Month: August 2024

For a few years now, at least six, I’ve been reading current news daily. Those days may be ending. I’ve been watching friends with completely different approaches to life for whom ignorance really is bliss. Regardless of what happens with the presidential election this November, I am seriously considering taking a permanent break. Here’s why.

First, I have been what is called a double hater, though I don’t fit this article’s demographic The percentage of the voting public in this group is low, just 3%-6%, depending on the year. Or so they say… It’s a variation of being independent or moderate, just spicier. That may have changed for some when Harris won (received? accepted? acquired?) the Democratic nomination. Polls agree, but maybe not in Texas. Regardless, most polls give Harris the lead by 4 points. Here’s 538.

Second, I don’t really hate anybody. Charles C.W. Cooke did write rather jauntily in the current National Review about hating everyone. He says this: “Within the balloon that is Election 2024, it is accepted as an article of faith that, thanks to the other team’s myopic perfidy, everything in America is ill. This is false, and it is good that it is such.” It sums up my feelings. People on both sides are saying the other side is made up of liars. Ignorant. Willfully wrong. And worse. Each writes this with perfect sincerity.

Third, the press doesn’t help, when that ought to be its job. Cooke describes this: “We rightly mock the media for playing the Prussians to Wellington’s regulars, but the sheer scale of its corruption and obsequiousness is no longer a laughing matter.” That idiom of Prussians to Wellington’s irregulars isn’t easy to find but seems to mean that one group (Prussians) who have been enemies or at least opposed to another (English) helps them win against a common adversary (Napoleon). Not that this is provable per se—both sides say the other side lies constantly—but this may be the result of a lack of awareness. For example, when Stephen Colbert was interviewing Kaitlan Collins from CNN recently, he says that they are reporting the news as it is when the audience breaks out in laughter. She asks if that is supposed to be a laugh line, and he acknowledges it wasn’t supposed to be but “I guess it is.” You can watch it on Fox here, and try as I could, it wasn’t on any left-leaning media, if you believe such things exist.

Fourth, we talk about siloes and this needs to be expanded a bit. This writer is working on a discussion module for high schoolers: “They encourage people to feel pretty sure that they are right about what they think – because everyone around them thinks the same thing!” As do most of us, I dislike being told I’m wrong. The problem arises when that involves opinion. Can opinions be wrong? Merriam-Webster says this: “belief stronger than impression and less strong than positive knowledge.” Online Etymological Dictionary adds this: “The word always has tended toward ‘a judgment or view regarded as influenced more by sentiment or feeling than reason.’” To go much further would result in a discussion of objective truth, about which I am unwilling to engage. But there is a delightful logical fallacy that applies called “The Settled Question.” Both sides engage in this wantonly. “Obviously…” or “Of course…” and the familiar “Have you stopped beating your wife” and less violent “What was there before time began?” Having been told my opinion is wrong, and having seen this as recently as this morning, I’ll suggest this explanation from Ilana Redstone: “Once we’ve fallen into the Settled Question Fallacy, we can generally imagine only two possible reasons why someone might disagree with us: ignorance or hatefulness. This is because this initial fallacy often leads us to fall into one or more of two other fallacies that make constructive engagement difficult if not impossible.”

I can count to four. Seems adequate for now. Don’t suggest that I am running away or burying my head in the sand (Ostriches don’t, by the way.) I think it will be interesting not to know how awful everything is. If the trucks are still running, and the mail is being delivered, and city water flows, I may be satisfied. I may be wrong. I haven’t explained why it will be okay. I just think not knowing about the doom will help, as will the Constitution.

Grief is one of those things that everyone experiences, in some form, at some time. It can’t be shared; you must deal with it on your own. For a while after I heard the quotation that follows, I was sure it summed up the conflict:  Jamie Anderson, a producer of Doctor Who, said “Grief, I’ve learned, is really just love. It’s all the love you want to give, but cannot. All that unspent love gathers up in the corners of your eyes, the lump in your throat, and in that hollow part of your chest. Grief is just love with no place to go.”

