Five Theses on the X-Files: An Appreciation

As an adult, I have never owned a TV or had television in my home. Nevertheless, those that know me know that I have managed to become fanatical about a handful of shows over the past two decades. Despite not having a TV I have exploited videotapes, then DVDs, and more recently streaming technology to catch up and keep up with my faves. I also have benefited over the years from the generosity of folks who were willing to let me come over week after week when I couldn't wait until the end of a season to find out what happened (Jonathan, Maria, and Laura, I am talking to you).

My fanaticism is no joke. I either ignore TV or I obsess about it. This is likely a holdover from my youth when, as a bored (and boring) child, I watched everything indiscriminately. I could sit and watch awful tripe for hours on end. I avoid that nowadays, but I find that, when I let myself, I fall into narratives and get totally wrapped up.

Some of the shows that have held me fast over the years only did so for a handful of seasons. Smallville, for example, faded for me after several major characters left the show (and it started feeling like Dawson's Creek with super powers). Similarly, though the first two seasons of 24 were gripping, it eventually became formulaic at best and a torture-fest at its worst. I still enjoy going back to episodes of both on occasion, but the series arc overall does not hold me.

Then there are the series that held me the whole way through. LOST immediately comes to mind, as does Buffy the Vampire Slayer (it took sticking through a season to get me hooked, but I got hooked and stayed hooked). A more recent discovery was The Wire, which was utterly fantastic throughout, and AMC's Rubicon, which had tremendous promise but has sadly been canceled at the end of its first season.

Of all this fanaticism, however, nothing holds a place in my heart like the X-Files.

I was first introduced to the series by my friend Theron, and over the years I would catch an episode here and there. Later, when the DVD box sets came out, I watched the "mythology" sets, and then the whole thing. Repeatedly. I loved it.

This past Christmas Theron and I had a conversation about the series, and that got me thinking about some of the things I have come to believe about what it means for me. It made me want to watch it again, as well. So over the past several weeks, my wife Kira and I have begun to re-watch the series from the beginning. We are now just finishing Season Three. This is Kira's second time all the way through. It is my fifth. As we've been talking about the episodes along the way, some observations have come up that seemed fit to share. So thanks for letting me be a nerd for a few minutes about my favorite show.

First of all, this is my first time re-watching the series since I finished watching LOST last year. I'll be honest, I had expected that LOST would have cooled me on the X-Files somewhat, but I am finding that is not the case. If anything, the intricacy and connectedness I find in LOST has just made me appreciate X-Files all the more. In fact (and I don't think JJ Abrams, Damon Lindelof or Carlton Cuse would dispute this), in many ways the X-Files made a show like LOST possible. Certainly LOST found an audience primed and hungry for weirdness and conspiracy in the wake of Mulder and Scully's long run. LOST made it respectably through six seasons, weathering a writers' strike and still delivering a quality story throughout. The X-Files managed to make it half-again longer than that, weathering a change of production location and the loss of its major star, and still delivered quality throughout. Kudos to both for that.

I know that some of my readers are long-time fans. I also know some have never seen the show. I hope the following will pique the interest of the latter half and give way to some good conversations with the former half. In what follows, I am going to make some opinionated observations, and I welcome comments and corrections from both newbies and fanatics alike.

Strap in, ladies and gents. We are entering alpha-nerd territory. Here are my five theses about the X-Files:

If you think the X-Files is a series about aliens, you are missing the point. Around the release a couple years ago of the second movie, X-Files: I Want to Believe, I had many conversations with folks who voiced their disappointment and confusion with the film. "Where are the aliens?" was what I heard over and over again.

It makes sense, of course. Clearly the alien stories and mythology were an essential part of the series. But -- as important as a backbone is -- it is nothing without the muscles and sinews around it. The X-Files was preoccupied foremost with telling creepy stories, and telling them well. The alien stories were definitely creepy, but so were the stand-alone "monster of the week" episodes (and sometimes more so. Think of "2Shy" from Season 3, or "Home," which some have rightly called "the scariest hour ever aired on television").

Which is all to say that a focus on the aliens alone means you miss a lot of good tingles -- both from the creepy monsters and from all the good development of Mulder and Scully's relationship.

If you think the X-Files is about figuring out the conspiracy, you're missing the point. This is a similar temptation to the one that frustrated a lot of the LOST viewers. Like the LOST writers, Chris Carter, Frank Spotnitz and the other key players in the X-Files were very good at weaving intricate, long-running story arcs that dropped clue after clue in an ever-widening web of intrigue.

But the X-Files is not a mystery novel. Despite the pedantic tone of the series finale, the story arc does not neatly resolve or tie itself off in satisfying closure. This is largely because there is not one conspiracy at work in the X-Files, but several overlapping ones at once.

Remember that the Consortium are pretty much all dead by the end of Season Six, having been killed off in a hangar by the rebel faceless aliens (alpha-nerd - I warned you). But their death did not mean the conspiracies went away. Even before their demise, we were shown that there were other agendas at work, at all levels of the government and the shadow government.

The one common thread was venality and self-interest. As the conflicting intrigues unfolded we see again and again that self-interest is the strongest loyalty most of the characters hold. Krycheck certainly exemplifies this, selling his services to the highest bidder and repeatedly double-crossing everyone, but he is only the most visible exemplar. Everyone and every organization is out to increase its power and cover its hind quarters. The overlap of these self-aggrandizing machinations drive most of the deep plots of the long-term story arc.

In fact, as time goes by, we come to discover not only multiple agendas among the humans in the show, but also the multi-leveled conflicts among the various alien races, at work for or against the colonization plot, and for or against hybridization. The complexity makes the show rich with narrative possibility, and -- for me -- makes the show's conspiracies all the more lifelike and realistic. I mean, spend a little time researching the various conspiracy theories around the Kennedy assassination -- trying to find one clear narrative in that rabbit hole is a lost cause, mostly because everyone's explanation brings in more and more groups that had some interest in the events, from Oswald ad infinitum.

The desire to take the complex story line and find the key to unlocking it can drive other simplifications, as well. So it seems important to say this -

If you think the X-Files is about the struggle between science and the supernatural, you are missing the point. A theme that resurfaces continually in the series riffs on the polarity between Scully, "trained in hard science" and rational inquiry, and Mulder, whose "spooky" ideas have taken him "outside the Bureau mainstream" into laughingstock territory.

In the first two seasons, in fact, this polarity is sharply emphasized, and it leads to some very interesting stories in which Mulder holds the place of "the feminine" in the narrative. What I mean is that the other men in the FBI treat him, narratively, as females have often been treated in television procedural dramas. Detectives roll their eyes at him, refuse to take his ideas seriously, and work actively to get him out of the way so the "real work" can be done. It is especially interesting to watch Scully's reaction to this behavior, especially when she participates in it.

