DCJDec2005

Volume 27

DECEMBER 2005

27. 6: THE MINISTRY OF SNOOP 12.29.2005

What is it with Americans? A few years ago they let their Congress file articles of impeachment on a president who engaged in private , consensual, adulterous sex and then lied about it. The “high crime” that prompted the impeachment would put hundreds of thousands (maybe millions) of men in the dock every day. Perhaps that is why the impeachment failed; my “statistic” probably included a few congressmen as well.

But this is not to revisit the stupidity that would have added a clause to the Constitution that “no blue dress shall be stained with semen,” but to address the issue of the italicized word above— privacy.

One would think, with even a cursory appreciation of the principles of the main contending political ideologies of our dear country, that it would be the “conservatives” who see themselves as the defenders of personal privacy. Never mind for a moment that, in case you haven't noticed, conservatives also used to be the champions of “small government” “frugal government,” not meddling in the affairs of other nations, and a few other characteristics that that seem to buried under the rubble of Iraq and tax breaks for the rich and corporate donors. But the individual, the family , and home and respect for their privacy have putatively been institutions that the right side of the political spectrum always respected and revered.

Well, things change, especially when political expedience trumps principle. Perhaps the most egregious single example of the Republican tendency to set aside their principles for political gain was their insinuation into the Terry Shiavo affair. To assuage their meddlesome Religious Right constituents the Bush brothers, Tom DeLay and the doctor who makes diagnoses by television, Senate Majority Leader Frist, among other political prostitutes, dragged poor Mrs. Shiavo out into the merciless glare of the national media. That was only an extension of the Bush administration's crusade to overturn the “right to die” legislation adopted by some states. What privacy does one have if not to have Big Brother Federal government (this actually sounds like language one would expect conservatives using) sticking its officious nose into the most significant and personal decisions one can have. Does the Bush administration want to arrogate to itself, and itself alone, all termination of life. Indeed, we must admit they are good at it.

Then there is the privacy of women, and the right to control their own bodies without the interference of their government. Here again, the conservatives have turned into raging hypocrites. They would deny women the right to terminate pregnancies, for whatever reason, by hanging out at women's clinics and hurling epithets and threats; they would require that young women obtain permission from their parents, even if they have been raped.

These snoopy, insinuating and meddlesome “conservatives” turn into carping legalists when pressed. Their most recent nominee to the Supreme Court is on record in insisting that there is not even an implicit constitutional protection for personal privacy. Big Brother or Big Reverend can pretty much get into your underwear if they want to with that sort of interpretation.

But turnabout is not fair play with the Bush administration. It is very aggressive in asserting its own privacy, or should we call it secrecy. This is an administration that has resisted nearly every attempt by others to gain access to information about its activities and policies. Try to get something out of them about Dick Cheney's holding in Halliburton; try to get the full documents on Chicken George's so-called military service; try to find out who in the White House rolled over on Valerie Plame, and all sorts of “privacy” “secrecy” “classified” barriers are raised. Secret prisons, renditions, torture, are all justified as “homeland security” or concerns of “national defense.” There is also the so-called “Patriot Act,” designed to look into even your lending library records.

And now, the Orwellian tendencies of Mr. Bush have come to full flower with his un-authorized permission for the National Security Agency to become the national Ministry of Snoop, literally illegally spying on Americans and on United Nations representatives. Was this going on when Mr. Bush stated in Buffalo, New York on April 20, 2004, that “Any time you hear the United States government talking about wiretap, it requires - a wiretap requires a court order”? Is this worse than “I did not have sex with that woman?” Do you want a leader of your country with a bit too much libido, or one with way too little integrity?

Still don't think that maybe Mr. Bush should be served with some articles of impeachment? Well, how would you like those NSA guys showing you some embarrassingly explicit 8 x 10 glossies, copies of incriminating emails and tapes of smoochy phone conversations documenting some private affairs that you would like to have remained ah “top secret”? It's enough to make you dump some stuff from your email program, change you cell phone number, and start wearing a fake beard. And, oh, don't forget to get any blue dresses drycleaned.

