How Karma Sticks Like Velcro

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Seeing How Wrong They Were

I don’t really believe in karma. My personal cosmology is based on random chance. My universe popped suddenly into being out of nothingness. This occurred in an unexpected instance of startling cosmic eloquence we call the big bang. It then evolved, along it's own celestial timeline, into that paradoxical confluence of the infinitesimally minute and the immeasurably vast. The place in which a bewildered humanity is forever destined to live out the moments of its brief lives. But the curiousness of how perfectly events unfolded to favor life, consciousness and intelligence is another matter altogether. The fact that it happened at all on this one tiny grain of sand, adrift in an unimaginable, and -- so far -- otherwise lifeless void has not eluded me. Nor has the improbable rarity that on our earth we have the exact conditions necessary for the evolution of life. And that it did happen in just the way it did -- in a universe where even the exact conditions necessary for things as basic as matter and gravity were a tenuous proposition at best. Now, that is something to ponder. But not in the way creationists ponder William Paley's self-evolving clock. I’m not looking for proofs of some divine counterpart to ourselves, busy in her laboratory whipping up flask after flask of parallel universes filled with little creatures, made in her own image, to “know, love and serve” her.

Even the notion of a biocentric universe, where we are just, in reality, a sort of floating brain in space becoming increasingly self aware as consciousness evolves as a part of our physical reality is, while interesting, speculative almost to the point of irrelevance, if not absurdity. So, like the Greeks before me, I don’t know why I’m here. In fact, I don’t believe there is even a reason why. All the reasons history and religion have given us have long since proven to be based on hubris and plain human arrogance. And I refuse to create a celestial sphere with planets and stars hung from it’s walls with crazy glue, as they did. Not because I’m smarter. But because my perch in history gives me the privilege of seeing how wrong they were.

The Pursuit of Social Justice and the Laws of Thermodynamics

And yet, in the beauty of mathematics; in the symmetry of Euclid’s two dimensional geometry, and even in the extraordinary, endlessly recurring proliferation of things in Mandelbrot’s fractal geometry, I can’t help but wonder if karma is itself some sort of inevitable physical reality. One that ultimately brings all things into a kind of cosmic balance. Where one finally finds a pattern to life’s craziness that makes it seem, if not normal, at least acceptably typical. One that lays those disturbing irregular and random bits and pieces of everyday life over with a blanket of recognizable, reassuring, recurring regularity. One that can provide that missing link between notions as diverse as the pursuit of social justice and the laws of thermodynamics.

And for the sake of continuing this metaphorical line of thought, I’m going to take a stab at imagining what that link would look like. Doing so requires the willingness to intellectually “trip the light fantastic” to some degree. It requires a departure from even the illusion of science and a willingness to stretch analogy like taffy to make it fit the framework of argument. So, prepare now to mentally “zoom-in” from the cosmic whole to the micro-personal, viral consciousness of the American ethnic majority in the precarious pursuit of the elusive occurrence of that stuff we call “karma”.

This Unscholarly Hypothesis -- This Convenient Myth -- of Mine

Karma can’t be seen. Nor held in one’s hand. It can’t be examined directly. No telemetry exists to reach out and grab it, or manipulate it in three dimensional form so that it can be analyzed, probed, researched, subjected to trial and error experimentation or otherwise captured for one’s own personal amusement or erudition. Even it’s very existence must be inferred. It must be inferred in the same way that the existence of other multiple physical dimensions are inferred by the secondary behaviors they exhibit in imaginary structures like hypercubes. Like people living in Flat Land we cannot experience the physical reality of karma directly. We have to deduce its existence from the behavior of familiar objects (or social institutions) that we all normally dwell in the midst of. We have to approach it in the same manner that Johann Galle and Heinrich d'Arrest did when they embarked on their mathematical journey to discover why gravity was misbehaving in one small sector of our solar system. A journey that led to the discovery of the phantom planet they knew had to exist to explain that anomaly; which was, of course, the previously unknown planet, Neptune. It has to be approached in the same way that eventually led cosmologists to conclude that gravity itself -- that omnipresent constant of all constants -- behaves differently at the far edges of the universe than it does in the deep space of our own cosmic backyard.

There are, by this unscholarly hypothesis -- this convenient myth -- of mine, no doubt, millions of undetected sparks of karma bombarding our personal realities every second, just as there is an ongoing angry blizzard of radiation particles storming our earth continuously like pieces of hail in the fury of a relentless winter storm. And we feel their hits, even without awareness from whence they come. We feel them not only in the drift of continents, or the upheavals of tsunamis and earthquakes, or in the unexpected molestations of famine, pestilence or disease that have plagued the existence of our species from the beginning. We feel them as well in our non-physical worlds. In our mental constructs. In those social fortresses that we as a species have assembled: in our countries and nation states, in our huts and villages, in our suburbs and cities, in our religions and governments and nuclear families. We even feel them in those personal, singular, existential and visceral pockets of consciousness that constitute that state of physical reality that we describe as life itself. They are there. In the winds of war, as they brush against our faces, chilling our skin even to the bone. In the brutalities we inflict on our own kind and on the other creatures of our planet. And on the planet itself. They are there. Always there. Amid our joys, our loves, our fears, our hatreds, our compassions, our indifference, our commitments, our betrayals of those commitments. They are there in the ticker tape parades, the launching of both rockets and new cities. In the birth of new dreams and in the destruction and death of old ones. They are there at the moment of our conception and at the instant of our passing.

