Burning Violin

Burning Violin #30 - Letters from the Wasteland

2009-10-05T03:02:15Z

I've got a beautiful stack of scanned letters that passed from one person to another all the way from the nineteenth century down to my mother. They're handwritten, in a variety of scrawls. Text meanders tightly down and around the oddly sized pages, filling up every spare bit of the margins in a spiral. Paper was valuable enough that the letter wasn't done so long as blank space remained. There are all sorts of interesting observations, bits and pieces of day to day life: a mention of a doctor doing what he could for cancer, the off hand reference to "the change of life," the descriptions of the journey in a wagon train west, the oddly poetic description therein of looking back as they reached the top of a pass "we could see everything and there was nothing."

Half of what we know about authors and historical figures is derived from their collections of correspondence, volumes stuffed full of their love letters, rants, and confessions of doubt. Even more of what we know about normal people is from such tidbits of correspondence. It's first person history, candid shots of what would become history, written by people who were there who did not know that the spotlight would eventually be upon their words. People who never were asked their opinions, never wrote great works for immortality, their words still echo because a little scrap of paper on which they jotted a note five hundred years ago chanced to survive in a crack between the bricks in a basement. The greatest hole in our knowledge of history is in the every day lives of normal people.

Today's citizens, for all the bemoaning of the death of letter writing, are the most literate citizens in the history of the world. With the electronic revolution, people en masse write more than they have ever written before. Millions of people transcribe their every heart break, professional decision, emotional connection, meal, and political opinion onto blogs and webpages for posterity. Sure, ninety percent of it is crap, but so is ninety percent of everything.

The problem is that so much of it is stored in a terribly vulnerable manner. I don't mean that it is in electronic form, but that it is stored nowhere except the hard drives of private for profit companies. If Facebook goes bankrupt and trashes its hard drives because of privacy laws, we will as a society lose a vast and unedited window into the lives of a certain people at a certain time. With correspondence shifting almost completely to email, there will not be the odd stack of kept letters granting a glimpse into the past. A few computer geeks might have the wherewithal and motivation to backup and archive their emails for decades on end, but the reality is that almost all email in its current incarnation is so much dust in the wind as far as history is concerned, little more resilient to the passage of years than a message shouted across a room.

I do not have a good answer, any solutions that jump to mind merely run into the iron walls of privacy laws, any proposed archives would have to jump through the hoops of getting varied private companies to invest in something for which there would be no profit, or rely on individuals donating their private electronic correspondence. Perhaps some good will come out of Echelon at least, so long as the Feds are archiving away everything that they are reading.

War

2009-09-29T15:45:45Z

"Wars usually begin when two nations disagree on their relative strength, and wars usually
cease when the fighting nations agree on their relative strength. Agreement or disagreement emerges from the shuffling of the same set of factors. Thus each factor is capable of promoting war or peace... When nations prepare to fight one another, they have contradictory expectations of the likely duration and outcome of war. When those predictions, however, cease to be contradictory, the war is almost certain to end." - Geoffrey Blainey, The Causes of War (1988)

Burning Violin #29 - A Bit of News

2009-09-11T17:27:53Z

Well, it's been a light few weeks on posting in these parts, and I figured it was time to try to get something up here, before the legions raise up and feast on my entrails or more probably, disappear into the wilds of the internet never to return again. There was a solid six month run there where we had a Burning Violin up on schedule every Wednesday. Oh I cheated sometimes and gave you a chapter out of "Katorga", but that was justifiable since it got a few people to click that magical button on the top right and order their very own copy of my novel. HINT: you can still do this. You won't be disappointed. The novel actually does your taxes for you and can be plugged into any outlet in your house to convert your home to solar energy. It may or may not perform sexual favors for you and cook you dinner. Do truth in advertising laws apply on the internet, you might be asking yourself right now? Coincidentally, my novel also is artificially intelligent and has passed the bar in Tijuana so it can act as your attorney, therefore if you order it, it will be able to tell you whether or not you can sue me for lying.

In any case, here's the deal. I started graduate school a few weeks ago, a PhD program in political science. I have to read about a thousand pages a week in addition to various papers and just for fun, learning statistics and Russian. Oh and I get to grade 300 papers since I'm a TA also. So ... [scratches head] ... time is a lot tighter than it was the last six months. A lot of what I am reading and writing is fairly relevant to the Burning Violin rants on politics and economics and such, which is how I ended up on this route in the first place, so I'm building up a decent pile of content that could be adapted for the site. The problem is that at the moment it doesn't make much sense out of the context of whatever class it was for, so I can't just cut and paste. I'll do my best to get something up here once a week to keep y'all sated. "A Fire in their Eyes" will continue to go up on schedule (though I might make it MTWTh instead of MTThF since Wednesday is my busiest day of the week and least likely at this point to get an actual Burning Violin) since it is completed and already loaded up into the system.

Writing these bits of madness and seeing some of your fine feedback is one of the things I am most proud and satisfied of in this little life of mine.

Just to not leave you hanging, I thought you might be interested in this bit of video that I picked up from Stats class, which shows both how intuitively useful numbers can be in understanding the world of politics and how much the world has changed from our preconceived notions of Developed, Developing.

Burning Violin #28 - Speaker for the Dead

2009-08-28T15:39:23Z

"The concept of a 'speaker for the dead' arose from my experiences with death and funerals. I have written of this at greater length elsewhere; suffice it to say that I grew dissatisfied with the way that we use our funerals to revise the life of the dead, to give the dead a story so different from their, actual life that, in effect, we kill them all over again. No, that is too strong. Let me just say that we erase them, we edit them, we make them into a person much easier to live with than the person who actually lived." -Orson Scott Card

Normal people get a couple of lines at a few cents per word in the local paper, but with the papers dying, we probably don't even get that anymore. A death certificate stamped by the county, an entry in a ledger somewhere, musty whether electronic or not, and the only mark of your passing is a funeral attended sparsely by a few old friends waiting their turn and family who will be sad this day, but less with each tomorrow. We cut through the world like blades, and when we've left the flesh, the flesh heals over. Most of us don't even leave a mark. The great ones though, whether they're particularly keen or just have the luck to strike a vulnerable spot, they leave scars that never quite heal.

