Homo Fukushimaensis

You can compartmentalize former lives successfully, balance them down into cool dormancies but the problem is you can't predict why or when they'll heat up which ones or what parts. You only know that they come back in waves and packets of eternal radiation rolling real and ghostly in your wakefulness and dreams.

Japan comes back with clarity. In my first airy hours there, I landed at Haneda, or Wing-Field, and was met by a young guide whose only mission was to get me to headquarters. It was o-hanami, when cherries pop out undeniably into pink blossoms, the Yeats in your heart burgeons on through your blood and only a pagan festival will do. Dawn was breaking too and the Tokyo-bound train passed through a steady succession of coastal rice paddies and hamlets. In its originating night, fog had settled down into a latticed matrix like lozenges of gallium arsenide between over-sized transistors, into flooded rice fields below dikes arraying off into hazy whites. My guide, who had probably woken up at 3 or 4AM local time to come retrieve her cargo, sat in silence, certainly, and what might possibly be described as aggrieved judgement. It was hard to tell. Everything was hard to tell. The Disorient Express.

Travel and you'll see how hemispheres and continents have their own ideas of trees. Even the grasses are different. The rocks, the weeds, the doorknobs. New sceneries, so plush, so manufactured, so old ran along my moistened window north and to my right. An acutely angled sun sidled up behind to jostle the sheltering fog, poking it first then stirring it up sprightly out of beds like pillows being fluffed and shifted one last time over sleepy heads. With my sleeve, I rubbed the grease patches my nose had left off the glass and asked the guide, "How do you say the word for the rice? What's in there? In Japanese?"

To insist on learning something in her language at that ungodly hour was typically inconsiderate. So gaijin, so outside-person. But there's no help for that. Some years later Kyoko would accuse, "you Americans, you always have to ask why." A half-minute later my companion said, "Ko-may. Go-han." By which she meant, "Rice...Food." Those little clicks and exhalations are loaded with a cultural power their translations can't approach. In that land they approximate a term more like "Staff of Life," but even that falls short. I spoke my first words in the language of the rising sun with the rehearsal of intended memory.

As a child, rice had been fair forced into my mouth from Rice-a-Roni boxes, and came with Chinese restaurant food for free. The Japanese, however, have a dissenting proverb: to grow one grain of it, a grandmother had to bend over in a shit-field for an hour. Live there, and you learn the monsoons come every June and reverse the weather's prevailing direction from easterly winds to west. The west wind's are insistent, and they carry, well, one hesitates to say rain. It's an airborne flood robust enough to drench every inch of you if you walk or ride a bike or motorcycle, warm water driven sideways up underneath your mackinaw, to run all icky down or up your neck and back, up your shins and into your ass crack, into your sneakers, your boots or spongy shoes. Most of these will mold up spectacularly, hairier with green than a neglected loaf of Wonder Bread if not well-rubbed with oil or soap on that evening.

The neon lights of Ginza would come sooner, and they made Manhattan's Times Square look antiquated and dirty, dingy and half-hearted. Ginza was 20 years more clever, clean and unyellowed, and its videotronic interweavings had cogently combined to form the world's biggest, most colorful bug zapper. It bathed me in hellacious beauty, stunned my eyes with variegations of ostentatious wealth and styles my pupils' backsides had never yet reflected, much less dwelt upon. Here was a city and a country cavorting in abnegations of a prior and now completely invisible defeat, working to overcome the insecurities of a small but proud island nation with no natural resources, dancing the steps to be richer than the West. Nuclear power made it possible.

There was someone named Karen on the long flight over. Despite being already engaged to a nice Mormon girl, I agreed to meet her under the Ginza clock tower, and did so in what had immediately become a whole different world. Walking hip to hip with someone whose job was simply to be herself, slower than normal while the throttle of one of the world's rarest and most unmuffled cars was blipped, I realized we were keeping pace with two teenage boys in a 1966 Iso Rivolta. Both were driving, after a fashion. 5, 10, 20 blips and they'd jerk forward 20 or 30 feet then come tautly to a halt. There were many others doing versions of likewise.

In a tortured, halting procession down the well-lit strip there came a brand-new chaffeured Rolls Royce, its tuxedoed passengers drinking from champagne glasses, there was a prim and pretty girl on display behind the wheel of a white Jaguar XK 12o wearing a matching angora sweater, there was a plethora of garden-variety Ferraris, Porsches all with their windows open in a circus of consumption with everything but jugglers on horses. There might've been horses there but we didn't notice. There was a lot going on, and but for the closeness of humanity it would've been cold out. It didn't seem cold. We were all of us floating on the deliciously flying fuck of it, blessed and knowing it, unleashed and transmogrified. I feel as privileged as those kids trying to cruise in the Rivolta. More privileged. We were energized, and some white horses would've been perfect.

Truths, Realties, and Double Santa Claus Theories

My son, previously dubbed Lord Running Boy (LRB), is now a 6-year old first grader. His teacher asked to speak with Lord Wife and me after school about his behavior one day this past week, an oft-recurring theme this year, and she started off like this:

"Well...there's an incident I need to bring to your attention, and the timing might not be, kind of another shock for you. It's hard to, well, I'm not sure what your belief systems are at home, but..."

Our attention? "Another shock" and "belief systems" along with Mrs. L's ginger, reluctant tone shoved us onto the parental Def-Con 4 footing, a place from whence the mind rushes to worst-case scenarios. Did he start a fight? Is a window broken, or a taboo? Did he tell his classmates America is running out of gasoline and their parents are going to starve? (Some of our household commentary, lacking context, might be embroidered by an eavesdropping child.) I was thinking property damage could be involved, resigned myself to his suspension or a lawsuit and hoped one wouldn't last too long or the other cost too much.

His teacher, a professional and compassionate woman with young children of her own, explained that our boy disrupted the class by suddenly climbing up onto his group desk and proclaiming to a room chock-full of 26 kindergartners and first graders, 

"Everybody! I have an important announcement...Santa Claus is not real. Santa Claus is your mom and your dad!"

As she described it, a pregnant pause was followed by one child's plaintive denial and went from there on to general uproar. We could easily picture frowns of doubt and consternation rippling across the room, little faces shooting red, pairs of fists starting to clench. She said one boy's body tensed so rigidly for so long she was afraid he would pass out. There was crying and staring blankly into space. In response to these defenses, our son maintained his position and emphasized it: "No. Research has been done. There is evidence. Santa Claus is DEAD!" 

About this time, Mrs. L switched into damage control mode, casting LRB's conspiracy theories into doubt by parsing, as the philosopher Kierkegaard might call it, her monstrous paradox through a public school's handy diversity filters and addressing her charges: 

"Class, LRB may think Santa isn't real, but every family believes differently, and what's most important is what your own family believes."

Order was eventually restored by moral relativism and insinuating our son is a crackpot, so have a merry Wiccan/Kundalini/Bacchus Chanukah. Peace out, and fair enough. But she went on to tell us that later in the library, by the aquatic-themed books, two girls she sees as class leaders apparently berated LRB for his outburst. While she didn't hear what was said, after it was said he retreated to cry inconsolably behind a further bookshelf. I had been wondering whether to come clean with her or not, and here was my cue. It wasn't about our belief systems, or our mostly futile attempts to raise something more than a Wanting Machine brainwashed by commercials for labor-arbitraged plastic toys screwed over transistors. No, we had done our level best to preserve the Santa mythos, and he figured it out all on his own.

The previous night I'd read him a bedtime story, "A Grumpy Santa Claus." After we finished, he leveled his gaze at me and said with an air of gravity, "Uhh, Dad...you know I know that Santa's fake, right?" I did know, and had observed his first seeds of doubt and the detective case he opened last Christmas with a rhetorical question: "I can't understand it. Why would Santa forget my Star Wars Lego ship after Grandma wrote it down on the letter?" (Answer: both Lord Wife and I have small businesses and families, with the obligations they entail. By the time we got to Toys R Us, they were sold out.) From there he soon progressed to time-honored logistical doubts. How, after all, is it possible to visit every house, fit down a chimney, or gain access to the disadvantaged families who live in locked condos and apartment buildings? Santa's sleigh must be rocket-powered, reindeer could never fly fast enough. And what are elves, anyway? They look more like dwarves than magic people, and not very productive ones.

