America's March of Folly

Earlier this month my wife and I happened to be in Berlin on German Unity Day (Einheits Tag). The German Capitol City was in a party mood with tchotchke vendors and food booths and temporary beer and soft drink kiosks set up all along the Scheidemann Strasse. The autumn weather was perfect while we listened to the symphony orchestra practicing Beethoven’s Third and Ninth Symphonies. After munching on currywurst and fisch semmels and drinking a couple of half liters of locally brewed pils beer we headed off to explore more of the city. Because my wife and I are such typical American tourists we had to visit Check Point Charlie and the Brandenburg Gate.

That night we found a wonderful Italian restaurant near the Friedrichstrasse Bahnhof. We happened to notice another American couple sitting several tables behind us. A few minutes after we entered the restaurant a very old German couple sat down next to the other Americans. The German couple eventually finished their pasta and the wife left. The older German man went to pay for their meal and discovered he could not find his wallet. In a panic he looked in his coat pocket, searched under the table, and after a few minutes gave up in utter dejection apologizing profusely to the waiter. The waiter told him it was all right and he could come back and pay later. After the other American couple noticed the old man’s distress, they began in English to loudly ridicule the old man’s motives saying he was just an old con trying to get a free meal. This went on and on even after the old guy left the restaurant.

Over the last few years I have watched the economic crisis known as the Great Recession spread across the globe deepening in intensity. There are mass demonstrations and/or riots in Greece, Italy, Spain, and France. Protest movement are growing in Ireland, Britain, and surprisingly in Sweden. The failure of conservative and liberal economist to predict the crisis is never discussed. Instead there appears to be a growing consensus among the world’s great economic powers that the best approach to mitigating the crisis is to go all out and reduce the deficit by cutting government spending on all social programs. In the United States for the first time since the New Deal of the 1930‘s Democrats are seriously talking about cutting or eliminating Social Security and Medicare. Meanwhile those far right-wing Republicans who ideologically never made their peace with the New Deal are opportunistically chanting the mantra of cut taxes, cut government spending, protect the big banks, protect the big corporations. By pursuing this perverse logic, thereby compounding the economic devastation in society, these right-wingers finally see their chance to gut all the hated social programs designed to help people enacted over the last 80 years.

But what is motivating these right-wingers? Is it purely greed or is there something deeper, more fundamental behind their thinking? The conservative blogger and radio host Mike Adams provides some clues, “The conservative sees man as born in a broken state. This tragic view of human nature sees man as selfish and hedonistic by design....Given his selfish nature, man must internalize some reason to behave in pro-social ways. That fact that he falls short of these values does not mean he is a hypocrite. The one who does not even believe what he says is the hypocrite. The one who believes what he says and falls short is merely human." Adams goes on to say, "According to the conservative, effective punishment is that which produces fear of transgression. Fear of transgression occurs when the punishment is swift, certain, and severe....In sum, the conservative believes we should first try to love people into conformity. If that does not work, we should scare people into conformity.” So there you have it, people are selfish and hedonistic and broken by nature. Work for low wages or lose your job, then get thrown out of your house, that’s how the “Free Market” produces and enforces conformity. If the “Free Market” cannot force people to conform then that leaves the State. Forget about equality and due process, severe and swift punishment by the police and courts will also produce the conformity right-wingers are so bewitched with.

Back in my Berlin Italian restaurant I called the waiter over to my table and apologized for the other American’s atrocious behavior. I then offered to pay for the old couple’s meal. In German the waiter told me there was no need for me to pay because the old couple lived in the neighborhood and they came to the restaurant all the time. A few minutes later the Matre d’ came over and told my wife and I that our meal was on the house. He then popped open a bottle of wine and served us gratis.

Those Americans sitting near us in that Berlin Italian restaurant made some assumptions about the old German man’s motives. They had no evidence for their beliefs. They simply acted on their own miscreant world view of humanity.

There is an old expression that says, “What goes around comes around.” There is a much older expression, one which is at the core of all the world’s great religions, “Do for others as you would have them do for you.”

Next Tuesday will tell us how deeply buried within our individual and social psyche The Golden Rule seems to have become entombed. However the midterm elections turn out, one thing seems certain, fear and loathing and conformity will continue in America’s march of folly.