Then I simplified it into “I hate love.” It’s not true, however, and like everyone, I love loving—a late spouse, children, friends, but also things like Blue Bell Homemade Vanilla, enchiladas, tartes au citron, and experiences like Firefly, Jack Reacher, The Lark Ascending, Misa Criolla (see below). And more of all of that. I do hate that loving means the potential for pain exists from its beginning.

Investigating the title—I was sure it wasn’t original—I learned it was the title of two songs. Here is Kelly Clarkson explaining the history her album Chemistry (2023), especially the fact that Steve Martin is the featured banjoist. Which has to do, per the lyrics of “I Hate Love,” with the fact that he was in a movie called It’s Complicated (2009). Clarkson believes complication is a more realistic depiction of love than The Notebook (2004), which she says lied. Not to spoil the ending, but that couple dies together in each other’s arms. The rest of the movie is actually complicated, but maybe the last two minutes spoiled it for her. And for me. (For those of you who know me, I know who Kelly Clarkson is because she comes from just down the road in Burleson, won American Idol, and appears in ads for Wayfair, but that is literally all. Couldn’t name a song or a husband etc.)

The other “I Hate Love” is by the rock group Garbage on their album Not Your Kind of People (2012). And obviously I never heard of them or their song. Clarkson’s is enjoyable, musically speaking. The Garbage one is rather painful. Personal opinion.

Looking for the “I Hate Love” songs on YouTube, one of those recommendations on the side was Misa Criolla (1964). What memories that brought back! A friend many years ago lent me the CD with this work. I played it so many times that I had to replace it. (I will no longer accept lends; I am not reliable.) Ariel Ramirez, an Argentinian composer, wrote his setting of the Mass not long after vernacular languages were allowed in Catholic services. It is easily his most famous piece, and famous internationally.

The “Gloria” is a particular favorite. So of course I had to listen to six: In black and white from 1967, with the Gloria beginning at 2:48. (The entire work is only 16+ minutes.) A similar version in color date unknown but newer. Los Fronterizos, a popular Argentinian group, appears in both. This one is wonderful, with Spanish lyrics and featuring singer Mercedes Sosa; Jaime Torres is on charango, a stringed instrument used in Andean music. I hadn’t heard of either of them nor could I have named the instrument. They are magnificent. Here is one from a Mass at the Vatican, with Pope Francis (also Argentinian). Patricia Sosa (no relation) is the soloist; Facundo Ramirez, the composer’s son, conducts from the piano. Rodolfo Ruiz is on charango. The entire work and Mass itself are here, Misa Criolla. The performance was 50 years to the day after the premiere.

The friend who lent me the recording lives nearer that Kelly Clarkson, but I don’t see her. We speak on the phone occasionally. Her husband died about the same time as mine. A Spanish teacher, she recommended her favorite version, with Jose Carreras. He, too, is marvelous. The recording was released in 1988, and I am betting the backup group is the same as at the Vatican, led by Jaime Torres. My friend talked about discovering the joys of YouTube and continuing advanced Spanish study on DuoLingo. (Apparently, the subjunctive mood is important in Spanish. We have it in English, but most have never heard the term. People speak as they learn, without reference to grammar usually. But this is how SpanishDictionary.com explains it: “The subjunctive is used to express desires, doubts, wishes, conjectures, emotions, and possibilities.” Yes, the links were there and work. In English, the most common use is for hypotheticals which sound like the Spanish list but go unnoticed (“If I were a rich man…”), so “were” instead of “was.”) We talked for an hour. She gifted me with Jose, and I suggested algal DHA for memory, which I do for all my friends.

An earlier conversation with another friend better illustrates the topic. She has been struggling with various cancer diagnoses for several years. As a result of chemo, she had a fall in April and hit her head. The doctor asked for an MRI beyond the usual CT scan. Sure enough, two tumors are growing in her brain, slowly it’s hoped. Words don’t do much, even to express love. She has good support and can ask me for the occasional assist. Hearing the pain in her voice hurts.

From time to time, we see a longer version of someone feeling helpless. Recently on Facebook: “I’ll never forget what my daughter said after her best friend was subjected to a racist comment on the school bus one afternoon. ‘I asked her if she was okay,’ my child said tearfully. ‘She didn’t say anything, so I just scooted closer.’ Reluctantly, she admitted, ‘I didn’t know what to do, Mama, so I just hurt with her.’ I hurt with her. It took me a moment to recover from that.”

