Wednesday, November 05, 2003

Someone has probably already written about and thought about this, but I was wondering the other day about how so many of the most unhealthy health practices are so closely tied to the most unhealthy social and environmental justice practices - thinking of sugar, harvested by slaves, and now chattel slaves, beef, robbing the plains, creating notions of manifest destiny NOT directly tied to the corrolary Christian stewardship, booze, pharmaceuticals - all tied to the enrichment of the few at the expense of many. Including militarism. Especially militarism. I find incredible irony in the fact that the same folks who created the "Rebublican revolution" and remain their foot soldiers, the "middle" class white male, to pay less taxes, support less welfare mothers, are supporting welfare patriarchs, the true beneficiaries of Keynesian economics that so many of their footsoldiers, Friedman and possibly Wiedenbaum (both of whom are Jewish, which I would think would freak those freaky conservatives right out of their paranoid right-wing skulls) indoctrinated as they are, would dismiss as being borderline communist, are supporting a budget that is all about imperialism and martial superiority in the interest of short sighted economic gains - read: plunder. Sally came back from her honeymoon in Hawaii. I felt conflicted when she started telling me, almost teary eyed, about the film before they went out to see the sunken USS Arizona. The films patriotic line was that the Japanese thought that attacking Hawaii would result in infighting amonstl Americans, and were surprised when it united them. Which is such a huge bunch of malarkey. Japanese military leadership, including Admiral Yamamoto?, who led the attack, were against it on the grounds that it would bring the U.S. full fledged into the war, which they did not want - better leave the sleeping giant lay. Which is to deny the U.S. encroachment into the Pacific islands to ensure access to cheap raw materials. It wasn't about democracy. It was about commerce, commerce that we are all implicit in supporting in every privilige we enjoy as Americans. I think I would be much more comfortable with politics in the U.S. if we wrapped less of it in ideology and were more blunt about trying to guarantee a high quality of life for our own citizens, at least the top 1% or so, with the aptly termed "middle" class holding the fort, as it were - living in seemingly less squalor relative to their ghettoized fellow colonized. Maybe everyone would buy in even more. See how much more our trinkets glow than our neighbors? I suspect, that fully understood and put to a simple, or even 2/3rds majority, many people would realize how we are not only colonized, but colonized by an evil absolutely alien to our basic humanity. And work to achieve a world of celebratory diversity, working towards the end of being poets of the universe, whether that be interstellar travel or the planetary humming of a b-flat, lower than anything ever recorded before. This is an aside, and I forget her name, but I'm fascinated by the item I recently read about the high school girl who discovered that astral bodies give off measurable radio waves, resulting in the field of radioastronomy. Why don't we know about her, the same way we know about Linus Pauling or Isaac Newton or Copernicus? Or will it take a few hundred or a few thousand more years to fully understand the importance of our place amongst the cosmos, among those discoveries the key fact that that are many ways of observing and measuring our realities, not all of which involve our crudely developed sense of smell, taste, hearing and touch. I don't like to think about it too much these days, since just trying to figure out percentages makes me think that Ron Howard is going to end up make a biographical movie about my descent and emergence from madness, but I wonder how mind boggling the next major movement in mathematics and physics will be, and how long it will take to be accepted. I remember talking with one of the lecturers from Science Camp, Zoon. I forget his last name. He patented (and this may be an geek urban legend) infinity and applications of n to the nth. I drove him to the small West Virginia airport to take him back to Yale, I think. Somewhere only a few hundred miles north and east, but galaxies away. We were talking about how we would know when people finally understood quantam mechanics and chaos theory and twentieth-century physics at all. And I said I thought that those ideas would finally penetrate when a parent responded to the age-old childhood question of why the sky is blue with the answer that there is a higher probability that the sky will be blue. I remember the moment less because of the impact of the specific question and response than Zoon looking over at me slightly alarmed as I steered the curvy mountain roads (I think I had at least one hand on the wheel, but I may have been steering with my knees) and pulled out my pen and note pad to scribble the thought down. He sheepishly asked if I might want to pull over. So I did. He was later elated to have found a slide rule in a local antique shop, as we waited, the first plane out having been cancelled, to see if there would be a departure into the air and worlds away, or back up the curvy mountain roads, in the dark this time. A plane did eventually take off. Zoon Nguyen. I spent another ride through the mountains with one of the world's strongest men, Phil Pfister, who, as the camp director Glen told us, was uncomfortable about his size, and not to talk about it. Because he was huge, and in a truly Herulean way. But also the most gentle giant. Cliche' in his gentle-giantedness. Looking over my typos, I had place for plane, and road for rode. Plane, with Zoon, is ironic in and of itself. 2:57:16 AM