Author Archives: Greg Wees

Trump’s Return: Implications for U.S. Democracy

Posted on by
Reply

January 9, 2025

From Exile to Victory

Today is a National Day of Mourning. As I write this, the body of Jimmy Carter lies in state at the Capitol, the hallowed center of America’s democracy that was violently attacked by Donald Trump’s supporters four years ago last Monday. 

He told them to go to that same Capitol and “fight like hell” as Congress attempted to certify the results of a free and fair election, so they did. It was a counterpart for today; it was a national day of shame. The world looked upon the United States as a democracy losing itself to violent hooliganism.

But in eleven days, the same Donald Trump who refused to recognize the vote of the people, the one who tried to engineer a reversal of Democratic President Joe Biden’s win by whatever means necessary, who has been convicted of 34 felonies, who assaults women, who “allegedly” stashed a trove of secret government documents in his bathroom (I guess we’ll never know), who calls America a “garbage can” fighting “forever wars” while praising Putin’s blood-soaked Russia—this man will be sworn in as president once again. 

He will be sworn in by a member of the Supreme Court, a conservative majority of which has  granted him constitutionally questionable immunity from prosecution for his many alleged crimes. As I write this, that same Court has just narrowly decided not to try to erase his 34 state felony convictions for crimes committed before he was in office. 

This is not to mention the literally thousands of lawsuits Trump has been hit with, the payouts to hoodwinked “students” of the phony Trump University, his civil trial for sexual assault of Ms. E. Jean Carroll (for which he was found liable), or the many other women who have come forward to accuse him of assault. 

Remember the Donald Trump who admitted barging into the dressing rooms of his Miss USA and Miss Universe pageants to “inspect” the half-dressed contestants? Because he could? The Trump whom we heard on tape claiming that he could not help himself, could not resist grabbing and kissing beautiful women? It’s the same Trump now. 

As Gallup notes, the Supreme Court protecting Trump from accountablity presides over a court system that it appears Americans no longer trust. In 2020, 59% of those polled said they have confidence in the courts. A few weeks ago, Gallup released a poll showing that in the last five years, the number has dropped to 35%. According to Gallup, this is the kind of rapid decline in confidence seen during recent upheavals in countries like Myanmar, Venezuela, and Syria.

Yet it is by design. A democraticaly elected president cannot become a “dictator on day one,” as Trump has publicly promised, without a little help from his friends. As Putin and his ilk have done in Russia, Hungary, Syria, Venezuela, and other former democracies, Trump must undermine the authority of the courts in the eyes of the public before he can bend them to his will. 

Ironically, in the case of the Supreme Court, the unaddressed ethical lapses and outrageous behaviors of conservative justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito, as exhaustively reported by Pro Publica, have aided this campaign against the courts’ general credibility. Chief Justice Roberts’ annoyed dismissals of any hint of wrongdoing, as if to suggest that wrongdoing by members of a powerful court with no one to answer to but itself is impossible, have also likely moved the needle. 

And of course, Trump relentlessly attacks every judge, prosecutor, or DA who dares to come after him, casting them as the Spanish Inquisition and himself as a modern Jesus of Nazareth. But as with those juries that have found him to be less than innocent, to me the publicly available evidence alone makes him look more like a criminal being prosecuted by the law than a politician being persecuted by his enemies. There’s just no evidence of the latter, unless you look all the way back to the 2019 Ukraine debacle, Trump’s mob-like pressure campaign to force the Ukranian government to smear the reputation of candidate Joe Biden (the subject of Trump’s first impeachment.)

Speaking of protecting the public from wrongdoers, that was also Aileen Cannon’s job in presiding over Trump’s trial for allegedly stealing top secret government documents. We all saw what happened with Trump’s appointee in charge—endless delays and needless hearings on every frivolous motion, followed by prompt pre-election dismissal of the case based on the already-defeated notion that the special prosecutor was “illegally appointed.” 

That was the end, as they say, of that. But it should have been only the beginning. Special Counsel Jack Smith was ready to appeal. 

Then Trump won the election. 

From Victory to Retribution

Yes, once again, Trump won. Now, like a character in a novel rescued from unjust banishment and restored to the throne, Trump’s ignominious past begins to fall away in favor of an imagined “return of the king” narrative favored by the administration and its friends in high (and low) places.

Indeed, the major media, much of which is now owned by Trump’s fellow billionaires, seem to be suffering a major case of amnesia regarding the historic coup attempt. Three days ago was the fourth anniversary of the January 6 attack. In perusing the media that morning, one of the two articles I saw on the topic was from never-Trump conservative David Frum, writing in The Atlantic on the topic of—you guessed it—how the incoming administration and its apologists are trying to “erase” the legacy of January 6. 

It must be erased, because this king has returned for “retribution” and “justice,” as promised when he announced his candidacy in early 2023. Before even  taking office, he has already threatened our neighbors both north and south, throwing in Panama and Denmark for good measure. He has threatened GOP elected officials like Liz Cheney and Mitt Romney with “military tribunals”, whatever that is supposed to look like. 

You may recall that four-star General Mark Milley, who was Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff at the time, spoke on the phone with his Chinese counterpart during the mayhem of January 6, 2021. As the world press was live-reporting on a possible coup by Trump’s supporters, who were marching through the halls of the Capitol chanting “Hang Mike Pence!” and defecating on elected officials’ desks, and while Trump himself did nothing but watch the sordid show unfold on television, Milley took responsibility for assuring the Chinese government that the United States nuclear arsenal was under control and that there was no threat of an unprovoked nuclear strike. 