If that were the whole of the tension, that would certainly be interesting. As the series develops, however, we are exposed to the complexity of this tension, and the polarity is anything but simple. First of all, while Scully is a rationalist and scientist, she is also a person of religious faith -- a fact that should provide common ground with Mulder's supposed "irrationality." Instead, her faith confounds him. Despite his credulity for all forms of the supernatural, this is one realm into which Mulder refuses to venture. In Mulder's world, there is room for aliens, but not angels. Scully, however, can see the hand of God in events, and becomes more bold in saying so as time goes by.

This asymmetry makes for one of my favorite aspects of the show. Throughout the series we see both Mulder and Scully facing crises of "faith," as Scully waxes and wanes with her Catholicism and Mulder bitterly abandons his belief in aliens as a result of one of the many false conspiracies that are "revealed" to him by the venal powers manipulating his crusade for their own purposes. In the final episode, when we hear Scully assert to Mulder that "you and I believe the same thing," the admission is as hard-won as it is accurately inaccurate. Mulder and Scully may believe the same Truth, but their respective articulations of that Truth, and its ultimate meaning, are still deeply personalized.

If you think the X-Files "jumped the shark" after Season Seven, you are missing the point. Next to the lack of aliens in the film, Mulder's departure from the series is often cited by my friends as their biggest disappointment about the series. The implication is that the series went disastrously awry, in terms of character and story, with David Duchovny's absence. In television parlance, this is known as "jumping the shark." Even the Cigarette Smoking Man says, "you know how important Mulder is to the equation."

True as this may be, there is more to the story. Though he is physically absent for the majority of the last two seasons, Mulder's absence forms a central presence to both the narrative and the development of the relationships between Scully and her new partners, Doggett and Reyes.

In Doggett and Reyes we have a chance to see the X-Files through new eyes, and new perspectives. The approaches of both to the unexplained phenomena in the Files are significantly different to those of Mulder, and in confronting these approaches, Scully is pushed to further define her place as the X-Files's advocate. Where her original role was that of skeptic, brought in to debunk Mulder's work, by Season Six she is the voice and the champion of the X-Files in a changed FBI landscape.

I will admit that the final two seasons are somewhat weak, but so are the first two seasons of the show. With the introduction of new major characters, a period of adjustment has to occur for dynamics and relationships to become firmly established. This was certainly true through all of Season One and most of Season Two. Think, for example, of "Ice," an early episode where Mulder and Scully's relationship is tenuous at best and there is very little trust or camaraderie in the face of unknown dangers. In contrast, by Season Two's cliffhanger conclusion, "Anasazi," Scully defends Mulder's innocence despite his violent and aberrant behavior and seeming guilt in the death of his father.

Truly, the high water mark for the X-Files finds its home in seasons Three through Six, but this means that those who would dismiss the Doggett and Reyes episodes should also dismiss the early Mulder and Scully episodes. While weaker than the strongest seasons, I contend that Seasons Eight and Nine are at least as strong as Seasons One and Two, and in some cases stronger.

Which leads to the inevitable conclusion:

If you think the X-Files is about Mulder, you're missing the point. Despite all the twists and turns along the way, the Mulder that we encounter in X-Files: I Want to Believe is fundamentally the same Mulder we first see in the basement office in the Pilot episode of Season One. Mulder is static. He matures, but he does not change.

The X-Files is about Scully. From the very first scene of the series (where we see her enter the J. Edgar Hoover building to be briefed), to the last shot of the show (where she and Mulder lay quiet as the rain falls outside), to the last shot of I Want to Believe (where she begins the operation to save the boy's life under the prayerful eyes of the nuns), Scully is the focal point. Mulder doesn't change, but Scully does.

While remaining committed to her scientific and rational view of the world, we get to watch as Scully rediscovers her childhood faith, and then watch again as that faith broadens beyond dogma to spirituality, ecstasy, and ecumenism. She meets a boy messiah, angels, miracle children, three incarnations of Satan and at least one incorruptable martyr along the way. It is more than subtly hinted that her inexplicable child, William, has a somewhat Christ-like "dual nature" that could someday bring peace between the aliens and the human race. By the last seasons of the show, she has had a remarkable faith journey, to say the least.

More than this, however, she becomes open to the Truth of the phenomena contained in the X-Files. Not in the way Mulder is open, but she achieves a credulity that remains balanced with her commitment to scientific inquiry. As an empiricist she has encountered overwhelming evidence of mysteries; unlike Mulder, she does not jump to explain them, but she accepts that, until the proper answers are found, these experiences cannot simply be dismissed. By the time she is paired with Agent Doggett, then, she has become the "spooky" one at the FBI. She has not become Mulder, but she understands him and what he must have gone through in those early years alone in the basement office.

This, in the end, is what makes the X-Files -- from very start to very finish -- so compelling for me. The slow build up of trust and affection between Mulder and Scully, the eventual consummation and inseparability they achieve in the narrative, despite Mulder's absence, and the tenderness and respect they show each other, are deeply satisfying to me. Moreover, as a person who makes his living trying to understand the deep conflicts that drive and motivate persons of faith, Scully's struggles and triumphs are to me very realistic and extraordinarily edifying.

And that, from start to finish, is for me the heart and soul of the X-Files. More than any other show I have seen, I think the creators and writers of the X-Files kept integrity with that heart and paid honor to that soul. This is why, to the confusion of my friends, I was so happy with I Want to Believe, despite its lack of aliens, and why I am certain this will not be the last time I watch the whole thing, start to finish. I want to. I believe.

Overheard on Limbaugh

So today, January 18, 2010, Rush Limbaugh said the following as part of his daily radio program:

The left is constantly telling anybody who will listen how rotten this country is, how rotten we are, how rotten the nation is, how unfair and unjust our economic system is. They create this environment of pessimism, self-hate, and desperation. They tell victims -- and they try to make as many people victims as possible by putting them in groups of victims.

They tell these people that they've got no chance in this unjust and unfair country. "If you're Hispanic, you got no chance. If you're African-American, you got no chance. If you're a woman and African-American, you are doomed! You have no chance. The only out for you is the military, and if you do that, you're stupid, but you really can't be blamed because this economy was so destroyed by George W. Bush, you have no future." What is this going to do to people? And this went on for eight years. And before Clinton got to ten it went on for 16 or 12 years, during Reagan and the first term of Bush. This has been a constant refrain: Uunjust, unfair America is.

