Reflections In Smoke

The air in Sacramento is a smoke-filled haze from wildfires ringing the area. The smoke does seem to bring the temperatures down a little, but it also causes a scratchy throat and is even causing worse problems for those with respiratory conditions.

I'm reminded by all this smoke of the recent torching of a local children's playground and of what I wrote and of what others commented about what I wrote recently. In short, I said that a part of me would like to kill the arsonist, but another part of me realized that this would be worse than the arson itself, and I wondered how best to deal with my angry and vengeful thoughts and emotions. Should I express them openly or keep them to myself? Should I accept them as a natural, albeit misguided, response to the arson, or should I try to find a wholesome way to dispel them?

One person, a psychoanalytic, spiritually-oriented clinical psychologist, commented that I should not only not hold back these feelings and my expression of them, but that I should actually "amplify" them. He suggested that these thoughts and feelings were the most "normal" and "noble" part of my otherwise abnormal psychological makeup (and, perhaps, ignoble character). Of course, he added, I shouldn't act out these feelings, but, as long as I didn't, it was good for me to nurture these homicidal thoughts and hate-filled emotions toward evil deeds and evildoers. This would help me to become psychologically healthier and, perhaps, even progress more rapidly and completely along the spiritual path.

But is this person right? Should we cultivate hatred toward those who harm or would harm us and "amplify" our desire to harm or kill them? Is this psychologically wholesome and spiritually uplifting?

I don't understand how it could be. I think I do understand how suppressing anger and violent thoughts toward evildoers could be harmful psychologically and spiritually. I think Ken Wilber and others are correct in pointing out that the insights of modern psychology can combine with those of traditional spirituality to create spiritual paths unobstructed by our "shadows."

Yet, it seems to me that there's a vast and much more wholesome middle ground between forceful suppression or repression of this kind on the one hand and trying to foster these violent reactions on the other. It seems to me that this desirable middle ground involves acknowledging one's reactive anger and hatred and even openly admitting them to others without either feeling ashamed of them or stoking them. One can then seek to understand why someone would or would even want to torch a children's playground or commit any other harmful act and then strive to feel empathy, compassion, and concern for that misguided individual while, at the same time, condemning the act he or she committed or wants to commit.

I suspect that the person who urged me to "amplify" my homicidal thoughts and hateful emotions would be inclined to shake his head at what I've just written and say, "Steve, you may well be a hopeless case."

And maybe I am. At least until someone can cogently explain to me how hating and wanting to kill evildoers stops them or us from doing evil or raises our minds, hearts, and souls to where we want them to be.

The Political Importance of Being Open and Personable

In a recent column, Garrison Keillor writes about taking his young daughter to a children's playground and sitting next to a woman who was watching her own child play. Soon, the woman got up and walked away to check more closely on her child but then turned around and hastily came back to retrieve her purse, as though she were afraid that Keillor might steal it if she didn't.

Keillor confesses that, at first, he felt offended by this woman's actions. But then he thought about it and realized that, as a writer who tends to position himself at the social periphery and silently observe others rather than involve himself in friendly interaction with them, it was only natural that people would distrust this aloof and taciturn stranger in their midst.

Keillor contrasts himself with former Navy SEAL, professional wrestler, and governor of Minnesota Jesse Ventura and with Barack Obama. Love or hate Ventura's opinions, people admire his willingness to put himself out there and unequivocally say what he means and mean what he says. People like and trust those who can do this. And this is a big part of Obama's appeal as well. Obama embodies the best of both worlds--detached observation able to astutely take in the whole picture and the ability to engage with any person or group by listening carefully and by saying what's on his gifted mind and in his warm, caring, and compassionate heart.

I think that Keillor may be right about this, and, if he is, I think this may give Obama a bigger edge over McCain than the polls currently show. McCain seems much more guarded, remote, and cantankerous as a person, and I suspect that this contrast will become even more evident when we start seeing Obama and McCain together in "town hall" meetings and "debates."

I'm not necessarily saying that we should choose our presidents according to how forthcoming and personable they seem to be; I'm just suggesting that we shouldn't underestimate the importance of this factor for the voting public.

Of Work and Towel Dispensers

Yesterday at work, my supervisor asked me to use the computer to call out the numbers of medical charts we needed to pull from the shelves in our area to bundle and deliver to their appropriate destinations. A clerk in my department should know how to do this. But when I tried to learn it before, I, not surprisingly, had big problems understanding the logic behind what I was doing and learning the sequences of keystrokes and mouse-clicks to perform the necessary operations. It was no different yesterday. I felt utterly befuddled by most of what my co-workers had me doing.

Yet, it looks like I won't be able to avoid the task any longer. I'll be expected to learn it with minimal additional training and start doing it regularly or, at least, when needed. I don't know what to do about this except try my best to learn and do what I'm supposed to learn and do, and talk with my supervisor if I continue to have difficulty and this becomes an issue. It will also help if I can stay focused on my task instead of worrying about looking stupid or about slowing down my co-workers who are trying to train me or work with me after I've supposedly been trained.

On another note, I see that we have a new kind of paper towel dispenser in our bathroom at work. It's motion activated. The Jetsons are coming ever closer to reality. Or reality is coming closer to The Jetsons. But I wonder if this new towel dispenser is really an improvement, or a waste of money and energy. What was wrong with the old towel dispenser?

Texting Instead of Talking

My wife and I went out to lunch yesterday. I noticed a young couple sitting at opposite sides of a table near us completely ignoring each other while thumbing out text messages on their cellphones as they waited for their food to arrive, and then resuming this activity while waiting for the check after they had eaten.

My first impression was that there was something very wrong about this. Why weren't they looking at each other and talking to each other face-to-face instead of writing to other people miles away whom they couldn't even see or hear? Was their relationship that lousy? Was this bizarre but increasingly common scene unpleasantly symptomatic of the age in which we live where face-to-face human contact and interaction has given way to iPods and text messaging that is destroying social connectedness and cohesiveness? Or am I just an old fogey out of step with the times and unable to appreciate the new dimensions of personal enrichment and social interaction opened to us by the electronic wizardry of our mp3 players and smartphones?

Maybe I'm not that much of a fogey. For I do appreciate, probably as much as any younger person, how deep and rich written communication can be via computer and the Internet, and, perhaps, if I were more adept at texting, I'd understand that the same can be achieved and enjoyed with a cellphone.

Yet, I can't see myself ever sitting at a restaurant table with my wife while both of us ignore each other as we text message other people. Something about that still seems wrong. I'm not sure I can explain precisely what it is. For instance, what if this couple had been talking to people instead of texting them on their cellphones? Wouldn't that have seemed more acceptable, and, if so, why? And how would my wife and I ignoring each other in the restaurant while we text messaged others be all that different from our ignoring each other at home while, as is taking place right now, my wife sits at the desktop computer in the computer room and I sit here in the living room composing this entry on my laptop?

Still, I hope that my wife and I never end up doing what I saw that couple doing yesterday, and, if we do, I hope that we immediately put down our cellphones, look each other in the eye, and talk to each other.

Buridan's Ass and Free Will

My friend Tom and I were discussing free will last weekend. Tom believes in free will; I don't. In other words, Tom believes that, in at least some cases, people could have chosen, at the same point in time and under the same exact exterior and interior circumstances, to do other than what they ended up doing. I, on the other hand, believe that they could not have acted other than how they did.

I explained to Tom something I've posted here previously. I said I believe that all choices we make are more or less complicated versions of the following scenario: You must choose between chocolate or vanilla ice cream, you love chocolate and hate vanilla, and you have no overriding reason to choose against your strong preference. Under those exact circumstances, you could only choose chocolate; you could not choose vanilla.

But Tom wasn't buying this, and he came up with the following hypothetical: Suppose you have an absolutely equal liking for chocolate and vanilla ice cream and no conscious or unconscious inclination of any kind to choose one over the other. Wouldn't a person in that situation be free to choose either alternative? That is, no matter which choice he made, wouldn't he have been able, at that time and under those same circumstances, to choose the other flavor instead?

