Cobb

Sticks and Stones

Theory is the same as practice, in theory.

I can't remember where I found an excerpt about the salty language of soldiers, sailors, airmen and marines. I'm thinking that it was Bill Whittle, but I couldn't find it there. The point of the passage was that in combat or conflict, deeds matter and words are merely the sauce on the meat. Even as a writer, I find that to be true.

Yesterday I wanted to post onto my little Facebook box, "Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me." It is because some words had hurt me, which they can when you decide to be serious and sensitive and take people at their words. Interesting phrase that, take people at their words. It means that in lieu of any experience with that person, without having the benefit of witnessing their deeds, we allow their words alone to carry the full burden of understanding them.  We inherently know this to be an act of faith, because we only know people, in the French context of the verb 'connaitre', when we associate with them, when we watch them walk and hear them talk and touch them and share deeds with them. But we know words, in the French context of the verb 'savoir' as we know facts. We consume them whole and digest them instantaneously and completely. So taking someone at their word can be a frighteningly risky exercise. We accept the complex weight of their humanity, something we know cannot be immediately determined, based upon words that do indeed have immediate and total weight. 

This is why insults hurt so much, especially when we have not decided fully what our own complex human weight is. If we thing we might be an idiot, and somebody calls us that, or tells us that someone is an idiot. Hoo brother, the full set of implications of being an idiot, especially true idiots we have known, comes down in full force in that one word directed at you, at your weak spot. 

There are other interesting implications of having people taken at their words. What if your own private words about yourself become public without your knowledge. Now, people you do not know posesses this ammo against you, in your own words - of the millions you might craft to build up the person you want to be, these bricks of your mental construction hurled back at you. If your psyche has bones, they may well be broken.

Fortunately, we humans have a very fine ability to distinguish our dreams from our reality, fairy tales from experience. While it's true that our minds recreate memories from words and images and sounds and recreate the past whole cloth, rather than fetch a reel of experiential film from vast archives in our heads, we still know what we've actually experienced from what we've heard tell. That is especially true of our experiences with people.

It is the actual deeds with actual people that matter, no matter what our words say. In fact, we need to be able to shock and adjust our systems with bricks of words in order to prepare us for actual experience. The more we savoir, the better we can connaitre. The more we can absorb the immediate impact of the symbols of communications, the better we are prepared to deal with the complexities of the real world. Words prepare us for sticks and stones. That is, in the end, their ultimate value. Words without deeds are fictions without the leaven of actions. They are deceptions whose veracity is unchallenged. They are narrative and counter-narrative, things best left in computers, libraries, archives and other deserts of humanity. 

In the post-modern world many of us live in, it is quite possible to live in such a desert bubble - to have never actually been punched in the nose, to have no broken bones or scars. I grew up in a time and place when such experience was to be expected, I will speak more about that under Vigilance Games. Mike Tyson says that everybody has a plan until they get punched in the face. That's for real. But absent a left to the kidney or a right to the jaw, it's awfully easy to get caught up in verbiage and mistake the map of literature for the territory of human life. I have a visceral hatred for the overlawyered aspect of our contemporary life and wish more disputes were settled via fisticuffs. Suing somebody out of their livelihood does not require courage, merely conviction. We are awash in words and words of conviction. They may be cheap, but that doesn't change their immediate impact on our minds.

That is why it is critical for the free man, for the whole human, to keep in close touch with sticks and stones and broken bones. We must be immersed in the physical to compensate for our overlong dalliances in the verbal and symbolic realms. I see that too many of us have been too easily convinced and wordsmithed into foolish inversions of normal human behavior. We change our diets - what we put into our body - not because of what our body is telling us, but because of what we read in a book or saw on television. 

As part of my martial education it is important for me to feel the lessons of what we know in human history that the body can experience, not simply to hear them. I have the habit of overthinking and weighing words very precisely. This can be foolish when not counterbalanced by hands-on experience.

Words will only break your bones if you take them too seriously. If somebody tells you to take a long walk off a short pier, or to go fuck yourself, you would be a fool to comply. I think the schoolyard kids have the right response, "why don't you try and make me?".  

Submitted for Cobb's Rules: Gordian knots are plentiful, always have a sword ready.

Not Gay Enough

I know that making broad generalizations about any culture, let alone contemporary upper-middle-class American Left Coast gay culture is an exercise in rope pushing, but that's never stopped me before. Besides, what are you going to do about it? I blame my culture.

So for some reason, after rereading Bill Whittle's TRIBES again, I decided to look up a list of who is actually gay in Hollywood, dialing a bead on the Pink Tribe. And like I never knew with Freddie Mercury, I never knew with George Clooney. No wonder the commies think they're so smart. And really, after all this time, I thought that Tom Hanks was gay. Maybe that was just Peter Scolari. Oh well. Part of Hollywood's job in spreading a thin veneer of impenetrable unobtruthium over all of their products is to protect the audience from their own stereotypical biases, or common sense, however you choose to call it. And of course with your willingess to suspend disbelief, you become complicit in the tissue of lies and harden it to bone and sinew of lies. But let me not use my own words when I have the horses' mouth:

It used to be a Hollywood sin, especially if you were an A-list male celebrity, to be gay, to come out of the closet. Girls, the majority of them straight, paid big money to see male movie stars, such as the late James Dean and Rock Hudson, Montgomery Clift, all confirmed gays, kiss their on-screen (female) counterparts. Not each other. (That was left for the wrap parties).