What stuck me was how similar, at least on the surface, this sounds to a message written by Dr. Carter G. Woodson, in 1933, in his book The Mis-Education of the Negro:

THE "educated Negroes" have the attitude of contempt toward their own people because in their own as well as in their mixed schools Negroes are taught to admire the Hebrew, the Greek, the Latin and the Teuton and to despise the African. Of the hundreds of Negro high schools recently examined by an expert in the United States Bureau of Education only eighteen offer a course taking up the history of the Negro, and in most of the Negro colleges and universities where the Negro is thought of, the race is studied only as a problem or dismissed as of little consequence. For example, an officer of a Negro university, thinking that an additional course on the Negro should be given there, called upon a Negro Doctor of Philosophy of the faculty to offer such work. He promptly informed the officer that he knew nothing about the Negro. He did not go to school to waste his time that way. He went to be educated in a system which dismisses the Negro as a nonentity.

I'd like to suggest, however, that there is a vast world of difference between Dr. Woodson saying this from a place of oppression, and Rush saying similar things from behind the gold-plated microphone of the EIB Network. To see the similarities on the face of the messages (that minorities have been fed a load of ideological horse manure about their proper place in society) is to miss the fundamental point.

For a member of the master class to point this out (and El Rushbo is always happy to point out, with his "nicotine stained finger," that he is part of the master class) is perhaps gauche, but has no possibility of being a call to revolutionary consciousness. When Dr. Woodson names it, however, he names not only the problem itself but those who perpetrate and profit by it.

When patriotic critics speak of the inequalities facing the minorities in this country, it is not to score points in the political game. It is to name a problem that, God willing, will be rectified.

The key question, the one El Rushbo doesn't actually ask, is who constitutes the "they" spreading these messages of inferiority? Woodson knows. Were he alive today, Woodson would be pointing steadily at the man behind the gold-plated microphone, and the powerful interests for whom he speaks.

Do not mistake coincidence for fate.

Thank you to Presvytera Marion Turner for sharing this with me.

We're calling from the Pleiades, and we'd like to make a request...

So I was listening to NPR this afternoon and, as an aside to a story about water on the Moon, they happened to mention "Calling Occupants of Interplanetary Craft, " a rather unfortunate hit for The Carpenters back in the 1970's. Here's a little taste of that magic, for those who don't remember:



Whew. Okay. Heavy, I know. The reason I'm even bothering to post about all this is that the NPR story mentioned The Carpenters as if they were the originators of the song. Not so. In fact, their version of the song was a cover of the original version, written and performed by KLAATU.

Now, I know. You've never heard of KLAATU. Nobody has. But back in the day, when KLAATU was, you know, doing its thing, there was a pretty massive rumor that they weren't a band at all. The rumor was that, instead, they were a front for a secretly reunited Beatles project. Srsly.

It was a nice pipedream for a culture exhausted by Watergate and such. The wish for something awesome, even secretly awesome, like the Beatles being back together, was a powerful opium for the masses. It would lull us into accepting just about anything. Even KLAATU. Even The Carpenters. So it goes.

There are two colors in my head, kid, eh?

Awaiting February 2nd: Everything in its right place.

Pick a card, Scully....any card.

I heard about this fellow, Professor Stephen E. Braude, thanks to the Wisconsin Public Radio program To the Best of Our Knowledge (if you download RealPlayer, or have a compatible player already installed, you can listen to the audio here). He's a real-life Fox Mulder (even to the point of talking about the man who could do Polaroid "thought-o-graphs," like in "Unruhe," from season 4).

My favorite quotation from the clip below: "If we've learned anything from the history of science, it's that human kind is not a very good judge of the empirically possible." Mulder couldn't have said it better himself.



You can find out more about Dr. Braude's professional work in philosophy here, and his work in parapsychology here. If you want to do some further reading, I've pasted an Amazon link to his book below, as well.




Disclosure: I am an Amazon.com affiliate If you choose to purchase products through links on this blog, I will receive a commission.

Weapons of Mass Distraction

Trust me. I have dropped a name or two in my day.

Like many academics, I suffer from an almost indescribable inferiority complex. If the world's economies aren't enough to make you feel irrelevant in your life's work, your students are always there to seal the deal. The fear that no one, but no one, will care that I am breathing has, on occasion, driven me to some gauche behavior. And, I mean, come on. I have some really interesting friends. Lots of them are quite accomplished in their fields. Several of them are famous. A handful are really famous (and one, admittedly, is infamous).

So, on those occasions when I am weak from my fears of irrelevance, I have dropped a name or two, or stretched my own importance, thanks to the borrowed importance of my more accomplished friends and acquaintances.

I am reminding you of this, dear Reader, not because I am particularly proud of this behavior, but rather to establish my bona fides for the invective that is to follow.

Some of my friends and acquaintances are in the military, or loosely associated therewith. Thinking back to the build up to the most recent Iraq war, I recall many of those acquaintances and friends taking me to task for my hesitancy about, you know, invading. What I recall hearing, more than once, was a strange form of name dropping that, I think, is akin to what I was describing in myself above.

When I would argue against invading from the evidence I had (the evidence that was available in the media and through my researches beyond the limitations of the American media), these jolly ol' Jingoes would get a knowing look on their face and a sage twinkle in their eyes. These old Hawks, mind you, are ancillary. They are factotums. They are sideliners now, and armchair warriors at best. Yet they wanted me to know that they were in the know. And they knew something I didn't.

"Well, I can't say much now. But I've been talking to [fill in the blank], and he's close to Colin Powell, you know, and he said...."

The upshot of what "he" said, in these cases, was that there was a whole lot of intelligence that was simply too sensitive to leak to the media, but if we (us common folk) ever knew the full extent of it, we'd be demanding ol' Saddam's head on a pike and thanking Dubya and Co. for invading when they did. The implication, in other words, was that the evidence I had was irrelevant, in light of the evidence that I didn't have.

Now, of course, it turns out they actually didn't know something I didn't, after all. They wanted to feel important and in the know. They (and lots of other folks) bought into a culture that was fed off equal parts fear and self-aggrandizement. That latter factor, I think, was what gave these Hawks (some of them quite well placed and influential - hey, I told you I know important people, didn't I?) the impetus to take the little crumbs of rumor they had and talk like they had fat seed cakes of certainty.

Let them eat cake, indeed. And we did. And why not? After all, "they knew something we didn't." A-yup. And we should have known better. Take it from one old name dropper to another.

But if you don't believe me, perhaps you'll believe one of the knowiest in the know fellas in the game, Tony Blair, himself. Yesterday he pretty much admitted that the whole WMD justification was a pretense, and that he would "still have thought it right to remove" Hussein regardless of whether there were WMD's or not.

This has led a prominent international lawyer, Phillipe Sands, to remark that Blair may now be open to war crimes prosecution, given that he joined into the war, and the justificatory posturing that preceded it, "irrespective of the facts on the ground, and irrespective of the legality" of invasion in light of the lack of positive evidence.

There's a full story on this developing fiasco here.

Tony Blair, however, is not our problem. He merely is a good, close friend to our problem. He had tea with our problem just last week, in fact, and they had such a fine time, and...

