, averting the holocaust of mounting natural and human disasters. In the course of these adventures, they undergo a paradigm shift of their own, discovering a subtler, more accurate, and more naturalistic explanation for the wonders of their world than the religious and mythical understanding of reality they (and the reader) had always held to be true.
Two of my favorite scenes:
1) Algonion, a main character on a highly adventurous spiritual quest (which leads him to become a wizard-trained archer-hero at one point), finds himself inside one of the ice spheres nested inside a larger sphere which is, in essence, the wizards’ incubator of wizardry. Inside, initially simple patterns of colored light and sound and tactile sensations cause pleasure when solved and pain when unsolved (by thinking, chanting, and moving in anticipation of the next sequences in the patterns), only to encounter ever deepening subtley and complexity of patterns upon each resolution. This is my representation of Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, in which accumulating anomalies in old established paradigms cause focused attention on those anomalies, and subsequent paradigm shifts. And it synthesises this quintessentially western theory of scientific philosophy with elements of Eastern mysticism. See The Wizards’ Eye.
2) Inspired by National Geographic footage of the Rainforest Canopy Ecosystem, Algonion is fleeing the Loci imps in an enchanted forest, their emotion-destabilizing darts, and the javelins of electricity that flashed in the air, swinging from trees and sailing from branch to branch…, “If only I could fold myself into the wind, he thought, desperately, “wrap myself around it like flesh around a whim….” Arriving at a debris strewn set of slate ledges leading down to a sea which “churned as though tossed by a storm, thrashing about like a beast with struggling prey clamped in its jaws,” he did just that, and transformed himself with his last lopping strides into a gangling bird that skimmed above that choppy sea…. See “Flesh Around A Whim”.
Also see :
Prelude to “A Conspiracy of Wizards”