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27. 5: THE DEMON IN THE FREEZER, by Richard Preston [BR] 12.23.2005

Remember the eponymous Alien in the movie? Remember when the Alien attached himself to that guy's face, then grew in his intestines and gnawed his way out? Yuk! He wasn't at all like those almond-eyed little aliens that Spielberg dreamed up for Close Encounters of the Third Kind , or the kind that people draw when they are explaining what critters abducted them and examined their genitals. Unh, uh, that Alien was one nasty sucker, who could eat you from the outside in or the inside out.

Fortunately, these are movie aliens, or aliens formed in the imaginations of people who have a repressed wish to have their genitalia examined. Real aliens like that would be a close encounter that would be, to use the vernacular, sooo not cool. But just when you suspend your willing suspension of disbelief along comes Richard Preston with his book, The Demon in the Freezer , and you realize that there are some really nasty aliens out there, only they are so small we can't see if they have almond eyes and three-fingered hands (for groping human genitalia) at the ends of spindly arms.

Viruses, that's what these aliens are, and they are looking for some nice hosts to eat their way through. If you turn out to be the “planet” they are invading, you could be in for a bad time and an early worse ending. Preston wrote about Ebola virus in his earlier book, The Hot Zone ; in this one he revisits one of the most lethal viruses in history—small pox.

Small pox, you say? You thought we had eradicated small pox. Most people alive today don't even remember that it wiped out more people on 1918-1919 that World War I did. In fact, this biological scourge was wiped out. Sixty years after the last big plague of it, small pox languished only in two freezers, one at the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta, and the other in a Virology institute in Russia. Why the last of these bugs were not consigned to the flames probably owes much to the tendency of the people who like to make wars to hold onto anything they think might give them and edge, and a little something under the table if they have a ready buyer.

Small pox was eradicated, thanks to the courage and dedication of troops of vaccinators who went anywhere in the world where there it broke out, cordoned the area off and kept it contained until it imploded. But the Americans just couldn't bring themselves to exterminate their lab supply thanks to specious arguments that it was a “species” that needed to be kept for study purposes. The Russian took t weaponizing the stuff by the ton, and now we don't know how much of it might have ended up in the lethal little hands of some nasty people.

We shouldn't think that the good ole US of A as less culpable in such stupidity. At the end of WWII American military medical personnel were eager to get their grubbies on the bio-weapon research that had been conducted by the nefarious Unit 731 [1] of the Japanese Army. This was the unit that conducted experiments on live subjects (including their subsequent vivisection!) using a wide variety of bio- and chemical weapons. Most of their victims were Chinese, but there were also Russian and American subjects. Rather than prosecute and execute these vicious murderers the US Army let them off in return for the fruits of their “research”.

Never mind that idiot George Bush is out there crushing entire countries looking for terrorists and weapons of mass destruction, there are terrorists of mass extermination waiting to be unleashed, waiting to be rubbed on a door handle at Grand Central Station, or a counter at Heathrow airport, or the bathroom faucets of a 747. The terrorist who may end up doing you in will not be wearing a balaclava or turban, but will be that guy in an Armani suit who coughed or sneezed three places ahead of you in line, or your own kid, or husband or wife coming home from work or school. There's a titanic struggle taking place between armies in bio-hazard suits in labs in the US, in Russia, Australia, and who knows where. Some are cooking up vaccine-resistant bugs and the others are in a desperate rush to counter with new vaccines. Once it breaks out, you won't want to be near anybody. Everybody will be a potential alien vector. One particular paragraph caught this urbanist's attention. "Epidemiologists have done some mathematics on the spread of smallpox, and they've found that the virus needs a population of around two hundred thousand people living within fourteen days travel from one another or the virus can't keep its life cycle going, and it dies out. Those conditions did not occur until the appearance of settled agricultural areas and cities, about seven thousand years ago. Smallpox could be described as the first urban virus." (p. 66)