Let me venture this: there is a deep inferiority complex at the heart of this nation. It has been endemic for generations, and it became epidemic in the last ten years. From Enron to the housing bubble to the credit crunch, we as a nation are running amok, from one fiction to the next, trying our best to feel relevant and important without the substance of fact or character to bolster us. The names we are dropping now, however, are names like "patriotism," "freedom," "security," "opportunity," and, yes, "hope."

These are the names of acquaintances whom these days we barely know. However, if we drop the names often enough, and broadly enough, everyone will assume we're still all old chums, won't they? And if those listening to us are convinced by our associations, then that's close enough to being real, isn't it, to fill the hole?

Sure it is, chum. That's the ticket. Take it from one old name dropper to another.

Overheard on Facebook

Concerned citizens on the move, tweeting us to victory:

"Please pay attention to terriorist, they r on facebook also, I spoke to the fbi, an they said that it can be possible an that facebook has to deal with this correctly, ;-)"

The fbi is right, kids. Please pay attention to terrorist. Srsly.

Physicists worried about time-travelling sabotage: The elusive Higgs boson

I am very intrigued by this notion that certain otherwise sober and respectable physicists have that "scientists from the future" may be impeding the work of the CERN supercollider. As Faraday once said, "Nothing is too wonderful to be true."

Read all about it here: Physicists worried about time-travelling sabotage: The elusive Higgs boson

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Detourning Women

Ladies and gentleman (and ladies): detournement.

(Thanks to Jennifer Randles for bringing this to my attention.)

Gives new meaning to the phrase, "celery stalk"

When I lived in Atlanta, years ago, the bathroom in my small apartment had a window. The tub was an old clawfoot tub, and it was set out from the wall, so the landlord had installed a wraparound shower curtain that ran all the way around the tub, obscuring the window.

One day, while cleaning, I pulled back the curtain to find that an ivy vine from the outside wall had worked its way through the window sash, and was extending several inches into the room. As it extended, it was not attaching to anything. Instead, it was just suspended in air, as if it were reaching toward the shower, to grab.

Say what you will about Al-Qaeda. For my money, that mute tendril of intrusion was as terrifying as any Hitchcock film. You northerners might not understand, but down here, we've got kudzu, and kudzu will freakin' eat your car.

At last, I have found someone who shares my fears. Watch, and be edified, citizens.

(It seems to have an ad attached to it - apologies!!)

The Iron is Hot

What, exactly, constitutes a "crisis" in this nation?

On the way to answering this, let's take a moment for a history lesson. A chartered corporation is, under American law, what is known as "juristic person." That is, in the development of legal precedent around the issue, corporations in America have, over time, been treated - from the standpoint of the law - more and more like human beings. There is a certain logic to this, of course. Corporations engage in commerce, just like real persons do, and therefore the "naturalization" of corporations as "citizens" is tantamount to the removal of impediments to commerce. Good business sense, there.

A strange moment happened in 1886, however. The Supreme Court that year heard a case known as Santa Clara County v.Southern Pacific Railroad. Prior to the rendering of the actual judicial decision in the case, Chief Justice Morrison R. Waite stated clearly, "The court does not wish to hear argument on the question whether the provision in the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution, which forbids a State to deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws, applies to these corporations. We are all of the opinion that it does."

While this opinion was not a proper legal precedent, it has been reported and repeated as if it were, resulting in a de facto extension of Fourteenth Amendment protections to American corporations.

Now remember, it took seventy years to begin to "fully" extend these rights to actual flesh-and-blood American persons (persons who happened to have the "wrong" color flesh or "non-white" blood), if we take the civil rights decisions of the mid-1950's as a benchmark. Of course, it could be argued that the Fourteenth Amendment has never actually been fully inclusive of the actual flesh-and-blood human persons it was (ostensibly) designed to protect. Our legacies of Jim Crow, and still-economically-and-racially-segregated cities, attest this fact.

Thomas Jefferson opposed the chartering of corporations, unilaterally, deriding them as "monopolies of commerce," and a threat to the health of the nation. So the 1886 "decision," and its effects, it can be argued, mark a radical change from the founding ideals of American government. The most radical effect of these changes is the preference of fictional persons over actual flesh-and-blood persons.

We see this effect writ large today, as our country groans and flexes its fear muscles over the pain being felt by many of these corporate "persons" - today mainly banks and financial institutions, yesterday semi-government loan agencies. We are being cajoled into swallowing a truly staggering amount of debt - nearly a trillion dollars - to assuage the suffering of these fictional persons.

The one upside to this 700 billion dollar debacle is this: all talk of universal health care "costing too much" is, by my lights, instantly nullified.

I was just reading the New York Times, and they reported recently that the estimates for the cost of universal, comprehensive health care for (nearly) all Americans would be somewhere in the 60- 90 billion dollar range. That is somewhere in the range of one tenth the cost of the proposed bailout.

It is a bargain at that price, certainly, but it is a clincher when you add that real flesh-and-blood humans, not legal fictions, would be directly helped by such a move. That, it seems to me, is a clear mandate for enacting such measures immediately - especially since we now know the money and the means are obviously available.

On NPR's "Marketplace Morning Report" this morning, Scott Jagow used words like "crisis" and "peril" to describe the situation. Dan Gretch, commenting from Miami, talks about the man in Miami Lakes whose condo is now losing value.

Excuse me?

Come to Nashville, and I will introduce you to Steve, who occasionally lives in the Post Office at night when the weather is cold. Folks in my city - real flesh-and-blood people - don't have homes, and they don't have health care. Their concern is not about losing investment value or market share. Their concern is about losing teeth, getting beaten up or harrassed by police, or their kidneys failing.

I don't say this to diss the man in Miami Lakes. I feel for him, too. His losses, relative to his context, are significant. But in both cases - Steve and the man in Miami Lakes - we are talking about people.

It is a very different thing to talk about a fictional person, and its pain, and its groaning, as if it were equal in importance, or more important, than Steve. Steve - though insignificant by economic indicators - is a living human being. No matter how little he contributes, he is, he must be, considered more important than any legal fiction. His pain and hardship must be considered more real and more important than the pain and hardship of any legal fiction.

Let me put this in concrete terms. Imagine there is a burning building. Inside the burning building is a baby and a corporate charter. The firemen who rush into the building ignore the baby and use all their resources to secure and protect the piece of paper from damage.

Think about that for a minute, and then try and convince me that such behavior is not a textbook definition of moral perversity. Yet the equivalent of this abhorrent, evil, immoral action is being played out before our very eyes this very day.

I say, do not stand for it. Stand for something better.

I say, stand up for the health and safety of your flesh-and-blood sisters and brothers - the guy in Miami Lakes, sure, but especially for the "least of these" among us, the millions of Steves in the post offices and under the bridges of America.