Today, things have changed. A little. Girls, who spend billions of dollars each year, worldwide, on movie tickets and Blu-Rays and DVDS, still expect to see Taylor Lautner, (a confirmed gay, from numerous Hollywood insiders), kiss a girl - and like it, but if he were to kiss a boy in his own house, behind closed doors, perhaps they wouldn't really care? Or would they?

However, if you're Leonardo DiCaprio, Tom Cruise, John Travolta or George Clooney, and 60% of your movie's revenue comes from overseas, where in some countries being gay is cause for being stoned to death, your studio, publicist, manager and hangers-on don't want you to admit to your sexual proclivities.

Why? Because the bottom line is if people in China and other parts of Asia, as well as the Middle East, who make up a significant amount of a movie's box office gross, know you're gay they most likely won't go to see your movies, which, in turn, would put a huge dent in the overall gross of said movie.

Simple.

Now you cannot expect anything civilizationally principled to come from that sort of defense, then again we weren't asking or looking for any such thing. Hollywood sells sex, so what else is new? Well, what else is new is that it only sells the hottest kind of sex it can figure up. Not just hokey pokey, but smokey pokey. That's what it's all about. Consider the following list of who the fuck cares...

And the WHO CARES list of confirmed living and dead homosexuals!

Adam Shankman
Alvin Ailey (late)
Andy Dick 
Barney Frank
Billie Jean King 
Bret Easton Ellis 
Bryan Singer 
Charles Nelson Reilly (late)
Christopher Rice 
Clay Aiken 
Danny Pintauro 
David Bowie
David Brudnoy (late)
David Sedaris 
Denholm Elliott (late)
Edward Albee (late)
Elton John (she is grandma to all the gays)
George Takei 
Greta Garbo (late)
Guillermo Diaz 
Herb Ritts (late)
J. Edgar Hoover (late)
Jane Lynch
Jann Wenner 
Joel Grey
John Cameron Mitchell 
John Waters
Johnny Mathis 
Kathy Najimy 
Lee Daniels 
Leonard Bernstein (late)
Lily Tomlin
Linda Hunt 
Liza Minnelli 
Malcolm Forbes (late)
Marc Cherry 
Mark O'Donnell (late)
Matt Drudge
Melissa Etheridge
Meredith Baxter-Birney 
Nancy Kulp 
Paul Bowles (late)
Pete Postlethwaite (late)
Peter Allen (who was married to lez, Liza Minnelli) (late)
Rachel Maddow 
Ralph Waldo Emerson (late)
Rip Taylor
Rupert Everett
Ryan Murphy 
Sam Champion 
Simon Callow
Tab Hunter 
Tim Gunn 
Tim Nasson 
TR Knight 
Trevor Moretz (Born in 1986, he is the 6' 3" older brother of Chloe Moretz) 
Wanda Sykes 
Wilson Cruz

Let's not forget Paul Linde with Charles Nelson Reilly, because those dudes were pioneers. Which now that I think about it, I've got to wonder about Nipsey Russell. I mean he never did anything any black people I knew cared about, so how did he get on game shows in the 70s? At least Johnny Mathis could sing, but for some reason I'm drawing a blank about what he actually did sing. I keep getting Smokey Robinson songs in my head. LL Cool J, yeah we know. So freakin' what is true in all cases, not just the above list.  

I would say for the record that I recognize about a steady (ok let me calculate it...) 20% of all the nuts, and of those whose names I recognize, the surprise comes about a third of the time? I don't know. It's silly to even dignify the facts with statistics for anything but curiosity. But I think there are a couple of surprises. Oh yeah Kevin Spacey and Daniel Radcliffe for about 20 seconds each, and George Clooney for a full minute. Gasp! But I'd do Clooney. On the other hand, I get the feeling I'd want him to shut up. Lord only knows what comes out of his mouth if he's not scripted. He impresses me as a superlative actor and a cool guy - our contemporary Cary Grant, unless there's something Hollywood wants to tell me about him and Grace Kelly too. Spacey is an admirable dude and I think I'd dig his gay vibe, I get the feeling he's got the juice to be the reincarnation of Noel Coward, and I'm quite frankly rather ashamed that he won't say jack about it, unless he's some kind of preternatural queer. I mean if anyone at all in Hollywood could swing it with style it would be Kevin Spacey, but clearly we're going to have to give the award to David Hyde Pierce. BAM. That's my man. 

Then again, I'm just saying what kind of entertainment homo I find particularly respectable / desireable, your mileage may vary. The whole subject brings up an interesting host of questions about the sexual ethics of Hollywood, if such a concept actually exists with any discipline worthy of examination. I suspect they do not and the whole don't-tell-just-sell cries out for some Wikileakage, but I can't say that I care enough. Nor is observing the state of decay at all compelling. Still, the fact that some homos are interesting to Hollywood and others are not must be an indication of something, not the least of which must be the secret joy and pride Hollywood must take in its selling of fiction of the lowbrow variety to the unsuspecting masses. Not a particularly ethical kind of business at all. Hmm.

