©
Death does not become me—at least not yet. But it’s impending shadow does impress me from time to time. As it did this week when human beings, heavy equipment and seawater converged on the gravel bar connecting the mainland to Ministers Island.
For our little Ministers Island volunteer group it was a happy occasion. We’d just purchased a big snowgrooming machine, a Pisten Bully “snowcat”, a four-and-a-half ton beast with a powerful Mercedes diesel engine and caterpillar tracks 12 feet wide. Our plan to groom cross-country ski trails on the island was coming together quicker than we could imagine. In the space of two weeks we’d met with one of Canada’s top Olympic trail makers, brought together local ski enthusiasts, found the right machine and by last Tuesday had it on a truck headed for the island.
And there I was, proudly sitting in the passenger seat of the first car leading the parade. Behind us was the big flatbed truck with the Pisten Bully on its deck. A pickup truck and another car rounded out our small convoy.
“Gee. The water is over the rocks,” said my driver and resident tide expert. I knew what she meant. The “rocks” near the island are her tidal clock. When the tide creeps up these rocks, it’s her signal to get the heck off the island. We both knew that within a few minutes the gravel bar would flood with water and Ministers Island would again become an island for the next 7 hours or so.
She stopped the car and I hopped out. The flatbed truck pulled up behind us. Its driver rolled down the window and leaned out. “How fast can you unload the it?” I asked, looking up at the Pisten Bully. He and his helper jumped down from the truck without answering. They began to undo the chains holding the machine.
“Guys, you can’t unload it here. The tide’s coming in.” I glanced over at the island. “How long will it take to unload it over there?” I watched as the tidewater spilled across the road, creating a wide shallow moat separating us from shore. “Can you get over there and unload it fast?”
Neither answered. It was a guy thing. They were still busy unhooking the chains from the machine. I began pacing. I checked the water flowing in. “How long to get this thing off the truck?” I asked again. Still no answer.
My friend, the driver in the pickup truck, put it in 4-wheel drive, drove around us and splashed across the moat to the near shore. The water was rising fast. I waved at him to get back off the island. The water splashed high as he crossed the moat. As he rolled up beside us I asked him to get everybody else off the bar and turned back to the truckers.
“Guys, we’ve got to get this thing off the bar.” I said firmly. “We've got to go.”
The helper resisted. “We have to do up the chains first,” he said as I watched him wrestle with the heavy chains.
“There’s no time,” I replied stiffly. “Back this truck up and get it off the bar—now.” I glared at him. “I don’t care what happens to this equipment. We have to get off the bar. The tide’s coming in.” With that they climbed off the back, got into the cab and fired up the truck. The driver pulled it into gear and began to inch back. ‘They’ll never get it off in time at this rate,’ I remember thinking. “Keep it moving. LET’S GO!” I yelled, and began running toward the mainland shore.
The cold air burned my lungs. I was running hard. Visions of the two kids drowning on this bar a few years ago danced through my head. I was only halfway across when I could see that another moat had formed, dividing me from the mainland. The truckers and I were now on a long island—an island that was getting shorter by the second. I picked up the pace.
As I looked back at the truck its rear tire hit a big boulder, bouncing the hind end of the truck into the air and pitching the Pisten Bully toward the side of the flatbed. Half of one track now hung precariously off the side of the truck. I stopped. ‘It’s every man for himself,’ I thought, and started running again.
The icy salt water splashed up over my knees as I ran through the shallowest part. I was across in seconds and on dry land. I looked back again. The truck was still inching backward. I turned and kept running toward my friend’s pickup. “Let’s go,” I said, getting in. He started up the hill to the parking lot. “I think we’re gonna need a boat,” I said. “Who do we know?”
Up on shore my tidal expert was snapping pictures. The rest of us stood and watched as the flatbed truck crawled backwards. It was painfully slow. No one said much. The truck’s rear wheels rolled into the moat, then the front. Minute by minute the moat grew wider as the truck made for the shore. The weird mechanical apparition with a hulking alien on its back—and its reflection—were moving toward us, wheels and axles submerged under water. At long last it powered up out of the water and onto the gravel roadbed. I felt my chest. My heart was still thumping. I wasn’t sure if it was from running or watching.
Neither of the truckers seemed phased. They cheerfully unloaded the machine and were soon on their way.
The next day we were following a van on the way to work and watched as it slowly drifted sideways on the fresh, greasy snow and slammed into a telephone pole. We stopped to help. It was a mom and her two kids. She was hysterical, but thankfully, no one was hurt.
Later that morning the truckers arrived again, this time with the rest of the equipment. After we got it unloaded we went back to the office to pay them, and showed them photos of their truck crossing the water. The driver turned to me and said, “I didn’t realize how deep that water was. When you were trying to get us out of there, I thought ‘this guy is kinda grumpy’. But now I see why.”