We may console ourselves with the march of biology since small pox wiped out millions in our grandparents' day, but don't count on it. Not only in nature cooking up SARS and H5N1 bird influenzas, but the bugs themselves are getting smarter; they have to if they want to survive. [2] When they begin to exterminate one species they have to learn to jump species, to go “pneumonic” and let the hosts provide a free ride one to the other. Read Preston's account of the symptoms of a student nurse who contracted hemorrhagic smallpox (Pp. 48-53) and one might prefer a terrorist attack that is an instantaneous atomizing flash of nuclear explosive, or even a quick chomp by the drooling mouth of that movie Alien.

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[1] Unit 731 Testimony , by Hal Gold, a book, ironically, that I purchased in Kyoto, Japan was a real eye-opener. Check it out at Amazon.com where there is a limited minor literature on this subject.

[2] Bird flu may have already found a way around the only vaccine available, Tamiflu, since recent vaccinations in Vietnam failed to prevent death (and manufacturer Roche's stock took a dive with the news of it).

27. 4: SWARTHY GUY IN A POLYCHROME WORLD 12.20.2005

When news began to flow out of Australia about Lebanese immigrants being attacked by gangs of “whites” on Sydney's beaches I was reminded of what one of former colleagues on our faculty at SDSU went through back when Iranian revolutionaries raided the U.S. embassy in Tehran and held its occupants for 444 days. My colleague came into my office (I was “chair” at the time) rather shaken that he was walking home when a car drove by and some youths yelled “Go home, you Iranian-Muslim bastard, or we'll kill you!” My colleague was an American citizen with a Ph.D. from an American university, and a Hindu from Calcutta. “I'm not Iranian,” he protested.”

“I know that,” I replied, ”but you're a ‘swarthy guy'; just the wrong shade on that side of the street.” He wanted to know where ‘swarthy guys' were from, and I told him “lots of places,” resisting the impulse to say “Why Swarthia, of course.”

The Australians were reported to be attacking anybody with dark skin. They probably would have attacked my colleague. And they probably would have attacked me. I'm a ‘swarthy guy.' And proud of it!

Eventually, Swarthies will dominate the world, at least chromatically. Interracial marriage continues to increase, and gradually the tinting of the human race will evolve into some polychromatic mongrelization that Nazis (paleo- and neo-) are always ranting about. But for the time being, that bleached look seems to be preferred. Almost all peoples of color, it seems, prefer lighter shades of pigmentation; lightening creams, bleaches, and other nostrums sell briskly to those bent on achieving that elusive “lightness of being.” Take a look at the most popular entertainers or the commercial ads in countries of people with color, actors and models with the lightest pigmentations predominate. It begins early, this preference for lightness. Peruse children's cartoons and animations and very often the evil person is cast is darker tones. And let's not forget Darth Vader.

I am quite content being a Swarthie, and even resentful when the nearest box I can check on a form is “White,” or when I am in Hong Kong and I a referred to as a “gweilo” (white ghost) despite the fact that I am shade darker than most of the Chinese people there. Now, I figure that different amounts of melanin in our skin has some relationship to the environments in which different members of our species spent lengthy periods of evolutionary time.

Fundamentalist Christian would prefer not to address the question as on of evolution, of a process whereby different humans “adapted” to the different climatic conditions they evolved in, that skin pigmentation has some sort of function, like kinky hair, Semitic noses, squat or lanky bodies, and such. That would open doors they just don't want to go through because it might not square with scriptural accounts of things.

