August 29, 2009 · 8:55 pm

The truth and change, 2: Technoredemption Goes Pro

house-of-tomorrow

The House of Tomorrow, 1933, Indiana version

In the first installment of The truth and change, I wrote about how the Enlightenment gave us a new kind of science and social discourse that pictured a perfectible mankind, which would be the basis of real democracy and freedom in the future.  Yet it was really a Greek tragedy.

Jefferson snubbed the ancients by declaring that there will be something new under the sun, and a hundred years later the world embarked on a century that would witness versions of apocalypse previously imaginable only in epics and divine texts.  Everything that the Enlightenment made it possible to imagine, it also made it possible to destroy.  That was the dilemma of my generation . . .

Technoredemption Goes Pro

The 1933 Chicago World’s Fair gave us the “House of Tomorrow,” which still stands in Indiana and at 78 years old combines the future and past in one space.  Like most dream houses created since the 1930s, it has a double garage, with a twist – one for an automobile and one for the airplane that “World’s Fair optimists assumed every future family would own …”

One can only imagine how this garage has played out of time – rumpus room, game room, massive mud room, cluttered workshop where grandpa used to build boats in bottles, and now the place where mom and dad surf the internet when the other isn’t looking.

The House of Tomorrow held out a vision of the future at odds with much of what was going on around it.  A few years earlier, World War I gave people a glimpse of the horror to be wrought by chemical warfare and bombs.  In 1933, faith in individual action and the capitalist economy was well under seige.  On February 27 of that year, Hitler burned the Reichstag and The Third Reich began.  World War II, with its multiple Holocausts of genocide, firebombing, and nuclear warfare would be soon upon us.

The House of Tomorrow, 1933, Berlin version

The House of Tomorrow, 1933, Berlin version

Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow (published in 1973) portayed this entire destructive arc of the twentieth century.  Science fuelled a spiral of violence, which unleashed and unbound human emotions both zany and horrific.  Pynchon captured this most vividly in Brigadier Pudding’s humiliation scene, a Pavlovian experiment in the malleability/perfectibility of mankind that was a living annihilation at the border between the past and our future in which Pudding relived and relieved himself of the filth of Ypres and Passechendaele over and over again.  The ritual became the center of his being.

Brigadier Pudding on the border between past and future.

Zak Smith: Brigadier Pudding, p. 236

Still, annihilation and holocaust were not the only ideas on the table. The playfulness of Pynchon’s novel and its main character, Tyrone Slothrop, held out the competing narratives of innocence and technologial redemption, impulses ironically (and perhaps hypocritcally) present in Robert Moses’s 1964 New York World’s Fair.  This was the year of my birth and the year in which Stanley Kubrik gave us Dr. Strangelove.  At the Fair, GM’s “Tomorrow Land” provided a delightful tour of the wonders yet to be bestowed on us by reinforced concrete, steel, and plastic.  Tomorrow Land was a glimpse into the world that could be, minus the evils of nuclear war, poverty, and exploitation.

At the Fair’s Pepsi Pavilion, “Children of the World” used mechanized dolls and music to showcase a world of hope and diversity.  This became Disney’s “It’s a Small World,” leading to the installation of its relentlessly saccharine theme song in the minds of millions of people every year, some of whom must wish that Slim Pickins would ride a missile into Orlando and put an end to the little dolls and gadgets just so they could get that song out of their heads.

The world we inherited in the Reagan years was reeling between the Jetsons and Dr. Strangelove as Paul Westerberg wrote “we’ll inherit the earth, but we don’t want it.”  If we were finally, really going to do it, to blow it up, I’d at least try to spend my last years thinking of other things.

TRS80mod3

The Mighty "Trash-80"

In 1981, I bought a TRS-80, Model III.  I was 17 and had saved up the money from my job at the pizza parlor down the street.  I read Alvin Toffler’s The Third Wave and John Nesbitt’s Megatrends.  A future of progress was much more appealing future than the one forecast by the “Doomsday Clock” on the cover of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists.  Such was the future according to Generation X, as we stumbled between slackerism and technoredemption.

In 1989, I remember being in my kitchen, washing dishes and listening to NPR when they announced that people had climbed over the Berlin Wall and were taking it apart.  In my own mind, I replaced The Day After with Blondie and hummed “Atomic” over and over again as I felt relief wash over me.

Then in the mid-1990s, Newt Gingrich started invoking Alvin Toffler at every opportunity.  1984 and Y2K came and went with neither Orwellian nor apocalyptic futures taking hold.  The most prescient glimpse of the future provided in my entire lifetime was not Space 1999 but Prince’s 1999, which accurately forecast exactly what I, and countless others around the world, were doing in 1999.  Whatever the future would be, it would be weird, and once Tim Berners Lee put the World Wide Web up, Gen X went online and, as if following Hunter S. Thompson’s consultation to our parents, we went pro.

Technoredemption provided a kind of cure-all for anxiety about the future.  Today it feeds the relentlessly positive assessments of Twitter’s contribution to revolution and freedom around the world.  Yet the same technology can bring us back to Huxley or Orwell, and we know it.  Evgeny Morozov writes that even as “activists and NGOs are turning to crowdsourcing to analyze data, map human rights violations, scrutinize the voting records of their MPs, and even track illegal logging in the Amazon”, ” governments are also relying on crowdsourcing to identify dissenters and muzzle free speech.”

Technoredemption remains as much a promise now as it was in 1776, 1933, 1964, or 1989.  Rousseau’s famous line from the opening of On the Social Contract – “Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains” – strikes me as quite true today, in the same sense that Rousseau meant it, and with the same consequences.

Notes and Credits

The photograph of the House of Tomorrow, Indiana version, was found on Wikipedia, in the commons at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:571531cv.jpg.  The House of Tomorrow, Berlin version, is in the Wikimedia commons at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Reichstagsbrand.jpg.

We didn’t need nuclear bombs alone to create armageddons of pain and horror.  Madhukar Shukla writes “The Firebombing of Tokyo was as devasting as the nuclear, Hidden in the history of that time, is an unnoticed footnote – the ‘Tokyo Fire-Bombing,’ which the Western press would not touch, and the Japanese survivors would not like to dwell upon [was an] event which happened months before the atom-bombs and with far more lethal consequences.”  Shukla’s blog is called “Alternative Perspective” and his homepage is here.

The illustration of Brig. Pudding is by Zak Smith, from his work Pictures Showing What Happens on Each Page of Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow. Much thanks to Zak for granting me permission to use the image.  The series of illustrations was featured in the 2004 Whitney Biennial (agh, just before I arrived in New York!) and is now part of the permanent collection at the Walker in Minneapolis.  In the episode referenced above, Brig. Pudding must undergo a scatological humiliation scene with Domina Nocturna as part of his atonement for his role in Ypres and Passechendaele, a scene occupying pp. 232-36 of the book (Viking Press, 1973).  Click on the image and you will be taken to a website featuring all of the illustrations.