Yes. As they say there’s no escape from death and taxes. Or is that time and tides? Whichever. We all lived to tell the tale, this time. And that’s exactly the point of living, isn’t it?
Wednesday, January 27, 2010
Thursday, January 21, 2010
Time to kill with the invisible man
©
I was hurling along Route 1 in the dark headed for Saint John. It was 3:00 a.m. I’d had maybe two hours sleep, and I knew I wouldn’t get to bed again until 2:00 a.m. the next morning. It was business as usual, just another red-eye flight to Toronto for a meeting.
As I stared through the windshield into the pitch dark hoping that at least the deer and the moose were asleep. My mind was wandering. I was working to stay awake, to keep from drowsing off. I turned on the radio. The BBC World was on three of the four stations. I learned that there’d been a 7.0 earthquake in Haiti just a few hours before, and early estimates put the death toll at 100,000 people. It was way too much for my tired mind to picture.
The next news clip (delivered in a much-too-soothing, sleep-inducing British accent) informed me that researchers had discovered that feeding test mice a blood pressure medication offset the effects of Alzheimer’s disease. Apparently, these angiotensin receptor blockers (ARBs) somehow combat the buildup of sticky plaques in the brain. I thought, “drug companies are going to love that.” Then I remembered reading that caffeine did much the same thing. Mice that were fed the human equivalent of 5 cups of coffee a day had a much lower incidence of Alzeheimer’s. Same effect, cheaper solution. I’ll bet the drug companies won’t be promoting that.
By the time I got into downtown Toronto it was 8:00 a.m. I had several hours to kill before my first meeting at noon. I decided to have breakfast at The Four Seasons. I don’t like the food, but the coffee is good, the cup is bottomless, they offer a choice of complimentary newspapers and they’ll let you sit and read as long as you like. As I picked at my omelet a solo business guy in sat down at the next table. We struck up a conversation. He was some kind of PR guy for the investment trade. Turns out he as from LA and had been doing this kind of marketing for over 30 years. I pretended to be interested.
After breakfast I went over to the Royal Ontario Museum gift shop to buy a book. Nothing caught my interest. I browsed the shelves. There was the usual variety of mugs and T-shirts. Lots of environmentally friendly stuff. Saving the environment is a feel good purchase. I spotted some framed prints of butterflies. I picked one up. It wasn’t a print. It looked like an actual framed collection of six butterflies. I looked closer. Could these butterflies be some kind of cunningly convincing, made-in-China reproductions? No. From what I could tell, they were real. I picked up another frame and compared it to the first. All the butterflies were unique. I looked at the next shelf and noticed that there were collections of dragonflies, too. Real dragonflies with iridescent bodies and gossamer wings. Six beautiful dead creatures for less than $30. “Environmental pornography” I thought, putting down the frame.
One of the nice things about being in the city is the anonymity. I can be the invisible man. I looked around. People walking fast, going somewhere. Lots of big urban SUVs with glittering chrome wheels with aging blondes in sunglasses behind the wheel. And sports cars, Porsches and sleek Mercedes two-seaters covered in salt in the middle of winter.
I bought a magazine and found a coffee shop. Three more hours to kill. I stared out the window at the traffic. I thought about the flashy cars again. They really are rolling pornography. Taut, smooth skins, powerfully rippled flanks, sparkling with chrome jewelry. It reminded me of a photo I’d just seen in one of the newspapers—a piece on Bob Lutz of GM unveiling the new 2010 Camaro at the Detroit Auto Show. The article informed us that the new Camaro is highly profitable, bringing home a profit of more than $8,000 per unit. The reason? GM rolled out the car as a fuel-efficient V-6 then added a gas-guzzling V-8 option with an almost criminal price markup. Well guess what? No surprise, all the muscle car fans wanted the big V-8, and were willing to pay the steep price.
Bob Lutz is a car guy. He’s deeply into the pornography of cars. Bob has publicly said he doesn’t believe we’re running out of fossil fuel. Bob is the guy responsible for Chrysler’s big reawakening in the 1990s before returning to GM. While at Chrysler he developed the monster gas-guzzling Viper V-10 and the big Dodge Ram pickup, one of which I owned for a while. It was a great truck, if you didn’t mind paying at the pump. I averaged about 15 miles per gallon. Ironically, Bob is also the guy at GM who’s supervising the development of the Chevy Volt electric car. But he’s behind on hitting his technical targets and behind schedule. It isn’t that easy to replace gasoline. Possibly to save face, Bob’s GM has introduced a sporty Cadillac gas-electric hybrid.
