I took Caitie to see it this afternoon, and I loved it. Puss in Boots is one of the best cat characters ever. Screw Garfield! Make a movie about this cat!
When I first started noticing Antonio Banderas in movies, I didn't care for him. But lately, I find I'm enjoying him in more roles. He's not above winking at us, winking at himself, like in Shrek 2, or Spy Kids; and he gives signs he's capable of a lot more. Most of the time, he's playing to type. The Once Upon a Time in Mexico movies were quirky, campy fun. Assassins, well Banderas was more interesting than Stallone. Probably not the best example, but I think his best screen role to date has been in The 13th Warrior. Looking at his filmography, I haven't seen most of his movies, so take it with the usual large dose of salt.
I didn't care for Pierce Brosnan in Remington Steele, but I now I think he's the best Bond since Connery. In fact, every now and then, I find myself thinking he may be better than Connery.
Blasphemy, I know.
Here's a weird thought: Antonio Banderas as James Bond. Never gonna happen, except in some weird Quentin Tarantino/Robert Rodriguez parallel-universe, yet it appeals to me.
Obviously, I've become distracted by the Puss in Boots character. I think he's the highlight of the movie, unless you're just interested in the CGI. Everything else was very good, but Puss steals the show.
Shrek 2 is an enormous amount of fun on a holiday afternoon with your daughter. See it!
It's a great bit of summer escapism. It's kind of in the tradition of the late 50s sf films like Them! (only not as good), or When Worlds Collide. The father-son piece is actually kind of a distraction, and the movie suffers for it. A small spoiler or three ahead, but nothing that really ruins the movie. There's no real suspense anyway.
Forget the science. Nearly all of these sorts of movies get the science wrong to one degree or another. Usually very wrong, and this is no exception. The VP does resemble Cheney and is as unlikable, the president's part is so small it's ridiculous, but he does resemble Bush in a way.
There's one gratuitous speech by the head of NOAA that should have been left on the cutting room floor, but we should probably be grateful there's only one.
I was disappointed that the survivors hanging out in the NY Public Library never found any books on cold weather survival.
The effects were outstanding. Again, you have to suspend your disbelief. For instance, would the Statue of Liberty remain standing with that much ice on it? My guess is, maybe without the arm holding the torch. But it's a big maybe that the whole dame would still be standing. There's lots of little points where you just have to ignore everything you know about thermodynamics, physics, structural engineering, paleoclimatology, and just go with it.
I don't know if it was the AC in the theater, or all the snow and ice in the movie, but it was quite nice climbing into my climate-changing SUV after it had been sitting in >90 degree Florida sunshine all afternoon. By the time I got home, I'd almost thawed out.
One of the features I've just discovered about narrative is that it helps to ground our awareness in time, as familiar physical surroundings do in space. In the last several days, I've been trying to deconstruct my own narrative (in both the literal and critical meanings of that term), and I've become aware of the uncomfortable sensation that arises in the absence of narrative, when it comes to our sense of "place," only in this instance, it refers to "place" in time.
I think we're all familiar with the kind of unsettling feelings, a feeling of "disconnectedness," one can have when we're quickly transported to unfamiliar surroundings. I think the movie Lost in Translation uses this as a device for both the characters in the movie, and for the audience. But at least the audience has the temporal dimension of narrative with which to orient themselves, and so the story is comprehensible. In the ending of 2001: A Space Odyssey, we're left without either familiar surroundings (very disconnected images - a living room in Jupiter?), or a familiar narrative (for the temporal dimension) to orient our awareness in the movie, and so the ending is ambiguous and we leave with uncertain feelings about the ending.
We have a ready store of narrative "snippets" we can use to patch our narratives when events excise significant portions of our existing narrative. If we lose our job, then that portion of our narrative that defines where we are in "time" (Monday, "hump" day, Friday, weekend!, payday, retirement day) gets swapped with a new narrative snippet - look for a job! We sometimes say we're "between jobs," instead of saying we're unemployed. That's part of the function of narrative, to tell us how to "feel" about ourselves, by suggesting to us where we "are." For many people, men especially it seems, following divorce, they try to resume their narrative as quickly as possible by remarrying immediately. The divorce rate for remarriages that occur less than three years following a divorce is significantly higher than the divorce rate for initial marriages. I'm not sure how much of this is because an initial divorce experience becomes a "narrative snippet" that is readily available to patch or revise a narrative that isn't going as planned.
At the moment, I'm grappling with the discomfort attendant to not having that sense of "place," at least in the temporal dimension. I find myself constructing narratives, and I constantly have to make a conscious effort to try and stop myself. I know the sort of "Zen" answer is to "just be," but I think we're dependent on narrative to help tell us "where" we "are." I think that if I were more experienced and disciplined in my meditation, I might be somewhat more successful at avoiding creating narrative. I intend to try to improve my practice, but in the short term, I'm adopting some more practical strategies.
The problem with creating narrative is that it creates a "way I'd like things to be" that I have relatively little power to achieve. Hence, there will almost certainly be a difference between the way things "will be" and the way I'd like them to be - the very definition of suffering. It's like setting a trap for oneself. At this moment, thanks to certain events, what I do have, I think, is a kind of clarity of insight as to "the way things are," in the present. And this insight strongly suggests to me certain actions that are appropriate. (The notion of "right action.") But these actions are not instantaneous, they take place over time, which invites me to overlay a broader narrative structure on them. Instead, I'm trying to focus on much shorter-term, immediate goals that I can achieve in the course of pursuing the "right action," without creating a larger narrative structure. This is tricky, and it doesn't do a great deal to alleviate the discomfiture at being somewhat adrift without a narrative. I think greater effort at meditation will alleviate some of those feelings.
