Older and wiser heads than mine

Yale Art Museum

Gurn and bear it, or, We are not amused

I came across two pictures with very different back-stories but similar visuals. The first one one is of Eliot Spitzer announcing his resignation as Governor of NY, while the second one shows the English gurning champion performing for the Queen. In neither case are the women in the pictures amused.

Here is a third photo, of Bill Clinton assuming a near gurn-worthy expression after Hillary withdrew from the race for the Democratic presidential nomination.

I don't know if there is any larger lesson here, other than what American politicians do spontaneously out of embarrassment or excess of emotion, British performers train for and do professionally.

A Theory of the Divine

I have a theory of the divine. It's not especially cheerful, though it does manage to deal with the problem of suffering in the world. What if there were some presence that basically fed off emotion?

Is my theory of the divine that there is some kind of emotion-sucking parasite floating out there?

Let's just say that if there is a food chain, we're not at the top of it. My theory is that we are the link between the material world that was created, and the vast abstraction that created it. Our job is simply to live, and to experience emotion, which presumably gets transmitted to or absorbed by whoever or whatever set the whole business of the Universe up and running. This view is not too incompatible with the Western notion of why mankind has free will, and the purpose of worship.

If we didn't have free will, the Creator would just be talking to himself through meat puppets - nothing new, no surprises, just the omniscient talking to itself throughout eternity. Worship is then seen as a particularly effective means of communication.

In other words, we are here with more or less free will in an environment where not everything is determined before-hand (I could give a whole lecture on the quantum physics reasons why God must NOT know when and where every leaf falls because the glue that holds the physical world together is uncertainty) because God was lonely and needed someone to talk to.

From the point of view of emotion, all of creation is therefore a kind of continuously running experiment in gathering sense-impressions. One could argue that since the experiment doesn't have a particular morality (it's just a mechanism to collect sense-impressions from the physical world), this idea explains the problem of good and evil. In some sense, it doesn't matter.

In case you think this assertion sounds harsh, consider this: from about 200 to 65 million years ago, there was abundant animal life, of a kind not seen since on this Earth, and what did this life do? It ate other life. In some cases, the life that was being eaten was plant life, which appears to be in no position to complain, but in very many cases, one dinosaur would eat another. Those animals had nervous systems and brains enough to exhibit behaviors. This means that these animals probably felt pain, and quite possibly, also felt something akin to fear. The point here is, in that long ago time before people, or even mammals, there was a complete eco-system of plants and animals, most of which we would now regard as quite alien. Did any of those animals achieve self-awareness, and wonder about Creation, or did they just react with autonomous but unconscious learned behavior, while feeling something we might call emotion - happiness, fear, and so forth?

What's missing from the primordial picture? Self-awareness, probably, and what we might call personality, although pet lovers will probably be quick to declare that even the family cat, with a brain the size of a walnut, has an individual, recognizable personality, and can certainly experience both happiness and fear. Since people are obviously both different yet similar in many ways to the family cat, there is at least the suspicion that what we call personality, the basis for belief in the human soul, may have been a kind of evolutionary accident or by-product.

There is a further question. Are the little bits of personality merged back with the greater consciouness upon death, or merely extinguished, having completed their task of transmitting sense-impressions? Alan Watts and similar Buddhist thinkers would probably say that we live in the Universe, so we must in some sense be part of the Divine, but that the notion of individual personality is not so important. Dr Watts' argument was that we come from nothing, from billions of years of not having existed, and that doesn't seem to bother anybody. If we then go to nothing, why is that any different? Why be afraid of nothing?

From Wilhelm Reich's orgone boxes of dubious efficacy to the statistically testable Random Event Generators at Princeton which appear to be sensitive to emotional world events, there is at least a hint that we are all connected in some as yet scientifically unknown way. The big question is, are we part of the cosmic presence that created things, or just a bit of the machinery that accidentally became aware of its own existence?