We like to think that the good ones slice to heal, to excise the tumors and gain access to the deeper ails of the body. The bad ones, we believe, are just twisting the knife. The secret is that there are no bad ones. Even the worst of men who try to change the world, think that they are helping it, think that the blood and scars are worth it to fix something, even if they're the only ones to see it. They are all defined by the same mad chutzpah that insists that they are different, that they have the right to cut deeper and deeper. It's only an insane man who believes that he is so special that he has the right to change the world. But without that madness, there would never be any change at all.

Ted Kennedy outlived his brothers by more than four decades, but never quite strode out of their shadows, so long because they were cast at dawn. He was a Kennedy, that name uttered with reverence by half and spite by the rest. It's become a word like "liberal," used interchangeably as a point of pride and a slur depending on the speaker. Ted Kennedy would probably never have been a senator without the aura of his brothers and the piles of money old Joe Kennedy made during Prohibition. But then, most of us probably wouldn't have TVs, cars and computers if we hadn't had the good luck to be born American, heirs of a national fortune built on a stolen continent. We're a nation of bandits and cowboys, the Kennedys but a distillation of the common stock, not better or worse, just concentrated potency.

The drunk who crashed his car into a river, saved himself, left a girl behind, waited until morning to call the police. A coward.

The statesman who eulogized his brother, reigned in the Senate for forty years, fought for progress. Lion of the Senate.

Which is real, which counts? The immortal sides take up their inevitable positions, dictated not by the man but their pre-designated roles. He was a great statesman, flawed yes, but great no matter what Fox News tells you. He was a horrible liberal, a statesman yes, but a horrible liberal no matter what MSNBC tells you. The problem with eulogies is in the eulogizer not the eulogized.

There is no great scale that balances our rights and wrongs. We are both damned and saintly all at once. Sin and virtue are like oil and water, they don't mix together into some shade of gray, they exist side by side, dark and light. And when that pallid mixture of our deeds is poured swirling down the drain, only the warped mirror of memory remains to tell those who remain what shade we once were.

There's an art to the obituaries of the notable, an attempt to fade the newly deceased into the sepia tint of old photos overnight. We rip our heads around at an impossible angle to try to snag a glimpse of what this will look like in twenty years time, when the weight of history has descended and cast judgment on the dead. Obituaries are the cover notes of biographies yet to be written.

"I rejected that idea. I thought that a more appropriate funeral would be to say honestly, what that person was and what that person did. But to me, 'honesty' doesn't simply mean saying all the unpleasant things instead of saying only the nice ones. It doesn't even consist of averaging them out. No, to understand who a person really was, what his or her life really meant, the speaker for the dead would have to explain their self-story--what they meant to do, what they actually did, what they regretted, what they rejoiced in. That's the story that we never know, the story that we never can know--and yet, at the time of death, it's the only story truly worth telling." -Orson Scott Card

Burning Violin #27 - Look On My Works

2009-08-19T13:20:06Z

We like to think that we're immortal, that even if our bones turn to dust, something of us will live on. It's the demiurge, the spark of divinity that burns in each soul, the consuming desire to create. In Christian mythology, God stamped Adam's soul with that gift, but withheld it from the angels. Lucifer rebelled at that final indignity. The ember of creation drives our every impulse, whether to build a house, a career, a business, an empire, a theory, or a story. Even the least ambitious of us strive for eternity by creating children. There's a simple underlying faith to civilization, independent of any religion or agnosticism. Humanity is eternal, and therefore that which we create echoes in eternity.

If that myth fell, would civilization fall with it? It may have happened before.

The biosphere, the area in which life lives, ranges from about 8400 meters below sea level to 5400 above, a thickness of only eight and a half miles. If the Earth was a pool ball, the biosphere would be thinner than the pool ball's coating of paint. The dinosaurs were wiped out by an asteroid only six miles long. That's a dust mite pinging into our metaphorical pool ball. We can take some element of pride in our insignificance, like raging fans of a team that hasn't won in a decade but still keeps showing up to play with full stands.

But we haven't even begun to appreciate that we are not just small in size but in time. Our entire civilization has erupted from clever bald apes into space travelers in twenty thousand years or so, depending on where you draw the precise line between animal and civilization. Life has existed on Earth for around 3.6 billion years. If the history of life on Earth were projected into a 24 hour day, the entire history of our civilization would have taken place in the last half second. Half a second. Every tragedy and triumph, the rise and fall of every empire, a foot note at the end of our planet's day. If we annihilated ourselves in an orgy of atomic fire, how long would it take for us to be replaced? Even if we scoured every bit of life from land, even the cockroaches, it would be but a few seconds to the planet before some enterprising microbes flourished into clever beasts who built their own nuclear rockets. We comfort ourselves in some twisted way, imagine that those inevitable successors will wonder at our ruins, page through our decaying libraries, puzzle out some lesson from our self destruction. We imagine that we will live on as some ghost of a memory.

But the instruments and relics of technical society disintegrate at a far faster rate than geologic time. Toss a circuit board onto your lawn and watch it disintegrate day by day. In the twenty odd years since Chernobyl caused the evacuation of the nearby city of Pripyat, nature has reclaimed the city despite the fallout. Soccer fields have become forests, libraries mere mulch for soil, winds and rain gradually pound even the concrete into dust. In another hundred years there will be little left but misshapen lumps of residual concrete and rusted iron. In a thousand? If we destroy ourselves, no one will wonder at our monuments, for they will have been dust for a thousand generations, subsumed into the soil and bedrock. No one will ever know we existed, save for a fossilized skeleton or two indistinguishable from those left by Cro-Magnon man.

There could have been dozens, perhaps hundreds of technical societies predating us, leaving nothing behind to mark their passage. How did they disappear? The usual suspects, none of which would be detectable at a geologic distance. Even a nuclear war would be swallowed in a few million years by the planet. The fossil record reveals unimaginable mass extinctions at intervals of a few tens of millions of years. There is no evidence of prior technical civilizations, but we wouldn't expect to find any at a remove of eons.

Whether we are only the latest in a line of technical civilizations, or whether we are the first such to arise on this planet, certain conclusions become apparent with the realization of the sheer scale of time and space. First, we are only the latest living to haunt a vast and unmarked graveyard. Second, we must learn to think on a larger scale, if we are to survive and truly make our mark on eternity.