I confirmed his assertion, but coolly asked how came to such a radical conclusion. As if addressing a simpleton he said, "Dad, I saw you and Mom wrapping presents on Christmas Eve." Sometimes a Teaching Moment is subtle, and sometimes it beats you on the head like a five-pound salami. I explained that while Santa isn't "real," it's not that simple, either. First, a long time ago in Amsterdam there was a real man named Santa Claus who became famous for giving presents and candy to children, especially to poor children, and who really wore a red coat. Next, his idea, of giving gifts to kids on Christmas, especially to those who were poor and good, was so powerful people wanted to keep it going. So he remains real in a sense, and taking on the role of Santa is fun. Lord Running Boy sought final clarification: "Yeah, but he died, right?" 

Some teacher. What I should have told him is truth is volatile, corrosive, people fight over it and it's a lot like nitroglycerin which when mixed carefully with sawdust stabilizes into dynamite so you can nestle lethal carrots of it under where you want to blow something up and activate it with blasting caps. It can be the most beautiful light-bringing thing or be treated as a terrible crime all at the same time. I should have said it's best to practice with small amounts first, use long fuses and take good cover because reality is a currency we must necessarily agree upon every day, and don't tell this to your class tomorrow because everybody has agreed there should be a Santa and children must believe in him until, as Mrs. L informed us, they're in 3rd grade. When truth disagrees with reality and you choose to set them close together you'll get burned by your own blast and you might even die. Furthermore, feudal aristocracies successfully convinced people the earth was flat for a thousand years, when even the Bible clearly said it's round. So think hard about that one if you're going up against Santa.
  
Despite his emotional injuries and those he inflicted on his classmates, we don't know that it's not for the best. At least he may have learned early what we learned much later, although to be honest we're proud of this son's ability to pursue and can take being known as the parents of the boy who ruined Christmas in easy stride. The principle I wish to delve more into for myself, and to somehow get all my sons thinking about too, is how simply seeing the truth is the easy part. The bigger trump to be pursued lies in the clever art of conflict resolution, of applying just the right myrrh-scented balm to human wounds and desires.

The next night I sent him back with a message for his classmates, that Santa is still real in some ways, and you get more presents from your parents if you believe in him. We all know how there are lies that draw smiles and truths which draw tears. He imparted the message, and I'm not sure what the right thing was to do, but he had a good day and maybe he's on his way to learning how to skillfully manipulate the credulousness of his classmates without taking too much advantage of them.

Memorial Day: Post Traumatic Growth Disorder

Three or four times a day I see a story and think, "I should blog about that." Writing requires a measure of solitude, however, and what most hovers around me is usually cacophony. So instead of posts, little mental Post-It notes get written which then stick on each other, pile up and fade into the past. But one of those post-its boomeranged back from a week and a half ago, with personal connection, starting with a soldier going postal on a base in Iraq:

The 44-year-old signals specialist from the 54th Engineering Battalion, based in Bamberg, Germany, was charged with five counts of murder and one count of aggravated assault for Monday's shooting, which killed two military doctors and three soldiers, at a combat stress clinic at Camp Liberty, in Iraq.

Russell had been relieved of his weapon a week earlier, after making some "inappropriate remarks," his fellow soldier said, and he'd been referred to the stress clinic for counseling. But each day, the counselors "sent him back to his base," where Russell complained the doctors were refusing to take his symptoms seriously or give him the medication he thought he needed.

On Monday, the soldier says Russell was being transported back and forth to the mental health clinic by his staff sergeant escort.

After yet another argument at the clinic, he and his escort had just returned to Russell's brigade headquarters. That's when he "assaulted his escort, stole his weapon," and held him at briefly at gunpoint. Russell snatched away the keys for the vehicle, and drove back to the treatment center, where he allegedly opened fire.

The overpowered escort rushed inside to alert his command, and the battalion's physician's assistant immediately called over to the clinic, but it was too late. The call went through "just in time to hear the gun shots."

These "stress clinics" were supposed to be part of the answer, with hundreds of thousands of troops reporting symptoms of post traumatic stress, and the more severe post-traumatic stress disorder.

The clinic Sgt. Russell attacked had denied him medications he repeatedly asked for, and the new treatment he instead received is the brainchild of my wife's ex-fiancee, Major Thomas Jarrett. Shortly before a desperate, enraged vet shot up his clinic, he had this to say to a USA Today reporter:

Jarrett tells soldiers he is "fed up of hearing about" post-traumatic stress. He said he wants to talk of growing from trauma and becoming stronger because of it.

"Thriving through your combat experience" is Jarrett's mantra. All in-theatre personnel are urged to view a 90-minute video of his rap, and those who exhibit signs of PTSD will sometimes be discharged to Camp Victory to attend his "Warrior Resiliency and Thriving" class. That a positivist "Post Traumatic Growth" schtick has been enthusiastically adopted by the military should surprise no one; at this point, sending soldiers into reserve just because they're burned out by years of hunting Haji would mean calling the war off. As to the consequences, only 24 US soldiers committed suicide in the month of January, a militarily acceptable loss rate. Yet something of crucial significance is being obscured in the hokum, and bears a disquieting psychological parallel with a previous catastrophic American failure.

Can it be so bad, really? In a different way, yes it can. When soldiers in the Roman legions broke down and wouldn't fight, their comrades were gathered to watch them beaten to death. When German soldiers on the Eastern Front in World War Two went AWOL ( or eventually, lost their weapons or ate too much food), they were executed. The US military isn't there yet, but in denying unpleasant facts and routinely giving its current and former soldiers the shaft, it has moved decisively in that direction. The Af-Pak war is heating up and troops are going on their 3rd and 4th combat tours. Neither legions nor SS units were asked to do the same, and war's intensity now is much higher, its operations more sustained. Including night operations, historically very rare and now routine. The psychological toll may be worse than anyone wants to admit, and Sgt. Russell represents far more than an unfortunate incident.

Following WWII, clinical psychiatrists analyzed personnel data amassed with the goal of learning how to better maintain combat effectiveness. Study results were unexpectedly and dramatically clear: all sane soldiers broke down if their combat exposure was longer than 90 days. Correlation between combat and acute breakdown was unpredictable, even curvilinear at first, but the correlation gradually tightened over time to almost 1:1. After 90 days of combat exposure, 98% of soldiers experienced incapacitating breakdown accompanied by lasting psychic distress. The 2% still functioning were psychopaths suffering from full-blown insanity, which combat progressively accentuates.

For the otherwise sane soldiers who came to the end of their ropes, the term "Post Traumatic Stress Disorder" was coined. Based upon the data, the psychiatrists concluded that warfare had surpassed the ability of human beings to endure it. This insight in hand, the Pentagon soon set out to find a pharmacological means of adapting humans to industrial combat. (For a powerful overview of combat's psychological effects and the US military's generally futile attempts to ameliorate them, see Richard A. Gabriel's 'No More Heroes: Madness and Psychiatry in War.')

When I was a small boy, about 5 years old, I remember meeting a man named Sonny Seeley at a camp picnic. He was commonly referred to as Uncle Seeley, though not any known uncle of mine. He was not a common visitor, and seemed from some far-off branch of the family. As they prepared foods indoors, I heard my grandmother and Aunt Sophie talk about what beautiful letters he had written them during the war, but how when he got home he hardly ever said another thing, what a shame; my impression is his letters were from North Africa. As he sat in the aluminum folding lawn chair in the pleasant sun he didn't venture much, and would stammer what was to me an uninterpretable tremulo when someone came up to greet him or ask a question. His whole body was trembling badly enough to not be able to speak intelligibly. He shook when he sat, his knees shook when he walked all skinny and gangly, like a stick puppet over-tensioned, hunched, unable to un-slack, even 20 years and more after whatever he'd been through.