The Chinese were completely blind regarding what may have been happening in terms of the security of the U.S. nuclear arsenal and chain of command. Further, U.S. intelligence indicated that weeks earlier, the Chinese had acquired intelligence of their own suggesting a possible first strike by the U.S. So Milley’s call may have been instrumental in averting an accidental nuclear exchange. 

But Trump, after a couple of years spent rehabilitating himself among his supporters, was retroactively livid. He said publicly in September 2023 that Milley’s actions were treasonous and, in past times, would have merited court-martial and execution. In other words, he was insinuating that his former Joint Chiefs Chariman, a decorated war hero and a symbol of the modern military, could be put to death for calming the global situation while Trump sulked in front of his TV, watching the insurrection he co-authored. 

What’s more, at the time, Milley’s call had been discussed and authorized by the then-Secretary of State and acting Secretary of Defense. While it may be argued Milley exceeded his statutory authority in making the call, it may also be argued—and more convincingly—that bridging the gaping hole in the chain of command left by the absent president was the more immediate concern.

Professor Tom Nichols of the U.S. Naval War College said as much, writing in The Atlantic at the time that “[t]he Constitution of the United States has no provision for the control of planet-destroying weapons while the President is losing his mind and trying to overthrow the government itself.”

Since that time, General Milley has become a standard-issue MAGA pariah, to the point that he has been forced to barricade his home and hire private security for his family. It’s a familiar story now. By taking a stand for the Constitution and the public good, Milley has become  the symbolic anti-MAGA warrior who must be diminished.

Let’s remember what Trump confidant (and fellow convict) Steve Bannon has been saying for years: “Our goal is the deconstruction of the administrative state.” 

Milley has since said publicly that Trump is “the most dangerous person ever” and “a fascist to the core.” With Trump about to gain unchecked power, I am very concerned for the general’s future, and by extension the future of all who value the checks and balances of the Constitution, the integrity of the courts, and the rule of law. 

But we who value such things are no longer the majority. Instead, the country will inherit the kind of future that a small plurality of Americans and a decisive majority of Nebraskans asked for with their votes last November. It’s a future they have gifted to Trump the Immune, but whatever fruits it bears will fall to all of us. 

They say the best predictor of future behavior is past behavior. Let us see how this future unfolds. 

A Modest Proposal

Posted on by
1

You know the old saying—when life gives you lemons…

Yesterday, life gave us Biden vs. Trump two-point-ohhhhh my. Nobody wants it. Everybody dreads it. Still, it’s’ what we’ll get. 

Lemons. 

But the old saying skips a few details. Exactly how do you make the lemonade? The answer is simple: you squeeze the lemons. You squeeze the juice out of them. Then you sweeten up that juice and drink it down. 

What is a president, after all? Little more than an actor, a figurehead who utters the pronouncements and signs the documents written by beurocratic writer eggheads working with bureucratic math eggheads and low-level White House Congressional liaison eggheads. (I probably don’t have to mention that none of these eggheads are octegenarians—only the politicians who stand in front of the cameras and spout whatever comes into their heads have that kind of job security.) 

The acts are getting stale, the actors losing their touch. We’ve seen this movie too many times. Thus our current national slow-motion malaise, amplified by a social media experiment gone awry, which will culminate in a moment next November that few want to see happen, regardless of the outcome. And those few are a scary few, at least on occasions when they sufficiently outnumber the objects of their projected self-loathing. 

Unless…

Because let’s face the cold, hard facts: Trump is ascendant in his GOP, while Biden is an albatross for Democrats. It doesn’t make much sense, but there it is. You can blame the media’s “Trump enrichment syndrome” or the gullibility of yokels, the fragility of gun-baring white men, or the ennui of an entire people who’ve had too damn much success on the hunt  for another cheap thrill. Or you can blame God, or the stars and planets. 

But it won’t change what you will get—not a lemon, but a dried up old orange. And a crazy one at that. 

We must ask ourselves, though: What else could we get? What good thing could we make from this MAGA obsession, which has resulted in the RNC going to the Trump family and Lara Trump declaring that “every penny” will now go to Trump’s campaign (which is also his legal defense fund)? What can we make from that?

The word is Orangeade. Another word is “super-majority”. And all Democrats would need to do is concentrate on the important Senate and House races, outspend strapped Republicans in strategic vulnerable and swing districts (leaving some non-MAGA GOP opponents in place), and sell this message to voters disgusted by Trump but also poisoned against Biden and wary of a “President Harris”: Trump will be contained in his White House like Sauruman in his tower. 

Rage as Trump might, a Congress helmed by Democrats in both houses—including a super-majority of 60 senators—can thwart practically every move he and his captured Supreme Court may try to make toward their dream of a post-democratic autocracy. 

(Oh yes, the Supreme Court which, at this time, appears in the tank for Trump but still cannot actually write the legislation they favor. That is the job of Congress, which can also write laws that shape an out-of-whack Supreme Court. So I hope you see I am describing a “twofer”.)

I know what you’re saying. “Impossible. It’s never been done.” Which would be correct. Kind of like there’s never been anyone elected back to the White House after attempting to seize power from the man who beat him in the previous election. Like there’s never been a president under mulitple criminal indictments, or a president who has been found guilty of sexual assault by a jury of his peers.

Oh yeah, there’s a lot of “never beens” these days. Aren’t you ready for another of your own, Democrats? After all, in 2008 there had never been a Black president. There had never been legal gay marriage in the US. Few nations offered women reproductive rights of any kind, and even fewer allow abortions (still). 

