Monthly Archives: October 2014

The Judge

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Having just seen the movie “The Judge” with Robert Duvall and Robert Downey Jr., the mariner felt more like Robert Duvall than Robert Downey, Jr. In other words, he felt old. Like Robert Duvall, the frontal lobes were intact and contained a lifelong establishment of reason, morality and a command of human behavior. Still, the body was finished; the brain confused by drugs and memory lapses. The shower scene “done me in,” as a Broadway play once complained; it was the last straw – the mariner, too, had outlasted his biological lifespan.

To make matters worse, the mariner came home to read a frightful edition of Smithsonian, describing the bright ideas that will shape the future. The mariner has always considered he was an agent of change. Indeed, his career was just that, bringing large corporations into new worlds of automated business management.

But technology has caught up and passed him by. Not so much the technical engineering but the changes in what human beings will be subject to in a world where reality and automated fantasy are combined in a smudged and inseparable pseudo-reality. One article in the magazine claimed to implant false history in a mouse brain. The mouse believed it had been severely shocked while standing on a steel plate. Placed in a box with an easy way to escape, the mouse stood frozen in fear that it would be shocked and would not move toward the exit. Yet the mouse actually had never received such a shock.

Translate this ability to alter reality to humans. The claim is a cure for Alzheimer’s, dementia, psychological disorders and other ailments of modern life. If one is paranoid of government and corporate prerogatives, one can see manipulation driven by foolish laws and corporate procedures – a capability that can be used for cure or curse.

In any case, one’s knowledge of one’s self may not be real. One’s history that has built an identity of self may be artificial – the self being lost among artificial memories and erased traumas and confrontations that make us who we are.

The mariner longs for that sailboat that will take him away from the modern world and travel among the shores of places that still are behind the technological curve – where real is real.

There are two concepts that dominate international culture today: We do it because we can – and the individual is not the solution. This mixture reminds the mariner of the early industrial age, where human rights were trampled in the name of progress.

Inept governments around the world are not interested in protecting human rights. Profits account for much more than personal freedoms.

Change is always traumatic as new processes displace old ones. The world will change under our feet even as we try to stand upon solid ground.

In the movie, Robert Duvall passed away due to advanced cancer. One could not help but share his release.

Ancient Mariner

Life Force

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The mariner was standing on a street corner the other day when a woman with a little furry thing in her arm (It couldn’t have been a wolf, maybe one of those toys that cries and wets itself. He saw one like it tucked into the abundant cleavage of a movie star. It looked like it belonged there – sort of like a soul patch but lower). The woman had a very large pocketbook hanging off her other arm, perhaps a distraction because the strap implied that it belonged on her shoulder. The woman had unkempt hair (do not judge her for that; my wife often says that it is a hair style and not “unkempt”) She wore black one size fits all pants, and a Detroit Lions sweatshirt under a light blue jacket.

The woman had two daughters along with her and was lecturing them. The littlest girl looked to be about five and the taller one looked to be about nine. They were dressed almost identically: red sneakers, jeans, each had a different t-shirt; both wore school jackets. The nine year old stared ahead indifferently while slowly chewing gum, hands in her jacket pockets. The little one had her head turned to look over her shoulder at something that caught her attention.

The mariner watched as the three continued down the block. The woman never stopped lecturing; the little one never stopped looking across the street and the tall one still chewed, hands in pockets.

Martin Wolf says the entire world is headed for a global financial crisis. The Indians clamor to remove the name “Redskins” from the football team. Every day there is a shooting somewhere that occupies air time on the tv news (The mariner often wonders if the news journalists station themselves in places where shootings may occur – sort of like hunting and waiting for deer to come down the path). ISIL seems a looming threat to the US – at least according to military analysts, military advisers, and military contract lobbyists. 2014 is the warmest year on record and 2015 will be even warmer. Is there enough water in the Ogallala aquifer to grow grain?

The three went into a small restaurant featuring Mexican cuisine.

The mariner wondered what the mother had to say for such a long time. It probably didn’t matter; the girls weren’t listening. There seemed to be some disarray in their lives. Apparently the girls had adopted ways to normalize their lives and the mother must carry burden in her life. It is odd how life can encase one’s existence completely, creating a reality only visible to those encased – like the woman and the daughters. They have a life that no one else lives.

As do you and the mariner. We are encased in our separate lives – unique to ourselves.

Turkey stands by while innocent people are being killed less than a mile away. Russia annexed Crimea and intends to make Ukraine Russian-dependent. Ebola kills 4,600 in Africa.