Among Pynchon’s themes we count the Europeans’ damning of the world to endure the repetitive future of their own racist, colonial past, which sits perversely at the heart of American innocence and condemns America (white America, especially) to this struggle between technoredemption, dystopia, and annihilation.  Like Rousseau, Pynchon sees the chains that reason has placed on mankind.  He continues to explore that theme in his writing, with impressive intensity in Mason and Dixon, in which the two famous astronomers are contracted to create an artificial boundary between two artificial entites (Pennsylvania and Maryland) that have been imposed on something like a state of nature.

Pynchon’s new novel, Inherent Vice, goes into the territory of detective fiction and film noir, two of my favorite genres.  I am giddy and cannot wait to read this book.  Expect more posts related to TP.

On August 31, 2006, Douglas Coupland posted a wonderfully ironic vision of the future as past and present on his New York Times blog.  At that point he boldly foresaw the Kindle-future, as he predicted that books will “cease to exist” and become “extinct.”  Looking at his old novels and thinking of insects, he began to think about how wasps made paper from wood, and then he used his own mouth to pulp his novels and make nests from them.  The resulting photos are quite beautiful, and the blog posting shows what Generation X looks like as a nest.

The photograph of the TRS-80 Model III comes from Stan Veit’s website, PC-History, based on his famous book, Stan Veit’s History of the Personal Computer.

I learned about Evgeny Morozov’s blog post in a Tweet from Cause Global’s Marcia Stepanek.

The ice age is coming, the sun’s zooming in
Engines stop running, the wheat is growing thin
A nuclear error, but I have no fear
Cause London is drowning and I, I live by the river

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August 20, 2009 · 1:04 am

The truth and change, 1: From Perfection to Dystopia

The House of Tomorrow, 1776

The House of Tomorrow, 1776

For as long as I can remember, people have been trumpeting the big changes that were supposed to occur in my lifetime.  In this span of years, roughly the 1960s-forward, change was the key ingredient of the future, which amounted to three alternatives:  progress, dystopia, or annihilation.  Looking back on the future of the last 45 years, however, it turns out that these aren’t mutually exclusive alternatives.

Einstein observed that the experience of an event is subject to relational factors like who’s observing it, where, and under what conditions.  So it is with the future.  It may not be the world itself that changes, but rather how we experience it, a future that happens inside our bodies to make the world look, sound, feel, taste, and smell different.  The House of Tomorrow may well be the house of yesterday, but it won’t feel that way.

This is the first of three posts on The truth and change.  The series will look at how tangled, ironic, and weird (to invoke a favorite category of Hunter S. Thompson’s) the future will be, if it’s not that already.  The exercise in lateral thinking takes us from perfection to dystopia, annihilation, technoredemption, slacker paradise, Qoheleth, Big Pharma, and cyberchange.

From perfection to dystopia

The future, change, and progress are products of The Enlightenment.  For millennia, people were assumed to be what they were.  Thinkers in the West and the East had explored all sorts of ideas about how to create good societies, find peace, and achieve enlightenment (The Buddha’s kind) – but there was no belief in a “future” that would be different from the past.  Differences in politics, spirituality, or technology were seen as superficial, and the great wheel of history rolled along.

Vanity of vanities, says Qoheleth, vanity of vanities! All things are vanity! …
One generation passes and another comes, but the world forever stays …
What has been, that will be; what has been done, that will be done.
Nothing is new under the sun.  [Eccl. 1: 2, 4, 9]

Then in the eighteenth century the philosophes in France and other spots around Europe started to think about the life we could have on Earth through science, reason, and (in one form or another) “democracy.”  The twin notions of change and the future became tangible, captured in a repurposing of the word “progress.”  In The Invention of Air, Stephen Johnson shows how these ideas were tied together across science, politics, and religion.  Ben Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, and Joseph Priestly (the nominal subject of Johnson’s book) were scientists and radicals who imprinted the American Revolution with the Enlightenment’s vision of the future.

As Jefferson wrote to Priestly after the presidential inauguration in 1800, “We can no longer say there is nothing new under the sun.  For this whole chapter in the history of man is new.”  In another context, Jefferson famously quipped, “Every generation needs a new revolution.”  Compromised as Jefferson’s revolution was, eventually even the enslaved and formerly enslaved African Americans, written out at the beginning, would build their own revolution to insist on (some of) Jefferson’s ideals, among others.  The times, they would be a-changing, and the early Abolition movement itself was a part of the Enlightenment’s vision of change.

New industries and the “New World” conjured an image of humankind’s infinite malleability – we were blank slates on which a better world would be drawn.  People were, in a word, perfectible.  Yet perfection was a contestable quality, and disagreements over perfectibility would draw the lines of ideological battles that lasted from 1776 to 1989.  One of the central lines in the struggle over change was who would make change happen best — freely acting individuals, private corporate entities, or the state.

These conflicts underlay Adam Smith’s own writings.  He placed great faith in individuals and very little in either the state or corporations.  In Smith’s ideal world, we were a self-correcting society of individuals guided “by an invisible hand to promote an end which was no part of [their] intention.”  In other words, people following purely individual motives could create social good, almost accidentally.

Smith applied his faith in individuals to economic life, but he saw a conflict between the capacity of individual action to create a moral world and the effects of capitalism’s main motor for change, the division of labor.  Far from perfecting mankind, the nature of industrial production (and with it, the creation of wealth) would render the bulk of people ever more ignorant even as democracy expanded their ability to affect their world:

The man whose whole life is spent in performing a few simple operations, of which the effects too are, perhaps, always the same, or very nearly the same, has no occasion to exert his understanding, or to exercise his invention in finding out expedients for removing difficulties which never occur.  He naturally loses, therefore, the habit of such exertion, and generally becomes as stupid and ignorant as it is possible for a human to creature to become.  The torpor of his mind renders him, not only incapable of relishing or bearing part in any rational conversation, but of conceiving any generous, noble, or tender sentiment … Of the great and extensive interests of his country, he is altogether incapable of judging …

This would be the product of capitalism, said Smith, “unless government takes some pains to prevent it.”  Smith never resolved this conflict in his understanding of change, and his fans have ignored it and instead dwelled on the “invisible hand” alone, taking this half-premise to logical extremes.

In Atlas Shrugged, Ayn Rand made a grand dystopian plea for her version of capitalist utopia that in general (if less radical) terms is part of everyday political discourse in the United States, where faith in powerful, dynamic individuals is strong.  The fear of the state is great, and the relation to mass politics is complicated.  The masses are fickle and in general not to be trusted (even by the masses).  To wit:  In the wake of the economic collapse of 2008, “going John Galt” has become the calling card of dissident financiers holding out against the reactions of the federal government and the populist fervor aimed at them, though this fervor was short-lived and now is turned against the government and health care reform.

Over time, dystopia transcended the narrow limitations of the conflicts between capitalism and socialism, seeing in both a massification of industrial society that used technology to dampen the very urges toward freedom and expression unleashed by the forces that Jefferson and Priestly heralded with such optimism.  Yevgeny Zamyatin’s novel We combined his experiences in the Russian Revolution and in the British factories of World War I to describe a true dystopia that was the forerunner of Orwell’s 1984.  Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World concentrated our gaze on the manufacture of pleasure as a way of breeding conformity and social order from the “torpor of mind” that Smith lamented in 1776.