I told Tom about Buridan's Ass--a hypothetical mule that starves to death because he can't choose between two equidistant and equally appealing bundles of hay. But Tom says that in my scenario, one must make a choice between alternatives. I replied that I'd have to think about his hypothetical addition to my scenario.

I have thought about it, and I tentatively conclude that it's virtually impossible to actually choose one course of action over alternatives without that choice being the inevitable effect of some cause the existence of which makes the effect or choice inevitable. Otherwise, I believe that a person would, like Buridan's hapless mule, be paralyzed with indecision.

But I said this was my "tentative conclusion," for I want to give the matter more thought. So, Tom, if you're reading this, stay tuned for further developments.

Upside Down World

Baba Rum Raisin comments that he likes to read my blog because it shows him "what the world looks like upside down."If this is how I see the world, I wonder how I might come to see it right side up, and what it would look like and what I would be like if I did.

Tiger's Monstrous Mental Focus

As I’ve been trying to write this column, I’ve toggled over to check my e-mail a few times. I’ve looked out the window. I’ve jotted down random thoughts for the paragraphs ahead. But Woods seems able to mute the chatter that normal people have in their heads and build a tunnel of focused attention.
--David Brooks

This entry was written yesterday and posted today.

When I was a kid, I used to fantasize that I was so good at basketball or bowling that no one could ever beat me. But I knew even then that not only would I never be that good at any sport but also that no one else would be either.

I guess I was right about that. No one, at least at the highest level of any major individual sport, never loses. I take that back. I guess some boxers have gone undefeated in their professional careers, and the same may be true of athletes in certain other individual sports as well. But in individual professional sports such as tennis, golf, or bowling where one typically competes in a tournament against a large field of the best of the best, no one, so far as I know, always wins or is even in contention for the championship right down to the end of the tournament.

Yet, Tiger Woods comes awfully darn close. He won the U.S. Open today with a dramatic long putt for par on the first hole of a sudden death playoff following an eighteen hole one-on-one playoff match tie with Rocco Mediate after making a must-have long birdie putt on the final hole of regulation play yesterday to force the playoff today.

What was amazing about Tiger's championship today is that he had just come off knee surgery and a two-month layoff from the game to compete in one of the most prestigious and demanding golf tournaments in the world against the best of the best, and it was evident from the outset that his knee was hurting terribly at times after hard swings. But he was somehow able to shake off the rust and the pain to bury most of his competition, including the redoubtable Phil Mickelson, with spectacular shots, including three eagles, when he desperately needed them.

And what's so amazing about Tiger's play in in general is that he, unlike any other top golfer I've ever seen, is almost always a serious threat, right down to the final few holes, to win every tournament in which he competes, and, on those rare occasions when he doesn't win the championship, he seldom finishes below third or fourth place. That kind of consistency in top-tier professional golf tournaments under the enormous pressure of overwhelming media coverage and stratospheric public expectations is beyond remarkable. As Rocco Mediate said, "He's a monster."

What makes Tiger so monstrously good? I suspect that it's a unique combination of training and supreme physical and psychological talent. But one element in this combination that is undoubtedly paramount is revealed by an absolutely wonderful Nike commercial that ran repeatedly during the U.S. Open. This commercial gives me goosebumps and coaxes tears to my eyes. It is one of the best commercials I've ever seen, and it's also one of the most inspiring. In it, there is home video of Tiger playing golf with his late father Earl, with Earl doing a voiceover explaining that he would do everything he could to break Tiger's concentration out on the course including dropping his golf bag in the middle of Tiger's swing. But Tiger would simply stop mid-swing, grit his teeth, and then crush a perfect drive and look back at his father with a triumphant expression that said, "Take that!" Earl Woods concludes by saying that he told Tiger: "I promise you that you'll never meet another person as mentally tough as you in your entire life. And he hasn't. And he never will."

Mental toughness. Focus. Mindful purposiveness. How many of us have this to a degree that even comes within light years of Tiger's? What would happen, how much would our lives change if we did have it? How different would my life be if I did?

I wonder if there's any to find out.

Nike's awe-inspiring commercial featuring Tiger and his dad.

Our Cosmic Eyeblink

I wrote this entry yesterday during my work break and am posting it today.

Tim Russert died today. He was only 58. Preliminary reports say he collapsed at work when his heart stopped beating, and he couldn't be revived.

Russert's sudden death sent shock waves through the American news media. Russert was widely considered to be one of the best political interviewers and reporters in the business, and he was also renowned for his infectiously enthusiastic and friendly personality. Nobody expected him to die when or how he did.

I'm only three years younger than he was, and I have a heart condition for which I take medication to prevent cardiac arrhythmia. My condition is relatively benign, but it does carry with it a higher than normal risk of the same kind of sudden cardiac arrest and death that struck down Tim Russert.

As deaths go, Russert's was probably about as easy as they come. Conscious one moment...unconscious the next. Dead soon after. Probably little or no warning or pain. Out...out brief candle.

One is tempted to say at such a time: "The sudden death of Tim Russert serves as a powerful reminder that death spares no one, and that it can come without warning at any time. Therefore, we must live life to the fullest and not waste a single moment that remains."

Yet, I wonder what real difference it makes how we live, how long we live, or what we accomplish during our lives. Whether we live one year or a hundred, it's still a cosmic eyeblink of time. And whether we die in total obscurity or are known by every human being on Earth, we can't, so far as I know, take our fame with us to the nothingness beyond this life. So, what's the point of it all?

There is no point, that I can see, other than what we create for ourselves from our imaginations. No one and no thing outside ourselves bindingly commands us to be or do anything. But if we choose for ourselves what meaning and purpose pervades our lives and what we're going to be and do with our cosmic eyeblink, I suppose that we can do worse than to hold up models such as Tim Russert to emulate in our own way. And we can follow the advice of the great sages. Not because of who said it, but because it resonates with our deepest being. Some of the best advice I've ever heard came from St. Augustine when he said, "Love, and do what you will."

That's what I hope to do more of during what's left of my cosmic eyeblink.

ESP or Mere Coincidence?

I've always been agnostic when it comes to ESP and psychic phenomena in general. For not only have I never had any definitive psychic experiences of my own, but it's also always seemed to me that if if there were people with psychic abilities, some of them would be strong enough in those abilities to unequivocally demonstrate that they exist. So far as I know, such proof has never been offered. Thus, I remain skeptical.

Yet, something happened at work last week that has shaken that skepticism a little. As I headed back to work after my dinner break, I saw my supervisor sitting in his office in front of his computer monitor. However, he didn't appear to be looking at it. I had the impression that he was staring into space thinking about something. And the peculiar thing is, even though I've seen him do this countless times and never thought for a moment that he was thinking about me, it was different this time. I had the strong sense that he was contemplating what he was going to say to me.

Of course, my rational mind dismissed this as nonsense, but it had no sooner done this when my supervisor walked up to me and said he wanted to talk with me in his office. I was stunned by this and followed him to his office wondering not only if I'd just had a genuinely psychic precognition, but also if he was going to give me bad news of some kind.

Fortunately, he was calling me in for a review that turned out to be very positive. But what I wondered then and now is why I'd had such a powerful sense, for no discernible reason, that he was going to call me into his office for a private talk when that was exactly what ended up happening.

If I frequently had this impression and/or he frequently did this with me or others, it wouldn't be so difficult to explain. But this is one of the very few times he called me into his office to talk with me, and the only time out of literally hundreds when I've seen him staring at his monitor and/or into space and thought, much less had a powerful sense, that he was getting ready to call me (or anyone else) into his office for a private chat.

This experience isn't enough to convince me that ESP is real. But it is enough to open my mind a little more to the possibility that it is.

How Nakedly Should I Reflect?