An Arts and Crafts Festival in the Redwoods

When I arrived here in Benbow Friday evening, I noticed a bunch of white tents along the Eel River bank. After setting up the rig with water, electricity and sewage, and hooking up the cable TV and WIFI, sliding out the push out (yeah, that's how I roll), I took a walk over to the Benbow Inn. The Inn is in the style of an Old English Manor House. The restaurant and bar are excellent. Sitting at the bar I asked the bar keep about the white tents. He said for the last 10 years the Mateel Summer Festival takes place the first weekend in June. The festival is an arts and craft fair with lots of live music provided by local bands.

The next day I wandered over to the festival (admission $13.00) and made a beeline to the beer tent. With a Stella in hand I made my way down the rows of white tents looking at crude hand crafted ceramic pots, tie dye shirts and dresses, hash pipes and water pipes made of glass, leather ware sellers, herb and plant peddler; you name the craft and it was for sale. Although I was walking along the banks of the Eel River with all its lush boreal forest vegetation, the smell that permeated the air was marijuana. Like anything else, when you don't expect to see something, you're not apt to be looking for it. Once the smell of weed filled my nose, I began to see people walking around everywhere hittin' on fatties.

After walking around for about an hour I made my way back to the beer tent where they had picnic benches set up. I got another Stella and sat at the table and bench looking at/observing the people around me. Soon a slender willowy young girl, maybe 19 or 20 years old, came into the tent with her small bare breasts painted like blue bonnets. Very pretty.

About a half hour into my observations several facts began to emerge. The crowd was overwhelmingly white. There was only a smattering of Asian, Black, or Latino people. There were, surprisingly, a lot of older folks in attendance and many of those olds guys and gals were puffin' on doobies. Taken as group, the crowd was fat, like in nearly obese. But that made sense considering all the weed that was being smoked. I could only image the amount of sweet and salty munchies being consumed.

It seemed almost every person who was capable of reproducing was reproducing repeatedly. Babies and young children were clinging onto women everywhere. The fathers were ignoring the kids and the mothers looked haggard and worn out. Even the children appeared distressed crying and pawing at their young parents.

People seemed to have money and given the poor economy up here in the north woods, I wondered where they got their cash. Then it dawned on me: someone has to grow the medical marijuana being distributed in all those clinics all over the state.

I must have listened to a dozen different bands playing music on the stages erected all over the site. A common thread running through most of the music was the lack of any band playing melodies. No melodies. Only beats and rhythms grinding away at my ears and brain. And maybe that contributed to my most stunning observation. No one was smiling. There was no joy anywhere to be found. Thousands of people ghosting around showing no interest, making no human connections, not simply unfriendly but non-friendly, unengaged, even paranoid. Very, very weird.

Forty years ago I attended festivals like the Manteel. Those festivals of the past were exciting and new, and ground breaking even revolutionary. No one had ever seen anything like it before.

Perhaps its the copious amounts of herb being smoked. Perhaps it is the harsh, cold, rainy winters being endured. Perhaps it is the narrow pop culture being followed. Perhaps is it the Frankenstein monster of religious fundamentalism sucking up all the rationalism in the air. Whatever the reason, the festival I attended yesterday, and that is the correct word, I attended not participated in, was joyless and reactionary. People seemed to go through the motions and no one was trying to do anything new or interesting. Same old-same old.

In the past the youth were always seen as a revolutionary force guiding history into new directions. Young people with clear and unencumbered minds synthesizing the new from bits and pieces of the old. The young people I saw yesterday were wear worn, beat down, befuddled, and incapable of midwifing a new world. What will become of their future? What a shame, what a damn shame.

I ended the day having dinner at the Benbow Inn and going back to the rig to enjoy a nightcap. While sitting outside a neighbor guy I met and talked to earlier stopped by and sat down. Within ten minutes he was preaching Jesus to me. Why can't I catch a break?

Times Arrow

 
In essence, when philosophers debate the nature of the universe, their arguments boil down to whether the universe is dynamic, static, or a combination of each. In other words, does the universe change? Does the universe remain the same? Do some things in the universe stay the same while others change?

A thousand years ago philosophers argued that the universe was mostly static with highly localized places, here and there, where things were changing. Yes it was true that people were born, they lived, and they grew old and died. But that dynamic was changeless. Change in the midst of changelessness. Common sense said look around at the mountains and the seas; do they become something else? The Bible taught the world that all existence was created out of God’s whole cloth in six days and has not changed since creation itself. 