I kept staring out the coffee shop window. So much glass, steel, plastic. So many well-dressed shoppers and workers hustling to the next traffic light or traffic jam. All this energy.
Energy’s been a nagging thought for a while now. Back home we’re finishing up our house renovation. It’s getting down to the short strokes now, so I’m hoping we’ll be able to move in soon. But a few of the trades guys have been cruising in “go slow” mode, and go slow means getting expensive. That’s my money that’s flying out the door; that’s my energy they’re using up.
As I was driving into work today, I realized that that’s what we humans do. We compete for energy. Just like all creatures do. Trees compete for their space, pushing their leaves up into the sky and their roots deep into the soil, trying to crowd out other trees.
From birth we’re taught to compete. We’re introduced to games, from Monopoly to hockey, and we’re encouraged to play and win. We pay lip service to being a good loser, but our entire culture focuses on the winners, the Wayne Gretzkys and Madonnas of the world.
Paradoxically, at the same time we’re also taught to share and love one another. On the one hand we’re encouraged to compete for the most attractive mate, then once we do, we’re supposed to magically stop competing, relax and share the love. Which paradigm are we to choose—the competition or the love?
It’s no wonder that so many old people—tired of competing—get ripped off by tradespeople.
But none of us can stop the force of nature, whether it’s human nature or an earthquake, I thought. I got up, buttoned up my coat and headed off to my meeting. I was still a bit early, but needed to get out into the fresh air. Or at least as fresh as it gets in Toronto in January.
I was hurling along Route 1 in the dark headed for Saint John. It was 3:00 a.m. I’d had maybe two hours sleep, and I knew I wouldn’t get to bed again until 2:00 a.m. the next morning. It was business as usual, just another red-eye flight to Toronto for a meeting.
As I stared through the windshield into the pitch dark hoping that at least the deer and the moose were asleep. My mind was wandering. I was working to stay awake, to keep from drowsing off. I turned on the radio. The BBC World was on three of the four stations. I learned that there’d been a 7.0 earthquake in Haiti just a few hours before, and early estimates put the death toll at 100,000 people. It was way too much for my tired mind to picture.
The next news clip (delivered in a much-too-soothing, sleep-inducing British accent) informed me that researchers had discovered that feeding test mice a blood pressure medication offset the effects of Alzheimer’s disease. Apparently, these angiotensin receptor blockers (ARBs) somehow combat the buildup of sticky plaques in the brain. I thought, “drug companies are going to love that.” Then I remembered reading that caffeine did much the same thing. Mice that were fed the human equivalent of 5 cups of coffee a day had a much lower incidence of Alzeheimer’s. Same effect, cheaper solution. I’ll bet the drug companies won’t be promoting that.
By the time I got into downtown Toronto it was 8:00 a.m. I had several hours to kill before my first meeting at noon. I decided to have breakfast at The Four Seasons. I don’t like the food, but the coffee is good, the cup is bottomless, they offer a choice of complimentary newspapers and they’ll let you sit and read as long as you like. As I picked at my omelet a solo business guy in sat down at the next table. We struck up a conversation. He was some kind of PR guy for the investment trade. Turns out he as from LA and had been doing this kind of marketing for over 30 years. I pretended to be interested.
After breakfast I went over to the Royal Ontario Museum gift shop to buy a book. Nothing caught my interest. I browsed the shelves. There was the usual variety of mugs and T-shirts. Lots of environmentally friendly stuff. Saving the environment is a feel good purchase. I spotted some framed prints of butterflies. I picked one up. It wasn’t a print. It looked like an actual framed collection of six butterflies. I looked closer. Could these butterflies be some kind of cunningly convincing, made-in-China reproductions? No. From what I could tell, they were real. I picked up another frame and compared it to the first. All the butterflies were unique. I looked at the next shelf and noticed that there were collections of dragonflies, too. Real dragonflies with iridescent bodies and gossamer wings. Six beautiful dead creatures for less than $30. “Environmental pornography” I thought, putting down the frame.
One of the nice things about being in the city is the anonymity. I can be the invisible man. I looked around. People walking fast, going somewhere. Lots of big urban SUVs with glittering chrome wheels with aging blondes in sunglasses behind the wheel. And sports cars, Porsches and sleek Mercedes two-seaters covered in salt in the middle of winter.
I bought a magazine and found a coffee shop. Three more hours to kill. I stared out the window at the traffic. I thought about the flashy cars again. They really are rolling pornography. Taut, smooth skins, powerfully rippled flanks, sparkling with chrome jewelry. It reminded me of a photo I’d just seen in one of the newspapers—a piece on Bob Lutz of GM unveiling the new 2010 Camaro at the Detroit Auto Show. The article informed us that the new Camaro is highly profitable, bringing home a profit of more than $8,000 per unit. The reason? GM rolled out the car as a fuel-efficient V-6 then added a gas-guzzling V-8 option with an almost criminal price markup. Well guess what? No surprise, all the muscle car fans wanted the big V-8, and were willing to pay the steep price.