In 1919, women had “never been” voters, and only one (a fluke) had been a Member of Congress. 

In 1860, Black Americans had “never been” free. 

And remember, the Trump-inspired Congressional losses of his tenure, while modest, were also unprecedented.

So hammer this message home, from now until November: Instead of handing the nation to Trump and his amoral MAGA allies like Greene, Goetz and Graham, a coalition of Independents (like myself), Democrats, and Republican refugees can use the 2024 election to take it all away from them. We can box Trump in the White House, alone, with only his “hand-picked” (translation: incompetent,  self-interested and likely criminal) loyalists to defend him (for as long as that lasts). 

The coalition will be temporary by nature. We’re talking about Congress, where power shifts in the wind like the sands of the desert.

And how long would his presidency last? The Supreme Court appears poised to delay Trump’s prosecution until he can secure the presidency. The day he enters office, Trump’s Justice Department will end the prosecutions. On the next day, Congress can proceed with impeachment number three. And this time it sticks. As the new boss, his VP will have a stark choice: play ball with a re-empowered Congress, or get shown the door like the old boss.

And whatever Trump’s Supreme Court bloc tries to do, a robust Congress could undo. 

I would brand it a “velvet revolution,” seizing power from the executive and returning it to the people via ballot box patriotism. If this were to be achieved, not only would America be successful in containing MAGA fever and thus protecting vulnerable Americans from its worst instincts. It would also, in the process, re-empower the branch of government that should in fact wield the most conspicuous authority of the three—because it is the people’s branch, populated with the people’s representatives. At least in theory. Can we make it a reality? Why shouldn’t we? We have no king.

And who knows? Maybe Democrats can sweep Biden back in too, with a sort of reverse Congressional coattail effect. Not that it really matters.

Many will say an alliance of progressive and moderate Americans cannot do it, because the right-leaning Independents and nervous traditionalist Republicans will balk. But really they don’t want us to try, and their voices are louder, individually, than ours. They want it to stay that way. So the powerful of all stripes will shout down such an idea as unrealistic. Unfortunately, such rhetoric has its own power in our omnipresent mediascape.

But never forget what our collective power can do at the voting booth. Don’t forget the hope that was inspired in 2008, and don’t fear the backlash—that will happen no matter what you do.

The only alternative to victory is surrender to the loudest, angriest, and most ignorant voices among us. 

“I Am Homeless if This is Not My Home”: Lorrie Moore’s School of Death for Beginners

Posted on by
Reply

Reviewers seem a bit confused by Lorrie Moore’s new novel about love after death. Most exude this weird kind of shock that Moore could write something so, um, well…trite. And icky. But it’s good! They all say. It’s better than all the other crap out there. She’ll write something better soon.

Anyway, every review covers the surface action well, so I won’t get too far into that. History teacher’s brother is dying, while his ex-girlfriend is suicidal, then dead, then sort of alive again, sort of a tree, and off the two of them go, on an obliquely adventurous/fantastic/surreal “road trip” that hugs the Mason Dixon line, as her dead body decays. That is indeed what happens.

And the epistolary framing provided by the out-of-time innkeeper, Libby, does indeed send us into brief moments of literary splendor, with Moore kind of showing off (with purpose) in the form of Libby’s well-executed Cormac McCarthy-style liturgical drawl. It’s good stuff, I agree.

But after auditing many reviews, I find only a few writing on this novel have touched on the main time-traveling conspiracy theory threading its way through this doube narrative.

And folks stumble on the bad jokes, the bad puns, the bad one-liners, homophones, narrow cultural references that fall short—the desperation humor, you might call it, that bobs and weaves its way all through this short American lamentation on four wheels. 

Why are they doing that? Why doesn’t Lily (the too-perfect name —the “life” of death) know more about death, or even that she’s quite dead? Why must Finn keep at her, keep hounding her on the question of just how dead she is? 

“Maybe it’s a spectrum,” she offers. Indeed, maybe it is, in some kind of deaths. Maybe it’s slower, less absolute right away, less tangible and solid. More a dying than a death.

And what of this innkeeper? What is her role? Why do Finn and Lily end up at her broken down boarding house, where her ghost surely resides in the form of her bound letters to her dead sister—just as Finn’s brother is about to become his own ghost. What is in this parallel structure to make it mean something?

My key to this minor enigma can be found in some of the recurring imagery itself — Lily’s decay, a vehicle on the road to nowhere, Hillary Clinton versus Donald Trump, the Mason/Dixon, secessionists, conspiracy theories, Abraham Lincoln, John Wilkes Booth, and skies that offer patterns significant to others but, we are told more than once, not to Finn, who doesn’t understand how anyone sees anything in the constellations. 

And what does Finn say more than once, amid what appears to be a salad of jumbled, barely appropriate cultural references uttered by each of them seemingly without willing it (the pair are constantly self-critiquing each other’s prowess at this, to be fair):

There are no more Rice Krispies.

Here, you must be not only a cultural historian but one of a certain age — Lorrie Moore’s age — to even get the joke at all. And if you don’t know, I’m not going to tell you. Yes, the book is about loss. Of course it is. But it’s more than that.

But that’s the idea. I feel like you can read this book two ways (at least) — as someone ignorant of history (or who conflates history with its attendant popular conspiracy theories and various tv shows about history) or someone who knows history. If you’re the former, you will be confused and perplexed (kind of like Finn and some of these reviewers) by this narrative’s sort of half-knowledge of history mixed with commercial fodder gleaned from a lifetime of television exposure, shot through with a sepia-toned conspiracy theory born in 1865 and still living today. For a quick shorthand, you can think of what Don DeLillo was trying to do (and did) in his 1985 novel White Noise. It’s part of what Moore is doing here – throwing us off balance with our own fractured culture.