"The dinosaurs became extinct because they didn't have a space program." -Larry Niven

Burning Violin #26 - Helix

2009-08-13T23:53:01Z

Ah, well so here we are, a day late and a post short it seems. I had grand plans for the 26th Burning Violin. It's the sixth month mark, which means we're getting serious, no chance of breaking up now by text message. Of course the giant fancy post took far far longer than anticipated, and is still in an amorphous state of unfinishedness. I'll try to get it done next week, a belated big deal, but as a way of pleading for forgiveness, here's a sweet love story with a happy ending.

Helix

What you don't understand is that I had to leave, I had no choice, damn it! Oh my friends were understanding, and my family too, but they didn't, couldn't comprehend what really had happened. I loved her, yes, with every part of my soul. But what made her death so terrible was not that she slipped away from me day by day as she faded more into cancerous delirium, but that she became more and more present in my mind. My God, she did not die!

From the first day I met her I felt a connection, a sort of transcendent, soul-gripping deja-vu that hinted of a past that was so ancient and eternal that neither of us could seize its true meaning. I know, you say that it was youthful infatuation, the fast dying flame of high school love. You are wrong. I felt, no, I knew that we had been linked eons before, that our souls had never orbited far apart. Indeed they may have been one, only now torn into separate bodies by some perverse deity.

I could sense what she thought, what she was doing, if she was but a room away, or across town. On some other plane of existence, some unearthly power had welded our souls together. I thought it a blessing then. But now? Ha! Now I rather think it was a trick of the devil, earthly damnation for some unimaginable crime. For it did not end!

As she approached her death in that sterile hospital, I began to feel her even more clearly, as if I no longer sensed the brushing of her soul past mine with whispering tendrils of thought, but physically felt it pressing into my head. For those last few days the intimacy grew closer, until it was omnipresent, watching me and sharing my thoughts with a closeness that we only fleetingly experienced during life. And when she died! Oh hell of hells! She was there, everywhere. I could feel her behind me, standing next to me. Even at her own funeral.

Soon I felt her talking to me, hearing her inside my head day and night. I thought I was surely mad, lost in some disease that had snapped every part of my mind. But it wasn't her voice that I feared, it was what it said. Beckoning, calling out my name, she wanted me to join her on the other side. I had sworn to love her until death did us part, and I had. It was she who was to blame. I couldn't stand it after some time, her calling me at every moment, speaking my name; I suppose souls have no need of sleep. Worse though was that I began to slip away as her soul became closer. Our minds began to mesh - oh I couldn't bear it! At whatever level our souls had been bound, they remained so as her body rotted in the ground.

I had to leave it all, she was drawing me away and I was losing myself. The friends, the family, they don't know. They think I ran to escape her memory. No, I ran to escape her presence. Soon her presence dimmed, as I moved from city to city. It seemed I might have found some relief at last. But heaven, or hell, twisted another knife in my gut and the sheer emptiness ate at me. It was all or nothing by fated decree. The balance life gave our souls is forever lost, replaced by either frightful fusion or utter desolation.

But I fear now. Yes, I am horribly afraid, because the visions, the closeness has begun to return. Once again she has found me, though I fled across the Atlantic in desperation. And now I see her once more, striding down the Champs-Elysees toward me, merciful God, she has come for me and I have no where else to run. I don't know why I am writing these words to you, my friend, but I feel someone should know the truth, whatever happens next. Fate has won. I will go find what awaits me in her embrace.

Burning Violin #25 - Katorga Redux

2009-08-05T13:13:22Z

Next week marks the six month mark of writing Burning Violin, so I'm working on something a bit bigger than normal, you know, to make it special and such. So this week I'm being both lazy and shameless by posting one of my favorite scenes out of Katorga (my novel, available from Amazon in both paperback and for the Kindle). This scene captures a lot of the heart of the novel at once: it's brutal, terrifying, and yet darkly funny at the same time. There are few things more awkward than an author writing his own blurbs, so buy the book (or ten, don't be shy), and write your own awestruck blurbs for me to quote so that I don't sound like such a pompous twat typing about how awesome I am. Even though I am. Please enjoy...

A metal door was held open for Doug into a tiny room, no more than ten by ten, hardly the size of a decent bathroom. A metal table with three chairs sat in the center of the room, and a broad mirror Doug recognized from old police shows covered one wall. The room was otherwise bare concrete except for a drain at the center of the room right underneath the table. The leader pointed to the single chair on the opposite side of the table from the other two.

"Please take a seat there, Dr. Bradley, someone will be right with you," the man said and then leaned close to talk in a low voice. "These are desperate times, Doug, please do your best for the Republic."

Doug drew himself up straight and spoke as firmly as he could. "I will do whatever I can, sir. I'm a good party man, myself."

The man nodded and his lips touched on an enigmatic smile for a moment and then he left the room in a hurry, closing the door behind him with a loud click. Doug walked slowly to the chair and sat down. He looked idly over at the mirror and felt suddenly claustrophobic, the walls pulling in closer every moment. Doug shivered and stared at those other two seats. Some interminable amount of time later, it was impossible to sense time accurately surrounded by concrete and glaringly unnatural fluorescent lights, Doug nodded off, face lowering to the slick metal of the interrogation table.

..........

"Wake up you ignorant piece of shit fuck donkey," a voice screamed in Doug's ear. A finger roughly ran up the side of his chin, covered in drool. "You're slavering all over my goddamned table you drooling goat fucking cock monger."

Doug jerked up in the chair, almost falling over backwards before a hand caught him by his hair and steadied him. He couldn't see, the fluorescents were so bright they were blinding him, burning his retinas. Doug shouted out, and got a slap across his face for the trouble, cheek left stinging by a latex-gloved hand.

"What? Who? What?" Doug exclaimed. He blinked against the lights and began to see shapes. Men in the two seats across from him, another towering over him, holding his head up.

"Three fucking stupid questions that only a slut slit licking terrorist taint sucking whore of a traitor would even think to ask!" Another slap across his face. "I've fucked sheep to death that made me less sick than you!"

"Now, now, Robert, why don't you go take a breather now that our friend has woken up," one of the men across the table said. The voice sounded so kind that Doug almost whimpered. The instinct made him feel ill, reminding him of dogs he had put down.