Yet numbing sameness wasn’t the only threat to Jefferson and Priestly’s House of Tomorrow.  The rocket scientists who stood on their shoulders (among so many others) eventually helped us create weapons of unparalleled destruction that could end all life as we know it.  Beyond dystopia, the future created by reason might actually annihilate us all.  These were our choices by the time I was growing up:  Smith, Marx, Rand, Huxley, Orwell, Dr. Strangelove, or Charlton Heston on a beach some time in the distant future.

The Apes were able to perfect themselves greatly with people out of the way.  The surviving humans, able to carry on through accidents of history and rocket science, became vermin and slaves until the moment in which Taylor and Nova became a new Adam and Eve under the ruins of the Statue of Liberty, now a fallen, man-made Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil.  If you look hard enough, you can see in the background the shadows of Priestly, Paine, Jefferson, Franklin, Einstein, Oppenheimer, and Teller.  Thoreau and Whitman are nowhere to be found.  They were buried by the knowledge of good and evil.

Notes and Credits

The quotation from the opening of Ecclesiastes is taken from the New American Bible, Eccl. 1: 2, 4, 9.

Jefferson’s statement setting aside Qoheleth is cited by Stephen Johnson in The Invention of Air:  A Story of Science, Faith, Revolution, and the Birth of America (New York:  Riverhead Books, 2008), p. 199.  Overall, this book is a real treat that shows a rare and impressive achievement of lateral thinking.  To extend your thinking, visit Johnson’s blog, where he is further ruminating on ecosystems, technology, and change.

My quotations from Adam Smith are taken from The Essential Adam Smith, ed. Robert L. Heilbronner (New York:  W. W. Norton, 1986), pp. 265 and 302.  Read this book, which includes abridged versions of both the Theory of the Moral Sentiments and The Wealth of Nations.  They are indispensable critiques of the world that Smith’s fans seem to adore.

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August 11, 2009 · 4:00 am

The truth and chickens, coda: The Road

chicken-red

The following five questions and topics address a very old issue involving a chicken and a road.  In spite of many hours given to thinking about this topic, by myself and legions of others, many issues are unresolved even as we speak (or write).  One brave chicken, one empty road, and a million synapses firing all at once all lead us to this juncture.  Follow the links and then contribute something to help finish the story:

Twitter your immediate thoughts and include #chickenroad in your Tweet …

Leave a comment if there’s something you want to highlight for readers, or warn them about …

Write a story that addresses the following points and/or questions and send it to jguidry.7@gmail.com.  We’ll talk about it, but mainly I’ll be looking to repost your story here.

Now … here we go.

First:  Which of the following roads (paths, lanes, etc.) was the chicken trying to cross, and in what way did it matter?  Each link takes you to the appropriate song (or book).

•    the road less travelled
•    the hillbilly highway
•    the long and winding road
•    the path of least resistance
•    the lost highway
•    the road to nowhere
•    highway 61 revisited

Second:  When the bear went over the mountain, he saw the other side of the mountain, to be sure, but winding through the valley below was one of the aforementioned roads (paths, lanes, etc.).  Alongside the road was a chicken.  Note:  the bear was hungry.

Third:  In the middle of the road is Paul McCartney.  Do they do it in the road?  Or not? And what is “it,” specifically?

Fourth:  As the bear reaches the road in the valley below, along with the chicken and Paul McCartney, “she” is coming round the mountain, when she comes, when she comes, driving eight white horses, and etc.  What happened next?  Who is “she?” And why were the horses white?

Fifth:  Should any character in your story “live happily ever after,” please explain how, and why, in precise terms.

Notes and Credits

Photograph of chicken in the road:  Ian Britton, August 29, 2004.

The drawings in the Bob Dylan video for Highway 61 Revisited are by a man named Giovanni Rabuffetti.  I can’t find a home page for him or a Wiki entry, but I found this entry on him on a blog called White Rabbit by a guy named Andrew Keogh.  I think it’s beautiful art, and there’s a lot of hits for drawings by Rabuffetti if you google him, including this video with animation by Rabuffetti for “All Along the Watchtower.”

One of the featured videos here is from The Beatelles, an all female Beatles tribute band from Liverpool.  You can learn a lot more about them here and here.  And if you like this, see The Beladies, who were the first all-woman Beatles band, hailing from Buenos Argentina.

And considering the road and highway theme of this posting, I can’t resist the temptation to post another favorite highway song by a favorite songwriter, Steve Earle, “The Long Lonesome Highway Blues.”  Enjoy.


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July 22, 2009 · 3:36 pm

Small addendum to Twitter posts: Dave and Kev

Grumpy old men?  Te-hee!  The TRS Twitter account is coming soon…

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July 19, 2009 · 3:25 pm

The truth and Twitter, part 3: The Swarm

bees-2

Act 1:  The buzzing of keyboards

The 140 Characters Conference was held at the New World Stages in New York on June 16-17, 2009.  The New World Stages are a large complex of five stages seating different audience sizes, up to about 500 people, along with lounges, lobbies, and galleries.  Much of it is underground – one who’s never been there is quite unprepared for what he or she will find once inside the doors and down the escalator.

In the theatres, the seats rise on a steep gradient.  Everything is painted black, and the lighting makes anything on stage come out into the setting, seeming to float in space, vividly in color.

During the conference, I was distracted by a low hum in the background: the sounds of fingers on keyboards.  At least half the audience had their laptops open and were tapping away at all kinds of messages, dozens of Tweets being unleashed as each speaker spoke about the world of Twitter and Tweeting from some different point of view.

The hum was distant and faraway, sounding as though it came from some hollowed out source not quite in the room.  It was enchanting, if in an industrial kind of way, bringing to my mind in a Proustian moment an incident that was altogether different and yet fundamentally similar.

Act 2:  One dog, one man, and thousands of bees

On a sunny spring day in April of 2008, I laid down with Duke under a gnarly, knotted, scrubby, runty tree.  There we rested for some time, children (including my own son) playing nearby, blue sky and warm yellow sunlight all around.

bee-tree

I noticed a bee flying just over me.  It wasn’t trying to touch me, though it came close.  As it buzzed off, I saw another coming down, slowly descending – then another, and another.  Suddenly, hundreds of bees reminded me of World War II photographs of paratroopers, but unlike paratroopers, no bees landed on us.  They came close and then flew off.

In the air above, I heard the low grade, ambient sound of buzzing.  Unlike anything I’d ever heard, it was assuredly distant, warm, and safe.  An aural blanket covering the scene, enchanting in a distinctly pre-industrial kind of way.

Act 3:  Enter the Queen

I sought a pattern in their behavior, and I soon found one.  Each bee – after buzzing around in an inert, hovering, apparently directionless state – slowly made its way to an extended branch of that knotted tree.  The swarm began packing itself on one part of the branch, growing from a small ball of bees to an enormous, undulating bulb.  A huddled, tired mass, to be sure.

Swarms like this occur when the Queen decides it’s time to move the whole the colony to a new home, or when a new Queen is born and leaves with part of the old colony – her brothers and sisters and not her offspring – in order to establish a new one.  Somewhere beneath the mass of bees above me was the Queen, who would be vulnerable until they built a new home.