Taoism is noted for its spontaneity. Action arises out of the present, and is therefore in harmony with the present, rather than in pursuit of narrative which may or may not be in harmony with anything, but which is almost certainly not within our exclusive power to realize. This view is inconsistent with a "big idea" in the narrative of our culture - the idea that we should dare to dream big dreams, and work to turn them into reality. I think that works sometimes, but it tends to be the exception rather than the rule. And when it works, I think it's often due as much to chance as it is the ability of man's "will" to bring dreams to reality. In the movie Cast Away, Tom Hanks' character's narrative is disrupted in both place and time. As we all do, he persists in constructing narratives. Near the end of the movie, following his "rescue," he's describing to a friend one of the narratives he constructed. He said he "knew" it would only be a matter of time before he would injure himself, or get sick, and that he would die a painful, lingering death. So, to preclude that narrative, he set out to kill himself and he, ostensibly, failed. (Mythically, metaphorically, he succeeded.) He told his friend that at that moment, he realized he had power over nothing. And then this feeling came over him "like a warm blanket," and he knew what he had to do. He just had to keep breathing. This is when we give up our attachment to narrative, and we live in the present as it is, rather than in a present which is just the difference between the way things are, and the way we'd like them to be - in our suffering.
I think it would be a mistake to take away the idea that I'm advocating timidity, or "daring to dream small." I understand that "he who will not risk, cannot win," and that there is no such thing as a risk free existence. What I'm trying to do is to discern how much of what we do (narrative) is thoughtless "behavior" that addresses immediate issues of "feeling" and which is often counter-productive (i.e. leads only to more bad feelings which require more narrative to assuage, and thus repeating the cycle). I'm not sure at what "scale" we can identify goals that are appropriate to the present, and not part of an imaginary future. I feel like I'm not being very clear.
I think the only power we have is the power to choose. I think when we focus on the difference between the way things are, and the way we'd like them to be (our narratives) - in essence, when we focus on our suffering - in making our choices, we make the kinds of choices that will only lead to further suffering. In effect, we are steering by the wake. All narrative constructions are products of our past, even though they purport to be visions of our future. Adhering to narrative becomes a focus on the past at the expense of a present which simply is the way it is, and of a future which will be what it will be and almost certainly will not be what we wish it to be in our narratives.
At the end of Cast Away, Tom Hanks is standing, literally, at a crossroads. A figure from the movie asks him which way he is headed, and Hanks says, "I was just about to figure that out."
I think that's where I want to be. I think I'm pretty damn close. And as unsettling, and discomfited as I feel, there's an undercurrent of excitement too. Another Springsteen reference, "I'm just around the corner from the light of day."
There are times when I would really welcome a silent computer. The G4 is much better since the new power supply, but it's still a constant presence and it is just "off" enough to not fade into the background. There's a slight "rumble" to the sound that keeps it out of the background. Usually iTunes can mask it, but sometimes I really don't want to have to listen to music either.
Such a dilemma. We should all have "problems" like this.
I'm kind of hoping there's at least one more revision of the current iMac model. If Apple creates a 1.5GHz G4 with a 128MB Radeon graphics card (matches the newest Powerbook features) and the 20" LCD, I may just go for that instead of a G5 tower. I suppose I should try to find an iMac I can listen to in a quiet environment, and see how quiet they really are. I only recall reading a few accounts, but I seem to recall everyone noting that they're nearly silent.
Of course, there's no way I can afford a new machine for the foreseeable future, but it won't stay that way forever. In the meantime, I can daydream about it.
First, a disclaimer: Even more than usual, I'm not an authority on this, and even less so than on many other things I'm not an authority about. So it's likely I'll be misusing certain words of art, so don't get wrapped around the axle if I do.
Conventional story-telling imposes a structure on a narrative. Stories have a beginning, a middle and an end. The end often seems to be the most important part of any story. A lot of the time, in a long book I like, I'll read the ending after I've gotten far enough along into the book to know that I'm going to care about the ending, and if the ending looks especially bad, I won't read any more of the book. If I don't happen to like the book already, I'll read the ending just to see how it turned out. A lot of the time, we tell our friends that a book has a "great ending," or "you'll love how it turns out at the end." So the ending of most stories is pretty damn important.
When we, consciously or unconsciously, impose a narrative on our own lives, the ending seems to enjoy the same relative importance. We all have that fairy-tale cliché embedded in our subconscious, "And they lived happily ever after." And who wouldn't want that?
Covey tells us to "begin with the end in mind." That's probably a sage bit of advice for something smaller than a lifetime. But Covey even tells us to think about when we're old and just about to die, and to try to regard our current circumstances from that perspective. Again, I think that's probably a useful exercise to gain some insight from a different perspective on our current situation.
But when we begin to impose narrative on our lives, we begin to own an ending we have very little power to create. We take on a task that is eminently doable for an author whose entire universe can be enclosed in the pages of a book; but it's probably outside the ability of any human being operating in the "real" universe.
There's a scene in Joe Versus the Volcano, where Joe has been adrift at sea for several days, and is delirious from dehydration. He wakes one night to observe the full moon rise in a sky filled with stars, and he stands up and he utters: "Dear God, whose name I do not know. Thank you for my life. I forgot... How big... Thank you. Thank you for my life."
"I forgot... How big..." I just love that. Because I'd forgotten too. Anyway...
Life's pretty damn big. And that's a good thing, I think. You need a lot of room to live a lifetime. Certainly more room than one can find in the pages of a good novel, even a James Michener novel.
But we impose a narrative on our lives, and we have the ending in mind at some level. We're all looking, I think, for "happily ever after." So we set out somewhere in our "beginning" and we have some notion of what we want our story to look like, and we have some idea of what our happy ending will resemble, and what kind of character we want to be. But as somebody once observed, "life is what happens while we're making other plans;" so, from time to time, like any good author, we have to revise the story. Suffering is the difference between the way things are, and the way we'd like them to be. One of the ways we try to remove suffering from our lives is by revising our narratives, changing the description of "the way things are" to something a little closer to "the way we'd like them to be." If my plans to be a huge success aren't working out, and so maybe I'm not as heroic as I thought I'd be, perhaps my character will be more appealing as a victim of powerful forces arrayed against him. So if not an heroic epic, perhaps a tragedy. Maybe if we've got a good sense of humor, we're content with comedy. And there may be all sorts of variations in between.