My grandfather and his brothers hosted that picnic, which may well have been on Memorial Day, and were all in that war in one service or another. They sent their wives to bring Uncle Seeley a plate of hot-buttered steamed clams, rolls and potato salad. They plied him with beer cans glistening from the cooler. While he struggled out his thank-yous and precariously worked to hold his paper plate level, I, being young and relatively free of good judgment, asked him why he was shaking. "Shell-shock," someone said in a deep hushed voice above me. "Go play with the Lawn Darts." Lawn Darts were not yet illegal and would arc meaningfully through the air, proving gravity, stabilized by colorful plastic fins. I don't remember ever seeing Uncle Seeley again, and hope he was able to find some measure of relief.

One of my wife's oldest friends, a social worker in Manhattan, once described Thomas Jarrett as "about the least empathetic person I've ever met, and I meet a lot of people." Jarrett's schtick is a bastardized version of some positivist themes of Albert Ellis, an influential psychotherapist he interned with for one summer in the late 1990s. His application for further work with Ellis was rejected, so he never finished his PhD. He never served in combat, and strongly implies that he did. Jarrett's one more fraud in a Fraud War, passing out candy-coated delusions.

Denial is one survival mechanism for when a truth is too painful to face; delusion is another, for when you're not interested in the truth at all. For when it's hanging by the teeth it embedded in your ass. When you stride about in front of grunts who have made fun of the dead and dish warmed-over dianetics, delusion is your friend. Admittedly, denial and delusion are endemic qualities, possibly even necessary to military life, and often aren't obvious. We're set up that way. Truth is harsh, believing in nonsense comes almost as naturally as the urge to spread it. There's more truth to be found in 5 minutes of myths and fables than an hour of nightly news. Speaking of parallels, folk still commonly blame or take credit for protests at home halting the war in Vietnam, a "stabbed in the back" variant. On the contrary, that war stopped because soldiers were increasingly turning weapons on their superiors, mutiny was in the air and there weren't enough combat-ready units left to conduct field operations. Nearing the end, everybody there was just going through the motions.

Vietnam produced more PTSD victims than any other war in American history, both in total number and frequency, despite the Pentagon's emphasis on instilling the desire to kill into recruits, based again on data from WWII and Korean War which indicated only a small fraction of combat troops actually tried to shoot an individual enemy. In their inevitable post-war analyses, the Pentagon fingered low morale of draftees as the primary fault, resolving to go into their future conflicts strictly with volunteers, ones who remain annoyingly human to this day. To quote Richard Gabriel:

"...war exacts a terrible cost in human emotions quite apart from the usual costs calculated in terms of dollars, dead, and wounded. It is a cost every soldier will pay if he is exposed long enough to the horrors of the battlefield. Weakness or cowardice has nothing to do with the probability that a soldier will collapse under the strain of battle. It is not man that is too weak; it is the conduct of war that imposes too great a strain for the sane to endure."

People think soldiers who break down under the strains of ongoing sleep deprivation, constant threat of ambush, seeing friends get blown apart and killing civilians are weak, defective, or somehow exceptions to the rule. They are the rule, it is a well-measured rule, one denoting a reality which does not mesh well with a politically cynical, inherently paranoid "Long War." If indeed we are in a Long War, rather than squander hard power and soldier well-being as if they were limitless, flushing them down strategically harmless hell-holes, the American people would be better served by leaders who recognize that sending troops on combat patrols and driving over IEDs for years straight dulls their effectiveness. Eight years of tactical Action-Jackson approach has served no military purpose but that of potential enemies, who gauge our exhaustion and impending poverty with glee. Modern war serves money, and Iraq and Afghanistan have so far done horribly even at that.

That's one skeptic's opinion. This is not: what's done abroad comes back home, and there is no such thing as "thriving through your combat experience." That's either craven or self-delusional bullshit conceived to advance one individual's career. Which it has, and which my wife foresaw. When she heard some years ago that Jarrett was going back into the military as a counselor, she immediately expressed a hunch he was going to damage a lot of people. The kind of damage that, she thought, might provoke one of his patients to kill him.

Naturally, when she told me about the news coverage of an ex's half-baked treatment scheme, I remembered the 20-year veteran sergeant who snapped and went looking for the ludicrous son of a bitch who told him to grin and bear it, killing 5 mental health staffers in the process. I thought of Uncle Seeley shaking, of grunts sent to Tony Robbins seminars, and of new-fangled fates worse than death.

How Neanderthals Go Extinct

It came like this: sapiens had domesticated animals around the time of Neanderthal extinction. There is not a shred of evidence suggesting Neanderthals had any animal husbandry, but there's plenty which attests to how they excelled in close combat and could use their overwhelming strength to take down 1000+-lb. animals by themselves. It doesn’t take much to imagine them grabbing a sheep or a goat under each arm and carrying them off with increasing frequency as smooth-browed herders grazed further and further up into the high country. The resulting conflicts sealed their doom when they were trailed back to their caves by overwhelming numbers until finally dwindling to a last incomprehensible haven under an overhang just above a beach in south Gibraltar.

Experts love being experts so they have this way of missing obviousnesses watching down on them as they scrabble around in the dirt over their pet details. First they said Neandertals died out because they were dumber, then they said it's because they weren't as loving or close-knit, didn't have language, weren't as facile at tool-making. All these theories and their common thread of arrogance have been steadily disproven and the emerging facts indicate the Neanderthals were every bit as human as us. I have long suspected it was them of whom the Bible says:

The Nephilim were on the earth in those days, and also afterward, when the sons of God came in to the daughters of men, and they bore children to them. Those were the mighty men who were of old, men of renown. Genesis 6:4

The picture above (note: will add soon) is of a Neanderthal tool a farmer found in the Dordognes and it's a regular prehistoric Swiss army knife. It's got a tip for drilling holes in bones and skulls on one side and an edge for cutting meat on the other. It's made of jasper which was coveted as a gemstone all over the ancient world because of its beauty and diamond-like hardness. It lays in my hand like it was made for me and it's still so sharp after 30,000 years it has cut my steaks. If they could make this thing of patient angle and precision, they easily could have made the jasper bow-drills found at Mehrgahr starting 7,000 BCE. They could make art. When you hold this stone in your hand, this eloquent marvel which I myself am not capable of making, you can feel just how obvious it is that they were artists. Maybe some of it remains and will be found.

Another conceit is bruited when it's said they were too gentle or weren't warlike enough to compete with us. I'd put my money on the precisely opposing proposition. Our thinner bones snapped against theirs in many an unrecorded mismatch, many disputes over herds and ancestral hunting grounds which we lost hands-down. Man for man it wouldn't have even been close. Some have recently drawn an extinction analogy using the Native American disease pattern after their population was collapsed by European-bred germs. That may well have happened or played a part, but existing evidence doesn't support the population densities, collections, and rapid interchanges so characteristic of the rise of deadly plagues.

There’s at least one simple sapien macro-advantage which definitively drove Neanderthal withdrawal. We ate less. Neanderthal caloric requirements were about twice those of our sapiens, which would mean twice as many of us could be supported per a given hunting ground. Those extra numbers surely provided for enhanced defense of those grounds, and would have favored steady and gradual expansion. To make matters worse for our near-forgotten friends, overwhelming evidence in both historic times and those before shows our collective humanity was usually just a step ahead or behind of famine.

I try to imagine how the human arc would have altered if our baseline requirement had been 4,000 calories a day. Both sapiens and Neanderthals were opportunistic cannibals, but a double-eating individual would suffer a much-increased caloric deficit during periods of food scarcity and would have to resort to survival cannibalism far more quickly. The image that comes with wondering "what if we had to come up with 4,000 calories a day," is that we'd still be roasting each other on spits.

Thoughts of Neanderthals keep on coming back to me. I'm always thinking about them, really, because they were so close to us, may be partially preserved in us, and were in some ways definitely better. It may just be that they were the Nephilim, once celebrated as men of renown, respected for their power and wisdom, and it's quite possible we picked some of our tool-making up from them. For our tools held no technical advantages over theirs. And they were at least as smart as we are right now. It was our bodies which turned out to be more sustainable during times of resource scarcity, so we survived being thrown out of the garden and they stayed. Does that not provide a sweet irony right now as we wrestle with our unsustainabilities and struggle to understand the natures of our multiplexed doom.