I am apt to conclude that, in the vein of the feminization of the American male, this misdirection close to the center mass of Hollywood's entire business model is apt to succeed in peacetime. So it comes as no surprise that Vince Vaughn's "Delivery Man" got greenlighted and the whole perceptibly Jewish and Gay Mafia influences in the mainstream give dudes like me headaches and sighs. And I'm only saying the Jewish thing because David Mamet says so. Every business is predominantly something, or overly influenced by something even if that is a modicum of respect to its tradition. I mean what's meritocracy when it comes to reading envelopes at award shows? Speaking of which, I ought to lay the following on you, from Bill Whittle, whom I've been recalling all weekend:

What kind of money could Barbra and Martin and Tim and Susan and Gwenneth and George and Steven and Viggo and Linda and Harvey and Brad and Angelina and Ben and all the rest  how much could they really put together, if they actually believed what they say  not to mention the cash available to the Malodorous Michigan Manatee of Mendacity? What kind of check could they write? $500 million would be less than 10% of every outspoken celebrities' combined wealth. That money could take every poor person in LA county and put them into much nicer apartments than the one I live in. They could, at a stroke, shame the President, the Congress, and the evil NeoCon warmongers by putting every displaced person in New Orleans in a Marriott for a year. They claim this is the kind of better human they have evolved into.

Why don't they do it?

They don't do it because that Tribe worships the golden statue of themselves, that's why. A church-going pharmacist in Des Moines would be ashamed of herself for giving only 10% of her modest salary. But Sean Penn can take himself, an entourage and a personal photographer  that's three or four people in a four-person boat  and show us all how incredibly big and down-home he is by sailing off a few feet to rescue people, before the boat sinks from the incompetence of failing to put in the drainage plug. He wore a very nice white flak vest, instead of the pass orange life preserver, because getting shot at is a lot more macho looking, if a million or so times less likely, than drowning because you went out into the water with a lead vest rather than a life vest. It's a scene in the trailer that runs incessantly in their heads: In a world run by evil corporations, a rebel who plays by his own rules starts a deadly game of cat and mouse with an all-powerful conspiracy in this searing portrait of extraordinary courage in a life under siege, starring: me!

 

Now I'm willing to bet that some thoughtful people who happen to dig their own parts on other people are put off by the pinche vendidas of Hollywood as much as I am. So understand that I am not suggesting that the character flaws of Hollywood are naturally attrative to Jews and/or gays. I'm not even saying, althought I might in the future, that there is in Hollywood a sort of consistent perversity that offers a unique haven for such scapegoats when the country goes bonkers. I am saying that if you are a weirdo, you can sell your weirdohood to Hollywood. Hollywood aggregates the long tail of weirdness of all sorts. And I am saying that merely being homo is not sufficient for Hollywood to love your homosexuality. You have got to be... whatever it is that you've got to be. Don't ask me. But the Hollywood gay is not gay and is extra gay at the same time. Just like Ice Cube, a Hollywood black is not gangsta and extra gangsta at the same time. This is what we call semiotics, and Hollywood is the deepest, dankest semiotic swamp since the court of Louis XIV. 

Round & Round

There are several men I know with whom I identify on multiple levels. I have taken time to call them my Exixtential Partners, meaning that would it not be for the random opportunities and chances, I could see myself living their lives and they mine. Some of those men have come by here at Cobb periodically, and sometimes they only appear in my stories. I feel that in my life I have been drastically short of such people and I imagine that many other men have lots of close friends, or at least it seems that way in beer commercials.  My friends are dispersed around the country. They are online in gamechat rooms and blog commentaries and Facebook timelines. They are a busy signal away on toddler lockdown or squirreled away doing important anonymous work for the nation. They are at a remove. 

Now that I am on the doorstep of being an old coot, it seems increasingly important to me that I get in touch and stay in touch with that diminishing group of people who might understand my jokes and not be offended. This is especially true since I work at home without the benefit of shallow but comforting professional lunch dates on the daily. 

Over the weekend, I think that I may have bumped up my Partner list by two. That's pretty extraordinary. It is due to the work of the man I now call Maestro. He knows a lot of people worth knowing. So the bottom line is that Maestro introduced me to Felix and NightCrawler, both extraordinary dudes and we'uns went a-shootin' in the boondocks. 

There were several significant things I noticed about myself and of society in association with the outing. At two days distance, I find the most amazing thing about this particular shooting outing, which will have been about my fifth or sixth in life, is the level of subtlety, or undercoverness, with which it proceded. After a casual breakfast on Saturday, I calmly went over to the local outdoor shop and picked up 200 rounds of 45 230gr FMJ ammo. I'm completely comfortable with those technical terms, and have no problem spending the $120 bucks required. But then I know that I have crossed a line that make most people I have known to cross their eyes and ward me away with crosses. I was very conscious of the weight of the ammo case in my hand as I walked back to my truck and closed the door on it. As soon as I got home, I found a lock for it and locked it up. I never bought ammo before, and kept guessing that there must be some protocol. But the whole thing was quiet and uneventful. This kind of thing happens every day. 

There was a monstrous dinosaur that munched its prey and spit it out covered with slime all before the sun came up in the morning. It's the Crackodon. I battled the beast at 0630 hours on Sunday at the supermarket rally point on our way to the ranges. As usual, I beat the monster down with a couple of Red Bulls and got the goo off me. By 0800 at the Starbucks in Valencia, I was in high spirits, as were my compadres: four extraordinary men, telling jokes and stories, in one pickup truck heading north with a big locked box in the back. 