Stand up by contacting your representatives and saying to them that if they vote for the bailout of fictions and against the healthcare of real persons, you will vote them out of office.

Stand up by saying "no" to the insanity that would protect the piece of paper and let the human baby burn.

Stand up to a news media that cries "crisis, peril!" in the face of corporate discomfort, while remaining mute, uncaring and unnoticing of the human disaster of health care and housing in our nation.

For God's sake, stand up.

Mr. Dylan, meet Mr. Bierce

economist - n. - a weatherman who doesn't know which way the wind blows.

You're simply not white enough. Get out.

Do not long for the night / to drag people away from their homes.
Beware of turning to evil / which you seem to prefer to your own discomfort - Job 36:20

Several years ago, I was on the phone with someone in the office of the United States Council on Energy Awareness, and I was lying my head off. I was trying to get on their mailing list.

The fellow on the other end of the phone was, by turns, suspicious, cagey, confrontational and interrogating. He wanted to know why I wanted to be on the list of this above-board, obviously grass-roots coalition of concerned citizens, rallying around a cause I think we can all get behind: the fact that there simply are not enough nuclear power plants in America.

So I was telling him that I was a high school physics teacher, and I wanted USCEA's excellent materials to share with my classes. None of this was true, of course. But then again, I wasn't the only one on the phone who was lying.

At the time, the USCEA was a well-funded and very sub rosa arm of the marketing departments of some key power companies, and they were enacting what can only be termed a sort of jiu-jitsu on the level of America's environmental memes. The USCEA was tasked with getting the message out, on the local and national levels, that the cleanest and brightest alternative to our energy "needs" was increased (and increasingly subsidised) nuclear power. Clean and green was the angle, natch.

I was successful in my ruse, and was the recipient for a few years of their materials, until the political climate changed in the Clinton years and the organization-formerly-known-as-USCEA changed its look and name and became something else with a different name but likely a similar agenda.

The main thing I was aware of (and this was the main reason I wanted on their list) was that the USCEA was slick. They sent media alerts. They put ads in magazines. They encouraged you to write your representatives, and they sent you the addresses of your senators and congress persons based upon your mailing zip code. They told you the words to say in your letter, and who to say it to. And by doing this, they made it look like writing your representative was your idea, and that their words were your words.

Like I said, slick.

My lie was a noble one. I got on their list and used their materials to contact my congress persons and senators about developments in the nuclear industry I was made aware of by USCEA's media alerts. Then, I detoured from the USCEA agenda, and instead of advocating for these inanities, I would urge my representatives to reject them, like any rational and sane member of the human species would. But during my time on that list, I also received a passive education in the big business of looking small - the power of grass root manipulation of public policies.

I was put in mind of all this just now, when I happened upon a full-page ad in the latest issue of Harper's. It's on page 11, if you have a copy handy and want to turn to it, or you can download a pdf of it here.

The top of the ad is a picture of a gridlocked highway, with the caption underneath reading, "One of America's Most Popular Pastimes." The ad copy underneath that begins the wind-up to the pitch by grousing about something everyone can agree to hate: traffic congestion. "For many people," the ad copy intones, "commutes to school and work and daycare can take up to three hours a day."

Now, I used to live in Atlanta, a city which, at the time, boasted the longest commutes in the nation - both in terms of average distance and average time per day. Getting across town could be Hell (forgive the pun) on wheels, and so I take this problem raised by the quotation above seriously. Commuting is no joke.

The answer in Atlanta, of course, was the same as it would be anywhere: more public transportation, live closer to where you work, buy a bike, telecommute, learn to live on less disposed income so you can downsize your car and your job, or, you know, walk once in a while. (My particular borough of Decatur enacted some of these sensible ideas as civic policy, making streets narrower and sidewalks wider, and focusing on the development of a planned town center with equal emphases on a central shopping district and the MARTA train station. Sensible. And it worked.)

This ad, however, sees the problem - and the solution- quite differently. The solution is not sensible downsizing of extravagance, but elimination from the streets of certain demographic groups. To paraphrase: white folks can't drive where they want to as fast as they want to because there are too many brown people in the way.

That's right. It turns out this ad is not about traffic congestion at all, really. It is about immigration, and the encouragement of a buggered and reactionary immigration policy that pumps hatred and fans hysteria (their tagline at the bottom of the ad is, "300 million people today. 600 million people tomorrow. Think about it.") while doggedly asserting that the real problem isn't our binge-and-sprawl approach to civic planning or our own over-bloated addiction to car culture. It's Pablo and Enrique, the men who just bussed your table and made sure your toilet seat was clean (or - why stop at day labor? - who prepared your taxes, taught your chemistry course, or anchored your local news. Money may make the "darkies" and the "brownies" more tolerable for a while, but when push comes to shove in the fast lane, they all look the same to us, don't they?)

Where I come from, this is called race-baiting, and it's of a species with the old arguments that say, "we can't let schools be integrated because those [fill in the insulting name for African-American men] can't be trusted around our women." It is an argument from fictional consequences, perpetuating comfortable bigotries and trafficking in stereotypes.

But the ad tell us, "Together we can do something about it." We. Who? Concerned White Folks, that's who. Jane Q. Citizen, soccer mom and den mother, blameless in her SUV, uniting with other lilly-white Janes across the nation to do something about it.

Sound familiar? Spend a few minutes on the websites listed (Californians for Population Stabilization, Americans Immigration Control Foundation, and the Federation for American Immigration Reform among them) and you will discover the same modus operandi that I encountered years back with the USCEA alive and well in the immigration wars. From the websites, you can download podcasts to share with your friends, print posters to put up, and - naturally - obtain media alerts and addresses for representatives to write. After all you, Jane Q. Citizen, carry a lot more weight and persuasive power than some evil lobbyist.

It is, in sum, fodder to help the bigots get organized, without drawing attention to the bigotry.

I don't know when Americans became such a cowardly people. Afraid of terrorists after 9/11? I can understand that, of course - even if ultimately we figure out that we trained and financed a lot of those terrorists back in the day with our wonderful covert military-industrial foresight. Afraid of our daughters and sons dying in an interminable war? Again, I find that a reasonable danger to be afraid of.

But afraid of traffic jams?

And worse - we seem not afraid enough to actually change our way-too-comfortable lives of excess and sprawl as we grasp madly for a solution, but rather afraid just enough to pass the blame off on those "others" (pick your ethnicity) who are somehow ruining "our" dolce vita.

This is pernicious rot, and it speaks ill of us (I'm talking to you, white folks). This ad campaign is a shill, and the "concerned citizens' organizations" behind them are a hissing and an abomination; well-oiled propaganda machines designed to get the Ruling and the Comfortable terrified of potential (not even actual) discomfort, and then equip them with choice pieces of the wrong data to parrot.