Bob Lutz is a car guy. He’s deeply into the pornography of cars. Bob has publicly said he doesn’t believe we’re running out of fossil fuel. Bob is the guy responsible for Chrysler’s big reawakening in the 1990s before returning to GM. While at Chrysler he developed the monster gas-guzzling Viper V-10 and the big Dodge Ram pickup, one of which I owned for a while. It was a great truck, if you didn’t mind paying at the pump. I averaged about 15 miles per gallon. Ironically, Bob is also the guy at GM who’s supervising the development of the Chevy Volt electric car. But he’s behind on hitting his technical targets and behind schedule. It isn’t that easy to replace gasoline. Possibly to save face, Bob’s GM has introduced a sporty Cadillac gas-electric hybrid.
I kept staring out the coffee shop window. So much glass, steel, plastic. So many well-dressed shoppers and workers hustling to the next traffic light or traffic jam. All this energy.
Energy’s been a nagging thought for a while now. Back home we’re finishing up our house renovation. It’s getting down to the short strokes now, so I’m hoping we’ll be able to move in soon. But a few of the trades guys have been cruising in “go slow” mode, and go slow means getting expensive. That’s my money that’s flying out the door; that’s my energy they’re using up.
As I was driving into work today, I realized that that’s what we humans do. We compete for energy. Just like all creatures do. Trees compete for their space, pushing their leaves up into the sky and their roots deep into the soil, trying to crowd out other trees.
From birth we’re taught to compete. We’re introduced to games, from Monopoly to hockey, and we’re encouraged to play and win. We pay lip service to being a good loser, but our entire culture focuses on the winners, the Wayne Gretzkys and Madonnas of the world.
Paradoxically, at the same time we’re also taught to share and love one another. On the one hand we’re encouraged to compete for the most attractive mate, then once we do, we’re supposed to magically stop competing, relax and share the love. Which paradigm are we to choose—the competition or the love?
It’s no wonder that so many old people—tired of competing—get ripped off by tradespeople.
But none of us can stop the force of nature, whether it’s human nature or an earthquake, I thought. I got up, buttoned up my coat and headed off to my meeting. I was still a bit early, but needed to get out into the fresh air. Or at least as fresh as it gets in Toronto in January.
Friday, January 15, 2010
On Avatar when nothing but boredom grows
©
A couple of weeks after we took our kids to see the movie, Avatar, I opened an e-mail from a friend praising the movie’s environmental ethics. Well, my friend wasn’t the only one doing the praising; he included a copy of something written by a guy named Gilad Atzmon.
Before I get into Gilad Atzmon and his science fiction-ish name, I should mention our own reactions to the movie. It was my wife Sharon who kind of put a wrench in it for us. “It’s just like FernGully,” she said as we left the theatre. And so it was. In FernGully tiny pixies live in a mythical rainforest paradise, which is threatened by humans. The pixies capture a human, shrink him down to their size and take him along on their adventures, during which he falls in love with one of the pixies—and the entire pixie race.
So cutting to the chase, FernGully has almost exactly the same plot as John Cameron’s Avatar, which has bigger pixies, more evil humans and phenomenal environmental destruction—just what we humans do best, obviously. FernGully laid it out first and Avatar simply repeated it with far more spectacular technical events 17 years later.
Sure I liked the digital effects. But for that kind of storyline I prefer Dr. Suess’s “The Lorax.” The famous kids’ book came out in 1971, and without any special effects at all, presented us with the Once-ler, who manages to cut down every Truffula Tree to supply his Thneed factory (as a grown up kid you should know that Thneeds are the shirts that everyone needs). If you want to save the 60 bucks it costs to take your kids to Avatar, you could pick up The Lorax for less than a third of the cost, though I don’t know which purchase is harder on trees.
This brings me to the ironic side of the story. In Cameron’s digital screed on the evils of human technology, he launches us into some of the most powerful storytelling technology of all time, the world of CGI-engineered humanoids. If the medium truly is the message, Avatar the machine-generated product is about as far away from naturally occurring biology as one could possibly get.
Not that I’m against machines. I own a few. But none of my machines actually fosters in me a feeling of oneness with the environment. And that includes my digital camera, which has me concentrating more on the quality of the image than actually experiencing nature. It’s the whiz-bang of the technology including the creation of the biomechanical avatar himself, and not the power of the story that impresses us about Avatar.