Felix and Maestro go way back to high school where they made friends in physics class. Both of them are about 7 or 8 years older than I. Felix has an old black & white picture of himself  in college where he looked like a brainy Danny Bonaduce. Now he looks like Steve Jobs' older brother. He stuck with the physics and has, most certainly, an enviable workshop. NightCrawler has the gnarliest scar I think I have ever seen. Like me he was born in a naval hospital and makes code run. He may be a few years younger, that or he covers his grey very well. He helped me in a very precisely geeky way, although I forget the name of the bone, I know exactly what part of my index finger should rest on the trigger.

--

We got to the spot, deep in the rugged shallow canyons near the illusive Santa Clara River. Paved road, cows, dirt road, deer, road runner, paved road, red tailed hawks, dirt road and then we were there. I've heard of this place, but it's a lot more intimate than I imagined. We signed in, paid, and drove further. We unlocked the members-only gate further up the road and found our pristine range. This is rather what I expected golf to be like. I guess I never quite made the right connection. Golf courses I know are not quite as beautiful as I expected, nice though, but completely over-crowded and overpriced. This gun range was nicer than I expected, quite inexpensive and completely private. Unless you count the booms echoing off the hills from shooters down the trail. I liked it. I felt at home. 

Maestro got me started with the .22 conversion on his .45 Kimber. I relearned everything I knew from scratch, but the safety rules were the same. I began a great number of drills with a four-step draw and in no time I was making big puffs of dirt behind the targets I kept missing. Four steps is an understatement. There are about 200 things to remember when you're handling the firearm, lessons learned from generations of shooters that can only come with practice. 

The quality of instruction I got from these vets was superb. I've head some of it before, but I shut up and listened. I learned that I've been doing a lot of small things wrong in my mind, and practically did the one thing I thought I wouldn't do, which was leave my finger on the trigger too much. I wasn't fumbly but handling a pistol properly is like playing the bass line of your favorite song on the piano. Even though the notes are simple and you know them, it's still all about touch, and you cannot master the touch and the bassline always sounds clunky until you play and play and play. 

I got out about 200 rounds of 22LR and a couple dozen of the 45. This was more than pretty much all my previous experience combined, and yet a drop in the professional's bucket. The big bada boom clumsiness I felt the first time I shot a Glock was not there at all. I learned how to use my left hand this time out, and figured out the squeeze. I still over-muscled my right arm, but taking the 'dynamic tension' concept out of my head helped me do that. Now I have no fearful anticipation of recoil, yet I'm far from relaxed. But it's joyful work. I very much love the idea of being certifyably technically proficient with firearms. Beats the hell out of golf. Yet golf has the same kind of learning curve. You think about your grip all the time. You think about your aim all the time. You think about what's in front of you, how far, what the wind is doing, where you shot the last time, how and when to adjust. Shooting is marvelously complex and sophisticated, and deadly serious. And like golf, when you're hitting your targets, it's pure pleasure.

By the end of the session, I managed to pop 4 out of 6 plates in one sweep at about 7 meters. I learned that it's more important to bring spray paint, masking tape and index cards than it is to bring a knife and paracord. I'm having a hell of a time with good men, the sort I have to trust my life with. 

And then we cleaned up, continued the incredibly geeky conversation about barrels and sight picture and dominant eyes and what you can actually hit with a deer slug at 100 yards with no scope, and the difference between combat shotguns and precision rifles and machining tool steel and carbonizing furnaces and the economics of high quality optics. My kinda folks. 

We slipped back into civilization, minding at all times who was taking what of our hardware and where to park with respect to our cargo and its relative accessibility. I got home around 3pm, exhausted and giddy. I can't wait until next time.  

Al Jazeera Considers Malcolm X

Al Jazeera is considering Malcolm X and the fate of Black Nationalism. And they invited me to discuss it Thurdsay, but I'll probably not have enough time away from my other commitments. 

I've written a lot about Malcolm X here at Cobb and I still think rather fondly of the man. I never read the Autobiography but I did read 'Malcolm X Speaks' in college and it knocked me for a loop. What I admired about Malcolm was that he was a smart man and a courageous man. He was both of these at a time when most Americans and certainly most black Americans didn't quite understand how to walk upright. Malcolm strikes me as someone who recognizes his own, and everyone else's original sin, in such a way that he discovered righteous redemption immediately at hand. So for him there was no need for shame. In the way of all who come before God, he found a way out of his past, and he saw a way to cleanse the future. So he sought to improve himself before God, and suddenly what everyone else thought wasn't so important. 

That kind of confidence can be a dangerous thing, and so Malcolm made unnecessary enemies along his own path towards righteousness. His was an error of loyalty but he famously got out of the one kind of jeopardy (of his soul) and landed in another (of his life). It's difficult to say whether or not he was reckless, but he did electrify. 

I have used the fact of Malcolm's religious conservatism to some effect here. 