OK, we won't go there. So, what was God up to in making those “in His own image” in different colors. Maybe God, the white guy in the center of the Sistine Chapel ceiling, is a bit of a puppet master, messing around in his creation, particularly our lives, a little bit like Zeus and the ancient Greek pantheon. God the dramatist. Let's face it, without some entertainment, heaven as we have imagined it must be a pretty boring place. [1]

For example, I imagine that God, when He was doing his creation thing, decided it would be interesting to see what would happen if he made people different colors. Which color would rise to the top, he might have wondered (that is, of course, unless as so many believe, He had a favorite color—you know, the color He is on the Sistine ceiling—all along), what color would have become dominant if He just left things alone. It would be like a race to see who is the favorite color. “Hey, there's a good idea,” God said, “I'll call that difference “race”! In a race there is a winner and losers.”

We, of course, no matter what color we are, are supposed to figure out what the hell to do with this reality. Are we just supposed to conclude that God made us these different colors so we could, like uniforms, know what team we are on? Are we supposed to match our color with those on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel and figure out which race God must like best? [2] Maybe we are supposed to figure out what part of the world suits our skin color the best and go, and stay, there.

Or, and this is the most interesting of all, are we supposed to pass some sort of test, the test being that we must figure out that the color is something we are supposed to learn to see past and to see the essential humanity of God's creation, eventually make race a matter of no consequence. Maybe God is not a racist, but wants to see if we can overcome our racism.

But when you see photos of the Australian “whites” screaming racial epithets at Lebanese immigrants, and the poor African-Americans of New Orleans all but being ignored by their government, and even members of the same race discriminating over different shades of skin tone, well, it seems like people still might not have figured out what the “game” is really about.

We Swarthy guys are right in the middle. We know that our “color” is a matter of context. Put us in a bunch of really “white” people and we look darker, put us among very dark people and we're the “whities.” We have to be careful not get into the color game ourselves. We also have to learn how to duck. It will probably be like that until the time when everywhere is “Swarthia.”

Still, I think if he had to do it all over again we should take away God's box of Crayons.

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[1] The Greeks figured that out early; Olympus was like a soap opera and they were always popping down to earth to get in on some of the mortal action.

[2] It seemed that God was getting a little darker over the years from candle soot and such, so he was recently whitened up by the art restorers.

27. 3: THE END OF AMERICAN EXCEPTIONALISM 12.14.2005

In 2002 I was giving some lectures on American Public Administration at four universities in Beijing. I wasn't convinced that American style PA was transportable to China; there, and are, were too many significant differences between our countries. I was trying to explain to one of my interpreters that it wasn't the same thing as importing to China something like the Jeep Cherokee plant that made the vehicle we were riding in at the time. The Jeep was identical to those built in the U.S.; but it was a consumer good, not a system for public decision-making and its administration. Such systems are derivative of the very culture of a society, I explained to her. A Jeep doesn't care what culture makes it, or drives it.

I realized that I needed some way to communicate this idea to my audiences if I was going to make this point as a basis for other things I wanted to say about American PA. I hit upon an idea as we were having tea a few minutes before my first lecture. I asked the interpreter “what does it mean to be a Chinese?” She hesitated; maybe she had never been asked such a question before and it might have seemed a very strange question to someone who had always lived in China. She answered that to be a Chinese meant that you were born in China, spoke the language and lived the culture of the Chinese people—to be of the Chinese “race.” [1]

It was my turn to hesitate. Then I took out my U.S. Passport and slid it across the table and asked her to have a look at it. She checked the photo and said I looked more “kindly” in person. I said: “That passport is what it means to be an American; an American is a person with U.S. citizenship .” I went on to explain that I could never become a Chinese in the way that she defined it, tat I could never acquire the “ethnicity,” but that she could become an American citizen as people of many races and ethnicities have. The citizenship was really the only thing, and perhaps should be the only thing that makes all Americans “Americans.” We are an amalgam of many cultures, races, even languages, I added.

She appreciated the distinction and I used it to introduce each if the four lectures I was to give in Beijing. I went on to make the point that you can import plans to make a Jeep identical to the one's we have in the U.S., but a lot of modifications would have to be made in importing American PA.

