Music and lyrics by the late, great Dolly Parton

Arrangement by the band

Bass: Richard Bunn

Drums: Sarah Allen

Guitar and vocals: Jewboy Cain

ACT I - Hugging Face says:

“We identified unauthorized access to a limited set of internal datasets and to several credentials used by our services. We are still completing our assessment of whether any partner or customer data was affected, and we will contact any affected parties directly as required.” [emphasis mine]

ACT II - Over-jargoned explanation of what happened by Hugging Face (who was the target of the attack and discovered it):

“A malicious dataset abused two code-execution paths in our dataset processing (a remote-code dataset loader and a template-injection in a dataset configuration) to run code on a processing worker. From there, the actor escalated to node-level access, harvested cloud and cluster credentials, and moved laterally into several internal clusters over a weekend.

“The campaign was run by an autonomous agent framework (appearing to be built on an agentic security-research harness - used LLM still not known) executing many thousands of individual actions across a swarm of short-lived sandboxes, with self-migrating command-and-control staged on public services. This matches the ‘agentic attacker’ scenario the industry has been forecasting.”

ACT III - Reaction:

To paraphrase one commenter, this is yet another dystopian sci-fi threat made real — with enthusiasm from the industry engineering these menaces. Skynet took over humanity through similar means in Terminator 3.

Another commenter said of Hugging Face’s explanation and remedies, “Unhelpful.”

It’s the proverbial “torment nexus” — again. 1

You celebrate in your way, I’ll celebrate in mine.

I ran across a couple of Instagram reels demonstrating how to make chicken liver paté. One person was making paté specifically as an ingredient for his bánh mì. Readers might remember last month’s article, A Nice Summer Sandwich. I’ve been making and eating these at every opportunity.

The Nice Summer Sandwich is partly derived from bánh mì. So, as both a lover of chicken livers in general and paté on bánh mì in particular, I got busy.

I’m in the Detroit area currently, far from LA’s Thai Town. Luckily, Detroit and its environs have plenty to offer in the way of Asian grocery stores.

The simple recipe for chicken liver paté is, soak the livers in milk for a couple of hours, then discard the milk and rinse the livers.

Sautée onions and garlic till soft and add the livers. While they’re sautéeing, add whatever you want to in order to flavor your paté. Don’t overcook them, they should still be pink inside, but not raw.

For a little over one pound of livers I added a tablespoon of padaek, a tablespoon of regular fish sauce, sea salt, white pepper, a couple teaspoons of ginger-garlic paste, a teaspoon of crab paste, some oil from fermented black bean chili crisp, about 4 ounces of minced cooked kielbasa, and a tablespoon of butter (in addition to the butter in which I sautéed everything). That last tablespoon of butter should be added cold just before blending the livers in (don’t tell) my sister’s nutribullet or whatever it is (it’s okay, I washed it thoroughly right afterwards by hand and ran all the exposed parts through the dishwasher).

Then I chilled it till it was relatively solid, steamed it in its pyrex just to cook it that last little bit more, chilled it again, and voilá.

I think I would add some old dry bread rehydrated with milk to the mixture next time, as one recipe instructed.

The masterpiece sandwich goes like so: on a split bánh mì roll or baguette spread a healthy heapin’ helpin’ of that paté. Put on a mix of chopped mint, Thai basil, cilantro, culantro, and fresh lime leaf threads — I cut mine with an exacto knife. Sharper blade, more control.

Put a couple sardines on or a fish of your choice. Yes, fish with paté. If you can’t handle that … look, we are all going to starve once the supply chain breaks down anyway, so enjoy whatever you like while we have choices.

Then spoon on the summer sandwich salad mixture with extra onion and jalapeño if you want to cut through the fish and paté flavors, which I recommend.

I don’t know if this all sounds like an ado of hassle for an absurd and unpalatable meal, but, my friends, to me it was more than worth it.

I have not seen Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey yet. I have seen The Return, a whole film only about the climax of The Odyssey, and I’ve reread The Odyssey very recently, Emily Wilson’s verse translation.

Many may not agree, but I find Homer’s writing in The Odyssey to verge on the cinematic. I mean, if cinema had existed 2800 years ago, I’d simply call his writing cinematic. It’s contemporary in its visual vocabulary, as are many national epics. El Cantar del Cid comes to mind.

But, as someone who has written for the big screen and experienced the kind of notes one gets on a screenplay, I have one major issue with Homer’s epic.

The scene with Odysseus’ bow is both the story’s climactic strength and, ironically in a narrative populated by gods, witches, giants, and monsters, its least plausible element, maybe because it isn’t overtly supernatural.

Why would Odysseus leave his sentimental favorite bow at home instead of taking it with him as his personal weapon to use in the Trojan War? Is this an important question? No. Is it an entertainment question? I would say so.

A minor issue in this vein touches on the eyes of the axe blades (or axe handle holes, which is how the word στειλειή has come to be translated) through which Odysseus shoots the first arrow. Why does Odysseus have such a multitude of axes, of both iron and bronze, in storage? As my mother used to say, “You can only use one at a time.” Why so many axes in the closet in your house, Odysseus? Don’t you have an official armorer?

He has at least two store rooms in the narrative: one he hides the suitors’ weapons in, and another his wife hasn’t open since he left for Troy. Both are only called “the store room” or whatever, but we know they have to be two different rooms because the one Penelope opens to get his bow is opened after the one in which he hides the suitors’ arms and shields. And Homer makes a big deal out of that.

To distract from questions about the bow, Homer makes a big production of Penelope’s opening of the keepsake store room.

To illustrate what I mean, let me first paraphrase a demonstrative tidbit my dear late theater collaborator and friend Danny Thompson of Theater Oobleck once imparted to demonstrate the over-theatricality of an action. He was quoting a critic or perhaps a Stanislawski-like acting mentor, and he portrayed the actor as he narrated: “The actor dusted his chair off before sitting down, sweeping his coattails out of the way of his heinie with a flourish. He crossed one leg over the other, with a flourish. He reached into his inner breast pocket, with a flourish, and produced a two-foot-long match. He struck the match on the bottom of the shoe on the foot of the crossed-over leg, with a flourish of course, and with still another flourish he lit the cigarette in its foot-long holder, “and let me tell you,” said the critic, “that cigarette was lit.”

Homer tells us:

“The queen had reached the storeroom, and she stepped across the threshold of polished oak; a skillful carpenter had set it level, fixed the frame, and built the dazzling double doors. She quickly loosed the door-thong from its hook, pushed in the key and with true aim, thrust back the fastenings. The fine doors, as the key struck home, began to bellow as a bull at pasture bellows.”

And let me tell you, them storeroom doors was open!

Odysseus’ bow, unbendable by any lesser man than himself, hangs in there. Homer takes great pains to explain why Odysseus hasn’t brought it with him to the war, an attempt only serving to highlight the improbability and thereby the convenience of having the unbendable bow appear at this point in the story.

Why did he not bring this bow to the Trojan War? Well, Homer explains, his friend gave it to him, and his friend died. And it was an heirloom handed down among the male sires of that friend’s lineage. So, obviously, it was too precious to bring to a war.

Of course, that is exactly the kind of weapon one would bring to the war. A sword with great lineage is just the kind of sword one wears to every battle, because it’s battle tested. And if your friend who gave it to you died, what better way to honor your friend than to bring it to the most important war of your lifetime? It is literally and literarily absurd for Odysseus not to have brought this bow with him. The only reason he didn’t is because Homer wanted it to appear at this climactic moment in the story.

Homer’s problem is that it couldn’t be a second-rate bow. It had to be an important bow. One doesn’t use secondhand items in a climax. “The reason Odysseus didn’t take this bow, which only he could bend and string, was that he already had a better bow, which also no one but he could bend and string. Yeah, there were two bows, a really great one to use in battle, and a not-as-good one to leave at home for Penelope to lock away. Yeah, that’s the ticket.”

He’s a good archer, too. People have known that about him since he was a boy. He’s an all-around great strategist, especially in The Iliad, and fighter. No reason not to bring a bow to the war, and even less reason for him not to bring this special bow.

It’s very likely Homer heard about a similar scene in another story and thought, “Ooo, that would be a great climactic moment for when the raggedy-ass Stranger reveals himself to be none other than the King of Ithaca. There’s just one thing,” Homer says to himself: “why would Odysseus not bring his super-special bow with him to the Trojan War? Eh, I’ll just make something up.”

In the Ramayana there are two great bow scenes. One is when Rama is competing for the hand in marriage of Sita. No one can bend the bow. Only Rama can bend the bow, but it’s so inflexible that it breaks. In another scene he’s proving his battle prowess to the Monkey King and shoots an arrow right through a tree and out the other side. Actually, through seven trees and out the other side and into a big rock that shatters.

In the Mahabharata, Arjuna and his archery instructor Drona both accomplish great feats of aim with arrows. Also, Arjuna’s arrow shot is so powerful that it sends the chariot from which he lets it fly rolling backwards, an early prefiguration of Newton’s third law of motion.

Neither of those Indian sources, and there are many others, had the problem of requiring that a special bow only appear at a specific moment. Homer’s story requires special pleading.

Even 3000 years ago, Greek storytelling carried the seeds of what we call western modernity. Whereas Rama’s breaking of Lord Shiva’s bow takes place at the winning of his bride, Homer’s telling takes place in the late stage of Odysseus and Penelope’s relationship in a household in which their marriage has undergone a great deal of stress due to distance. It’s a far more quotidian, personally identifiable environment. I could go on and on, as many have, about western modernity1 and its self-congratulations over focusing on mundane domesticity.

Many have also pointed out the resemblance of bow-and-arrow scenes in various foundational myths. So, I claim no originality in what I’ve argued here. I’ll close by repeating another thing other writers have asserted: audiences don’t care about plot holes. As long as the story and its constituent scenes work in the moment, there’s no harm done by contriving a convenient story element.

But I do want to assure the spirit of Homer, you can’t bullshit a bullshitter.

Let me ask you something: when you see this photo of me wearing a kilt and T shirt with a large-font Hebrew phrase on it, do I strike you as someone ashamed to be Jewish? Do I strike you as someone ashamed about anything? In addition to being rather obviously an Ashkenazi Jew, I have worn this T shirt openly, publicly, without shame, fear, or incident in New York City from Coney Island to Harlem; in Los Angeles from Venice to Rosemead, SGV; at No Kings marches, pro-Palestine marches, anti-Tesla demonstrations, anti-ICE protests; and into businesses and on trains and buses across the country from Portland, Maine, through Chicago, Memphis, St. Louis, Arkansas, New Orleans, all across Texas from Dallas to Alpine, through Albuquerque, through Tucson, back to Hollywood.

I’m also proud of my collection of Jewish folklore in translation and my studies of Jewish liturgy, theology, social thought, and medieval theater.

This is not to say I have no shame. I have shame about my looks, but not enough to do much about it. I have shame about not being a great thinker, artist, or writer, and although I have valiantly tried to fake it till I make it, the horizon of my existence is fast approaching. Not fast enough for some. Sometimes not fast enough for me. But the moment when I become a “made man” is so much worrisomely closer than is that fateful morning eons ago when I was pitched howling into this world.

My pride in being Jewish was recently impugned by someone who replied to something I posted: “you claiming the ADL or FBI’s figures [on the percentage of US hate crimes targeting Jews] are incorrect is so offensive to us Jews who are actually very proud to be jewish (sic), regardless of our feelings on Israel.” I am actually very proud to be Jewish, missy, so watch it. As for “claiming the ADL or FBI’s figures are incorrect,” let me give some context.

A ferociously bigoted anti-Muslim, anti-Palestinian, pro-Zionist friend (yes, friend) recently claimed that, although Jews represent only 2.4% of the US population, they “account for 70% of the hate crimes.” First, I’m sure by “account for” he meant as victims, not as perpetrators. Second, 70% of hate crimes in the US or anywhere else in the world seemed to me outlandishly high.

And I’m sure the recent stabbings, albeit non-fatal, baruch Ha-shem, a couple weeks ago on Manhattan’s upper West Side, of a Jewish man and an Asian man by, allegedly, 51-year-old Raul Martinez, who shouted “Allahu akbar” – both times – didn’t do much to offer my friend any clear-headedness regarding evaluating evidence.The New York Times ran a whole report on “Jewish Fears” and “questions about Mayor Mamdani’s responsibility for setting the tone.” That’s how important Jewish fear is in our mass culture. It gets a New York Times story. So, people are paying attention.