Robert shoved Doug so hard that he tumbled out of the chair and it landed on top of his head. Doug cowered for a moment, expecting a kick or another tirade, but Robert only paused to spit in his face before exiting the room. Doug lay there for a moment before standing on shaking legs, wiping the spittle from his face with the end of his silk tie as his stomach roiled in protest. He picked up the chair with hands that hadn't shaken so badly since his wedding day and looked around for his bag, desperately needing a valium. His bag was on the other side of the table, behind the two men. Doug refused to ask for it, and sat down in his chair. He took a deep breath and composed himself.

"There must have been a terrible mistake," he said. "That man I came here with told me that the Republic needed me. I came as quickly as I could and am at the government's service."

The two men exchanged a look. They both wore the gray and red uniforms of the world police. Doug thought that the three bars on each of their breasts meant that they were captains, but all he knew about such things were from television and movies, all of which were spinning nightmare scenarios before his eyes from memory.

"I am Lieutenant Thomas, and this is Lieutenant Allen," the man on the right said. The man on the left said nothing, but stared at Doug through squinting eyes and lit a cigarette. "I assure you that there has been no mistake. We are quite aware of your activities and all we want to do is help you as best we can. But make no mistake, we know absolutely everything, we just need to hear it from you."

"What are you talking about?" Doug asked. "I came here to help."

"And you can help," Thomas said gently. "You can help by telling us the names and addresses of all of your co-conspirators." He leaned forward and placed his hand on Doug's. "It is essential to the security of the state that we know exactly what the plan is, in your own words. We have to stop your friends before it is too late."

Doug opened and closed his mouth repeatedly. "But I haven't done anything!"

Thomas sighed and rubbed his eyes with both hands. Allen blew a long cloud of smoke at Doug. "Was your wife in on it?"

Doug blinked. "No, of course not."

"Then you admit you were?" Allen asked.

"Were what?" Doug asked.

"In on it." Allen said.

"On what?"

"It."

"No."

Allen paused for a moment. "What it weren't you in on?"

"It?"

"It."

"What?"

"Exactly." Allen said and blew out another long cloud of smoke. "How can you know your wife was not part of it, if you don't know what it is?"

"She wasn't in on anything!" Doug said.

"So you must have inside information on the plan, if you do know for a fact that she was not involved. And even if she is not involved, your involvement makes her an accessory and thus involved just as much as if she were involved." Allen said, he leaned back and blew out another cloud of smoke, tapping the ashes off his cigarette onto the concrete floor with a look of satisfaction like a mathematician having finished a twenty page long geometric proof.

Thomas leaned forward again. "Look Doug, I know you're protecting her. Hell, if our positions were reversed, I'd try to protect my wife too, but you can't drag her down with you. You have a chance to make things right here. Take responsibility, turn in the guys in charge, I know you were just going along with it out of friendship, you weren't really a terrorist, right? I mean, if you don't confess and tell us what we already know, then we're going to have to assume that Caroline was involved, and have Robert go bring her in and interrogate her. And I don't think anyone wants that except for Robert."

"But I didn't do anything!" Doug shouted.

Thomas shook his head. "Come on man, it's over. But don't drag Caroline down with you. And little Alice, I mean if you're lucky she'd get put into foster care, but really with two parents classified as anti-social, there's not much of a chance of her not getting sent off-world to work off some of your debt."

"Quit saying their names!" Doug yelled. "You have no right, you don't even know them!" He sobbed.

"Shhh, I know, I'm sorry." Thomas said, and patted Doug's hand again. "Just tell us what happened."

"You were part of a group plotting to smuggle a dirty nuke into the Los Angeles spaceport, weren't you?" Allen asked. He opened a folder and threw dozens of pictures of Doug talking to various people, passing them by on the street, looking at various public buildings. "We've had you under surveillance for quite some time and have tracked down most of your associates, but we need your help to convict them."

Allen folded his hands in front of him. "So should we talk about it, or should we have Robert go get your wife and daughter and get answers out of them?"

Purchase the entire novel now at Amazon, in paperback or for the Kindle:

Burning Violin #24 - The Dream

2009-07-29T13:26:52Z

"I woke up in between

a memory and a dream"

-Tom Petty

Nations are collective dreams, born when a critical mass of people believe in them, dying when that belief dissipates. In the late nineteenth century, Germany manufactured a thousand year national identity virtually overnight. For most of history, the story of the Germanic peoples of central Europe was one of indomitable unconquerability, swallowing the armies of would be overlords whole, ungovernable even by fellow Germans. Principalities allied in confederations, but retained sovereignty. They'd fight invaders, but also fight each other in endless confused wars. That was the story of Germany until Bismarck, and it was a story the rest of Europe was happy to hear, because a unified Germany was as powerful as the rest of Europe combined. Balance of power politics didn't work if a single state could counter the weight of everyone else.

The new story forged Prussians, Bavarians, Saxons, and Hanseatics into Germans. It was a story told so well, so convincingly, that ten million Germans would give their lives for it in the following seventy years. It was so persistent that even forty years of occupation and partition did not dim the concept of a German nation among Germans. They were neither Eastern nor Western, but Germans all, these men whose grandfathers did not call their sons German.

Africa is a continent where the dreams do not match the landscape. Lines wander across the map, doodled two centuries previously by Europeans playing at emperor. Dozens of states stand as hollow shells, nothing but political entities, bodies without souls. The pattern repeats in the Middle East, Latin America, Asia, Europe. Broken little states without identities, civil wars and border massacres rage for decades with breathers when the peacemakers come for a few years to allay their consciences. People don't follow laws, they follow stories. When there is no story, when a state is just a state, mere anarchy is loosed and blood runs in the streets. Only a murderous will can maintain control and order in the face of utter chaos, that's why these democracies disintegrate even with perfect constitutions and the promise of a better life. The cycle of blood is never broken with institutions or foreign armies, it will churn forever until a leader comes who can tell the people who they are.

Rome lasted a thousand years after its state was gone, carried as a spark in the back of every western mind. The dreams of Rome live in every western capital, every fluted column and marble façade ripped straight from the Capitaline. We build Rome again and again because we still dream the same dream, tell and retell the same story of republic and empire.