I recount this anecdote because I now realized that I was also expressing something that resided deeper in me—the notion of American exceptionalism. It is true that American culture comes from rather unique sources; it's as much an idea as a place. But many people believe more than that. Most people I know, and people I've met all over the world, believe that America is special, different, and exception to the history of nations and civilizations. America is a beacon to the world, the land of opportunity, the dream destination of every person from dictatorial, corrupt governments, failed economies, and even stale, tradition-bound democracies. Even people from nations we regard as enemies want to come to America to learn, work and/or live. America is the exception, it established the first truly secular government in history.[2] America is sui generis.

There have been several factors that seemed to buttress this impression. Remember the days when America used to retain its amateurism in the Olympics when rivals like the USSR and East Germany were professionals on performance enhancing drugs? Then came the Dream Team in basketball, professional prima donnas, that represented that winning was more important than principle. There was the America that helped “keep the world safe for democracy” in World wars I and II, but insinuated itself in a civil war in Vietnam and now feels entitled to wage preemptive wars on false pretenses. There was the America that used to conform to the Geneva Conventions even if other nations did not, but now engages in torture, renditions, and illegal detentions. There was the America that preached human rights, but violated its own code. There was the America that stood for truth, but blurred the lines between truth and propaganda with a government that plants “news” stories in various media at home and abroad. There was the America that stood for fairness and equality but lets corporations rob their employees and pursues tax policies that continually expand the distance between rich and poor. There was the America that stood for openness and merit, but where politicians funnel money to favored corporations. The growth of corruption in America is shown to the world when the government of this putatively “most powerful nation in the world” showed its indifference and ineptitude in responding to its own hurricane victims. This is the America that preaches democracy around the world, and yet conducts elections that mirror the corrupt practices of pseudo-democracies, whose politics is ruled by money and favoritism and is conducted with lies and deceptions. There was the America that was founded with clear separation between church and state, and now is eroding that wall with the siege of evangelists who have forgotten that many of its first settlers were refugees from religious persecution in countries where such practice was conducted under “divine right.”

There is now an America that all but stands alone in its view as exceptional, whose current leaders feel no obligation to join treaties such as the Kyoto accords on environment, that scorns the United Nations when it chooses and invokes it when it chooses, and of course, employs its overwhelming military force with bullying self-interest. This American excpetionalism is no longer the exceptionalism of the admiration and respect of others, but of its own arrogance.

The measure of this rapid and profound can be discerned in headlines and on the streets around the world, a world that mostly expressed sympathy and support after the attacks of 9-11 to one that has expressed derision and dismay to the response of America's ignorant, deceitful and arrogant leadership. That attack came only a few months after I somewhat proudly handed my American passport to that young Chinese interpreter in Beijing and explained one of the reasons I regarded my country was “exceptional.” I can't do that anymore.

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[1] There are, of course, considerable exceptions to this. Many Chinese are not born in China, the language has many dialects, and there are Chinese who do not even speak Chinese and have, certainly among the fifty or so “minorities,” quite different cultures. But she was doubtless referring to the central Han ethnic group in China and its speaking of Mandarin Chinese.

[2] See Susan Jacoby, “Original Intent,” Mother Jones , Vol. 20, No. 7, December 2005

27. 2: THE SPICE GARDEN, by Michael Vatikiotis [BR] 12.8.2005

“It is as though the gods that made the continents had a great deal of material left over and cast it helter-skelter into equatorial waters.” [1] So write Louis Fischer in 1959, about the 7,900 islands than compose Indonesia. The gods might have thought things out better as to how they distributed their worshipers.

It is a feature of the righteousness of religions that they always pose themselves against external scourges, whether secular in the form of plagues and famines, or religious in terms of the powers of evil that they concoct for their own purposes. They never regard themselves as a scourge, as a virulent and evil pestilence that is, almost always, more disruptive deadly and deadly than any invasion of locusts, rats, or flood or famine, or human “sinfulness.” I do.