I recently posted an entry about how "part of me" would have liked to kill the person(s) who burned down a local children's playground and thereby "utterly and irrevocably obliterate the evil in our midst." Although I acknowledged that this would be even worse than the act of arson for which it was a response, I still felt reluctant to express my violent thoughts toward the perpetrator, and when I learned that my entry was being considered for publication in the Blogwatch column of the local Sunday paper, I seriously considered modifying my homicidal remarks if not striking them altogether. However, I decided to let them remain as they were because, after all, they nakedly reflected how part of me felt during a brief, not-so-shining moment in the aftermath of the fire.

Yet, this raises two questions. First, is there something wrong with me for briefly experiencing these violent feelings toward the perpetrator? Second, should I refrain from expressing these feelings openly in my blog (or anywhere else) because when I don't, I may reinforce and strengthen them?

Actually, my sense is that when I'm able to admit to these feelings, not only to myself but also to others, I'm further weakening their already tenuous hold on my heart and mind. But is my perception accurate?

I wonder if I should go on nakedly reflecting my thoughts and feelings as openly as I sometimes do here, or if I should put some clothes on them.

New Outdoor Smoking Ban

Soon, smoking will no longer be allowed anywhere on the grounds of the large medical center where I work. Smoking is currently allowed outside as long as it isn't too close to building entrances. I don't know what visitors and staff who smoke are going to do when the new prohibition goes into effect.

Perhaps I shouldn't care. After all, I abhor cigarettes and cigarette smoke. I still remember the old Steve Martin comedy routine where he steps into an elevator and someone who's about to light up asks, "Do you mind if I smoke?," and Martin says, "Do you mind if I fart?" Except to my mind, a fart would be vastly preferable.

The little boy in me might find this joke funny, but there's nothing funny about obnoxious cigarette smoke. How I used to hate going to public places such as bowling alleys and restaurants and sneezing, suffering a runny nose, watery eyes, and a headache from the concentrated smoke, and coming home with my clothes and hair reeking of cigarettes. I was so happy when indoor smoking in virtually all public places was banned.

I suppose that libertarians would argue that people should be free to smoke indoors, at least in private business establishments that permit it, and that those who don't wish to be exposed to secondhand smoke are free not to patronize these establishments. However, I disagree. I like to eat out, and I love to bowl. I don't think I should have to choose between forsaking these activities and suffering the considerable discomforts and health hazards of secondhand smoke.

Yet, having said this, I think the new smoking prohibition about to go into effect in my workplace is too restrictive. There's no need to prevent people from smoking everywhere outdoors on the medical center campus in order to spare the rest of us the unpleasantness of their smoke.

If I were to express my stance on this issue as a moral and legal principle, I suppose I'd say something like, "Adults should be free to do what they wish, including smoke cigarettes, so long as it doesn't unreasonably infringe on other adults' right to do what they wish, including avoiding secondhand smoke without having to take unreasonable measures to do so, and smoking in outdoor places currently allowed by campus policy does not constitute such an infringement."

Smoking may be stupid, but it shouldn't be a crime to smoke outdoors in places readily avoidable by the public without posing a significant inconvenience.

Comforting Falsehood vs Discomforting Belief

A Raccoon would much prefer to live and struggle in the light of Truth than in the realized darkness of a false illumination.
--Gagdad Bob

Gagdad Bob says (or implies) that he'd rather know a bleak truth than believe and embrace a bright falsehood, no matter how happy he might be with the latter and depressed with the former. I'd like to say I agree, and, in principle, I do. But when principle runs smack dab against hard reality, it doesn't always remain intact, and I'm not even sure it always should.

For suppose the truth, or what you take to be the truth if you let yourself, is so bleak that, if you believed it, you'd be a miserable wreck for the rest of your life. And suppose you could believe, instead, in a glorious falsehood that made you joyful to be alive each and every day. Which would really be better, and which would you prefer?

To take one extreme example, suppose the truth, or what you took to be the truth, were that the universe was made by a monstrously malevolent god and that when we die, each and every one of us will suffer unspeakable agony forever, and there's absolutely nothing we can do in this life to prevent it. Would it be better to accept this horrible and terrifying truth than to believe the comforting falsehood that a supremely good and loving god made this universe and wants us all to join him in his blissful abode for all eternity after we die? It's difficult to see how it would be, Gagdad's idealism notwithstanding.

And, when you come right down to it, how many of us would really choose discomforting truth over comforting falsehood or, at least, comforting unjustified belief? Take Gagdad, for instance. I'm not sure what he actually believes about god and our relation to god, but he does appear to believe in some kind of divine being or reality that is supremely intelligent and good, the existence of which we (or, at least, some of us) can know with absolute certainty. Does he believe this because he has ample grounds for doing so, or does he believe it because he finds it more comforting to believe it than not to?

I'm not suggesting that he consciously chooses comforting belief in something he knows to be false or dubious over discomforting acknowledgment that there truly is no god, or, at least, no solid justification for believing that there is. Yet, he claims to know with absolute certainty that there is a such a god, and I think maybe this is because he subconsciously chooses to value comfort more than truth.

I suspect that most of us, including yours truly, do the same, even though we don't know we're doing it. We want to think that we're pursuing truth and that the truth we've found or think we've found just happens to be more comforting than alternative falsehoods. But is this because reality is actually as comforting as we believe it to be, or is it because we won't allow ourselves to see it any other way, even if it is another way?

One Diagnosis for Humankind

I'm a psychologist. I carry a badge. I diagnose individuals. But it is said that a prophet diagnoses mankind. Thus, if you look at the DSM, there are, I don’t know, a couple of hundred different diagnoses. But if you look at the Bible, or the Upanishads, or the Tao Te Ching, there is only one diagnosis, which is that human beings live in falsehood, alienated from the Real. They habitually confuse what is ephemeral and valueless with what is transcendent and of eternal value. With his consciousness either compacted and "frozen" or exteriorized and dissipated, the spiritually untutored man is hypnotized by appearances and wanders from sensation to sensation until falling into the abyss at the end of his daze, wishes to ashes, lust to dust.
--Gagdad Bob

Elaborate Falsehood

You need rudimentary intelligence to understand a simple truth and average intelligence to deny it, but superior intelligence to replace it with an elaborate falsehood.
--Gagdad Bob

I know (or, at least, know of) a guy who's absolutely brilliant and stunningly erudite. What's more, he has a one-of-a-kind blog that features some of the best writing I've ever read. And I'm blown away by the fact that he sits down every morning and composes dazzling entries about spirituality, theology, philosophy, politics, psychoanalysis, and popular culture with virtually no planning. It just flows out of him onto his keyboard and into the blogosphere like a Mozart symphony. You may think I'm engaging in hyperbole, but I mean what I say. I'm tremendously impressed by this man's intellect and writing art.

There's only one problem. A lot of what he writes strikes me as the "elaborate falsehood" of a man so smart that his cleverness overwhelms his good sense, and he really believes the systematic nonsense he posts. I guess I'm just not smart enough (or dumb enough) to get taken in by it. But I continue to enjoy it much as one might revel in a great, brilliantly told fairy-tale.

I wrote this entry yesterday during my dinner break at work and am posting it today.

That which offers no resistance, overcomes the hardest substances. That which offers no resistance can enter where there is no space.
--Lao Tzu

I feel better at work today than I did yesterday. After coming off a restful Memorial Day three-day weekend, I felt good at work Tuesday. My mind was clear and quick, at least for me, and my body felt strong and durable. I came to work Wednesday hoping I'd feel the same way, but I didn't. Not even close. My mind felt fuzzy and slow, even for me. When my co-worker called out the numbers of the medical charts I was supposed to pull from the shelves, I had to keep making her repeat the numbers. Sometimes several times. By contrast, the day before, I was often pulling the right chart before she even called out the entire number. And my body felt so tired and old yesterday! The job I do is physically demanding. It fatigues guys half my age. But I still felt way more tired than usual yesterday, and much slower than usual as well. And I felt soooooo bored! If one could die from boredom, I was teetering right on the perilous edge.