Act 4:  Of the social organism

In the Queen, the insect colony becomes incarnate and we see that very magic trick that occurs again and again in nature:  the metaphysical made real.  To live or die as an individual bee makes sense only as a function of the Queen’s existence.  She alone carries the source, yet she cannot exist alone, without her offspring.  The social organism is a whole that has no physical being in itself, but is instead a thing greater than sum of its irreducible, individual parts, each of which will fight to the death to protect the Queen.

The social impulse, according to Donald Ingber, is something we can see in fractals throughout organic nature, beginning with bacteria, single-cell based colony creatures, cellular cooperation in larger organisms, insects, and possibly ourselves.

One group of Argentine ants may have broken the geographical barrier between kinship and colony.  These ants have created a kind of mega-colony that exists in North America, Europe, and Japan.  Even though they live across such vast distances, they behave like ants who live in one colony, refusing to fight each other and yet ruthlessly destroying non-kin ants they find in their way.  It is the “largest of its type ever known for any insect species, and could rival humans in the scale of its world domination.”  Interestingly, these ants were able to establish such distant colonies because people, however unwittingly, carried them there.

Human beings are the only large animal that has managed to populate the world in numbers and social structures that can be compared to the social insects – ants, bees, termites.  Our technologies – language, boats, smoke signals, printing presses, as well as the World Wide Web and Twitter – have enabled us to break the micro-social, hunter-gather barrier and form true social organisms.

Act 5:  Living in the land of ideas

Unlike ants or bees, however, we may be creating a new kind of meta-social being that relies on the very gap between the individual and social organisms.  In that gap, we remain as individuals happily, fruitfully, and contentedly human in the smallish communities that make our lives meaningful.  Exploring that gap was the whole point of the 140 Characters Conference, as it is of the plethora of commentary on Twitter and social media that one can find all over the Web, from those who damn Twitter for destroying thoughtful cultural production to those who celebrate and explain its benefits.

Further distinguishing ourselves from social insects, each Twitterer and his or her followers constitute a kind of spontaneous swarm that exists only in cyberspace.  Unlike the swarm of bees that I witnessed overhead last year, one very busy bee in Twitter can be part of many swarms, in addition to being the Queen of his or her own.  These swarms are multiple, derivative, tumescent, and utterly human.

In the buzz of Twitter, our ideas themselves become protagonists.  As Jay Rosen, one of the more thoughtful mediators of the phenomenon puts it,“Twitter keeps me in touch with people who are friends of my ideas. I know about their projects and current obsessions; they know about mine.” Todd Chaffee, a digital media expert, goes so far as to call Twitterspace “the global mind.”  One blogging group, The Hive Mind, is comprised of 5 science writers who actively swarm around topics and blog their work.

William Saletan, Slate’s prolific blogger on science and the human condition, observes a migration going on between dual and overlapping worlds of physical experience and cybercommunication, as we “shift our mental attention and our comfort zone from the physical to the digitally enhanced environment.”

He notes such people are “lost in invisible worlds,” but that’s not true.  They’re living in the spaces between very real and tangible worlds, seen and unseen, building swarms and with them the ethereal sounds of buzzing keyboards humming in the background of everyday life, as audible now to the rest of us as presumably the sounds of automobiles once were to our great-grandparents’ generation.

Dénouement

I doubt we’ll ever truly understand ourselves as a social organism.  We are biologically individual creatures, and we perceive the world through individual minds, even when our perception is helped along by the grand edifice of knowledge and social consciousness that helps us understand the world.

Yet solipsism isn’t what it used to be.

We needn’t be as depressed and desperate as Sartre or Morrissey, nor as arrogant as Richard Dawkins, in order to understand how the gap between self and other makes us who we are.  That gap is the place of creation:  of all art, science, technology, storytelling, representation, and myth-making.  Einstein, unicorns, cave paintings, and Twitter all come from the same urge to touch the whole, and in these bursts of creativity we see truth and beauty and all that makes our short time in the conscious world as good, or bad, as it can be.

Notes and credits

A special thanks goes to Marcia Stepanek, a friend and colleague whose Cause Global blog chronicles how new developments in technology and communications affect the worlds of philanthropy and cause-based action.  She invited me out to the 140 Characters conference which made my observations on Twitter possible.  You can also see her blog postings at Pop!Tech and the Stanford Innovation Review.

On the micro-social, hunter-gatherer societies:  For people, these are the smallish, tribal societies that were the basic form of human social organization for most of our history, say from the time we began living on savannahs until the advent of large, social agriculture.  This covered a time period of roughly a million years or more, depending on how you want to define human beings.  In the animal world, wolves, lions, elephants, wasps, and a few other animals still use this form of social organization.  Some of the writers I’ve read on this period of our history are Jared Diamond, in The Third Chimpanzee and Guns, Germs, and Steel, his blockbuster on technology and change in the social organization.  Also quite interesting is Colin Tudge, The Time Before History, which examines human history and the impact of people on the planet for the last 5 million years.  Tudge’s book is good fodder for thinking about global warming in a very long-vue sense.

William Saletan’s posting which I quote above was not about Twitter, but rather about Blackberry and cell phone usage.  Interestingly, a search of Saletan’s blog at Slate for “Twitter” brings back no results.  Full disclosure:  his blog, “Human Nature,” has been a source of inspiration for a number of years.

Chris Weingarten’s presentation at the 140 Characters Conference was one of the more raucous and interesting.  Among his provocations was this:  “Crowd sourcing kills art,” and I reference him above as a critic of Twitter, who is also a constructive, critical user of it.  At @1000TimesYes, Weingarten is reviewing 1000 CD’s on Twitter, even while he provides a very pointed view on the negative impact of Twitter on cultural production. Weingaretn’s blog is called Poisson d’Avril.  Here you can see the Twitter reviews and appreciate the minimalist form of review on your own, such as the review of one of my favorites, Green Day, “If the world ends tonight, Green Day made the album of the year.”  Or the more esoteric pan of someone whose music I have also enjoyed, Regina Spektor, “In New York, even our twee is meta.#4.5.”  Gonna have to find the album just to figure out what he means, though I have an idea.

Counterpoint:  Solipsism isn’t what it used to be, but for Chris Weingarten and lots of others, social media like Twitter have the ironic effect of increasing solipsism by creating flocks of people telling each other “all about me.”  It’s a topic I am thinking about.

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July 9, 2009 · 2:51 pm

The truth and set theory: more on Mr. McNamara

null-2

Robert S. McNamara struggled with his own humanity in the face of all he had done.  His faith in statistics, systems theory, and science was equaled by his seeming allergy to human emotion, in spite of a life lived full of emotion.  Whether his sense of duty was a righteous sham or a noble straightjacket cannot be answered now, but we do know that his sense of duty prevented him from acting on his beliefs.  In not acting – not speaking out against the war and Johnson’s stubborn pursuit of it – McNamara’s misdeeds became the emblem of his life.

My perspective on McNamara is a luxury of history.  In 1984, when I was working for the Mondale campaign as a College Democrat, we looked back on the 1960s with dim and misplaced nostalgia for something we didn’t understand.  When we drew up our marches and rallies against the U.S. role in Central America, we wondered what had been lost since 1968.