All the while, we reduce the size of our lives to what can be contained in whatever limited narrative we've constructed for ourselves. We edit our pasts, and revise our futures, and see the present through whatever role we've selected for ourselves. And we've diminished ourselves and our lives in the process.
Not only that, but everyone else with whom we interact, everyone else we observe, everyone else we talk about, they all become supporting characters in our narrative. After all, we are the center of the universe. Because I am this way, and I see myself as "good," then all the other people who are the opposite way must be "bad." Or ignorant, and in need of education. (Hmmmm... Why does that sound so familiar?) Or damned, and in need of salvation. Or, something exciting. Maybe we embrace the conflict and the drama, because the interior states those things evoke are what we have come to feel as "normal." And so our narrative is one of conflict, perhaps even part of a larger narrative of "good" versus "evil," or of a "clash of civilizations." Perhaps this is where we find "meaning" in our lives, in our existence. The meaning is found in our narratives, of which we are the authors. What kind of meaning is that? I'm not sure it's very meaningful.
Maybe we never really manage to revise the plot sufficiently to make the difference between the way things are and they way we thought they would be small enough to be content with our lives. This is not good, I think.
I think all the attention we pay to revising and editing, and paying attention to the past and trying to navigate to a "happy ending" is what separates us from our existence. The happy ending is now. It just never ends. Well, maybe it will end tomorrow. But tomorrow takes care of itself, if you let it. If you don't try to make tomorrow conform to whatever your conception is of what tomorrow should be. I think.
Anyway. That's probably enough about that. People can do whatever they damn well please, and if they want to spend their lives "writing themselves into existence," well, who the hell am I to tell them they shouldn't? Nobody at all.
Had something of a fling at the iTunes Music Store this weekend. I bought 33 songs, but only one album. That happened to be the first Crosby, Stills & Nash. The singles focused on some sixties numbers like, Under the Boardwalk; Summer in the City; Baby, I Need Your Loving; This Magic Moment; Long Cool Woman (in a Black Dress); On Broadway, and a bunch of others.
Al Stewart is now available, though not much of his stuff. I bought The Year of the Cat; Time Passages; Song on the Radio; and On the Border.
Altogether, since the opening of the iTunes Music Store, I've purchased 466 songs.
A while ago, I was reading a book about martial arts at Books-a-Million. It was by some ex-Air Force guy, with a lot of "warrior" stuff in it. I didn't buy it.
In one passage, the author wrote about what a "true" martial artist is. Presumably, the author knows what a "true" martial artist is, and he wishes to share that knowledge with the rest of us. He wrote that a "true" martial artist wears a very simple uniform, with no patches, or names or symbols on it. His belt is similarly unadorned. This is supposed to reflect the humility of the "true" martial artist.
This is false. One cannot tell a "true" martial artist from a "false" one by what they wear. Clothing is a convention, and convention varies according to circumstances. A martial artist may choose to observe convention, or to ignore convention; it has little to do with the art. Similarly, wearing a plain uniform will not make someone who is not a martial artist into someone who is. It has nothing to do with clothing. Finally, anyone who believes themselves to to be an "authority" on martial arts, and then pays attention to things like clothing as a means of discriminating the "true" from the "false" martial artists, is no more an authority than the man who dresses up in fancy uniforms and relies on his dress to make his claim as a martial artist. It has nothing to do with clothing, and it has nothing to do with paying attention to clothing.
Another time, I was reading something in someone's weblog about people who were not "true" Buddhists. As is usually the case when someone is pointing out how other people aren't "truly" what they claim to be, it was a disparaging comment. I don't recall if the person who wrote it claimed to be a Buddhist or not; but if he or she did, then they had some more work to do.
Having in one's mind an idea of what a "true" Buddhist is, is a form of attachment and desire. Desire is the source of all suffering. There are many different kinds of Buddhists; but I would maintain that all persons are Buddhists, whether they believe themselves to be or not. We all walk the same path, though our attention may never dwell on the same things. It's not really what anyone believes that makes them a Buddhist. How could it be?
Don't believe everything you read. Least of all, what you read here.
I forget who it was, I suspect it was Dave Weinberger, somebody said that with our weblogs we were "writing ourselves into existence." It's kind of a nice turn of phrase, and it fits so well into a larger narrative, a narrative about narratives, but it's no truer than any of the other ones.
Existence precedes narrative. Probably goes without saying. We don't need to "write ourselves into existence." But what we do is try to construct an idealized narrative that is intended to present our existence to both ourselves and others who observe us as who we would like to be, not as who we truly are. Except that we truly are people who cannot accept that we truly are, let alone who we truly are. If you can follow all that. And we don't just do it in our weblogs. We do it in our heads, and we do it all the time.
Partly, we construct these narratives, and partly, we try to fit ourselves into the larger narratives around us. Roles written for us by our families, our cultures, our schools, our churches, our employers, our lovers, our children, our neighbors, our friends, and even our enemies. We struggle to make some coherent, acceptable story out of our lives where, often, we get to play the hero. Some of us prefer to play the victim. A few embrace the role of the villain. Sometimes the roles change as the narrative changes, as we try to plot our way to a "happy" ending. All the while, focusing on the narrative, the writing, and neglecting the existence.
As authors, we're too clever by half. We seduce ourselves with the beauty of our writing, until our attention becomes focused on the words and not on the existence. This is ego. We can, and usually do, become trapped in our narratives. Our choices constrained by the character we've constructed, by the plot holes we wish to avoid, or ignore. And it's not just individuals, entire communities, countries, religions, political parties, families, any group of human beings that share a common set of beliefs and goals, all of them can become trapped in their own narratives as well. There's a lot of that going around these days.