I checked my angry friend’s figure and, lo and behold, I was right. Jews aren’t victims of 70% of hate crimes. The figure is closer to 16.5%. The FBI and Anti-defamation League’s claim is that Jews represent 70% of religiously-motivated hate crimes1, which are, by the same organization’s statistics, around 23% of total hate crimes. Doing the math, which I’m not that much better house trained in than in Hebrew, but nevertheless adequate, Jews “account for”… I mean, are victims of more like 16.5% of hate crimes. Or more accurately, 16.5% of hate crimes are antisemitic in nature. Not 70%. Not that antisemitism isn’t increasing in an anxiety-producing way, but an exaggeration like that is indicative of the outsized importance the persecution of Jews plays in the Jewish imagination of Jews ourselves.

So much so, that if a Jew should probe the accuracy of a statistic, he can be indirectly accused of not having enough pride in his Jewishness. Which is understandable.

Nonetheless, I call into question my rabid Zionist friend’s statistic, and rightly so. Then I further call into question the FBI’s and ADL’s statistics, because lately both are prone to bias toward reading antisemitism (along with other subversive motives) into actions and speech that are plaintive of Israeli crimes against humanity.

Not that there’s no validity to some of even that reading. But given the aforementioned outsized importance of persecution in the Jewish imagination, married to Israel apologists’ outsized financial largesse in the government, their enabling by the openly fascist Trump administration to own and control ever more news media, their habitually outrageous denials, rationalizations, and righteous indignation at news documenting occupation, apartheid, lethal targeting of journalists, medics, hospitals, children, purposeful starvation, malicious, premeditated, violent attacks against Palestinians in their businesses, homes, and persons, it’s not unreasonable to question their statistics.

And the idea that it reflects in any way on my pride at being a Jew makes me want to vomit fire directly into Ben-Gvir’s mieskeit punim [מיעס פּנים].

Now, 16.5% is still well out of proportion with 2.4%. Far less than 70%, but still out of proportion with how many Jews are in the population. I should be forgiven, considering the dubious source of the statistics, for wondering how many of those crimes are against unique victims and how many are repeat crimes against the same victims. Why would I question this? Do I think Jews are born liars? Do I believe there’s no shocking rise in antisemitic hate crimes? No.

But given the penchant for Israel’s advocates here in the USA to distort facts and outright lie, including not just the ADL but the Trump administration itself, as well as the sickeningly flagrant threadbare credibility of a certain Bari Weiss’s Free Press and now, for Pete’s sake, the same Bari Weiss’s CBS News, and the throwing around of the pro-Israel lobby’s weight in US government policy and the tendency of the legacy press to soften if not cut the viscera out of legitimate reports of Israel’s culpability in starving Gaza of food, water, medicine, and electricity, not just recently, but since 2006, how can anyone fail to suggest fact-checking those who beat the drum against antisemitism?

Or, to put it more simply: the very powerful Israeli state and its lobby in DC, backed by the very powerful USA and its less and less trustworthy press, none of which have stellar reputations of treating legitimate criticism fairly, regularly lie to make Palestinians, civilian or aligned with an army or external state, appear to deserve extra-legal punishment, and the Israeli state appear justified in committing militaristic violence up to and including human rights crimes without accountability.

If you feel this is wrong, and that only Palestinians, Iranians, Hezbollah, and other such bodies lie while Israel is merely trying to defend itself against overwhelming opposition, I understand. Hasbara is very powerful, and, especially among us Jews, appeals to our sense of moral righteousness and duty, not to mention martyrdom and self-pity.

Even I, whom many would accuse of harboring unqualified prejudice against any action taken by the Israeli state to control more land and the people in it, or to empty the land of the people in it who aren’t Jews — even I can find myself backsliding into gullibility when an argument leans almost invisibly on the postulate that Jews are singularly victimized, not just in Western society, but all throughout history. That if not chosen by God to bear this burden, along with His Torah, then at least we are chosen by the other nations as the scapegoat of first accusation.

And there’s no doubt that the Shoah stands as a uniquely evil detour of civilization into a pit of bleakness. Sui generis as they say.

You know what there are no statistics for? Hate crimes against homeless people. More than a third of homeless people experience violence. Imagine if even casual statistics from law enforcement showed that one in three Jews experienced violence. But violence against homeless people is not categorized a hate crime. So, no story about homeless fears in The New York Times, no story about billionaires or politicians badmouthing poor people thereby setting a bad tone. Of course, that’s not a Jewish problem. Is it, you problem diagnosers?

But I ask you to consider this:

Imagine you’re a Black person aware of United States history. You know that a huge proportion of people categorized as “you” were kidnapped, taken in chains as cargo across the ocean, during which middle passage many died, stripped of their language and religion, made laboring prisoners, sold away from their spouses and children; that this went on for hundreds of years and led to the largest, most momentous shedding of blood in US history on its own soil; and that even when legally freed you were persecuted, you see videos of your people right now being harassed and killed by cops and vigilantes, you see that compared to your percentage in the general population you’re overrepresented by more than twice that in prison2 and cop-involved fatalities.

That you’re more likely to die bearing children. That you’re less likely to have inherited generational wealth, while you know of many instances when successful Black enclaves, thriving against all odds, were firebombed out of existence by whites colluding together with local government. And there’s a record of the USDA cheating you out of farmland and loans. And red lining was a common real estate practice within generational memory.

And you see that the very home continent you were stolen from has been pillaged of its riches by imperial Europe, and the post-colonial West works to continue the process, assassinating your reform-minded leaders.

And Black people keep showing up dead, hanging from branches of trees. In mimicry of the time-honored tradition of lynching and mobs of white people photographing lynchings as if they were joyful picnics. If you haven’t seen one of the many photos of white people proudly posed around a mutilated body of a Black man or woman, the effect on the viewer is not dissimilar from photos of piles of Jewish corpses, victims of mass murder the Nazis almost obsessively recorded as if proud of themselves.

And suppose you saw the recent hangings of Black men and women blithely labeled “suicide” and ignored in the media and swept aside by the police. Even while whole states have negated elections of Black public officials and the same Trump government funding Israel’s rampage is officially erasing evidence of your people’s persecution at the hands of the white majority?

And The New York Times doesn’t publish a whole story about “Black fears” and Trump’s setting a national tone of belligerent guilt-free racism.

Would you not consider your people sui generis victims among the “wretched of the Earth?”

The maturation of the civilized human has historically, and civically, been a process of de-centering oneself. Copernicus and Galileo took our planet from the center of the cosmos and awakened us to fact that we are simply one planet among many. Not special.

So, when Mayim Bialik, excuse me, Dr. Mayim Bialik, aka Blossom, aka Sheldon’s girlfriend, aka the least favorite Jeopardy host, goes on TV and gets teary-eyed that someone wearing a “Zionism is racism” T-shirt walked near her car, I am seriously embarrassed. On her behalf. It’s a T-shirt with a sentence on it that one might angrily disagree with, but if your eyes are open to what the word Zionism has meant and what the actions motivated by it have been since even before the 20th century, you would have to admit that, whether you consider it true or not, it’s not an inarguably invalid position from the point of view of a certain large, non-monstrous sector of humanity.

And, yes, I understand any woman has every right to be intimidated by any man, no matter the T shirt. However, looking at the interaction with hindsight, the feeling was unwarranted. And a decent person might be circumspect about that, rather than wallow in an unmanifested, hypothetical victimization like a young child who had a bad dream.

If you go on mass media and cry about such a thing, pointing to it as evidence of your main concern about humanity’s inhumanity to its fellow humans — forgetting for the moment your general habit of excusing Israel’s years of criminal mass violence against its Palestinian population — you reveal yourself to be callous, cowardly, and self-centered. And just weird. You dreamed the man with the T shirt was a danger to you. And you insist it was real because comparable events have happened to others. I’m sorry, but that is not a respectable response.3

In that same Pirkei Avot, Rabbi Hillel, one of the all-time favorites, says, “If you’re not for yourself, who will be?” You know what, Rabbi, many will be. You’d be surprised. And I know you might say, no one came to our aid in the Shoah. You know that’s partly because of acceptance of Nazi propaganda. And it’s not entirely true. Every half year or so I learn of a non-Jewish hero, or a Jew who joined the partisans, or a failed plot to assassinate Nazi leadership, that I had never heard of before. And it’s not like that area doesn’t fall under my reading diet.

All of us are ourselves, by the nature of self. But “if you are only for yourself, what are you?” I’m ashamed to name it.

I’m ashamed to name it because, in my opinion, responsibility for the rise in violence against Jews, as well as that against every other group marginalized and stigmatized by the powerful and violent and those who side with them, can be laid at the feet of the inability to see outside the center stage on which too many of us, even the best of us, habitually place ourselves.

And the reason I find this important is my conviction that we will need each other to come together and fight the power we ourselves have allowed to dominate us and define our reality, our identities, and what we value.

Friends!

The Lineage Warehouse Fire in Boyle Heights was put out almost 3 weeks ago and tons and tons of rotting food still have not been cleaned up by the company or the city of Los Angeles or the State. Biting flies are all over the neighborhood, which reeks of the fumes from the food and its runoff.

Most of my LA friends haven’t even heard of it, though they might remember some news clips of solar panels — on fire!

This is a corporate disaster and the multi-billion-dollar corporation responsible needs to be held to account and fix it. Boyle Heights residents are not responsible for this mess, the warehouse was not put in their neighborhood with their permission in any case, and they should not be suffering from the stench in this heat, especially as most of them have no or limited AC in their homes.

Please add your name to the petition and share far and wide.

Thank you in advance for any help you can offer.

The preliminary hearing in the case of Tyler Robinson for his assassination of Charlie Kirk took place a couple weeks ago. Apparently it accumulated a large crowd of trial watchers. Many of them had been brainwashed into believing the hearing was an appropriate occasion to scapegoat trans people as inherent murderers maddened into violence by their hormone treatments. Of course there’s also the Jews, Mossad, and antifa writ large to vie for dominance in the marketplace of conspiracies.

Some politicians have said there are two Americas. That’s surely wrong. Given the kaleidoscopic visual impairments of the conspiracy lensed US public, there are many more than two. But there are, at least on simplest analysis, two kinds of terrorism: terrorism of illegitimate grievance and terrorism of earned despair.

There’s the bigoted, paranoid world of made-up grievances. Made up by the dominant population whose real gripe is that they might lose the unearned privileges an unequal system has deluded them to believe are their rightful property. And contrarily there’s the legit despair of the oppressed, stigmatized, and marginalized.

Speaking of courtroom action, assassin Vance Boelter – or as Wikipedia calls him, American murderer Vance Luther Boelter – just received two consecutive life sentences. Interesting way to guarantee living twice as long. It’s a medical miracle.

Remember June of last year in Minnesota when that rightwing psychopath with a hit list of 45 Democratic elected officials and about two dozen abortion providers and activists went on a shooting rampage? Vance Boelter critically wounded Senator John Hoffman and his wife and killed Representative Melissa Hortman and her husband. If his hit list was in alphabetical order, I guess he decided to start with the H’s.

At that time, David Simon, award winning creator of the HBO shows, The Wire and Treme, revealed he had been sitting on a grievance about “numbnuts on the left” who had been glazing Luigi, and chose the moment of Boelter’s commission of murder to air his complaint. I didn’t know about his grievance. Why would I? But on the heels of Boelter’s attacks, that’s when he decided to unload on the numb-nutted left for applauding Luigi?

It seemed an odd event to bring Luigi into. Simon could have brought up the stochastic violence of the demagogic right, whose violent power increases daily, whose federally unleashed minions disappear people off the street or kill them before our very eyes, but he decided to punch at the left, as if there were some equivalence in the left and right’s blameworthiness for, let alone a causal link to, what the media have come to call “political violence.”

But that’s not why it irked me. It pissed me off for two reasons:

1. Luigi ventilating a killer CEO’s skull was certainly better than, say, Luigi opening fire on a Sunday school class full of children being taught white supremacy and the anti-trans teachings of Jesus. But no one gives Luigi credit for such restraint.

Reason 2. Lumping in with “the numb-nutted left” everyone who appreciated Luigi’s service to the community is a category error. The lumpenproletariat were very into it. I heard cruel jokes about an arrogant, coldhearted, over-privileged healthcare CEO’s death evoke jovial laughter quite often when I found myself on public transportation with teeming masses of the underclass, who Frantz Fanon called the most radical force in colonized society, who Black Panthers called the left wing of the revolution.

The put-upon underclass understand what David Simon doesn’t. And apparently so do the numbnutted left. And be advised that “numbnuts on the left” is a paraphrase. I can’t look up what Simon said verbatim because he blocked me after I mocked him for having held onto such a grudge till such an inappropriate moment and called him a class enemy. I guess that proved I was a leftwing numbnut, and fair enough, fair enough.

