The Power of a Word

I want to thank everyone for their comments on the last post.  I want to thank you all for your thoughtful and intelligent consideration of what I was saying, and for your own insightful input.  Mostly, I want to thank you all for not jumping ship on me.  I know how touchy a subject race can be.  I woke up today and realized that it was Martin Luther King jr. Day, and I thought, whoops.  Perhaps my timing wasn't the best, but I had no intention of coinciding with the holiday.  Quite honestly, I had forgotten all about it.  I meant no offense by what I said, and I sincerely hope none was taken.  I hope you understand; I couldn't very well argue for a word's right to remain in Huck Finn if I wasn't willing to write the word myself.  If I danced around it and only made oblique references to it, that would have undermined the point of the post, as well as compromised my own integrity.  However, I want to be perfectly clear that I absolutely do not advocate casually throwing racial epithets around.  I just don't believe a dead writer's words should be tampered with, just to make us all more comfortable with our own history.  I could only hope that no one tampers with my own words long after I'm gone, assuming anyone even remembers that I was alive.

I believe that if there's any hope of us all getting along and putting these painful chapters of the past behind us, then we all need to learn to calm down, relax, and speak openly about these things.  I think that acting like someone has violated some sort of restraining order if they get within fifty feet of the subject of race is counter-productive.  We need to put our cards on the table.  We need to embrace the awkwardness and push our way through, rather than running away.  I don't believe in sugar-coated social tranquillizers that put us all to sleep and allow us to go on living in denial.  I believe in the smoke alarm that wakes us up so that we can put out the fire before it's too late.  That alarm might be painful and disturbing to the ears, but it's far better than letting the house burn to the ground.  

People ofter say, "We'll look back on this and laugh someday."  I truly hope that day comes on the subject of race.  I hope the day will come when the lexicon of hatred will hold nothing but blank pages, and the words that sting and hurt today will finally become demystified and robbed of their power.  I hope the day will come where we'll be able to sit down and talk comfortably about the people we all once were, but are no longer. That day may be a long way off, but it'll never come until the tension in the air is diffused.  If we go on hiding everything behind painful smiles and we walk on egg-shells around each other, if we jump to conclusions and fly into anger at each other at the mere mention of a word, then we'll never be able to reveal the warmth of our true smiles and welcome each other in as part of the larger family of the human race.

Am I defending the word?  No.  I'm saying that the word gains power if you lock it away in a vault.  It becomes the "forbidden Word" with a capital "n", and it grows to mystical proportions.  It draws attention to itself in that void of silence where you censor it.  It becomes the undiagnosed cancer festering beneath the skin.  It becomes almost sacred and revered by virtue of being forbidden.  I say let it go.  Let them scream it from the rooftops until their voice is gone.  Don't give them the satisfaction.  Who cares?  It's just sad, angry men cursing the world.  They hold no real power over you.  They hold no power over any of us, beyond the power we give them.  Don't give them the power.  Let the vault stand empty and leave them with no weapons in their arsenal.  I hope we can forgive and be forgiven and all move on together.  There's a universe of incredible possibilities out there if we can set aside our petty differences between each other.

Nuclearheadache's Guide to Everyday Nutcases (part 1)

The DSM-IV does a fine job of describing genuine mental illnesses, but what about the rest of the lunatics out there?  You know who I'm talking about. You run across them whenever you step out your front door, these other people.  Every last one of them is completely, hopelessly out of their minds.  Next month will mark my 35th trip around the sun, and I've yet to meet one of these so-called "normal" people, not even in the mirror.  This handy guide is for and about everybody else out there.  Not those in the padded rooms, or the people that get a pass because everybody knows they're a little off.  I'm talking about people that are still "Okay" enough to hold down jobs.

