Bare and Bare-ish

Contemporary attitudes to bare and bare-ish bodies puzzle me. On the one hand showing off body parts when they’re almost uncovered but do display bulk and size and girth and cup-size albeit not das ding an sich, is as common as chicken feathers in a poultry yard. On the other hand, nakedness of any sort comes under the judgement of a prurient puritanism the strictness of which would challenge the goodies and gaffers of 17^th century New England.

 

A vignette from the distant past. As part of my first term in college all kids were obliged to take a swimming test. Boys and girls were put in separate groups, each group showing up at the indoor pool at different hours, even different days. The reason for the separation became apparent when we discovered that the school would not provide swim suits, so that if a kid didn’t come wearing one, he or she was obliged to take the test naked.

 

Back in the olden days of yore, no one thought much about it. It just happened. Big whoop. Think about it happening in 2026. And then follow the trail of law suits that would ensue from the non-suit swimming.

 

On the other hand, in 2026 it’s almost impossible to avoid seeing barely clothed bodies all over the place, whether on the red carpet or on the poster advertising the latest modification of some underwear brand. Think about that happening in the olden days of  yore when barely baring the little kid’s butt in the suntan lotion billboard was a scandal.

 

Which is it? Do we like bodies or not? Is it the shadow of a smile that titillates or the smile full-on?

Grok

I’ve known since it first became a thing that Twitter’s “Grok” AI bot is named after the word invented by Robert Heinlein in Stranger in a Strange Land. In the book, “grok” means understanding something so thoroughly that it and the thinker become as one. Presumably the Musk-rat wants us to think that his Grok functions much the same way as the bot comprehends the user’s perspective so deeply that its response is exactly what the user’s little heart would desire.

 

What I just grokked, however, is just how much Musk-rat’s use of the term reveals about his own demigod mentality. To get at the danger that connection represents, I need to think through a little bit more about Heinlein’s book.

 

“Grok” is a word that the main character of the book, Valentine Michael Smith, usually called Mike, imports to Earth from the language of the Martians. Mike had been born on Mars, the only child begotten by the first human colony of Mars, which had then disappeared, leaving Mike to be raised by the Martians. But that’s not the only thing that Mike imports from Mars.

 

Martians are very sophisticated people, but their outstanding characteristic is that, in the meditative states that they enter as they work towards grokking things in the universe, they access a degree of power and control over the thing that they grok that, simply by willing it, they can convert that thing into something else entirely. For instance, the Martians had spent some time grokking that the planet that existed between Mars and Jupiter represented a profound danger to the solar system, and so they willed the planet to destroy itself. The asteroid belt represents the leftovers of that planet.

 

Mike is a plain old human being—hence the last name that Heinlein gives him, Smith—not a Martian. But one doesn’t have to be Martian to achieve the power that the Martians have by dint of inheriting their culture. Once he acclimates to Earth, then, Mike goes around grokking things so thoroughly that he does to them the same kind of things that the Martians did to that destroyed planet. When the federal authorities send a bunch of armed officers to confront Jubal Harshaw, the lawyer-philosopher-savant who has become Mike’s mentor, almost in loco parentis for him, Mike groks that they mean nothing good for Jubal and so he . . . he makes the officers disappear.

 

It’s not the only destruction of others that Mike accomplishes during his life on earth, but grokking does not necessarily entail destruction. Two of his many female companions, recognizing what it is that Mike likes in a woman, grok together to reshape themselves into a closer likeness to what he likes, for instance. Those women are key members, priestesses in fact, of a new church that Mike creates, deliberately intended to teach Martian ways to human beings. Ultimately all of the members of the church, at least the ones who are part of the highly selective inner sanctum, develop their grokking skills to the point that they are as adept as Mike himself.

 

The theology of Mike’s church collaborates with the power that grokking engenders. At its base is the notion that all creatures are divine, a fact unfortunately hidden away from humans by the mere fact that they are human—Martians are born into a culture that understands, fosters, and develops the divine potential of every individual. It is also part of the theology that living beings are simply a temporary expression of the infinite divinity that every individual can become. In practice that means that to die is not to end existence. The idea is a bit like the notion of reincarnation that makes a subsequent embodiment of a particular soul an expression of just how “pure” that soul has been.