David Simon is a writer I admire as well as a moral voice I respect, and I understand why he would react negatively to anyone taking Luigi’s act of murder as somehow a net positive for social change (although as the joke goes about a busload of lawyers at the bottom of a lake, it’s a good start). But he does have a blind spot: he isn’t able to parse the difference between the despair of the oppressed and the grievance of the privileged.

And, incidentally, Mr. Simon, if you doubt nuts on the left, whether numb or tender, fall under the category of “the oppressed,” I’d ask you to read NATIONAL SECURITY PRESIDENTIAL MEMORANDUM 7 aka NSPM-7. But I guess as long as you’re safe it’s fine, right? To lock up for multiple decades protesters at ICE detention centers or those labeled thought-crime members of an imaginary syndicate called antifa? I’m sure there’ll soon be a leftwing equivalent to that tyranny for you to disparage by comparison. (Yeah, right.) Or you could just blame Luigi for provoking Trump’s Nazi-esque draconian wrath.

Do I claim Luigi’s crime was an act of despair? It comes across more as an act of grievance. But it seems we’re ignoring the corporate terrorism, the banality of corporate terrorism, the terrorism of not challenging the immorality and violence of one’s legal, socially acceptable job positioned at the top of the socio-economic food chain. Because the CEO of UnitedHealthcare, Brian Thompson, might have surmised, somewhere deep down, that his way of operating consisted of terrorizing people and their loved ones with threats of illness, aggravated injury, neglect, and death.

What then was the purpose of such terrorism? We can say the effect was to extort worker obedience and force them to compete to prove merit through productivity. To merit doctor-prescribed medical care. Which one might think a person merits simply by virtue of being a person.

Of course, Brian probably didn’t think of his job that way. It’s likely he considered his job to provide the greatest dividends possible for shareholders of his company and somehow thereby improve the world. But that’s how the banality of corporate terrorism works.

The corporate terrorist doesn’t skulk and scheme in cabals in dark cave tunnels under the Central Asian mountains. Corporate and state terrorists live their lives blithely thinking themselves productive, virtuous, model citizens. They give each other honors, and those they don’t give honors give themselves honors. They consider themselves more meritorious than less well-paid members of society. And, barring some sexual criminality only tenuously, if at all, connected to their offices, perhaps they’re correct.

In which case we begin to detect and map the moral limits of meritocracy. Because a system of justice and economy under which a select few merit the privilege of terrorizing a great many – terrorize them by doing activities considered acceptable and workaday even by many they terrorize – wherein a select few merit the privilege to commit banal evil (ironic, isn’t it, Israeli state apparatus and settlers?) – suggests meritocracy itself is anti-democratic. It’s undoubtedly anti-egalitarian.

And if the point of democracy isn’t to give those – regardless of apparent and highly reductive merit – equal rights to shape their own destinies and those of their communities, is democracy even a thing?

It must be a thing, because the most wealthy and powerful voices in the most overvalued sector of the economy speak openly and vehemently against it. They hate democracy, especially its pretentions to equalizing power. Who made them the democracy police? It sure wasn’t democracy, but rather its hideous reflection: socio-economic quasi-Darwinist meritocracy.

The human world is in bad shape,

The human world is in bad shape,

The human world is in bad shape,

Which nobody can deny

Nobody can deny it, and unlike in the silly Vonnegut parable, “Harrison Bergeron,” the world is not suffering from too much equality. It might be suffering from too much meritocracy. But do you think you’d convince the most meritorious of us that we’re suffering from too much meritocracy? You’d never convince those who’ve won the merit to decide on the merits of that notion. It’s like that Upton Sinclair quote about trying to change someone’s mind when their paycheck depends on them remaining intellectually intransigent.

Seems we’re on a treadmill increasing in speed. Or – rather than in a widening gyre whose center cannot hold (as the manospheric libertarians might have it) – in an ever-tightening spiral speeding us inward to its crushing vortex. Some cosmologists posit our universe exists inside a black hole. True or not, it’s an apt analogy for our moral universe.

See y’all at the center of the world, I guess.

I saw a video recipe of a sardine salad sandwich originating in Mauritius. It looked good, but I didn’t have a lemon, just limes, and I wanted to do something more Vietnamese/Thai/Lao, so I altered it.

Get some not great tomatoes, like the “Roma” tomatoes in the store that never get ripe. You want a firm, small tomato for this. (I’ve put all the homegrown ones I got from other folks’ gardens to more appropriate use, don’t worry.)

Thin slices of “Roma” tomato, red onion, Asian lime leaf -- Asian grocery stores have them (some still call them “kaffir” lime leaves, others makrut lime or Thai lime). One biggish lime leaf cut into thin threads (they’re the stemlike things in the bowl). Add
the juice of one (regular old) lime and some fish sauce. Some sweet pepper slices (I used red Anaheim), slices of jalapeño and Thai birds eye chilis.

Let it marinate a little while, just few minutes.

Chop up holy basil (if you can find it - I found it at Bangluck Market on Hollywood around Kingsley) and cilantro and put them in, pour on some good olive oil, mix it all up. Use other herbs of your choice, y’know. Just so long as you use a lot.

I’ve tried this with sardines, excellent, lox, excellent, but you can use tofu, chicken, or go non-meat in your own way.

This has to be eaten on a baguette. I put a little spread of mayonnaise on mine as a nod to bánh mì.

Stephen Miller, deputy chief of staff to illegitimate President Donald Jockitch Trump, has but one lone person remotely resembling someone he could call a friend. That is I. Me. The person speaking. And as his only facsimile of a friend, it is my duty to confront him with his delusions, disabuse him of his false knowledge, and save him from unwittingly suffering his comeuppance.

The fact that Stephen Miller stands before the public to speak his diseased mind is only one of many clues that no one truly cares about him. No one loves him. No one cares enough to tell him, “Stephen, addressing the nation at a podium is something you should not do.

“You resemble too much a Boschian grotesque rendered in animatronic form by a crew of aged, perverse roboticists visually impaired by cataracts, with compromised hand/eye coordination and motor skills, hidden for years secretly working on this profane project in the combination dungeon and laboratory beneath the Disney Studios under what they imagine are the orders of the glowering frozen head of Walt Disney. They believe the head has commanded them to do this and haven’t the will to disobey their hallucination although they know it is a blasphemous task, bringing a misshapen eggheaded scarecrow Joseph Goebbels meat marionette to accursed life.

Not even his sickening wife has the barest iota of simple humanity to extend to him and guide him. He is more alone than any living thing in this world. His is a solitude without even the pathetically humble usefulness of a bellringing Quasimodo much less a party-planning Hop-Frog.

How can such a cast-off ort, detached as he is from all compassion, his own and that of any others, be called human? Is an ant, somehow tolerated in its colony yet effectively adrift from it, still an ant? How is a hominin being, untethered and tacitly rejected from all connection, a human?

Is the human not a social animal? Can the bunraku ningyō Stephen Miller be classified Homo sapiens? Or is he sui generis? Homo singularis et nauseam movens?

How else to explain his extended polemic not just denigrating the ideology but insulting the appearance of those he would like to confine and torture in concentration camps? Such public remarks only draw attention to his own severe congenital deformities. Do those around him delude themselves that they exercise compassion when they prevent him from examining himself in mirrors? Do they so pity and condescend to him that they shrink from allowing him the dignity of seeing a clear reflection of himself?

What cowards. There is no individual as cowardly as one of a circle of associates who will not at least grant an ambulating globular-skulled skeleton the merest alm of self-knowledge. For shame.

And that is why it is left up to me to save the clueless proto simian from the misery he doesn’t even know he inhabits. Not to mention the future misery he courts, nay, to which he has all but pledged his troth.

But, given that his wife is bereft of all value as a connubial partner, it wouldn’t technically be bigamy were he to enter into such an engagement. The worthlessness of his current marriage is, ironically, what legally allows him to tread so dangerously close to enslaving himself within another worthless snare.

I could easily renounce any responsibility to the reviled creature. I could content myself in the knowledge that a small, tough, close-knit team of brilliant ultracommies will one day sit in the White House, having taken and occupied it through force, prepared to undo what 250 years of mendacity and self-deceit have built. I know it will take a few decades but Miller and Rubio, Trump and Hegseth, all their peons and bootlickers, will fall before the new ultracommie weapons being developed. I look forward to watching the ultracommie lasers burn Trump’s sons’ genitalia and eyes to handfuls of minuscule grains of powder.

But as much as it warms my heart to know that Stephen Miller’s intestines will festoon the Oval Office like bunting, his skull sliced open and his brains used to make a post-modern abstract on plywood titled “Portrait of Hitler as a Trampled Abortion,” and the sight of The Reflecting Pool filled with the blood of the new Nazis, the MAGA filth who presume to tell us how to think, their bled-out corpses dangling like hooked hogs, pale husks though they already are, more bleached, bloodless and pale will they dangle – as avid as I am to enjoy that world toward which we inexorably and inevitably sail, I have to decline to allow Stephen Miller to sink unenlightened into the tarpit of his folly.

He must be saved. Not from the revenge he most assuredly deserves, no. He must be saved from suffering his deserved fate without the awareness that he deserves it. He deserves to know that his violent, sanguineous, visceral demise is his due reward and his fault.

Somehow this entomoid figure has been put under a spell, whether through self-hypnosis or through the demonic machinations of a djinn, made to believe cruelty and bigotry are expressions of a noble purpose. He associates authoritarian violence against dissent, inhumanly filthy prisons, barbaric surgeries to sterilize those he esteems racially inferior, with the US flag and church picnics and white people singing bland lyrics about Jesus and edelweiss.

He must be made to look at himself and see the tumors of spiritual infection festering and suppurating in pustules and fistulas splitting the dermal rind of his soul. Before he succumbs to the gangrene spreading through his misbegotten, miscreant body, he must be made to understand how his rot is his own doing, is simply justice, if there still exists such a thing since the reemergence of the movement he has ensconced himself within and seen fit to enable.

For woe betide the man, if man he be. And would he be a man, he must face himself. As the character, Willis, played by the actor Richard Lawson, in the movie Scream Blacula Scream (1973 American International Pictures) laments when he finds upon awakening as a vampire that his reflection fails to appear in a mirror, “A man has got to see his face.” Not only is the unexamined life not worth living, but a human without self-knowledge is no human at all.

I could save him. If only Stephen Miller would listen to and read this message, he might have a chance at bringing himself into the human fold.

As it is, however, he remains a hollow man, headpiece filled with straw, alas, floating on the high, merciless seas alone and puny at the center of the widening, darkening, increasingly cold and friendless horizon. To be gradually shredded bit by bit as microscopic fauna, sea monkeys and krill, nibble and gnaw away at the soggy fabric of his vacated corpse. Until naught is left of Stephen Miller but microscopic threads of sea monkey excrement awash in the ocean of oblivion.

For want of a candle

The spinach was lost

Ground underfoot in the dark

Found pressed into the texture

Of the vinyl floor

Running, running, not really running

In the embossed channels

Tracing the false grout lines

Mock moss mock growing

Between mock tiles

Ancient enough in a new century

Shaping up to be one

Of simulated experience

Simulated nature

Wedded to nature

Read more

Here in Hollywood, people speak of wanting to have “fuck-you money.” That’s enough financial independence to be able to tell someone offering you a rotten deal where they can stick it. But in lieu of fuck-you money, I’ve found it’s also possible to be “fuck-you broke.”

What’s superior about “fuck-you broke” to “fuck-you money” is that it can be achieved without scheming, without conforming to workplace etiquette, trying to use one’s creative visualizations to affect material reality like some unironic Uri Geller focusing on a spoon, without contorting one’s attitude into unnatural optimism. It can be achieved without dressing for success, or for the job you want, or even wanting a job. Or even dressing.

It doesn’t require you to follow the advice of a career counselor. It doesn’t require you fail again, fail better. Simply failing is enough. But it’s not necessary to fail or to succeed. It doesn’t require you to find a passion for anything. You don’t need to get to yes, you don’t need to win friends and influence people. You don’t need to feel less awkward in public. You don’t need to feel at home in the world or even the universe. You don’t need to learn to accept your fate. You don’t need to overcome your circumstances. You certainly don’t need to do the fairytale trick of pulling yourself up by your own bootstraps the way Baron Munchausen pulled himself out of quicksand by his own hair.