The Plight of the American Ethnic Majority

And they are there for a reason. To restore balance in the presence of dissonance. Not only in the thermodynamic forces that determine how the physical aspects of the universe play out, but even in the playing out of the pursuit of social justice. Consider, for instance the current plight of the American ethnic majority -- the white race. For two thousand years the history of the world has been written by the hand of the white race. It has controlled those institutions of power: governments, religion, technology, social progress, capitalism, democracy and all of those major propensities of civilization that have dominated the earth. If not by argument and intellectual discourse, then by the sword. And yet, at their pinnacle of strength they have repeatedly, in our own time, surrendered that dominance, willingly, by concession. The mighty WASP of the 1950’s has lost so much of its sting. And the power of cultural dominance, which had for two hundred years percolated down from a white aristocracy to those at the bottom now increasingly bubbles upward from the bottom to the top. We see it in the physical icons of culture. In fashion, where the new wardrobes of the rich come not from the boardrooms of corporations and the wives of socialites but from the streets of inner city youth. In music, where rap and hip hop have replaced classical music as the predominant vehicle of the cultural thrust that sets in motion the drive and direction of social and intellectual change. And in art, where kids with cans of spray paint set the new standard of the Avant-garde.

Choosing Victimhood Over Dominance

But, perhaps the most startling change has been the decision of American whites to choose victimhood over dominance as the main method of achieving whatever remaining part of the white American dream that may still be had outside the covers of Time-Life books and 1950‘s television reruns. As they scratch and claw their way to minority status, both in the reality of population decline and in their own mental frame of reference, they increasingly decry the loss of white culture and white dominance to the cultural giants they fear most: affirmative action, the crumbling of evangelical Christianity, the growth of secular humanism, and the culture-wide acceptance of intellectualism over religion as a vehicle of progress. And, in attempting to recapture their depleted vitality, they have beat a path to the backwoods of talk radio, anti-intellectualism and a resurgence of racism and neo-conservative political surrender as a means to achieving those ends.

Even the Language Has Caught Up With Them

So, it has come to past; and yes, it may indeed be a reflection of that elusive factor, karma, that even the language has caught up with them. That even the words that spill from their mouths betray them cruelly; inflicting the unkindest cut of all. That karma has, in effect, seen to it that there is a word of compensation, a word of rhetorical revenge, set down to even the historical score between black and white. A word that dredges up all the hundreds of years of guilt that whites managed to hide under the legendary and celebrated cloth of the American Empire. But the word has stripped away that cloth as surely as it had the emperor of his “new clothes.” Karma has seen to that. Because for two hundred years there never was a word as hurtful , undeserved, hollow, or demeaning as “ nigger“. It carries absolutely no redemptive social value whatsoever. The word “ nigger“ has served as a cruel and maliciously spiteful tool against blacks for centuries. But society has a way of evolving useful new tools when there is a need for them. Now the word “racist” has picked up that utility to a great degree when applied to whites. And now, every time whites hear the word “racist” they cringe. They feel the need to justify themselves. To somehow cleanse themselves. To put distance between themselves and that charge, even when they are not particularly guilty of it. But nothing helps. They literally, viscerally feel the guilt of the “sins of the father“. The charge of racism sticks to whites -- not just in America, but the world over -- as if it were made of Velcro. Yes, it’s unfair to call all whites racists. Like the word "nigger", it triggers the same sense of self loathing, guilt, shame; the same visceral enducement of fear of failure, the need to cover up the truth -- even when the truth is innocence. It impels one to deny the undeniable. It triggers the need to deny the word itself and it's reality: that the very word “racist” is now the new “nigger”. And that, in short, if such a thing exists, is karma.


How Karma Sticks Like Velcro by jimmi malarky is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.
Based on a work at malarkyspond.blogspot.com.
Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available at http://malarkyspond.blogspot.com/.

Of Paper Cups and Permanence ( A Tone Poem for the Tone Deaf)

I've always considered some things in life as being disposable. I’m not talking about diapers, cameras, or paper cups. Nor am I talking about the social extremes of our crumbling and crippled culture: disposable spouses (and the disposable -- or “wash and wear“ -- wedding gowns they logically infer). Or the disposable children who are the unclaimed progeny of delinquent husbands, wayward wives; and all those sexual kleptomaniacs, social negligents and sex-ed truants who are plainly too lazy, stupid or uninformed to use a condom. Neither am I speaking of the “disposable poor”. Those locked out of the safety net of the middle and upper classes, well beyond the sights of those within America’s gated communities. Well beyond access to a living wage, health insurance, decent and affordable housing, or the benefits of higher education, meaningful careers or the distant promise of a dignified retirement and old age. I’m not speaking of all these because they lie well outside the menagerie of “must haves” that comprise the life goals of the American Dream. And those are the real obstacles to curing the weightier problems mentioned above. Disposable items in my list are and always have been the simpler things that we, as a consumption based culture just “can’t do without.“ They are bicycles, lawn mowers, wide screen TV’s, cars and car loans, houses and mortgages, and all the other chattels that comprise the “clutter“ of “the good life“ in America. I don’t own them. Or, if I do, I own them in their cheapest, ugliest, refurbished and most undesirable forms. With the clear intention of using them and disposing of them. I take no particular pleasure in conspicuous consumption or in the ownership of property in any form. Neither do I borrow to own. I have never had a bank loan. Never borrowed to pay for anything that I cannot finance out of pocket. It’s not a matter of just saving cash -- although it does; and throughout my life it has. It’s just my stubborn refusal to participate in society in the way people who actually read the directions do. It’s a matter of simplicity. The kind of simplicity that Henry David Thoreau sought to achieve in escaping to Walden Pond. (Or, even the type of simplicity I seek to escape to in Malarky’s pond). It’s the need to flee what Thoreau described when he said that “Most men lead lives of silent desperation”. (And, today, of course, “most men” also include “most women” as they aspire to, and finally achieve, the sorts of things that “most men” always were free to chase after.