One doesn't need to read The Spice Garden to arrive at such a conclusion; just pick up a newspaper and read the lines or between them for the underlying or overt cause of many of the world's wars and other miseries. Religious dogmatic differences, one of the most stupid human creations for their own self-delusion and self-destruction, will be found lurking behind most every pogrom, massacre, system of torture and other inhumanity. Religion is the spice that flavors so much of human behavior that, despite its lethality, it is hard to imagine history as being very interesting were it removed from the human equation.

Noli, the island of Michael Vatikiotis's novel will remind most readers of nearby Timor and its tribulations. There apparently is no actual Noli, but it is easy to imagine there might be since the author sets his story on one of the islands among the 1208 islands found in the eastern province of Indonesia. This is the Maluku (also Molucca) archipelago that is surrounded by the Pacific Ocean to the north; the province of North Sulawesi on the west; the province of East Timor on the south/southwest; and the province of Irian Jaya on the east. They are the fabled spice islands, islands where the cloves, mace, peppers, nutmegs and other exotic flavor enhancers and putrefaction perfumes that were worth more than gold in their time were fought over by the Portuguese and Dutch.

Noli is also the name of a spice that was once the prime element of the island's economy but, like the rest of the spice islands, no longer plays a significant economic role after the discovery of alternate sources of spices in Africa and India. So Vatikiotis's Noli supports itself with a local fishery and an indolent lifestyle, leaving plenty of time for intrigues, suspicions, and plots.

Indonesia, of which these islands are a part, is the world's largest Muslim nation. They are the majority in the Maluku islands, flowed by Christians (predominantly Protestant) and small fractions of Buddhist, Hindu and local animist beliefs. Like a “garden,” the other term in the metaphoric title, the island is a microcosm where different metaphysical “species” play out their delicate social balance through invasion and supercession.

Vatikiotis gives this relationship a particularity in the relationship between Ghani, a Muslim fisherman who also owns the local hotel-café, and Fr. Xavier, a Jesuit. At another level is a young couple who want to marry, but are from the respective faiths. Ghani and the priest are friends, who joust amicably over their different faiths, and are about the only characters drawn in much relief. Both of them are not pure examples of their religions; Ghani is a womanizer, and Xavier has his internal struggle with his vow of celibacy. But both would be content to see their days lived out with cool drinks on the veranda and the simple circadian rhythms of the insular life. So the reader almost anticipates how these relationships will play out in what is also an expected upset in the status quo.

Almost anything can act as the detonator for social breakdown of that equilibrium, a word, a look, or, in this case, a rape. What follows in The Spice Garden is what we have seen in the news in Palestine, the former Yugoslavia, Chechnya, India, and in countless wars, revolts, insurrections and “ethnic cleansings” -- neighbors, fellow citizens, friends, and co-workers going at each other with a ferocity and hatred so virulent and murderous that one wonders how it could have been held in abeyance at all. The perpetrators are mostly roving gangs of youth, fired with some purpose in their otherwise dull or hopeless lives by religious leaders and zealots, and manipulated by political leaders who understand that their power relies heavily on ethnic and religious tensions. Anything, from past slights, to presumed insults fuel the beheadings, mutilations, pillage, and of course, rape. This is what happens on Noli, where the respective gangs rush about trying to obliterate the innocent and unprotected of their respective “infidel” communities.

It is also what happened in the Moluccas between 1999 and 2002, a period in which this writer “watched” these atrocities played out from the closer vantage of Hong Kong. Vatikiotis, who is a journalist specializing in this region has been even closer, so close that one wonders whether he might have debated treating this subject in a non-fiction book. Which is the weakness of this novel. The reality on which it is based is covered with only the thinnest veneer of artifice; Noli could easily be the island of Banda Neira, [2] and its spice “noli” a reference to nutmeg, which at one time made Dutch traders extremely rich. While the characters of Ghani and Fr. Xavier are given some biography and emotional depth the rest of the “cast” are pretty much caricature. This is not all the author's fault; the reality of the subject he as chosen is often beyond our imaginations, and we have now, too often, on our television news seen the carnage, the bloodthirsty zealots and their pliant minions, and the archetypical strutting military-political leader in mirrored aviator sunglasses.