 

What Mike wants to accomplish, then, is to make all humans as capable of such divinity as Martians are. Of course, Martians are also not only capable but more than willing to snuff out the life of any young Martian that does not take the divinity as a serious responsibility. On the theory that killing the young Martian does not put an end to that particular soul, the practice is thought to produce an increasingly more divine population of living Martians. So too on Earth, Mike sifts out all the non-responsible people who want to join his church. Only the most select of the most select achieve the potential of divinity. The adepts do not always kill the impure souls that want to join the church, but in the long run those who do reach the highest level of the church will be able to control every aspect of existence, and so the impure will simply die off on their own until in the future at some point all living humans will be like the Martians.

 

I know that the summary of the novel is too long to tolerate. But it’s essential to understand that what Heinlein imagines is a race of human beings who have divine power, who can control every aspect of existence, who have the power of life and death and are entirely immune to any law or practice that inhibits or proscribes that power. When the state tries to intervene against Jubal, then, the state is deemed impure and so destroyed. Jubal himself is something like what has come to be called a sovereign citizen. He uses his mastery of the law, human law, to assert for himself such a grand prerogative of authority that he might as well not be subject to any law at all. So where Mike handles the “theological” side of absolute personal power, Jubal does the same for the social and cultural side of such power.

 

The combination of theology, law, sociology, and culture is irresistible. It is also what undergirds Musk-rat’s and, it seems, a great many of the tech bros’ attitude and approach to existence on this planet. They are above the law because they control the law. They want to be immortal, and so fund research into how to extend human life, their life, maybe into infinity. They are semi-divine because they control almost every aspect of human existence in this AI-benighted world we live in. They are a threat, a dire threat, to anyone who is not “pure” enough—which is to say too poor, too technologically unsavvy, too much underlings. It’s not that Musk-rat has the power to grok people into non-existence. Instead he uses his power to create a “department” of the government, DOGE, that sets out to erase people indirectly. How many have died because DOGE eliminated foreign aid, for instance? And Musk-rat doesn’t give a rat’s ass about the damage.

 

What I grokked, in short, is that the use of “grok” as the name for Musk-rat’s AI bot is not an accident. It is quite intentional. It should be taken as a warning. 

Health Care As It Should Be

When I went to vote in the PA primary yesterday, I was wearing my Harvard t-shirt. I have one or more t-shirt for every institution that I’ve been associated with, and this one came up in the rotation. Anyway, the nice lady behind the desk asked if I’d been there, and I said yes, and she said her granddaughter had just been admitted to the dental school. So I congratulated her and said that I had fond memories of the dental school.

 

I didn’t go into the reason why I had such memories. There was the serious business of being # 44 to vote that day—it was around 2 p.m., so pathetic turnout is the name of the game. But the memories of the dental school are interwoven with memories of the health services offered to students and faculty at Harvard, at least back in the last millennium: I don’t know what they’re like nowadays.

 

Three experiences there.

 

One day I was sitting at my desk intent on taking notes to prepare to write a paper, and I carelessly inserted the back end of a Bic pen into my ear. Being a lucky kind of guy, I immediately felt the little rubber cap that seals the end come out and nestle itself lovingly into my ear canal. I went to the health services. The receptionist did not mock me. The nurse who carefully removed the cap did not mock me. I walked out chagrined but un-mocked.

 

A while later a physical exam suggested I had a heart murmur. The health services sent me to a specialist facility where the good doctors and technicians spent some two or three hours trying one test and then another and another trying to figure out what was going on with the ol’ ticker. It turned out that nothing was going on, and happily I trotted back home.

 

And then came the dental experience. I went to have my teeth checked and cleaned. The dentist looked at the results of both procedures and said, “Your teeth are fine, but your gums have got to go.” What a joker! And so the health services provided me with a periodontist who considered my mouth and decided that the dentist had been right. He, the periodontist, was affiliated with the dental school, and it happened that he had a student who was about to finish her training—a nice Iranian woman, as it turned out. The student would do the surgery, which took place over the course of a month or so, one segment of the mouth at a time while the periodontist supervised. I was the student’s final project. Everything worked out fine.

 

So from blush-causing idiocy to oral surgery, the health services were there to help.

 

And you know how much I paid for all of that? Nothing. Zero. Zilch.

 

That’s the way health services should function across the country, for everyone.

Memory vs. Journals

I came across some old—some more than half a century old, in fact—journals that I’d kept, off and on, since back in college days. Also some prose and “poems” from HS days, starting back in 10^th grade, but those are far too embarrassing even to read.

 

Anyway, the journals are proof positive that memory isn’t a reliable adjunct of being human.