America has its own myths and stories. Declarations, tea parties, cowboys and Indians. The Depression, defender of Democracy, vanguard of the Free World. We walked on the moon, played baseball, beat the commies and the Nazis. None of it's particularly accurate, but all of it is true. We are what we believe we are. Our dreams and myths define what we try to be, but they also mask the errors of our past. The belief in exceptionalism makes us exceptional, but it also enables our sins.

We don't like to remember that Jefferson owned slaves, that we had to be dragged against our wishes into the crusade for democracy, that JFK screwed everything with a skirt and got us closer to Armageddon than we've ever been, or that at one point or another we've invaded just about every country in the western hemisphere. We make the same mistakes over and over again because we really believe that we're doing it for the first time, that every evil is the exception to the rule. The myth of history is that we would do it differently if we got a chance, but the truth is that we do get the chance every day, and we rarely change a thing.

If Americans, or the citizens of any nation, ever saw their history in a perfect mirror, the intertwined horrors and heroism, the dream of the country would die. It might be replaced by something different, more honest, but it might just leave a void. Changing the dream without waking is a tricky proposition.

The greatest danger is that the dream fractures, especially along easy geographic lines, as it did once before. The problem does not arise when people disagree over what the country should be; that's the essence of politics. The danger lurks when people disagree over what the country was and is. When half the country believes in one story and dream, and the other half believes a mutually exclusive story and dream, the country as a whole is in grave danger.

"Real Americans", "godless liberals", "ignorant rednecks", "ivory tower intellectuals", "left coast", "socialist elites", "Jesus freaks". On the surface, it's just name calling, but underneath it's the opening salvos of a civil war, urged on by cable television. The story is falling apart, the people are awaking from their collective dream. A nation cannot survive as a schizophrenic, any more than a mind can dream two dreams at the same time.

"A house divided against itself cannot stand ... I do not expect the Union to be dissolved - I do not expect the house to fall - but I do expect it will cease to be divided. It will become all one thing or all the other." -Abraham Lincoln

Burning Violin #23 - Micro Horror

2009-07-22T13:11:35Z

Micro-stories are tiny tid bits of stories that tell a tale in an absurdly small number of words. They're found in occasional contests and postings on writer's message boards in the dim corners of the internet. There are no set definitions: sometimes fifty words, sometimes a hundred. For this posting, I wrote twenty micro stories that lean towards horror. The twist? The last few words of each become the first few words of the next micro story. The final story ends with the first few words of the set to bring it full circle. The parameters are completely arbitrary, but then so are most rules. Enjoy.

I. A blood soaked bandage covered his right eye socket. He gave it for a glimpse of wisdom. It now sees the truth behind all things but will never stop bleeding. The blood has mystical properties.

II. The blood has mystical properties. It flows from his fingertips as they bash against the keyboard, never resting. If he stops typing, he will die.

III. He will die. The judge and jury have had their say and only the executioner remains. A million volts of justice, but when he steps through the final doorway, he is alone on an empty world.

IV. He is alone on an empty world, its sky purple and its flowers red. A dull bluish-orange sun beats down through his faceplate. The suit carries enough automated nutrients to keep him alive for a month. The wreckage is the punch line.

V. The punch line of any joke is sadistic. If there's no victim, there's no joke. The world itself may be a punch line, but in a cosmic oversight, we were not informed.

VI. "We were not informed," the words echo. Handcuffs click closed, police smirk and lead the way. Magic words, those. Knowledge was power and so withholding it deprived the state of power. Silence was treason.

VII. Silence was treason on the low slung trireme. The ship's listener could read intent with a song. Every sailor, from cabin boy to shift commander, knelt before their captain with offered song. Those that refused were drowned in casks of sea water.

VIII. Casks of sea water lined the museum walls, a thick-boarded barrel for each of the twelve seas. A thirteenth barrel sat empty at the center of the room, accorded a place adorned with candles and mystic herbs. "The Lost" was carved into the metal supporting bands, runes symbolizing the lost sea of the immortals. Once it had been full, but over the centuries every king stole a little until superstitious monarchs stooped to pricking themselves with the cask's splinters in vain hope of a few extra years.

IX. Hope of a few extra years drove Ruby across the Nevada desert to a broken town of retirees and gas station attendants. A place of magic hid there according to an old story on the internet.

X. An old story on the internet showed Roger how to raise the dead. The soul moved on though, and the body is just so much meat. That meat is base, a low source of animal instinct. Without the soul to temper it, the body is an animal. Roger saw his mistake its eyes. No zombie this, for intelligence is part of the meat.

XI. Part of the meat always clings to the bone, or so his grandmother always said. Towards the end, she lost her mind, but something remained behind to claw at those who cared for her. She cackled that phrase, up until the day she was found dead on her bathroom floor. Some say the day after she was found helpless on her bathroom floor. Her presence nagged him for the rest of his life, half seen glimpses in the mirror, half heard snippets of conversation never muttered by mortal lips.

XII. Mortal lips whisper for help. She does not. Her check rejected, her ATM card lost, I offer to pay, and must do it over her objections. I carry dense groceries for her daughter's dinners. We step through automatic doors into an unimagined world.

XIII. An unimagined world stretches around every child. Their imagined worlds are for more beautiful and terrible. One by one, the architecture of dreams falls into the disrepair and chaos of the mundane and knowable. We all keep a nugget of our old dreams.

XIV. Old dreams drink at their own bar on the far side of Nowhere. They sip stall lagers and bitter scotch not aged quite right. Some dreams you would recognize. "I want to be President" sits in one corner, a bottle of whiskey in hand. Campaign buttons hang on his sleeves from a hundred never entered elections. All their words run, like ink in a tear-splattered notebook. A ballerina with smeared mascara slides in across from him and asks about the wound through his heart. "That," he says, "is the mark of those for whom I am no longer just a dream."

XV. No longer just a dream, Jack's Coffee Heaven stood tall with a glistening sign, crystal windows, and a spreading aroma of roasted beans. The first customer entered the shop and whispered to Jack. The store closed at noon forever.

XVI. Forever was her promise, but now I hear her night and day despite her death. Whispers, shouts, sweet tickles in my ear. I know not how she remains, but she haunts me still.