What made Malcolm great was that he had great faith and tied himself unswervingly to his religious discipline in ways that seem extraordinarily rare to us these days. He displayed an uncommon unity of mind and spirit. He embodied a kind of integrity we don't often see in public life. But he was also very clear about the work that he saw blackfolks needed, and it was very much in the vein of personal responsibility. I recall my brother's metaphors of the the past week. He works as a beat cop on Skid Row and he said of the indigent homeless that they do not wash their faces. They remain dirty  because they have cut themselves off from society seeing no hope of ever fitting in. But of folks with hope, we wash our face every day because we expect to fit in. The culture of despair begins when one decides not to wash your face, when you decide to be dirty, and it is catching. Similarly, the dysfunctions of the black community Malcolm sought to address started with us washing our faces, of acknowledging our value in the eyes of God, of negotiating our respectability in society starting by cleaning up our act. To wit:

The platform that the Honorable Elijah Muhammad, our religious leader, stands on is the platfrom of complete freedom, justice and equality for the 20 million black people or so-called Negroes here in America. And he teaches us that because of the seriousness of the condition that our people now find themselves in that it is absolutely impossible to solve our problems with means other than religion. And he teaches us that the religion of Islam is the only religion that will instill within our people the incentive to stand on our own feet. And instead of trying to force ourselves upon whites or force ourselves into the white society or blame the white man for our predicament and constantly beg him for what he has, he says that the only way that we can solve our problem is to unite together among ourselves, among our own kind, clean ourselves up, rid ourselves of the evils that we've become addicted to here in this society and try and solve our problem ourselves.

When I was quite interested in being a representative of the Old School, there was a lot of Malcolm to love. And to the extent that he still symbolically represents to many, various ideals of freedom, that is is very useful. There is a lot of bourgie baggage that people could discard in their pursuit of liberty and Malcolm could very well be a bracing reminder of that challenge. Malcolm wouldn't settle for slim pickings. No Affrimative Action could dissuade him from his righteous cause.

There is also, as I think of Malcolm, that nagging dissident counterpoint from Albert Murray. Malcolm was a city creature and as much as he spoke of radical ballots or bullets, we didn't see him down in the Jim Crow South putting his body in harm's way for the cause.  

But I think Malcolm most importantly represents to me the gap between black Americans and Africans everywhere else. The failure of his post-Meccan ideas for the OAAU demonstrated how lofty and impractical trans-national organizations can be, especially unfunded ones. And for better or worse, it illustrated the difference between a man of the people and an academic. John Henrik Clarke was a founding member of the OAAU, and if it had any refining to do of its ideas and charter, he was certainly able. But like so many Pan-Africanists, Black Nationalist and other black power radicals, Clark found his home, not in the streets but in the university. And that comfy place is pretty much where all Black Nationalists remain. Pan-Africanism didn't happen because the superficial conditions that united one population in one year with another in another was completely a function of the messenger. As much as black Americans talked about how white Americans couldn't understand the black experience unless they lived in the ghetto, it was ironic that so many were convinced that people half a world away could feel each other's pain. 

The prospects for Black Nationhood are dead and gone, and that is precisely because there is no black orthodoxy. Those like Clarke who would write them out, those like Cornel West who would compare and contrast them, those like Lorraine Hansberry who would meliorate them to a hungry public, are few and far between. They have the distinct difficulty of being heir to a legacy, largely that of King and Christianity, that provided quite substantically the substance of the Negro desire. As I like to say, when I was born there were only 20 million Negroes and most were poor. Today there are 38 millions of African Americans and most of us are middle class. We wanted civil rights and we got them. You would be hard pressed to go to the UN and plead the case for the poor African American, you'd be laughed out of the building. 

When people talk about a separate black nation, they almost inevitably talk about 'taking back' Alabama, Mississippi and Georgia. Indeed when Georgia got its first black mayors, it was called the Black Mecca. The perversity of wanting to take over a slave state suggests strongly to me that it is not so much a question of forward looking freedom, but racial revenge. And of course Black Nationalism is inextricably bound to its racialisms. 'Cultural' black nationalists, of which I was one, say culture but do so with the intent of raising the culture of the black raise and loudly imposing cultural privileges and prerogatives on non-black races. There's really no call for that in the world, but it gets one fairly far in Georgia. So perhaps that's the last and only place for it. There's nothing quite like the beautific irony of tree lined neighborhoods teaming with happy upscale black families in the shadow of Stone Mountain. When I lived in Georgia, having moved there from 125th and Broadway in NYC back in 1995, nothing could prepare me for the gushing solicitations of white real-estate agents offering me discounts in the huge new houses built in Forsythe County, which used to be Ground Zero for the KKK. 

I used to keep track of the many court decisions which marked the success of civil rights law. Many people heap all praise on the big congressional packages, but there were many individual court decisions that ordered integration. When we list them today, things like having black state troopers or going to the YMCA or serving on juries, seem almost trivial. And yet there remains something about the American South that lives in the bones of people in that region. What we in the non-slave states take for granted, they still struggle with and the slightest insults there set of racial recriminations that don't resonate everywhere else.  But that is the lived black life that many desire. I say for them, they have their black nation. And where it is that big deal that Memphis has had a black police chief, the rest of us don't mind and don't care.  I say there is a black nation in the South and for better or worse, it is what it is. Which is to say only symbolically relevant to the rest of the nation and the world.

We know quite well how one arrest, one trial, one murder, one disappearance, one accident, one sexual assault can keep millions fixated to their television screens and yelling at each other online for weeks and months. And surely the American South volunteers up a little hamlet or housing tract on a regular basis to feed such fires of folly. This is the drama that is our racial background noise. And it remains convenient for people who remain alive 40 years after Malcolm X died to try and make our jaws drop. But those matters that involve life or death for many more people, like the human trafficking over our border to the south are much more compelling on a human scale. Racism is not the problem for my generation that it was for my father's generation, and I recognize how straightforward it is to see the very same pattern repeating itself in this country. Everybody wants their own little nation inside the American empire.