Like the old Who song says, It's a put on. Don't forget you're hiding.

My recommendation? If you're really worried about gridlock, sell your car. Change your life and your lifestyle. Stop blaming some fnorded "other" for problems we bring on ourselves and perpetuate.

Or... if you really want to get some karmic traction, join the mailing lists of these bozos and use their lobbying infrastructure against them - by advocating something sensible, decent and moral to our representatives - for a change.

Say hi to your mother.

Business as Usual

So I was listening to NPR yesterday morning and heard the hue and the cry being issued over at the Dow Jones corporation like shares of common stock over the takeover bid being hoisted up the flagpole by rogue pirate Rupert Murdoch. He might take over The Wall Street Journal.

The fear is great. Editorial standards may be compromised. The independence of this flagship of journalism may be steered instead to serve the biased business interests of Murdoch's vast financial empire. And, most clearly, there is a fear that whoever might mount a successful takeover bid - be it Murdoch, Mordor or Moloch - will in the end slash the company and leave it in tatters and ruins, a shell of its former glory. NPR's David Folkenflik can be heard probing the gravitas of the situation, asking after the concerns of the Bancroft family, Dow's major shareholders, and wondering aloud if this "exemplar of American journalism" will be sullied.

Give me, as they say, a break.

To blanch at such possibilities is, to my lights, simply to confuse a corporate mouthpiece like the Wall Street Journal with something of actual value to the Life, Liberty and Pursuit of Happiness in the day-to-day existence of the majority of American citizens. You know, things like drinkable water, clean air, secure jobs, and affordable health care. The folks at NPR's business desk seem unable to think of this newspaper in terms other than that which one, in days gone by, would have considered reserved for national resources (which can - but should not be - strip mined) or national ideals (which can - but should not be - compromised).

But this takeover is not of that class of debacles. It is precisely the sort of thing the "independent" editorship of the Journal has been championing since...well, there's never been a time they haven't championed it, actually. Leveraged buyouts making the way for tyrant CEO's to radically gut once-proud and -prosperous companies leaving mountains of pink slips, decimated communities and worthless pension funds in their wake is the very gut and gristle of what the Journal lauds on its pages. Simply look at Flint, Michigan or listen to glib economists gush about sneaky corporateering to the likes of Tony Robbins or on financial websites: the business of this country is business, and this is what savvy businessmen do.

So, as for me and my house, there will be no tears shed for a lost Eden of journalistic independence unstained by the apple juice of Murdoch's business interests. Murdoch, for my money, is just the most recent and the most visible of the snake-oil salesmen who have been running this country since the Boston Tea Party: a bunch of Anglos who are thinking with their pocketbooks, disguised in native drag to make us all buy the ruse that they actually belong here, dumping our Life, Liberty, etc. over the side of the ship in the name of their representation and happiness.

Let the Wall Street Journal hang, say I. And may its readership - who so often seem beyond the touch of conscience or consequence - tremble in the shadow of its swaying. Now that would be an exemplar to American journalism. Wouldn't you agree, Mr. Folkenflik?

Unfortunately, you can't exorcise Maxwell's Demon

So, its a curious thing about ovens. Have you ever noticed?

Let's say you want to heat up a nice tasty batch of chocolate chip cookies. Mmmm mmmm good. So you preheat the oven to 350 degrees, drop the dollops of dough on the non-greased cookie sheet, and pop them in for 10 (gooey) to 12 (crunchy) minutes.

Now, the yumminess before us likely distracts us - at this point - from paying much attention to this matter that I now want to foreground, but let's tarry a moment and ask the question as the cookies cool:

What's going on with the oven?

The oven is cooling too, you see. 350 degrees is hot (that's why you own "oven mitts"), and it takes a while to cool down. In fact, I bet if you went back a half-hour later the inside of the oven would still be at least a little warm to the touch. The heat is dissipating, going elsewhere, but it takes time.

This is thermodynamics in a nutshell.

Here, on the Earth, we are basically moving a more-or-less static amount of heat around. In daily life, it looks like this: You turn on an air conditioner, and the heat in your home is transferred outside. You eat the cookies, and your body chemically burns them to nourish you. When you feel the wind or watch a rainstorm, you are seeing the effects of these temperature differentials at work on a slightly larger scale. On an even larger scale, as the Earth passes through the cold void of space, we lose some of the heat held in the envelope of our atmosphere - an amount that is more or less equivalent to the heat we collect from the thermonuclear reactions of the Sun burning some 93 million miles away. The amount of heat stays pretty much the same, it just moves from place to place, so some areas are temporarily hotter than others.

So our planet is a pretty efficient heat-exchanger, both on the macro scale (we lose heat at about the same amount as the Sun gives us heat) and the micro (Honey, turn on the AC, please).

I watch television so rarely that I am always amazed (agog? apoplectic? anguished?) when I am in a situation when I can spend a few minutes channel surfing. That happened today (I'm staying in a hotel for a work conference) and I happened across a show called Sunset Tan.

Now, on a lot of levels, this show is a study in thermodynamics. It is, if you will, all about moving heat from one place to another. In just the few minutes I watched it, this much was clear.

I was particularly struck by the nine year old girl, brought in by her mother in order to be perfectly tanned for school pictures (the young lady, by the way, got the "cocktail" package - both the bed and the spray - the same one that Britney had gotten earlier that day. "You want the same as Lindsay Lohan, don't you, honey?" asks the mother. Enthusiastic nodding). "This is L.A.," the bronzed twink ex-busboy manager opines, "You've gotta have the darkest tan."

Later the show dissolves into the sort of interpersonal acrimony so resplendent these days in reality TV (the regional manager who bitches out the store managers for not being available "24 hours, seven days a week" even though none of the managers can get the regional manager to return their text messages or phone calls was an especial treat). I have no idea if these people are real, or if this is just subtle parody - but I guess in L.A. there is no way to tell. I mean, in a land of that much sunshine, the fact that one would go to a tanning salon at all sort of begs the question, doesn't it?

The fact that reality TV shows like like American Idol have managed to turn the cold shoulder of rejection and failure into a hot career opportunity is itself a fine illustration of a key thermodynamic principle. In any closed system, unless external energy is added, differences and extremes will eventually equalize and become indistinguishable. Like the Earth upon which American "culture" happens, a state of stability is reached.

This is a roundabout way of admitting that - even though I really want to - I don't think I can, in good conscience, blame American popular culture (as reflected in L.A.-based reality TV) for the problem of global warming. And it breaks my heart that I cannot. But I can't. Reality TV simply moves the heat around. It does not significantly increase our atmospheric temperatures - no more than the hot air in Washington, at any rate.

Instead, I offer this explanation for the current climactic crisis. Not a popular one - in fact, I have not heard it ventured or discussed elsewhere. So it may simply be my kookiness. That being said, however, the theory does attend to these matters of thermodynamics that have preoccupied this little meditation.