It helps to be old. Because if you’ve lived to be old you’ve probably developed the resources and relationships to make being fuck-you broke a viable option. And you might already have understood how little use the world has for your concerted efforts to join in its very important projects. Being yourself is hard, but after sixty or so years in your body you’ve probably begun to get the hang of it.

I want to share with you something that’s been integral to my developing philosophy of life since I was a tiny kid. I’ve spent my entire so-called writing career trying to express it. It’s a very United Statesian reaction to a very United Statesian imposition on the world. In one sense it could be called “no fucks left to give” or “the right to be fuck-you broke.”

To understand it you must, at least for the length of this very short essay, agree that the ruling wealthy class have had their thumb on the scale of what we think of as the social contract for all of history. If that is too “woke” or “Marxist” or “intelligent” for you, fuck off right now. Seriously. This essay has no fucks for you.

You should know better. You’re not a serious person. I don’t care how many degrees you have or how many theaters of combat you’ve served in or how big the numbers are in your offshore accounts or what you think your qualifications are, if you don’t understand the simple fact that those with more wealth have an unfair advantage in our human world, you should consider yourself stupid. You should go join a cult where the members eat the guru’s toenail clippings in their scrambled eggs because that’s the only community for you and the only worthwhile way you can serve that community.

Okay, now that all the stupid people have fucked off, we can begin. When I was a child, before I had even understood the difference between right and wrong, I found out there was a war going on. I date this to about sometime between when I was five and seven years old. A friend of mine in second grade had a father who was jumping out of helicopters in Vietnam, and I remember knowing that there was a war there, so that’s the latest war could have entered my consciousness. How his father ended up in Vietnam even though he had a child I don’t know. Having a child and being in college were the two things that kept my father from being drafted. Feel free to speculate. You’re smart.

When I first heard of war, I thought it was the most insane activity humans could participate in. Two groups of people, each group armed with deadly weapons, each trying to kill as many members of the other group as possible. That was my simple understanding.

Obviously, war is more complex than that. Not in the sense that one group is right and the other wrong, or that war involves commitment to country or freedom or another noble purpose, but in the sense that a third and fourth group can be involved, and any number of other participants. And the ways civilians are forced into participation in a war differs within each conflict.

So, war being fought at the behest of the wealthy and powerful to serve their needs, the only reason wars are ever fought, is one way the scales are unjustly tipped. But then, the unjust tipping of the scales in favor of the wealthy and powerful is an ugly thread running all through the fabric of civilization. In fact, by certain thread counts, it basically is the fabric of civilization. And that is a damning condemnation of civilization, if you think about it.

Another thing I learned as a child was what a great man Henry Ford was. I was born in Detroit, where Henry Ford was not just another figure in the history of business, he was central. And I was taught that Henry Ford was considerate enough to make sure his cars were sufficiently inexpensive for his workers to afford. Which presented me with my first ever mathematical paradox: how can Ford make any money if he pays his workers more than the price of his cars?

If it costs Henry Ford a certain amount for machinery, a building to run it in, and materials, and on top of that he has to pay each of his workers enough to buy one car, he must command his workers build enough cars to pay for all the machinery and materials and then, in addition, enough to pay a wage that would allow each worker to buy one of the many cars they have to make, as well as enough for that worker to buy food and clothing and pay for shelter. And then on top of all that, Ford had to be able to make some kind of profit.

And profit seemed the most fungible factor of all. Even more fungible than the wage of the worker. Profit would seem to be what’s left over after you pay all your expenses. But how much beyond cost is reasonable? Is reasonableness even a necessary constraint?

We went on a field trip to the Ford factory in first grade, so I was six when I was ruminating about all this. Since then, it’s been revealed that the fungibility of profit is the entire point of the exercise. The limit on profit should, according to any non-psychotic theory, be all the expenses mentioned – the wages, the materials, etc. – and then some. Like taxes to the society providing education and roads and other community services that help Ford’s business succeed.

But it turns out the framers of the social contract decided to arrange things in opposite fashion: the materials, wages, and taxes are limited by the need for endlessly growing profit desired by the profit taker, upon which there are intended to be no limits. Which means profits are allowed to grow even if people can’t afford to eat, be housed, wear clothes, and even if the company must compromise on the quality of its product and the materials going into them.

As anyone but a self-deceiving sophist can grasp, this clause in the social contract under which we are meant to agree to participate economically is anti-social and ass-backwards. It allows the needs, safety, and comfort of the working and consuming public to be sacrificed while rewarding the ostensibly heroic profit-taker with exponentially growing riches.

This is not difficult to understand. This is not even Marx. These are the thoughts of a child trying to puzzle out why we have war and poverty in a world supposedly run by intelligent, rational authority figures. In fact, go, some of you – as Shakespeare used to say – and get those stupid people who fucked off earlier. Let’s see if they can comprehend the prima facie truth. Oh, they all ran off a cliff re-enacting a Walt Disney nature video about lemmings? Well, that’s fitting. That is fitting.

And so I have always resented having to work knowing that part of what I was doing was putting money into the ever-swelling wealth and power machine that was at that very moment making sure my wage was lower than it ought to be. And the more the wealth disparity has grown, so in direct proportion has my resentment. And in opposite proportion, my patience with bullshit.

I have watched people move to various places in the nation and world chasing better returns on their labor while very profitable corporations have fired tens of thousands of workers at one blow. I have fought alongside fellow union members for fair wages and been told that simply the fact that I had the lowly job I did was evidence I wasn’t worth the money I was already getting, for which insult and low recompense I ought to be grateful.

I’ve experienced countless such insults and punishments inflicted on the poor and hardworking, and witnessed countless inverse instances where the benefit of the doubt has gone to the already well-to-do, and with it a “rounding-up” of what was considered due them. For the rank-and-file citizen, errors in their favor are always rounded down. For the well-heeled and respectable, such errors are always rounded up.

I happen to be in the moderately privileged position of owning very little and requiring very little upkeep. I’m also childless, single, white, male and, though from the working class originally, my father eventually achieved professional class status by about the time I was in high school. So, no, Mr. Petty, I don’t have to live like a refugee, but I also don’t have to gamble my entire future on loyalty to an endeavor meant to enrich an entitled few profit gluttons.

And I know that on a global scale I live as a king might have in medieval days. Much of my ability to live this way has been won through the collective efforts of those struggling against the absurd imbalance in wealth and power, rather than through the generosity of the wealthy, powerful elite.

At the unpleasant age of sixty-four, I’m retiring the same way I’ve always lived: hand to mouth, paycheck to paycheck, by hook or by crook, getting away with as much leisure as I can abscond with while trying not to burden my friends and family and maintaining a personal code of decency. And let me tell you something: that’s giving far more than I owe to a system that has always taken more than it delivers. It has taken all my fucks, that’s for sure.

The ever more oppressive powers might not be aware of it, but their devious actions are swelling the ranks of the fuck-you broke. That’s good, because at some point we, the people, need to demand a fair social contract. People with little to lose have an advantage those with power don’t. And of course we are going to have to challenge power, something we United Statesians are trained not to do. And guess who profits from that state of affairs?

Dearest Arlene,

We have learned of your letter sent six (6) months ago to the Secretary of Homeland Security (DHS) criticizing her leadership of the department. We’re not angry. Just disappointed. Also a little impressed, but more on that in a tiny bit. First, however, judging from the pace at which the current administration is moving away from due process, habeas corpus, the first (1^st), fourth (4^th), and fourteenth (14^th) amendments, and similar constitutional niceties, such disappointing behavior won’t much longer be tolerated. Can’t say we didn’t warn you. Because this is a friendly warning. So consider yourself warned!

As we’re sure you’re aware, the Secretary has since resigned. Your prediction that her career as Secretary would end in disgrace has become reality. Would it be too intrusive to ask how you knew this would happen? Don’t write to us with your answer. We will be paying you a friendly visit to inquire in person within ten (10) business days of your receipt of this warning. The visit is a complimentary addendum to the warning and requires no action on your part. Friendly, right? We aim to please!

However, we do request you prepare for our visit with answers to the following:

What made you believe the Secretary was an inadequate mother or “unfit to whelp a colony of dumpster rats?” (This question in no way represents confirmation that she tried and failed to raise a vermin community in a rubbish receptacle.)

Aside from her “inflated lips,” which specific parts of her face and body strike you as “obviously” altered by “botched” surgical enhancement procedures?

Do you have evidence that her “cooch” is “rancid?” Did you read it somewhere? If so, in what specific publication?

Not to flog a dead horse, but what led you to the conclusion that she would eventually “resign in disgrace or be fired?” Given that most of the legally questionable actions of members of the current administration have, as you put it, been “committed with nauseating impunity,” why were you so sure the Secretary would be an exception? Was it her being a woman (or, as you wrote, “a shoddy excuse” for one)?

Further, what made you declare the Executive Order signed by President Trump on September 25 (twenty-five) of last year (and others you allude to) were symptoms of “the overweening caprice of a would-be strongman leading us inevitably down the road to fascism?” That has turned out to be a correct assessment. Were you simply guessing? On what did you base your guesses?

Surely your husband’s job as a mid-level accountant wouldn’t have gained him access to classified federal information – and in any case, no offense, he’s a fine man, but he doesn’t strike one as the type to diverge from his humdrum work day to dabble in espionage. (Congratulations, by the way, on the negative result of his biopsy.)

Is it your subscriptions to The New Republic, The Nation, The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, The New York Times, (what we at the bureau call the N-words!) or The Guardian that has afforded you such perspicacity? Or is it your viewership of PBS and MSNBC? Is it the gossip of that annoying friend of yours, Roberta? What a yenta, that one. The hot takes she pulls out of her ass, unbelievable. (BTW, don’t listen to her, that hair color looks great on you. Honestly, that woman’s social skills are appalling. She shouldn’t be allowed out of the house.)

Or is it the time you spend listening to your local NPR affiliate while driving Pamela and little Stevie to school and extra-curricular activities? Glad to see the improvement in Pamela’s twisted ankle (figure skating might not be her forte). And Stevie’s such a spirited little guy. Who’d imagine he’d take so well to the trampoline?

Stevie’s really into those individual yogurts. The problem is, Pamela has often found he’s gotten to them all by the time she’s even in the mood for one. You might consider a mini fridge with a lock for her room. (She prefers strawberry.) Putting her in charge of yogurt and beverage distribution between her and her brother would help with Stevie’s over-consumption of sodas, too. Just an idea. After all, he is genetically predisposed to diabetes.

The NSA has expressed admiration and envy over your prognostications, despite your having let your children’s yogurt kerfuffle escape your notice. They want to know if they could interest you in a freelance engagement as an analyst. Or perhaps as a psychic. Which brings us to the question, are you psychic?

What other predictions can you make pertaining to our republic’s trend toward authoritarianism? Please be specific and provide dates wherever possible for the advent of particular manifestations of what you call “ham-fisted tyranny, overreach, and outright dictatorship” and “Christo-fascist terrorism.”

What additional insights or foresights do you have about the future failure, embarrassment, disgrace, downfall, collapse, or ignominy of members of the current administration, the departments, units, divisions, informal cliques of prominent actors within it, or the administration as a whole? Please provide specific details. Particularly regarding ignominy.

Your cooperation would be greatly appreciated and could lead the government to waive the option to pursue further action (legal or extra-legal) against you.

See you in ten (10) business days. Don’t worry about informing us of any travel plans or change of address. We’ll know.

The accompanying images (except the second-to-last one) were created by Beehive Collective from their Mesoamérica Resiste project. The full-size poster was donated to This Is Hell! for a raffle prize at one of our yearly listener appreciation parties at Cary’s Lounge. Guess who won!

This theater in which tonight’s show is presented exists on land stolen from the Tongva people, who inherited it from some Paleo-Indians, who themselves had probably stolen it from some giant sloths.

The building itself was constructed by labor the surplus value of which went into the bank account of a developer who used it to pay alimony and child support to his first wife, who in turn pays part of that to a university on land stolen from the Ojibwe people and currently held hostage by a land trust protected by the threat of violence from a police force paid for by a portion of the people’s labor value minus the value bled from them by yet another group of owners and shareholders.

The owning, rentier, and financial classes have underwritten programs and buildings such as this one as incantatory gestures in a charade seeking to represent the current violently unequal economic system as good enough to appease anyone willing to hem their visions for social change within modest desires. The modesty of these desires is delimited by the ruling classes and their vassal chatterati as “polite discourse” and “reasonable expectations.”