How Neanderthals Go Extinct

It came like this: sapiens had domesticated animals around the time of Neanderthal extinction. There is not a shred of evidence suggesting Neanderthals had any animal husbandry, but there's plenty which attests how they excelled in close combat and could use their overwhelming strength to take down 1000+-lb. animals by themselves if necessary. It doesn’t take much to imagine them grabbing a sheep or a goat under each arm and carrying them off with increasing frequency as smooth-browed herders grazed them further and further up into the high country. The resulting conflicts sealed their doom when they were trailed back to their caves by overwhelming numbers until finally dwindling to a last incomprehensible haven under an overhang just above a beach in south Gibraltar.

Experts love being experts so they have this way of missing obviousnesses watching down on them as they scrabble around in the dirt over their pet details. First they said Neandertals died out because they were dumber, then they said it's because they weren't as loving or close-knit, didn't have language, weren't as facile at tool-making. All these theories and their common thread of arrogance have been steadily disproven and the emerging facts indicate the Neanderthals were every bit as human as us. I have long suspected it was them of whom the Bible says:

The Nephilim were on the earth in those days, and also afterward, when the sons of God came in to the daughters of men, and they bore children to them. Those were the mighty men who were of old, men of renown. Genesis 6:4

The picture above (note: will add soon) is of a Neanderthal tool a farmer found in the Dordognes and it's a regular prehistoric Swiss army knife. It's got a tip for drilling holes in bones and skulls on one side and an edge for cutting meat on the other. It's made of jasper which was coveted as a gemstone all over the ancient world because of its beauty and diamond-like hardness. It lays in my hand like it was made for me and it's still so sharp after 30,000 years it has cut my steaks. If they could make this thing of patient angle and precision, they easily could have made the jasper bow-drills found at Mehrgahr starting 7,000 BCE. They could make art. When you hold this stone in your hand, this eloquent marvel which I myself am not capable of making, you can feel just how obvious it is that they were artists. Maybe some of it remains and will be found.

Another conceit is bruited when it's said they were too gentle or weren't warlike enough to compete with us. I'd put my money on the precisely opposing proposition. Our thinner bones snapped against theirs in many an unrecorded mismatch, many disputes over herds and ancestral hunting grounds which we lost hands-down. Man for man it wouldn't have even been close. Some have recently drawn an extinction analogy using the Native American disease pattern after their population was collapsed by European-bred germs. That may well have happened or played a part, but existing evidence doesn't support the population densities, collections, and rapid interchanges so characteristic of the rise of deadly plagues.

There’s at least one simple sapien macro-advantage which definitively drove Neanderthal withdrawal. We ate less. Neanderthal caloric requirements were about twice those of our sapiens, which would mean twice as many of us could be supported per a given hunting ground. Those extra numbers surely provided for enhanced defense of those grounds, and would have favored steady and gradual expansion. To make matters worse for our near-forgotten friends, overwhelming evidence in both historic times and those before shows our collective humanity was usually just a step ahead or behind of famine.

I try to imagine how the human arc would have altered if our baseline requirement had been 4,000 calories a day. Both sapiens and Neanderthals were opportunistic cannibals, but a double-eating individual would suffer a much-increased caloric deficit during periods of food scarcity and would have to resort to survival cannibalism far more quickly. The image that comes with wondering "what if we had to come up with 4,000 calories a day," is that we'd still be roasting each other on spits.

Thoughts of Neanderthals keep on coming back to me. I'm always thinking about them, really, because they were so close to us, may be partially preserved in us, and were in some ways definitely better. It may just be that they were the Nephilim, once celebrated as men of renown, respected for their power and wisdom, and it's quite possible we picked some of our tool-making up from them. For our tools held no technical advantages over theirs. And they were at least as smart as we are right now. It was our bodies which turned out to be more sustainable during times of resource scarcity, so we survived being thrown out of the garden and they stayed. Does that not provide a sweet irony right now as we wrestle with our unsustainabilities and struggle to understand the natures of our multiplexed doom.

Hell-Hound On My Trail

The cryptozoological terror sighted above torments my existence. If I were to flee to the Swiss Alps and hide out in the conference halls of Davos, it would track me down across continents and seas to emphatically corner me, her whole body trembling like some frenetic freak as she drills her dark expectant eyes into me and telepathically blasts out the message, "Give the dog your food. Give the dog your food!" She also has this routine of "are you ready to go out, are we going out? Are you ready yet because I'd really really like to go out out out and pee on everything and maybe I'll see a squirrel and then I'll climb up a fence or a tree and lick it to death."

Her name is Ripley, she is (allegedly) a Jack Russell terrier, geriatric yet undaunted. For any of you who own one of these accursed fox-hounds you know that one of their many annoying mutant traits is they simply must burrow under the covers with you, any covers, and sometimes you'll wake up to this thing, this awful horrible stink-mouthed thing licking your feet. She also has literally run off walls, caroming off the four corners of a room. This was not my choice, my wife inflicted this animal upon me and somehow it became my job, my job, to feed and entertain it. To top it off, more money has gone into her dental work in the past 4 years than has gone into mine in 20. God help us all.

And Another Thing To Figure Out

Lord Running Boy requested armies for Christmas, and they were raised. He has since waged long-running campaigns against family proxies, and so eulogized a recent battle:

Dear brave soldiers, all 40 of you, for the men who died in two thousand and two: we are sorry. Sorry mom, sorry wife, sorry children. We are all dead and will not have any children again. "Abo, Abo, Abo" means another battle is coming. [Shifts into raspy voice.] We are dead and can't have any more children. We are not brave anymore. We are all dead and we are sorry. Knights are bravery.

Whereupon he informed his grandmother that he is the third reincarnation of Scipio, gaining the aristocratic title "Africanus" for his family, conquered Carthage and made it a tributary after winning the Second Punic War. It is an egregious injustice no one remembers him now despite repeatedly kicking the famous Hannibal's ass, not to mention those of his brothers. It seems the accusations of bribery from Antiochus were the false designs of hard-liners unhappy with his fairness of vanquished enemies. As Livy and Polybius will tell you. He is come back to correct these wrongs and wrestle with two new opponents called SAT and WASL.

The transcript is accurate. The paragraph above is only worry, bafflement, and history. I know we don't stand alone. I know we stand with all the all the others, we stand upon their stepping stones, and if this subject persists long enough, Perseus, I will advocate enlistment in the Coast Guard.

Lip-Reading The Inauguration

For a non-deaf person (at least for awhile) I'm a functional lip reader and can confirm all the notes below, plus one they missed. From DNA India:

Millions may have lauded Barack Obama's Inaugural speech but what remained unheard was what was said by a First daughter to her father, and between the new President and his predecessor after the swearing-in ceremony.

According to a lip reader, the first African-American president of the United States, just after the ceremony, asked George W Bush: "You OK?"

As to what was Bush's reply, according to The Sun, the lip reader said: "So relieved."

The 43rd president had later informally handed over his former White House residence to Obama saying: "It's all yours now - good luck."

And while thousands cheered the hope brought about by their new leader, seven-year-old first daughter Sasha was said to have told her president-dad: "That was a good speech, perfect."

Right after he completed his address, Obama turned back to his daughter Sasha, leaned over and asked, "So how was that?" Funny how your staunchest supporters can be your harshest critics.

Update: Vincent, proprietor of the spiritually wayfaring Perpetual Lab, reports that his beloved caught another sotto voce moment when Obama gave his younger daughter a kiss on the cheek, and she whispered in his ear "Mister President!"

It's great to see such unabashed affection amongst America's first family. They're not guarded, distant, or dysfunctional. They're vital and strong, totally in love and proud of each other. Does this carry over into policy? No. Just into everything.