 

I mean, the general picture that I have in memory, mostly that I was* at best a callow youth and at worst a self-absorbed asshole, is pretty accurate. It’s the details that on the one hand flesh out that sense of self and on the other hand illustrate that what I thought, memorially speaking, to have been the case was not the case at all. F’rinstace, important friendships that I thought had disappeared by sophomore year had indeed diminished but had not disappeared as I remember them to have done. Nonetheless there are a lot of friendships lost and never found again—although I have to say that FB has helped me to reconnect with people who otherwise would have been lost to time.

 

Some things I just do not remember at all at all. At some point in the spring of 1973 I went to Philly to see the Grateful Dead in concert. What I say about that experience is neat—the best concert ever and so on. But I have not a single memory trace of the event, nor of the trip to Philly nor of what I did besides go see the Dead. Similarly I write of getting drunk, or near drunk, several times, but my recollection is that I really did not drink a great deal. My preference by far was for vaporous sorts of mood-altering substances. That is borne out in the journals for sure, but I guess alcohol played some role as well.

 

And to top it all off, as I sometimes do for gits and shiggles, I asked Word’s copilot AI to structure and refine this, and the damned app tells me that “Copilot can’t generate high-quality content here.”

 

I choose to take that as a compliment to my scintillating prose.

*Here's hoping the tense is correct.

Sin

I’ll take your theologically loaded term, sin, rather than crime. As I understand things, some laws, the violation of which leads to crime, are well worth violating—for instance the “If thou art Black thou shalt sit at the back of the bus.” I hadn’t thought about it, but I suspect that a great many laws that begin with “if” are worth violating. So sin is the violation of some rule, prohibition, behavior that does not adhere to a general truth—for instance the truth that “All men [by which one is to understand humans as a whole, I presume, at least nowadays if not in 1776] are created equal.” No “if” there, and of course it stands exactly against the “if” of Jim Crow.

 

In the biblical tradition it stands to reason that the first sin is the violation of the edict that A&E should not violate the prohibition against eating of the fruit of moral knowledge, good and evil. I’ve always thought that the fruit itself is irrelevant since the will knowingly to violate the prohibition is itself acknowledgement of the distinction between good and evil. But if one’s going to be dramatic then some action, the taking, the eating, the savoring, the dawning awareness of guilt, and so on—all of that is necessary for a good story. And the continuation in the loving self-sacrifice of god in the guise of a human follows as further drama.

 

In the Catholic tradition, kids before the age of reason, as they call it, before age seven in the conventional accounting, are not capable of making the distinction between good and evil and so kids are not, indeed cannot be “sinful.” They can break rules to be sure, but such behavior is not a sin per se. At any rate, I think the most general of truths is not the avoiding of moral knowledge. If it were we’d all be running around like kids breaking rules but not sinning. I realize it’s kinda low-brow to say, but nonetheless it seems likely that the most general of rules, the most truly sin-producing as well as law-breaking, is the plain old golden rule.

 

If I’m supposed to treat others as I’d wish to be treated myself, and if I fail to do so, then I’ve committed a sin. By the way, I’d extend the “other” here to all creatures great and small, although I acknowledge fully that were a mosquito or a flea or a chigger to molest me, I’d retaliate lethally if I could. And I suppose I’d be obliged to go to confession. Forgive me father for I have sinned.

 

In the great scheme of things, then, how would I consider an all-powerful being who allows or, depending on the flavor of the theologian’s notions, creates a world in which some critters can exist only at the expense of violating the golden rule. I’m not considering the mosquito or flea or chigger as moral agents, mind you, but rather conceiving of the stance of an all-powerful being who creates a world where such critters can exist only in such a way—or for that matter a gorgeous tiger who must kill to subsist, or a beautiful hawk who must snatch the baby rabbit from its hutch so it can eat. And so on. I hear already the line from Paradise Lost, “and without thorn the rose,” which points to the innocuousness of a prelapsarian creation. Presumably mosquitos and fleas and chiggers had an alternative lifestyle back then.

 

But what am I to think of such an all-powerful being? Ah, of course—one cannot plumb the mysterious ways of god. Sort of the theological version of shut up and eat your oatmeal. My take on such all-powerful being is slightly different. The golden rule does not depend on some such being to articulate it. It’s an emergent truth, palpable in every human interaction, although not always on a short-term basis.

 

Just think what the US would think (if a country can be said to think) were some foreign power to intervene to get rid of cockwomble for us. We would certainly not like that done to us. And  yet we did it to Iran in 1953, and to . . . add however many countries you want, and you will note that the outcome of such interventions has always been the opposite of what we wanted. In Iran it took a couple of decades for the consequences to become obvious, but we didn’t treat others the way we would want to be treated, and the sin was ultimately punished.