My father's requirements for Nationhood were the four Ls. Law. Liberty. Love & Land. People hold such promises as impossible, living in their own enclaves. But we the American people still provide these things to each other. It starts with trust. Well, I should say it starts with trust for me, because I have what my grandparents did not have, the experience of seeing America beyond the local news - the experience of getting around the country and seeing for myself. This is the same formula that helped Malcolm to see beyond the provincialisms of Elijah Muhammad's 'white devils'. Brave journeys are the beginnings of all stories of villagers who become heroes. Brave journeys are what make wise men out of foolish boys. So it takes a brave journey to acquire the four Ls. Those who venture forth will have the opportunity. This nation remains new enough to be flexible and it still bends towards justice. 

We should remember the courage of Malcolm X and understand that freedom is not convenience and it is neither gained nor taken away easily. We should recall that standing tall before God and working towards righteousness is not for the faint of heart. It is a brave journey. Simply remembering or dealing in symbols is not enough. There are mistakes to be made and works to be done. 

"In all our deeds, the proper value and respect for time determines success or failure."
"Stumbling is not falling".

Obamacare & the Power of Monopoly

All of the critics are aware of the Sunby story. Here's my focus. (emphasis mine)

You would think it would be simple to find a health-exchange plan that allows me, living in San Diego, to continue to see my primary oncologist at Stanford University and my primary care doctors at the University of California, San Diego. Not so. UCSD has agreed to accept only one Covered California plan—a very restrictive Anthem EPO Plan.EPO stands for exclusive provider organization, which means the plan has a small network of doctors and facilities and no out-of-network coverage (as in a preferred-provider organization plan) except for emergencies. Stanford accepts an Anthem PPO plan but it is not available for purchase in San Diego (only Anthem HMO and EPO plans are available in San Diego).

So if I go with a health-exchange plan, I must choose between Stanford and UCSD. Stanford has kept me alive—but UCSD has provided emergency and local treatment support during wretched periods of this disease, and it is where my primary-care doctors are.

Before the Affordable Care Act, health-insurance policies could not be sold across state lines; now policies sold on the Affordable Care Act exchanges may not be offered across county lines.

Several years ago, my biggest point was that the main problem with the costs of healthcare in America had to do with the fact that many states restrained competition by granting only one or two health insurers to work in a particular city or county. I spoke to my cousin who is a trauma surgeon, and he said it was the reason he left Philadelphia. Oligopoly and monopoly determined what procedures doctors and hospitals could be reimbursed for in their treatments. It wasn't about the best care for the patient given a broad variety of choices, it was about what insurers decided to pay for. So long as insurers could maintain a monopoly, and not be faced with interstate competition, they made out and care providers were hamstrung.

 Well I can't find the reference, but that was one of my major ideas. It's in here somewhere.

 I also can't find old DMG, our gastroenterologic expert who used to hang out here. 

If You Like Your Healthcare Plan...

Somehow I think this montage will be disappeared.

The Human Bits

The other day I was deeply engaged in a 2A argument and the question of the virtue of police officers came into focus. Someone suggested that he shouldn't have to require officers to be personally virtuous, that the proper police department would generate the appropriate results.

I immediately thought that doesn't make sense - a police department that produces Robocop or Mark Fuhrman or stop & frisk or broken windows policies undermines the trust of the communities they are supposed to serve. Upon further reflection I could concede the point, and yet an even more stark defense of my position arose.

In the first place, I myself find it useless to extend general virtues onto the victors of certain contests simply because they win. This comes to mind generally for sports. Last year's Tour de France raised the question of why there isn't a women's equivalent. The origins of the Tour were to inspire manly virtues in the French population in the wake of WW1. And yet today's cyclists, despite their perserverance, endurance and sportsmanship hardly evoke much of the warrior mystique. And even against the scandal of Lance Armstrong and others, I am rather hard pressed to see the winner of the Tour de France as much else other than the winner of the Tour de France. Thus according to the policy of the police department all appropriate benchmarks are applied to determine that best officer. The best policeman may very well simply be the one who makes the most arrests or solves the most murders. The best banker the one who makes the most money for the bank - the ideal institutional member, fulfills the mission of the institutional charter. 

So doesn't the Progressive or liberal structuralist inculcate human values into the organizations and institutions of society? I think they do - I think they expect that fidelity to institutional rules imbue the follower with the values of the organization, which are some fraction of the idealized values for humanity itself. When you value the mores of the Red Cross, then your participation under its structure rubs off positively on you.  When I was a Progressive, I would stress the institutional because only the institution transcends the slipshoddities of the individual and the meanderings of the masses. If you wanted peace, for example, it wasn't sufficient in my mind to have peaceful individuals. The only real peace was a peace permanently moderated by an institution. Let people do what they will, but slam them against the walls of the virutous institution and you will have the values of the institution expressed. 

However, my current thinking about the dynamism of individuals and societies mitigates against my hopes for institutions, as well as my aversion to the idea that men are mostly empty and mostly need to be (ful)filled via their loyalty to institutions, be they churches, businesses or governments. And my friend correctly argued that it is a conservative principle for people to possess virtue, and that the virtue of the people that make any institution worthy of respect and loyalty. Although there is some balancing required, I think Kafka would agree with me.  

As I look at this dynamic I see a conflict between the aims of civilization and the aims of society.