At the end the people of Noli do their best to return to some degree of uneasy equilibrium, but things are not as they used to be. They never are, and they never were.

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[1] The Story of Indonesia, 1959, P. 3

[2] See, for example, chapter two of Thurston Clarke, Searching for Crusoe; A Journey Among the Last Real Islands , 2001.

27. 1: WHAT GOES AROUND . . . 12.4.2005

The appearance of God in Genesis is extremely difficult to comprehend. In the beginning God is just “the Word,” a notion, a concept [1]. Then he becomes sort of a personified “big bang” that starts everything off. The rest is story and his tory. From no-thing , and out of no-where He came, and not leaving well-enough alone, He started creating things that led to us (and some people call this “intelligent design”?)

What's impossible about this is that something comes out of nothing. From the very beginning in religious teaching in the Judeo-Christian tradition we are asked to accept a logical impossibility. Now you can go ahead and be a jerk and reply that God does not have to be logical. But my main premise is that even God can't escape logic; even He can't escape that basic premise of philosophy that “ a thing cannot be and not be at the same time. Go ahead, try it. Could an all-powerful God, for example, make a stone so heavy that even He couldn't life it? Either way He can't be all-powerful.

So why am I bugging you with this? Because it's the basis for a philosophical position I want to advance, called Nilhilology. The point of nihilology is, by the way, not to get rid of God (Nietzsche had a lot of trouble with that), but to examine the question of what He hath wrought, i.e., creation. It is a point of view that alleges that if you begin with nothing, as do all creation myths, then all that is created can only, logically, sum up to nothing.

OK, so you don't give a rat's ass about that . . . I can't say that I'm going to spend a lot of time worrying about the implications of this either, because as a nihilologist I think that there is not much we can do about it. So let's try a different angle on the subject; this one is anecdotal, so try to bear with it.

Let's take computers, for instance. They are a marvel, aren't they. Match them with the Internet and a student today can do a book report on say Thomas Merton's The Seven Story Mountain by going online, picking a few reviews and downloading them. Then with a little facile cutting and pasting he can make a reasonable amalgam, go into that cool Thesaurus application and find apt synonyms for about a third of the nouns and a quarter of the verbs, a little more paraphrasing and, hit print. Voila! a book report without ever having turned a page. What a time saver! [2]

Compare that to when I was in graduate school. I had a manual typewriter (I got a Smith-Corona electric the second year). At the time there were only clunky old mainframe computers that you used only if you had some data to run, and then you had to punch out all these cards and carry them to the computer place and you would get a quarter-ton of perforated paper print-out that was almost impossible to decipher. If I wanted to read a journal article I got in my car, drove to campus, searched for a parking space, walked to the library, looked up the journal in the card catalog, filled out a request form, took it to the desk and gave it to the librarian assistant, [3] waited until they got the journal for me, took it to a desk, read the article if it was there (see note 3) and , if I wanted to copy any of the material, I did it by hand into my notebook since there were no copiers and the little stored value cards that students use to make copies these days. Then, back home, I could type it out into my paper. [4]

But my point is not about cheating students; it's about time. Sure, in one sense there seems to have been a lot of time saved as technology (computers, copiers, the Internet) has advanced. But we are not counting up time the way a nihilologist counts time. That is, you have to count all the time and effort that goes into making computers, printers, building the Internet, the software and operating systems, all of the research and study and information that goes into getting you sitting in front of your computer, logged on to the internet with you email application open, and connected to your printer— that all took time , lots of it. You even have to learn the software, and that takes some time. A nihilologist would contend that when you sum up all he that time that goes into saving time the time saved is zero . So, if you use technology to save time, in the overall scheme of things it is no different than without the technology.