To that end, I have never borrowed from a bank. Only purchased a home after saving the cash to pay for it and only then to quiet the whining of in-laws that paying rent was “throwing money away.” Only purchased a refrigerator because my wife would not keep our meat on a pole in the back yard in winter. Only run the most used of used cars from “Larry‘s Last Leg Used Car Lot“. I only take generic medicine to cure my ills. I only eat generic food from generic cans with plain white labels. I listen to my own music that I write myself. And I read this blog that I write myself, and anything else that I can lay hands on that is free. In short, I have a black belt in deferred gratification. And, no, if you’re wondering -- it’s really not that I’m cheap. It’s just that I don’t give a damn. Stuff just doesn’t matter to me. Stuff clutters our closets. It takes up the space in our homes that used to be used for living. It requires dusting. It requires washing. Buying it requires your long-term participation as a wage-slave or indentured servant to the same people who sell it to you. For most, it requires a down payment. Monthly interest payments. Credit -- on the approval of a banking hierarchy that would decline to shake your hand at the closing of a deal least you infect them with the germs of a common person. Who would take your money, but would not have you as a member of their country club. And almost nothing that is pushed on us by the predators on Madison Avenue is actually necessary to either our survival or our quality of life. Not the automobiles. Not the electronic gadgets. Not the “buy now pay later” furniture. Not the big screen TV’s. Nothing. Because none of those things really enhance our lives. Our brains do. And our brains are all that is needed to experience the world around us, even in it’s natural, digitally “unenhanced” state. That’s because 90% of what is important in life occurs between our ears. The other 10% occurs between our legs. And beyond that nothing is important. We think it is. We’re told it is. We’re prodded into a lifestyle of mindless “consumption for the sake of consumption” to enable the few wealthy among us to become ever richer, while the invisible poor of the third world go without food and die daily from starvation. And we increasingly deplete the earth’s resources so that tomorrow’s generations will lead lives far worse than those of the “silent desperation” that Thoreau spoke of. So, am I too extreme? I am hardly radical at all by some standards.

There are others who have lived even more extreme lives than I. There are the few who hold down good paying full time jobs, but choose to live only slightly above the level of “dumpster divers.” They choose to live in their vans for years so that they can achieve things like buying their first home for cash or escaping the rat race and retiring early. I managed to do that; even without going to those extremes, but they are still the sort of people I admire: The ones who, from early on, choose to walk away from the normal paths that others look to impose on them. The ones who ignore the admonitions of the high school guidance counselors, parish priests, evangelical preachers, politicians and harebrained, role modeling, laxative-gulping anal-retentives who manage to float to the top of the toilet bowl of the social order.

I aspire to a simpler life, a simpler time. One that followed the era when our ancestors first climbed down from trees, lost their tails, sprouted the enhanced neural networks we have today, and became hunter-gatherers. It was a good time to be alive. A time when our hands still clung tightly to the bosom of the earth, even while our opposable thumbs reached out, beyond our grasp, to the yet to be born notions of Descartes and Hume and Lock and Nietzsche. It was a time when the “starry starry night” existed both in nature and in ourselves. That culture must have lingered among human kind for a million years before the first chump noticed that those seeds inside wild tomatoes could hit the ground running and magically give birth to an entirely new crop. And so began the vicious cycle that we know today as agrarianism, the ownership of property, morality, law, religion, banking, war, slavery, industrialization, and all of those things that we as a society today hold dear. The things which, I like to say, follow us all -- from the cradle of civilization to the grave of entropy. They are -- all of them -- the things I would most like, in my life, to ignore.

Today we are gathered as human beings on the threshold of the final ripening of humanity. It is the equivalent of no simple “senior-moment” in our history. It is an “evolutionary-moment”. One which will determine whether the next epoch will include humanity among the surviving or the extinct species of the earth. We will survive as a species only if we are willing to learn to postpone gratification so that our progeny will inherit the means and necessities of survival. And it will happen only if we allocate the resources of the earth equitably and sustainably, not just for the next 40 years, but for the next million.
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Of Paper Cups and Permanence ( A Tone Poem for the Tone Deaf) by jimmi malarky is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.
Based on a work at malarkyspond.blogspot.com.
Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available at http://malarkyspond.blogspot.com/.

I’m OK (and You’re even Better ! )

Life is a trap. The ultimate roach motel. With every decision, You lock yourself into another compartment with no apparent exit. And most choices either seem like a good idea at the time; or you are simply forced into them by the willfulness of a more muscular predator. And, of course, time -- outside the realm of quantum mechanics -- only flows in one direction. Even if you could reverse directions, would the past be at all plastic? Could it really be lived out in a different manner? Could one choose new paths? Could one find out what was behind “door number two” instead of having gone through “door number one” as per plan “A” of one’s life. Well, maybe not. I mean what’s done is done. Maybe that path you took is built. In place. Not alterable. Maybe if you altered it, what you would be doing is not really changing the past, but instead living an entirely new life, and so, in the process building an alternative, side by side, life parallel to the one you already lived.

That’s the idea behind parallel universes. It’s like trillions of “you’s” making trillions of decisions about your parallel lives and living them all out in another dimension of hyperspace. But are all those other “you’s” really you? I mean, you are not aware of them now. And if you are unaware of them, and they are not aware of you, then are they you or are you them in any meaningful sense? It’s like having a trillion clones. Or one. No matter how perfect a duplicate, you are still not the same. You don’t share the same conscious memories or awareness of the present moment.