2008 Holiday Retro-Prospective

Schools closed in Seattle on Wednesday, December 17th because of predicted snow. None fell until the morning of the 18th, and by that evening accumulation began to close the airport. I drove my delayed-arrived mother-in-law home through a welcome slide-o-matic. Snowstorms here are an excuse for ataraxy because we are ill-prepared, and they usually pass quickly. But it kept snowing, snowing for days straight, and the holidays became compulsory. Lord Running Boy got a birth-cousin on the 20th, so we housed the newling's two brothers, aged 1 and 4, for 76 hours. At one point 14 snow-bound souls were in the house, and I contemplated fleeing to a Motel 7. Schools were closed for 16 days, and Santa's other reindeer, FedEx and UPS, first started delivering on New Year's Eve; and the packages are still straggling in.

As a city and a nation, circumstances dictate what we don't really don't want to face. By common and unspoken consent, we were determined to have one last great holiday season, and reined things in as little as possible. Let us not consider the foreboding vagaries of Christmas Futures, but revel in our rituals, our instinctive motions, and perpetuate the myths of beneficence from a North Pole. I had to explain multiple times to the #1 son that such a destination is impossibly remote, impossible to drive to with our car. That no runways for a plane exist there, even a helicopter lacks a fuel payload to reach it, and besides, it's a secret place, with casual visitors, particularly the fathers of strong-willed yearning boys, forbidden. He's still ruminating on letters of introduction and the journey's mechanical means.

Weird weather here. At one point, a wind gust picked my 20-foot aluminum extension ladder clear off its hooks on the fence and threw it down by the side porch, sheared a neighbor's tree limb off and cast it 30 feet east to shatter over the stones of the back patio, and blew the firewood clear off the porch. It must've been near a hundred miles per hour, and it knocked the power out to a few thousand homes and businesses, but we stayed lucky. Even more strangely, 'It's a Wonderful Life' was nowhere to be seen on cable on Christmas Eve; given that its plot centers on financial ruin and the contemplated suicide of a well-meaning banker, you'd think it would've been topical this year, but it had been supplanted by the more glib, BB-gun focused 'A Christmas Story,' which ran for 24 hours on TBS. (Jimmy Stewart's legacy was on nationally, according to Time magazine, but was out-rated by CSI: Crime Scene Investigation.) Perhaps an age has passed, I thought while pressing through the channel menu, hopefully not mine.

I came across a television interview with Seattle's mayor and Grand Jowl Master, Greg Nickels, who gave his own road maintenance efforts a "B." Hmmm. To my knowledge he has yet to be assassinated, true, but if the faculty of a law school had been tasked with keeping roads open while debating the environmental impact of snow-plowing and graded each other's performance on a curve, it would've been progress. Seattle's 13 snow plows (Portland, to the south and nearer to the Pacific, has 50) use rubber plow-blades which compacted the flakes down into icing 3-6 inches high, enshrining tire-ruts for the duration. They spread sand on top, spewed an ineffective salt-free de-icer, never cleared side streets, and simply gave up after a few 12-hour shifts.

Therefore, the conditions were absolutely perfect for four-year olds waiting for Santa, for youths butt-surfing on garbage can lids down the steep streets near our house, for the way purple, green, blue, red and yellow lights shine in the dark above the illuminated crisp and crunch, and for playing with the inflowed largesse of elves when you have nowhere to go for days. With the aid of tire chains, rally-style driving, egg nog and extra liquor, a great Christmas was achieved. It was fun, it was infuriating, it was memorable. Due to the needs of high-energy boys cooped up in palaces of Ganesh, to fatherhood, the feeding of people and building of diaper pyramids, it was the near-death of blogging for me.

They picked up the garbage can today for the first time in three weeks. The streets are clear. The stacked cardboard, the bags of gift wrapping, and the mounds of recycling tentatively sidle up to a New Year. Welcome, 2009, and we are wary. Hail Mary, full of grace: help us win this stock-car race.

Sphenopalatine Ganglioneuralgia (Brain Freeze)

Having a kid around means fielding lots of questions, which can range from fun to horribly embarassing. When LRB (Lord Running Boy) ate his vanilla ice cream too fast, got hit with the dreaded brain freeze and asked, "how can ice cream make my head hurt?" Good question, my boy. Internet to the rescue.

The medical term is sphenopalatine ganglioneuralgia. When something very cold touches the top palate of the mouth, it causes the blood vessels to constrict. This makes the nerves send a signal to the brain to reopen them. The rapid reopening of the vessels causes buildup of fluid in the tissues causing a slight swelling in the forehead and, therefore, causing pain. It normally takes 30-60 seconds for the fluid to drain, and the pain goes away.

If you've ever been in a relationship with an actor, friendly or otherwise, you know they're emotion-amplifiers, they are shouters from rooftops and steepers in jacuzzis of pathos, sometimes simultaneously. Unsurprisingly, their brains exhibit differences. A fascinating public discussion was held at New York’s Columbia University this month, in which the RSC’s Michael Boyd and Dr. Oliver Sacks compared notes on memory, neural processing, and asked, How do actors memorize their lines?

(Excerpt)

Michael Boyd: We worked with about 30 actors over nearly three years on the RSC’s last complete cycle of the history plays. All the actors were in at least seven of those plays and learnt a huge number of roles. Halfway through the project, we left the first four plays behind for nearly a year. And we had to revive them. The actors began to get anxious about whether they would remember them: not only their principal roles, but the roles they understudied - thousands of lines, hundreds of states of emotions. An extraordinary feat of spatial memory was required, too: they had to remember where to go. Where am I? Backstage or front of house?

This process started with actors on their own going through their lines. They didn’t remember them. We then moved on to working together in a room, sitting down doing a line-run. It wasn’t very good. Then we decided to cut to the chase and just fling all four plays onto the stage - without costume, without décor, without all the effects. And the actors were very nearly word-perfect straightaway. It was clear that what they were trying to retrieve was no more than a broken bit of memory, only complete when the actions of their bodies and the emotions were combined together with the recall of the line. And there was a further improvement when they were not only together on stage, but also together with an audience. Then they became absolutely pitch-perfect and word-perfect, with an urgent need to communicate. I think that says something about where we keep our memory. Maybe our memory is in our body as well as in our cranium.

Welcoming The Otter

He was born at 6:14 this morning like an incoming 8-pound, 20-inch artillery round, one so polite and mild he decided to not explode, but even so he's set everything in flux, the flux which hypnotizes us. The elements imitate, mutate, and repeat each other, muttering their memes into the kaleidoscope of genes, as if that's enough.

We had already guessed how different he is from our first, and now we know. Yes, he is what came from us, from our parents and grandparents and they from theirs all the way back through. We inherited recessive codes of melanin, dominant eye colors, crenelations in our brains, curves in our eyebrows and our bones. The outcomes are infinite. But as a father, I know we inherit far more than that. We inherit culture, we inherit prejudices, we receive affinities, proclivities, morals, and bad habits, and everything organic about us swims in the swirling thickness of the past.

Into this realm drop the souls who want to visit or need to come back again through the wells of forgetfulness into these bodies. They decide to arrive vulnerable and as resplendent blood-drenched treasures, their umbilical cords shining like strings of pearls. We don't control them, they choose us because they think we can help them, and we can only extend the best welcome to this husk.

Honestly, I don't know how it works. Maybe they choose us, or maybe they're drafted, and I might just fall apart trying to hold this in my heart. All I know is that we, the antecedents, will do our utmost. This new boy is everything we ever were, plus himself.

In Defense Of Religion, Part I

All cultures, to my knowledge, strove to convey and control the experience of transcendence, and to name it. The follies and tragedies we humans commit against ourselves and others would seem to belie, belittle, or invalidate attempts to reach and understand the divine, but religion is an indication that we're trying to become more than animals, and are succeeding. While we're still sandwiched tightly between the sacred and the profane, those persistent struggles to find god are actually testimonies that one might exist.

We are all seekers, and even if inactive or atheistic we all confront the mystery of good and evil when we undergo bodily suffering, psychic pain, or loss, and when we genuinely express love or feel its overarching power. Many voices echo from the past, doing their best to honor this mystery and its nature, and the traditions of the major religions all set down principles of ethics which would help us live together and draw out better societies.