XVII. She haunts me still, the woman from the store. Slender, tight, luxuriant. Her look draws me on, her brown eyes beckoning. Her knife slides across my neck.

XVIII. My neck aches from the stiff drive and stiffer company. In the trunk is the most irritating of them. I drive for the docks and stroke the knife in the passenger seat.

XIX. The passenger seat of his Nissan was filled with a clutter of reference books about space and mechanical engineering. He mutters, "I may have stumbled on the secret."

XX. The secret door looked like part of the wall. Only Charlie could see the silvering of light through cracks on the edge. Dust motes scattered away from the light as if it was a stiff breeze. Whispers came from the door except when Charlie looked right at it. The knob would not budge until the day he tried it with a wounded hand, wrapped in a blood soaked bandage.

Burning Violin #22 - Tripwire Laws

2009-07-15T13:10:50Z

What you have to understand about laws is that they were never intended to protect anyone. Laws provide order, a structure that organizes how people interact. They are a set of guidelines and instructions intended to program human behavior. The notion that laws protect us, that they exist to outlaw harmful behavior from hurting all of us citizens is a quaint one. But that notion is the article of faith upon which civil society survives. Murder is not outlawed because it is wrong but because those who would murder are not deemed useful citizens.

Any behavior that is useful, regardless of harm, is perfectly legal. Just ask any CEO who has destroyed a thousand lives at a stroke. Ask his victims. The equation of morality with legality is one of the great myths of the modern world.

Victimless crimes are the most obvious hole in the belief that laws are there for protection rather than order. Prostitution, substance abuse, and the entire gamut of crimes not against individuals but against Puritanism cannot exist to protect people since such crimes by definition do not hurt anyone. Why are there victimless crimes at all then?

There are many victimless crimes that are strictly structural in nature. Most civil laws fall into this category: parking laws, traffic laws, noise ordinances. These laws exist in order to grease the wheels of society and keep the entire engine moving. They are not conceptually nefarious, except in so far as every bureaucracy is its own form of malice.

Structural laws are distinct though from criminal laws that punish individuals for actions that do not affect other people. Smoking pot in your home does not just not infringe on the rights of anyone else (the supposed basis of law, the protection of other citizens' rights), but does not affect anyone else in any way whatsoever. The criminalization of private behavior, whether in the realms of sexuality or substance, is in stark contradiction to the assumed basis of laws. If a joint is smoked in a forest and no one smells it, was a crime still committed? How can an action that sends no ripples out to the rest of society be deemed harmful, illegal, wrong?

To understand why certain private behaviors are outlawed, we must approach the problem obliquely. Who are such laws designed to ensnare? Drug use laws primarily trip up young people who disdain following rules for the sake of the rules themselves. The laws that don't make sense exist specifically to catch individuals who are willing to break laws that don't make sense. They are tripwires set up by society to criminalize the individuals unwilling to accept arbitrary government authority.

The individuals most likely to break the laws that really matter to power brokers are the exact same individuals who are likely to break stupid laws when they are young. And in doing so, they are demonized and removed from the political process for the rest of their lives. Stalin's secret police could not have dreamed of creating so perfect a snare for those most likely to resist the government. Society itself condemns the very individuals most likely to be willing to fight the government on behalf of the people.

America has perfected this system, imprisoning over one percent of its adult population. One out of every thirty American adults is in prison, on parole, or on probation. Over half those convicts were convicted of nonviolent victimless crime. If there was no victim, if there was no violence, what exactly could the crime have been?

Marijuana, we are told, is a gateway drug, it leads to criminal behavior. Alcohol though is perfectly kosher. A six pack of Coors never led to anything but good times. The reason alcohol doesn't lead to a criminal future is that being caught with three ounces of it doesn't sacrifice your freedom, your education and your right to vote. Make any arbitrary behavior criminal and it will beget further criminal behavior. Criminalize cracking your knuckles and knuckle cracking will become a gateway behavior, guaranteed to lead to a lifetime of shitty jobs and dead-end opportunities to nowhere. And a significant portion of our potential future leaders will be caught up in the dragnet. Leaders buck authority. They tear down arbitrary rules. If we criminalize the arbitrary, we criminalize the best of who we are. We outlaw the very children upon whom the future depends.

It's a circular logic. Item A is illegal. Illegality's punishment is to destroy your life and brand you as a criminal. Therefore anyone who touches item A is a criminal with a destroyed life. The knot pulls tight for any value of item A. Marijuana, knuckle cracking, cola, burritos, homosexuality. Insert absolutely any behavior or substance for A and you get the same result. That is not a judgment of item A, it is the beautiful design of a mechanism for destroying individuality.

More to the point, it is a system designed to break and discredit at a young age any individual willing to openly challenge authority.

Burning Violin #21 - Smooth Criminals

2009-07-08T13:06:01Z

I'm a little too young to have been much affected by Michael Jackson's music. To my fourth grade ears, Weird Al's renditions of Fat and Eat It were immensely more entertaining than the source of their parody. Of course, for some reason I thought Madonna and Marilyn Monroe were the same person until I was twelve, so my childhood reflections upon popular culture are probably entirely lacking a relationship with reality. The main impact Michael Jackson had on me was a realization of the clusterfuck of American copyright law.

In 1985, Michael Jackson purchased for $48 million the rights to the ATV Music catalog, which included most of the Beatles songs written by John Lennon and Paul McCartney. McCartney hoped to win the rights to the catalog himself with a little help from his friend (Yoko, oh the irony), but was outbid by the King of Pop. The incident did not exactly have a beneficial impact on the friendship of the pair. The story is legendary at this point and is often retold with one of two underlying messages: look what a dick Michael Jackson was, or look how out of touch Michael Jackson is with reality that he'll drop fifty million dollars on a lark to fuck over a friend as a joke.

The conclusion I drew was far simpler: how can Paul McCartney not own the rights to his own songs? How is it rational that Paul McCartney owes Michael Jackson money every time he sings "Hey Jude" or "I am the Walrus"? Well you see, someone else owned the rights, and then sold those rights to someone else, who bundled them into an attractive package and sold all those rights to all those songs as a lump legal entity. It's quite simple if you can think like a lawyer instead of a human being.