Civilization, according to Socrates is the organized specialization of labor. It is the specialization of labor that creates the interdependence of the farmer to the distributor to the marketer to the consumer. Each participates in such a way that the individual's privacy is maintained and scrutiny is not required. IE I do what I do in my specialization and I get enough renumeration from that. As a stevedore I do not have to be as articulate as a teacher. As a teacher I do not have to be as physically fit as a stevedore. They they can fulfill their role in civilization and 'be all that they can be' within the context of that civic duty. But they do not fulfill their human potential, they suffer the alienation that ultimately comes from their very specialization. The system does not recognize what else that individual is outside of their job, or as the cliche goes "I don't pay you to think".

In society on the other hand, we look to our commonalities and make calls on matters of character and deportment. Society is more about fitting in. We want the stevedore to wash his hands before coming to the table. We want the teacher to accept that everyone is not her student. We look through society's lens at more of the person in the context of their living life, rather than their civic participation that helps the world go 'round. When these people sit down at my dinner table, it is not enough that they tell me that their school is top ranked or that the harbor pulled in more freight this year. 

So how do I reconcile the idea that some people's virtues matter and others do not? In fact, this is what I do according to my Peasant Theory. I do not expect that the overwhelming majority of people, the Peasantry, exhibit any particular decorum. I merely expect that they are provincial and spend most of their energy taking care of themselves and their families and property. It doesn't surprise me that they are vulgar and not diplomatic. I do not insist that they adopt 'policitical correctness'. That is because whatever damage they do, they do locally. As leaders of their own families and property, their misbehavior brings retribution upon their own heads and no more. It is for the professional class, The Slice, the Managerials to have the decorum apporpriate to the institutions they operate. In my view, only 30% of the population requires higher education - as they are the Slice, the Alternative Slice, the Anti-Slice and all such heirs apparent. The Ruling Class must have the wisdom of the ages and all such virtues required for understanding the conduct of human business, and they, outnumbered by their knighthood must command the respect of that powerful Slice class. The corruption of the Ruling Class spells doom for civilization. 

In short, the more responsibility you have for society, the more you should possess virtue. This is essential to humanism as I see it. But let us consider the prospects for liberty.

Let us presume that the distribution of the talents virtues of the leadership are unpredictably random in the human population. I use the metaphor of slavery in this regard. The slave will ultimately recognize that he is a slave, whether or not he is ever educated in the nature and history of slavery.  If it is possible for any slave or peasant to be virtuous and to accomplish the understanding of The Slice or even of the Rulers, then they should absolutely have the right to opt out of compliance with organziations put in place to institutionalize the values of the Ruling Class and to leverage civilization. This is, to me the essence of liberty, to limit the panoptics and influence of the institutions of the ruling class in order that every man might fulfill his human potential outside of those institutions. Imagine you are as strong as a stevedore and smart as a teacher and diplomatic to boot. You should be free to opt out of Slice or Ruling Class obligations Consequently, the benefits of institutional membership should be in your Logarithmic Shadow, ie ignored as beneath you. You should be queer or bohemian or hermetic or organic. You should not take up a seat in public school, and you shouldn't have bagboys take your groceries out to your car for you. You should be a man of independent means and your house it's own institution. You should be neither agent nor subject, you should be free.

It is this sort of free man who takes it upon himself to serve dutifully in the Slice or lead dutifully in the Ruling Class. We presuppose that there will be enough volunteers to take up the Mantle. So I conclude that higher standards of virtue must be applied to individuals commensurate with their responsibility over others in their social and functional roles. However the size and scope of institutions must be limited against monopoly and oligopoly. Thus the leverage of the institution and the necessity of its function should not outstrip its ability to be reformed. No institution should be too big to fail, and the failure of any institution should not cripple society but directionally straighten it.  

The risk against tolitarianism is the presumption that powerful institutions which compel obediance to their members is that legitimate human values and virtues of the organization are in conflict with those of smaller human groups. The more powerful the institution the more it creates a chicken-egg situation of which values should predominate. Crossing the organization can cause irreperable harm ot a community which depends on the organizational function. These smaller human groups, these minorities, these communities should not be sacrificed. Certainly free men have the right to assembly, to create their own small institutions independent of those larger more powerful ones. 

--

Trust and the Hacker
James Baldwin wrote that the downside of being a professional is understanding the underside of one's profession. The displeasure of The Slice is more consequential because they understand how the organization they run can be undermined - how their weaknesses can be exploited, or indeed how the organaization's strengths can be abused.  So it comes as no surprise that we expect professionals to swear oaths of loyalty to be virtuous themselves. 

It is therefore, and once again, the virtue of those capable of subverting that keeps the Slice, the profession moral. This is especially notable in the matter of computer security as more of our human institutions attempt to improve their efficicencies and effectiveness via information technology. We pay strict attention to 'black hat' vs 'white hat' hackers. The integrity of all of these institutions are at some risk no matter what, but the very knowledge that enables the professional to create, can equally be used to destroy, and this is the critical point I wish to illustrate. It is the virtue of the human bits that secures the value of the institution to society.  

History Repeating Is OK

"Those who fail to learn the lessons of history are bound to repeat it." -- Some Dude

That's not bad.