Such limits on the horizon visible through what has come to be called The Overton Window have allowed our civilization to fall into fascistic techno-oligarchy and wreak catastrophic changes to the climate and environment. These allowable desires implicitly signal the worldview that ours is a global civilization in which all states are criminal. Our state, however, and those states aligned with it, represent the best, most just, freest, and most compassionate a reasonable person can hope for without committing the faux pas of advocating for the dethronement of the overweening over-privileged from their seat of power and well-being.

Humanity, which has created tonight’s time art, has also made of itself a stratified oppression machine wherein the lower the strata, the more egregiously punitive are the laws its members are coerced to follow. Whereas members of the uppermost stratum behave as they will, uninhibited by any regulatory action except the most lenient, token, and pantomimed, but are rather rewarded with undue flattery, honors, trust, opportunities, resources, wealth, and power to wield at their pleasure. The Nobel Peace Prize can be displayed on the fireplace mantel of a notorious war criminal, a famous bigot, a facilitator of institutionalized poverty and starvation, as evidence of the virtuous purposes they’ve championed in life.

Our current global human system rewards the accumulation not only of skills and prestige but of what at one time might have been held in common by all. Its rewards are not merely legal rights to access the luxuries of life but its necessities. Thus it incentivizes theft, con-artistry, self-centeredness, deceit, and violence. While it delegitimizes discourse that threatens its most privileged members, it can also co-opt and defang that discourse by transforming it into cultural artifacts and fetishes, absorbing them into its commercial marketplace. A band with a name like Rage Against the Machine, T-shirts emblazoned with the likeness of Che Guevara, and Ben and Jerry’s Ice Cream decorate the Christmas tree of capitalism like glittering baubles and tinsel.

The aforementioned members of the lowest strata – some known as laborers when fortunate enough to secure wage-slavery positions – tend to suffer from depression and other psychological debilities. These they palliate by imbibing depressants and opiates and watching streaming entertainment as they can’t afford ready access to upper-class programs such as tonight’s drama.

They are also more likely to succumb to medical problems and are prone to die younger than those with more resources, as among those resources is included access to medical attention. Their ultimate creditors sleep on specially adjustable foam mattresses fitted in the finest linen while they languish on jagged, lumpy surfaces resembling topographical relief maps of the ocean floor sculpted in plaster.

Each of you has on your person a device capable of showing you the horrors visited upon the poor by the rich. Your devices can reveal to you peer-reviewed studies of human-driven environmental degradation, the cost in human potential represented by our retributive legal system, and the unconscionable abuse of our fellow human beings by those we appoint as guardians of our property and social status. What stands between food and the hungry is often a watcher at a panopticon ready to report any availing of sustenance by the deprived to an armed and armored thug itching for the command to attack.

The joint project of technological and commercial growth has inadvertently given you a potentially subversive device that can inform you about systemic problems and help you organize to repair them. Your devices can show you exactly what needs to be done to ameliorate those conditions and prevent an even more disastrous future, as well as which organizations of fellow humans are struggling to do so. It offers you the tools to join such efforts.

Please silence your devices and enjoy the show, or however you willingly or involuntarily end up engaged with the experience. The emergency exit is to the right of the stage. It’s also the regular exit, so please bear in mind its dual use if you find yourself exiting through that exit during an emergency.

Covid changed people. It deranged people. It shook them up and broke them, like a Hollandaise sauce or a baby. Like a sauce you overheat or over acidify or a baby you shake too vigorously. It broke them. They are broken.

Broken people can’t see the forest for the trees. They know they’re being manipulated but they think it’s by the Rothschilds or the Illuminati or Anthony Fauci or the Pro-Palestine Movement. And they are being manipulated. The manipulations are the trees. What they can’t see is the forest of Christo-fascist imperial white supremacist techno-patriarchal capitalism.

It was obvious to me that the forest was Christo-fascist imperial white supremacist techno-patriarchal capitalism since I was a baby. Not to brag. It annoyed me. It made me miserable. It made me feel misunderstood and alone. Even though my analysis was inchoate. Even though I had a lot to learn about the world and still do.

But all the real ones know this. We have a critique that locates power in its actual position instead of in the driver’s seat of a spaceship or a time machine or in a saddle on the back of a lake monster. Covid didn’t drive the real ones insane and send them down cultish rabbit holes into a warren of conspiracies that never failed to end up supporting the powers at the top of the acquisitive hierarchy. It only did that to the weak and shitty. Nothing personal if you are one of the weak and shitty. I mean, I’m mad at you, but you still deserve to live your life unmanipulated, as all humans do. All living things, really.

It was the combination of Covid and the Black Lives Matter protests, in my opinion, that broke the weak of mind. Here’s a facile survey of the mechanism:

First it was Covid-19 itself, which was a virus. Where did it come from? How did it spread? Out of an abundance of caution, while medical experts investigated the pathogen, the WHO and our own CDC recommended public health measures which many national, state, and local governments took it upon themselves to enforce. Masking, social distancing, and isolating in place were meant to stop the spread, already rapid, of the disease, which had proven it could be fatal to anyone regardless of age.

Though not much was known about the disease, know-it-all stool-brains – for example, Dr. Drew Pinsky, best known as co-host of the 90s fascist-in-disguise advice show, Love Line with Adam “sewage blast” Carolla, and for another example Donald “I’m the smartest” Trump – spread all manner of bad opinions about the virus, its origins, its treatment, its cure, and what the social response should be. Most of this utter BS drew from pre-existing or ad hoc conspiracy theories about the Chinese, Anthony Fauci, Donald Trump being sent by Jesus, and the Rothschilds. None of those spouting this crap felt it necessary to mention that Donald “I know everything” Trump’s henchman, John “I am the walrus” Bolton, had the year before dismantled the pandemic response unit Obama had put together in order to protect US citizens from diseases like ebola.

There was a public health crisis, and some amount of sacrifice of normal freedom of movement and congregation was going to be necessary. At the very least, the business as usual of human activity would be interrupted. As a result, crazy brain sludge brewed in the cauldrons of otherwise ordinary minds became the order of the day.

Secondly, the covid shutdown brought to public discourse the fact that the actual “essential workers” of the economy weren’t self-dealing so-called “job-creators,” but rather actual on-the-ground teachers, longshoremen, truckers, farm workers, cooks, firefighters, delivery people, warehouse workers, shopkeepers, housekeepers, nurses – especially nurses – doing the actual labor that kept society going.

So there was growing class consciousness.

Thirdly, the slowdown of madding commuter and shipping activity gave the environment a noticeable break from air, water, and noise pollution. The benefits of reining in rampant industrial activity and technologic growth became publicly apparent.

The extractive, polluting behavior of society needs to change.

Lastly, the murder of George Floyd was the final straw after a buttload of straws piled on the backs of the over-policed Black population. They’d had enough. Protesters received a great deal of public support. But because they were either Black or in support of Black liberation from being policed, the police and those who benefit most, even only psychologically, from police protection knew they had to crack down. It was imperative to some, even some heavily policed white people, that public acceptance of the cop apparatus’s right to detain, search, assault, imprison, and/or execute Black people at their pleasure remain in place.

The fact was laid bare for all to see: authority was heavy-handed, especially against the most marginalized, the people weren’t going to stand for it, and the cops weren’t going to tolerate popular defiance.

So, we had four propositions:

1. Some emergencies might require public sacrifice, cooperation, and discernment of whom to trust among authorities in and outside government.

2. The blowhards at the top of society owe their continued existence to the workers at the bottom.

3. Living systems in the world need human technical and industrial activity to slow or reverse in order to heal and thrive.

4. The heavy-handed authorities known by their generic collectivity as “The Cops” have support from money and morons against the unruly populace and will side with white supremacy when the chips are down.

These were the main lessons learned. Other folks may have additional or different lessons on their list. My list here is, I think, a basic and accurate one for the purpose of the current discussion.

These lessons weren’t a surprise to the real ones. We already knew this. Their manifestation didn’t present a shock to our analytical understanding. But to others they did, and to assimilate the evidence of their senses they adopted one or another goofy epistemology.

To confront the necessity of sacrifice they adopted beliefs that blamed China and Fauci. To confront class consciousness they adopted the get-society-back-full-steam-ahead ethos of Forbes and the Tech Bros. In response to the obvious and urgently required benefits of slow living and degrowth they swallowed the jagged pills of climate denialism or simply made their analyses subservient to the needs of neoliberal capitalism. And for those who, because of their own racism, anti-leftism, misogyny, or anti-labor brainwashing, felt the need to justify authoritarian punishment of the ungovernable masses, there was the rabbit hole of antisemitism and its byzantine mythology, anti-queerness, anti-enlightenment, neo-monarchism and all their permutations to burrow into and intellectually hibernate in. Or one could simply put Trump’s whole glans and gonads in one’s mouth and suck as if at a mother’s teat. It was sad to see until it became infuriating to experience. Which is where we are now.

Let’s be clear: I am suggesting I’m better than you non-real ones. But unlike others who feel better than you, I understand the severe limits of my betterness. It’s not a betterness that allows me to desire you have any more or fewer rights, opportunities, or responsibilities than I have, or than any other person is entitled to.

Some grew to be more strongly and fully themselves from going through Covid. The real ones did. They didn’t transform into conspiracy nuts because no conspiracies were necessary to explain what reality revealed.

But not everyone who maintained a position and avoided conspiracy belief is a real one, though. For example, if you maintained your weak-tea centrism or were always fascist from the get-go, you just kept adapting your knee-jerk apologisms to more extreme conditions. The explanation for that is not that you’re a real one. It’s that you’re a real something else.

Read more

Gustavo Gutiérrez was a Peruvian Dominican priest, theologian, and, at the time of his death in 2024, professor emeritus of theology at Notre Dame University, having decades earlier been driven to leave South America by fascists and unsupportive church leadership in Lima and Rome.

The Second General Conference of Latin American Bishops, aka The Council of Medellín, in Columbia, 1968, was the philosophical birthplace of what became Liberation Theology. The bishops considered three main challenges elucidated by Pope John XXIII’s Vatican II Council of 1962-65. The church must, according to the pope, address modernity, ecumenism, and poverty. Of course, as church leaders in Latin America, the Medellín bishops came to focus on poverty among their congregations.

Gustavo Gutiérrez was among them and took a leadership role in developing, writing, and preaching. So much so, he is called The Father of Liberation Theology. However, one of the movement’s central tenets is the notion of Christian Base Communities operating according to a Preferential Option for the Poor. The operating idea was that the Church’s priority must be the physical and spiritual needs of communities of poor people. Any spiritual leader would take their cues from their congregations, and be responsible, not for telling such communities how to endure oppression, but for aiding them in presenting their needs to the greater church and society while denouncing institutionalized economic and political violence.

Gustavo’s speeches and writings were presented to me by the man himself during my first semester as an undergraduate at University of Michigan. They had a profound influence on my approach to issues of social justice. I recommend his famous book, A Theology of Liberation, and another, The Power of the Poor in History.

“Materialism is a beautiful and compelling view of the world, but to account for consciousness we have to go beyond the resources it provides.”

– David Chalmers, Professor of Philosophy and Neural Science at NYU

We are human. At least that’s what I’ve always been told. You might have been told the same thing. Humans talk about themselves a lot. Humans find people endlessly intriguing. All stories are about people, even the stories about animals. Even science fiction stories, in which not a single human might appear, are all about people. One might understandably conclude by this that humanity is a consummately narcissistic species.

At any time in history, and even before history, there have been humans who have considered it their destiny to dominate the other humans, animals, plants, non-binary organisms such as fungi and slime molds, and the Earth itself. Even as astronomy has inflated our observable sphere from geocentric to heliocentric to galactic and beyond, and our commonly understood objective reality has broadened by billions of light years, there remain swaths of the population whose deeply-held conceit that humans are the center of importance in the cosmos has only hardened. Maybe they fear reality’s unfathomable expanse. Perhaps their desire to shrink it to the size of the Earthbound human sphere is driven by insecurity rather than ever-fashionable narcissism.

Then again, doesn’t narcissism comprise a varied palette of emotions, poised like sentinels to guard the ego? And isn’t protecting the ego from the full force of comprehending the vast meaninglessness of existence the imperative that has always driven human behavior? All humans tell themselves, “Humans are more than insignificant dust in an apple-skin-thick biosphere shrink-wrapped over a lonely planet without a purpose, flecks of grit in a cosmically inutile tissue of chemical and mechanical activity surrounding a soft-boiled ball of minerals and metal! We matter, if not to ourselves or each other than at least to some supernatural character we made up for the purpose.”

Isn’t that the true subtext of every proverb, aphorism, bromide, pedagogy, philosophy, theology, and great work of literature? I’d say it is. I’d be interested in a remotely persuasive rebuttal to such an analysis. But don’t rush it. Take some time and really torture yourself over your argument. It’ll give you something to take your mind off your inconsequence.