That’s not exactly how this Gilad Atzmon sees it. On his website he writes, “Avatar may well be the biggest anti War film of all time. It stands against everything the West is identified with. It is against greed and capitalism, it is against interventionalism, it is against colonialism and imperialism, it is against technological orientation, it is against America and Britain.”
Well, as I just said, Avatar IS all about technological orientation. And do I agree the movie is anti-war. But anti-Western? I wouldn’t be so sure. I could see its premise as anti-human, at least in light of our rapacious behaviour toward our environment. I’m pretty certain that John Cameron isn’t naïve enough to think that human rapaciousness is limited to Western cultures.
So what is the futuristicly-named Gilad Atzmon on about? Well, turns out that Atzmon is a rather famous British jazz sax musician who was born in Israel and has evolved into a bit of an anti-Zionist. He doesn’t exactly approve of the methods of the Jewish state, and hints at a global Jewish-led New World Order conspiracy.
Far be it for me to dismiss the possibility of a global conspiracy. Hell, that’s always fun to think about. And on Atzmon’s site there’s a link to another even-quirkier conspiracy theorist I’d never heard of—one James Orlin Grabbe. He’s dead now, so we can all relax; he’s not much of a threat. But he was interesting.
Turns out that J. Orlin Grabbe, a.k.a. JOG, was one of the first weird Internet cult heroes. He grew up in Texas in a religious family, was a real math genius, went on to get a B.A. in economics from Berkley and studied for Ph.D. in economics from Harvard. There he specialized in the study of financial derivatives, futures trading, foreign exchange markets, graduating in 1982. After that he signed up as an assistant professor at Wharton, where he more or less pioneered the study of international finance. In 1986 he wrote the book, “International Financial Markets,” which is still in use today to teach students about derivatives.
Among JOG’s weirder exploits was a bogus alterego known as “Bob, the Sex Candidate” who ran for the US Presidency. In an interview with Larry King, “Bob” promised to introduce free government-run brothels to the public, which would be staffed by conscripts who didn’t wish to serve in the military.
Before entirely dismissing Grabbe as a complete eccentric we should acknowledge that he was a serious researcher with a wicked sense of humour and a strong political conscience. One of his papers, “When Osama Bin Ladin Was Tim Osmon,” is a semi-famous Internet exposé on Bin Ladin’s days as a CIA operative working in the US long before the 9/11 event. There’s a lot more of this on the Net, if you’re inclined toward that kind of thing. If true, there’s a lot more we’re not being told about undercover activities leading up to the war in Iraq, and Grabbe was both curious and crazy enough to pursue it.
I have a friend who writes to me frequently about the state of the world, especially about the recent sub-prime financial collapse. Like Grabbe he believes that the “invisible hand” of a small cadre of global elites is behind this and other financial hijinx, all of which is either leading us to global war or to a single world government, or both, inevitably toward an authoritarian future. It’s something that Grabbe, with his attraction to politics and chaos theories, would appreciate. I’ll have to tell my friend about him.
Just thinking about all of this conjures up an Orwellian sense of dread though, doesn’t it? Or maybe the dread comes from nothing happening at all—only the dreadful boredom of driving back and forth to work in the cold weather, and the thought of the next snowstorm.
It’s no wonder we Canadians love our movies and the Internet in January.
A couple of weeks after we took our kids to see the movie, Avatar, I opened an e-mail from a friend praising the movie’s environmental ethics. Well, my friend wasn’t the only one doing the praising; he included a copy of something written by a guy named Gilad Atzmon.
Before I get into Gilad Atzmon and his science fiction-ish name, I should mention our own reactions to the movie. It was my wife Sharon who kind of put a wrench in it for us. “It’s just like FernGully,” she said as we left the theatre. And so it was. In FernGully tiny pixies live in a mythical rainforest paradise, which is threatened by humans. The pixies capture a human, shrink him down to their size and take him along on their adventures, during which he falls in love with one of the pixies—and the entire pixie race.
So cutting to the chase, FernGully has almost exactly the same plot as John Cameron’s Avatar, which has bigger pixies, more evil humans and phenomenal environmental destruction—just what we humans do best, obviously. FernGully laid it out first and Avatar simply repeated it with far more spectacular technical events 17 years later.
Sure I liked the digital effects. But for that kind of storyline I prefer Dr. Suess’s “The Lorax.” The famous kids’ book came out in 1971, and without any special effects at all, presented us with the Once-ler, who manages to cut down every Truffula Tree to supply his Thneed factory (as a grown up kid you should know that Thneeds are the shirts that everyone needs). If you want to save the 60 bucks it costs to take your kids to Avatar, you could pick up The Lorax for less than a third of the cost, though I don’t know which purchase is harder on trees.