The resulting codes of ethics and senses of morals are strikingly similar, and in their basic precepts, they got it right. Although we often fail to do what we should, we come from traditions which contemplated over the basic questions of life and came up with the right answers. We have that much in common, and I try to remember that when someone asks if I have accepted Jesus into my life. Yes, but not for a distorted doctrine which redeems the irredeemable and excuses all manner of pomposity.

Tolerating differing beliefs, so critical a component for the world we hope to build, is a balancing act of respecting their wellsprings and gently but firmly pushing back when they flow too heavily upon the commons, one which newly encompasses not a lazy river or a village green but the entire earth. A path to tolerance is to listen to the other sources of belief and learn about them, and to consider lives in other societies which are unlike our own. Can the differing codas be reconciled, in a practical sense, now that distance has shrunk and we're so intertwined?

I think it's possible, but requires a great deal of luck in leaders, ones who believe a certainty in knowing god's will for application of policy is extremely dangerous. If there is an impulse to fight without reservation, it is religious certainty in government, deeply underscored by menaces recent and present. Governments always try to convert religion into civic religion, but the goals of the theocratic-leaning state show a strong tendency to diverge from the goals of the divine. We're far more likely to find god in what we don't know, and there will always be plenty of that.

Aledo High Seniors Pick Classmate With Down Syndrome As Homecoming Queen

From the Dallas Morning News...

Never has the selection of a homecoming queen sent so many tears falling so freely.

Kristin Pass, an 18-year-old senior with Down syndrome, became Aledo High School's homecoming queen Friday to a joyous standing ovation and the flutter of a thousand tissues on a remarkable night for an amazing young woman.

Her grandfather, Dr. David Campbell of Corsicana, escorted her onto the field and gave her a quick kiss on the cheek as Kristin joined eight other young women in the Homecoming Court to await the results of the vote, cast by the 360-plus members of Aledo High's senior class.

Then came the announcement ... and pandemonium.

"Oh my gosh! I was sitting in the student section and everyone stood up, crying and cheering for Kristin," said longtime friend and fellow senior Meaghan Geary, 17, who first met Kristin in the third grade. "It was great!"

The vote may have been a surprise, but no one who knows Kristin doubts her popularity, her mother said.

"Kristin has a lot of friends – she likes everyone. It doesn't matter if you're tall or short, pretty, not pretty, smart, not smart – she likes everybody. She has great friends. And Aledo is a great community."

"She's just the neatest kid in the whole wide world," added her aunt, Chari Hust of Houston, "and everybody sees that.

Clay Gilmer, who works in the stadium press box, running the scoreboard and clock, said people pushed toward the windows as the young women were introduced.

"They were all pulling for Kristin," Mr. Gilmer said.

When she won, he was thrilled. "This has been such a special time, a special week for Kristin," he said. "And I was really taken by the maturity and the love shown by her friends, her peers, her classmates.

"That makes this a double blessing."

Kristin pronounced the evening "exciting" and "awesome."

She was so thrilled, her mother said, that she took her crown to bed with her. Her selection as homecoming queen was a wonderful surprise. But Meaghan seemed to have an inkling that it could happen.

"Everyone loves Kristin," she said, "and I didn't know for sure, but in class everyone was like, 'Who are you voting for?' and everybody was like, 'Vote for Kristin, she's so good.' "

Kristin doesn't care what's on the outside, Meaghan said. She's friends with everyone, and everyone admires that. "She's the person we all want to be," Meaghan said.

(via Brother Tim:) And you young people at Aledo High School are the people we all want to be.

These kids at Aledo High School have put a beefsteak on the black-eye George W Bush has given to the State of Texas. They have proven by example, that putting love, compassion, and caring, before one's self, is the best way to go.

It is for this reason that Barack Obama will most likely become President. The young people of today care not about a person's skin color, religion, or handicaps; they look to what's most important: the heart. It is incidents such as this that give me hope for America's future.

Thanks, and a tip 'o da hat to: the Senior Class of Aledo High School.

The Case For American Mania

On one morning when my wife and young son were to go on a trip, I woke up at 4:02 AM, having had almost 5 hours of good sleep. My son was right next to me, covers thrown off as usual, his feet digging under my shins. At 5:30, I tried to steal away downstairs to grab a laptop and work before taking them to the airport. Halfway down, a wooden stair creaked in the dark, and my beloved child sat bolt upright and demanded: "Who said that!??"

He is an American. That is to say, he shares behavioral features commonly described as distinctly American--he has a high degree of "get up and go," all curiosity packed intensely into a burning ball of energy. These qualities are blessings, to be sure, but ones not unalloyed on a personal level. If scaled upwards into larger organizations, they would be recognizable, pronounced, and always looking for trouble.

At this very moment, off the top of your head, you could certainly recite at least 5 ongoing whacked-out things about America. And why is this so? A far more homogenous nation, Japan for example, which I assure you is completely insane, is only so on a few dimensions. Ditto Germany. And England, oh, you're definitely a rival, England, culturing your eccentricities like yeast strains in Public Trust, but can you really hope to compete on our scale of self-aggrandized Special Ness? I think not.

Maybe it's not an accident that my son (aka Lord Running Boy), his mom, and to a lesser extent, me, share a newly studied condition called Restless Leg Syndrome, which is associated with growth factor genes MEIS1, BTBD9 and MAP2K5 and is 5-10 times more common in populations of Northern European descent than of Asian, African, or Mediterranean. There's no effective cure. Many Americans I've known have something of this "movement urge" quality, for example a longest-term girlfriend always fidgeted while waiting in line, same as me. Whereas I've not much run across that in distant habitudes. In myriad Old-World queues, I've stood and noted how they form wordlessly, by automatic consent, its members then exhibiting the patience of cattle, the posture of glaciers. Americans, by contrast, must frequently be told to form lines, then reminded. We find the word "queue" repellent, and therefore employ it only when conversing in Latin.

I've begun to suspect that we and I, along with millions of our fellow citizens, share a genetic mutation--and that there exists a biological, self-selected basis for the crazes of our nation. If you live abroad, you will eventually recognize Americans strictly by their walks: aggressive, rolling, forward angles, lots of arm/shoulder movement. Europeans walk possessively, far less arm movement, posture further back with a tendency to glide. Asians, well, they almost vanish at times, and could probably walk unnoticed through an Alice in Chains mosh pit. Generally, where nature leaves off and nurture takes over is mysterious, but Americans can be spotted when not walking, too. I've been sitting mutely in foreign coat, clothes, hat, haircut, and shoes, reading a foreign book or drinking a foreign drink when people approached to ask me a question in English. They could have been reading behavioral signatures, true, but Germans have also reflexively decoded my ancestry, a good part of which is from there, while correctly noting a Czechoslovakian influence.

Jack Kerouac perfectly captures American cultural distinctions throughout 'On The Road,' a book he wrote in 20 days using benzedrine and a 120-foot roll of typing paper. It explores America, criss-crosses its essence, and revels in restlessness while an archetypally manic Neal Cassady searches for "it." Cassady isn't alone. In one anecdote, two big farmboys from Minnesota pick hitchhikers up on their flatbed Chevy truck on the way to California. Blonde Swede-descended bats out of high-decibel hell, they drive through the night, eight unmuffled cylinders banging the air for speed, wooden planked bed kicking up violently over bumps following characters who would hot-rod Southern California. In other forms of wildlife, new traits are expressed quite rapidly as environmental pressures draw out mutations. Humans have shown varieties of imaginative and remarkable knowledge-based adaptations to environmental circumstance, but in the migratory magnet of the American Experiment, have we unknowingly bred a hyper-culture? It would explain much, so let's take a crack at it.

Freud believed all psychotic disorders are forms of narcissim; with mania, one becomes the anointed, the savior, the One with ecstatic insight and a license to redeem everyone and everything if they can only be made to comprehend, to see, to agree. With dementia praecox and depression, one is singled out for crucifictions, is helotized, degraded, paranoia transforming politesses into Parthian shots. Dr. Ronald Fieve, the psychiatrist who pioneered lithium treatment for patients with bipolar disorder, gave us a clue. Years ago he noted that 90% of North Americans who come under treatment are diagnosed as manic-depressive, only 10% schizophrenic, remarkable in that the percentage of these clinical pathologies is reversed in Europe.