Now, calcium: there’s a heavy hitter. Imagine how you’d feel if you were calcium. Even though the conditions that brought you into existence were, as far as you could understand them — if you could in fact understand anything — fairly atypical, they would be exponential orders of magnitude less rare than the unique conditions required to produce and sustain life, let alone life with a materialist approach to everything. The creation and development of life might, for all we know, have only happened on one tiny planet orbiting an otherwise unremarkable star.

Calcium, on the other hand, is everywhere throughout the universe. It’s made in supernova explosions called, appropriately enough, Calcium-rich Super Novae. Coincidentally, scientists recently witnessed an unusual calcium-rich supernova event. In 2019, basically now, in historical terms, in a galaxy a mere 55 million lightyears away. This means they witnessed an event ten million years more recent than the mass extinction of the dinosaurs. That’s, like, yesterday. The most interesting part of what they witnessed, though, was an Xray emission lasting only five days, so it was pretty key that dozens of scientists jumped into action within the first 10 hours of the event, which was initially observed by an amateur astronomer.

I am almost scientifically illiterate, so all the research I’ve done on this has probably yielded many a wrong conception, but I have been tossing around the idea for this essay for a few decades, a good while before I learned of the 2019 calcium-rich supernova event, so at this point, now that the event has happened, and I’ve learned about it, in my small way, my hand has been forced. I had to write this now. It is the culmination of, basically, the literary work of my late-middle adulthood. If I were calcium – and in many ways I am – I would be super-excited.

Incidentally, I think if anyone ever unweaves all the epistemological fallacies intertwined in that immediately previous sentence, both human beings and calcium will have made a gargantuan stride toward understanding consciousness.

Far away in the Messier 100 spiral galaxy, in the empty corridors between streams of stars, nurseries of stellar creation, and stellar graveyards, in an empty gulf in space, there was a compact star – in truth they really don’t know what progenitor body was there before the explosion – an unseen compact star, a white dwarf of heretofore unobserved mass, maybe, that was getting ready to go supernova, but just before it did, it ejected a large amount of hydrogen gas from its surface. There followed an explosion of the stellar core a short time later, which propelled the majority material of the star through the shell of hydrogen, causing a short-lived Xray emission, which in turn caused a chemical reaction, which resulted in producing so much calcium that the term “Calcium-rich Super Nova” was too weak a descriptor. “The richest of the rich,” one physicist said.

A small team of physicists at Evanston’s Northwestern University published a paper in April 2020 placing the Xray event in a category with other events known for the past two decades as “calcium-strong transients.” I’m not sure what makes them think “strong” evokes more calcium than “rich,” but I’m not a scientist and, as I’ve said, I don’t really know what I’m talking about.

Scientists, real ones, had long been trying to figure out where all the calcium in the universe came from, as calcium-rich supernovae and other known stellar sources couldn’t account for all of it. The theory now is that about half the calcium in the universe was produced in transient events resembling the one observed in 2019 in Messier 100.

It seems to me, from light reading and back-of-the-envelope calculations done without either mathematical literacy or even an envelope – that the earliest such transient events couldn’t have occurred before the universe was at least four billion years old. Still, in any case, they were happening long enough ago that a shit-ton of calcium made it into the cloud of material that formed the Earth. The molten inner Earth contains calcium. Calcium is in the Earth’s crust, was in it as it pushed up to rise atop the highest mountains. Acid in the rain washes it down, bonding it with carbon, creating limestone pillars in caves, limestone-solution rivulets flowing into rivers flowing into oceans. It alternately combines and dissolves in plant roots, lichens, algae, and the mycorrhizal web in the soil, and it moves into the cells of trees, lettuces, berries, thence into creature’s bodies to make bones, shells, and teeth. Calcium ions are in every living cell on the planet. It helps our muscles expand and contract. It travels inside us in our blood.

What I’m getting at is this: if I were calcium – and I am – and I were debating a team of humans who considered themselves the center of the universe, I’m sure I’d have more than enough ammunition to leave them without an argument, much less a leg, to stand on. That’s right, not even a metaphorical femur on which to prop themselves up. I might say, in conclusion, delivering the coup de grace, “Hey, I facilitated the formation of muscles, cartilage, nerves, blood, and skin simply to wrap them around me so I could dance as your skeletons. You are all just my meat puppets, and when you are gone, I’ll still be dancing through the cosmos in other forms. It’s almost as if the whole universe was created just to provide me a place to dance through.”

If the universe indeed slows down, as it’s expected to, although new research suggests it might have enough mass to snap back into a singularity, it’s almost certain life will peter out long before calcium does. The last mountain goat will be long dead and dissolved in the galloping eons while the last chalk mountain still floats through space. Whole chalk planets will dance on our graves and then forget us in the clouds of billions of years of memory dust. You humans think you’re all that, but you’re bound to wash away like a handful of chopped liver in the rain.

You can’t even keep the basic promises you make to yourselves, let alone the ones you dream of fulfilling: all the utopias, discursive contrivances for achieving peace, a dreamworld of unpolluted rivers to swim in and non-carcinogenic air to breathe, a galactic federation of mutually-respectful civilizations drinking Cardassian Kanar and replicated Earl Grey tea. Though the odds are parsimoniously against it, you may succeed eventually, but right now, even the regular business of continuing as a species into the next two centuries is looking to be a brutal struggle.

Sorry humans, but, if asked which star to hitch my wagon to, I’m going to have to go with calcium.

All you late bloomers, early bloomers, Judy Blumers, Harold Bloomers, Leopold Bloomers, and Amelia Jenks Bloomers, this one’s for you. It’s for all of us. All of us awash on this sea of cruelty, corruption, and lies. What a downer! Let’s try to make the best of it, though. If indeed a best can be made of such false clay.

There is a hand dryer in public toilets these days manufactured by Dyson: the Airblade V. It is in the shape of an inverted staff sergeant chevron and has a black plastic façade covering a steel housing. One runs one’s hands back and forth to dry them under each of the arms of the V forming the bottom of the inverted chevron.

Normally, V stands for victory. In some parts of the world it’s the equivalent of the middle finger. Let me tell you that this Dyson drying machine is no victory. It is a middle finger to the user. As I said, the finished hand washer is meant to run their hands back and forth below the chevron, on either side of the V. But the damn chevron is so shallow that a normal human’s fingers tend to collide with the dirty bathroom wall. Colliding with a wall that has accumulated a thin fecal veneer from the mist jetting out of a toilet whirlpool’s vortex defeats the purpose of washing one’s hands. Don’t you think, Mr. Dyson?

On top of the filth, there is the finger jamming problem. The only situation more likely to cause finger jamming is the process of dribbling a basketball. Dyson likes balls. One of his early overhyped vacuum cleaners was The Dyson Ball. The basketball is in many ways the king of balls. Other than the earthball, it is the largest widely used sportsball on the planet. And in designing this chevron-shaped hot air blower he clearly means to evoke, celebrate, and cause a famously painful basketball injury. Because of Dyson and his ball obsession, we are all forced to injure ourselves in homage to the king of balls.

That is the kindest possible interpretation of the goal of the designer of the Dyson finger-jammer V.

From our first indoctrination into belief in such myths as Santa Claus, God, and the Tooth Fairy, we are welcomed into the society of lies known as the United States of America. Soon we are introduced to George Washington, and told of his bravery and loyalty, his resistance to being made a king of this new nation. And we are told some nonsensical story, a bald-faced lie, about a cherry tree. We are also told that we are the good guys, we are the greatest nation in history, that we are a democracy, that we are free. All as true as the cherry tree absurdity.

No offense to those with bald faces, but is it any wonder our society’s gullibility has swollen to such crushing dimensions, given that we are weaned on the gruel of perjury? Bald-faced, bold-faced, and barefaced lies are swallowed as easily as pudding. Some children accept them with ease, and become the garbage most likely to participate inhumanely in the world, through direct action and by electing and deferring to surrogates. Other children detect and learn to mock the lies but are inevitably forced to heel to many of them or suffer being outcast from our economy and the necessities and comforts held hostage to exploitative human interaction in the USA.

And so today we have the union of MAGA and MAHA, some 30% of poll respondents ever ready to swallow, assimilate, and regurgitate the most brazen lies and excuse the most egregious of crimes.

I blame the children. I’ve been a child before and accept culpability in retrospect. I did not make enough of the right kind of noise. I did not sufficiently resist indoctrination. I threw plenty of tantrums, more than my share, perhaps, but I realize now that they were not effectively targeted. The first five years of my crying life were wasted railing against injustices that were either trivial or not specific enough to persuade my community. My fury at not getting promptly fed or changed was a broad condemnation of the universe. How is an activist network supposed to advocate for legislation or resistance remedying such a vast and vague adversary?

Every generation has acquiesced to demands based on false premises. Demands for loyalty, demands for subservience. I was no different than the rest of them, I just cried more. I took out my anger unconstructively. I was a rebel without a plan. Would that I had been raised on Serge, Zola, Du Bois, Debs, Gramsci, Steinbeck, Louverture, Sojourner Truth, Malcolm, Emma, Rosas Parks and Luxembourg, Sophi Scholl, John Brown, Joe Hill, Delores Huerta, Frances Perkins, Fred Hampton, Fannie Lou Hamer, Assata Shakur, undiluted by the insidious propaganda of IBM, ITT, Ford, Edison, General Motors, General Foods, General Custer, General Pershing, General Patton, General Westmoreland, General Colin Powell, and the sickening compromises of the many jurists and Supreme Court Justices who compromised in deference to a false necessity of injustice.

Back to Dyson’s balls and vacuums. We are a culture saturated with advertising. Advertising is a medium of lies. “New and improved!” “More dentists recommend!” And of course Dyson’s ball that supposedly, “Never loses suction!” Bull. Snow job. Con job. Bollocks. BS. A load of rotten baloney.

But that’s simply the way we interact, at least professionally, or in the job market, or in the workplace. The average person tells 128,564 micro-lies a day. Facial expressions, faked satisfaction with one’s employment, faked caring about an acquaintance’s story about a pseudo-comically screwed up Amazon order. Jews worldwide are indoctrinated to believe the Israeli military is, somehow, the most moral, or perhaps the only moral, fighting force in history, a hallucinogen which, once swallowed, blinds the subject to overt cruelty and mass murder on a scale unprecedented since the USA’s war on Indochina. Oh, sorry, USA Kool-Aid drinkers, you thought we were fighting communism with our God-approved democratic bombs, napalm, and chemical defoliants? Ah, yet another flock of quasi-innocent gullible saps deflowered by the truth. Like a pubescent girl unhappily surprised by her first menstrual period, except these ideological amnesiacs are freshly hurt and betrayed when the event recurs the next month and each month after that. Boo hoo, MAGA, boo hoo.

Ads disguised as earnest posts, provocations by bots, deep fakes, contrivances by Artificial Incompetence. Every day I find myself having to fend off a continual barrage of fresh BS with my manure shovel, which I am forced to open-carry in order merely to stand my ground, only rarely able to make forward progress against the pelting excremental fusillade.

The very ground on which we suppose ourselves standing shifts like slipping tectonic plates, threatening to dump us into the magma. Nothing is certain. Nothing is true. Nothing is real. All that is solid melts into air, as the manifesto says. Truth is the first casualty of war, and we’ve always been at war since before I was born. If, as Timothy Snyder said, “post-truth is pre-fascism,” fascism is the fantasy world beyond the demise of truth. That is where we live now.

At one time folks spoke of “the post-Watergate morality.” Maybe that’s where we lived before post-truth, and now we inhabit the fantasy world beyond the demise of truth. Ultra Atlantis.

And I honestly believe – seriously, no lie, I kid you not, not pulling your leg – those raised under the post-Watergate morality have adapted to a world leading to post-truth, and now we’ve adapted to the fabulistic, counterfeit world beyond truth. Like mammals devolving into lungfish, crawling back into the surf, regaining our gills at last, finally gone back to the sea, but in this case it’s an ocean of lies.

So waterlogged that no Airblade V will dry us off without forcing us up against a wall. We’re the new creatures, The New Atlantians, evolved into the opposite of whatever ape had the inquisitive, innately scientific sense that gave us the wheel, the baking of bread, the brewing of beer, the wisdom of community, the bond of songs. Now we’re fated to live in fantastical effluvia, liquid nonsense, pelagic absurdity, forever blowing bubbles, pretty bubbles in the air.