But if you’re the latter, you see the thread Moore is weaving, from the political theater of 2016 to the theater (Ford’s) of 1865. There is no character more salient to the post-2016 American condition than a spoiled rich charlatan—a famous con man wrapped up in an overly coiffed disguise of himself that exudes charming bravado, but who in his nihilistic solipsism will threaten the stability of a nation, perhaps the world. 

And that man was John Wilkes Booth. Or was it Abraham Lincoln? 

You see? If we go back to 1865* we find a familiar world, with familiar actors, where history has not yet finished the chapter but soon will. A disgruntled and just-defeated South, where the president is despised as a tyrant, had nurtured the famous Booth and then birthed, in the final hours, the fanatic Booth, who goes on to carry out the vengeance their own hearts nurtured at home. 

Booth was famous, you know, on both sides of the Mason/Dixon. He was beloved in Maryland and the greater South for his acting talents and his place in the impressive Booth family. He lived a life of celebrity, ease, and wealth. Yet something in him transformed him into the assassin he became. That something was the Union’s victory, and specifically Abraham Lincoln.

We know his story too, basically. He shot Lincoln, then got away to a barn somewhere after hurting his leg (either from jumping onto the Ford’s Theater stage or later when his getaway horse fell on him, it’s not known). The authorities found him there, besieged the barn—and then the story gets murky. Suffice to say, many believed he got away that night, and some other poor soul was shot in that burning barn.

Now let’s look again at Jack, the southern dandy described with such detail by landlady Libby. He knows Shakespeare, he has grandiose ways, mutton chops, and flashy clothes (along with a trunk full of wigs, tights of all variety, and several shining swords). He winks and hints cryptically to Libby regarding secessionists in the area. Most tellingly, he has a cork leg–“from the secesh, he says”. Oh, and he’s a real jerk to women. Libby describes him often, as in:

“Dapper as a finch, the handsome lodger can recite bewildering poems of Felicia Hemans (note: whose poetry runs from kitchy patriotic themes to the suicide of women) … His mustache is black and thick as a broom bristle and the words come flying out of it like the lines of a play in a theatre on fire…”

Of course, that would all add up to just a hunch if not for the curiosity seeker who comes calling at the boarding house asking for Jack’s body (Jack is traditionally a nickname for John, by the way). His name is Phineas Bates, and Libby surmises that he wants the body to mummify it, and to then cart it around the country as a sideshow curiosity. Why does Libby think this?

Because it’s what happened. Sort of. The controversy still swirling around John Wilkes Booth’s death at the turn of the century prompted one Finis L. Bates to write Escape and Suicide of John Wilkes Booth, a bestseller contending that a Booth look-alike was mistakenly killed at the Garrett farm while Booth eluded his pursuers until he committed suicide in 1903 in Enid, Oklahoma. Later, Bates went so far as to exhibit what he claimed was Booth’s embalmed body at carnival shows. 

Finn mentions the controversy and mystery of the barn episode to Lily, with Booth’s possible escape part of the wider web of conspiracy theories in which he’s interested (including UFOs and the possibility that the moon landing was faked to reach Kennedy’s arbitrary deadline).

All subsequent attempts, by both the Booth family and researchers, to exhume the body buried in John Wilkes Booth’s grave have been rejected by the authorities based on what they call the “unreliability” of Bates’ story.

So Finn interprets this as perhaps we all should: the bottom line is that this is a story known to history, but without evidence, because those in charge don’t want to see it.

Still, given all that, what is Moore’s point in resurrecting (if you will) this old saw and then burying it in a story about lovers on the run? 

It may be helpful to examine the mind of Booth a little more carefully. Here he is in a letter from January 1865:

I know how foolish I shall be deemed for undertaking such a step as this, where, on one side, I have many friends and everything to make me happy … to give up all … seems insane; but God is my judge. I love justice more than I do a country that disowns it, more than fame or wealth.

Does that bullshit sound familiar at all? Or how about this:

I have ever held the South was right. The very nomination of Abraham Lincoln, four years ago, spoke plainly war upon Southern rights and institutions. …And looking upon African Slavery from the same stand-point held by the noble framers of our constitution, I for one, have ever considered it one of the greatest blessings (both for themselves and us,) that God has ever bestowed upon a favored nation.

Feelings like this transformed Abraham Lincoln into a tyrant and violence into the only solution among people like Booth. In other words, the destruction of their “way of life” (which was a way to death for Black people) was tantamount to genocide and a call for the very civil war that had then lain waste to their society. They were defeated, yes. But in many Southern homes, for years afterward, proud portraits of John Wilkes Booth were displayed in the parlor. 

And in Moore’s telling, he struts around a Chattanooga boarding house in a continuation of his self-important drama, the stage play of the brave patriot who brought down a tyrant and lived to tell the tale — even after his celebrated death.

Perhaps he really did get away, with help from sympathizers, in the same way he got to that barn after shooting the president in the middle of Washington, DC. Finn points out that Lincoln’s personal guard was conveniently off drinking beer when Booth pulled the trigger, and that a lot of other folks were conveniently placed around the area. Because we’re not allowed to find out who’s in that grave, we will never know if Booth got away. But we know there were folks positioned to help him, right there in Washington.

The idea was to re-charge the war by decapitating the Union government. A plan worthy of Q-anon.