With this in mind, I wrote my friend, Peter, who was there in 1968. I asked him to read the post and address one question:  “[D]o you think I let him off too easily?”

He wrote me the following, which he allowed me to post here without editing:

McNamara remains something of an enigma to me.  He was definitely my enemy back in the 1960s when I was going to school in Ann Arbor.  I recently relived those days with one of my old friends.  I was attending a conference in Dearborn and made a trip to AA on a beautiful spring day, and my buddy (I hadn’t seen him since 1984) drove in from western Michigan.  We recalled the bombing of the ROTC building, the bombing of the CIA office hidden somewhere in downtown AA, various demonstrations we took part in, our first and subsequent encounters with teargas, etc., our first trip to DC to take part in an antiwar march, etc.  (we didn’t leave out drugs and rock and roll in our tour of memory lane).

You are quite right about McNamara’s capacity for self-reflection and his—you don’t use these terms— almost theological understanding of what Paul Ricoeur would call “fallible man.”  And of course this is what makes him so very different from the motherfuckers of recent vintage who got us into unnecessary wars.  Not only will they never be described as the “best and the brightest,” but they provide ample evidence of a total incapacity for self-reflection and self-doubt.  All this being said, one of the things that “The Fog of War” revealed was that there were definitely limits to McNamara’s willingness or ability to plunge into his psychic depths.  I have a sense that he got near the heart of the matter, but perhaps because of what psychoanalysts call (or at least used to call) resistance, never quite managed to truly come to terms with the reasons for and consequences of his actions.

Errol Morris’s reflections came out in the New York Times yesterday, “McNamara in Context.”  Morris points out that as McNamara saw it, his job was to keep us out of nuclear war, which he succeeded in doing even as he failed so spectacularly in other important ways.  So much of his life’s work, including at the World Bank, created unintended consequences that were not good at all.  Robert S. McNamara was one singularly influential person, a Robert Moses of death and destruction, who had it in his power to do so many things at the flick of a finger.

Like my friend Peter, Morris notes that McNamara never fully accounted for his individual role in the Vietnam War and the unnecessary death it caused, noting that he always used the first person plural when speaking of it.  “We were wrong.”  For Morris this is part of a greater conundrum: “… how do you say you’re sorry for history?”  That kind of accountability is bigger than the individual who, if responsible for some large part of the problem, was surely not alone in it.  McNamara was in over his head.  He had no mind for the ideas and emotions that would have addressed the situation he was in.

We see now how Dick Cheney is living with his failures.  It’s not likely his obituary will state that in his later years “he wore the expression of a haunted man. He could be seen in the streets of Washington — stooped, his shirttail flapping in the wind — walking to and from his office a few blocks from the White House, wearing frayed running shoes and a thousand-yard stare.”

That image, by Tim Weiner in the New York Times obituary of McNamara, recalled for me another fallen genius of the same era:  John Nash and his haunting of Princeton in his illness, prior to his resurfacing and recognition with the Nobel Prize in Economics.  Both men were gripped by insanity at the height of their powers, only McNamara’s was an historical psychosis that had sanction and authority, while Nash’s was a bitterly lonely, neurological defect.

What is the line between the righteous pursuit of the good, however one conceives it, and real evil?  Between clarity of vision and madness?  Or perhaps more aptly stated:  Who draws that line?  The righteous believe they know, and that it’s a simple issue.  But it’s not.  Maybe there is no line at all, or maybe it gets dim or disappears from time to time.  An unwelcome thought indeed, but in math, the empty set is always a subset of any set. ∀A: ∅ ⊆ A  So it is with life.

This is not the same as saying there is no good or evil – for there is – only that in some situations truth and rocket science place us at a disadvantage, in a fog of righteousness and knowledge.  McNamara was an outlier in the same population of which we are all members, and when we really look at outliers, we simply see ourselves, or at least parts of ourselves, magnified.

Notes

The mathematical notation ∀A: ∅ ⊆ A means that “for all sets A, the empty set (∅) is a subset of A.”

Robert Moses was the most powerful figure shaping the urban geography of the New York City metropolitan area.  From the 1920s to the 1970s, he created park systems, highways, bridges, tunnels, and public housing that, taken together, are fundamental elements of any picture of 20th and 21st century New York.  While few dispute the benefits of the parks, beaches, and swimming pools Moses created, his highways destroyed neighborhoods and isolated populations from each other.  Along with the system of public housing he created, Moses is partly responsible for the patterns of racial segregation in New York, and according to Robert Caro’s Pulitzer Prize winning 1974 biography, The Power Broker:  Robert Moses and the Fall of New York (Knopf), this was intentional.  By the 1960s, Moses’s star began to wane, and he lost several public battles over new projects. One of Moses’s most influential critics was Jane Jacobs, whose The Death and Life of Great American Cities is considered a classic urban geography and community theory.  Jacobs led the fight against Moses’s Lower Manhattan Expressway, which was never built.  Like McNamara, Moses was an appointed official.

For six months in 2004, I lived on the Red Hook side of “the trench,” a stretch of the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway (a Moses project) that, along with the Gowanus Expressway (Moses) and Battery Tunnel (Moses), cuts off Red Hook from nearby Carroll Gardens. Red Hook’s public housing development (Moses, again) is one of the largest in New York, and its residents are largely non-white.  Carroll Gardens is an old Italian neighborhood that has retained its character, though they had to fight make sure the BQE didn’t demolish their church.  In the last few years, Red Hook is undergoing new change, as people from all over the city flock to the giant swimming pool in the park there (Moses), along with one of the newest, and largest IKEA stores (not Moses) in the metropolitan area.  Another major (decidedly un-Moses) attraction to Red Hook today are the tacos, whose vendors recently won a touchy battle with the city in order to keep plying their delights for summer soccer fans.  It was a struggle Jane Jacobs might have appreciated, as chronicled in part in the Brooklyn Paper.

I have not read Gladwell’s book, Outliers.  I’ve read two of his other books and enjoyed them.  In my own work as a social scientist, I’ve spent the last 20 years looking at the differences between outliers the rest of us.  Not a fan of essentialisms, yet without denying the possibility of essential differences among some people, I tend to view difference as a matter of degrees and context.  (see The truth and us).

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July 7, 2009 · 2:57 am

The truth and Mr. McNamara

things that get destroyed by war, Ann Arbor, January-February 1991

things that get destroyed in war, Ann Arbor, January-February 1991

“Every quantitative measurement we have shows we’re winning this war …” Robert S. McNamara, 1962

Few people with the power to make change have placed so much faith in science as a force for public good.  Few have wreaked so much havoc and destroyed so many lives with their belief in science.  Many fewer still are those who have tried to grapple publicly with the damage they did.

These were thoughts that occurred to me as I read the obituaries of Robert S. McNamara yesterday morning.  It brought me back to Errol Morris’s The Fog of War, which I recently spent three days watching, over and over, for a different project.