I think it's truer to say that we're not "writing ourselves into existence." Rather, we're writing ourselves out of existence. We cease to be people, and instead become characters and plot devices.
One nice aspect of DSL "Extreme" is that the download of 614MB of Apple Developer Tools takes less than an hour. Of course, it'd probably be a touch faster on a cable modem, but only just a touch. I have to wonder just what I think I'm going to do with Apple's developer tools, but you never know I guess.
I'm not sure how I feel about so many people taking an interest in Stanley Milgram's experiments and the Stanford Prisoner Experiment in the wake of the Abu Ghraib debacle. On the one hand, I'm kind of encouraged by it. On the other hand, I despair that the vast majority of the people reading about them will conclude that it could never happen to them. I also despair of reading citations of the Kitty Genovese murder with all the wrong conclusions being asserted as moral failures to be avoided in the future; and rejection of those "failures" used as justification for taking inappropriate actions in other situations.
It's kind of depressing how easily "authority" can identify "threats" in order to justify and increase authority. I try not to embrace any mantle of authority because it would impair what I would hope to achieve - more people thinking for themselves, instead of relying on authorities to make themselves feel better about difficult issues. I suppose it had some survival value in our evolutionary past, but it seems to be more of a liability than an asset today.
Where are the clever people like Howard Bloom, Howard Rheingold, Steven Johnson, Joi Ito and all the advocates of "emergent" properties and "social networks," and "memes" and their thoughts on how one might go about addressing the challenge posed by an emergent social network driven by malignant memes? I'm not mocking them (well, not much anyway), but I think the most humane way out of our present difficulty will require an approach that incorporates much of what we've learned about how humans behave in groups. Bloom seems content to be an alarmist and simply point out the "threat" to increase the appearance of his own "authority." Rheingold seems to be focusing on the the "positive" aspects of "smart mobs," and isn't interested in exploring the darker side of mob behavior and how we might be able to mitigate it. Where's Robert Wright of Nonzer0? Why are so many of the "digerati" trapped in 19th century memes about war and pacifism? Where is the truly innovative thinking in the "blogosphere" that is exploring how we might be able to leverage technology and what we now understand about human behavior in ways that can address the challenges that confront us without relying on so many old ideas, usually revolving around force?
This is not to suggest we won't have to rely on force from time to time. But I think we can be far more intelligent about how we go about solving this problem than we have been to date. We're trapped in our own thinking, and we need to try to present ideas in ways that break us out of that trap.
All conflict is a matter of what people believe. I believe it's time we learned to "think different."
I wonder what it would be like if Tinderbox had the collaborative features of SubEthaEdit? Probably in the "too-hard" category, but it would probably be neat.
There's a new version available of the freeware HTML editor, Taco. I don't do much with html, but when I do, I use Taco. It helps keeps me sane. Well, as sane as I'm ever going to be anyway.
The new version of Word for the Mac seems to be significantly slower than the previous version in at least some features. I don't use Word a great deal, mainly to open documents from work, and occasionally to edit them, so I doubt I would even notice. But it seems kind of curious, and a little disappointing.
Be sure to check Software Update in your System Preferences for the latest security update from Apple. It addresses a vulnerability in the HelpViewer application. There would appear to be a remaining vulnerability regarding Telnet, so if you haven't addressed that issue, you may want to review this page. And hey, be careful out there.
I'm not going to be writing about terrorism tonight. I've got a couple of notes going in Tinderbox that may or may not make their way to this page some day. I'm not sure. It gets a little tiring. In any event, I feel like blathering on here tonight, for lack of anything a lot better to do I suppose.
There's a story I'd like to tell one day, but there are other people involved who may not welcome having that story shared publicly. Certainly not before the dozens of people who read Groundhog Day. So I'm wondering what I can offer without giving away too much? Perhaps a few general observations might be okay.
First, I've discovered, once again sadly, that denial is something you can't see in yourself, however enlightened you may wish to believe you are. You think denial is a cognitive thing, and that if you were in denial you'd know it because, you know, you're thinking it. It doesn't work that way, unfortunately. Denial only reveals itself in behavior, where you keep doing the one thing that won't solve your problem, only perpetuate it. And denial isn't necessarily about believing something that isn't true, it's about refusing to see what's true when it's right before your eyes. It's kind of anti-believing, or just a refusal to even admit perception. It's quite strange. It takes a radical sort of event to push your perceptions past your refusal to embrace them. In any event, once you get past denial, lots of things happen. Some good, some bad. Mostly good though. And just in case there's any ambiguity here, I'm talking about my own denial. I didn't like the event that pushed me past it, but now I'm grateful for it.
That's probably enough about that for now, except for one final observation. In my present circumstances, I find it's difficult for me to concentrate on any one topic long enough to form a coherent train of thought. It's an attention thing, and it will pass; but for now, about the most I can muster is the short note.
In other news, I watched The Fog of War the other night. I ended up buying it from Target, but I've included the Amazon link. It's well worth watching, but I have serious reservations about those who have made facile judgments regarding McNamara's character. I don't wish to imply that the man is some kind of hero or anything, but his is a complex story of an intelligent man in a chaotic, difficult time. I think it sort of defies easy judgments, certainly those that seem to condemn or dismiss the man as some sort of archetype of the morally compromised technocrat. Regardless of what anyone thinks about the man, I think his eleven lessons and the examples he offers from his own experience are well worth heeding. Certainly, I think it would have been helpful if the present administration had considered them before embarking on the adventure we find ourselves mired in at the moment.
I was at a social hour put on by the management of my apartment complex the other night. I wanted to get out and meet some of my neighbors and chat with some flesh-and-blood people for a little while. I got there relatively early, before there were very many people there. As I was standing by the pool, I felt something hit my shoulder. I thought for a moment that someone had thrown something at me to get my attention or something. I turned around, but there was nobody nearby who appeared to be paying attention to me. I looked down and saw a piece of pine bark mulch, and I suspected that somehow that was what had hit me in the shoulder. At no time did I think to reach up and touch my shoulder.