TV Shows We Wish We Could See

One of the kids just bought a TV, so I had some suggestions for her on what to watch. The following are the programs that the Family Channel should be showing:

Who's Driving This Bus? - A reality show about family conflict, interspersed with long periods of travel to the relatives' and reviews of mediocre southern-style food as served at strip malls in the Northeast. The truly interesting premise behind this program is that all the conflict is over issues on which the participants already agree.

She's Not My Cousin! - A game show that tries to answer the question, "Is my father's mother's cousin once removed actually related to me?" In tonight's episode, contestants try to find out if they are related to Vladimir Lenin, through a connection on the maternal grandparent's side. Recently discovered photographs show my great-grandfather around 1910 looking very similar to the soon to be Soviet leader, with the familiar goatee and cap, plus both he and Lenin were at least partially Jewish, around the same height, and lived in the same general area in Europe. And, they both kept changing their names! There is even evidence that suggests that Lenin may have stopped in at the family bakery in Riga during his flight to Switzerland. Bagels or bolshevism? You be the judge.

What's Daddy Going to Eat? - a game show in which untrained men with no culinary competence are left to fend for themselves, for periods of up to three days, while their wives take a break, visiting children and other acknowledged relatives. There is a complex scoring system, where credits earned by nuking frozen hot dogs are wiped out by a run to the local Chinese take-out place, with double penalty points assessed for having Chinese for both lunch and dinner. Style points are added or subtracted, depending on whether or not food is consumed at the table, in the living room, or standing over the kitchen sink. Double style points if utensils are used, triple points if the utensils are washed between uses and not left in the sink awaiting the next course. Bonus points can be earned by baking a cake, but only if that is not the main meal of the day.

Do You Ever Clean Up Around Here? - another game show, in which the wife from "What's Daddy Going to Eat" returns home, and tries to figure out if anything has been vacuumed, swept, washed, wiped down,or otherwise cleaned in her absence. Double points if laundry has been done, triple for bathrooms. The highlight of this game show is the search for the secret schmutz, left in an otherwise high-traffic area but sure to be ignored. At the end of the program,the wife returns home, and reveals to the studio audience the location of this cache of crud. The audience then votes on the probability that the husband even saw anything out of the ordinary,much less cleaned it up.

Supermarket Slalom - where wives try to track down their husbands and their shopping carts in a confusing maze of aisles and week-end special offers. The object of the game is for the wives to get everything on their weekly shopping list and place them in the cart, while their husbands maneuver the carts at random, placing extraneous items in the cart while removing others. The husband wins if any three of the non-essential items that he added equal either the monetary or caloric value of all other food items combined, or if he successfully eludes his wife, and makes it to the check-out counter while she is still carrying six or more items.

You Bought What? - Similar to "The Price Is Right", but in reverse. The female contestant is given a dollar figure, and asked to choose which of three items her spouse actually bought. The main categories are Specialty Food That is Bad for Us, High Tech Gizmos We Don't Need, and Abstruse Reading Material We Could Have Gotten at The Library.

Political Orientation

You are a Social Liberal (70% permissive) and an... Economic Liberal (13% permissive) You are best described as a: Socialist Link: The Politics Test

Seven Haiku on Bunionectomy

Inspired by some quality time with the family where we learned more about their medical problems than we ever wanted to know...

I have been quite ill
Was it very serious?
Bunionectomy...

Toes bothering you?
Try a bunionectomy
Take some off the top

Bunionectomy?
A way to get perfect feet
From imperfect toes

Bunionectomy?
But it was such a nice toe
Now somewhat smaller

Bunionectomy?
A callous remark indeed
Why not the whole foot?

Can't accept defeat?
Try a bunionectomy
Win at one remove

Bunionectomy?
Is it all about feet, then?
Babe the Blue Ox knows

A Parent's Birthday Wish Haiku

A book of haiku?
What could be a better gift?
A visit maybe...