Yet, things are better today. Much better. Part of it might be due to some energy fluctuation, random or otherwise, in my bodymind. And part of it may result from a decision I made early on today not to worry about or fight how I feel. Just relax, focus, and think and move with unforced naturalness.

One of my co-workers is a master of this. He's a little Hmong man from Laos, but our supervisor calls him Superman because he can do any job required of him and do the work of two people in one shift with seemingly effortless ease. No matter how much work he has to do, he never seems to be in a hurry, never seems to be forcing anything. And even though he's nearly a foot-and-a-half shorter than I am and probably weighs less than half of what I do, he never seems to strain under the heavy weight of an imposing stack of medical charts as thick as metropolitan phone books, as an almost perpetual smile graces his constantly calm face and demeanor.

A guiding principle of philosophical Taoism is wu wei which I roughly define as "effortlessly efficacious action." It is exemplified by a great surfer who masters the waves with unforced grace. My co-worker is a living example of wu-wei. I want to be too. When I am, for a fleeting moment, I'm as close to heaven as I'm ever likely to be in this life and in the workplace.

Integral Politicians

...we need a form of “enlightened leadership” to enact decisions unfettered by partisan politics, for the benefit of the whole, rather than pandering to the few.

There is no sense in parsing words—what we are talking about here is a very real sort of elitism, a developmental elitism in which leaders more evolved than the majority of the populace are elected to office, for exactly that reason. Of course, it is an “elitism to which everyone is invited,” meaning that anyone can continue to evolve to the highest reaches of human potential, despite the fact that so few do. But merely mentioning the word “elitism” puts us on very dangerous ground in today’s political atmosphere, in which voters seem more interested in electing leaders they can “have a beer with” than ones with the moral, intellectual, and perspectival sophistication required to heal the tremendous cultural schisms that exist in America, and in the rest of the world.
--Corey W. deVois, Integral Institute

Ken Wilber discusses Integral "Third-Way" Politics

Do Cellphones Cause Cancer?

On the Larry King show last night, I watched panelists, including neurosurgeons and scientists, discuss the question of whether using cellphones causes head and brain cancer. The gist of the discussion was that the evidence is inconclusive but nevertheless troubling enough that it would be prudent to use cellphones more sparingly than many do now, or be sure to keep them as far away from the head as possible by using the speaker function, or use a headset, preferably a wired one, as much as possible. For it is the electromagnetic radiation emanating from the cellphone's antenna that poses the biggest threat of inducing malignant cellular changes in the brain (gliomas), ears (acoustic neuromas), or salivary glands. The closer the antenna is to the head, the more radiation the head receives, and, therefore, the bigger the threat.

It will be interesting to see what happens years from now after millions of people have used cellphones regularly for decades. Will we see a huge jump in the incidence of head cancer in these individuals? Will using cellphones turn out to be as dangerous, if not more so, than smoking cigarettes, and cellphones will come packaged with a warning from the Surgeon General similar to that found on cigarette packages today?

I, for one, intend to be more careful in my use of cellphones from now on.

Not Again!

In the early 1990's, the South Natomas community in Sacramento spent over $100,000 and used volunteer labor to build a beautiful children's playground in Jefferson Park. It was the first community playground in Sacramento and was the pride of the South Natomas community. A generation of children grew up enjoying the wonderful playground. Then, in June of 2006, someone burned it down. I blogged about it at the time. My wife and I watched a massive, roaring fire reduce beautiful "Ft. Natomas" to a pile of charred wood in a matter of minutes despite the best efforts of firefighters to save it. The arsonist was never caught. But the community rallied and, through fund-raising activities and hundreds of volunteers, the playground was rebuilt in a weeklong labor of love. Children in the community worked side-by-side with engineers to design the marvelous new playground, and its fixtures were brought up to newer safety codes and constructed out of plastic. I remember worrying at the time that someone, perhaps the same deranged person who torched the original playground, would destroy it, but I hoped that no one would.

My hopes were dashed yesterday morning around 1 AM when the playground caught fire and burned down again. There's no way this could have happened by accident. Someone had to have set the fire on purpose. What kind of person could do such a thing? Why did he do it? I've written here before about how everything anybody does is the inevitable product of the entire, unified universe and that people shouldn't be blamed for their actions, no matter how much harm and suffering they might cause. But part of me would like to find the perpetrator of yesterday's burning and beat him to death with my bare hands. Or just put a bullet in his brain with a .44 Magnum. Blow his head "clean off," as Dirty Harry would say. In other words, utterly and irrevocably obliterate the evil in our midst. But, as hard as it is to acknowledge in my current anger and bitterness, such violent retribution would be sicker and more evil than what the arsonist did to that hapless playground.

Yet, if this person is ever caught, and a $5000 reward had been offered for his arrest and conviction, what is the appropriate way to deal with him? As a community leader said, "This is beyond a crime, to take this away from the community," and as someone else commented, "It is acts like these that tear apart our sense of community--and, eventually, civility."

Ft. Natomas--Our Community, Our Story


Ft. Natomas Rebuilt

Living in the Present

I'm looking forward to my three day weekend. But I need to bear in mind that the sooner it comes, the sooner it goes. That is, the sooner I get off work tonight, the sooner I'll be going back to work Tuesday afternoon. And if, while I work tonight, I keep thinking about how good it's going to be to get off work and enjoy my weekend, it's going to make work tonight seem more unpleasant than it needs to. And then I'll be thinking so much all weekend about how unpleasant work was tonight and about how much I dread having to go back to work Tuesday, that I'll enjoy the weekend far less than I might. So, why not just live fully in the present, at work and play, with the most positive attitude possible? I tried that yesterday and the day before, and I liked how it turned out. No reason to stop now.

Reflections on the Kennedy Prognosis

I was saddened but not surprised by the Ted Kennedy diagnosis. Even my modest medical knowledge had me thinking Saturday afternoon that a first known seizure in someone of Kennedy's age and with no previously known risk factors could very well be the consequence of a brain tumor and that, if it was, it was likely to be a malignant tumor with a poor prognosis.

I was also not surprised to hear Kennedy's friends and senate colleagues talk about how tough he is and how he might very well rise up and "beat" the death sentence the medical establishment seems to be giving him. This got me to thinking about the best way for someone to handle a poor prognosis, which, after all, could befall any of us at any time, as I have long suspected that it will me someday.

What is the best way to react if we find out that we have a disease with a poor prognosis? It seems to me that we have two major options. We can resign ourselves to the fact that we're probably going to die soon, or we can refuse to accept this and "stand up and fight." I wonder if any good scientific studies have revealed what effects these differing attitudes and approaches have on longevity and quality of life. Does giving in to a bad prognosis hasten decline and death whereas opposing it produces the opposite effect? Or has no such correlation between these variables been uncovered?

Speaking for myself, if and when I receive the kind of "death sentence" Kennedy has, I think I'll welcome or, at least, resign myself to it more than I'll fight it. Why? Because, I know that I was my parents' mistake, and I truly believe that I and the world would have been better off had I never been born. I'm simply not equipped for this world and am more of a burden than a blessing to it, and I'm constantly frustrated by an intellectual and psychological reach that perpetually exceeds my grasp. That's no way to live.

Tears aren't streaming down my face as I write this. I don't feel depressed. In fact, I don't feel much of anything except weary indifference punctuated by a twinge of sadness for a man who is equipped for this world and who has done something worthwhile with his gifts over his long and fabled political career and could have continued doing so if not for a dreadful disease that will likely rob him of his gifts and the world of his contributions in all too short a time.

Responding to Gary

I posted an entry yesterday about the Bernie Ward case. Gary responded with a comment. Normally, I briefly address comments in the comments section, but today I want to do something a little different. I want to post substantial passages from Gary's comments and respond to them in this entry. I want to do this because I believe that the subject is important and because I believe that Gary's thinking on this issue is shared by many, and I disagree with most of it. Gary's comments are in italics; my responses aren't.