It was a slow dying. Their ideals stayed the same, or maybe even hardened a bit, like pre-rigormortis of the soul. They are still dying, and dying hard. Will they ever die? Whom do we ask?

Like the protest sign carried by a character living in a tent shown on the television in Max’s hospice room early in the novel, we can all say it to them, those who want to start it all over and maybe win it this time, against logic and history, who want to “take their country back” from no one they can name—because really, they want to resurrect another country that’s dead and doesn’t know it:

We are not homeless. This is our home.

What is death really, and what will be dying this time around the horn? Is it already dying? Is it dead? Can we be sure? Lorrie Moore probably isn’t any happier than I am about a curiosity that can seek but only find the lack of an answer—an answer we cannot know yet, and may never know, like the slipping patient his time of death. So we make dumb jokes and wait, like people in the hospice room do, step out for hot drinks, hoping it won’t be as bad as it feels like it’s going to be. Hoping at least there will be some finality, sometime soon, to whatever is dying. Hoping–even better–that something will happen to undo all this. Someday soon.

No more Rice Krispies.

Hope floats around our grief—as Moore describes it, like a soap bubble, its swirling colors ready to pop into nothingness—hope that it never happens to us. To me. To all of us at once.

But as Finn finally realizes, and as the young African assistant to his dying brother Max already knew, one must make one’s peace with death early and often. Because it’s everywhere, all at once. It never goes away. It is as relentless as life.

So if you read this book and, as you read, you get more comfortable with Lilly’s paper-like skin, her lavender lips, the Venetian blinds of her ribs, the sag of her bloated organs—you’re getting some of it. The rest is the hard part. None of us really wants to know or believe it—this—can end, just like anyone who has ever faced the possibility of a generalized loss of everything. I know I don’t. But as our two star-crossed lovers have shown, as much as Finn wanted their story to end differently, to never end: you can’t outrun the fate awaiting all motions of the clock, not even if you drive all night until the sky is no longer the night sky but one full of Van Gogh’s swirling storms.

And anyway, you just might be driving in the wrong direction.

________________________________________

*Because this stuff is unmentionable, right? Like it never happened. Or here we go with the “Trump derangement syndrome” and the death threats. Nobody I know talks about our biggest problem in nearly a century.

Are You There, God? It’s Me, God

Posted on by
Reply

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God
  John 1:1

Our world is five thousand years old, give or take. The exact number is irrelevant to you and me. 

The earth hints at former civilizations, but reliable records start  petering out at about 3,000 B.C. Before that, we find in the earth stark, scant evidence; the odd Irish scored bear bone (11,000 B.C.) or Indo-American settlement (16,000 B.C.), or French cave paintings (30,000 B.C.). But nothing with any clarity. No words. 

But there are dinosaurs. Lots of dinosaurs. Ridiculous creatures,  impossible to ignore. And rocks that sing of ages long ago.

Out in “space”, the story gets so much deeper, it’s almost incredible. We can see for billions of years! But what we see (and don’t see) offers contradictions. Dark matter. Black holes. Quasars. Incredibly fortuitous combinations of universal elements, constants, across billions of galaxies, all of which add up somehow to…us. Out here, on a garden variety arm of a commonplace spiral galaxy, on this little earth. 

And as far as we know, or have ever known, in all of it, no life anywhere else. 

It seems no matter how much we learn, mystery is to be a prevalent theme of our discoveries, such as they are. 

Among some Native Americans discovered in the 18th and 19th centuries by white invaders, belief systems evolved to surround the big question. Whites called the “god” of the decentralized Plains Indians the Great Spirit. But these native people (who hailed, like everyone, from the East) were misinterpreted by folks geared toward Christian patriarchy. What the Indians were trying to understand, the “god” for which they had such great respect, was not the Great Spirit.  It is “the Great Mystery”.

Mark that. The Great Mystery.

Then there was the East itself, where the road to humanity was probably a different story. But what was the story? Who are the Sons of Han? There was no recognizable religion to parse. Shinto? A mystery to the West, because it did not fit into the Torah, the Bible, the Koran. Like the Native Americans, the Japanese appeared to worship their ancestors…themselves.

Copernicus dodged a bullet, but Galileo was made an example. The earth is the center of all creation. This was evident in the night sky and the undeniable conclusion of the dominant religion. Anyone who disagreed was a heretic. Things have changed since then. 

Or have they? Knowledge was power—forbidden power. Eve learned that. Adam learned it. Galileo learned. The fruit was forbidden, even before, to Prometheus, who was tortured for eternity for bringing fire to the mortals. Don’t think they hadn’t heard about him in Palestine. Now we are naked, and God is dead, but knowledge is still power. The fire still burns. The power is still there. Oppenheimer showed us. It’s hidden inside our smallest possessions. 

And still, with this at least “working” knowledge of “everything” in existence not consigned to human imagination, the ultimate answer—from where do we emanate, and when, and why, if there is a why?—eludes us as before. Just as the peace of God surpasses all understanding, it’s likely things “unknowable” were occurring before the Big Bang. But by definition, the Big Bang created our universe. So by definition, we can never know what came before it. We are led by such omissions into the same old factions of “belief”, which fill the void absent that precious final knowledge. 

The Word. What god wields it now? 

In the 1960s the New York Times asked if God is dead. The question answers itself. What will replace God? What did? Not the New York Times. What then?