This brings me to the ironic side of the story. In Cameron’s digital screed on the evils of human technology, he launches us into some of the most powerful storytelling technology of all time, the world of CGI-engineered humanoids. If the medium truly is the message, Avatar the machine-generated product is about as far away from naturally occurring biology as one could possibly get.
Not that I’m against machines. I own a few. But none of my machines actually fosters in me a feeling of oneness with the environment. And that includes my digital camera, which has me concentrating more on the quality of the image than actually experiencing nature. It’s the whiz-bang of the technology including the creation of the biomechanical avatar himself, and not the power of the story that impresses us about Avatar.
That’s not exactly how this Gilad Atzmon sees it. On his website he writes, “Avatar may well be the biggest anti War film of all time. It stands against everything the West is identified with. It is against greed and capitalism, it is against interventionalism, it is against colonialism and imperialism, it is against technological orientation, it is against America and Britain.”
Well, as I just said, Avatar IS all about technological orientation. And do I agree the movie is anti-war. But anti-Western? I wouldn’t be so sure. I could see its premise as anti-human, at least in light of our rapacious behaviour toward our environment. I’m pretty certain that John Cameron isn’t naïve enough to think that human rapaciousness is limited to Western cultures.
So what is the futuristicly-named Gilad Atzmon on about? Well, turns out that Atzmon is a rather famous British jazz sax musician who was born in Israel and has evolved into a bit of an anti-Zionist. He doesn’t exactly approve of the methods of the Jewish state, and hints at a global Jewish-led New World Order conspiracy.
Far be it for me to dismiss the possibility of a global conspiracy. Hell, that’s always fun to think about. And on Atzmon’s site there’s a link to another even-quirkier conspiracy theorist I’d never heard of—one James Orlin Grabbe. He’s dead now, so we can all relax; he’s not much of a threat. But he was interesting.
Turns out that J. Orlin Grabbe, a.k.a. JOG, was one of the first weird Internet cult heroes. He grew up in Texas in a religious family, was a real math genius, went on to get a B.A. in economics from Berkley and studied for Ph.D. in economics from Harvard. There he specialized in the study of financial derivatives, futures trading, foreign exchange markets, graduating in 1982. After that he signed up as an assistant professor at Wharton, where he more or less pioneered the study of international finance. In 1986 he wrote the book, “International Financial Markets,” which is still in use today to teach students about derivatives.
Among JOG’s weirder exploits was a bogus alterego known as “Bob, the Sex Candidate” who ran for the US Presidency. In an interview with Larry King, “Bob” promised to introduce free government-run brothels to the public, which would be staffed by conscripts who didn’t wish to serve in the military.
Before entirely dismissing Grabbe as a complete eccentric we should acknowledge that he was a serious researcher with a wicked sense of humour and a strong political conscience. One of his papers, “When Osama Bin Ladin Was Tim Osmon,” is a semi-famous Internet exposé on Bin Ladin’s days as a CIA operative working in the US long before the 9/11 event. There’s a lot more of this on the Net, if you’re inclined toward that kind of thing. If true, there’s a lot more we’re not being told about undercover activities leading up to the war in Iraq, and Grabbe was both curious and crazy enough to pursue it.
I have a friend who writes to me frequently about the state of the world, especially about the recent sub-prime financial collapse. Like Grabbe he believes that the “invisible hand” of a small cadre of global elites is behind this and other financial hijinx, all of which is either leading us to global war or to a single world government, or both, inevitably toward an authoritarian future. It’s something that Grabbe, with his attraction to politics and chaos theories, would appreciate. I’ll have to tell my friend about him.
Just thinking about all of this conjures up an Orwellian sense of dread though, doesn’t it? Or maybe the dread comes from nothing happening at all—only the dreadful boredom of driving back and forth to work in the cold weather, and the thought of the next snowstorm.
It’s no wonder we Canadians love our movies and the Internet in January.
Thursday, January 7, 2010
Holy cross and the human condition
©
According to the Internet the meaning of the name “St. Croix” is “holy cross”. There happen to be three St. (Saint) Croixs listed on Wikipedia: one is the largest of the Virgin Islands (where Columbus landed in 1492 and named Santa Cruz), another is a 165-mile-long river in Minnesota and Wisconsin, and the last is our smaller river along the international border between Canada and the U.S.
Those of us who live along this particular St. Croix River know that the inspiration for the “holy cross” for French explorers Pierre Dugua du Mons and Samuel de Champlain was the three-way intersection of the St. Croix River, Oak Bay and the narrow tidal bay leading into Waweig.
I expect that symbols factor large in human history. Each wave of new explorers must have re-crafted their new environments using the symbols they brought along from their homelands. This would be as true for the Asians coming to the New World some 15,000 years ago as it was for more the recent European visitors just over 400 years ago. Each new wave of migration erases the symbols of the previous inhabitants.
