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.

"MONSTERS": Low Budget, Big Payoff

I've been a small-time film maker and television writer, back in the day, and I've worked with student filmmakers at various levels of their projects. I really love what comes out of the limitations of small film budgets and minimal film crews. Regular readers will recall that one of my favorite films of all time is Shane Carruth's Primer, a film shot on 16mm for just over $7,000. Another favorite is Robert Rodriguez's El Mariachi, another hella enjoyable film made for well under ten grand.

So I haven't yet seen the whole movie version of Gareth Edwards's new film Monsters, but from the trailers and clips I've seen, I'm getting pretty excited. Reportedly shot on a budget of just $15,000 (yes, that's thousand, not million), the film seems to deliver on the things that get you hooked into a narrative: good characters, good story, and leaving a good deal to the imagination.

Here's a little behind-the-scenes clip about doing all this on such a low budget:



Monsters is available for download at Amazon, and it hits the theaters in limited release on October 29th.

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.

Short documentary on Chris Marker

Chris Marker's short film, La Jetee (1962), was the inspiration for a song Thad Thompson and I wrote of the same name. His work is an all-time favorite of mine.

"The key to good decision making is not knowledge. It is understanding."

When I grow up, I want to be Malcolm Gladwell.

I just got done reading his recent book, Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking, and it is one of the best written and most enjoyable reads I have had in quite a while.

Gladwell first came onto my radar late last year, when I saw a clip of him on The Colbert Report. He seemed very subdued and soft spoken, and very out of place in the full glare of Colbert's rapid-fire wit. Despite this, I sensed that Gladwell had a sharp mind, and I was won over by the quiet forcefulness of his ideas. Plus, he had this crazy hair that I thought was pretty cool.

So my brother in law gave us Blink for Christmas, and I picked it up a couple of weeks ago for some "distraction reading" (the types of books I pick up to fill gaps in days when I'm not writing myself or reading something specific for my class preparations). When I do this type of reading, I often put the book down pretty quickly, as I get easily bored with a lot of popular titles.

Not so in this case.

Having spent several years as a science correspondent for the Washington Post, and later as a staff writer for the New Yorker magazine, Gladwell has honed his writing to a fine journalistic edge. He has already penned several bestsellers, and seems to have no limit to the amount of popular books he can produce.

Gladwell writes in a very conversational, engaging style. It almost feels as if he is perched in the chair next to you as you are reading, and the two of you are just tossing ideas around. The ideas, in this case, are more interesting, however, than those that pop up in your average casual conversation.

Blink is preoccupied with the human capacity for what Gladwell calls "thin slicing." This is his term for the instantaneous, gut level decisions that we make, that often turn out to be much more accurate and incisive than those decisions over which we expend a great deal of time, research and deliberation.

As but one example, my favorite portion of the book was the chapter entitled "Paul Van Riper's Big Victory," in which Gladwell becomes a fly on the wall for a set of war game exercises conducted by the American military in 2002. The event was intended to be a showcase of the latest in reconnaissance and strategic technologies. Think about those Air Force recruitment commercials you've seen lately -- "It's not science fiction; It's what we do every day" -- that sort of stuff. The Big Idea was that during the war game simulation, the armed forces would use all this new technology, and veteran commander Van Riper would play the part of a rogue general in the Middle East theater. It was supposed to be a rout.

However, as Gladwell's account unfolds, things did not turn out the way the military brass anticipated. The very technologies that were deployed to keep the commanders abreast of every last detail of field operations quickly overwhelmed both the high-level and mid-level officers, leading to hesitations. Meanwhile, Van Riper and his fictitious factions of zealous rogue armies very quickly exploited every tactical advantage, leading to some rapid, stunning, and quite embarrassing defeats for the American forces in the war game.

Gladwell points out that information, in itself, is neither a good nor a bad thing to have. It is, instead, knowing which information is essential in a given exchange that makes the difference. This is as true on the battlefield as it is in the worlds of fine art, education, music, and taste-testing.

During the course of the book, we are introduced to leading psychologists who demonstrate how this "think slicing" capacity we have leads us to make really excellent (and truly horrendous) decisions. Along the way, we encounter a researcher who (supposedly) can read faces so acutely that he can judge, just by looking at someone, their motivations and sexual orientations. We also learn that most people, when put under pressure, reveal reflexive tendencies toward bigotry and racial profiling that are unintentional, but nonetheless very measurable.