Yes, it’s possible that at some point in time we will be able to share one another’s experiences in a meaningful way, just by “plugging in” to one another’s neural networks. Physically. It involves mapping the human brain much the same as we have already mapped the human genome. And then recreating it in an accessible digital format. It’s the kind of world that guys like Ray Kurtzeil describe. And, then it wouldn’t matter that you aren’t dealing with clones of yourself. You could live other lives simply by sharing the vast archive of human “present moments” that would be storable in digital format. It would no longer be necessary to limit yourself to one life, as we have for all of human history up until the present. In fact, from the moment that the task is accomplished, it will create for us a sort of virtual time travel, back to the point where the first brain copy was created. We would no longer have to speculate or reconstruct history, as we do in today’s fiction and rhetorical academic efforts.

And maybe that’s an essential part of “human nature”, as we call it -- to be able to live multiple lives. To live without limiting our experience to our own streams of consciousness. That’s essentially why we have language. To share with one another that which is not a part of the other’s experience. To end the loneliness of personal existential singularity, by achieving the ultimate communal singularity. To crawl into one another’s heads and see if their lives might have been worth living instead of or in addition to our own. It’s why we have books, literature, libraries, theater and all the exploding choices of media experience that are evolving today. Maybe it’s even why we have cheating husbands, wayward wives.

Of course, our brains are probably too tiny for all of this. And so, that means we will need to enhance them. To merge them physically with artificial intelligence via bio-micro-processing. And given the tendency for micro circuits to become ever more compact (although there are probably quantum limits to how small our digital devices can become) this looks realistically achievable. Just as bionics is enhancing our muscular and skeletal strength toward our becoming a race of “super-people” (and even, unfortunately, “super-soldiers” to better destroy ourselves through war), so too will our rush for singularity take us with ever increasing speed into the future -- one of “super-consciousness” -- the final Singularity. The final coming together of the ancient concept of the alpha and the omega.

And when we have, at long last, lived out all those trillions of alter-lives, will it have finally been worth it? And will we even still have to ask? They say, “if you have to ask…” Well, you know what I‘m saying.
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I’m OK (and You’re even Better ! ) by jimmi malarky is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.
Based on a work at malarkyspond.blogspot.com.
Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available at http://malarkyspond.blogspot.com/.

Is the End in Sight? -- Why the Extinction of Entire Civilizations Happens

Was their any inkling to the average sap in late antiquity that the dark ages were about to descend ? Was the fall of Rome perhaps a hint? Apparently not. Humanity was essentially clueless about the millennium-long unfolding of plague, warfare, torture and cultural decline that was about to commence. And long before that, the ice age, too, seems to have happened unexpectedly -- and rapidly -- catching so many misfortunate mammals; freezing them right in the act of taking a shit or finishing lunch. So that thousands of years latter the likes of us could dig them out of the glaciers and marvel at how they still had a mouthful of fresh half-chewed chow sitting between their jaws; ironically wondering how random chance allowed this to happen so long before the age of the Frigidaire.

Extinction doesn’t just happen to humped back Wales or platypus ducks. Even whole civilizations, on occasion decide to exit the scene without prior notice. The Aztecs did it -- or had it done to them. Maybe the Antlantians did it. That was so long ago that we don’t remember, and can’t quite decide whether Plato, when he wrote about them, was spinning out a work of history or fiction (something like the problem we have today in deciphering Faux News’ accounts of current events). Add to these vanished civilizations the stories of the Mayans, the Moche of Peru, the destruction of Pompeii, and the handful of other documented but now extinct super-cultures that once dominated their little part of paradise on earth, and the old Malthusian warnings about famine, war, pestilence and disease seem a little closer and less surreal than they normally do as we make our way from Wendy’s to Home Depot and Wal-Mart, hunting and gathering along our daily path to survival in the post-modern age.

So, what’s in store for ourselves? Is technology going to save us? Or, maybe, be our ruination? Is there any way, short of simple guessing to see what the future holds for America, or for the western world, Or the third world, or simply for the Earth in it’s entirety? Maybe. But probably not. What ensures the survival of entire cultures and empires -- even our own -- from the cradle of civilization to the unmarked grave of entropy, is perhaps more hit and miss (or in the case of Atlantis “hit and myth”) than any of us might ever imagine.


Both the extinction and the survival of civilizations may be more or less a matter of dumb luck. It is entirely dependent on the coincidental evolutionary ability to deal with unexpected developments in the world around us. It’s that serendipitous process that we have come to attribute to “natural selection“ and the “survival of the fittest”. And, more often than not the over-confident and misguided attempts of our societal planners to anticipate complex social problems leads to results not unlike that of the paradox of the suicidal twin who mistakenly kills his own brother.


Communication, Commerce and A Common Cultural Heritage: How Three Important Civilizing Cornerstones are Crumbling

The obvious problems of great magnitude that confront us as a civilization, are of course, firstly, the ones that have been debated for centuries, and rightfully have continued to be, and, secondly, the ones that have only come into view in the last few decades. Simply stated they are: 1) Overpopulation and the ability of the earth’s resources to sustain that ever increasing base of the universal human tribe. And 2) The perilously wobbling balance of the world’s ecosystem, made increasingly thin by the act of human living itself. But these things, are monumental. They go far beyond the mere survival of civilizations. They determine the survival of the species itself. They threaten not so much to send us back to an agrarian past. They threaten to send us all to an early grave. And from that there is, of course, no comeback. The mere collapse of civilization, by contrast, is something that has happened repeatedly in our past and will likely reoccur perhaps even in predictable cycles. It is a problem that we can deal with -- albeit, after the fact. It’s the predicting part that gets tricky.