Stop for a second and think about theft. There are two components to stealing: you take something and the person you took it from no longer has it. When you take a picture of someone, it is not stealing. You made a copy of them, but they still exist, nothing (well except their soul if you're of certain stone aged religions) is missing that was there before. Copying does not meet the common sense definition of theft. I cannot have stolen something from you, if you still have it after the supposed theft.

Consider copying a song instead of photographing a person. You copy the song onto your computer from a friend's iPod. Your friend still has the song, but now you also have it. Nothing has been stolen. Ah, but you see, you just cost the record company the value of that song, so you stole from them. Does the record company still have a copy of the song? Well, yes. Then how was anything stolen from them? Well it's not really the song that was stolen per se, it was the money. What money? The money you would have paid them for the song. So if I had no intent to purchase the song, then I didn't actually steal anything? Or put in another way, if Schrödinger's cat is simultaneously alive and dead in that box, then he owes $1.9 million to the RIAA.

Enough dancing straw men, they enflame my allergies anyway. The root of the problem with copyright logic is that it only makes sense within a certain framework of legal assumptions that do not exist outside the minds of attorneys. Any file on your computer is just a big long list of zeroes and ones that when read in the right way become a picture of breasts, or a pop song, or a shopping list, or this article that you're reading right now, or a picture of bigger breasts. Saying that it is illegal to copy a song is the technical equivalent of outlawing a number.

In any case the lesson is, every time you download a Beatles song without paying for it, you're stealing money. From Michael Jackson's children. And won't someone think of the children?

Singed Couplet #2 - Generations

2009-07-06T22:44:01Z

They say that every generation is the same. Fathers and mothers alike are disappointed in their sons and daughters, these weird amalgamations of the previous generation. Faces so familiar yet so utterly alien. We respond increasingly well to animation as it gets closer and closer to realistic, but suddenly are disgusted when it is almost but not quite real, when the faces are real, except for something alien and almost indescribable. The uncanny valley. Children are like that sometimes to parents. They look almost like mom, almost like dad, a little bit from an uncle or an aunt, maybe grandma's eyes. It's a miracle and a curse all at once. The worst of parents try to shape their child's life like a marionette, a vicarious second chance. The best try to guide, show the steps that worked for them, hide the sadness when their favorites don't work.

Stalin moved his old mother into an enormous dacha with servants, but she would not leave a single tiny room intended for the maid. He visited her, and once she asked hesitantly what it was exactly that her son had become. I am like the czar was, he explained in the only way that would make sense to her. Better if you'd have stayed in seminary school, she concluded.

A generation later, Stalin's son Yakov died in a German prisoner of war camp, after his father refused to exchange him for a German field marshal, saying simply "I have no son".

The myth of history is that we will not repeat the mistakes of our parents.

Burning Violin #20 - Markets and Ethics

2009-07-01T13:56:35Z

"You cannot legislate the poor into freedom by legislating the wealthy out of freedom. What one person receives without working for, another person must work for without receiving. The government cannot give to anybody anything that the government does not first take from somebody else. When half of the people get the idea that they do not have to work because the other half is going to take care of them, and when the other half gets the idea that it does no good to work because somebody else is going to get what they work for, that my dear friend, is about the end of any nation. You cannot multiply wealth by dividing it." -Adrian Rogers

The inherent flaw in that quote is that it assumes a system that is just, that the poor are poor because they deserve to be and the rich are rich because they deserve to be. It assumes that an individual's wealth is directly proportional to his earning of that wealth. But the free market system, like any system, rewards neither superior ethics, nor superior effort, nor superior merit. Like all systems, it simply and blindly rewards those that play the game the best.

No economic system in human history has produced the raw creativity, output and progress of free market capitalism, but it is easy to forget why America championed free markets in the first place: because they are more just, more right than any other economic system. Sometime during the Cold War, we lost sight of that original motivation and our means became our ends as our economies created unimaginable wealth and prosperity. We defended free markets because they worked the best instead of because the nature of their freeness made them the ethically superior system. In forgetting those ethical grounds, we have lost the ability to intervene in the market when ethically necessary. If the reason for the market is its superior performance, then intervention on ethical grounds that affect performance is against everything the market stands for. If the reason for the market is its ethically superior outcome, then intervention on ethical grounds helps the market achieve its purpose.

The best education money can buy. The best medical care money can buy. The best car money can buy.

There are things that it is simply ethically wrong to have determined by the availability of money. There are certainly things that should be. Better house, better car, better TV, a bigger stack of DVDs, eating tenderloin instead of pork chops. These are things that can be determined by money, that working hard and earning money should allow you to upgrade. There are certain categories of expense that should not ethically be determined by money. Money should not be able to buy you better medical care or a better education or better legal representation.

This isn't an unrealistic utopian impulse. It's something that can and should be designed and legislated. Being able to cut checks for $50,000 per year should not get your child a prestigious education at a private liberal arts school. Access to education should not be a financial decision, it should be a strictly merit based decision. The best students should go to the best schools, and on down the line, regardless of their financial status. Likewise, the mediocre students should go to the mediocre schools, regardless of their ability to pay for an exclusive private school. Medical care should be determined by need not by money. The Mayo clinic should be where the most severe and hopeless cases are sent, not simply the ones with incredible insurance.

The bottom line is that there will always be differences in quality, whether it is education, medical care, or simply the type of car that you drive. But it is utterly unethical to have some of those differentials determined by money.

What society can do is make decisions on which resources should be allocated by free market supply and demand, and which should be allocated on the basis of different criteria. In an ethical society, the first decision should not be what is possible, it should be a determination of what should be. The question of how it must be limited or compromised is a fundamentally different question than what the world should be like. We can say outright, without a financial commitment, that we think that all citizens should have health insurance and free access to medical care. It is entirely possible that this ideal is not within the reach of our resources, that no matter what we do at present, there simply isn't enough money, doctors or hospitals to achieve the ideal. The question then is how to decide who gets access to those resources. Simply saying that we only have the resources to give 80% of Americans health care and determining that therefore the poorest 20% will be the ones that miss out is the most unethical way imaginable for determining access to resources. Even a lottery would fundamentally be more ethical, at least then we are not pretending that the hourly rate you bill out at is an appropriate measure of how much you deserve medical care.