In Morris’s film, McNamara narrates his life around 11 “principles” that he learned from his involvement with war, both the Second World War and Vietnam.  The first is “empathize with your enemy,” and this is the vantage from which I prefer to think about McNamara himself.  Rhetorically speaking, this makes him my enemy, which I know he is not, but like any enemy he is the object of my perplexed and sometimes angry thoughts, a person I likely would have “opposed” had I been of an age to do so.

To the extent that McNamara is an object of anyone’s judgment, however, empathy is the perhaps the best way one might understand how a person as remarkable as McNamara could also be, as David Halberstam put it, “a fool.”  Yet to remember McNamara only in anger or glib, anti-intellectual sniping at the fact that brilliance is no guarantee against foolishness gains nothing for the world.  Most brilliant fools will never, in the manner of Mr. McNamara, admit and more importantly explore their mistakes for the good of the public.

McNamara’s reckoning with his own illusions of scientific truth led him to conclude, among other things, that “rationality will not save us,” that “belief and seeing are often both wrong,” and that one should “be prepared to reexamine your reasoning.”  These are his lessons from war, but they would serve us well in ordinary life, too.

From the mid-1990s forward, McNamara became immersed in debating the issues around nuclear war, as well as Vietnam, and the documentary he made with Errol Morris was released right about the time the Bush administration began the invasion of Iraq in 2003.  McNamara’s ultimate conclusion from a life of war and science was this:

“What ‘the fog of war’ means is: war is so complex it’s beyond the ability of the human mind to comprehend all the variables. Our judgment, our understanding, are not adequate. And we kill people unnecessarily.”

In his dreams and goals and desires, in his patriotism and sense of duty, McNamara was no different than most people.  His own peculiar acumen, however, put him in an extraordinary position to affect the lives of others.  The hubris of his belief in science was perhaps no more or less than Richard Dawkins’s own arrogance, but circumstance and ambition have placed Dawkins in a relatively benign position that mainly involves preaching to his own choir of fellow travelers.

We might serve Mr. McNamara, and ourselves, best – whether from the view that he was an inhuman monster or the more reflective position that he seemed to wish we would have – by listening to the things he had to say during the last 15 years of his life, from the time of his autobiography, In Retrospect (1995), forward.

Late or not – 27 years elapsed between the end of McNamara’s tenure as Secretary of Defense and his autobiography – McNamara at least tried to help the world understand what he did, without making excuses for himself or (for the most part) fudging the facts in a self-serving way.

One could only wish that other powerful true believers would do the same, but the likelihood is that Alan Greenspan, George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, and Donald Rumsfeld won’t go where Mr. McNamara finally chose to go.

Personal disclosure

I was not yet born when Robert McNamara assumed the post of Secretary of Defense.  My first memories of television, however, are of war reporting.  I recall a picture of an empty field, with the rat-a-tatt-tatt of machine guns firing in the distance and the gravelly voice of a war correspondent trying to explain what we weren’t seeing.

The first time I went to Washington DC was in 1990 or 1991, quite possibly for the Washington Mall protest against the Persian Gulf War, part 1 (Desert Storm), though I don’t recall.  There was a wedding I went to around that time, which might have been the first trip to DC.

What I do remember is this:  As we drove from Michigan to Washington, we listened to the 10,000 Maniacs album Blind Man’s Zoo.  “The Long Parade,” a song about watching people pass along the Vietnam Memorial, stuck in my head.  By the time I reached the end of my own walk along the wall, I was in tears, as much for the tragedy spelled out in the 50,000+ names on the wall as for the one name I knew was not there.

My own father served in the US Army from 1962 to 1967.  He wasn’t sent to Vietnam, though he trained soldiers who went there from the place of my birth, Fort Hood, Texas.  Later, he was sent to West Germany where, for a couple of years, he stood with the first line of defense in the event of Soviet invasion.

Notes and Credits

These are the obituaries I read in preparation for this posting:  Thomas Lippman in the Washington Post, Tim Weiner in the New York Times, and Fred Kaplan in Slate.com.

The photograph at the head of this post is of a wall that I helped to build in Ann Arbor at the beginning of Operation Desert Storm, the First Persian Gulf War, in 1991.  The idea for this piece of public art was Jeffrey Levy-Hinte’s.  At the time, Jeff and I were both graduate students in political science at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.  A group of us built the wall and attached to it all of the things that get destroyed in war.  It was located on the central lawn of the Ann Arbor campus, the “Diag” as we called it, for the the diagonal pathways that cross the lawn to connect the buildings.

things that get destoyed in war, close up

things that get destoyed in war, close up

The wall stayed up for only a few days, being torn down by ROTC members on the one night that people didn’t camp out there to protect it – at the time, it was terrifically cold, in the single digits every night.

The university, however, didn’t clean it up, and it remained for another few weeks.  As a pile of rubble it actually accomplished its goal even more effectively.  During this time, no one crossed the Diag without stopping to talk about the war.

Richard Dawkins is among the best and brightest evolutionary scientists of his generation.  I’ve read some of his books and have enjoyed them – The Selfish Gene, The Ancestor’s Tale – but I have found his unoriginal assessments of religion and the stupidity of people who choose to believe in God (even if they also believe in evolution) to be, at the most generous, tiresome.  For an example of hollow, rude intellectual badgering, see his video on Google.  It’s like a supernerd bully picking on crippled jock bullies and, frankly, I found the original much more entertaining.

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July 2, 2009 · 2:40 pm

The truth and Twitter, part 2: Truth Default Swaps

newspaper

The truth will not be verified.

On January 28, 2009, a group of journalists and media professionals gathered in New York to talk about how the new social media were changing the field.  The conversation was abuzz with Twitter, which was creating fascinating new possibilities for breaking and sourcing stories.  Yet the same technology responsible for social media was killing off the newspapers by destroying their revenue base, and the rot was moving up the media’s trunk to broadcast and cable news.  No journalist’s job was safe now. The issue, said Jay Rosen, one of the panelists, was that no one knew how we were going to pay for “verified truth.”

This month, the Ann Arbor News will complete its transformation into “AnnArbor.com,” a Web-based news organization and community platform that brings together traditional journalism, digital media, and freelance bloggers.  The paper itself will be printed twice a week, on Sundays and Thursdays.  This is a first in the country for a market its size.

How AnnArbor.com intends to verify truth is not clear, but their constituents appear to have other concerns:  as of noon on June 27, 2009, the site’s “feedback forum” showed that “print the newspaper” had received 209 votes (more than any other category), while “ensure that all paid content is reviewed for accuracy” came in fifth at 80, and “investigate/analyze local issues” came in much further down the line at 21.

Perhaps some people prefer to go about verifying their own truth, on their own time, rather than trusting an institution to do so.  Social media is, after all, a DIY culture.  People who care most of about the accuracy of what they believe have always looked for news in multiple places:  papers, on-line, television, etc.  Some even read books (paper and Kindle).

At the 140 Characters Conference on June 16 and 17, Moeed Ahmad of Al-Jazeera gave a short presentation on how they used Twitter during the Gaza War of late 2008.  He discussed how they are working on a method to verify Tweets, by creating a table format for the feeds, including a column for each entry stating whether or not it was “verified.”  In the mayehm of the Iran uprising, the major news organizations in the US have started posting pieces from YouTube and reader-contributers, noting that the organization isn’t responsible for the content.  It’s the only compelling content that can be found; if you don’t post it, your competitor will.