I stated a few paragraphs above: “ …Both the extinction and the survival of civilizations may be more or less a matter of dumb luck. It is entirely dependent on the coincidental evolutionary ability to deal with unexpected developments in the world around us. It’s that serendipitous process that we have come to attribute to “natural selection“ and the “survival of the fittest”. “ To that end I would like to look at three endangered aspects of our own American culture that look to be the sorts of Achilles’ heels that, one could speculate, might, in fact, be capable of bringing down a civilization -- even our own. They comprise three essential cornerstones of that civilization -- communications, commerce and the common cultural Heritage -- that are very much immersed in a less than obvious sort of cultural chaos simply by nature of the fact that we swim, fish and play in their waters on a daily basis. So much so that we are lulled into an unsuspecting sleep, and a dream that these things will go on undisturbed eternally. But, most likely, they won’t. Better we remember that melancholy poetic caveat of T.S. Eliot about the end of the misguided life of Prufrock:

"We have lingered in the chambers of the sea
By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown
Till human voices wake us, and we drown. "

The Digital Age: How it Wastes Our Time, Tries our Tempers and Fails our Expectations

We are convinced today that we live in a world made better by a conversion from analog to digital technology. And while all of us are understandably awed by that ubiquitous flooding of information into our daily lives, we are not necessarily all the better for that. Have we taken what was simple and digestible to the homo sapien mind and made it complex to the point of being beyond the limits of usability? Is it possible that “user-friendliness” has inherent limits beyond which we cannot go in a capitalist society; one determined to cut costs to the bone by eliminating every aspect of human utility?

How the New Hardware of Communications Determines its Content

Fifty years ago, Marshall McLuhan told us simply, that “the medium is the message”. It made a nice looking paperback on the racks of Burns’ drugstore in my hometown. And so, of course, while other kids were preoccupied with playing baseball, I snatched it up. It was prophetic. Today that is so easy to see. Take for instance, how the “new and improved” economic order of our own times compares to that of the less technologically sophisticated world of only 50 years ago. In the America I grew up in in the 1960’s there were a multitude of simple devices that, while still around “in spirit“, have been technologically enhanced, or “super under-sized” if you will. For instance, there was the telephone. For about 90 years, since 1876 when it was invented, it had changed little. It was a simple and reliable device that depended on human support (telephone operators) and a nationwide network of copper wiring that also transmitted to homes the electricity coming from our system of electrical grids. Public companies provided not only the basic equipment to consumers, but also were able to service the devices, usually on the same day that a complaint was received. They also provided a network of public phone booths so that consumers away from their “plugged in the wall” phones could make calls conveniently from distant points. And it was all done in an affordable manner. Then in 1973, the first cordless cell phone was introduced and there was a revolution underway in communications.


But, is communication actually better today? I would argue , no. Because, you see, while phones have become portable, lighter in weight, and reliant on digital instead of human driven technology, they have at the same time -- unexpectedly -- become much less reliable. For those who actually use cell phones, the annoyances of “dropped calls”, excessive monthly costs and usage fees, hours wasted in poor service reporting (“Your call will be answered in the order it was received. Please stay on the line. Your call is important to us…”) is obvious. In fact, it is just as obvious to non-users who watch the endless unapologetic hours of television commercials based on the “Can you hear me now?” problem that is ubiquitous in the cell phone industry. And we may as well mention now the health threats related to cell phone usage that were never a concern prior to the digital age. In addition, the telecom industry has managed to transfer the cost of distant calling from their own corporate ledgers onto the shoulders of consumers, as public telephone booths have all but disappeared in the last few decades.

You Are What You Read, and Watch on the Tube

And now, the same can even be said of the, increasingly unreliable, electric grid that transfers power to the millions of American homes around the nation. They, along with the whole infrastructure network of the country, including roads, bridges, interstate highways and power generating systems have been neglected to the point where they are not only frequently nonfunctional, but represent a public safety hazard. Yet political leaders continue to pacify the tax paying public that what is needed to solve these problems are not tax increases, but even more tax relief -- especially for that segment of the population most able to pay such increases. And that, of course, is because that same segment of rich and affluent Americans (and even some foreign nationals) have been busy for the past 40 years motoring up the media. They have used it to promote, with the relentless urgency of a war-time propaganda machine, the message of the Chicago School of Economics, that greed is good, that a nation can prosper on endless consumption without the need to ever produce anything useful, and that the natural price of prosperity is the presence of a permanent poor working underclass. And it has worked. It has worked because the new technology aligns itself so well with an old strategy, put simply: “If you can’t dazzle them with brilliance, then baffle them with bullshit.“ They did. And the American people bought into it. Into the whole theology of downward mobility -- from the necessity of two-income families to the inevitability of balloon mortgages that preclude the possibility of significant home equity without the assist of the
invisible hand of inflation. Into the myth that “entitlement” is the natural custody of multinational corporations and not the claim ordinary workers make on that part of the gross national product that was generated from the sweat of their own brows. They did so as the news media increasingly morphed from being news into a kind of perpetual “infomercial” of the sort that saturates the Faux network today. McLuhan had warned us that all advertising is news. But, also, that all advertising is always only “good news”. And as all news became all advertising, all news became good news -- even bad news. The deaths of soldiers and civilians in Iraq and Afghanistan became the good news of the transplanting of democracy into the Middle East, instead of the bad news of the mutilation of human beings for the gluttonous acquisition of oil. And similarly, the bad news of massive downward social mobility and the disappearance of the American middle class became the good news of permanent lower taxation and the triumph of all American capitalism over godless socialism. And it made the new politics of consumption (even when it was the eating of one’s own body parts) not only palatable, but absolutely mouth watering.

As the American tax system has become increasingly less progressive over the past 40 years - since the Reagan administration -- we have witnessed both a massive transfer of wealth from the working middle class into the hands of our wealthiest citizens and a simultaneous deterioration of those public services and infrastructures designed to service that very same middle class. But it is illusion to believe that the progressive income tax (the marginal rate of which was 90% for the richest taxpayers during the moderate, Republican, Eisenhower presidency) can be expected to deliver comparable reliable public services at the current 35% top marginal rate on capital gains (which are the largest source of income for the rich) instituted under the Bush tax cuts. And the rich, of course do not have to deal with the problem of cheapened public technology since they can afford to pay the cost of enhanced private communication networks which are beyond the economic reach of the middle class.

