I’m more familiar with Manhattan than with the town where my wife was born. Where my mother in law still lives…
I had visited New York on three ocassions. I had spent there three, maybe four, weeks. In total! I’ve driven to Dej, my better half’s birthplace, for at least 50 times. And mind you, getting there from Bucharest, by car, takes about the same amount of time as that spent in a plane flying from Bucharest to JFK…
In NYC, I used to stay at my late uncle’s. In Garden City. Almost every working day, I took the early train into Penn Station and wore my soles out criss-crossing the island. Alone, the first two times, accompanied by my wife and little son during the last ocassion. Whenever we come to visit my in-laws we almost never leave the house. Except for buying groceries. To go to the cemetery. Or, rarely, to visit some derelict castle …
Why? Does it really matter?!? Do we actually need explanations for everything?
Why can’t we just wonder? Specially at the strange things which happen to us…
Or, more exactly, when we realize how strangely we had behaved ourselves for such a long time!
Imagine having a festering boil. On your ass, for good measure. You may take to the doctor, for treatment. Or you may wait, hoping your organism will be strong enough to heal itself. This being your call. Nobody else but you has anything to say about this situation. Let’s say you have chosen to go to the hospital. Once there, the matter has gotten somewhat ‘out of your hands’. You still have the last word but the doctor calls the more important shots. Pun indended, of course. He can simply open up the boil, put you on a course of antibiotics and send you home. He might decide to check you up and see whether the boil is a symptom of something deeper. He might attempt to rip you off by ordering, all at once, a host of complex tests and of fancy treatments. Or all at once. Cut up your boil, set you on a course of antibiotics, order a decent set of tests and still rip you off. ‘Is there a point to all these?’ Yep! How the ‘good’ doctor will choose to treat you is the consequence of how you have chosen him. And of how the community you belong to had chosen to organise its health system. But the more consequential decision, whether to go to the doctor in the first place, is yours. I’m not going to analyse the factors you have to balance – we’d go back to how the community you belong to had chosen to organise its health system. I’m only going to parade the possible outcomes. A nice scar on your butt and a decent tab for you – or for your insurer, to pick up on your way out. Acompanied, hopefully, by an otherwise clean bill of health. A nice scar, and a clean bill of health, accompanied by an outrageous invoice. These being the ‘good’ outcomes. The doctor might find out, after reading the test results, that you also have, say, a blood disease. One perfectly treatable by modern medicine. But which would have easily killed you if you had waited much longer. The doctor might also find out, after reading the test results, that the boil is the symptom of an incurable disease. One which will kill you for sure. Only now you’ll die in the relative comfort of the available paliative treatment you can afford. Or you might choose to nurse your boil at home. Get out fine. And a lot cheaper! Die of an apparently unrelated disease six months later. Or pass out because of a sepsis which had eventually became untreatable. Due to your own prevarications…. ‘And what has the boil on my ass to do with Covid?!?’ Covid is a boil on our collective ass. We might decide to treat it ‘on the go’, hoping that on the ‘other side’ our lives will return to normal. Or we might decide to use it as an opportunity! An opportunity to clean up our act….
I still have to find, only I’ve lost patience, an explanation for what had ‘fed’ Trump. Trump as social phenomenon…
For too long, a small group in our nation’s capital has reaped the rewards of government while the people have borne the cost. Washington flourished but the people did not share in its wealth. Politicians prospered but the jobs left and the factories closed.
Trump has made himself famous. Among others, for imparting new meaning to the concept of ‘fake-news’. And for using “alternative facts” to introduce us to an ‘alternative reality’. His…
Only his reality did have something in common with that faced by many of his fellow Americans.
Oops! Suddenly, Trump’s ‘alternative’ reality – part of it, at least, has become one with that experienced by “we, the People”. By a majority of them, anyway.
What made so many people – dispirited, undoubtedly, believe that a self professed pussy grabber and proud member of the Washington establishment would solve their real-life problems… by ‘draining’ the very ‘swamp’ in which he had grown to his present stature … that’s something for other people to explain.
My point being that Trump’s behavior had very closely followed that of Goethe’s Apprentice Sorcerer. He had used his uncanny knack of playing hide-and-seek with reality to climb into the Oval Office only to be fired after one mandate. To be the first American President who had survived two impeachments. And the second one who had witnessed – more or less unmoved, the untimely demise of half a million Americans due to disease
But the first who had done that during a mostly peaceful mandate. Pandemic, true enough, but otherwise peaceful.
NB. The ‘Spanish Flu’ pandemic, which had happened during Woodrow Wilson’s mandate, had caused the death of 675 000 Americans. Only that had occurred just after a world war, when viruses hadn’t yet been discovered and man hadn’t yet walked on the Moon.