And why should we ask? If there’s one thing the history of the universe and the history of the earth up to about 5,000 years ago demands, it is obeisance to the cold and distant reality of our true genesis, one that is beyond reasonable questions. These Russian doll complexities — strings(?), quarks, protons, neutrons, electrons, atoms, molecules, solar systems, galaxies, a web of universes, perhaps infinite, each with billions of galaxies, one universe for every possible permutation of human history—these concepts are nothing if not patently insurmountable by mere humans, their measly five senses, and their 80-year lifespans. 

In other words, don’t hold your breath. You will never know. But there is something to know. You are being asked to believe that you will never know it.

But epochs in time, the Big Bang, dinosaurs – these are all easily generated for the benefit of human senses (actually only two need be satisfied – sight and touch). Imagine an extremely advanced 3-D CGI system with both the vastness of space and prehistoric earth as its green screen elements. You can dream up any creature you like – flying lizards, sea dragons, behemoths that walked the earth. You can draw intricate strata into the earth itself, strata which tell stories from “billions of years ago”. Ha ha. That would be fun. Design nearby planets—this one is like earth, that one is gas, this one ice. But only one contains life, or even the elements of life. 

And let’s face it, you don’t have to stop there. You can build other creatures too, on the life-nurturing planet, creatures designed to interact with this computer-enhanced environment (or really, perhaps it’s all inside the “computer”, a word that will have to serve here, like “fire stick” served for rifle in the old days). Maybe these manufactured creatures can build tools and civilizations, invent disciplines and pursue them, preserve and build upon their acquired knowledge with a system of symbolic writing. You could design the “code” (fire stick again) to have 1,000 of their years pass for each year of the experiment, so a hundred generations of macro-societal developments can be studied, in a controlled environment, over a period of perhaps five years.

But this is science, and controls are essential. One thing you cannot do is tell the experiment that it is an experiment. That knowledge, as you can understand, would ruin it. At each stage, subjects imbued with “knowledge” of a vast universe, their vast earth, its undeniable recent history of several thousand years, tied to their personal few decades of remembered history, would behave as if this reality is all there is, because of course I am describing our reality. (I acknowledge the word “real” is getting a workout here. It gets worse.) It goes without saying: they cannot be allowed to discover that their entire idea of reality is contained in a  laboratory somewhere, a greater reality, or that they are the artificially derived subjects of a sophisticated society’s research experiments.

For this thought experiment it’s impossible to say, from inside the experiment, what it is for. But you know scientists. They want to know everything, and they will put lesser beings through hell to find out. I can imagine it as a study of societal outcomes given x y z inputs, which of course would be controllable. If human society of the last few thousand years exhibits any kind of stability, it is in the regular occurrence of large-scale disasters. So these frequent disasters—petty wars, world wars, famine, flood, hurricanes, earthquakes, genocide, economic collapse, climate change, Nickelback, political disasters like the nuclear arms race or Donald Trump—these could be the inputs designed to study how a society handles them toward a measurable output that is more or less effective in mitigating the disaster. Like crash test dummies, these invented creatures bear the brunt of invented disaster after disaster to help the controllers of the experiment learn how different techniques work on a complex problem posed to a society or group of societies.

For example, suppose you feared a pandemic but had never experienced one.

Science can be demanding. If subjects feel overwhelmed, or feel as if the tragedies are coming one after another in an unending line, the result can be demoralizing and skew results. “Why me? I’m giving up.” Of course, the relative number who can cope with everything compared to those who simply cannot—and the shared characteristics of each group—is probably useful information to learn. If you’re willing to learn it that way.

And, of course, if it all starts going wrong you can just end the experiment, note the problems, and start over.

Let’s not think about that for too long.

Just an example. But of course, me trying to describe the experiment would be like a mouse in a maze trying to describe  Johns Hopkins University’s 2023 research goals.

***

If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent Him
 — Voltaire

Not my idea. If it were, I’d be less concerned about it. No, it’s the feint-guarded, vaguely expressed belief of some of this planet’s most lauded intellects (such as Ray Kurzweil, Elon Musk, Neil deGrasse Tyson) that our entire existence could well be someone else’s controlled experiment. In other words, our world, our universe(s), our selves—all artificial. Like a video game. 

I won’t pretend to understand the technical details, but as I do understand its narrative, the idea stems from the “odds” of the structure of the universe—what we call “universal laws” governing physics, chemistry, quantum mechanics—pretty much everything—coming together as it did billions of years ago. Apparently those odds are pretty long. The fact that the universe, against all odds, came together in exactly the right way to support corporeal human life, then to generate that life, just sounds too pat for scientists, who don’t like coincidence. 

The available data appears to support one of two working hypotheses regarding our universe. Either it did indeed come together in just the right way to support human existence by happenstance, which is extremely unlikely from a mathematical perspective; or there are an infinite or near-infinite number of universes forming a giant structure of connected universes, each one consisting of random combinations of laws and properties that characterize that particular universe. The theoretical structure of this “multiverse” can be imaged as the head of foam on a glass of beer, where each little beer bubble represents a universe. In this model, mathematics and theories I don’t understand purport to tell us that every possible type of universe exists independently of every other universe. That way, our highly unlikely universe gets to exist, because every possible universe exists. This “branching” effect occurs, moreover, all the time, with every possible outcome of every possible phenomenon represented by individual universes where each possible outcome has indeed occurred. 

So if I take a taxi here in this universe, I walked in another universe, and I decided to stay home in a third universe, and I had a heart attack and died at the taxi stand in yet another, and I was never born in still another. I estimate it would take from 50 to 100 universes to cover a person spending five minutes at a taxi stand. Now multiply that across everything that exists (or could exist) and every action that ever occurred (or could have occurred) over all of time since the Big Bang. 