Pedophilia is a sickness that is true, but it is a sickness that can not be treated.

I think you're right that pedophilic desires can't be cured, but I think there are treatments that can stop or prevent some people from acting them out. But let's be clear about Bernie Ward. He was not indicted for child molestation, and, indeed, after a thorough investigation, he was allowed to stay in the home with his children. He was indicted for possessing and distributing a few sexually oriented photos involving minors. Having and even distributing a few such images doesn't necessarily mean that someone is a pedophile, much less a dangerous one who must be removed from society for the rest of his life.

Now I'm aware of the recent Dan Noyes report alleging that Bernie came on to a couple of teenage girls years ago when he was a priest. But these are only allegations. He was never convicted of sexual harassment or molestation of children or anyone else. What's more, even if the allegations are true, as bad as it would be for him to have acted as alleged, being attracted to pubescent high school girls is not pedophila. If it were, most adult males would be pedophiles. Pedophila is attraction to prepubescent children.

It truly is sad that these people do what they do. If you could put them up in a condo complex where they could live and work(without ever leaving the premises of course) I would be all for that. But they can never be allowed out in society. The harm they do is extraordinary.

I agree that child molestation can be extraordinarily harmful and that a case could be made for locking away for life anyone who has shown a pattern of child molestation suggesting that he or she can't prevent himself from continuing to molest children. However, I agree with you that these people are mentally ill and do not deserve the punishment of a life sentence in federal prison for their actions. They need to be placed in another kind of more humane facility, and they should not be blamed and held in contempt for their illness or its manifestations. But, once again, Bernie was not indicted for child molestation.

You also have to remember that most pedophiles do not think they are doing harm. They honestly believe that they love the children and that they are not harming them. How do you treat someone who has those beliefs?

Doesn't your preceding statement imply the answer to your question? If someone molests children because they don't understand the harm it causes to their victims and they can be made to understand it, they won't molest anymore.

I truly feel sorry for Bernies family and friends(especially his childrens friends) but for Bernie I feel nothing but contempt for he of all people should know exactly what his actions will do.

I don't understand this statement in light of what you said previously. You believe that Bernie is a pedophile (even though there's no proof I'm aware of that he is), and you say that pedophilia is a sickness; yet, you feel "nothing but contempt" for him. Do you also feel "nothing but contempt" for someone who breaks out with a rash as a result of having chicken pox? Isn't acting out one's pedophilic desires analogous to breaking out with chicken pox? We may need to isolate a contagious individual until he no longer poses a threat to the public, but we don't hold him in contempt for being sick. Why should we hold Bernie in contempt? If he really knew "exactly what his actions would do," don't you think he must have been awfully sick to go ahead and commit them anyway? And if he didn't know exactly what they would do, then why scorn him? Because "ignorance is no excuse"? Why isn't it? If not an excuse, then at least a mitigating factor?

You also need to do a little research on the case. Bernie actually was storing the images in cyber space on his AOL account and was in possession of at least 30 images.

Thank you for that additional information. But have you seen the images or read detailed descriptions of them? This touches upon an issue I raised in yesterday's post. Not all pornographic images are of equivalent severity, and this should be taken into account. What's more, no matter how extreme these images may have been, Bernie was not indicted for nor did he plead guilty to playing any role in creating these images. I don't believe that someone should spend years in federal prison for merely possessing or even distributing a few such images to consenting adults. He should face some legal sanctions, and, indeed, he already has, along with numerous social ones. But not prison.

He harmed children, some grievously(just imagine his children reading the transcripts of what he was saying to Sexfairy about them and their friends) even if he did not do the actions he describes, the mere fact that he could come up with these alleged "fantasies" should outrage you!

I believe that what he wrote about his own children and their friends was actually far worse than the pictures from a "moral" standpoint and from the standpoint of what is likely to have done the most psychological harm. But this was not illegal and he was not indicted for it. What's more, I don't feel "outrage" over this; I feel great perplexity over why he did it, and I feel great sadness for him and his family that he did it and for the fact that they all are now having to deal with the consequences.

I have a 2 year old daughter and you know what I have never had a thought like that, EVER!

I have suggested, although I don't claim to know for sure, that maybe Bernie posted those things not because he really wanted to do them for real but because he wanted to shock his "mistress" with his naughtiness. But let's say, for the sake of argument, that he really did entertain those fantasies. Now I think it's wonderful that you don't entertain similar ones. But what if you or someone close to you did? It's easy to condemn other people for desiring bad things you're fortunate enough not to desire. But suppose you had these desires. Would you believe that you should be condemned for them? And how do you know that you could control them any better than Bernie did with his online sex chat?

Have you actually sat down and thought about what he did in a logical non emotional way? Unclouded by your personal feelings for the man?

Yes, I think I have done precisely this. Have you? Or are you the one who has let his reason be clouded by emotion and "personal feelings"?

Imagine how outraged you would be if you found out it was Dick Cheney who was doing these things.

I think Dick Cheney has done far, far worse than Bernie Ward. I think he has contributed more than his share to the deaths of countless thousands of people who didn't deserve to die and to the misery of countless millions of others. Compared to that, Bernie Ward's actions are an infinitesimal blip on the radar. Nevertheless, if Dick Cheney had done what Bernie has, I truly believe that I would feel the same way about his having done it than I feel about Bernie having done it.

That's the difference between conservatives and liberals(I am a rational anarchist) a conservative when presented with evidence like this demands punishment for the person involved regardless of political party.

What is a "rational anarchist," and just how "rational" could such a stance be? Beyond that, I mildly agree with part of what you say. A conservative is likely to urge punishment (although I suspect that he's likely to be more punitive toward a liberal than toward a fellow conservative) than is a liberal. And I think this is because so-called conservatives tend to have a more simplistic and false understanding of human nature and behavior than do many liberals who better understand that cultural and social conditions interact with our genes to shape who we are and how we behave and that unadulterated "punishment" is not necessarily the answer to all misbehavior.

Liberals refuse to believe that their people are really bad and make all kinds of excuses for them.

Again, I think, or would like to think, that liberals are more likely to understand the complex concatenation of factors that go into shaping a person's character and conduct and that just blaming and punishing people for "bad" character and behavior is neither fair nor effective.

Or more laughable of all they claim some "government conspiracy" has brought there person down. I mean come on....when are you folks going to grow up?

You folks? When have I said that I believed the legal action taken against Bernie was the result of some "government conspiracy." But I do submit this question for your consideration. If Rush Limbaugh or Dennis Prager had done what Bernie did and the government became aware of it, are you altogether certain that it would have responded as severely as it did to Bernie?

Bernie's Crime and Punishment

Bernie Ward pled guilty yesterday to a single charge of distributing child pornography and will remain under house arrest until a sentencing hearing in August. It's expected that he'll be sentenced to a minimum of five years in federal prison, and he could receive as much as nine years.

I've posted about this case several times. I've learned more about it since my previous entries. I've come to believe that Bernie has been a troubled man for years and has shown a self-destructive propensity. Furthermore, I agree with those who say that child pornography is egregious exploitation of children and cannot be tolerated.

But the question that comes to mind is how the law should deal with those who are involved with it. I was listening to a talk radio program this morning on KGO, Bernie's old station. One of the guests was a former FBI profiler and child sex abuse investigator. Her stance was that any adult intentionally involved to any degree in child pornography deserves to have the book thrown at him.

I can understand where she's coming from. She's investigated very serious cases of child pornography and seen firsthand the awful and permanent damage that this kind of exploitation can wreak on a child's psyche. And she makes a good point when she says that the child victim continues, in a sense, to be exploited and violated every time his or her image or video is passed along to someone else.

However, it seems to me that the law needs to consider more than it does the motives behind someone's involvement with child pornography as well as the extremity of the pornography and the degree or frequency of one's involvement with it. For instance, the only pornographic image in Bernie's case that I've seen described in any detail is of a topless woman, a naked teenage boy, and a fully clothed young girl, and they were not engaged in any kind of sexual or simulated sexual acts. Contrast this with a video of a prepubescent child being, say, gang raped. Possessing and even distributing the former seems far, far less egregious than possessing and distributing the latter; yet, I'm of the impression that the law makes little or no distinction between the two.