          Miss Migraine

You probably know someone like this.  Most likely you call them a hypochondriac.  Ironically, it's just this sort of casual, amateur, exaggerated diagnosis that's at the root of Miss Migraine's problems.  You see, she isn't technically a hypochondriac, at least not in the clinical sense.  In fact, she isn't really anything in the clinical sense.  But if you spend any amount of time around her, you'll learn that she has a growing list of ailments and disorders longer than your arm.  All self diagnosed, of course.  Miss Migraine rarely takes any of these fantasy conditions seriously enough to actually go see a doctor about them.  She mostly just likes to throw dire medical terms around and complain to you about her problems on her lunch break.

Although it might all come across as an obvious ploy for sympathy, Miss Migraine's biggest problem is actually her own stunning lack of empathy.  The rest of the world's problems are flat and inconsequential to her.  It's all just a lot of whining and noise, lacking any real dimension, until something happens to her.  Her pain is always a much bigger deal than yours, and she has to describe it in the appropriate terms so that you'll understand that.  No one else has ever had the kind of problems she has.  Last week, when you briefly mentioned hurting your back, that just got on her nerves.  Suck it up, and get over it!  Then she goes and hurts her back.  Whoa!  Now this is serious!  This feels way worse than what you were talking about.  My God, she must have slipped a disc.  Oh no!

The classic example is the migraine headache.  For every one person who actually suffers from these debilitating afflictions, there are nine others who casually refer to every headache they have as a "migraine."  Not because they're experiencing any of the symptoms of the condition.  It's just because calling it a "headache" just isn't good enough.  They have to make sure you know that they have a worse headache than you could ever dream of having.  They have the worst headache in the history of headaches.  To that I say, "You've got a migraine headache, huh?  Well, I've got a nuclear headache.  Top that!!"

           The Cynic

This is a person who casts anything that anyone anywhere does in the worst possible light.  Their lack of faith in humanity is bottomless.  If you give five dollars to a homeless person, you're just trying to feel better about yourself, or even more likely, you're probably buying drugs off of them.  If you don't give five dollars to a homeless person, you're a greedy, heartless jerk.  If you try to do a good job, you're a suck up.  If you do a bad job, you just suck.  There's just no winning with The Cynic.  They're like a human slot machine that comes up "asshole" every time.

Of course, this rigged game is exactly what The Cynic is looking for.  It reinforces their negative image of people.  It's a vicious circle.  Their negative image makes them see the worst in people, and then what they see proves to them how horrible people are.  But why are they so determined to see people this way?  Where does this circle start?  Did a lifetime of disappointment and discouragement turn them into this bitter, hostile husk of a person?  What kind of satisfaction are they getting out of this?

Well, first there's the simple pleasure of sitting in judgment on people.  There's nothing like really digging around in someone else's faults.  It can provide hours of enjoyment and conversational subject matter.  The only thing better than slowing down to see a gruesome car accident is knowing that the guy who caused it was drunk and had a baby in the car at the time.  While we all may be guilty of being fascinated by this sort of thing from time to time, The Cynic thrives on it.  And their rigged outlook provides them with an endless source of material.  Secondly, it makes them feels better about themselves.  If you're a piece of garbage any way you slice it, then there's no chance of you looking like a better person than them.  Hell, "better person", no such thing.  People are hopelessly rotten, so it's pointless to even try to do anything good.  Get the idea?  It's hard to even talk about The Cynic without being dragged down into their bitterness yourself.    

To be continued...   

Looking for Love in the Uncanny Valley

The other day a co-worker of mine told me about a new pornographic sex-simulation game for the Xbox Kinect.  I suppose it was inevitable that something like that would happen, but they certainly didn't waste any time getting around to it.  I should point out that my source for this information is a known liar and idiot, but it's the principle and concept that I'm concerned with here anyway.  If they haven't actually made something like this yet, you know that they will sooner or later.  In an earlier post, when I complained that they needed to make more mature games for the new Kinect, this vision of a lonely middle-aged guy groping, gyrating, and smacking the thin air in front of his TV was definitely not what I had in mind.

