Aphorism #1

One proposition proved true by Jesus and Socrates is that people who rigidly adhere to moral precepts are much like those people who always drive the speed limit. They disrupt the flow of traffic and everyone hates them.

Dream of Sept. 15, 2007

This evening I had what was among the most vivid dreams I have ever had. Had it been a film I might have said the director was mad. First, I was an insurance salesman who was walking off, jogging off, to get breakfast for a client. I was in a city unfamiliar to me, but my dream self, Dream Me, knew it quite well. (Note: I am now remembering that I had left my house also because the Golden Girls sans Sophia were getting naked there).

My client was an old woman whom I knew to be senile; she wanted only Cap'n Crunch cereal. I found a smarmy waiter in an out-of-doors cafe who took the order but required, before hand, a tip/bribe of five dollars; I had only one ten, a one, and (strangely enough) a three dollar bill. I did not want to give him the ten on principle—Dream Me doesn't need the money.

After getting change, I gave him five, but then a major shift (plot twist?) occurred and I was unable to receive the order—famished client will no doubt haunt me in my next dream!—I was thrown into a wormhole which brought me to a strange land (My dream self was at such a loss) which was being torn apart by unknown forces.

I found a method of escape back to Broadmoore by floating on red bricks. This was the only way out of the devastation. A race of industrious lizard people who were indigenous to the area had created this expensive method of escape for the unexplained many who had found themselves in this strange land. These bricks were a prized commodity among the natives who depended on transportation charges for their existence. (Had they also brought us here?)

So expensive were these bricks that bipedal creatures were sold only two, on which they were expected to stand for a period that I was given to believe would be some months' time. I tried to explain to the creatures that I and my friends, for by now I was representing a number of other humans who had found themselves in this odd situation, were not of a species that could be expected to stand for such a long time, and would, therefore, require additional bricks.

I argued before the appeals tribunal of lizard magistrates, who were tan and green (my thesis committee?). I prepared a brilliant ad hoc case, or so I believed. while wobbling badly on two bricks, I presented my argument. I argued through algebra and prime numbers (such is the brilliant logician that is Dream Me) that the moral precepts represented in the Principle of Universality demanded we be given better accommodations. Fairness and equality of condition after all demanded it.

The tribunal was unimpressed. It did not appear to them that the humans were at all equal in any respect, so unlike the beautiful, streamlined lizard genus of their home world. "Of course, that is why we need better accommodation." I was reaching. "Since we are unlike, we need to accommodate the mean"—whatever that meant! This, however, impressed them as being very reasonable and we immediately received a yacht of red bricks. And in this manner we began the long journey home.

###

I Got a New Chair Today.

When I got to work today, there was a new chair at my desk. I had been wanting a new one as the old one was at least 3 ½ years old, and like most of the furnishings and equipment in my classroom, I had inherited it from my predecessor. Today is also the day we were expecting a visit from the corporate office's director of curriculum. We are a lonely outpost seldom visited by anyone from those distant parts. Even before I had sat down in the chair and fingered its firm cushions and luxuriant newness, I remembered the film Stalag 17, how the Germans had given new blankets to the prisoners-of-war only to take them away after the visiting Red Cross officials had left. I sat down and leaned back. There was not the creaking sound that I had become accustomed to, the one that would always disturb the rare silence that would fall over the crowded room during a testing session.

It occurred to Cassie on day that she had never looked upon the backs of the pictures on her wall. That this would have occurred to her at all was only further sign that her eccentricity was still intact and an active part of her waking life. But, still, these pictures that had been her constant companions for decades, whose images—cubist renderings of Parisian café scenes painted by her mother and father before the war—were as familiar to her as the mole on the side of her neck. It was their countenance that had remained with her after the death of her parents and her advancement into middle age, the after-image a youth spent in the shadow of two brighter suns. As she sat looking at the frozen image of that plump waiter moving carefully through that café crowd, and the improbably angular couple kissing on the street corner, there was one aspect of these familiar old friends that remained a mystery to her. Their backs. It suddenly seemed indecent to her that she should have spent her entire life among the pictures but have never known what lay on the other side of them.

So Cassie walked over to the living room wall and, standing on a sofa, lifted one picture off the nails that had been holding it fast for a nearly a lifetime. She gently laid it down on the sofa and began to turn it over. She saw taped to the back of the picture frame . . . an envelope. Upon the envelope, written on a handwriting she knew well—her mother's. It was strange to read,

“Open the envelope, Cassie, this is important.” Opening the letter she found the following words It's about time you looked there. You always take so long to do things. Your father was like that. Please be more observant in the future.

For a while, Cassie sat down in a kind of strange trance. Whatever would have motivated her long-dead mother to have such an odd message on the back of that picture all those years ago? She strained to remember something that would have explained it. Seeing there was no date on the yellowing paper, she sat stunned. Then she laughed. Cruel joke, she thought. The old bitch playing mind games with me beyond the grave. She no doubt had put it there. . . yes, she placed it there to be . . . a cruel joke! She did not just send me a letter; that's not possible, so it must be that it was her senility, a product of her senility—made her a mean bitch at the end, though in truth mother and daughter were close.