I wrote about a topic similar to this, published in Dallas Morning News. And surprise! I find the cover photo on X, with my name. Not that anyone notices. The article is here, and you can read it if you have a subscription or if you haven’t used up your free article for the month. PDF sent on request. I am proud of it.

In an odd play—as are all of Harold Pinter’s—we meet four characters in No Man’s Land (1974) In this trailer, the protagonist Hirst asks a stranger who has presents himself as an friend, “Do you know from what I derive my strength?” Spooner, the stranger, replies, “Strength? No.” The stunning answer is, “I’ve never been loved.” Not that anyone understands the play itself: This reviewer of a Steppenwolf production notes, “Whatever I tell you, I doubt that it would help you to clearly understand this play, and in fact that effort would be utterly futile, as the brilliance of Pinter’s writing here is that it can basically be taken any way you want it to be.” Or, more simply, nobody knows that it means anything, brilliant writing aside.

Hirst is, of course, lying. Even if he had never been loved, he could love. And he could at least love himself. Sometimes, I end with an admonition. This piece has been about the noun “love,” but the message may be the verb “love.” Saturday evening, I heard Dr. Bob Roberts (“PASTOR * BRIDGE BUILDER * AUTHOR”) speak on loving people you disagree with. It was powerful because, as a Baptist preacher, he disagrees with much of what his audience (Latter-day Saints, Muslims, and other faiths) believes. His experience suggest that he walks this talk. Lots of people don’t; he apologized for the bpain his Baptist brethren have caused his hosts. Maybe we don’t have time to do anything else. This seems like a little paragraph to end with, but considering so many factors, I hope you will take love to heart, even though you know it may hurt.

“Singularity” is a word I thought I knew. My (limited) understanding had to do with gravitational singularity in which gravity becomes so intense that spacetime collapses. We can throw around such terms as singularity and event horizon (which surrounds the singularity) as readily as if we understood black holes. I don’t even understand why autocorrect accepts the word spacetime; the more usual spelling is space-time, per Merriam-Webster.

The new definition introduced lately is actually technological singularity, the point in time at which technology takes over and surpasses its human creators. Human life as we know it would not continue. In Mission Impossible—Dead Reckoning (2023), the real enemy is called the Entity, an AI that was accidentally activated and now seeks world domination as bad actors seek to possess its power. You’d think they’d realize that’s impossible (sorry), but the Entity does use liaisons, one of whom is named Gabriel.

Consider that name, Gabriel. Its Hebrew origin means “God is my strength.” The angel Gabriel has a significant history in the Abrahamic religions. He is a messenger who reveals knowledge—in the Old Testament, New Testament, and Quran. In the movie, Gabriel is a murderer and allegedly a liaison with the Entity. But there aren’t accidents or coincidences, so I take it to mean that this evil messenger announces human destruction. (His own, too, but the liaisons never seem to figure that out in advance.)

The genesis of this inquiry (sorry) began recently with a lecture by Paul Tobolowsky, a retired physician with an interest in miracles for a local group called Science and Religion. It began with a discussion of what a miracle even is, but Dr. T’s premise is that everything is a miracle, that the fact life exists is a miracle. The idea of divine intervention seemed troubling to some because of the apparent workings outside science. My thinking is the opposite: An intelligent actor knows and uses laws we cannot grasp. I introduced the etymology of the word, which begins with “smile” before it gets to “wondrous.” That also didn’t get any traction.

The basis of the premise (sorry) is emergence: “By definition, emergence occurs when a complex entity has properties that its parts do not have on their own and emerge only when they interact. For physicist Sean Carroll, mysterious processes within and between atoms give rise to the emergent properties of the observable world. To biologist Ursula Goodenough, the emergence of life and intelligence from the lifeless atoms of our planet seems ‘far more magical than traditional miracles.’” This abstract suggests the same thing, from a different perspective. My problem with this has to do with intelligence. From what I seem to be understanding, then, intelligence is made of matter.

Leaving the miraculous out of this, however, will not work if there is nothing divine within it. In other words, there is a vast difference between a supreme intelligence and               how we currently live. This long essay includes a discussion of intelligence as matter from a spiritual perspective. If, full circle, that bothers a scientist, I have to say I don’t understand why.