I'm not a geneticist, but as an observer of human history, I'm well aware that even in the face of war, persecution, and famine, for every 2 people who flee, 98 stay put; only prolonged starvation causes mass migrations. This is entirely consistent with primate behavior, where those most likely to migrate are the edge-dwellers, usually aggressive low-level males. They leave their tribe (the term is used intentionally) not because they're driven out, but because they seek opportunity and are optimistic enough to countenance risk, unattached enough to leave their loved ones.

The migrant monkeys and apes who make it through the meat gauntlet to seed a new troop are the smartest and most hardy, so in their new troops they often wind up on top, creating species-level evolutionary impacts. Some of my other forebears crossed the Atlantic in what were accurately called "coffin ships," and despite the Great Famine, despite the lethality of Black '47 and years to come, more of the Westies stayed in Ireland than ever left. Even under the worst circumstances, the ones who crossed the water were the most motivated and the most dissatisfied, traits which they passed down culturally.

Accordingly, if I were a geneticist, to prove my case for American Mania I would search for studies that look along mammalian pleasure stations, the dopamine receptors. Examples are readily found: "Dopamine D4 Receptor Exon III Polymorphism Associated with the Human Personality Trait of Novelty Seeking;" Evidence that the Dopamine D4 Receptor Is a Susceptibility Gene in Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder; and "Population Migration and the Variation of Dopamine D4 Receptor Allele Frequencies around the Globe."

Well, then. People who can get up and go, they echo or amplify a core human evolutionary advantage. We got the hell off the Savannah and went looking for the smorgasbords of our prophecies. Whether it was catastrophe, longing, or wild hairs, something made us leave behind the security of our lakes in the Ethiopian Rift Valley. The D4-7 allele is a comparatively young recombinant outlier which differs by 6 sequential mutations from the common DRD4 alleles, and the American population is full to the gills with it. To quote the team of the latter migration study above, "we propose that this (D4-7) allele originated as a rare mutational event that nevertheless increased to high frequency in human populations by positive selection." The optimisms which can shift into pitiless, uncontrollable ecstasies, the energies which can be encased in the painful thralls of ADHD, they are our birthrights.

There are a host of implied linkages about how our genetics shaped the American interpretations of commerce and capitalism, winner-take-all competition as tied to Smithian evolutions, and greater-sum game theories. But if I wanted to write a book about it, and someone will, I would no longer be a knock-about blogger, would I? Therefore I'll just climb up on de Toqueville's imposing back:

"Choose any American at random and he should be a man of burning desires, enterprising, adventurous, and above all an innovator. The same bent affects all he does--his politics, his religious doctrines, his theories of social economy, his domestic occupations--he carries it with him into the depths of the backwoods as well as into the city's business."

(Democracy in America, Vol. I, Pt. II, Chapter 10)

That's still how Europe sees us. Like an aching knee foretells the storm, every day I stare down the ugly barrel of what I know is an epic, unfolding seizure in the American Experiment. Every week I give a thought to leaving, just like all my grandparents or great-grandparents did, just like the majority who have ever settled here, be they rapacious Vikings, religious nuts financed on a stock swindle, Scots-Irish Picts looking for somebody to shoot, huddled puking masses waiting to jump ship, economic refugees slaving over gourmet meals in L.A., or the elite and brilliant scions of India out to make a Silicon Valley fortune. Where else would we go? We have traveled the world, and it is not enough.

Many now argue for American post-exceptionalism, and I positively ache for it, but it's not that simple. That much must be confessed; I and my country-mates are genetic outliers. A collection of mutants, our bodies process the very pleasures of life differently, and we are a manic nation. Quod erat demonstratum, U+220E. At the very least, and more charitably, we are comparatively hyperactive and cannot alter our inner structures.

The next time we hear someone preaching crazy-ass moonshines from our national podium, there's a good chance they actually mean them, but require medication. Self-knowledge, after all, is a most valuable tool for managing temperaments, moods, reactions, selves, nations. We are Americans. Brown, yellow, black, red or white, we're crazier than thou and our genes went through serious shit to make it this far. We don't need an economist. We don't need an enabler-politician. We don't need a preacher. We need a good psychiatrist.

Far Side Cartoon: Superman's Wife Sews On His Logo

"After many years of marital bliss, tension enters the Kent household."

Hole In The Head

Awhile back Vincent of A Wayfarer's Notes offered to write a post on the case of Phineas Gage, who survived a famous brain injury, the study of which led to advances in neurological theory. Vincent is a deft and deeply thoughtful writer, so I begged him to whip up a post. I then forgot all about it until he gently reminded me of its completion, and below he muses beautifully on the conjoined dualities of our brains and intellects, our possible souls and animal selves, all while peering through the hole in a man's head:

Phineas Gage was swift, capable, responsible. He was physically fit and a leader of men. These qualities made him at the age of 25 a supervisor on a Vermont railroad construction project and might have helped him rise through the ranks to a senior management position in that branch of engineering. But the smooth track of his life was shattered in a single instant.

A certain part of the terrain was littered with huge rocks. It had been judged less costly to blast them with gunpowder and build a straight railroad, than to detour round them. It was 1847 and Alfred Nobel being only 14 had not yet invented dynamite. The established blasting method was to drill a deep hole in the rock, pour in gunpowder, poke in a fuse (a long string made of gunpowder wrapped in paper) and cover with sand or clay. This had to be firmed up by tamping with an iron rod, so that the force of the exploding gunpowder would radiate in all directions, and not just back up the drilled hole, as from a gun.

On this particular occasion, Gage was preparing a number of blasting-holes. He found it a monotonous routine, something he could do with only half his attention. He was interrupted by a question from a fellow-worker, which took longer than anticipated to resolve. When he resumed, he forgot he hadn’t yet added sand to the current hole. He tamped the naked gunpowder with his iron bar. It sparked against the rock and set off the powder like a flintlock gun. The bar shot out with the force of a cannon-ball, passing through his skull. That single moment is the basis of his enduring fame.

My own introduction to Phineas Gage was The Omnibus Believe It Or Not, by Robert Ripley. I was seven or eight, and must have skipped the boring sentence where it said that “[the crowbar] made its exit at the junction of the coronal and parietal sutures ...” I was more influenced by the accompanying drawing, which showed the bar at the moment of passing through, going into his skull on one side and emerging at the other. For nearly sixty years I carried a mental image of Gage staggering along a track for assistance with the crowbar still in his head, though in truth it had passed through swiftly and out the other side, taking bits of brain with it.

So when the story of Phineas Gage came up again in a book I’ve been recently reading by Antonio Damasio, it was familiar, like a Bible story woven into the fabric of my imaginative life. As for Damasio, my connection with him goes far beyond any academic interest in neuro-science. David Mickel put me on to him after my miracle cure from chronic fatigue syndrome. That illness was the great rock which blocked the track of my life. Must I curve around it, accepting its permanence? I didn’t know until a time when with all the force of my survival instinct I cursed it and rebelled against my fate. Dr Mickel’s therapy was the blasting process, miraculously sudden and effective, like a single explosion. Later, when I went to Edinburgh to study with Dr M himself, he recommended The Feeling of What Happens, by Antonio Damasio, whose earlier and more significant book I’m reading now: Descartes’ Error. It starts with an account of how Damasio’s wife Hanna, using Gage’s damaged skull preserved in the Harvard Medical School, made a computer simulation to work out which areas of his brain had been destroyed.

Gage was a living miracle, but it’s well-known that his survival had a dark side. All his basic faculties were intact but his personality was changed for the worse. To his friends he “was no longer Gage”. The detective work was to discover, comparing Gage with modern cases, the functions of the brain-cells destroyed by the passage of the tamping iron. We now know that they were from the region which processes emotion.