Decide on the world you want, and if it is not feasible, decide on how to compromise without compromising the integrity of the ideal. The poor will always be with us, but we have the power to decide what poverty means in our society.

The end of a nation does not come when it cares about the poor. Indeed, the strength of character of any nation is best measured by the lots of the least within it. When the richest society in human history decides that it is a perfectly just and deserved outcome for CEOs to make a thousand times what their employees earn and that 10 million children deserve to not have health insurance, then we are not far removed from the only place that sustained injustice ever leads: blood and fire in the streets.

Burning Violin #19 - Paradigm Shift

2009-06-24T13:36:09Z

"The only true wisdom is in knowing you know nothing." -Socrates

The nineteenth century and early twentieth century saw the culmination of a certain old way of thinking, the sort of thinking that led each and every intellectual of any repute to conclude his life with an epic work that basically boiled down to "Absolutely Everything in My Specialty". The works got longer and longer as time passed. An obsession with minutia and the meticulous detail of such works began to resemble that urge six year olds sometimes get towards comprehensive cataloging. "I'm going to write down every person/number/word in the world". Less reflective children continue the exercise until they get bored, but certain children reach a sort of elementary school epiphany that there is always more to write down. They wouldn't necessarily put it so succinctly, but that's the gist of their conclusion.

Just about every field of human thought suffered from the same malaise by the early twentieth century.

Historians would dedicate decades to compiling comprehensive histories. Edward Gibbons finished off the eighteenth century with the immense six volumes of The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, a feat later topped by numerous historians embarking upon their own attempts to write comprehensive histories of absolutely everything. William and Ariel Durant's The Story of Civilization spanned eleven volumes and two million words. Arnold Toynbee's A Study of History topped out at twelve volumes. If a work could just be long enough it could capture the essence of everything that happened in all of human history.

Writers churned out longer and longer novels throughout the nineteenth century, taking twenty pages to describe a man getting out of bed in the morning. Dickens and Tolstoy took years off their lives just lifting their manuscripts. If a novel could just be long enough, it might capture reality itself.

Physicists reveled in the pinball universe. Every atom a billiards ball bouncing around in perfect accordance with physical laws. If you could measure just so precisely, you could know the precise position and vector of every atom in the entire universe. You could predict through humble Newtonian physics every event in all of history, every thought that ever flitted through a human brain. You could see the future. If the measurements could just be precise enough, you could know everything that ever was and ever would be.

Mathematicians spent half a century on the monumental project of comprehensively defining and proving all mathematical axioms, fitting them into a grandiose universal set. With enough volumes, you could annotate and define every possible bit of logic and its relationship with all other conceivable logic.

Children see the flaw in this societal hubris: there is always more. A history could always be more complete, until a volume was written on every single person who ever lived. A novel could always be more real, until it was as voluminous as what the historians aimed to produce. There was always another atom to measure, another axiom that didn't quite fit the existing ones. We thought the map could be as perfect as the territory.

The twentieth century tore down all those notions, one after another. Gödel's incompleteness theorem destroyed the idea of comprehensive mathematics, proving not only the impossibility of completeness, but also that any system included axioms that were true but not provable. Einstein ripped down physics with relativity and the genesis of quantum mechanics: it's not simply that we do not know whether an electron is here or there until measured, it's that the electron is simultaneously in both places until we do. Schrödinger's cat. Heisenberg's uncertainty principle. Our ideas of history itself disintegrated in the world wars of absolutism and the birth of atomic fire. Science fiction and horror were born as nineteenth century novels died. Lovecraft and Wells wrote of a vast and incomprehensible universe that dwarfed everything in human experience a mere few decades after writers focused their microscopes on cataloging the minutia of human experience.

We cannot know everything, but realizing that is the first step to knowing something.

"Relying on words to lead you to the truth is like relying on an incomplete formal system to lead you to the truth. A formal system will give you some truths, but as we shall soon see, a formal system, no matter how powerful--cannot lead to all truths." -Douglas Hofstadter

Singed Couplet #1 - Wild Horses

2009-06-22T16:46:43Z

There's a phenomenon in certain circles known as the discovery of population. We're used to the idea of people being a national resource, familiar with the perception by both the extreme right and extreme left during the 20th century of the value of having more and more people in a state. More workers => more industry, more soldiers => more power. But this is a fundamentally modern perception of population. Prior to Napoleon, the huge population of France (larger than many other states combined, for centuries) was considered a liability. Three times the population didn't yield a multiple of power, but a multiple of burdens. It just meant more damned half starved peasants whose necks needed boots. And boots were expensive and more fun to use kicking other countries in the dangly bits.

Napoleon democratized warfare overnight. He realized that a hundred thousand eager volunteers kicked the crap out of ten thousand crack troops with years of training. And if they failed, it took him a couple weeks to round up another hundred thousand volunteers whereas it took another decade to train up a few regiments of shock troops. Napoleon fielded the largest armies ever seen in Europe and used them to conquer the better part of the continent. And every time disaster struck, every 400,000 man Grande Armée that disintegrated into the Russian wastes, more men waited at home to be handed a rifle and a uniform.

Napoleon was the most dangerous man to arrive in Europe since the Khan died at the gates of Vienna, not because he conquered (conquerors are a dime a dozen in European history), but because he woke the beast of the people. For all of history the power of the people was a force to be beaten down, not something to be tamed. It was too dangerous to tame, it could turn on the master's hand too easily.

That's democracy, shed of elections and millennia of elevated discourse on natural rights and freedom. Democracy in its rawest form, the beating heart underneath all those pretty words and infrastructure, is just the people moved to action. The institutions, the parliaments and congresses and republics and constitutions, are the bit and bridle and saddle that turn the strength of the people into something useful and constructive. It's a fine line that cynical governments walk with their people: break a mount and it's tame but worthless, be too lax with the whip though and it will lose fear and throw you.

Experts keep saying that Mousavi will negotiate and cut a deal and that will be the end of it. Experts don't understand democracy, they think that people follow leaders. If Yeltsin hadn't climbed on top of that tank, Russians wouldn't have returned to communism, someone else would have climbed onto the tank. In the mythology of westerns, wild mustangs will sometimes take a rider, but they won't ride with him forever, they will leave him if he becomes unworthy. You can chain a wild horse, but that doesn't make it a fucking toy pony.