How did this happen? How did a progressive, strong, organized, unionized middle class -- one that had persisted and flourished for 40 years from Roosevelt to Reagan suddenly come undone? It did so with the assistive hand of the new technology. A hand which reached not only into the pockets of ordinary Americans, but into their brains; erasing old content and replacing it with new. Replacing the notion of common social responsibility for the many -- that venerable idea known as the “social contract” with the neo-conservative notion of an “ownership society”. But it neglected to tell ordinary Americans, the inheritors of a disappearing middle class, that they themselves were to become the owned.

Next, Part 2: “How Our Banking System Fails Us Now”
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Is the End in Sight? -- Why the Extinction of Entire Civilizations Happens by jimmi malarky is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.
Based on a work at malarkyspond.blogspot.com.
Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available at http://malarkyspond.blogspot.com/.

The Revenge of the Smut-Bot : Is Freedom of Speech a Dirty Word in Altoona, PA?

There was a time when there were only “7 Dirty Words” (Well, maybe only 7 worth knowing) at least according to the late cultural hero and iconoclast, George Carlin. George actually managed to turn his mockery of verbal hypocrisy in the 1960’s and 1970’s into a very successful full time career. But Carlin came up with that routine when things were still done manually. You had to, more or less, sort through dictionaries by hand to discover the dirty words (and dictionaries actually made that more difficult, since they had already laundered the list by removing all the really good dirty words in advance.) That meant that you had to become the equivalent of a modern “dumpster diver” to actually discover really dirty words in the 1960’s. You had to go into those slimy, smelly public restroom stalls in movie theaters and check one wall after another for whatever dirty word might still have escaped erasure by the manager. Or, if that kind of anthropological field work turned your stomach, you had to dig through the few available literary works that might actually contain dirty words. Like the collected works of Lenny Bruce. Or maybe the poetry of Alan Ginsberg. The side benefit to that being that you got yourself a truly eclectic and progressive education. The bad side (at least in my home town ) was that you had to hang out endlessly in equally filthy hole-in-the-wall places like Whitey’s News (No, my home town was neither Watts, nor Harlem) reading books on the sly that, as a kid, you never had enough money to buy (and certainly couldn‘t ask your parents to finance). But it was a hobby with its own rewards. At least until Whitey himself noticed your side interest in the endless racks of girly magazines in the rear of the store, and not so diplomatically suggested it was time for you to move on. Or failing all that, you could just ask Robby Flynn. Now there was a kid designed for a career in linguistics, with a minor in advanced theoretical rhetorical filth.


But still, the limits of available source materials usable in the scholastic pursuit of the linguistic appreciation of smut were, for the most part, constrained to the acquisition of information primarily through the oral tradition. I mean you were pretty much limited to screaming and recieving variations on the “Your Mother…” paradigm. And while that model served well for much of the later twentieth century -- helping resolve some of the most pressing cultural and social conflicts of the time (at least for those of us in the 12 to 18 year age bracket), it was not until the coming of the information age that the dissemination of verbal filth saw a rebirth, not unlike that experienced in the 18th century age of enlightenment after Guttenberg introduced the printing press, with its astonishing unleashing of ideas that led to an exponential growth in the availability of trivial information about which literally “everyman” could argue both pointlessly and endlessly. In short, it was a good time to be alive!


It is said (probably far more often than necessary) that history repeats itself. In fact, that quotation, arguably, has repeated itself far more often than history ever will. But, more to the point, one would be remiss not to draw parallels between the introduction of Guttenberg’s movable type and Bill Gates’ personal “movable feast” which made “type” itself -- the written word -- available to all, immediately, indiscriminately and ubiquitously. And, of course, once again, it resulted in a new epiphany of knowledge of all sorts; not the least of which was that in the continuing tradition of the pursuit of a new vocabulary of filth.


One almost expects to see a fly in the ointment, in the oil that greases the wheels of progress, no matter in what age technical and social evolution make their great advances. And so, it is no surprise that there are those out there, lurking silently, working by night, unknown faces, cunning and unnamed digital artisans under the employ of some evil and nefarious supervision seeking to thwart the pace of progress. And so it is with our beloved home town paper, the Altoona “Rear View” Mirror -- an institution that has spanned both the 18th and 21st century in one superhuman leap, publishing both by morning in movable type and around the clock through the marvel of the internet -- that the ugly and Orwellian face of censorship of the press has revealed itself. And it has done this in the form of the ugly Altoona Mirror “Smut-Bot”.


The purpose of this evil contraption, this Smut-Bot, is to digitally search and destroy any and all words that might even in the slightest way violate the covenant of political correctness. And it takes no enemies. Collateral damage be damned. With full tolerance for Friendly Fire. It takes the good words out along with the bad. The first and the foremost along with the filth.