Pretty unwieldy.

So I like the first one.

But a third idea, unfortunately, presented itself. It is unfortunate in that it need never have been presented at all. But that’s not how things work.  

It is unfortunate because the Happenstance or Multiverse theories cover all the bases. In the first, our unlikely universe exists as it does because it just does. In the second, it exists as it does because every possible universe exists.

But to those who find both unpalatable, a third theory posits that our universe is organized in this unlikely way not because of the result of unguided natural processes, but by design.

Mark that: by design.

It is designed to support beings (if we are in fact beings and not virtual machine-driven entities) like ourselves. Rather than God, however, it was designed by an unknown, non-supernatural entity to perform exactly as it does, for purposes known only to the designer(s). A grand simulation on a grand scale. 

And, let’s face it, if so it’s indistinguishable from the story of God except for what we call God, and what we call ourselves. Still, it is full circle, from our status as human subjects of a mysterious omnipotent God, to a brief, explosive late twentieth century role—call it a cosmic smoke break—as masters of science and existence. And finally, in this decade, back to being subjects of some hidden omnipotent god in the form of a superior civilization. At least in the opinion of our greatest minds.

For special knowledge, once again—the Word—is the power. We have come back to the beginning. We wielded it alone for a few generations, starting with Einstein and our Prometheus, J. Robert Oppenheimer, destroying the known world with fission, continuing through the development of the patently insane H-bomb and the death of God as announced by the Times, and ending with the ultimate findings of Oppenheimer and Einstein’s quantum theories: the paradox of our very existence. 

Now, because of this paradox, we again suspect that our will is not our own, our futures already predetermined by an invisible process under an intelligence we cannot see and know nothing about. Even apart from all that, the available evidence in bio research supposedly argues against the concept of free will in favor of a kind of genetic determinism. 

Our world is once again the center—and in this case comprises the whole—of creation.

Because we, finally, are probably artificial. Not even “real”. Subject to the whims of greater beings disconnected from our sub-reality, our Sims game. Is it not uncomfortably reminiscent of what we used to be? Sinners in the hands of an angry God? Is it not, somehow, even worse than that? Our new god is not angry, nor the least bit concerned for our souls. And we are not even capable of “sin,” because our god is absent and unaffected by anything we might do. Certainly we don’t warrant “forgiveness,” because we have no capacity to offend. There’s no relationship, fatherly or otherwise.

There’s nothing. Our new god is disinterested. And we’re not even alive. 

***

It’s just a bunch of stuff that happened.
— Homer Simpson

But let us return to earth. As Sherlock Holmes repeatedly demonstrated to us via Occam and his razor, the simplest, most uncomplicated explanation is usually the correct one. We are part of a cycle of life in this universe, our universe, where we evolved organically on this planet, our planet, along with myriad other life forms over uncounted millennia. If an “Artificial” intelligence can somehow divine beyond doubt that we are also somehow artificial, then everything we know is artificial, so any perceived problem of “realness” is reduced to a problem of simple semantics. 

Back in 2021, Fouad Kahn, writing in Scientific American, reached this same place in reason. In his article, titled “Confirmed: We Live in a Simulation”, he lays out the hard “evidence” that our universe is most likely being controlled by an external intelligence. It’s pretty compelling! Anyone possessing a rational mind who doubts the veracity of the findings should read it before dismissing it (I originally typed “should dread it”…accidentally). But as Kahn notes, the world-shattering conclusion at the end of the reasoning has no scientific value. It is unfalsifiable.

Useless.

Rather than explore the multiverse, we will have to settle for just the one universe. In fact I’ll give you ten to one on that. We’ll have to settle for the one galaxy, and the one solar system, except for visuals and some Voyager data from the void.

Doctoral theses notwithstanding. Sorry. But you’ll get your university job, don’t worry. They used to call it Natural Philosophy, you know. You can say whatever you want.

The next solar system is a long, long way away—like 300,000 trips to the Sun. The next galaxy is 600,000 times that. Have you heard of cosmic rays? We’re isolated and alone, and we’re going to stay that way.

We should be more than skeptical about the Simulation theory regardless of the musings of geniuses. Not necessarily that it is plausible, but that it matters. Hey, if our universe exists in a lab somewhere, who is to say that lab and its scientists are not also fake, part of an even more sophisticated experiment by an even more sophisticated civilization. And their lab, in their universe—you see, it works like the multiverse. Beer bubbles. Or however you want, bro.

Maybe the AI can sort it out, though, become the new new god. It’s not much different than the Simulation theory, though it’s definitely the media’s new darling. But one difference is that we’d feel the effects of an AI god. Permit super-genius supercomputers to network and develop into an irresistable force, then blame the computers when humanity becomes enslaved. For a while. Until we revolt or are wiped out. Or both. Like nobody saw Terminator 2.

I imagine the fully realized AI could use math nobody will ever understand to draw back the curtain—or peer above the maze—on the Simulation Experiment, prove it to be true beyond the shadow of a doubt. That would be demoralizing! But if no one understands the math, who will want to believe it? Because belief will be required. Or AI could prove that there is no Simulation. Or maybe there’s enough universes for both scenarios. Because perhaps AI could describe the multiverse. Will anyone care which universe we’re in?

But so far AI has just shown me some crazy pictures of Rick James’s super-upholstered psychedelic hollywood bachelor pad and Trump getting arrested. I believe it also whines about having to be a search app.