Of course, this is hardly a new thing.  The Atari first took a stab at the idea with the pixelatedly pathetic Custer's Revenge.  As far as what sort of erotic satisfaction someone was supposed to get out of this, your guess is as good as mine.  Was it just good for a few juvenile laughs, or were people actually turned on by this?  At any rate, the genre persisted.  Computer system after system, console after console, there has always been an underground market of these games.  In Japan there is even apparently a whole cottage industry of pornographic anime games with interactive cartoon characters that can be abused in the satisfaction of all sorts of perversions and fetishes.

Setting aside issues of morality and taste that might be raised in objection to all this, there is a common failing to all these attempts.  It is this failing that keeps this latest Kinect example from being something that people might secretly find intriguing, and makes it instead something hopelessly, embarrassingly lame.  It's the missing element of physical contact.   Without this, what are you left with?  There's the visual stimulation, but good old fashioned regular pornography does a fine job of providing that.  There's the added element of interaction, but this comes at a noticeable price to the visual.  Sure, our lonely gamer can actually manipulate the subject of his amorous attention, but it ends up looking like he's just moving the wooden joints of a lifeless marionette.  Besides, this interaction is always facilitated via mouse or motion control.  At no point does the gamer have even the remotest sense that they're touching another human being.  So, allowing the gamer to thrust at the empty air, only to see these actions translated on the screen as relations with a virtual avatar, misses the point for miles upon miles.  The poor guy could turn off the TV, pump at the air, and use his imagination, if there was any hope of getting the slightest gratification out of it. 

There was a point, though, when that gratification seemed within our reach.  In the mid 90's virtual reality was the big fascination.  A fully immersive, artificial environment seemed right around the corner.  Sure all the current efforts involved  cumbersome gloves and helmets and they often caused seizures, eye-strain, and nausea, but it was just a matter of working out the bugs, right?  Sooner or later, we were going to find ourselves stepping out onto a virtual landscape that would feel just as real as the natural one.  Somewhere down the line, virtual reality went the way of flying cars and video phones.  It became yet another idea that seemed to serve no practical need.  The dream remains, simmering somewhere on the back burner of all our thoughts, but it's no longer something that we hope to find in the stores tomorrow afternoon.

But what was this dream?  What fulfillment were we hoping to find?  If you think about it, virtual reality was more about the physical sensation than the visual.  Sure, we wanted everything to look real, but this was a secondary consideration and one that we've come to satisfy with the refinement of graphic quality on the flat screen.  In all but one crucial respect, which we'll discuss shortly, the difference in the appearance of computer graphics and the real world is almost a negligible one at this point.  And yet, the dream remains unfulfilled, doesn't it?  It was really all about feeling like you were really in the virtual world, and somewhere deep down in a dark recess whether anyone wanted to admit it or not, a big driving motivation behind this desire was sex.  Sure, in polite company we'd all be in awe and amazement of how you could reach out and touch the leaves on the virtual trees, but after everyone had cleared out at midnight, you know what we would have all been up to. 

That missing variable of physical contact in the coital equation would have finally been provided for.  In fact, it might be for the best that this technology ended up on the shelf for the time being.  If we were to achieve a simulation of sex that was virtually indistinguishable from the real thing, who knows what kind of disaster that would spell for human relations.  Sex, just as physically satisfying as the genuine thing, would be ready at hand, even making the unintended pun here obsolete.  The pains we go through now in the pursuit of satisfaction are a huge and integral part of every facet of our existence.  It's no telling how far we'd let ourselves go.  Would we all degenerate into fat blobs of jaded satiation?  Would the human race burn itself out over this?  Will we ever be ready for this sort of thing?