Let's return for a moment to that oven with which we started all this, and the time it takes to cool. Like the atmosphere of the Earth, the lining of the oven is a relatively efficient insulator. Left to its own devices, the oven hovers at just-about room temperature. However, when you add a great deal of heat to it, it holds it for a long period of time. When energy is added, the heat dissipates relatively slowly. When you bake the cookies, it takes time for that 350 degrees to go elsewhere.

Now imagine what would happen if you heated that oven to 700 degrees. Then 1400 degrees. Then 2800, and then... you get the idea.

It would take a bit of time for that heat to go somewhere, wouldn't it? And while the temperature difference between the inside and the outside of the oven was equalizing, the room would heat up, and then, from the room, to the outside, and so on. Eventually, you wouldn't notice the heat differences because they would seem relatively equal. We are, after all, dealing with relative temperature extremities. Even 2800 degrees is a somewhat reasonable temperature for the Earth, and so we are, at the end of the day, still only moving heat around a bit, not significantly adding to it within the system.

But what would happen if the temperature in that oven was heated to, say, a couple of million degrees?

Now suddenly we are dealing with a different order of magnitude. This is not a natural temperature for the insulated envelope of atmosphere around the Earth - in fact, the only natural object anywhere near us that generates that kind of heat is the Sun, and it is not actually near us (except in cosmic terms). If you put that kind of energy into your oven, and then opened it, I guarantee you it would really heat your kitchen when you opened the oven door, and likely the whole neighborhood and town, to a temperature that would make things like molten steel seem as innocuous and gentle as, say, a tanning bed.

And because the Earth is, like your oven, a pretty good insulator, the heat you released from you kitchen would linger around a while, heating a greater and greater area as the enthalpic and entropic forces of thermodynamics equalized across the system. The difference being that a couple million degrees goes a lot farther in its effect once equilibrium is again reached.

What I want to point out - and what I haven't heard mentioned in any of the discussions of global warming so far - is that during the middle part of the last century our country (and several others) did exactly what I have just imagined here, with our oven, in the form of nuclear testing in the atmosphere and, later, underground. Not just once or twice, but literally thousands of times.

Though each of the blasts had their own characteristics and differences, one common feature to most, if not all, of them is this: the initial burst of prompt and thermal radiation coming from the fissile core is, at its coolest, about twice the temperature of the surface of the Sun (for some fission bombs it goes as high as three times the Sun).

The United States alone has detonated over a thousand fission devices of various types, not to mention the fissile cores of commercial and military nuclear reactors across the planet. Each of these is generating a glowing spark of new heat into the relatively efficient insulation envelope of the Earth. Not, in other words, simply moving heat around, but creating new heat - vast and unimaginable amounts of it - in isolated but iterated and reiterated instants for almost forty years.

Where on Earth do we foolish mortals (who now wield the hammers of the gods) expect all that heat to go? We have equilibrium with one (one!) comparable heat source that balances the loss of heat in our atmosphere and its over ninety million miles away.

It has always seemed strange to me, having survived the paranoia of the Eighties, that we were so afraid of the effects of nuclear war when we had been, for an entire generation, effectively having one right here in our own country - in Nevada, in New Mexico, in the South Pacific, and high in the stratosphere.

That last one I mentioned - a test called Starfish-Prime - had a measurable effect on the Van Allen radiation belts that interact with the Earth's magnetic poles, in addition to crippling human-made satellites and disrupting communications and electronic equipment across the northern hemisphere. The forces created in nuclear blasts - the electromagnetic and ionizing - are well-known to linger and bounce through the Earth's atmosphere and magnetic fields for years after a blast. Why should we expect the thermal effects to be any different?

They aren't any different. The great actuarial table of thermodynamics is against us. In a closed system (like the relatively efficient insulator of the Earth's atmosphere) heat stays around, becoming general and ubiquitous, until it bleeds away. Slowly. And if you add insane amounts of heat to such a system - even if it doesn't seem to heat everything at once (because these things take time) it will. Don't just trust me: I am merely quoting the experts.

At the turn of the century James Clerk Maxwell asked what would happen to an imaginary closed system if you could put a demon into it - one that would be able to sort out the high-energy molecules of a gas from the low energy ones. The demon would be able to sort out energy problems without creating more energy problems - would be able, in other words, to deal with heat without creating more heat. A wonderful, if wholly imaginary, solution (and one that would make those in the present administration, perhaps, blush with hope): salvation without sacrifice; an instantaneous reversal of our slow and dedicated penchant for destruction (self- and otherwise).

In times such as these, such a creature might be useful. Some might argue we should find such a demon and make a deal with it. Others might observe that it may well have been such a deal that got us in the present mess in the first place.

Perhaps it is already too late for those sorts of eleventh-hour bargains. Too late, at any rate, for a "quick fix" that doesn't involve some very, very hard sacrifices. It's a devilish reality, even compared to the treacheries of an L.A. tanning salon.

So that's my theory. You can disagree with my conclusions, and I am happy to debate it over a plate of chocolate chip cookies (I prefer gooey). Though I rather think, from here forward, we might be wise to eschew debate in favor of something more effective. Like prayer.

Zyklon-Barbie

Here's what worries me about America.

See, it's like this. Say that you're an ugly, mule-toothed skinhead race-baiting neo-Nazi. You are also a musician, and your career has been built on writing and playing songs that denigrate all the "mud peoples" and praises Aryan sensibilities and family values. Then, let's say, for example, you die in a tragic automobile accident. Very few people are going to notice, or care. Some might even cheer. After all, you were ugly. In our country, bad racists are ugly (natch).

But what, oh what, America, if your racists are beautiful?

The ugly racist of my example is, of course, Ian Donaldson of the white power band Skrewdriver. Outside of fringe circles of the right wing, Donaldson never garnered much notice. The songs Skrewdriver sang were not examples of high art - far from it. Humorless paens to the likes of Rudolph Hoess and testosterone pumped swastika waving were mostly the order of the day. Easy to dismiss these guys as kooks (because, um, they are kooks).

But what about Prussian Blue, my friends. What about Prussian Blue?

Prussian Blue, you see, are a folk duo made up of the teenage Gaede twins, Lynx and Lamb. They have delicate features, straight blonde hair, and winsome looks to give the camera. In its original incarnation, Lynx played violin and Lamb played guitar, though now they have graduated to a more robust, band sound. They look sweet - innocent, even.

Oh, and they sing Skrewdriver songs. Did I mention that they sing Skrewdriver songs?

The Gaede twins, y'see - in fact, the entire Gaede family - are virulent racists. Consider, for example, this selection of lyrics, penned by Lynx, for the song "What Must Be Done":

ALL the mud races must be banished,
For look at the world they have damaged.
Look around and what do I see?
Ugly brown faces staring at me.