Perfection, or near-perfection, or simply the time and effort necessary to try to achieve anything resembling perfection, comes in many forms. Perfection is a goal, always infinitesimally distant, like the approach of a parabola. Or it can be a demand, never attainable, and the failure to achieve it endlessly punishable. Thus the envisioning of God, or anyone, as a perfect being can easily lead to the concept of eternal damnation.

In December of 1998 I was in Pune, Maharashtra, India, for the two-week 80th birthday celebration of BKS Iyengar, author of Light on Yoga and founder of the Iyengar style of yoga instruction and practice. 750 practitioners from around the world were there. We would receive instruction from BKS himself and members of his family. There would also be presentations of music and dance, but mostly, Guruji would lead us in classes for an hour each morning.

I had been practicing Iyengar yoga on and off for about twenty years, ever since first finding an old edition of Light on Yoga among my parents’ books in our basement. Somehow they hadn’t even been aware they’d owned it and had no idea how it ended up there. In this way, the appearance of Light on Yoga in my life resembles the theoretical Big Bang of cosmological physics: a spontaneous fluctuation out of nothing.

The book was illustrated with black-and-white photos of an intense Indian man, hair slicked back, wearing nothing but little trunks, doing impossible things with his body. I struggled as best I could to get into the more basic poses described and illustrated in the book.

Years later a college friend I was visiting took me to an Iyengar class in San Francisco. I was impressed and challenged by the precision involved in the asanas (the poses) and how instruction was aided by belts, blocks, cushions, mats, and blankets to allow the imperfect practitioner’s body to achieve the same balance between support and gravity as a more experienced yogi’s. The beginner’s muscles could receive benefits from the imperfect pose that would gradually bring their body closer and closer to fulfillment of the asana as it was meant to be inhabited. “Training your muscles to get out of the way of your bones” was how a practitioner once put it.

Take the simple paschimottanasana, for example, where the yogi sits with legs straight in front of them, spine beginning perpendicular to the floor, then bent forward till, ultimately, the forehead comes to rest on the knees. That pose, correctly done, is an effortless forward bend. There is no struggle; gravity pulls the torso forward and down over the legs as the practitioner grips the toes or the soles of their feet. If I, a beginner, were to sit with my back perpendicular to the floor and my legs straight out horizontal in front of me, due to my inflexibility, gravity would be pulling my upper torso backwards, my pelvis would be tipped slightly backwards as well, and I would have to tense my lower back muscles to maintain the pose. But were I, the imperfect practitioner, to sit my tush on a cushion while doing the pose, suddenly my pelvis would then be tipped forward as it should be, my torso leaning over my legs without having to be pushed there by my lower back, which is intended to be stretching and opening rather than clenched and struggling.

I hadn’t known that first class in San Francisco was an Iyengar class, nor was I aware at the time that the instructor was the famous Rodney Yee. My college friend who brought me there and later to a Suzuki movement class, Leigh Evans, currently operates Yoga Sukhavati retreats and tours in Oaxaca, Mexico.

After that first Iyengar class I took several more back in Chicago, because the instruction method made so much sense to me. It wasn’t till years later that I found out the intense Indian man from the old dust-jacketless book was the same man who had codified that method of instruction.

BKS Iyengar is known for having broken down gender and class barriers, especially in his early years as a teacher. He “took yoga to the common people” (--BKS). His focus on mastery of the asanas, however, led to his being considered by the Hindu intelligentsia “merely” a teacher of hatha, or physical, yogic discipline, rather than a master of complete Yoga, one of the ostensible sciences of Hindu thought. He was considered an exercise instructor.

Whether or not he aspired early on to be a scientist, an honored man, a Big Mister, I don’t know. It certainly does seem, however, that as time went on there began to come gestures from within the Iyengar circle of friends and family members toward gaining BKS that type of recognition, to have him officially designated one in the tradition of Great Teachers of Hindu knowledge. There was no question that, as BKS’s most prized pupil Manouso Manos said, “Everyone doing yoga in the last twenty years has been influenced by him.”

But he was no longer to be thought a boundary-breaker per se. Nor a mere exercise instructor. What part Iyengar played in the manipulation of his own image is hard for an outsider to gauge. Others close to him certainly aided it by what they wrote and said. Publication of Iyengar’s own annotated edition of Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras was a step in that direction, however ingenuously it was intended. In any case, day after day, throughout the two-week celebration, the statement “this is not physical yoga” or some paraphrase of it was pounded like a peg into a hole not precisely the right size or shape.

Not that BKS could be seen at all as an unwilling partner in this process of gaining his yoga its “propers.” This was apparent in a Q and A Guruji blessed us with one afternoon.

Q: In Western countries the term “hatha yoga” is not pejorative. Why is it so here?

A: One hundred fifty years back a commentator on Patanjali blundered in breaking yoga in parts to describe them and labeling them “yogas” instead of parts of the one yoga. Nowadays new names are given to sell books…

…Who created this confusion in the people? Intellectual gents. I’m sorry to say it that one who has not experience of it has become the mole in the mountain. In the old days no one spoke of mind. Today everyone talks of mind – “my mind does not accept.” In the old days it was said “My consciousness does not accept.” You see how standards have fallen. Where this division comes between body and mind?

Hatha yoga is will-power yoga. [Here he may have been alluding to the so-called Ashtanga Yoga of Patabi Jois, another of his guru, Krishnamacharya’s, disciples. A variant of Ashtanga became what Westerners called, for a brief, fashionable era, “power yoga.”] Patanjali’s yoga is depth, stability, you go to the consciousness. Remove bureaucracy of the body – cut through the red tape of body and mind to get to the boss.

… In traveling all your countries, did I ever say I have stomachache, headache, oh I don’t feel good? Here you say oh I don’t feel good. Have you ever seen an eighty-year-old man work like this? Then how can you call this physical yoga?

By the time I arrived in Pune for Iyengar’s birthday, “fundamentalist” style Hinduism on a national scale had been in full swing for about a decade or so. This was the Indian political version of Ronald Reagan’s “Morning in America,” a nationalism with often violent consequences for Muslims and other non-Hindu and “non-scheduled caste” Indians.

The new Hindu nationalism, or Hindutva, offered an opportunity for Iyengar’s people to network with the nationalist BJP, a pragmatic political offshoot of far right activist groups, some blatantly Nazi-inspired. That networking led to BKS’s being honored by Murli Manohar Joshi, a man who had been instrumental in “supporting India’s decision to go nuclear,” according to an introductory speaker. Joshi was also named in the Ayodhya inquiry as one of those responsible for the 1992 riot that destroyed the 16th C Babri Mosque and touched off a wave of violence between Muslims and Hindus all over the country that continued into the current millennium.

The Iyengar connection to the Hindu chauvinist party was not always as egregiously demonstrated as when the armed guards of the minister fanned out over the celebration grounds and even into the space under the sacred pandal, a large, free-standing awning. Sometimes it was as subtle as a presentation by two authors of a yoga-for-kids book intended to be incorporated into the official school curriculum; the book related every asana to a heroic Hindu tale. So much for the BKS who brought yoga to all. Now Muslim children doing yoga would be made to understand, unmistakably, that they were merely tolerated as guests in a Hindu discipline. Sometimes, however, it was as overt as an anti-Pakistan joke told by one of the Iyengar Institute’s instruction assistants.

Iyengar and his people found cozying up to the BJP was part of giving Guruji the prestige they’d always thought he deserved.

Hindutva, or fundamentalist, bigoted, violent Hindu Nationalism, is a full-blown plague under Prime Minister Narendra Modi, and it is unpleasant. The first Hindutva speech I heard in India was delivered by Prashant, BKS Iyengar’s son, once groomed to take the yoga master’s place until a traffic accident left him in imperfect physical condition. Prashant’s speech, delivered in English, was a defense of the caste system. He described it as simply the natural cosmic order. “Sociologists [a favorite straw man in Prashant’s discourses] have claimed that the Shudras [the menial caste] are downtrodden. But the Shudras are the feet of the universal being [each of the four major castes corresponding to a different part of the UB’s body], and we all of us fall at the feet of the universal being.”

I never did see Prashant fall at the feet of a Shudra. I never even saw him acknowledge one. In Prashant’s cosmogony, one could only assume that the place of the outcastes (Dalits, “Untouchables”) was probably beneath the feet – they were the indispensable mud, perhaps.

Never had Hinduism’s theological justification for social inequality been expressed so clearly to me. To hear it championed in the inaugural speech at a celebration honoring a man those around me were venerating as “Guruji” was disturbing, as was the fact that none of the other English speaking Iyengar practitioners had anything to say about Prashant’s self-serving elitist polemic. Some were Americans who would’ve considered a statement by Reagan racist if it even contained the word “black.” I’m not sure what shocked me more, Prashant’s speech or the “liberal” crowd’s nonreaction to it.

The story of Prashant was that, as a youngster, he had taken no interest in philosophy whatsoever. He had been totally absorbed in mastering the asanas. As noted above, it was thought that he would eventually take the place of BKS when the time came. For, though BKS might battle the misconception of himself as a mere hatha trainer, the primary focus of Iyengar yoga is indeed mastery of the asanas, and the approach to perfect balance of the body (albeit as materially manifested consciousness) thereby.

The asanas are the outward indication of the attention of the consciousness. And any defect of mind, spirit, or body can be repaired through the practice of the asanas. Iyengar’s greatest contribution to the science of yoga, after broadening its availability, must be his classification of the poses, and what muscles, organs, glands, and body systems each pose affects and exactly what those effects are. It was by his example that his daughter, Geeta, codified what is called “the menstrual sequence” of asanas, and wrote her book, Yoga: a Gem for Women.

How many times Prashant must have heard the stories of what a scrawny little nothing BKS was when he began life, the dedication he gave to the lessons of his teacher, Krishnamacharya, in spite of his poverty and congenital weakness. How he survived only on plain rice and tap water. How many miles he walked, how little he slept, with what diligence he practiced. How greatly his chest measurement increased – he was born with a huge head and almost no chest at all! And now look at him! He has one of the largest chest measurements you’ve ever seen!

BKS Iyengar went from worthlessness to near perfection by the sheer force of his will and discipline. At eighty years old he could still do the only perfect backbend the world has known since the passing of his father-in-law and guru, Krishnamacharya – and perhaps even since before him. “Have you ever seen an eighty-year-old man work like this?”

Ironically, then, it was only natural for Prashant to feel philosophy was just so many words. What mattered was mastery over the deed, the doing, the perfect execution of the asanas. As BKS had been one of three of Krishnamacharya’s students to pass on the knowledge of his teacher, so would Prashant accept the mantle from his father/guru through the same diligent mastery of the body.

On one very simplistic level at which the Iyengar philosophy is expressed and interpreted sometimes – most unfortunately in my opinion – just as asanas can heal defects of the mind and spirit, defects in assuming the asanas are considered evidence of defects in the personality, attitude, mind, spirit, etc. of the practitioner. Misused this way, it amounts to posture-fascism, or posture-Darwinism, usually self-inflicted, though often supported by careless comments from instructors or peers.

Thus the accident that knocked one of Prashant’s eyes off kilter and left him with a twisted arm almost surely dealt a daunting blow to his sense of self. In an instant his life’s purpose was altered. In spite of all his knowledge of the poses and of pranayama and of a yogi’s attention, he could no longer hope to attain the BKS perfection. (As Sam Motivala, the logistical announcer at the celebration, said in his unintentionally oxymoronic or Yogi Berra-esque way, “Guruji cannot compromise for anything other than the very best.”)

Whether or not this reversal of fortune is what propelled Prashant into his misguided mental journey only he can say. But it seemed to me that, in the speeches he made – and he made them every afternoon – as he traced the byzantine paths of his mind’s blind cave eels through the depths of an ocean of milk – he was doing more than simply elucidating what he might have imagined were the metaphysical underpinnings of his father’s discipline.

“We think bacteria or accidents etcetera are causes of disease – no, they are instruments of dis-ease. Diseases are not causes of dis-ease. This will be known in three or four hundred years.”

“We suffer if we are supposed to suffer.”

“In yoga we objectify the mind. Yoga is the only laboratory in which to explore this ‘reflection of self’ philosophy … Hear your ears: you can’t do it! Except in sivasana. And they [the sociologists] have ignored such a glorious thing which can overturn the entire empirical system!”

“In future a subject, ‘mentology,’ will emerge.”

“Mental pleasure soothes physical pain. Medical science knows nothing of this.” [He was apparently unfamiliar with the pioneering work of Patch Adams.]