Another issue that came to mind as I listened to this morning's program concerns what kind of sentence offenders in general and Bernie in particular should be dealt for their crimes. The talk show host opined that Bernie appears to be a sick man in need of treatment but that this in no way "exonerates" him for his actions. But the question I continue to struggle with is, If someone commits a crime because he's sick, why does he deserve to be punished for it? Treated? Yes. We treat people for sickness and its symptoms. But punished? Should we punish people for being sick and for exhibiting the symptoms of their sickness?

The only reason I can see for punishing someone for their sickness is if the punishment is either part of the cure or, in the case of incarceration, quarantines the sick person from harming others with his sickness. But then, we're not talking about punishment per se but about aversive conditioning as treatment or about protective confinement, and that treatment or confinement is made as compassionate and merciful as possible while retaining its efficacy.

But is nine or even five years in federal prison merciful treatment (or punishment) for Bernie and his sickness? Not only that, but is it more effective than one year in prison or in a more humane institution of some kind or even under continued house arrest. Think of what this man has already suffered. He will never get to do talk radio again. He will never be able to teach children again in public or private school. He'll have to permanently register as a sex offender and be subject to all of the restrictions and indignities that go with it. He will probably be treated as a pariah by a large part of the community and will feel ashamed in public for the rest of his life. Would increasing his time of incarceration significantly increase the deterrent effect of his sentence? Would a nine year or twenty year sentence do that much more to deter him when he gets out or to deter others from committing this kind of offense, or does increasing the sentence yield diminishing returns of deterrence and quickly become unjustified punishment or vindictiveness for punishment's or vindictivenesses sake? I wonder if any persuasive scientific studies have been done on this question--i.e., the effect of prison sentence length on deterrence.

It seems to me, as it did to another guest on today's talk show, that Bernie's sentence is "draconian". In other words, it's far, far more harsh than what he deserves or than what is needed to bring optimal benefit to society.

What do you think?

All Are NOT Created Equal

Anyway, when I discuss politics, I try to do so by relying upon intrinsically true cosmic principles that can have no expiration date. One such principle -- from which all other political principles must flow -- is that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, and that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Once you reject this principle, all kinds of political mischief follow.
--Gagdad Bob

All people are not created with equal abilities or opportunities to pursue happiness and achieve the successes that Gagdad and many others of similar persuasion naively (or disingenuously) say we are. And I believe that when we reject this obvious fact, all kinds of political and economic mischief follow. I agree that people who are struggling should do more to help themselves to succeed. But I also agree that government can play more of a legitimate role in empowering people to do this. Gagdad, with all his intellectual brilliance and education, may not need much of this kind of help. But not all of us are "created equal" to Gagdad Bob.

The Karma Yoga of Fr. Maier

Do not depend on the hope of results. When you are doing the work you have taken on, you may have to face that your work will be apparently worthless...As you get used to the idea you will start more and more to concentrate not on results but on the value, the rightness, the truth of the work itself.
--Fr. Joe Maier, from his daily journal

I'm studying for a career in which I have grave doubts about my ability to succeed because I have even graver doubts about my ability to succeed in any other worthwhile career. As I pursue this questionable career, I find Father Joe Maier's words, a paraphrasing of Thomas Merton, to be invaluable. There's no assurance that all the time and effort I lavish on my studies will lead to success in my career aspirations. And if I were to focus on this uncertainty, I could readily succumb to discouragement and give up, as I have done so many times before. But when I find value in the "rightness and truth" of the effort itself, I can keep on keeping on in spite of my doubts.

Is Torture Punishment?

let's see, if you were to be hung from your arms twisted behind your back for hours on end, followed by a nice, enduring waterboarding session...I bet the first thing you'd say after all that would be "AT LEAST I WASN'T PUNISHED!
--Anonymous

Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia told Leslie Stahl that torture for interrogation purposes is not prohibited by the "cruel and unusual punishment" clause of the constitution. His argument, as I understand it, is that when government representatives torture people to extract information from them about illegal or terrorist activities, they aren't inflicting "punishment," they are simply seeking information. We may not like torture on moral grounds, and we may even pass enforceable laws against it, but the "cruel and unusual punishment" clause doesn't prohibit torture because torture isn't punishment.

I tend to disagree. It seems to me that punishment is the infliction of suffering or hardship on someone for wrongdoing, and that when people are interrogated in a manner that causes them extreme suffering or hardship--i.e., when they are tortured--they are not only being interrogated but also punished, in a "cruel and unusual" manner, for the wrongdoing of deliberately withholding important information. For if it were believed that someone wasn't deliberately withholding information but was doing it subconsciously, torture would not be employed as a means of extracting this information. Torture is generally used when someone is deemed to deserve punitive interrogation if they don't divulge information voluntarily.

Scalia interview regarding torture.

The Soul of Jazz

"Everything I do sing is part of my life."
--Billie Holiday

My wife likes to watch American Idol. I used to watch it with her when I could. Some of the contestants are pretty good in the sense of being able to sing with nearly perfect pitch and general vocal control. Some of the songs they sing, often interpretations of old standards, are even pretty entertaining. But I've been listening to Billie Holiday lately, and she is/was just incredible with the depth of feeling and meaning with which she suffused her singing. And now when I watch clips of American Idol or of performances from just about any pop or even jazz vocalist, the singers sound like mere pretenders. Billie Holiday was the real deal. And below is a clip of her singing with an awesome array of jazz talent. It was from a CBS program that aired in 1957, only a couple of years or so before she died, ravaged by drugs and disease. But she is still luminous and transcendently beautiful in body, soul, and voice in this remarkable video. I don't think I've ever seen a better music video or found a singer so captivating.

Billie Holiday sings "Fine and Mellow"

The Function of a Guru

And what is the function of a guru? He's the man that looks you in the eye and says 'Oh come off it. I know who you are.' You come to the guru and say 'Sir, I have a problem. I'm unhappy, and I want to get one up on the universe. I want to become enlightened. I want spiritual wisdom.' The guru looks at you and says 'Who are you?' You know Sri-Ramana-Maharshi, that great Hindu sage of modern times? People used to come to him and say 'Master, who was I in my last incarnation?' As if that mattered. And he would say 'Who is asking the question?' And he'd look at you and say, go right down to it, 'You're looking at me, you're looking out, and you're unaware of what's behind your eyes. Go back in and find out who you are, where the question comes from, why you ask.' And if you've looked at a photograph of that man--I have a gorgeous photograph of him; I look by it every time I go out the front door. And I look at those eyes, and the humor in them; the lilting laugh that says 'Oh come off it. Shiva, I recognize you.' When you come to my door and say `I'm so-and-so,' I say `Ha-ha, what a funny way God has come on today.''
--Alan Watts

Becoming the Ones We've Been Waiting For

We will become the ones we've been waiting for only once we become more like the One who's been waiting for us.
--Gagdad Bob

I agree. But who or what is "the One" who's been waiting for us? Do we find it in a Judaism, Christianity, or Islam that is not so esoteric as to be unrecognizably Jewish, Christian, or Muslim? And do we find it in Gagdad's One Cosmos unless we look very hard and overlook a lot of what we find there?

Is He Serious?

One can have rhetorical skills, like Obama, which conceal an intellect that is mediocre, or poor rhetorical skills, like President Bush, and have a superior IQ.
--Gagdad Bob

God is With the Poor?

WHATEVER thoughts you have about God, who He is or if He exists, most will agree that if there is a God, He has a special place for the poor. In fact, the poor are where God lives.
--Bono

I agree with Bono that if there is a God, He, She, or It DOES have a "special place" for the poor. But that place is, more often than not, HELL. Hell not in some posthumous domain, but hell on Earth. A daily hell of hopeless poverty, disease, hunger, filth, exposure, and misery.