After the scientific revolution began in the 1500’s, it became clear that the opposite appeared to be true. The English scientist Isaac Newton, building on scientific work from the previous 150 years explained that motion was about changing position, location. But according to Newton, motion was more than that. It is only when motion changes that we notice motion. If motion changes speed, either speeding up or slowing down, it becomes noticeable. If motion changes direction, you notice it. In other words, if you accelerate, you notice the acceleration. If you do not accelerate, but you are still moving along at a constant speed in a straight line, you do not notice your motion. We only notice motion when motion changes and change requires time. Motion and time are inseparable because time is embedded both in the motion and in the change in motion. Thus motion and time cannot exist without the other. From Newton forward the big questions facing the deep thinkers of the day were: Which form of motion dominates the universe, constant motion or acceleration? Is it possible to accelerate and not notice it?  If it is possible to accelerate and not notice it, how can we tell the difference between constant motion and acceleration? Since we cannot notice constant motion, does constant motion even exist? For the same reason, does motionlessness exist? In the midst of all this debate, some thinkers divided the universe into the dynamic physical and the static spiritual. In the physical universe change is normal and it is really about motion, and motion is about time. In the spiritual universe everything is changeless, timeless, and eternal. Accordingly, the great philosophical debates over the long centuries are really about time.
 
Despite our cultural and national differences, everyone on earth has time in common. Time dominates our lives. We live a certain amount of time then we die. Does the Arrow of Time continue flying forward in some new form after death or does it fall to the ground? Is there a beginning and an end to time? Eternity is another way of saying time has stopped. Can the Arrow of Time fly in reverse? Can the Arrow of Time change its speed? Can we travel backward in time? Can we travel forward into the future?

Addressing the last two questions, Albert Einstein said no and yes. Around 1900 Einstein decided to take a closer look at Newton’s ideas about time. Newton assumed that time was in constant motion. Time moved at a constant tick-tick-tick never slowing down or speeding up. Tick-tick-tick forever and ever. Einstein thought that time may actually accelerate. We cannot travel to the past because the potential exists for the time traveler to murder a grandparent and thereby destroy the time experiment before it began. That is a paradox that cannot be resolved. Einstein formulated the Twins Paradox which he did resolve:  identical twins agree between themselves that one twin will make a journey into space in a high-speed rocket, flying at nearly the speed of light, while the other remains on Earth.  After seven years of exploring the cosmos, the traveling twin will return home to discover she has aged less than her identical twin who has aged 60 years! Time travel to the future was possible! For Einstein, time was not absolute as Newton believed, but relative to the speed the observer was traveling. Laboratory experimentation and the observed behavior of cosmic rays confirmed that the consistent tick-tick-tick of time slows down as speed increases until time slows to a crawl as you near the speed of light.

Although it may not be possible to physically travel back in time, it is possible to observe the past from a safe distance. As astronomers look deeper into the distant reaches of our universe, they are also looking back in time. Telescopes are actually time machines that look into the past. Two hundred years ago another paradox came to light. Olbert’s Paradox stated that there is an inconsistency between the observation that the night sky is dark and the observation that there are more stars than grains of sand on all of earth’s beaches. If the universe is infinitely old, it was reasoned, star light from so many stars should bathe our night sky in a glare of light brighter than daylight. Olbert resolved the paradox logically by showing that the universe is not infinitely old and therefore the light moving from more distant stars has not had enough time to reach earth. The best observational data today tells us the universe is about 13.8 billion years old and the universe is expanding in all directions. Not only is the universe expanding in all directions but the expansion is accelerating. Extrapolating backward in time to the distant past, the universe was a much smaller place than it is today. Modern cosmology seems to have answered some of the big questions of philosophy. Neither constant motion nor motionlessness exists. Everything in the universe is accelerating all the time even if that acceleration is not noticed. More profoundly, change is the normal state of the entire universe.

Everything is changing all of the time everywhere in the universe including here in the United States of America. So the question is what kind of change do we want? Who should benefit from change? Who should sacrifice for change? Which direction should that change go? How can we influence change?

This blog site is my small attempt to influence the Arrow of Time. If I can nudge the Arrow, accelerate the Arrow, into another direction, a direction that leads to real peace instead of perpetual war, real freedom as opposed to the constitutional fraud most of the world lives under, and needs satisfied instead of poverty generalized, great! The problem though is the Arrow of Time is far too big for one person to change its direction. If, on the other hand, many, many hands nudge it, the Arrow of Time will accelerate away from injustice, war, exploitation, and hate and in the direction of socialism.
 


December 2009