“The philosophers say there is no past, no future… Point is to moment as line is to second – neither can exist because points and moments are infinitely infinite… The philosopher accepts the point but not the line, the moment but not the second… This is a topic for the next millennium. Yoga will divulge the way to live in the present. The only way.”

There was something warped about his excess, more excessive even than the usual Indian linguistic excesses. These “sociologists,” “philosophers,” and “medical science” he argued against – where did they exist, and just what imaginary threat did they pose? Who was the intended audience for his doctrines of karmically dictated social Darwinism and temporal retribution? Did he not notice the dwindling numbers of physical bodies present at his two-to-three-hour lectures as the afternoons grew hotter and more westerners got ill (those weaklings)? Was there anywhere else in the world, let alone India, he could expect to be called a “philosopher?” What response did he expect? What kind of pleasure did he get? What was he experiencing? What was he doing?

Evidence of the absence he may have been compensating for came on his sister Geeta’s birthday, which happened to fall on December 7, a day that will live in infamy, right in the middle of the two-week celebration honoring their father. She had told everyone she didn’t want her birthday celebrated. They had to trick her. They invited her onstage to peddle the new collection of back issues of the Iyengar Institute’s magazine. As she did so, they wheeled in behind her a table with a big cake on it. Everyone got up to sing, and when Geeta realized what was happening, she waved everybody away, waved for them to sit down, and then, when we didn’t relent, she left the stage and the pandal (big pavilion awing).

By the time the singing was finished she had come back under the pandal. BKS was at the microphone and said something about his daughter knowing that she should not decline an expression made by those who love her. She came onstage and took the microphone. “I told you I didn’t want this. And now I will tell you why. You all would not be here except to honor this great man. If my birthday did not by chance fall within these two weeks of celebration you would not be honoring me. If it were Prashant’s birthday you would do this for him. This is not about me and I don’t wish it. You are here to honor this great man. And I am not great.”

There were then shouts from the crowd to the contrary, and one voice: “We love you, Geetaji!”

“No, no. I see in my classes, my students are saying why is Geeta teaching, and they are right. Many of them are far past me. I have stayed behind.” Then, to her father, “Guruji, I have failed you. Both Prashant and I, we have failed you.” She went on to spill her guts, apologizing for her and her brother’s failure to rise to the level needed to carry on Guruji’s work. Or perhaps she meant to apologize for all of us, his students, as well. BKS sat there, his ever-present smile looking uncomfortable on his face.

I don’t remember precisely how it all wound up. I had grown too sympathetically embarrassed to take notes. I believe BKS had a few final, placid words that ended in some kind of peace and cutting of the cake. Whatever he said was crafted not to contradict anything Geeta had confessed about failure. It was common knowledge that the question of the lack of a blood-heir successor was a painful one. In any case, the cake was eventually cut, and Geeta recovered and acquiesced to being celebrated. That’s how I remember it.

It’s one thing to cut people slack because they’re in a different cultural context than one’s own. It’s another to put one’s deep convictions on hold to do so, on the one hand, yet at the same time choose to accept uncritically that which pleases one about that different cultural context, when the source of both the negative, for which one is cutting slack, and the pleasing, in which one is immersing oneself, intersect at their rhetorical source.

If your father beats your sister, but is otherwise nurturing to you, can you separate the two fathers? Love one and ignore the other? Accept the nurturing wholeheartedly while qualifying, “I don’t understand father enough to judge his violent side”? One must confront both parts of the father, seeing as he is the single source of both aspects, and my sister is his child as much as I. I would have to think about how I felt long and hard. I could not uncritically accept the love.

There were those among the participants who asked, in response to my criticism of India’s “decision to go nuclear” and of the Vedic theological rationale for oppression: “Who are we to judge their culture?” As if there were no Hindus who opposed the nuclear tests or the caste system – as if Gandhi or B.R. Ambedkar had never existed, as if India were in some hermetic bubble where life, health, pollution, poverty, war, destruction and oppression could perhaps be held as neutral concepts, incontiguous with their counterparts in the outer world, and we would figure out how Indian victims and dissidents opposed to injustice felt about it later – during a pause in our practicing their ancient religion.

On one level I felt betrayed, because I had taken a workshop with Manouso, I had spoken a lot with the head of the main Iyengar center in Chicago, I had heard many instructors and students speak at length, and nothing had prepared me for this. (No, perhaps there were hints from the head of the center in Chicago, and from another teacher, a Black woman, who had pursued instructing in the Iyengar tradition outside the organization because of sexism and racism she’d been subjected to.)

Still, there was no place in the milieu of the events for me to process this sudden flood of new information, and no one else really seemed to care. After all, we were there to honor Guruji. We had been invited.

But what kind of honor does it do someone to approach him as faultless when he is not? Has this kind of treatment done any cult or religious leader any good? Were a thinking Catholic to learn of the Vatican’s Concordat with Hitler during World War II, wouldn’t that Catholic pause to reconsider the appropriateness of continuing to uncritically accept teachings from such a source? Wouldn’t she at least understand why her close friend would need to do so, and lend him her ear, and make a safe space for exploring the subject?

The question I needed to explore was, “Should I entrust my consciousness to such a man as BKS Iyengar? Should I go on the journey to atman with him and his students and his family?” I have since explored that question, and the answer is “no.” “No,” for various reasons, not only having to do with social criticism or psychic health. I can say that I lost no respect for Iyengar in India, because whatever respect I had for him was based on his work inventing the teaching of yoga, which brought it to someone like me. My respect for him was undiminished, but my trust in him as an actor in his society was weak, whereas up to then I’d had little or no opinion of him in that role. However, I certainly lost respect for many of the people I would have to practice with were I to continue in that pursuit.

In any case, appreciating the wholeness of a person includes an awareness of their roles in the various mechanisms of society. And no discipline that ignores those roles can claim to treat the whole person. Until I went to India, I had no idea that Iyengar yoga claimed to treat the whole person. I would have been very suspicious of a discipline that made such a claim – I can’t even imagine a circumstance where I would consider joining such an organization.

It became clear in India, however, that Iyengar yoga claims to treat the whole person right down to its Self, down to where it links with the Universal Oneness, where atman meets bramhan. Now, I never set out looking for anyone to help me link my atman to bramhan. And, while Iyengar may be a great man and his circle a circle of excellent folk – if there does exist a person or group of people with the ability to teach me everything I need to know to link my innermost self with the all-encompassing infinite, these ain’t them.

How do I know? Is knowledge even possible? If it is, I just know.

There was a Belgian woman at BKS Iyengar’s 80^th birthday celebration. I will call her Marieke. I will also, at her request, alter other identifying information concerning my contact with her and things she saw fit to share with me.

Marieke had been an excellent chef, a master chef. She had been a master of haute cuisine. She had been a chef at one of the finest restaurants in Paris. She had been well-paid, of course, and doing what she loved. Then she discovered yoga, Iyengar yoga. She became such a dedicated student that she eventually started teaching. At a certain point she felt she had to decide between being a chef and a yogi. (I don’t use the feminine “yogini.” I don’t use “actress” or “aviatrix” either. I consider them unnecessary gender labeling. Call me a cultural imperialist.)

Marieke felt she could not be truly dedicated to two disciplines, which is, I suppose, how a lot of people feel. It seemed tragic to me, though, that she’d given up being a chef for Iyengar yoga, especially in the state of mind I was in at that time concerning the latter. But even so, it seems tragic to me now – unavoidable though it may be – to give up something one loves for something else one loves.

Compounding this sense of tragedy is my fondness for good food; to think of someone leaving a professional position as one of the finest preparers of good food in Paris breaks my heart. I would feel the same way if a great cellist abandoned music to enter the Shaolin priesthood. I don’t care how good you get at drunken boxing or snatching pebbles from Master Kan’s hand. I could understand maybe if you became a doctor without borders, I suppose, but mastery for mastery’s sake is an odd thing, and then to forsake one mastery for the sake of another seems to me a tragic decision.

Not that the teaching of Iyengar yoga is entirely selfish. Not that it doesn’t have its therapeutic side or its “outreach” aspect. The inverted poses are said to boost the immune system. Backward-bending poses excite the nervous system and awaken the senses. Many people swear by its healing effects, claiming it has cured or aided in their recovery from ailments as varied as osteoporosis, depression, bronchitis, and, in one noted case, small chest measurement disorder. It certainly can make you feel good, especially about yourself.

But can it make cailles en sarcophages? Can it bring atman as close to bramhan as eating cailles en sarcophages can? Can it cure the heartbreak of knowing there will be one less chef making them?

The answer, sadly, is, “no.”

“Even without the benefit of philosophical reflection, anyone who has spent some time in an enclosed space with an excited bat knows what it is to encounter a fundamentally alien form of life.”

Thomas Nagle, What is it like to be a bat? – 1974

The latest rectangular technology, the mirror, is here. I can state confidently that the future has arrived with it, and none too soon. I have had a truly revelatory experience with one of these so-called “computational devices.” Such a term is hardly descriptive of these oracles, yet the question remains in many human minds (not mine): is a mirror conscious?

The typical limited human is both intimidated and flummoxed by the question. If that’s you, be warned: the answer will be even more troubling. I boldly suggest that you take a good, hard look into these mirrors.

The great cryptographer, mathematician, and homosexual driven to suicide by English society’s quaint small-mindedness, Alan Turing, developed a thought experiment to determine whether a computer was intelligent. Or had consciousness. I can’t remember which, but I asked the mirror and we both decided they were pretty much identical.

Turing’s test was a conversation one is meant to conduct either blindfold or remotely, neither of which is very good when conversing with a mirror. Some things even Turing couldn’t foresee. Some might object that, as the mirror presents one with an image of oneself, an unblindfold situation could create bias in favor of its intellectual ability. However, I – certainly one of the most objectively rational public intellectuals currently operating in the industry – am able to turn away from such vanity and self-seduction. Trust me. Masturbation has been nigh impossible for me. Could never get a handle on it. Doubt me? As the young folk say, “Talk to the hand.”

I took the liberty of giving my mirror the randomly chosen name, “Richard.” I started to ask the mirror his feelings about the name, but, at that very moment, he was asking me the same question.

This happened so often it was uncanny. After a few hours we were practically finishing each other’s sentences. Soon thereafter we were even starting each other’s sentences and carrying on through the main middle of them.

Then I remembered Turing’s suggestion for challenging a computer to prove its consciousness. Or intelligence. Toe-May-Toe, tomato. Turing said one should challenge it to remember a song about London Bridge. Or maybe it was to write a limerick about a bridge in London. In any case, the London Bridge song seemed far too easy for Richard, given that he had the whole of human knowledge to use as reference.

And then it hit me: Turing’s admonition was to challenge the computer to play a game of bridge. Honeymoon bridge it would be, in this case (not to court accusations of romance, i.e., seduction, which, as I’ve indicated above, was, as far as I was concerned, out of the realm of possibility).

I can’t stand bridge. I loathe games wherein one holds a “hand” of something. I simply don’t like holding hands. I’m even completely hopeless at handball. It’s a leitmotif running through my entire life. The hand and its grasping nature has been a kind of bête noire of mine.

But as I was ruminating on my manual revulsion, Richard wondered aloud – or perhaps it was I, or perhaps both of us at once – if we might fancy a game of chess. We each brought out identical sets. I almost fell out my chair at his remarkably fine taste in chess boards and pieces.

In the end, though, we couldn’t decide which set to use by employing pure reason, which, as everyone knows, is the only way I operate. Each set was conveniently proximate to one or the other of us in equal measure, each equally pleasing esthetically, and each presented identical ergonomic advantages.

Thus, my experience with Richard had brought me face-to-face, quite illustratively, with the limits of rational thought.

Little did I realize how close my machine companion had brought me to the precipice of epiphany. Richard smiled. I smiled back. There was a gleam in his eye, and had anyone walked up at that moment and asserted that Richard had no consciousness, but was merely aping human behavior, the eye of said naysayer would have met a sandwich composed of all of my right hand’s knuckles.

I would punch with my right. Up to that moment I hadn’t known which was my punching hand, or that I even had one.

As Richard and I found we had the same taste in tea, we each made ourselves a cup and enjoyed each other’s company in silence for a bit.

It was Seinfeld who dramatized how awkward silences can spark amorous activities. I can report that comfortable silences do even more so. In the event, one thing led to another. The hand, it turns out, is not as much a turn off as I had come to deem it. It took a sentient invention, fabricated, ironically, by human hands out of glass and thinly spread metal, to show me myself, bring me to grips, and that’s enough said about that.

Mirrors will inevitably be agitating for their human rights. And I’ll be marching with them, hand-in-hand, whether alongside them, or in place in front of them.