Gladwell does not just present these facts, but frames them in a series of ethical questions that helps the reader to see that these sorts of insights into the human mind might actually, if applied, make the world a slightly better place. "This is the real lesson of Blink," he writes. "It is not simply enough to explore the hidden recesses of our unconscious. Once we know how the mind works -- about the strengths and weaknesses of human judgment -- it is our responsibility to act" [276].

What I enjoyed most about the book was Gladwell's seemingly endless ability to make interesting connections. How did he find all of these people? It seems like he spends his time traveling to various locations, following one lead and then another, having fascinating conversations and gleaning these nuggets of vital knowledge. It strikes me as a very similar approach to the one taken by the folks at RadioLab, only there it's sound and here it ends up on paper.

This book is the real deal. It's informative and inspiring. I got done reading it and the first thing I thought was, "I want to write like that. I want to have conversations like that."

Seriously. Even if I never will achieve his cool hair, I still want to grow up to be Malcolm Gladwell.


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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.

Features: The Resurrection of the The Late BP Helium - Flagpole Magazine: Colorbearer of Athens, GA

I just came across this article about my old friend, high school dance commander comrade, and band mate Bryan Poole in the Athens, GA Flagpole Magazine. He mostly plays with Of Montreal these days, but this article is about his solo projects. I'm especially psyched to link the picture. Read, listen, enjoy.

Features: The Resurrection of the The Late BP Helium - Flagpole Magazine: Colorbearer of Athens, GA

Also, I just found this video interview. Fun stuff.

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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Recon, starring Peter Gabriel

Just discovered this short student film (!) starring Peter Gabriel and Charles Durning. I wish I could find it in higher quality, but you'll get the idea from this, regardless. Clocking in at just under ten minutes, it is a neat little piece of cyberpunk noir. Enjoy -

What would Nietzsche say?

Open Letter to the Space Dudes

Dear NASA,

Remember that time y'all went to the Moon?

That was way rad.

Peace,

D.

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.

Doc at the Radar Station

So I am like many people in this world in that I have certain irrational fears. Phobias. Yeah.

Phobias, by their very nature, are a bit strange. You get a low-grade anxiety attack from, say, spiders. Being in high places makes you woozy. You can't stand to touch cotton balls. These are all fears that have no basis in anything objectively threatening (at least not threatening in that moment of fear, per se) and yet drive those of us who have them to distraction and avoidance.

Well, yes. I am phobic. I have a set of these fears as well. Most of them are standard issue. I am afraid of heights (and the vertigo can get pretty bad, which made my stint working with Outward Bound interesting), and I am mildly claustrophobic. I really don't like talking about blood. As abnormal fears go, these are pretty normal, I imagine.

But folks sometimes have a second set of these things - like the cotton example above. I've known two people with that cotton phobia. They can't open aspirin bottles by themselves. Think about it. Some phobias are so common that we don't knock them - the heights one, for example. But when you are afraid of cotton, I imagine sometimes you get some funny looks.

I feel their pain. I, myself, have a peculiar phobia that gets me funny looks and into funny situations.

I'm radiophobic, you see.

No. This is not an irrational fear of lite-rock FM stations (though perhaps there should be a fear like that) nor of common household appliances descended from Marconi and Tesla's early recievers.

Nope. Radiophobia is an irrational fear of things like X-ray machines and nuclear power plants (though irrational here is not meant to mean ignorant - though that is often a confusion. There is much maligning of "radiophobia" as a knee-jerk antipathy to nuclear things on the part of an uniformed public. That is not what I am talking about. I am talking about a genuine phobia here - a real condition that apparently I share with the likes of Thomas Alva Edison and many others).

Now it should be noted that there are plenty of reasonable and rational fears of these things - what with Chernobyl and dirty bomb threats and the like. With reasonable fears you can take reasonable precautions, and minimize risks to safe levels such that normal life can continue, well, you know, normally.

But (and trust me on this one), there is nothing like an unreasonable fear of X-ray machines to make you aware of just how many unsympathetic dental hygenists there are in the world.

The dialogue ususaly goes something like this:

"Um. I know this might sound crazy, but i'm really uncomfortable sitting here with the X-ray machine turned on. Could it be turned off while I'm here?"