The mariner walks back home, just a few blocks. The grass on the lawns is still green and neatly clipped. That’s a trademark in this town. A man is washing his car in the driveway. In another block, three men are cutting down an old tree. As the mariner walks up his driveway, a red squirrel twenty feet away watches with a cautious stare.

Life envelopes everyone. It seems a force unto itself tied somehow to history and the journey everyone takes. Yet our journeys are unique and so different. Nevertheless, each of us, living a life unknown to others, is part of the daily history of the earth.

What is the life that envelopes an ISIS fighter? A US Senator? Bill Gates? A barefooted starving child in Africa? A software engineer at Monsanto? A prison guard? Your neighbor? Your child? We share this singular phenomenon called “life.” Yet each of us lives it alone.

Ancient Mariner

 

Survival of the Single Soul in a Turbulent World

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The mariner has been tossed about by the trying times of our culture, our economy, our information invasion, our ignorance of science, and the prevalence of greed in all life’s endeavors. The mariner has languished in the knowledge that there is little in our lives that is as it was yesterday or how it will be tomorrow.

Some of the languish stems from his age. He no longer is mainstream in his interaction with commerce, raising families or sporting events. Still, the mariner feels there is something amiss – something that can improve the life experience of each of us individually even in the midst of a massive paradigm shift moving toward macro-marketing, cultural dependency beyond nationalism, and instantaneous awareness of every event occurring around the entire planet.

Fatalism is not the answer, of course. One eventually lashes out at the confusion; retreat from the conflagration is necessary but only temporary. Each of us lives on this planet and must therefore be part of the planet’s history, ecology, and future.

The mariner will retreat to his study and keyboard to discern how you and he, meager single souls in a sea of thrashing whales, tsunamis, rogue waves, hurricanes and monsoons, will keep our ship seaworthy even without a charted course.

It seems, at first thought, that seaworthiness is how individual souls interact rather than being part of a larger organism swept by the tides. Consider the Cesium atom that keeps our time so accurately that only one second of error occurs every billion years. Cesium ignores corporate piracy and suppression of the masses. It abides only by the rules of Cesium atoms. We must search within rather than attempt to race ahead to divert the storms.

Ancient Mariner

How We Arrived Here

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October 15, PBS started a new series called “How We Got to Now.” It is a series about how simple but extremely important ideas made our current society possible. The premier researched the idea of ‘clean’ as in the need for clean streets, clean drinking water and many other comforts and technologies dependent on clean environments.

As regular readers may know, the mariner is vacillating about maintaining his blog. In his last post (What should we care about?), the mariner cashed his chips and turned the fate of the world over to the gods. That fate remains with them; the mariner has donned a fatalist’s cloak. Somehow Doris Day made fatalism appear attractive when she sang Que Sera Sera. In reality, the cloak is a drab color. Nevertheless, there are no questions to answer and no expectations.

How the mariner got to fatalism is the question in this post.

In the last 170 years we have sailed a course worthy of Jason and his Argonauts. While every discipline imaginable shared in the shape and direction of our course, the mariner believes communication has had the greatest influence.

Just a few quick touchstones: Ignorance is bliss. What you don’t know won’t hurt you. We do it because we can. Nothing in life is free. America; home of the free. The war to end all wars. Google. Yahoo. Microsoft. Netflix. Cable tv. Satellites. Hulu. Cell Phones. In a category all to itself, Internet.

Throw in day-to-day accounting of people losing their homes by the millions. Ineffective, greedy government. Beheaded journalists. A nonexistent recovery for anyone making less than $75,000 annually. Every fire of any size anywhere in the world along with every drought, every flood, every hurricane. Being forced to watch news programs showing how everyone except the top 10% of citizens grows poorer every year.

Dying ash trees. Increasingly colder winters and hotter summers. Crop status. Blood test results. Overstated scares about Ebola. Football concussions. We must evaluate the foreign policy of every country in the world whether we want to or not. Crazy news journalists with no regard for truth, taste or moral obligation to the viewer.

Had enough? Not only must you handle too much information, everyone else knows your information as well. Now, cloud technology will take from you the last bastion of privacy – your information will not reside on your computer but in a commercial, for profit data base.

I fear the demise of crocheting, reading paper newspapers, substantive education that enforces higher moral values for all citizens – including the knowledge to activate those moral values.