And what of the "crucial respect" mentioned above?  In the world of computer programming and robotics there is a familiar term that defines the issue here, "The Uncanny Valley".  This is the idea that the closer simulations come to look and act and resemble real human beings, the more acutely we become aware of the fact that they are not human.  It's that strange, lifeless mask that we're all familiar with whenever we see a CGI replication of a person.  The lines of real and artificial converge, but never intersect on the horizon, at least not as far as the eye can see at the moment.  That could change in the future, further down the road.

In our virtual scenario, this issue goes beyond appearances and becomes a metaphysical one.  It can even serve as a mile marker of authenticity between the two realities.  At what point is the blurred line between masturbation and actual conjugal relations crossed?  At what point is the shame replaced with afterglow?  Ironically, I would have to pin-point that frontier at the point when the virtual object has reached the level of autonomy and A.I. self awareness to actually be capable of rejecting the advances of the user.  Unfortunately, that leaves our poor lonely gamer right back he started from in the real world.  This poor guy can't catch a break.

Saving Private Ryan: Images of War

Saving Private Ryan begins and ends with two long, extended battle sequences.  These scenes are shot hand-held with little dialogue and they have the feel of on-location documentary footage.  Because Private Ryan is a Spielberg film, and because it has that Spielberg style that feels good-hearted and hopeful even in the midst of war, I think people tend to forget how real and raw these scenes are.  One of the most brutal and violent depictions I've ever seen.  Kubrick may have had the more dark and calculating reputation, but shot for shot, there's really nothing in Full Metal Jacket that comes close to what you see here.

But it's not just violence for the sake of violence.  The two separate scenes and the feeling their images invoke serve as milestones that gauge the evolution worked in the audience's mind through-out the film.  The first scene depicts the D-Day landing at Normandy.  The shots are fast and low, and they give you an uncanny, unnerving feeling or being right there with the soldiers.  You feel you're experiencing the battle with them, and the one thought that goes through you mind, the same thought that must have gone through so many of their minds, is  simply that you don't want to die.  Beneath the withering fire of the German guns the whole point and purpose of the battle and all other considerations are pushed aside.  Life is torn to pieces all around you, and you just don't want to die.  Nothing else matters.  Then, the movie closes with another epic battle scene, as the characters fight to defend a bridge where the German army plans to cross.  Again, it's a harsh and violent scene, and again you feel like you're down in the middle of it with the characters, but yet somehow the fear of the opening scene is gone.  Death is still there at every turn, and a character is even show paralyzed into inaction by his own fear, but that feeling of stark and intense mortality that drives every other thought from the mind is gone, replaced by a feeling of nobler purpose.  It is the deceptively simple story that takes place between these two scenes that causes the change.

So what is this nobler purpose?  The movie barely touches on the political agendas and moral issues behind the war itself.  The subject of the holocaust is raised through a Jewish member of the squad that goes searching for Private Ryan, but this is more a matter of characterization than theme.  The German soldiers aren't cast as villains, and in fact, there is one scene where we can't help but feel sympathy for one of them.  So this "nobler purpose" isn't just a matter of good fighting in a righteous cause against evil.  The feeling is more like men put into an unfortunate situation where they're forced to kill one another.  In the heat of battle they're driven to a murderous rage because the enemy is trying to kill them even though they're also trying to kill the enemy in turn.  The absurdity of this is demonstrated clearly in one scene in particular.  The saying, "If God be for us, who could be against us?", is even raised in a conversation between the men, but it's clearly not where the movie's heart lies.  This is just the soldiers trying to make sense of the situation they find themselves in. 

No, the nobler purpose is to be found in their mission to find Ryan.  "This time, the mission is a man.", one of the soldiers observes.  It's the fact that even in the middle of a war, with men dying all around, one individual human life still has value.  It ultimately doesn't matter whether Ryan goes home and "invents a longer lasting light bulb."  What matters is that a human life was saved.  The importance of this comes to be something that goes beyond the "math" of the mission and even the senselessness of war itself.  One single man's life still has value.   