Of course, any alternative explanation, one that might involve time machines, navigable multi-verses, worm holes—Einstein on the other end puffing away at his pipe; bad science fiction, all of it!—would have been rejected before even being entertained. Science fiction was fine when it kept to its metaphoric functions; it was ridiculous when it called attention to its otherness, sensational stories meant to excite the middle brow fan. It was a sad comment on society. Astronomy had divorced astrology some centuries before, but in within the pages and plasma screens of the modern entertainment landscape, science had not yet (or again) detached from its fictions. Two thousand years of slouching ignorance: I believe it 'because' it is absurd—I believe it is a poem, Father.

When will I go home again? Cassie's grandfather had asked. She was a girl, and he was in a hospital bed. --Soon, she assured him as he watched the magic lantern show on the wall. Said he saw a man skiing down the plaster and made a passing comment. The next time she saw him he was in another room and everyone was sad and so was she. And for the first time she felt hopeless. At the house, she went into granddad's room and out the window saw sunlight shinning on a pine tree. It was a warm early-summer day. She smelled his stale tobacco in the air and knew that magic would never touch her life again.

.

Attack on Al Gore's Assault on Reason

I was recently scanning the internet for entries on Al Gore's book, Assault on Reason, and was surprised to see so many people criticize the book before they had actually read it. Some of these people did not plan on reading it at all but offered some strong opinions. For example, Robert Tracinski on a site called Real Clear Politics said, “Based on excerpts of Gore's book published in TIME, his not-so-subtle theme is that reason is being "assaulted" by a free and unfettered debate in the media. . .” Actually his argument centers around his thesis that there is not a free and unfettered debate in the media, though a person is free to disagree with this thesis and the reasoning that leads to it.

Josh Hammond on the site Best of the Blogs stated, “If you thought Al Gore was arrogant, condescending, and a know-it-all before (none who read these entries probably do), then Al removes all doubt in his latest broadside on the Bush administration.” And he adds although he has not read the book that,

“Maureen Dowd gets it right when she calls Gore’s book a “high-minded scold”. Gore’s primary “research” is selective newspaper articles, selective Congressional testimony, selective commission reports. . .”

He says that because of all this he doesn't intend on reading it at all, “because the last thing I need is a condescending politician lecturing me about how life is. . . I have read a variety of book reviews about the book and that is good enough for me.” Yet I would push the question: why do you blog about a book you have not even read? Or if you do, why charge with confidence that he has used “selective quotes,” etc., when your sources are themselves merely a selection of book reviews? One can simply not be unaware that using substandard rhetoric to attack a book with the title “Assault on Reason,” will leave one open to the charge of being ironic.

Personally I have so far read the majority of the book and can say, based on that portion, I didn’t find the book at all “arrogant” or “condescending.” I was surprised that it was as balanced and reasonable as it was; I was really expecting a partisan polemic. What I found in its pages was a largely detached, critical examination of contemporary communications theory.

One of the things he writes about here is exactly the nature of the some of the criticism this book is getting: the person who writes it is scrutinized while the “ideas” within the book are marginalized by selective quotation, omission, or pre-judged sentiment. The book does lack eloquence at times. It does have an agenda. There is much Gore's book that is not new, but it does seem to try to present information an honestly way and to lead the reader with logic more than bluster, or clever verbal jabs. It's a good read.

Smarter than a 5th Grader

Living from one break bell to another

The teacher writes a lagging rhyme upon

Yet another student’s pleasant failure:

“Let failure upon failure be our bond”;

‘Till longed for 3 PM has come and gone,

Then if the lagging poem be thrown away—

And to toss the scrapes one is often fond,

Will yield an unacceptable delay;

For the life is short and the work day, long;

The hallow’d ring around the temple grays;

The papers are counted, ink is measured;

American life leaves no time for play—

Efficiency makes our bombs work better.

structured Sentences will soon be given

Useless teachers by judicious villans.

Because I Do Not Turn. . .

It occurred to Cecilia on day that she had never looked upon the backs of the pictures on her wall. That this would have occurred to her at all was only further sign that her eccentricity was still intact and an active part of her waking life. But, still, these pictures that had been her constant companions for decades, whose images—cubist renderings of Parisian café scenes painted by her mother and father before the war—were as familiar to her as the mole on the side of her neck. It was their countenance that had remained with her after the death of her parents and her advancement into middle age, the after-image a youth spent in the shadow of two brighter suns. As she sat looking at the frozen image of that plump waiter moving carefully through that café crowd, and the improbably angular couple kissing on the street corner, there was one aspect of these familiar old friends that remained a mystery to her. Their backs. It suddenly seemed indecent to her that she should have spent her entire life among the pictures but have never known what lay on the other side of them.
So Cecilia walked over to the living room wall and, standing on a sofa, lifted one picture off the nails that had been holding it fast for a nearly a lifetime. She gently laid it down on the sofa and began to turn it over. She saw taped to the back of the picture frame . . . an envelope. Upon the envelope, written on a handwriting she knew well—her mother's. It was strange to read,

“Open the envelope, Cecie, this is important.”