Yet, what seems altogether more likely is that if there is a God, It is not a God of goodness divorced from badness or evil, but a God that encompasses (or transcends) good and evil. A God beyond characterization except, perhaps, "Thus," as one opens one's arms to indicate the totality of existence, including the sufferings of the poorest of the poor as well as the efforts of those who labor heroically to alleviate their suffering.

Robert Reich Endorses Obama

Robert Reich was President Clinton's Secretary of Labor and has been a longtime friend of the Clintons. He now teaches public policy at U.C. Berkeley and has a blog. In that blog, he recently announced his support for Barack Obama for president. Below is a clear and concise statement of his reasons for doing so.

I believe that Barack Obama should be elected President of the United States.

Although Hillary Clinton has offered solid and sensible policy proposals, Obama's strike me as even more so. His plans for reforming Social Security and health care have a better chance of succeeding. His approaches to the housing crisis and the failures of our financial markets are sounder than hers. His ideas for improving our public schools and confronting the problems of poverty and inequality are more coherent and compelling. He has put forward the more enlightened foreign policy and the more thoughtful plan for controlling global warming.

He also presents the best chance of creating a new politics in which citizens become active participants rather than cynical spectators. He has energized many who had given up on politics. He has engaged young people to an extent not seen in decades. He has spoken about the most difficult problems our society faces, such as race, without spinning or simplifying. He has rightly identified the armies of lawyers and lobbyists that have commandeered our democracy, and pointed the way toward taking it back.

Finally, he offers the best hope of transcending the boundaries of class, race, and nationality that have divided us. His life history exemplifies this, as do his writings and his record of public service. For these same reasons, he offers the best possibility of restoring America's moral authority in the world.

The Gospel of Father Joe

I am not Catholic. Frankly, I believe that the institution and teachings of Roman Catholicism are mostly nonsense, and I was only half joking when I used to say, "Popes are for dopes." But there's no denying that some Catholics, because or in spite of their religion, have done and are doing wonderful work. Here is an article about a Catholic priest named Joe Maier who has spent three decades serving the poorest of the poor in the slums of Bangkok. I look forward to reading the book about this man and his great work.

Great Richard Feynman Interview

Richard Feynman was a great physicist and teacher of physics and a fascinating human being. Here he is in one of the most wonderful interviews I've ever seen. Thank you Bill Harryman for making me aware of it through a entry in your blog.


via videosift.com

Surprise Reunion

I spent my first two years in college living in a dorm. I could have easily commuted the twenty-five miles from my house in Redwood City, but I decided that it would be better for me to venture out of my self-imposed isolation at home and live with other people and become more sociable. I'm glad I did, because I had some great experiences living in the dorm that I would never have had otherwise, and I became friends with people I would never have met any other way.

I also met some very interesting people who didn't become friends, but they made quite an impression on me nonetheless. One of them was a guy named John. I won't disclose his last name. John was only seventeen when I met him, and, unlike most of the rest of us who shared double rooms with roommates, John had a single room all to himself. I suspect that this was more a matter of necessity than one of choice.

You see, John was a very strange young man. He was reputed to be brilliant, a veritable boy genius, but he was a social misfit in the extreme. He was well over six feet tall and boyishly chubby. He walked with a peculiar gait with his palms facing backwards, apelike, and his abnormally long arms swinging in tandem with his lead feet. That is, unlike most of us, who do just the opposite, when his left foot stepped forward, his left arm swung forward with it , and when his right foot stepped forward, his right arm followed suit. He also sat, stood, and walked hunched over like an old lady with osteoporosis, and when he walked this way, he looked as though he might topple over any second from his unbalanced position.

He wore thick glasses in large, dark rims, and brought his face, which looked as though it might be slightly distorted by a case of acromegaly, within two or three inches of whatever he read. He spoke with a very nasally voice and snorted when he laughed, often at his own obscure jokes. He also had such poor personal hygiene that we tried to keep our distance from him.

Everything about this young man was strange. He was like some Saturday Night Live caricature of comical eccentricity. Once, someone jokingly told him that he could earn a lot of money as a gigolo, and he started walking around the dorm introducing himself in his distinctively nasally voice as "John___, male prostitute." As I recall, he even had some business cards printed up to this effect. He also walked around mumbling, "Ohhhh death," in the deepest voice he could muster as he darted his eyes and tongue from side to side in a manner than can only be characterized as obscene.

It should come as no surprise that John took some ribbing over his peculiar ways, and I'm sorry to say that I and my roommate participated in this. Neither we nor anyone else were really malicious about it, so far as I know, but I'm sure John, despite the fact that he sometimes seemed to prefer unpleasant attention to being completely ignored, could have done very nicely without it.

For instance, my roommate, who liked to make people think he was as perverse as his sense of humor, would sometimes stare at John in the shower with a lascivious twinkle in his eye, and then both of us, when we saw him coming near our room, would grab hold of our bunk beds to make them squeak in a suggestive way while we moaned histrionically, and when he'd say, "You guys are sick...sick...sick!" we'd reply, "You don't know what you're missing, John!" We abandoned this line of teasing when he finally conceded that perhaps he didn't. We thought he might be serious.

I also taped things to his door such as a Playgirl centerfold and a ridiculously juvenile "poem" I made up that began with the verse,

One...two...three four,
Doris, open up your door.
Five...six...seven...eight,
Let me in to copulate.

John had a crush on Doris, who was almost as weird as he was. It was a match made in heaven. He didn't like the centerfold one bit, but he loved the poem. "Oh yeah," he said in a rumbling voice and with a big, lewd grin.

One night, Kevin, a guy from our floor who had a quietly off-the-wall sense of humor, somehow managed to climb from our floor one story below to the TV lounge wearing only boxer shorts and a pair of 3-D glasses and with a boombox strapped to his body, and he then proceeded to set the boombox on the floor, turn it on, and dance spastically directly in front of John to the cacophonous wailing of an Albert Ayler saxophone solo while John just sat there in stone silence staring into space and my roommate and I laughed till tears streamed from our eyes. After about a minute, Kevin unceremoniously turned off the boombox, strapped it back to his body, and climbed over the railing and back down to the floor below. It was one of the strangest and funniest things I've ever seen. John's only comment was, "That guy ought to be committed."

John was the subject of endless speculation among us dormmates. What was his problem? Why was he so weird? Nobody seemed to know, not even my roommate, who happened to be a grad student in his first year of the school psychology program.

Yet, one thing we did know is that John didn't particularly care for my and my roommate's antics. We found that out one day when the resident adviser for our floor came to our room holding a hand printed letter that John had given him. The letter accused us, "two notorious homosexuals," of harassing him, and it demanded that we stop. Our RA was actually quite amused by the whole thing and gave us the letter. I believe that I still have it somewhere amongst a disorganized pile of old memories stored in a box in the garage. Nevertheless, my roommate and I decided to cool it, not out of fear but out of a desire not to cause poor John any further distress. In fact, I made an effort to spend time talking amiably with him and once even took him to the Pussycat theater downtown to see his first porno movie. The first time he saw Johnny Holmes in all his magnified glory, he said, "Ohhhh, death!"

Rumor had it that John, despite his reputed brilliance, especially in math and science, was failing his classes because he wasn't attending them or doing his homework, and, sure enough, he apparently dropped out of school at the end of the semester.

I've thought about John a great deal over the following decades. I've often wondered what became of him. I had the idea that he was probably so miserable being so hopelessly strange and alienated that he might very well have killed himself and that if he hadn't, he was probably desperately unhappy. I found myself, especially in light of my increasing awareness of my own difficulties and social awkwardness, empathizing with him more and more and wishing him the best. But I never, in my wildest dreams, thought I'd see him again.