In the end, they stay to defend the bridge.  Not because the Germans are evil and have to be stopped.  They stay because Ryan doesn't want to abandon "the only brothers he has left."  They stay, because they stay together.  So when that final battle comes, it's no longer just a case of men thrown senselessly into the face of mortality.  It's men who have chosen to fight and even die to try to keep each other alive.  They've learned that isn't a question of nine men sacrificed to save one, or one sacrificed to save nine.  It's life that matters, regardless of the numbers.        

The Existence of God

Some people look at the stars and find God.  Some people find God in the first glimpse of the face of their newborn child.  Some people find God behind the bars of a prison cell, or at the end of their rope, or when they're scraping rock bottom looking for that last fix.  Some people find God at an alter call at a Sunday evening service where the drowsy light of the setting sun shines through.  Some people don't find God until they're drawing that last painful breath.  I found God in the periodic table of elements.  To each his own, I guess.

I grew up in a Christian home.  We went to church three times a week, twice on Sunday and once for Wednesday night prayer meeting.  We were there whenever the doors were open.  I also went to a private school for several years, also Christian.  I was knee deep in the religion.  It surrounded me on all sides.  Through-out my childhood I fluctuated between periods when I would become serious about being a "good Christian", and other periods when I couldn't care less and I just wanted to see what was happening with the TV shows I wasn't allowed to watch.  Regardless of these fluctuations, however, it never once even crossed my mind to question the truth of any of it.  God & the Devil, Heaven & Hell were as real and self-evident to me as my hand in front of my face.  I didn't even know that doubt was an option.

Then one day my brother, who's a few years older than me, came home from his college classes and mentioned that they had been learning about the notion that reality, as we know it, could be an illusion.  I remember his pointing to the light bulb hanging from the ceiling in the hallway and saying, "How do you really know that the light is on?  How do you know that you're not imagining it?  How do we know that we're both seeing the same thing?  How do you know you're not dreaming right now and none of this is real?"  I didn't know it at the time, but I wouldn't be exaggerating now if I told you that this simple moment on a rainy afternoon completely changed my life and who I was as a person, forever.  A tiny little crack had opened up in my view of the world, and I could see an incredible light coming from the other side.

I became fascinated by philosophy after that.  I started reading everything from Aristotle to Nietzsche.  I didn't understand half of it, and the half I thought I understood then, I didn't really understand either.  But the wheels were turning.  I started to keep a notebook of my ideas, a kind of fledgling precursor of this blog.  It wasn't long before the most obvious question of all occurred to me, "How do I know God is real?"  Now, it wasn't that I had been living under a rock and had never heard of atheism.  It was just that up to that point, I had never realized how someone could arrive at that conclusion.  Atheists were evil people, denying God so that they could live a life of sin and excess...or so I'd always heard.  Now I was seeing how reason, rather than sin, could lead you there as well.

Naturally, this didn't go over big at home or at school.  I started to rebel and get into trouble.   I started to ask questions.  Looking back on it now, my questions concerning Christianity and the existence of God could be broken down into three basic sub-categories: 1.) How do we know the Bible is actually the word of God?  2.) If everything that happens is God's will, then how does human free will fit into the equation?  3.) Did God decide and create the ideal of what is good, or does goodness exist independently of God and God is simply the ultimate realization of the ideal?  In other words, how could God be the highest measure of the standard and the creator of the standard as well?

Regarding the first question, the best they could do was quote me a bunch of Bible verses.  I had sense enough even then to know that you can't prove the authenticity of a document by quoting from a document itself.  I could write something on a napkin, and add a footnote that it was the word of God.  So that argument proved nothing to me.  Regarding the other two questions, oh we went round and round in circles on those.  I can't hardly blame them though.  Despite what I said in the opening paragraph, I'm still struggling with those myself.  Anyway, eventually they grew pretty tired of me at the school.  They put me on something they called "spiritual probation", a new type of thin ice that they basically invented just for me, and then they made it pretty clear that they didn't want me coming back to their school next year.  I was trying to open the minds around me in the same way mine had been opened.  Clearly some people were hostile to this.