Nihilology also raises the question of whether this whole business of creation is of any worth or consequence in any scheme of things (see the problem here; you have to invoke categories that nihilology would seem to deny relevance – oh, well . . . ). If it all amounts to nothing , then why bother to care about the consequences of our existence and our behavior. A host of vexing questions flow out of this. Will all of human experience –the history, the art, the literature, the experience, all the questioning and pondering, the good, the bad, the ugly, the whole “kit and kaboodle,” the “whole shebang” (even words like kaboodle and shebang) will at some future time just collapse into a void of nothing-ness , the nothing from whence it came. It's not a terrifying thought, but one of frustration and sadness. Frustration because we have evolved some sense of “justice” about life. Does nilhilology mean that all the nasty stuff that has been done by some people will go unpunished? Does it mean that all the human achievements will disappear, that all the effort has been for nothing? That's kind of depressing.

And does this mean that everything is countervailed by its opposite, by that which negates it? For example, does this mean that there is just as much evil in the world as there is good? Seems there would have to be for them to sum up to zero in the final accounting. In physics every action, we learn, has an equal and opposite reaction . So why shouldn't this apply to everything, like good and evil, love and hate, life and death, etc. This would also square with aspects of chaos theory, which posits that every action no matter how minor (the wagging of a puppy's tail) factors into events. Then there is systems theory; nihilology views creation as a “closed system” in which everything, from the molecular to the molar is a “little (or larger) bang,” a cycle to and from nothing-ness. And, if we take this into the temporal dimensions, all time is folded into this cycle to the extent that, at some point, history collapses back into nothing happened !

Yikes! That is depressing. No wonder Nihilology doesn't seem to be taking off as a post-modern philosophy. It implies that it doesn't seem to matter whether you do good or evil in the scheme of things because eternity is not an endless ticking of time, but a cycle in which there is (perhaps) and endless cycle of bangs between nothing and existence. It all seems so meaningless, so pointless, or as I heard a young lady bemoan the other day, “it's like really sooooh not fun.” [5]

And the really soooooh not fun part about it is that the whole process doesn't seem to give a rat's ass about you. It's sooooh not like my First Grade Catcehism that answers the question “Why did God make me?” with “God made me to know, love and serve Him in this world and be with him in the next.” See, that's got some purpose and hope to it, and guidance, too. People sooooh want meaning. They sooooh want purpose. They want something to shoot for, they want to be “all that they can be,” be a Nobel laureate, a movie star, to be on Oprah . . . . they want some form of immortality. They want a good story, whether it's true, or not; the last thing they want is some nihilologist unloading some sooooh not fun cosmology on them.

So you are about to say, enough of this Dragon City Journal depressing crap. It's, it's, it's like soooooh not fun, dude. Let's check the surf, see a movie, and go out for some beers and wash this depressing stuff out of our system.

Then, you hear some guy a few bar stools down talking about sports or politics, it doesn't matter; but you perk up when hear him say, “What goes around, comes around, man” with such assurance and conviction. And you say to yourself, “Hmmmmm . . . and drain your bottle of “tastes great, less filling.” Then you snap out of it: Bartender! Drinks all around, on me !

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[1] This by John (1:1), not from Genesis, whoever wrote that one; but it only muddles things rather than clarify.

[2] Yes, this can all be done without a computer, or the Internet, but I am not writing a confessional here, just trying to make a comparative point.

[3] Actually, when I was a grad student I was allowed to go into the reference stacks by myself and find the journal. Sometimes there were other grad students in there, cutting articles out of journals with razor blades. These days such behavior has been transferred to illegally downloading music.

[4] Moral: Students today don't have a clue. But I'm not doing moral philosophy here.

[5] She was referring to school, not Nihilology.