So there I am, chatting up a few of the lovely young ladies for several minutes, and they are all smiling so earnestly at me, and I'm congratulating myself on my engaging personality and winning charm. I headed over to the bar to avail myself of another cold adult beverage, and the kid handing out the beers says to me, "You've got bird shit on your shoulder, man."
Sigh.
I went back to my apartment and looked in the mirror, and sure enough, a great huge green one too. Of such size and mass that I'm surprised it wasn't mistaken for a parrot or something. So I made a mental note to recall the next time that the earnest smiles of attractive young ladies may just be masks for their discomfort when confronted with a blathering, middle-aged fat guy with a pile of bird poo on his shoulder.
Might file that one under "Important Safety Tips," or something.
To date, what has marked the conduct of the so-called "war on terrorism" is a conspicuous absence of any meaningful over-arching national or international strategy. The focus thus far has been almost exclusively on a military response; which, while an important component of any strategy addressing the potential threat posed by terrorists, is insufficient and by no means the most important component of a comprehensive strategy to address the threat posed by terrorism. I would characterize the the current situation as a nineteenth century response to a twelfth century religious movement using twenty-first century technology.
Terrorism, as its name implies, does not rely on conventional modes of conflict in order to achieve its aims. However, any form of conflict between opposing groups is ultimately a contest for the beliefs of members of the opposition. To cite a popular culture reference, and one of my favorite movies, in Gladiator, Quintus remarks to Maximus, "People should know when they're conquered."
Just wanted to note that today is the day, seventeen years ago, when USS STARK (FFG-31) was hit by Exocet missiles fired by an Iraqi Mirage in the Persian Gulf. Among the 37 sailors killed that day was ET3 Kelly Quick, a young man who had worked for me up until just a couple of weeks before.
My own son was born the next day.
Endings and beginnings, another turn of the wheel, and we remember.
Suffering, as I've noted here countless times before, is the difference between the way things are, and the way we'd like them to be. It's really a matter of attention.
Get your attention right, accept the way things are, and then it becomes easier to perceive what right action becomes.
We don't live in a static universe. Nothing could live in a static universe. Everything that has a beginning, has an end. But each ending really marks a new beginning. It's just a matter of attention, you see.
As conscious beings, we possess the power to choose. It's the only real power we have. Each choice marks both an end and a beginning; and we have only the power to choose, we have no power over the consequences of those choices. They simply become a piece of the way things are.
Right action, is perhaps something of a misnomer. In the grand scheme of things, there is really no wrong action. It's a matter of scale, I suppose. Everything remains in balance, and harmony ultimately prevails, I think. When we are so fortunate as to be correct, right action promotes harmony at the scale of a single human being's perception. Perhaps just that single human being's perception. Another action may appear to promote disharmony at that scale, but as the consequences propagate through time and space, at a larger scale, that action might be seen to have contributed to promoting the harmony of the whole.
All of which is of little comfort if we can't manage to master our attention. But even if we can't master our attention as much as we'd like, what has our attention now will pass too.
Nothing like a night's sleep and a bowl of Cocoa Puffs to improve a man's disposition. That's what I always say.
I was talking to my taekwondo instructor before class earlier this week, and I was asking him about his martial arts experience. He told me he'd been practicing since he was seven years old, and that he'd studied, karate, judo, aikido and taekwondo. I asked him about aikido because it's not an art that's taught in a lot of places, at least not around here. He said he felt that it was perhaps the most difficult of all the martial arts, but that it was, in some ways, the most "art-like" of all of them.
We did a little drill to give me an introduction to what aikido was like. We stood face to face, each with our feet about shoulder width apart. He loosely grabbed each of my wrists, and he told me, without moving my feet, to just use my arms to push him off balance. So I tried for several seconds and I was unable to get him to move his feet in order to maintain or regain his balance. He just kind of shifted around with his hips in a way that's kind of hard to describe. Next he told me to grab his wrists and to not let him get me off balance, and not to move my feet. Of course, an instant later I'm moving my feet to avoid falling over.
He told me not to resist the force of his arms with my arms, but to pay attention to my center and to move my center as I needed to in order to remain on balance. I tried, but again, I was immediately lifting one of my feet off the ground. This went on for several attempts, and toward the end I began to understand that the biggest challenge was mastering my attention. My attention naturally went to my hands where I held his wrists, and I tried to resist or control his motion. Instead, my attention should have been fixed on where my center of mass was, such that I might use my legs, hips and torso to move it around in response to the force being applied by his arms. Toward the end, I began to have some success keeping focused on where my center was, and remaining on balance for longer periods of time, though never for more than just a few seconds.
We did a couple of more drills where I would throw a punch and he would redirect the force of the punch, and apply a little bit of force, usually just a hand on the shoulder, sufficient that I would lose my footing at each punch. He mentioned that aikido was the most "spiritual" of martial arts, because it focused on not trying to inflict physical damage on one's opponent, merely to render his attacks ineffective. He told me that if I ever had the opportunity to watch an aikido practitioner, to observe how little he or she moves in response to an attack or even in response to several attackers at one time. He also told me he spent a lot of time walking on his knees when he was learning aikido and it was hell on his knees.
I remember remarking to him that learning to master one's attention, and keeping it focused on one's center was probably a great life-lesson as well. That came to me again this morning as I was lying in bed thinking about what had made me so angry last night. I am more convinced than ever that the most important thing one can do to lead a life with the least amount of suffering is to learn to master one's attention. Something I thought I understood before; but, as I have just been reminded, there is still more that I need to learn.
Two of the most moving war movies I have ever watched are Gardens of Stone, and Saving Private Ryan. I saw part of Gardens of Stone on cable once, and I bought the DVD to see the whole thing. I've only watched it once. I rented Saving Private Ryan. I haven't been able to bring myself to watch either again. I will one day.
But not yet.