Mirror readers are invited to join their community in the fullest sense by inputing their digital comments to many of the articles and editorials appearing daily in the Mirror. And they do. At a furious pace. But they do this only to find that many of their words are deleted without warning by the Smut-Bot. With the speed of the hand of god, it transforms its readers’ words into simple strings of asterisks. Not just obviously “dirty” words. Not just the “f” word. Nor just the word for excrement. Even silly comments like “You might be a redneck… if” turn instantly into cryptic strings of the sort that read: “You may be a ******* if…” And you might expect even that much. But the Smut-Bot is not content with the obvious. It’s mission is to seek out and destroy. But in finding and destroying obvious offenders its sense of power grows. It begins to remove all words that could be potentially construed to be offensive to any group in any way. So, you begin to notice other kinds of words being removed. Words like “Jew”. (Making an ongoing discussion of ,say, the Holocaust all but impossible. Words like “Hell” automatically become transformed into “****”, making the frequently discussed topics of creationism, evolution, religion and the invariable and urgent human need for an expletive, simply unattainable. Even the word “heroin” disappears into a string of asterisks, becoming “ ****** ”, distracting from discussions of community drug problems. No one knows the length of the list of forbidden words, nor of how many new ones are added daily. No one has a copy of the “dictionary of the deleted”. Except that new-age scribe pulling his levers and turning his knobs in the digital dungeon somewhere in lost halls of the Altoona “Rear View” Mirror. Oddly enough, there is still one questionable word that can slip through the Smut-Bot unnoticed: "Transvestite "! I wonder -- does that tell us something about the mysterious keeper of the butt, er, the “Bot”?


So, where are the Tea Parties, the Candle Light Vigils, the angry commentary of talking media heads and talk show hosts to protest this intrusion into free speech? Where are the defenders of words. Of all words. Even dirty words? Where have you gone, George Carlin?
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The Revenge of the Smut-Bot : Is Freedom of Speech a Dirty Word in Altoona, PA? by jimmi malarky is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.
Based on a work at malarkyspond.blogspot.com.
Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available at http://malarkyspond.blogspot.com/.

The Invisible Hand of the Market and The Illusion of a Capitalist Utopia

Adam Smith, long before Marx, understood the notion of “class struggle“. In fact, it was Smith who first gave us the phrase, the “laboring poor” so often used to describe those who struggle the hardest in our country today, in its variant form, the “working poor”. Smith understood that whatever gains were derived from the new system of “capitalism” (a word not yet in use in his own time) were extracted from the never ending toil of the many to the benefit of the relative few. The irony in all of this is the fact that while Adam Smith today is seen as an icon of neo-conservative ideology, his “Wealth of Nations” was never intended to be an economics text, but rather a moral and social commentary. It sought not to provide an entrepreneurial formula for success, but rather an understanding of the rapid transformation of social and political structure that was giving birth in the 18th century to the new and previously untried notion of capitalism.


Another phrase he gave us was the “invisible hand” of the market. It’s what conservative talk show hosts, republican want-to-be political candidates and ball cap wearing neo-cons everywhere so passionately evoke in their fervent defense of everything capitalistic. And somehow that’s fitting. Because they are the exact group that Smith had in mind when he invented that phrase: those who were a little too dim-witted to read and pick up on the meaning of the original arguments in his text. Smith used the analogy of the invisible hand because he knew that some coffee-house readers in the age of enlightenment were (like today’s talk-radio “ditto-heads”) less than well educated and required the benefit of a simpler illustration to convey the point of his argument.


There’s no loss of irony in the use of the “invisible hand” metaphor by today’s political right -- especially the Christian right. As with religion, they are true believers. To them, the invisible hand is much more than a symbolic figure of speech. It is a reality. As real to them as the resurrection of Christ or the Second Coming. And they are just as intent on imposing it on the rest of us as they are their religious ideology. As in their determination to codify their divine directives into the law of the land, from the yearning for a public display of the ten commandments in every courthouse, to the repression of the teaching of evolution in our public schools to the full and complete overturning of Roe, the Christian right seeks to impose a complete and unrestrained version of capitalism on America. But not the capitalism of Adam Smith -- rather, the capitalism of Milton Friedman.


Awaiting Utopia: A New Moses and A New Promised Land


The idea of unrestrained capitalism is akin to that of religious dogma to the neo-con mind. If only “liberals” and “socialists” -- their depreciatory designations for those of us who favor the workable pragmatism of a mixed economy, including a progressive income tax, a social safety network, class egalitarianism, and movement away from a war and weapons based economy -- would go away, we could all find total fulfillment in the Chicago School notion of a total free market economy. And this would all, of course, be flawlessly guided by the transcendent Invisible Hand of the free market.


For forty years -- from Reganomics through the tax cuts of Bush II, the invisible hand has guided us, like the hand of god for forty years guided Moses, leading his people through the desert back to the promised land, until now we finally stand upon the very edge of the precipice, awaiting the next neo-con messiah (1) who will finally part the waters and lead us, all of us -- the chosen people of god -- into the new Capitalist Utopia. A Utopia that Adam Smith would never recognize.
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(1) Who will it be? Palin? Huckabee? or some even more sinister and shadowy dark horse emerging from the (by then) freshly cremated ashes of John McCain? I don’t know. Watch for him/her. Will you know “the one” from the “666” burned into their forehead…or by the sign “HICK” pasted on their back by some scheming, underhanded liberal?
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The Invisible Hand of the Market and The Illusion of a Capitalist Utopia by jimmi malarky is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 United States License.
Based on a work at malarkyspond.blogspot.com.
Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available at http://malarkyspond.blogspot.com/.

Squandering the American Dream: Was it a Sin?