What if reading the news became like swimming on a beach with no lifeguard?  I don’t think this is what will happen, but just consider the possibility.  Think about truth as a risk proposition:  what I believe should inform what I do, and therefore what I do is only as good as what I know.  Bad info = bad action.  This is not new – people always have worked very hard to create ways to mitigate the risk of believing things.

To deal with this risk, we create truth:  value-based, self-interested calculations about events that make sense to people and mitigate the dangers of belief and action.  Some of us construct that “sense” with a lot of external research (fact checking, asking friends, etc.).  Others rely on their internal “sense” of “The Truth” (moral codes, principle, etc.).  Still others mix these processes or switch from one to the other when it’s convenient.

Twitter doesn’t change the way we go about trying to verify truth in everyday life, nor will it stop us from needing to do so.  Rather, Twitter speeds up the capture and dissemination of information, magnifying both the potential gains and risks of believing something we read.

In a hyper-competitive world of individually-based incentives, motives, and pay-offs, Twitter allows people to become more risky.  Social media allow us to believe that we have dispersed the risk of belief through crowd sourcing, and in turn, we’re less worried about acting on the wrong information than not acting on the latest information.  Crowd sourcing creates something like “truth default swaps,” in which risk is carved up and transferred to so many people that it seems to disappear.

This works for a while, probably most of the time, but mistakes happen.  To wit:  the New York Daily News appears to have reported Farrah Fawcett’s death about a half hour before it actually happened, though it appears their reporting was accurate, if out of time.  Fortunately, the Daily News‘ slip in time did not involve the firing (alleged or real) of nuclear weapons.

On October 28, 2008, Blythe Masters, one of the young turks at J. P. Morgan who was involved in creating the mechanisms and structures of credit default swaps in the 1990s, addressed the Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association’s annual meeting.  She emphasized that “it is important to distinguish between tools and their users.  We need to remember that innovation has created tools for managing risk.”  Masters’ point was that people in the industry behaved as if they had eliminated risk, instead of recognizing that risk never truly went away.

The issue for journalists and citizens alike in the age of social media is similar.  In a world where information is flowing much more quickly than anyone’s ability to verify it, will we use the new technology to manage the risk of belief or ignore it?

Either way:  The truth will be derived.


Notes and Credits

This is the second of three posts on Twitter.  In the third and final installment, truthandrocketscience will get its own twitter account.  Also, I am a big fan of lifeguardless beaches.

The newspaper pictured at the top of the posting was generated with the Fodey.com newpaper generator, which I find especially useful when mixing up a new batch of truth.

The panel on January 28 was hosted by MediaBistro, a professional service organization for journalists.  The panel was called “Journalists and Social Media:  Sources, Skills, and the Writer,” and it featured Jay Rosen of NYU and his PressThink blog, Shirley Brady of BusinessWeek.com, Andy Carvin of NPR, and Rachel Sklar of The Daily Beast and other media endeavors.

Apart from the 300 or so people who have “voted” on the AnnArbor.com site, there are approximately 99,700 other Ann Arborites who have not yet registered their preferences (this grants that each of the votes is a unique individual, which is most likely not the case).  Perhaps they are reading the Detroit Free Press, on paper.   Or freep.com.

Further:  One might interpret the general interest in “print[ing] the newspaper” at the top of the feedback poll as a desire for all that old fashioned newspapers represented, which would automatically include “verified truth” and local investigative reporting.  But one would have to ask and explore more deeply to figure it all out.

My interest in the Ann Arbor News is partly personal.  I lived in Ann Arbor from 1988 to 1996, during which time I was a graduate student in political science.  Besides reading the News, I once appeared in the paper, in a photograph of Gulf War protestors in December of 1991.  I saved the paper that day, but somewhere along the way in moves around the upper Midwest and finally to New York, I lost it.  But every Christmas, when I unwrap the creche to put beneath my tree, I look at the the shreds of a 20-year old Ann Arbor News page and remember my days there.

The story of Blythe Masters and the group at J.P. Morgan who created the credit derivatives that figured so prominently in the financial crash of 2007-08 has been documented (and verified) by Gillian Tett of the FInancial Times, in her book, Fool’s Gold: How the Bold Dream of a Small Tribe at J.P. Morgan Was Corrupted by Wall Street Greed and Unleashed a Catastrophe (Free Press, 2009).  Tett quotes Masters’ SIFMA address on p. 250.  It’s a gripping book that also has the best explanation of all the different complex securities that were part of the story:  credit default swaps, collateralized debt obligations, asset-backed securities, etc.  Tett was interviewed about the book by Terry Gross for Fresh Air.

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June 23, 2009 · 4:05 am

The truth and Twitter, part 1: The Mix Tape

twitter-iran1

The truth will be digitized.

Last week, I went to the 140 Characters Conference here in New York.  There, hundreds of people met to explore how Twitter, new media, and micro-blogging are disrupting life these days.  People were asking important questions of all this new technology:  What do we get out of it? Is it changing anything that matters in any interesting way?  Where’s it going?  What does it mean?

The conference couldn’t have been more timely, though this was completely an accident of fate:  On the very days of the meeting, June 16 and 17, the Iranian people were using Twitter, cell phones, and other inventions to coordinate and narrate a national uprising to protest the (allegedly) fraudulent results of the recent presidential elections.  The story is available only over the internet, because Iranian control of the press and media have made it impossible for regular journalists to cover the events on the ground.  Thus we turn to Twitter and bloggers to understand what’s going on.  Huffington Post’s Nico Pitney is singularly inserting himself into the moment by providing the only comprehensive, live blog of the event.

These are the largest and most disruptive public demonstrations since the Iranian Revolution of 1979, when masses of Iranians overthrew the US-backed Shah of Iran.  The Iranian Revolution was one of the few documented true revolutions (to use a political science term!), in which the structure of society itself, and not merely the regime, was changed in a rapid convulsion of political will.

Something similar might be happening today.

The events of 1979 have an interesting parallel to the present, for the earlier Revolution was spurred along by the innovative application of a radical new technology that not only subverted the regime but also fit neatly into the lifestyles and habits of regular Iranians.  The new technology was accessible to everyone, regardless of education, age, gender, or geographical location.  I am referring, of course, to cassette tape recordings, which in the 1970s took the entire world on a quantum leap of do-it-yourself cultural production, re-production, and mashing-up.

In the West, this took the form of the mix tape.  We used the songs of our favorite bands to declare love or war, to apologize for insensitivity, to make a stand, break up, explain any of the preceding, or simply state the case for plain, animal lust.   The truly radical could even place Yes, The Clash, and Air Supply on the same tape, just to make a point.  The mix tape reached its all-time high with Nick Hornby’s novel, High Fidelity, in the mid-1990s, which was later immortalized on the silver screen with John Cusak at the very moment in time when the cassette tape itself was tossed into the dustbin of history by the arrival mix-CDs, MP3 playlists, and (a few years later) the iPod.