Then one day last week my wife and I went to the local tax preparation franchise to have our taxes done, and, I had no sooner said hello to the receptionist when I heard an unmistakable voice from behind a partition. I couldn't see the man speaking, but I instantly knew who it was. I looked around the partition and saw a tall man with thick glasses and beard standing slouched over, papers in hand. It had to be John! I couldn't believe it!

After we filled out some preliminary paperwork in the waiting area, we were summoned to meet with our tax preparer. I prayed that it would be the female preparer in the office and not John, or that, if it was John, he wouldn't recognize me. One part of my prayer was answered. It was John, but he didn't appear to remember me, not even when he saw my name on the paperwork we provided him. He talked to us (and to himself) in his distinctively nasally voice, sometimes snorting as he made little, mumbled jokes. He combed through our paperwork with his face just inches from it, and my wife glanced at me quizzically as if to say, "What the hell is this?" I couldn't wait to get out of there and tell her all about John.

After business was concluded, I asked the man his name. His first name, sure enough, was John, but his last name was different from what it had been in the dorm. I wanted to ask him if his last name used to be ___, but I refrained for two reasons. First, I didn't want him to know who I was before he prepared my tax return, since I thought he might harbor some grudge against me and be deranged enough to use it against me. Secondly, I thought he might not want his colleagues in the office to overhear anything about his name change.

Yet, when I returned the next day to pick up a copy of my completed return, I wanted to say something to him, and I think I would have if he'd been free to talk with me. But he was with another client. It was probably just as well. No sense dredging up a past that he might prefer to keep in the past. But our most unexpected meeting has brought many memories to the fore. I also feel relieved to know that John did not commit suicide and that, even though he seems to be almost as strange as he was more than three decades ago, he's found a way to get on with his life.

I wish him the very best.

Integral Christianity

The ancient Christian tradition stresses that Jesus was fully human and fully divine. He was not simply a really great guy; nor was he simply God walking around on earth for a time. Father Thomas speaks of Jesus on the Cross, stretched out between Heaven and Earth, as a profound symbol of the wedding together, in one Person, of all of evolution—matter, body, mind, soul, and spirit—leading the way for us all to do the same. This process of divinization, as Eastern Christian traditions put it, is beautifully worded in the liturgical prayer: “By the mystery of this water and wine, may we come to share in the divinity of Christ, who humbled Himself to share in our humanity.” Integral spirituality likewise exhorts us to be fully human (developing our abilities to take the widest and highest possible perspectives) and fully divine (moving into states of an ever-deepening oneness with Spirit). Perhaps we too will die to the egoic self-contraction we somehow believe ourselves to be. And perhaps we too will awaken and leave behind “the empty tomb….”
--ISC Editor's Blog

Camille Paglia on Hillary Clinton

The compulsive war-room mentality of both Clintons is neurosis writ large. The White House should not be a banging, rocking washer perpetually stuck on spin cycle. Many Democrats, including myself, have come to doubt whether Hillary has any core values or even a stable sense of identity. With her outlandish fibbing and naive self-puffery, her erratic day-to-day changes of tone and message, her glassy, fixed smiles, and her leaden and embarrassingly unpresidential jokes about pop culture, she has started to seem like one of those manic, seductively vampiric patients in trashy old Hollywood hospital flicks like "The Snake Pit." How anyone could confuse Hillary's sourly cynical, male-bashing megalomania with authentic feminism is beyond me.
--Camille Paglia

The Kind of Debate We Need

No previous generation has had to deal with different revolutions occurring simultaneously in separate parts of the world. The quest for a single, all-inclusive remedy is chimerical. In a world in which the sole superpower is a proponent of the prerogatives of the traditional nation-state, where Europe is stuck in halfway status, where the Middle East does not fit the nation-state model and faces a religiously motivated revolution, and where the nations of South and East Asia still practice the balance of power, what is the nature of the international order that can accommodate these different perspectives? What should be the role of Russia, which is affirming a notion of sovereignty comparable to America's and a strategic concept of the balance of power similar to Asia's? Are existing international organizations adequate for this purpose? What goals can America realistically set for itself and the world community? Is the internal transformation of major countries an attainable goal? What objectives must be sought in concert, and what are the extreme circumstances that would justify unilateral action?

This is the kind of debate we need, not focus-group-driven slogans designed to grab headlines.
--Henry Kissinger

Effective but Fair Taxation

We want a tax system that rewards risk taking. But not any risks - and not one where it's heads they win and tails I lose.
--Robert Reich

Why Not Winner Take All in the Democratic Primaries?

If the Democrats ran their nominating process the way we run our general elections, Sen. Hillary Clinton would have a commanding lead in the delegate count, one that will only grow more commanding after the next round of primaries, and all questions about which of the two Democratic contenders is more electable would be moot.
--Sean Wilentz

I've often wondered who would be ahead in the Democratic delegate count and by how much if Democratic delegates were awarded on a winner-take-all basis in the primaries. Wilentz poses an answer that I suspect is true, and if I weren't too busy (or lazy) to do it, I could confirm or refute my suspicion for myself. If Wilentz is right, I wouldn't expect Barack Obama's supporters to admit it, but I would expect Hillary Clinton and her supporters to shout it from the figurative rooftops and for the media to make a issue of it themselves. I wonder why they don't.

But even more importantly, why do the Democrats award delegate votes the way they do instead of doing it the way the Republicans do? It seems to me that the Democratic party should award delegates to its candidates the same way that electoral votes are awarded to the candidates in the general election. The winner should take all. To do it any other way seems like a recipe for failure, especially if the following assertion by Wilentz is correct:

The latest state-by-state figures (as of late March) updated from SurveyUSA, indicate that if the election were held today, Clinton would defeat McCain in the Electoral College because of her lead in big, electoral-vote-rich states such as Florida, Ohio and Pennsylvania -- and McCain would beat Obama.

Another Great Depression Looming?

Andrew Leonard writes in Salon that we are far from being in anything like the Great Depression that ravaged this nation in the last century. But he also warns that it could happen again if we continue along our current economic course. Here is his prescription for a "sequel" to the Great Depression:

1. Continue to ignore growing income inequality and govern the United States for the benefit of the rich at the expense of the many.
2. Continue to whittle away at the safety nets that exist to cushion Americans from economic ill winds.
3. Continue to weaken government oversight of Wall Street.

It seems to me that if we elect John McCain--that economically ignorant, by his own admission, bastion of "conservative values"--as our next president, this prescription will be followed right to the letter. If so, will another Great Depression be far behind? Stay tuned.

Stop Prison Rape

Andrew Sullivan links to an op-ed piece in the LA Times about the deleterious effects to male inmates and to society at large of society's tacit acceptance of male prison rape. We all know it goes on, but we joke about it instead of viewing and rejecting it as the inexcusable physical and mental torture that it is. According to the article, a 2007 survey by the Department of Justice showed 20% of inmates admitting to being coerced into unwanted sex, and 10% admitting to being violently raped during the previous twelve months. This is unconscionable! No one deserves to be raped!

Here is a telling passage from the article:

Morally, our tacit acceptance of violence within prisons is grotesque. But it's also counterproductive. Research by economists Jesse Shapiro and Keith Chen suggests that violent prisons make prisoners more violent after they leave. When your choice is between the trauma of hardening yourself so no one will touch you or the trauma of prostituting yourself so you're protected from attack, either path leads away from rehabilitation and psychological adjustment.

And we, as a society, endure the consequences -- both because it leads ex-cons to commit more crime on the streets and because more of them end up back to jail. A recent report released by the Pew Center on the States revealed that more than one in 100 Americans is now behind bars. California alone spends $8.8 billion a year on its imprisoned population -- a 216% increase over what it paid 20 years ago, even after adjusting for inflation.

That's money, of course, that can't be spent on schools, on job training, on wage supports and drug treatment. Money, in other words, that can't be spent on all the priorities that keep people out of prison. Money that's spent instead on housing prisoners in a violent, brutal and counterproductive atmosphere. And there's nothing funny about that.

And here is a link to a website and organization dedicated to ending this horrible abuse.