There's a scene in Gardens of Stone where James Caan is attending a garden party and encounters a disagreeable sort of person. That scene has more than a great deal of resonance for me, especially at this particular moment.
It occurred to me last night that another feature or characteristic of an ideologue is that action taken by ideologues has at least two desired objects, and one may be of greater priority than the other.
The first is the immediate objective of the action. The second is to demonstrate to domestic opponents that the ideologue is right. The second objective may be more important to an ideologue than the first.
An ideologue is someone who places ideology ahead of principle. Ideologies are ideas that govern the organization and structure of groups; principles are ideas that govern the actions of individuals. A characteristic of ideological thinking is that the ends sometimes justify the means, because the ideologues wish to believe they are always trying to serve the good, when all they are really serving is themselves.
All terrorists are ideologues. Not all ideologues are terrorists. And being an ideologue does not, of necessity, make the ideas underlying the ideology wrong.
Ideologues believe themselves to be in conflict with those who don't share and promote their ideology. After all, they are trying to pursue the realization of the good, and therefore whatever impedes their progress is to be opposed, and ideally, eliminated. One way to eliminate opposition is to demonstrate the correctness, of their vision, their ideology. This is why being right, is more important than doing right, to the ideologue. So ideologues, extremely confident in their views, and motivated to demonstrate the correctness of those views, are more motivated to take action than non-ideologues. Afghanistan suggested certain lessons to neo-con ideologues, which were then applied to Iraq. Ideologues are less troubled by uncertainty than non-ideologues, and indeed, view uncertainty as a form of weakness to be overcome. Unsurprisingly, analysis of events by ideologues often yields an outcome that promotes or reflects the views of the ideologues. (It occurs to me that I'm doing something very similar here, right now. But I admit I could be wrong. This just happens to be where my thinking leads me at the moment.)
So Iraq was viewed, I think, with some anticipation as perhaps the greatest validation of the ideology of the neo-cons, and that pursuing war with Iraq would be useful not merely for the objective of installing a secular democratic government in the heart of the middle east, but also of demonstrating the overwhelming correctness and superiority of the thinking of the ideologues, hopefully silencing their critics and attracting new minds to their views. Of the two, I believe the second was the most attractive idea, and what most motivated their efforts to lead the country to war in Iraq.
In year since the president declared the end of significant combat operations in Iraq, it has become clear that Iraq was not the unambiguous victory the neo-cons had anticipated and desired. The deteriorating situation in Iraq is due, I think, to the rigidity of ideological thinking, and the distractions caused by focusing on domestic critics and fighting what is essentially a rear-guard action politically. When events don't follow the anticipated course, the ideologue must devote significant cognitive resources to an analysis of events that avoids the appearance of having been wrong, a cardinal sin; and to searching for some means of characterizing the nature events to support the underlying ideology, in order to remain consistent. Ideologues value consistency highly, at least as it relates to their underlying ideology. As a result, opportunities for thinking "outside the box," ideologically, are missed, and our opponents begin to obtain the advantage of working inside our decision loop. In other words, they begin to get the initiative, which is usually an advantage in any conflict.
This administration is riddled with ideologues. Oddly enough, I still don't believe I would characterize Rumsfeld as one of them. If anything, Rumsfeld is an ideologue on Rumsfeld. But Bush, Cheney, Wolfowitz, Feith, Ashcroft, Rove, are all ideologues. I'm not sure about Condoleeza Rice. My sense is she is not an ideologue, but that she is somehow uncertain enough of her own authority to not be in their sway. Colin Powell is most definitely not an ideologue. Such a large concentration of rigid, ideological thinkers in leadership positions has significantly impaired our ability to respond rapidly and appropriately to a fluid and dangerous situation in Iraq.
People value consistency, but the consistency of the ideologue is a trap. Something worth thinking about in the months to come.
As always, I'm an authority on nothing. I make all this shit up. Do your own thinking.
Brigadier General Janet Karpinski is discrediting herself, her soldiers and her service. While responsibility undoubtedly goes higher and lower in the chain for this debacle, a significant portion of it rests with her. Her repeated assertions that she didn't know what was happening don't exonerate her. Rather, they point out her dereliction of duty. Whether or not she knew what was going on in Abu Ghraib, it was her responsibility to know. More so than anyone else above her in the chain of command.
There's an old saying in the military, "You get what you inspect, not what you expect." Although that notion has been somewhat deprecated in the days of Total Quality, anyone with any experience in the military knows that it remains true.
You can't be everywhere all the time, but you can be out of your office, talking to your troops on a daily basis, such that you will have a good idea of what's going on. Occasionally, and inevitably, there will be surprises. But they should be in the details, not at the level of gross errors. She should have been well aware of the state of training of the MPs acting as prison guards. She should have been well aware of the operational relationship between her MPs and the military intelligence personnel working in her prisons. She should have been the architect of that relationship, unless someone higher in the chain overruled her. She should have spoken to prisoners to hear what they had to say. There are a host of things she could have done that might have prevented this disaster. And it was her job to do them.
When you receive command, you own all of it. Not just the parts you're "aware of." The fact that you can't know everything, excuses you for exactly nothing. For every person who fails in command, there are ten others who murmur, "There but for the grace of God go I." It's the nature of the beast. And when the fickle eye of Fate is turned toward you, your last responsibility in command is to accept it. Not try to weasel your way out of it by claiming you're being made a "scapegoat," or that you're expendable. Everyone is expendable. Or to hide behind the fact that you're a woman, or a reservist.
If she's to be believed, my guess is Brig. Gen. Karpinski made a conscious or unconscious decision not to know what was going on in that part of the prison. Because something about knowing what went on in there, would have required her to do something about it; and my guess is, she lacked the wherewithal to take that duty on. Maybe she didn't know how she'd be perceived as a woman in a male-dominated army, complaining about prisoner abuse. Maybe she wanted to make sure she didn't ruin her chances for promotion. Maybe she thought that if what she didn't know was going on produced intelligence results that shortened the war, she would get some of the credit. Whatever it was, it was a failure of command responsibility. Like the saying goes, "If it were easy, anyone could do it." Not everyone gets command.