 

So experience leads to the emergent truth of the golden rule. No need to invent a middle man, whom the theologians would call god, no doubt, to articulate the law that separates the good from the evil.

 

So sure, I’ll use the word sin to denote those actions that violate the transcendent, if I may use that term, rules of human behavior. But as far as I’m concerned sin does not depend on the dictum of some all-powerful being. No need for a god that transgresses the most comprehensive of such rules, at any rate.

US : Iran :: Japan : US

The attack on Iran made me think of the attack on Pearl Harbor, and that made me think of how Japan may well have considered the US for the hundred or so years before 1941.

Consider the American 19^th century from the perspective of the Japanese Empire, then—leaving aside Perry’s forcible opening of Japan to “trade” in 1853.

 

From just before the Civil War, the US had expanded tremendously from its east coast origins. It swept away nation after nation as it moved to the west. In the 1840s, having had its citizens infiltrate the territory, it annexed Texas. In treaty with the UK, it acquired what are now the states of Oregon and Washington. As a demand after the Mexican American War, it acquired California, Nevada, and Utah. Right after the Civil War, the US purchased Alaska. OK—all of that is territorially part of North America.

 

And then came the Spanish-American War, when the US quite deliberately attacked the weakest of the European Empires in order to show that it was more powerful than that empire and in order to establish its expansionist agenda beyond North America. In the Caribbean, it acquired Puerto Rico and, for all intents and purposes, Cuba. In the Pacific, where no doubt the Japanese had a much much more focused interest, it acquired the Hawai’ian islands in the same way that it had acquired Texas, by infiltration. And then there were the war prizes—Guam, Wake Atoll, and the Philippines. Guam, Wake, and the Philippines are all about two thousand miles from Japan.

 

Between Guam, the Philippines, and Japan there are the Micronesian islands, an archipelago of small islands that is small in land area but covers a vast area of the western Pacific. And then there’s Okinawa, only 400 miles from the main Japanese islands.

 

Japan annexed Okinawa in 1879. After WW I the League of Nations mandated most of the Marianas islands to Japan. Buffers, perhaps.

 

And there it stood between the end of WW I and the start of WW II. US territories on one side, Japanese territories on the other side, divided not by fruited plains or purple mountain majesties, but by the Pacific Ocean.

 

Again, between the founding of the US and the beginning of the 20^th century, the US had swept away nation after nation in asserting its manifest destiny. It had warred with Mexico to cement its annexation of Texas, and in the aftermath of that war had acquired great swaths of western lands. It had purchased more lands, both from Mexico and from Russia, and acquired more by treaty.

 

Was Japan to think that the US would stop its westward expansion with Guam, the Philippines, and Wake Atoll?

Dickinson, Faith, Doubt

In Our Time this time was on Emily Dickinson. It was a good, solid reminder of just how deeply religious the poems are. For me it was a corrective because on the whole I tend to focus on the doubts that hedge the faith rather than the faith itself. But yes indeed, the poems are both religious and full of doubt. One of my favorites, which underscores that duality, is this one:

 

I know that He exists.

Somewhere – in silence –

He has hid his rare life

From our gross eyes.

 

’Tis an instant’s play –

’Tis a fond Ambush –

Just to make Bliss

Earn her own surprise!

 

But – should the play

Prove piercing earnest –

Should the glee – glaze –

In Death’s – stiff – stare –

 

Would not the fun

Look too expensive!

Would not the jest –

Have crawled too far!

 

The faith, indeed the certainty of a divine presence, is obvious in the first line (I’m reminded of a student who once upon a time said she thought the poem was about a potential lover . . . sure, why not). But so is the doubt—the “silence,” the “hid” if the first stanza point in that direction, but then so does the “should” and the “would” of the third and fourth stanzas.

 

And even more importantly, the poem emphasizes a profoundly critical stance on the nature of the divinity that, without doubt for the speaker, shapes our ends. From the divine perspective, it’s all “play,” a “fond Ambush,” a “surprise”—a bit of fun. From the human perspective, on the contrary, there’s “piercing earnest,” “glaz[ing],” a “stiff stare,” so that the “fun” becomes something else entirely.

 

That “He,” then—not just a good guy, not just a benevolent, jolly hidden giant. It’s more like one of the several conjectures in King Lear. “As flies to wanton boys, are we to the gods. / They kill us for their sport.”