People are fascinated by the impossible. The speed of light cannot be exceeded. Minds cannot be read. Time cannot be reversed. God cannot be described. Yet we put ourselves in the position of reading the patterns of the world and knowing, despite the fact that we cannot and do not. We are tool-making apes imagining tools that cannot be made. We are pattern matching chimps predicting the weather and the climate. We are blind logicians describing colors with words. Such things inspire us to be more than we are, and as we bash our heads against the walls of probability, we congratulate ourselves on our imagination despite the fact that we don't know what we're talking about. When we talk about them as if they were in the realm of possibility we call it science fiction.  Such things make human sense, but not absolute sense. They are the mental equivalent of optical illusions. 

My fascination with these illusions issues from my idea about information thermodynamics. It takes a great deal of energy to sustain a belief in a mass of people. But let me introduce another idea into this, which is that in human populations, there are states of equilibrium that are reflective of our evolution and of our society/culture. Rather like the orbits of electrons, there are higher and lower energy states and ionic transfers of knowledge, some of which allow us to function in the normal manner of human society, and some that in our altered state allow us to function at a 'higher' level. 

Hold that thought.

The other evening, as my sleep cycle became disturbed, I found myself listening to someone talk about interstellar travel for the Long Now Foundation. It snapped into focus that any sufficiently long voyage of a space ship crew requiring instructions to be passed from generation to generation would create a very different type of human being. Imagine being born, living and dying in a space ship with 100 crew members. Two generations into the voyage, if it was successful, you would only have an historical representation of society's meaning of the voyage. You could not assert by way of experience that the crew's meaning would be the same as society's meaning. The crew would become society, and their mission would become survival - I'm sure there is lifeboat literature aplenty on this. But what if there were 1000 members in the crew and the destination were 200 years away? What would remain human? Only those things that could not have biologically evolved. Which is to say 99.99999% of the genetic humanity would be identical. The crew would not have generated an ability to.. read minds, reverse time, see radio waves, breathe chlorine.. I say they would become tribal, and I say that tribal society would function the same way it does in any small tribe on Earth. And even if they could all do physics in their heads, there would be a 'dumb' one. And even if they were athletes, there would be a 'slow' one.

The original mission to another solar system would generate the higher energy state of the nations capable of collaborating, designing, building, staffing and funding a colony starship - a huge endeavor. Institutionally, all of the values of those must be maintained for the project to get the starship off the ground. But subsequent to generation one, the institution is the starship itself. The energy level of its normality is at equilibrium. But that can be excited by different energies that were suppressed or redirected in the creation of the endeavor. It will inevitably go off track. 

So what I'm saying are two things. First that if you could harness a global effort of all humanity to populate some distant star, what would arrive there would only be humanity in a genetic way. That its society would deviate from its origins even though the coherence of its institution (the ship) has a life or death discipline. Humanity's purpose for the ship will, outside of the reach of humanity, be ignored for the necessities of the ship itself will take over at the hands of the people in the ship, period. 

Secondly and most importantly I am saying that there are absolute limits on human experience, but like sex, and food and breathing, they remain vital and interesting to humans. We have infinite hunger for our own selves and our own experiences. Outside of our own experiences, our interest tails off, but we still like the smell and sound and feel of our own babies. 

--

In my own Peasant Theory, I assert that the failure of democratic and other institutions will reduce us to feudal arrangements. I would call a feudal arrangement, a lower energy state. It has a structure that is closer to our evolutionary understanding. If we were to devolve even further - if our feudal order collapsed, then we would be reduced to the even lower social energy arrangement of tribalism. I note without much comment in passing that theses equilibria are suitable for smaller populations. If you have only 20 people, a tribe makes sense. If you have 2000, you should probably try a fuedal arrangement. For organizing the activities of 20 million, a kingdom probably won't work. 

I mention this because I have issues with certain Leftist theories about the 'new man' and what sort of institutions (presumeably 'internationalist') should rise humanity to the next energy state of organization above that of nations. And I think that in each of these evolutions, the level of command and control is reduced as the energy level is increased and the number of persons organized increases. The 'energy level' remember, is about information thermodynamics. In the largest organizations, the energy required just to keep track of what the instintution itself is doing becomes a larger and larger fraction. 

I believe that at some point, a human centered institution or collection of institutions reaches their maximum effectiveness. Like the neck length of a dinosaur or giraffe - if there's going to be blood pumped up there with a heart, there is going to be a limit of how tall. If the brain is going to signal reflex actions in the tail, there's going to be a limit of how long. If an instituion is going to be responsive to individuals, there is going to be a limit of how big, how impersonal, how abstracted it can be and still command loyalty. And our starship example explores the dimension of longevity and independence. 

So there may be an arrow of time, but there is not an arrow of human progress that can be mediated by institutions of command and control, of education and meritocracy. But what humans have to learn and generationally will forget, is all of human business, and all of human history. It will repeat. It should repeat. Because to sustain a large and permanent institution degrades the efficiency of humanity itself, which can demonstrably work in smaller, lower energy groups. And they may end up doing so, owing to the failure of larger more expensive institutional arrangements. 

I will say finally that people need to hack. They need to discover the truth of things on their own. People should be impatient in this regard. We cannot wait until we are all certified McDonald's chefs before we are allowed to cook our own hamburgers. We cannot make all of our city mayors attend Harvard Businsess School. We cannot wait until we can predict our lover's every mood before we commit to marriage. Perfect is the enemy of good. Dreaming of the impossible does not actually help us achieve the possible.