Ray Kurzweil is a prominent writer on this topic. He predicts the (technological) singularity will happen by mid-century. This is an article; here is a TED talk. He sounds confident and quite prophetic. We will be better in most ways, but also possibly useless–the conundrum. The fusing or merging or whatever it will be called has begun. People have brain implants. This Pew Research Center poll suggests we aren’t quite ready for general use though, from 2016.

A quick ending (sorry) because it’s late and this should take a week and not a day. Dr. Tobolowsky’s conclusion is that he is surprised when people are asked how they are, the response isn’t something like “I’m wonderful! I’m miraculous! Do you realize that we are made of matter that is as old as the universe? That it has been through billions of tranfers and in billions of other forms in those billions of years?” I wrote about our existence as light and stardust in 2021, here, but I am not sure I’ve actually acted like it. His was an exuberant ending, and, oddly, might be worth trying.

Trust: One of those words that we know casually but hurt deeply when it’s betrayed. Previously, I introduced the truth-default theory which is no more than people believe what they’re told and don’t even entertain the idea someone may be lying. That is as good a definition of trust as any. If so, why do we get so angry with ourselves if we respond to phishing? Another matter.

A wilderness of mirrors: First, it’s a line from a T.S. Elion poem, “Gerontion.” As tempting as it is to suggest something to do with geraniums, the title means “little old man.”  What does the phrase mean? I don’t know. Archibald McLeish has a famous poem “Ars Poetica” with the final lines, “A poem should not mean/But be.” Eliot is notorious for density. When he was young, the writing could be obscure, visual but hard to decipher. (What do you remember about “Prufrock”? Perhaps “I have measured out my life with coffee spoons.”) One son graciously agreed to take my lit class when I had to be elsewhere. He’s just studied this era at the University of Texas and announced that it was all impossible to understand but what they needed to know was…I’m not sure I trust what he told me he told them. But they seemed very pleased with the whole event.

Second, “a wilderness of mirrors” was used outside the poem as a means of describing the double-crossing and subterfuge of the spy world. This article tells its history, beginning with James Jesus Angleton, the head of the CIA from 1954-74,“to describe the angst and confusion created during the Cold War by moles and double agents.” The analysis of how the ways of interpreting messages makes sense if you’ve watched such movies.

Consider, after all, the ways a spy’s message may be read:
1) It is written by a loyal agent and its information is accurate.
2) It is written by a loyal agent but its information is only partly accurate.
3) It is written by a loyal agent but its information is entirely inaccurate.
4) It is written by a double agent and its information is completely false.
5) It is written by a double agent but its information is partly true, so that the false parts will be believed.
6) It is written by a double agent but its information is entirely true, so that the allegiance of the agent will not be discovered.

So, to put trust and wilderness together: One easy way, especially today, is the admonition “Trust, but verify.” Many think its origin was President Ronald Reagan. In fact, it was one of several Russian idioms his advisor Suzanne Massie taught him. It rhymes in Russian, which I can see but not pronounce having abandoned that language study: доверяй, но проверяй.

We talk about being in the weeds all the time. Messy, scary, thorny, buggy. Wilderness has a kinder connotation but probably shouldn’t. Not that it’s weeds, but untamed nature should probably be more frightening.

Communication—as I’ve often said—is virtually impossible. (This is a sweet little game of Telephone. Jimmy Kimmel and the Avengers actor had one, but…) What I’d like to suggest is visualizing all those mirrors reflecting a wilderness—whether it’s conflicting reports or confusing words—and realize them for what they are: potentially intentional misdirection and incorrect information. Only last week I reposted a lost child report that was a fake. Someone pointed it out to me. I should have checked. Another story was about an albino grizzly that had been taken to the Arctic mistakenly. That was obvious enough to require a check first. A clever story, but hopefully grizzlies and polar bears are different enough that scientists wouldn’t confuse them. The video is quite convincing, though, probably because the narrator seems so, well, trustworthy.

Word of warning and a new word, too: aphantasia. It means you don’t visualize, or can’t, because of neurological reasons beyond my grasp. And you may not even know you don’t. This is an instructive article with a link to the original study.