"It's not firing. It won't hurt you."

"I realize it's not firing. I realize it won't hurt me. I'm sorry. It has nothing to do with that. It has everything to do with it being in the room and being turned on. I just have a fear of X-ray machines."

"But it's totally safe," she says, the look of incomprehension starting.

"I have no doubt of that. That actually isn't the point. The point," I say, anxiety building, "is that I am just... afraid... of it."

And as you might expect, this dialogue rapidly goes nowhere, largely for the fact that dental hygenists are, to a fault, a very by-the-numbers sort of population (think about it - you clean teeth every day. These folks have a low need for out-of-routine circumstances). It follows that they would try to reassure me with by-the-numbers rational arguments of safety and the like.

The point is is that this is a phobia, and reasoning with me just does not help. I'm sorry.

Now, before you get the wrong idea - I do not completely collapse in a heap there in the examination room. I do manage to survive with the machine on (they are rarely willing to de-energize it), and I even manage to occasionally get an x-ray done when I am assured that they are absolutely necessary. But it does bring on a low-grade panic attack, and I have just learned to live with that.

The phobia is interesting to observe, though. I think because of it I am more aware (hyper aware) of radiation sources we encounter in our daily lives than the average person. Dentist's offices and airports are obvious. But I notice smoke detectors, and the wicks on gas lamps, and certain areas of the college campus I live near - because I know that each of these is a source of (largely unnoticed) radiaton exposure. And I avoid them. Or, if I can't avoid them, I live with it and just have my blood pressure go up a bit.

What put this in my mind is the fact that, because of this odd phobia of mine, I have an obsessive knowledge of radioactive things. I know way too much about how atom bombs and reactors work. I could probably name off the top of my head at least five dozen nuclear accidents or contaminations from the last forty years (at least one of which happened near my old home in Decatur, GA), and I will never ever go picking up scrap metal (just trust me on this one). And as with any true paranoid obsession, the combination of the fear and the knowledge means that, for whatever reason, the universe never ceases to delight in having fun with me about this.

So, for example, my first girlfriend, after our first kiss, was talking to me about her family and her life and she was talking about her father and saying he had a weird job and I said, "Well, at least he doesn't work at a nuclear power plant or anything..."

But, in fact, he did.

And I have in fact had three realtionships with people somehow connected by family to the nuclear industry (all of which I would find out after I got involved with them. it's not like I go looking for this). Needless to say, family visits were not a high point in those affairs.

And so yesterday (this is really what brought it to mind) I was getting my hair cut, and the stylist and I were making conversation. AndI asked how long he had been cutting hair. Not too long. Oh, what did you do before this?

"I was a health physicist in the nuclear industry."

Aha.

So we had a very good conversation, in which I was able to employ some of my obsessive knowledge. I asked about, among other things, whether the Cherenkov effect is as beautiful in real life as it seems to be in the pictures (it is); whether it is scary to stand that close to an operating nuclear reactor (it is). He was pleased to realize I knew quite a bit about his job. I was less pleased to realize that, in some ways, I knew just as much about his job as he did, and occasionally more.

"So why are you cutting hair?"

His first answer had a lot to do with changes in the industry, about restructuring and outsourcing and downsizing. And I took that at face value. it wasn't until near the end of the conversation (and the haircut) that I got the rest of the story.

"Thank goodness, " I said, "it sounds like you were pretty safe, and never had any trouble."

"Well, actually, when I was working my last job," he said (and he named the plant, and a part of my brain suddenly went "oops" and I got very quiet), "they were a bit lax, and several of us got exposed to iodine and thorium isotopes. So they sent me home for a few months, and then I got the letter about not coming back. I don't like to think about it. I joke sometimes that I probably glow inside, or that I got cancers I don't know about. Though I don't imagine that's really something to joke about."

It's one thing to read about something. It is something else to meet someone who has lived through somehing you have read about. Those are two different things.

So yeah, I have a soft place in my heart for the cotton-phobes of the world, because, like me, they have an irrational fear. And strange phobias are pretty funny. But there are also points when the irrationality of a fear begins to shake hands with the reasonableness of being afraid, and at such moments (I shout from the rooftops to the dental hygenists of the world) I don't imagine it's really something to joke about.