The following letter emanates from the tiny and charming town of Martinsburg, Pennsylvania -- our neighbor to the south. It was titled “Sins ‘hamstring’ us”, and appeared in the September 26, 2009 issue of the Altoona Mirror. I think it says something important about things that scare us all about America today. And it says it clearly in the sort of language that we can understand best. These are the things that real people -- not television talking heads -- worry about. I’ve reprinted it here, followed by a few thoughts of my own:


When the president talks about a "prescription" for our health care troubles, and economists talk about a "prescription" for the economy, they leave out something even more important to be dealt with and that is this nation's moral and ethical bankruptcy.
Trying to accomplish anything on the financial front is akin to putting the proverbial cart before the horse.
Our overall national health demands that we first and foremost walk back the national "sins" that actually hamstring us as it relates to, once again, becoming what God and our founding fathers envisioned for this great nation.
As a country, we will no longer be able to thumb our collective noses at God with respect to issues such as abortion, gay marriage, our advocation of the gay lifestyle in general, alcoholism and rampant drug abuse, people in positions of power abusing that power, etc., while pleading with him to restore our nation to sound financial footing.
When I hear politicians deliver stirring speeches and ask God to bless America, it really does ring hollow.
I have, and will continue to maintain, that Americans need to be as vigilant on the social and moral issues of our time as the economic ones.
Cameron L. Sprow
Martinsburg

Malarky's Reply to Mr. Sprow:

Cameron,

We do need to be even more vigilant on social and moral issues than economic ones. On that, you and I agree. I lived in Martinsburg for some years; and this is just an observation, not a criticism, but the air is clearer there than it is in Altoona. People know right from wrong and pretty much agree on which is which. But simply a few miles north, to the Hollidaysburg and Altoona areas, you begin to see god and his intentions "through a glass" just an ever smaller bit more "darkly", as St. Paul might have put it.

Maybe it’s because there are more poor people here, both socially and economically. Maybe it’s because of the lack of good Mennonites and Baptists and the multitude of churches we see on every corner of little Martinsburg. Maybe it’s because people actually build their entire lives around those churches and take what their ministers say seriously. Maybe it’s even because Martinsburg still has decent neighborhoods with people living in decent houses and working hard and saving and keeping in touch with neighbors and families. I don’t know. But something is different as you move northward in Blair county.

Things get more complicated. Choices become harder. We listen less to the words that our ministers actually say from their pulpits. People struggle harder -- not work harder -- but actually “struggle” harder. They struggle for things that have nothing to do with god or morality or sin. They struggle for more junk from Wal-Mart. For more expensive tennis shoes for their kids. For more exciting vacations in places much farther away. And they don’t stop much to wonder where god really fits into the picture. They wonder what Glenn Beck thinks, or O’Riley or Hannity. But, not god.

Of course, the further north you go, the more pronounced the difference seems to become. By the time you reach State College, well, it’s like you’ve arrived in a whole other world. Not that that's bad -- but it is noticeably, maybe even a little uncomfortably, different to those of us to the south. The people not only don’t think the same -- they don’t even look the same. Many don’t even have their normal conversations in English. And openly gay people look much more at home there too. They fit in, for the most part, without raising an eyebrow. No one much thinks about homosexuality being a problem at all. Abortion (and the idea of reproductive rights) is pretty much a given too. (I guess those among us who can't afford to raise children decently are reluctant to have them at all. And perhaps that makes good sense.) There are, of course, still people and organizations there who hold meetings to protest both. And, I imagine, in the privacy of their living rooms, well all sorts of words are spoken about these things, because, you see, some of them remember too the way things were once.

Personally, I think that some of the things that are different about today's world are desirable. Like diversity of the sort that enables people different than ourselves to live happy, productive and open lives. A world where the expectation is upon us to try to understand why some among us are differently oriented in terms of gender or social preferences. One where the law, at least, insures that race is so much less a barrier to belonging to one’s community. But other aspects of today's America are clearly a step backward.

I guess that if we want to see some of the more sinister things you talk about go away, we all need to turn back the clock about 70 years. Turn it back to the era between the 1930’ and 1960’s, when ordinary Americans were growing more prosperous instead of poorer. When kids graduating from school could pretty much take for granted that they were going to be able to get decent paying jobs -- union jobs. (You see, "Union" was actually still a good word back then.) And those were jobs that would enable them to support a family on one income, so that parents (with the regrettable exception of single parents) had sufficient time to devote to raising their children. To actually teaching them right from wrong, instead of only having the time to bribe them with a pair of $100 tennis shoes before cutting out the door to work their second jobs. Without leaving them under the care of the television networks to teach them about morality. To give those kids and parents sufficient time together as a family that they weren’t bored enough to look for other things, like drugs, to keep them occupied.

When so many people are so comparatively poor and have, at the end of the day, only enough time to watch television shows that dwell on the lives of people more affluent and successful than they themselves could ever imagine becomming, they begin to think that maybe there’s something wrong with their local neck of the woods. Maybe that’s part of the crawling, noticeable difference between life in Martinsburg, Hollidaysburg, Altoona and State College.

Maybe the higher the number of McDonald’s and Wal-Marts there are, the poorer paying the jobs become, and the longer and harder we need to work to just make ends meet. And the less time we have to simply live our lives. So, maybe the problem really does have a financial solution. Maybe we need to get our economic house in order again. To turn back the clock to a time when jobs paid a living wage, and could be counted on to provide simple necessities like health care, a regular 40 hour week, union protection, vacations that people could take as families, and where those families could survive well even on one wage long enough to see that their kids grew up getting the attention they needed. And if private industry continues -- as it has for the past 40 years, since the time of Reagan -- to fail to step up to the plate, then it is time, once again, for government to do it -- as it did in the 1930’s under Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal.

Perhaps then the moral and social problems would pretty much take care of themselves. I’m just not sure that that’s going to happen. Because of that other problem you mentioned -- the “people in positions of power abusing that power.” They aren’t likely to go away. And their personal “sins” will indeed continue to “hamstring us”. The politicians, the business owners, the “community leaders”, the excessively wealthy among us -- they all have too much to loose financially to allow change to happen. No, we are just going to have to get a lot smarter -- and a lot better educated -- if we really want to get back to the kind of America you and I both obviously want so badly.

TSquandering the American Dream: Was it a Sin? by jimmi malarky is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.
Based on a work at malarkyspond.blogspot.com.
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