Just wanted to find an excuse to blather on briefly here, so here's some recent trivia from the Adventures of Dave...
BellSouth is offering "Extreme DSL" for $5.00 more per month, pretty much doubling my bandwidth. So I figured I'd go for it. Should kick in sometime mid-week. I'll get a permanent IP address in the bargain, which offers some intriguing possibilities.
I've been re-factoring my home budget spreadsheet. I've decided to do it in Excel this time instead of Mesa. I'm a little disappointed that there hasn't been more development work on Mesa, but I guess there isn't much demand for Mac spreadsheets when Excel and AppleWorks pretty much own the market for the Mac. In any case, Excel is a better choice because I've also purchased and installed Documents-to-Go for my Clié. This way, I should be able to make entries to the spreadsheet much more frequently, allowing me to keep a better picture of where my money is going - and maybe hang onto a little bit more of it.
I took the planet-cushing SUV to the car wash today and got it cleaned. It was largely an effort in futility. The apartment complex has a sprinkler system that pretty much waters everything, including the parking lot. The water is extremely hard, and I've got water spots all over the car and the car wash did nothing to take them off. I bought some kind of rubbing compound that is supposed to be able to do the job, but I couldn't muster the energy to tackle it today. I can't wait too long though, so perhaps tomorrow after work. From now on I'll be parking the car in my tiny little garage.
AquaMinds pumped out another update to NoteTaker 2003, bringing it to version 1.8.9. Nice to see it's still being actively developed. I use it to capture articles and notes from the internet using its fairly robust Services support.
I saw Man on Fire this weekend. It was a good action-flick. Nothing special, but a good matinée feature. I'm really looking forward to The Day After Tomorrow. For some reason, the end of the world holds a great deal of attraction for me. I launched Sherlock for the first time in a long time when I wanted to check out the movie times, and it wouldn't load the theater listing. I ended up deleting the preferences for Sherlock and managed to get them back.
After the movie, I stopped by CompUSA to look at the new iBooks. I hadn't seen one of the G4 models before, other than pictures. I liked the keyboard and palm-rest area better than my May 2001 original-vintage "icebook," but I like the exterior appearance of the original better than the new ones. But they still look pretty sweet. I won't be able to afford one for some time, but they just keep getting better, so I'll be patient.
I wanted to wish my mom a happy Mothers' Day, but I noticed they weren't on iChat AV this afternoon. So I launched Remote Desktop and saw that Dad was playing cribbage. I took control of the mouse and launched iChat AV and then quit Remote Desktop. They got the hint and gave me a shout before I was able to initiate one with them. We had a couple of glitches, but they cleared up quickly and we had a nice talk. I really do think iChat AV is the killer app for Macs with broadband.
Exchanged a couple of e-mails with Dave Weinberger regarding the Truth and Reconciliation in America note. We don't see things exactly eye-to-eye, but I think we're in agreement on some of the important points. Got a nice note from Kurt Brobeck too. Who says you need comments?
Cindy Sherwood is an old high school friend who I was briefly back in regular contact with a couple of years ago. I'd been trying the last e-mail address I had for her with little luck. She did receive the most recent one I sent to her on her birthday, and I got a note back from her today. It was nice to hear from her and catch up a little bit.
Here's another reason why I don't have a cell phone. I have caller ID on my hardline, and I haven't received a phone call in over a week. Mind you, I am not complaining. Most of the calls I do get are sales calls, but it's nice that my number isn't in too many databases yet.
It isn't clear just who "we" are in Dr. Weinberger's prose (presumably, anyone sympathetic to Dr. Weinberger's view), but it suggests that something was "taken" from "us." It sets "us" up as the victims, people who have suffered a loss somehow by having our country or our democracy supposely "taken" from us. As drama, it's intended to evoke an emotional response, and that emotion itself is rooted in fear, one of the very things he argues against in his description of "our" America. Ask yourself, what do you feel, or would you feel, if something was "taken" from you? Anger is probably the most common choice. And anger has its basis in fear. So Dr. Weinberger is invoking fear in making his appeal for a different kind of America.
I point this out to show that there are significant similarities, at least in approach, between Dr. Weinberger and those he laments; and this is what will perpetuate the divide between them.
I'm an equal opportunity asshole. I don't have much patience with ideologues of either political extreme. I'm not saying Dr. Weinberger is an ideologue, but in this case, he is exhibiting ideological thinking.
If you're someone who is "rich," or an employee of a major corporation, or someone who is involved in the conventional political process, or someone who supports the incumbent administration, do you think you'd feel as though you were part of Dr. Weinberger's America? I think not. But, in point of objective fact, you would be just as American and just as much a part of America as Dr. Weinberger. I'm sure Dr. Weinberger would agree with this, and would protest that he's merely using his "taking back" theme as a rhetorical device. But a rhetorical device to what end?
We've become too accustomed to treating those who disagree with us as "others," who somehow mistreat us, or abuse us, or whose conduct is otherwise not worthy of our respect; perhaps because we feel they don't respect us. But this type of rhetoric merely reinforces those views, perpetuates them, sets them more firmly in our respective belief systems. In a comment at Dr. Weinberger's weblog, someone writes "This is the problem with liberal America." I would argue that that is the problem in America today: This notion that there are two Americas, one Red, the other Blue, and each only sees the "problems" in the other. That is ideological thinking writ large.
I responded to Dr. Weinberger's essay in his comments by reiterating what I have stated here and elsewhere several times before, Ghandi had it right, "You must become the change you wish to see in the world." This is what I'm attempting to do here in Groundhog Day, and in my life. As with any endeavor, I meet with my occasional successes and my inevitable failures; but I do believe I'm doing better at keeping the goal in mind. I'm suggesting that if Dr. Weinberger hopes to achieve his America, he has nobody to take it back from but himself, by trying to recognize the emotional traps of ideological thinking that divide us and create imaginary villains out of those who might otherwise be friends and neighbors.