What will happen next?
Who knows… Goethe’s poem had a relatively happy ending because a master sorcerer was at hand. Who had solved the problem with a swift gesture of his powerful wand.
No such easy solution is available now. But one thing has become clear. Again…
Two things, actually. Too many dispirited people eventually become a powerful – and highly unstable, ‘Petri dish’. Where all kinds of ‘social experiments’ might ‘spontaneously’ explode. And playing with people’s passions might take you places. But will, almost always, end up badly.
Libraries, book shops – new and second hand, used to be my home away from home.
Communism crumbling under it’s own weight in my home country, Romania, widened even more my already special relationship with the written word. Books nobody would even had dared to dream about got translated into Romanian. Or even got imported in original.
As borders became more and more open, I’ve also ‘imported’ some myself.
The honeymoon lasted for a while. Only at some point I was no longer ‘comfortable’ in most bookshops. If anything, there was ‘too much of it’. Too much of the good stuff, to much ‘noise’… Not enough time to read everything I would have liked to… so I gave up. I gave up compulsively visiting book shops, not reading…
The really special thing about it? There was no ‘noise’ in there! None of the books I’d found on its shelves ever seemed ‘out of place’. Most of them, of course, were of little – if any at all, interest for me. Yet they seemed worthwhile, if you understand what I mean.
The good thing lasted for almost 10 years.
At some point I found a ‘closing soon’ placard hanging on the door. I didn’t even enter that day. Too sad.
I can’t say I’d given up visiting book shops. Only that I had stopped doing it with gusto. And, certainly, that I had given up perusing book store shelves.
I’d started to rely of friends ‘telling’ me what to read. Real life friends, Facebook friends… you name it.
And I continued to do it. Only my scope had become nearer and nearer. Without even realizing what was going on….
Until a good friend of mine – a real life friend, told me – on Facebook, that Anthony Frost was alive and kicking!
Hiding behind a different name, a few hundreds meters from the old place, but the very same thing. A rather small location full to the brink with the good stuff!
Visiting it, and perusing its shelves, I realized – with a shudder, that my intellectual bubble had shrunk. Became ‘deeper’ – debatable, but certainly narrower!
Go find your own books!
Anthony Frost, in Bucharest, is a good place to start! Or to rekindle your love affair with the printed word.
“The Texas educational system inundates the children with the almost mythical stories of Sam Houston, Stephen F. Austin, and other Texan heroes. This perpetuates the feeling that Texans are superior to others. Social Identity Theory claims that in-group biases are a direct need to feel superior to another group. By reinforcing such ideals of Texas history at an early age, they are indirectly making Texans feel superior to other states.”
In fact, Texans are so proud of their state, and so confident in themselves, that their power grid, run by ERCOT – Electric Reliability Council of Texas, has no connections linking it to the outside world. Yes, your eyes are OK. Texas – most of it, anyway, cannot import electric energy. No matter what!
For those who know anything about power management, this is insane. For the rest of the people, this sounds like gibberish.
Who cares where the power comes from?!?
Until it stops coming… exactly when you need it most!
‘OK. But surely, there are also other systems which are independent. And isolated. What about Hawai’i? It’s too far away to connect itself with anybody else and it’s doing just fine.’
True enough. And I can name a few more, easily. Only most of them are independent because they are isolated, not by design. And, exactly because they are isolated, they are run with utmost care. More precautions are taken than in ‘normal’ situations.
‘Precaution’ meaning, in this case, spare capacity. The responsible people running those systems make sure that, when push comes to shove, somebody is there to deliver the goods. The megawatts of power.
Maybe we need to reconsider our infatuation with ‘just in time management’. While ‘just in time management’ maximizes profits by streamlining inventory, it works its magic only when everything goes according to plan. And the stricter the streamlining, the harsher the consequences of anything not going according to plan!
And no, I’m not making fun of the ordinary people who suffer the consequences! This being the moment when I feel the need to remind you that the author of this blog – that’s me, tries to asses the consequences of our limited consciousness. Of the fact that none of us knows much. And, furthermore, that very few of us admit that! Which consequences might be – as too often are, tragic.
Specially when those who are not aware that their knowledge is limited happen to be invested with critical decision power.
“The popularity of authors like Deutsch, Sandbrook and Foote – men of very different calibre in many different ways, but all wordsmiths who form history into desirably unchallenging packages for certain kinds of audience – is undeniable. It points to a conclusion that the wider historical profession, from schoolteachers to internationally renowned critical scholars, struggles to overcome. People, and specially people from priviledged groups, do not want historians to tell them bad things about their tresured identities. They will, indeed, forcefully react against such challenges, when given the political rallying-calls that allow them to do so. In that sense, it must be said, they do not want history. They want what they are increasingly getting: a cosy blanket of half remembering and convenient forgetting that is cushioning their slide down the slope to full-blown cultural dementia.”