These touchstones are merely the foundation of a new age that goes far beyond the book 1984 except that uniforms will not be required. Jeans will suffice. Still, modern forms of slavery will become entrenched. There is nothing that can stop this nonsense and still we must be reminded of all of it from television, papers, cable, and, of all things, as if deliberately paradoxical, we will be able to view only information that data controllers want us to know.

The mariner gives up. Only the gods can right the ship. He feels his single ballot is useless to stem the tide. His age and energy prevent him from stirring the blood that was present when he was a young activist.

Sailing away to visit information-deficient places in the world sounds very healing to the mariner. And to put up his feet under a palm tree in some underdeveloped country (read minimal information capability) may heal wounds.

“Live in Donnellson,” my learned wife says. “It would not be hard to be an isolationist as well as a fatalist.” Ah, if there were only palm trees and open water….

Ancient Mariner

What Should We Care About?

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The mariner has experienced the hopelessness of righting the mighty wrongs of this world. Henceforth, he will trust in the vengeance of God as Armageddon is smote upon us.

He will abide the future ordained by the imminent asteroid.

He will bask in the warmth of whatever it is that is getting warmer but doesn’t exist.

He will ignore the burdens loosed by Pandora.

He will trust the horsemen to deliver the Apocalypse.

He will leave our resolve to the Sun.

 

The mariner will focus on matters of the mundane, inquisitive, whimsical and oddly irrelevant, all things considered:

Puppy farms persist in Iowa.

Cricket invasion in home town.

Mentioned to some readers, the mariner still is intrigued by unintended phenomena from genome manipulation.

Will Robert Downey Jr. find honor in “The Judge?”

Is the Catalina 22 sailboat a sporting model for the Gulf?

Why is coffee so important to the liver?

On World News Now, what happened to Reena Ninan?

It was mentioned recently that diabetes will kill someone before smoking does. Does this mean diabetics have nothing to lose if they smoke?

 

We’ll see how it goes…

 

Ancient Mariner

 

And it came to pass in those days, that there went out a decree…

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It has come to pass that the mariner is preparing for that isolated but pleasantly benign part of life called the very old. Finally. It will be a relief. He has grown weary if not traumatized by the unending crassness, abuse, greed, enmity, and ignorance of Homo sapiens. He will not care whether we first kill ourselves through destruction of the global ecosystem or have so many specimens that many will take to living under water or in space.

The mariner will no longer ponder the irrationality of finding ways to keep H. sapiens alive for more and more years without providing income and a place in the workforce, curing dementia and diet, and eliminating the side effects of a good twenty dollar Cuban. An entertaining thought to the mariner is that when everyone can genetically select the perfect fetus, all women will look like Amy Adams or Halle Berry; all men will look like Arnold Schwarzenegger or Derek Jeter. Even more stultifying is the holy nature of childbirth without holy euthanasia on the other end. Love thy neighbor will be very important when there are twelve billion H. sapiens climbing all over each other. The mariner no longer worries. It will be irrelevant.

The mariner has quit television. None of it is important; all of it is ill-reported, and the entertainment deliberately avoids everyone over sixty and anyone with a modicum of functional intelligence.

The mariner has chronic back pain. For years he has taken a fistful of anti-seizure medications leaving him wandering about with little more focus than a zombie. There is no chance a grand mal is in his future. Since the chronic back pain persists in spite of prescribed remedies, the mariner will trash medications and at least be able to complete simple tasks.

The mariner is going off the grid as much as possible. No intensely monitored loans, no intensely monitored mortgages, no intensely monitored credit cards, no intensely monitored browsing on the Internet. Checks if he has to otherwise cash only. Only his assets will be visible – to everyone. It is not the government he fears; it is nosy fee lice that wander the Internet clouds seeking to bleach his privacy into nonexistence. It’s no one’s business which car he will buy next. A perfect retreat would be somewhere in Costa Rica – totally nameless.

The mariner will fulfill his desire to sail in warmer waters than are available in most of the United States. Winter is no time to be above the sub-tropic zone (20°N). He is still puzzled that early ancestors thought walking into snow and subfreezing temperatures was a good thing to do.

The mariner is selling his sixteen-foot sailboat because there is no decent water within which to sail it.

Even now, the computer is turned on less frequently. Email response may be slower than the Pony Express. The cell phone has always been worthless. A rotten log receives a better signal.

What’s left are home flower gardens and landscaping in season. Someone else will make home repairs. Finally, all there will be is visiting family, and most importantly, discovering new ways to be an unabridged H. sapiens.

So, to quote a trite phrase, “So long, farewell, aufweidersehen goodbye.”

Ancient Mariner signing off.