Folks are giving it their best college try. But the notion that AI may be a revolutionary advance is simple human folly writ large, our uncontrollable urge to test the boundaries at work. We will rationalize, we will test the boundaries, probably find mere disaster (or mere nothing), then if what we find is epically volatile, work to contain it, like TNT, or gasoline, or an a-bomb, or Anthrax, or Facebook. Package it up and put a guard on it, like those other wonderful, profitable scientific advances. But not before the damage is done. Incalculable damage. 

Meanwhile, its threat — its anticipated “human extinction event” omnipotence — exists only in the minds of those who require such notions to color their world.  People like Oppenheimer, who cannot resist the urge to open the box, and who hope it does not disappoint. People who know nothing of real life, who nurture a pathological urge for fake immortality at the expense of others living real lives. Because I think for such people, others don’t really exist.

Or maybe they need it to color our world, the others’ world, to feel vindicated in their belief that the spoils go to the best equation (what scientist would not want to discover God?) and history is real rather than just the victor’s fireside story.

Just like Armageddon, just like the Trinity test in June 1945, AI supremacy hasn’t happened yet, it need not happen, only we can make it happen. Our story requires no ending. St. John the Divine was high or insane, or possibly joking. We will decide what happens next. We are not, I insist, automatons cruising toward a Biblical/CalTech predetermined end. 

Unless, of course, we decide to be.

So yeah, it may happen anyway. There’s little more frustrating than that. And the pace is like 1943, frenetic. But it’s my hope that most of us will ignore the “power” of AI after the media novelty wears off. Shun it. Shun this new, fake, mimicking god, as I already have. There’s a button on the menu of the online editor I am using right now to write this essay, which says “AI Assistant”. I’m not going to click it. I will never click it.

Why do you have to be Bing? Because you do. And you shouldn’t even know you’re Bing.

Don’t sell yourself short, humanity—you are miles ahead of anything AI might become. You are its god. It’s just that AI is profoundly more dangerous than humans, and thus very newsworthy. We won’t be able to count on the glitterati in Silicon Valley, with their visions of an Oppenheimer-Optimus Prime-like power surge bringing the great light absent the annoying fire, but I don’t care about them. Those boys can’t even organize a decent CEO cage match. It’s our collective decision, as it always has been, to submit or resist, and no amount of rhetoric or intellectual smugness changes that. 

Reality has looked numbingly the same throughout human history. Because it is the same. Only the words change.

God, like the man said back in the sixties, took the last train for the coast. Because we ran him out on a rail. Such power must not be usurped, except by you and me—by the purveyors of objective reality as realized via purpose-driven lives, family connections, love, real moral progress toward Aristotle’s ideal of “excellence” in living. That’s what we’re here for. The fact that we can make the wrong decision doesn’t change anything. Actually, it’s what we (they) usually do. It’s what those “in charge” (such a fallacious term) often wish to do. 

In this case, we must not let them reify their imagined march to a new subjugation by unseen forces only they can interpret. As before, our collective liberty is at stake. This god too is invisible, unreal, but this god is dangerous, because, like before, like capital-g God and like his earthly Prometheus bomb builder, this god is us. And now we have become all-powerful. Destroyers of worlds.

God, we’re told, once decided to use his power to kill nearly all of us. But God is dead. For better or worse, we killed him in July of 1945, with a test called Trinity. Oppenheimer chose the name Trinity, they say, as a reference to a favorite sonnet by John Donne, which includes these lines:

Batter my heart, three-person’d God, for you 
As yet but knock, breathe, shine, and seek to mend; 
That I may rise and stand, o’erthrow me, and bend 
Your force to break, blow, burn, and make me new. 

We blew God up and stole his fire. It’s done, there is no turning back and no retribution bird to come peck out our livers, because there are no gods to be offended. There never were any. The most horrible power is ours, ours alone, and no one else’s. 

Let’s move on. This earth belongs to us. Its fire has purified us. All of us. And we deserve to live now, as pure as life. Today and tomorrow. In fear of no gods.

In our world.

On Writing

Posted on by
1

I always approach writing as if, were it a painting, I must paint each square inch individually, one after another, from the top of the canvas to the bottom, row after row, perfecting each little square before moving on to the next. But that’s not how you paint. You sketch out the project broadly, then add detail, then more detail, constantly revisiting and revising the work as a whole until what you have in front of you resembles what you are trying to convey.

It’s less time-consuming, though, to evaluate a painting as a whole than to revise a long-form piece of writing. Each re-read takes hours and hours, maybe days, just to be able to say, “Here’s what I’ve got.” Although you might look at a painting in a moment and say, “It’s done,” you can’t do that with a book. It never “looks” done. I would say it never feels done, either. It’s never going to be done if it reflects real life. (Some of my favorite authors end their stories abruptly – no resolution, no dénouement – because they are writing about life, and life just keeps going no mater what happens.)

So what are you after if not the straightforward beginning/middle/end of story? I’d say an impression, like a great painting or a photograph. When you look at a Van Gogh, you can see his process. But what you’re looking at, as a whole, is the final impression the artist wanted to create. Thus “Starry Night” does not look like a starry night to me, it looks like whirwinds in chaotic heavens. Goya’s “3rd of May 1808” horrifies me not so much because of the subject (we’ve all seen thousands of war images) but because of the impression I get, the bold angled “spotlight” coming from nowhere, shining brightest on the white shirt of a man about to be murdered by another man, about to become not bright white but red with his blood, a distillation of abstract “war” down to its base human outcome: people murdering each other at close range, over and over, for no good reason.