For centuries it had been assumed that emotion was the enemy of calm rationality but Damasio discovered that to be wrong. The new unemotional Gage was unable to make sensible decisions about how to run his life. He couldn’t get his old responsible job back. He was virtually unemployable after the accident, but not through what we normally think of as “brain damage”, i.e. loss of “intelligence”. You can read his doctor’s notes in this Wikipedia article, for an account of his personality change.

Why is the book called Descartes’ Error? The reasons are quite deep. I am just giving a summary here. Descartes, the “father of modern philosophy” saw mind and body as profoundly separate, with a single interface or bridge in the pineal gland. To Damasio, there can be no mind without body; no thinking without an awareness of the physical, whether it be our own body-awareness or an interaction with the outside world.

His idea, derived from neurological observation, changes everything. It makes religious theories obsolete: not completely wrong for they posited the existence of soul and God as the unseen source of the wonders perceived with senses. In Damasio I see a line between arid theology on the one hand and arid atheist science on the other.

Damasio is too erudite for me to explain further. I have understood his ideas not through the study of his books but the reintegration of my own self following a miraculous cure. I have had to find my own language to describe it. I have said in this blog that man is an animal, despite being overweighed with a huge intellect, like an elk with antlers, or a peacock with a gorgeous tail. I have discovered my own animal nature. My passions are governed by survival, my ecstasies induced by Nature, for I am its child, sucking at its teats. I am nourished by the paths that lead out from cities, and the ancientness of the open sky.

I was educated with a bit of Latin and less Greek; forced into team games---soccer and cricket---as sole recognition of body. The headmaster viewed all deviant behaviour as incipient homosexuality. We must act as a pack of hounds, with him as chief huntsman. My rejection of competitive pursuits was seen as primitive, uncouth and shameful. I took refuge in solitary dreaming, out in the ploughed fields digging up fragments of clay pipes, discarded by the ploughman when they broke; or trying to bring down birds from the sky with a slingshot I’d invented, made from a springy stick with clay stuck to the end.

I tried in adult life to hunt with the pack. I allowed marriage and children to force me into well-paid desk-drudgery. I tried to find in religion, or rather its mystical soul, a language and guide for the unruly impulses I felt.

But how could religion work, when it was based on supremacy of soul over body; all life’s treasure leached away into the abstract realm? Religion was and is a cruel assault on a child’s mind. Like corporal punishment, its use has diminished here in England, to be replaced by the atheistical religion of science, capitalist economics and modern medicine; which is far worse. I’m for “spirituality”---except that it’s wrongly named---and always have been: but not for “beliefs”.

Phineas Gage was the first martyr and saint of neuro-science. Damasio does more to explain what makes us tick than any psychology or theology I have read. But it can never make experiential religion or mystical awareness obsolete. For we possess the gift of direct knowledge, beside which science, for all its “evidence-based method”, is as speculative as theology.

Nothing in the laboratory tells us as much as our own primitive awareness. If someone tells of the visitation of an angel, or the voice of God heard on a lonely mountain-top, why should I not respect that? How else express an experience, but as it appears to you? Life is no less awe-inspiring, experience no less mystical, when we get closer to understanding the body and brain, whose soul is in every cell and neuron.

Freedom From Memory & How Google Makes Us Stupid

"Dave, stop. Stop, will you? Stop, Dave. Will you stop, Dave?” So the supercomputer HAL2001: A Space Odyssey. Bowman, having nearly been sent to a deep-space death by the malfunctioning machine, is calmly, coldly disconnecting the memory circuits that control its artificial brain. “Dave, my mind is going,” HAL says, forlornly. “I can feel it. I can feel it.”

I can feel it, too.

I’m haunted by that scene in 2001. What makes it so poignant, and so weird, is the computer’s emotional response to the disassembly of its mind: its despair as one circuit after another goes dark, its childlike pleading with the astronaut—“I can feel it. I can feel it. I’m afraid”—and its final reversion to what can only be called a state of innocence. HAL’s outpouring of feeling contrasts with the emotionlessness that characterizes the human figures in the film, who go about their business with an almost robotic efficiency. Their thoughts and actions feel scripted, as if they’re following the steps of an algorithm. In the world of 2001, people have become so machinelike that the most human character turns out to be a machine. That’s the essence of Kubrick’s dark prophecy: as we come to rely on computers to mediate our understanding of the world, it is our own intelligence that flattens into artificial intelligence.

(I've been thinking the same as more and more of my interactions are conducted with multi-tasking pancake people. The above is excerpted from a recommended article by Nicholas Carr in The Atlantic. Read the rest.)

Will Kill For Oil

I wondered a few posts ago what Preznit and his coterie would be doing after the election, and a graphic artist has donated their patriotic time to answer the question. If only Thomas Paine had Photoshop, and King George had Total Information Awareness, semantic analysis, and millions of terabytes of retrievable phone conversations stored on optical disks, history would seem so much more alive.

This picture, gleaned from the keenly visual Cat in the Bag blog, telegraphs the dissonant tragedy that is the Bush Administration. They were so certain of their course, and why it would be good for everybody. It's one of life's kick-ass ironies that if you start out certain you're on the road to ending up with doubts, and if you start out with doubts you've got a good chance to close in on certainty, at least part of it, and cuff it.

I Am That Girl

Her name was Kim Phuc, and she had just been napalmed. Trang Bang was her village, it was 1972, she was 9 years old and fleeing down Highway No. 1 from Saigon to Pnom Penh. American GIs were sheepishly herding Kim and other children away from another atrocity. She was naked, in mortal agony, humiliated, had 3rd-degree burns over 65% of her body, and was in all likelihood going to die.

I assumed she was dead, if not one of the millions of the anonymous war victims who live in Vietnam. But the Associated Press photographer who took the iconic picture, Nick Ut, rushed her to a hospital. As the picture was taken, Kim was most worried about her disfigurement and how it would limit her future prospects:

I still remember my thoughts at that moment: I would be ugly and people would treat me in a different way.

A decade later, she lost faith in her own society:

In 1982, I went through another very difficult ordeal. I had been admitted to Saigon medical school. Unfortunately, one day the government realized that I was the little girl in the picture and they came to get me to work with them, to use me as a symbol, and I didn't want to. "Let me study," I asked them, "I don't want to do anything else." So they automatically kept me out of school. It was awful. I didn't understand: why me? Why could my friends continue their studies and not me? I felt as though I had always been a victim. At 19, I no longer had any hope and wanted to die.

Now she lives in Toronto, is 45 years old, and has become a UNESCO representative. I heard her on Monday when she was broadcast on NPR's 'This I Believe' series:

On June 8, 1972, I ran out from Cao Dai temple in my village, Trang Bang, South Vietnam; I saw an airplane getting lower and then four bombs falling down. I saw fire everywhere around me. Then I saw the fire over my body, especially on my left arm. My clothes had been burned off by fire.

I was 9 years old but I still remember my thoughts at that moment: I would be ugly and people would treat me in a different way. My picture was taken in that moment on Road No. 1 from Saigon to Phnom Penh. After a soldier gave me some drink and poured water over my body, I lost my consciousness.

Several days after, I realized that I was in the hospital, where I spent 14 months and had 17 operations.

It was a very difficult time for me when I went home from the hospital. Our house was destroyed; we lost everything and we just survived day by day.

Although I suffered from pain, itching and headaches all the time, the long hospital stay made me dream to become a doctor. But my studies were cut short by the local government. They wanted me as a symbol of the state. I could not go to school anymore.

The anger inside me was like a hatred as high as a mountain. I hated my life. I hated all people who were normal because I was not normal. I really wanted to die many times.

I spent my daytime in the library to read a lot of religious books to find a purpose for my life. One of the books that I read was the Holy Bible.

In Christmas 1982, I accepted Jesus Christ as my personal savior. It was an amazing turning point in my life. God helped me to learn to forgive — the most difficult of all lessons. It didn't happen in a day and it wasn't easy. But I finally got it.

Forgiveness made me free from hatred. I still have many scars on my body and severe pain most days but my heart is cleansed.

Napalm is very powerful but faith, forgiveness and love are much more powerful. We would not have war at all if everyone could learn how to live with true love, hope and forgiveness.

Christians can be good. More about Kim's story here.