Our people must look like my mom and dad.
They don't now and that makes me mad.
We don't want to be mongrelized,
We want to be Nature's Finest down deep inside.

Now here's what worries me. In America we seem quite eager to accept any lame or even hateful idea that comes down the flagpole, so long as the one handing it to us is attractive. We idolize the uncouth and the ill-mannered so long as they have a Hollywood address or a Prada pedigree. We obsess about JonBenet to the neglect of our own children and crave our own fifteen minute alotment of attention.

In such a milieu, it is not hard for me to see the possibility that Lynx and Lamb would get a sympathetic ear for their tripe. "After all," I can hear the voices saying, " they're so cute, their politics can't be all that bad..." At the very least, their "angelic good looks" are garnering the twins a rather high media profile - even when the media attention is less than charitable.

The media outlets in this country are notoriously fickle. In a constant craving for a new angle, I fear it is only a matter of time before some major news organization decides to give Prussian Blue a "fair hearing," in the name of some distorted notion of "equal time" or "free speech." If that comes to pass, we may find ourselves coming face to face with what America really values, as liberty and justice for all crumbles against the brute force of our national narcissism.

I mean, after all, they're only kids. And they're so cute...

His Master's Voice

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Categories: conspiracy, reading

Ice cream, Mandrake. Children's ice cream.

Many of my friends have observed that I do not drink so-called "soft" drinks, opting instead for one of several brands of seltzer water. In fact, with the exception of a ten-day stint in central Mexico, I have not had a"soft" drink in close to a decade (the significance of my extraterritorial imbibing will become clear in a moment).

Some friends, observing this, have occasionally asked me my reasons for soda water over so-called "soft" drinks. So here, for once and for all, I intend to set the record straight.

First of all, go to your local library (while it's still free) and get your hands on a copy of The Plays of Ford, Webster, Tourneur and Wharfinger, published by the Lectern Press, Berkeley, CA. Try to find the 1957 edition (it's a reprint. I think the first edition was a textbook). This version is important because it provides the only published version of Richard Wharfinger's play The Courier's Tragedy taken from the 1687 folio edition (most other published versions come from the Quarto, several years later) which replaces the closing lines of the fourth act:

"Who once has crossed the lusts of Angelo,"

with

"Who's once been set his tryst with Trystero."

As far as Jacobean revenge plays go, Courier's Tragedy is no masterpiece. But it is remarkable in that this (called by some corrupt) interchange of refrains is the first known mention of the Tristero.

The full stanza reads as follows:

He that we last as Thurn and Taxis knew
Now wrecks no lord but the stiletto's Thorn
And Tacit lies the gold once knotted horn.
No hallowed skein of stars can ward, I trow,
who's once been set his tryst with Trystero.

Dr Emory Bortz, in his 1967 monograph Plotting the Stealth and Intrigue of the Jacobean Revenge Plays lays out a convincing argument for the Folio over the Quarto refrains by comparing and contrasting what the audience's understanding of each would have been in Wharfinger's day:

"The 'hallowed skein of stars' is God's will. But even that can't ward, or guard, somebody who has an appointment with Trystero. To merely cross the lusts of Angelo would provide any number of avenues for escape: leave the country, for example. Angelo is only a man. But the brute Other, that was something else again. Evidently Wharfinger was convinced that, to his audience, Trystero would symbolize the Other very well."

Now, it can be argued (as some have done) that all such references are aberrations with little or no historical founding, and scant literary reference. In short, they sound like myths. True. But this fails to take into account the truly repressive clampdown on the flow of information during the political height of the Thurn and Taxis postal monopoly (the repurcussions of which, it can be argued, are still in evidence today. "Going Postal" is merely the most egregious contemporary example of a trend which has existed for quite some time).

The scant but constant fringe references to the Trystero (later Tristero) throughout the recorded history of the Thurn and Taxis (and even, it has been argued, such proto-modern postal organizations e.g. the Pony Express) is made all the more interesting by the almost complete hole of silence surrounding the name in the more commonly known histories of the politics of central and western Europe through the eighteenth century.

The silence begs the question: has there been, for five centuries, a viscious and arcane plot to undermine the established postal service? (in Europe and possibly even in this counrty) And if so, is this "silence" a direct result of fierce and constant repression on the
part of those who controlled the ebb and flow of facts through most of that period (Thurn and Taxis itself, and later systems based on the Taxis model) or, more insidiously, has the silence been generated by the Trystero itself?

Information historian Gossett Englebart may have unknowingly prefaced just these questions when he wrote of the advent of email and it's possible effects on the global information economy (in his article in The Economist reviewing Alvin Toffler's Future Shock and John Naisbitt's MegaTrends). Could it be that what has seemed all along like a safe, decentralized process of spontaneous generation and improvements (starting with the Arpanet and extending now through the World Wide Web, and particularly the ready availability of Eudora Light, Outlook, and now G-Mail) has really been a well coordinated, all out and perhaps final assault upon an
information management monopoly whose influences have been felt since the early days of western civilization?

One could put these questions to Gossett's cousin, Douglas Englebart (co-developer of the Arpanet and, not coincidentally, credited creator of the "mouse" - the hardware architecture
that made "surfing the web" a conceptual possibility literally within the grasp of millions) but he isn't talking. Perhaps he, too, knows the value of silence.

It is entirely possible (the evidence is there to support the proposition) that there is a long standing and not-coincidental connection between several key events in our recent history:

1. specifically (and already mentioned) the rise of a viable, "decentralized" long distance information courier system based on the Arpanet model (email);
2. the dramatic rise in deaths related to postal workers going over the edge
   
3. there is evidence of connection between between the government backers of arpanet in the sixties and the MKULTRA counterintelligence program which supervised mind control and destabilization experiments around the same time (see particularly the July 1989 issue of the Covert Action Information Bulletin, pp 15-21);
4. the "revamping " of the Coca Cola formula in the mid 80's, and its near immediate withdrawl and reintroduction as "Coke Classic" with a slightly altered formula which replaced good ol' sugar with high-fructose corn syrup
   
5. there was a particularly interesting study recently on the effect of high doses of corn syrup sweetening agents on the prevalence of psychotic breaks in occupations of high stress and repetitious activities. One interesting conclusion was the finding that service workers such as postal clerks were particularly susceptable;
6. and the collapse of the Soviet Union (with one result being that suddenly the much coveted Georgian and Ukrainian corn harvests were allowed to flood the global market in the interests of "stimulating the economy").

One could definitely make a case for it, and I agree with them. That's why it's seltzer water only for me, folks. The evidence is there, if you dig. Go do the detective work yourself - I think you'll agree.

Hope that clears things up.

Categories: conspiracy