Coincidentally, I’ve had my own cultural intersection on the go for the New Year. As I write this I have a friend visiting Belize who sends e-mail posts of his discoveries. And another friend lent me social scientist Jared Diamond’s informative book, Guns, Germs and Steel, which deals with the spread of the human species around the globe.
Among the many striking things that have impressed my traveling friend about Belize are the ancient ruins in the rainforest. Here’s what he said after his first visit to a Mayan site:
“Interesting in all this is it's believed the actual fall of the Mayans was more of a slow decline. Having utilized all the resources near at hand, water, farmable ground, firewood, and with continuing population growth the rulers missed the signs of resource depletion, primarily due to a series of wars against other nearby cities and personal wealth accumulation. It was the ‘if-I'm-not-hungry-how-could-there-be-a-food-shortage’ syndrome. Typically the ruler’s compound was the last to be abandoned, while the citizens moved away in small clusters to set up sustainable family agricultural units—much as they still are today in rural areas. Hmm, this all sounds vaguely familiar.”
What caught my attention, other than the obvious parallels to that resource-depleted extinct society and our present modern tangent of over-consumption, is the reference to the different crisis reactions between the elite and the common folk. Where the ordinary people could see the writing on the wall, so to speak, the ruling elites were seemingly oblivious to the degradation of their environment until it was too late to change.
As a migrant to this area, the issue of social order is always at the back of my mind, as I’ve written often before in this column. To me this area seems to have a far more vertically stratified culture as compared to other parts of Canada. I’ve attributed this, variously, to the Loyalist background of the place, the greater divide between the wealthy and the less affluent here, the lack of ethnic diversity with fewer newcomers than elsewhere, a more static population, and so on.
My own personal preference might be for a more ‘horizontal’ egalitarian society, where there is a narrower gap between the social classes. And indeed, recent social research has shown that societies that are more horizontal—read: egalitarian—than vertical have a higher creative output. One only has to think about the huge “beat” generation living in Greenwich Village in the 1950s or the big generation of techie kids growing up in Silicon Valley to see the results in practice.
In practice egalitarian societies may be the exception rather than the rule. That’s where Jared Diamond comes to the rescue. According to his research over 40 years in places such as New Guinea, egalitarian societies were the norm when our ancestors were hunter-gatherers. In societies in which every member has to be a generalist in order to survive, equal status is automatic.
However, with the rise of agricultural food production just 6000 years ago a new possibility arose. With a surplus of food, societies were able to devote resources to specialists. The first specialists included a ruling class, then a religious class, then a host of other clerical and artisan specialties. The vertical human society had arrived.
In this way, modern human colonies seem to have a lot in common with ants. The Times of London recently reported, “William Hughes, of the University of Leeds, who led the research (on ants), said: “The core principle of social societies is they should be egalitarian. We’ve found this isn’t always the case and that some of the males are cheating. There is a genetic influence on royalty.” Hughes goes on to say, “…we carried out DNA fingerprinting on five colonies of leaf-cutting ants and discovered that the offspring of some fathers are more likely to become queens. These ants have a ‘royal’ gene or genes, giving them an unfair advantage and enabling them to cheat many of their altruistic sisters out of their chance to become a queen themselves.”
So specialized societies, whether human or ant, are hierarchical. But not entirely so.
The whole notion of our democratic political system is based on the intersection of both the vertical and horizontal. The population-as-a-whole elects representatives, who in turn work within a vertical administrative system to represent the public interest.
This intersection between the vertical and horizontal reminds one, correctly, of the Christian cross. And it’s no coincidence. In Christian tradition, the cross is the intersection between life and death, the worldly and the divine, good and evil, and between the Biblical, tradition of a Jehovah-directed vengeance (vertical) and the New Testament tradition of love and forgiveness (horizontal).
Obviously, in a complex, densely populated world we need vertical social order. To be equally obvious, we need creative, collaborative solutions to meet our present environmental challenges—which will require a horizontal society. We need a balance.
Unfortunately, what we’ve been experiencing for the last 30 years, at least on this continent, is an increasing vertical divide between the rich and the poor. Perhaps it’s time to start reassessing the distribution of wealth in our society before it’s too late.
Maybe we can do what our Mayan forefathers could not. Only time will tell. Welcome to 2010.
According to the Internet the meaning of the name “St. Croix” is “holy cross”. There happen to be three St. (Saint) Croixs listed on Wikipedia: one is the largest of the Virgin Islands (where Columbus landed in 1492 and named Santa Cruz), another is a 165-mile-long river in Minnesota and Wisconsin, and the last is our smaller river along the international border between Canada and the U.S.