As for the fact finding mission… I wonder! Given the amount of loyalty extended to Trump by Kevin McCarthy, how many years might pass before the facts will be ‘found’?
5?!? And who would be fingered for ‘starting the whole thing’?
Now, will ‘they’ find a constitutional way to set a precedent? That a guy who had so horribly – and tragically, misused the sacred notion of “freedom of expression” has no place in such a powerful position? Or, by failing to do so – for whatever reasons, will ‘they’ leave open the ‘opportunity’ for an even more callous ‘political animal’ to climb into the Oval Office?
Being an engineer, I’m gonna present you with a more straight-forward version than the philosophical one.
For something to be real, it has to have consequences.
‘But…?!?’
No buts! The only thing which classifies something as being real or not is our consciousness. Without it, without our consciousness, the something we’re talking about now – reality itself, would cease to be ‘real’. Without us pondering about it, ‘reality’ would continue to exist, of course! Only it would no longer bear a name… Without us being concerned enough about it, it would ‘disappear’ from our ‘radar’.
‘Yes, but … you just said that something becomes real as soon as it has consequences! We encounter ‘real’ things in each and every moment of our existence. We need air to breathe, water to drink… food to eat. And a solid earth to walk on…’
True enough. Only for all these things to become ‘real’, we first need to notice them!
See how ironic things are? In retrospect, electrons are real. Despite the fact that none of us can actually see them. Or otherwise ‘feel’ them. In any way, shape or form! But until we had gathered enough evidence about their existence…
And now, that our discussion has reached this subject – evidence, I feel the need to mention the fact that Earth is not yet round ‘enough’. That there still are some people actually believing in the notion of the Flat Earth.
‘Are you implying that the Earth might be Flat?!?’
Excellent question, thank you very much! (If I may say something like that myself. Please excuse my boastfulness!)
You see, we are dealing here with two things. Two very different things.
The roundness of the Earth. Which seems to be real. The ‘Flat Earth’. Which is certainly real.
The roundness of the Earth belongs to the realm of science. Which is ‘wrong by definition‘. At least according to Popper… In the sense that the Earth will continue to remain round only till somebody will prove it to be different. Which had happened already… In ‘reality’, the Earth resembles a potato more than anything else! On the famous ‘other side’, the ‘Flat Earth Theory’ belongs to the realm of belief. Which is also real. Not in the ‘direct’ sense – a concept which describes a real ‘reality’, only in the sense that it has certain consequences.
‘The Flat Earth has consequences?!? You admit that the concept – ‘the Flat Earth’, describes something which doesn’t exist yet you pretend that it has consequences?’
Yep!
Can you deny the reality of this whole thing? Six hundred and twenty million hits? In less than point 8 seconds? Can you pretend these are not ‘real consequences’? Can you imagine, for instance, how much energy is spent only to preserve this amount of raw information in the ‘cloud’. How much ‘space’? How much bandwidth is used to transport this ‘fake-ness’ across the ‘globe’!
‘And where does this whole thing lead us? What about the Flat Earth? Is it still a fake?’
Yeah. I’m actually tempted to say ‘obviously’! On the other hand… it’s hard to deny how ‘real’ the whole thing is…
Imagine an ‘outside observer’. From, say, Sirius. Who had just arrived. Didn’t have enough time to become familiar with what’s going on here.
Thailand. Ballots had been cast in November. A party had lost. And pretends, without proof, that the elections had been rigged.
“In his first public comments after the coup, Gen Hlaing sought to justify the takeover, saying the military was on the side of the people and would form a “true and disciplined democracy”.” GETTY IMAGES
When the parliament was about to be convened, and the electoral results formally confirmed, the backers of the loosing party – which had happened to be the army, declared martial law and annulled the electoral results. The leading general announced in public that the measure had been adopted in pursuit of a ‘real and disciplined democracy’.
The US. Ballots had been cast in November. The looser pretended, without proof, that the elections had been rigged.
When the parliament was convened to certify the results, a mob had stormed the House of the Parliament, at the bidding of the loosing President. Order was finally restored and the dully elected President installed into office.
What would the ‘outside observer’ think about our planet? About us…
What if their job is to asses whether we should be allowed to roam the Galaxy? To be entrusted with some very powerful technological ‘secrets’. Which would help us solve some of our very stringent problems. Feel free to name a few…
nicichiarasa 