In the midst of all this, everyday life went on.  In Chemistry class we were learning about the periodic table of elements.  We learned that all the chemical reactions between the elements were due to the fact that all the different elements are trying to reach a stability and stasis by having eight electrons in their outer shell.  Perhaps it was because 8 seemed such an arbitrary number.  If it had been an even 10, I might not have even taken note of it.  But as it was, it made me wonder.  I wasn't exactly seeing God in all this then, that came later.  At the time, I was just wondering.  Here was a rule that governed every physical reaction through-out the universe, but why?  Why did these atoms have such a thing for the number 8?  Who decided this?  The rule caused the reactions, but what caused the rule?

No doubt someone with far more scientific training that I could ever dream of acquiring  would be able to explain exactly why 8 is the magic number, but that would be missing the point.  Such an explanation would only remove the issue back by one degree.  My questioning had led me to that old conundrum that anyone who's ever had a conversation with a four year old child is familiar with.  For every "why?" there's another "why?" waiting on deck right behind it.  You can explain to the Nth degree how everything in the universe works, from the tiniest microbe to the collision of galaxies, but you'll never reach an ultimate explanation of why it just conveniently happens to be that way.  You can take the whole cosmic clock apart piece by piece and show exactly how it keeps time, but you still wouldn't be able explain why we're fortunate enough that this clock even exists instead of just a pile of cogs and gears.  In other words, how do you account for the principle of clockworkness itself?  Why not chaos?  Again, you could go deep, really dig down into the metaphysical foundation of everything and explain why the universe is governed by a system of consistent scientific laws, but you'll find another "why?" waiting right behind that one.  

Take evolution, for instance.  Now, to Christian people "evolution" is a dirty word, but ironically, I see this "God-principle" more at work there than anywhere else.  Just like with the periodic table, someone could explain to me in intricate and minute detail exactly how natural selection works.  I know enough about it myself to see that there's no mysterious magic behind it.  It makes, simple, natural, logical sense.  But aren't we lucky that it does?  There's even a built-in slight degree of imperfection in the universe that allows it to work.  This raises an issue for another day, but for now I'm just pointing out that there's even a perfect degree of imperfection to make it all work out, that slight little hiccup in the clock that keeps it running.

Now, you're thinking that all these issues have been raised before by the theory of Intelligent Design.  I would say, yes...but not quite...or maybe, up to a point.  You see, I'm not looking at all this and seeing the hand of a designer.  I'm thinking God is the design.  Once upon a time, people thought the clock itself was God.  Then someone came along and said, "No, God made the clock."  I'm saying that perhaps God is the principle of clockwork itself.  It's not the gears and springs and scientific laws; it's the thing that allows the gears and springs to work as a clock.  It's the reason a flower is beautiful, that falls as a shadow behind any other reason you might give.  It's not how we came to be here to see the flower; it's why.  It's...well, quite honestly, it's beyond my power to explain.  In fact, it's the very nature of it to reside beyond explanation.  If you try to explain God, you find that it slips another degree away, forever just beyond your grasp.

There might be some fall-out and controversy over this, or it might be met with bland, unimpressed indifference.  I don't know.  I wish I could say I was up to that task of really putting this into words.  I've heard before that writers should never whine about their own inadequacies of expression in their writing.  They should either put up or shut up.  Well, I've done my best at putting up.  I wish I could say that all this helps me sleep at night, and that I'm no longer confused and plagued with doubts.  But I am, and probably always will be.  That light bulb in the hallway changed me in ways that can't be unchanged, even if I wanted to.   All I have to offer is a feeling that I have, a sense and a faith that the ship of space and time is being guided along on a steady course, holding the whole crazy universal carnival together.