Those of us who live along this particular St. Croix River know that the inspiration for the “holy cross” for French explorers Pierre Dugua du Mons and Samuel de Champlain was the three-way intersection of the St. Croix River, Oak Bay and the narrow tidal bay leading into Waweig.
I expect that symbols factor large in human history. Each wave of new explorers must have re-crafted their new environments using the symbols they brought along from their homelands. This would be as true for the Asians coming to the New World some 15,000 years ago as it was for more the recent European visitors just over 400 years ago. Each new wave of migration erases the symbols of the previous inhabitants.
Coincidentally, I’ve had my own cultural intersection on the go for the New Year. As I write this I have a friend visiting Belize who sends e-mail posts of his discoveries. And another friend lent me social scientist Jared Diamond’s informative book, Guns, Germs and Steel, which deals with the spread of the human species around the globe.
Among the many striking things that have impressed my traveling friend about Belize are the ancient ruins in the rainforest. Here’s what he said after his first visit to a Mayan site:
“Interesting in all this is it's believed the actual fall of the Mayans was more of a slow decline. Having utilized all the resources near at hand, water, farmable ground, firewood, and with continuing population growth the rulers missed the signs of resource depletion, primarily due to a series of wars against other nearby cities and personal wealth accumulation. It was the ‘if-I'm-not-hungry-how-could-there-be-a-food-shortage’ syndrome. Typically the ruler’s compound was the last to be abandoned, while the citizens moved away in small clusters to set up sustainable family agricultural units—much as they still are today in rural areas. Hmm, this all sounds vaguely familiar.”
What caught my attention, other than the obvious parallels to that resource-depleted extinct society and our present modern tangent of over-consumption, is the reference to the different crisis reactions between the elite and the common folk. Where the ordinary people could see the writing on the wall, so to speak, the ruling elites were seemingly oblivious to the degradation of their environment until it was too late to change.
As a migrant to this area, the issue of social order is always at the back of my mind, as I’ve written often before in this column. To me this area seems to have a far more vertically stratified culture as compared to other parts of Canada. I’ve attributed this, variously, to the Loyalist background of the place, the greater divide between the wealthy and the less affluent here, the lack of ethnic diversity with fewer newcomers than elsewhere, a more static population, and so on.
My own personal preference might be for a more ‘horizontal’ egalitarian society, where there is a narrower gap between the social classes. And indeed, recent social research has shown that societies that are more horizontal—read: egalitarian—than vertical have a higher creative output. One only has to think about the huge “beat” generation living in Greenwich Village in the 1950s or the big generation of techie kids growing up in Silicon Valley to see the results in practice.
In practice egalitarian societies may be the exception rather than the rule. That’s where Jared Diamond comes to the rescue. According to his research over 40 years in places such as New Guinea, egalitarian societies were the norm when our ancestors were hunter-gatherers. In societies in which every member has to be a generalist in order to survive, equal status is automatic.
However, with the rise of agricultural food production just 6000 years ago a new possibility arose. With a surplus of food, societies were able to devote resources to specialists. The first specialists included a ruling class, then a religious class, then a host of other clerical and artisan specialties. The vertical human society had arrived.
In this way, modern human colonies seem to have a lot in common with ants. The Times of London recently reported, “William Hughes, of the University of Leeds, who led the research (on ants), said: “The core principle of social societies is they should be egalitarian. We’ve found this isn’t always the case and that some of the males are cheating. There is a genetic influence on royalty.” Hughes goes on to say, “…we carried out DNA fingerprinting on five colonies of leaf-cutting ants and discovered that the offspring of some fathers are more likely to become queens. These ants have a ‘royal’ gene or genes, giving them an unfair advantage and enabling them to cheat many of their altruistic sisters out of their chance to become a queen themselves.”
So specialized societies, whether human or ant, are hierarchical. But not entirely so.
The whole notion of our democratic political system is based on the intersection of both the vertical and horizontal. The population-as-a-whole elects representatives, who in turn work within a vertical administrative system to represent the public interest.
This intersection between the vertical and horizontal reminds one, correctly, of the Christian cross. And it’s no coincidence. In Christian tradition, the cross is the intersection between life and death, the worldly and the divine, good and evil, and between the Biblical, tradition of a Jehovah-directed vengeance (vertical) and the New Testament tradition of love and forgiveness (horizontal).
Obviously, in a complex, densely populated world we need vertical social order. To be equally obvious, we need creative, collaborative solutions to meet our present environmental challenges—which will require a horizontal society. We need a balance.
Unfortunately, what we’ve been experiencing for the last 30 years, at least on this continent, is an increasing vertical divide between the rich and the poor. Perhaps it’s time to start reassessing the distribution of wealth in our society before it’s too late.
Maybe we can do what our Mayan forefathers could not. Only time will tell. Welcome to 2010.
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