At the same time that mix tapes reshaped the possibilities for personal expression in the West, Iranians were gathering in private, often hidden, rooms to listen to cassette tapes of sermons by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, a prominent religious leader who was exiled from Iran in 1964.  Khomeini took refuge first in Iraq, which has a large (majority) population of Shiite Muslims, and later in France.  His sermons were smuggled into Iran, where they met a large audience, hungry for his words.

Khomeini’s message was both religious and social.  He married basic Islamic piety to a consciousness of poverty, economic injustice, and outrage at the atrocities of the Shah’s violently repressive state.  The Iranian Revolution of 1979 was deeply tied to Islam’s notions of charity and essential human equality (not the same as “freedom” in any Western sense), tenets of belief that the Shah’s regime violated so openly and egregiously. Cassette recordings overcame the literacy barrier and brought this message to wide audiences that might have missed him had he been restricted to paper texts and photocopies.  Cassette tapes were the samizdat of the Islamic world in the 1970s.  Anyone could listen.

Cassette tapes allowed the Iranian opposition to gather, communicate, and plan for a better day.  When that day came, in the heady rebellion of 1978-79, it seemed as if the world exploded, just like it did this week as Iran commanded center stage everywhere.  It’s no small coincidence, it might be added, that some of the chief protagonists of the present turmoil – Ayatollah Montazeri,  Mir Hossein Mousavi, and Hashemi Rafsanhani – were there in 1979, in similar roles, only as much younger people.

So Twitter brings us full circle, from cyber space and cell phones – whose ubiquitous flip-top form bears more than a passing resemblance to the original Star Trek Communicator – back to cassette tapes.  Déjà vu all over again, as Yogi Berra once noted.

Today, Twitter and cell phone videos are our cassette tapes of Iranian change, bringing us the haunting images of people shouting Allahu Akbar from the rooftops at night, just like they did in 1979.  Then, as now, regular people sang the traditional Muslim declaration, “God is great,” to indict the regime in power.

That’s the original cultural source of change in Iran.

Note

This is the first of 3 postings on “The truth and Twitter.”  More to come…

Credits

Opening photo:  www.life.com/image/ugc1002722/in-gallery/28782/eyewitness-from-tehrans-streets.  LIFE has several dramatic series of photographs from the current events; other photographs are here. Looking at these photos, I can feel, in my bones, what “history” means.

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June 11, 2009 · 1:08 am

The truth and unicorns, part 3

The Narwhal, Sea-unicorn of the Arctic

The Narwhal, Sea-unicorn of the Arctic

Unicorns weren’t always mythical creatures.

The Greeks classified them among natural animals, with rhinos and other one-horned beasts.  Vikings traded Narwhal tusks to Medieval Europeans, who believed they were unicorn horns and paid dearly to possess them and their magical powers.  Marco Polo recorded his encounter with the Javan rhinoceros as the discovery of a unicorn.

No one knows exactly what the Narwhal’s tusk is for, though it is found only on males and therefore probably has a sexual function not unlike the extravagant feathers of the male peacock, or the electric guitar.  Yet while narwhal tusks and peacock feathers work as sexual aids for narwhals and peacocks, legend has it that the rhino’s tusk is coveted by humans as a sexual talisman.

This is disputed, however, and there are other medicinal applications of rhinoceros tusks in Chinese traditional medicine, for fevers and convulsions.  Either way, humankind’s uses for rhinoceros tusks are threatening the mega-mammal’s very existence, and it may soon vanish into the same ethereal space where its cousin, the unicorn, lives.  Climate change may well send the narwhal there, too, to dwell with vanishing hitchhikers, organ-jackers, and people who make phone calls that come from inside the house.

In the Charlie the Unicorn cartoons, myths and legends pile up on one another into what is among the most popular videos of all time on Youtube, collectively scoring close to 50 million views for 3 episodes.  In the first, Charlie is prodded by two smaller unicorns to come visit “Candy Mountain,” a place immortalized in the hobo fantasy song,

Where the handouts grow on bushes and you sleep out every night
Where the boxcars are all empty and the sun shines every day
On the birds and the bees and the cigarette trees

Along the way, they meet a Liopleurodon, a real-world creature of fossilized myth that is quite in dispute in contemporary America, who will help guide them to Candy Mountain.  As they move on, Charlie prods them, “Alright guys, you do know that there’s no actual candy mountain, right?”  They reply, “Shun the nonbeliever.”

When they reach the actual Candy Mountain, Charlie recognizes the error of his earlier belief, and walks into a cave in the mountainside, where he’s shut in and abandoned.  He awakens in a meadow with a large scar over his lower abdomen.  “They took my freakin’ kidney!”

In the second episode, our hero is lounging in the meadow on his nice carpet, watching a big screen TV.  Suddenly, his tormenting pals appear to him from an imaginary coral reef awash in “poisonous fugu fish” (puffer fish), which according to ethnobotanist Wade Davis are the source of the poison that produces the near-death experience resulting in zombification in Haiti.  It’s in a book Davis wrote, The Serpent and the Rainbow.  Legendary horror director Wes Craven made the book into a movie with Bill Pullman playing the real-world Indiana Jones down in the Caribbean.  Unicorns can lead you anywhere.  Maybe they’ll make Charlie into a zombie.  How many degrees can Charlie be from Kevin Bacon?

Again, they journey.  Along the way, there’s a magical amulet and a Banana King, whose temple looks like an Egyptian pyramid with an insignia of the “hammer and banana” fashioned like the “hammer and sickle” of Communist symbolism.  As Charlie is proclaimed the banana king, his friends abandon him and he falls from grace, literally.  When he reaches his original meadow clearing, he finds that his things are gone – “Aw you gotta be – great – they robbed me!”

In the third episode, his friends appear from the future with an apocalyptic message:  “The end is nigh.”  As they ride a large duck down a mythical stream in the future, Charlie’s friends taunt him with calls of “ring, ring – hello” over and over again, reminding one of the phone calls urban legend.  They confront shadowy narwhals that threaten to kill them.  Then they are on the floor of an ocean in a Greek ruins, Atlantis anyone?  Charlie’s friends abandon him and he succumbs to sleeping gas, only to awaken in a frigid landscape where he finally encounters the snowman, who has cut off Charlie’s horn and uses it as his snowman nose, and of course you know what they say about a snowman’s nose and its correlates.  There’s a large scar on the snowman’s lower abdomen.  “Aw look, it’s my kidney.”  A jolly, happy soul, as the song goes, indeed.

Note

The horse, which provides its body to the unicorn of myth, is quite closely related to rhinoceroses.  They are both perissodactyls, otherwise known as “odd-toed ungulates.” Along with narwhals, swordfish also have pointy appendages sprouting from their heads, too.

Credits

Narwahl photo: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Narwhalsk.jpg.

Big Rock Candy Mountain, Harry McClintock, 1928.  http://www.bluegrasslyrics.com/all_song.cfm-recordID=s29253.htm

Charlie the Unicorn:  Jeff Steele, Filmcow.com.  http://www.youtube.com/user/SecretAgentBob, http://www.filmcow.com/.

For a nice collection of issues related to Darwin and debates about evolution and creationism, see this page at the the New York Times.

Bonus

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