I don't think we can change human nature. But as humans, I believe we can understand our nature, and we can begin to master it. At least, I think I have a better chance of doing that, than I have of "changing the world," or "taking back" my country.
Sacking Rumsfeld now would make Wolfowitz the SecDef. How is this an improvement? Sacking both of them creates no small amount of turmoil and chaos in DOD at a time when we're burning through billions of dollars in both procurement and operations. Again, this would not be a "good thing." There are people and agencies within DOD that would exploit such a period for their own advantage.
The best bet is to turn out the entire administration at election time. Failing that, perhaps the president may be persuaded to request the resignation of his entire cabinet following his reelection, and we can have a more orderly transition with proper continuity of what has already proven to be inadequate oversight.
I believe it is possible to make too much of Abu Ghraib. Just barely, but it is possible. I think the opponents of the administration should exercise caution that they do not make what is already a very bad situation much worse.
I also believe it has never been clearer that this administration is not fit to govern. Ideologues are slow to adapt to changing conditions as their ideological belief systems give them tunnel vision, and the importance of being "right," makes them loathe to act in ways that may give the appearance of having made a mistake. About the most you get from an ideologue is the passive-voice, "mistakes were made."
George Will, who I've found to be an insufferable blow-hard the last few years, wrote something I actually agreed with today, and you may find it somewhat resonant with my own ruminations regarding ideologues: "This administration cannot be trusted to govern if it cannot be counted on to think and, having thought, to have second thoughts." You see, ideologues don't have second thoughts. That's because they are doing good, and therefore are, of necessity, right. Ideologues are people who lose sight of principle in pursuit of an ideal. I think Will is trying to distance himself and his brand of conservatism from the "neo"-conservative ideologues whose misadventures in Iraq threaten to give conservatism a bad name. Let me hasten to add that Will has exhibited his own predilection for ideological thinking in the past. Nobody is immune to it, because we all seem to believe there is some "good" worth compromising principle in order to achieve.
To greater or lesser degrees, mostly greater I'm afraid, we're all victims of our own physiology. It's amazing how much "doing good" seems to stimulate "feeling good." And we all like to feel good, or where would the licit and illicit drug markets be? There is a component of "good" feeling in the "fight" portion of the "fight or flight" response. I don't know exactly which parts of our mind-body connection come into play between the cortisol and epinephrine and various neuro-peptides that are expressed or inhibited as the brain commands the body to do violence and prepare for injury; but there is a "thrill," for lack of a better word, that can come with conflict. That is, unless one comes out on the losing end. My guess is, there's a kind of threshold where the body and the mind turn the "good" feelings into "bad" ones to encourage adoption of the "flight" response, but until that threshold is reached, it can be a bit of a rush.
But we don't often get into fist-fights anymore. Nowadays we just bully each other on the internet. But the same old neurological impulses kick in. Add to that people's desire for attention and the appearance of authority, and it's little wonder why people like to weblog. There are also lots of people who get their thrills just from watching, as we all learned in junior high and at hockey games. And there are people who feel powerless and fearful and angry, who enjoy watching or listening to those who they feel represent them "beat up" the people they believe make them powerless, fearful and angry. (Nobody wants to believe they do it to themselves. If they did, then they wouldn't be powerless. Easier to blame someone else.)
It's mostly just physiology, with a bit of psychology on top. (I suppose if we recognize that most of psychology is really physiology, then that would go without saying, but I'm not sure we do.)
Lots of people catch the flu every year, and some of them die. Not much any of us can do about that. Yeah, we know if we wash our hands, we may have a better chance of not catching the flu, but how many of us can be troubled to do even that? Not many. Shelley's post, and much of this weblog, is about reminding people to wash their hands. But we should harbor few illusions as to how successful we're likely to be. Even I forget to wash may hands more than I'd care to admit.
I remember back when there was a spirited discussion of the virtues of anger, and I was trying to make the point that being angry was like having the flu. There's nothing terribly virtuous or beautiful about it. It's just a physiological thing that happens, which if we don't treat properly can hurt us. There's a lot of the flu going around these days. We could all use a little rest, a little chicken soup, and to remember to wash our hands every now and then. It's not as exciting as doing "good," fighting the "good fight." But we might live a little longer. At least until we got over the flu.
Back in February, I engaged in some e-mail correspondence with Tinderbox developer Mark Bernstein regarding how I could output RSS with markup such that in an aggregator/RSS reader like NetNewsWire Lite, my feed would show paragraphs as paragraphs. It came down to an issue regarding encoding the markup text, and the details are beyond my comprehension even as simple as text is supposed to be.
In any event, Mr. Bernstein created a means of exporting a Tinderbox file such that an RSS feed could be displayed in an aggregator like NetNewsWire Lite using a new markup element called ^encode. Using this markup element in my export template, I was able to generate RSS feeds where paragraphs looked like paragraphs, bold was bold, italics were italics and links were links. This was cool.
When I downloaded the latest version of Tinderbox, 2.2, I reviewed the release notes in case something had changed which might affect the way I create Groundhog Day. In the release notes, ^encode is called out specifically as a means for encoding entities as markup in RSS feeds. It looked to me as though nothing had changed, it was now just an officially released, documented feature.
Unfortunately, when I exported my Tinderbox file to create Groundhog Day, the RSS feed reverted to being just a blob of text with all sorts of unsightly angle brackets and letters (markup) merged in with the blob of text. In other words, no markup at all. This was not cool.
In correspondence with Mr. Bernstein I've discovered that to export my Tinderbox file such that my RSS feed looks like it did before, I now replace ^encode with [CDATA[^text^]]. You won't find this documented in the release notes, but it seems to work. If you're having trouble generating readable RSS with Tinderbox 2.2, you might be best advised to avoid ^encode and rely on [CDATA[^text^]].
