Recently in Burning Violin Category

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.

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.

"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

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

Ah, well so here we are, a day late and a post short it seems. I had grand plans for the 26th <i>Burning Violin</i>. 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.

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?"

"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

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.

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.

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?

"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.

"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

Cities are unique from rural areas because they concentrate vast numbers of people into relatively small areas. The density of the population itself can be a factor in democratic development. Density is the concentration of power; it is why corporations and political parties can wield such extraordinary power: they concentrate and distill power down into a small enough tool that it can be wielded effectively. The more densely power is concentrated, the more easily it can be brought bear on a political pressure point. When a population is dispersed throughout the countryside it is vulnerable to the concentrations of entrenched power, but when a population draws together into a city, its concentration rivals the entrenched. But the concentration of political power is not sufficient to ensure political consciousness; else every city would be a center of democracy. Cities are unwieldy beasts, difficult to control even if they are not politically conscious. Their presence explains why even in autocracies, cities are correlated with increased democracy, even though their weight is not sufficient to sway the system as a whole to democracy. The concentration of raw political force in cities, even when not conscious, causes autocrats to tread lightly, warping the political system around itself with an almost gravitational field.

The concentration of population into cities also is significant because the density and proximity of the population encourages political consciousness. Proximity imposes limits on government actions, because suppressive action against even a small part of the population is clear and present to many people, whereas outside of cities, government action is distant or immediate, only observable if you and yours are the target. What is nearby is relevant, and for people in cities, that circle of nearness contains far more people and events than those in rural areas. It is one thing to hear of government suppression two towns over, but quite another to be able to hear the gunfire from one's own home. A second side effect of proximity is the simple matter of communication. Just as viral epidemics spread more easily through the tightly packed urban populations, so to do viral epidemics of memes. Word of mouth communication is the most powerful form of communication, relying on the strength of personal bonds and ties, bonds which are compressed and multiplied in cities. Modern communications make personal proximity less important than in the past, but only to a degree. Communications systems are the easiest for a state to suppress, whereas word of mouth communication, while suppressible, is impossible to entirely eradicate. In poor states, where communications technologies are less widespread, they are even easier for the state to suppress.

Population density also leads to the perceived radicalization of society. Statistically, occurrences that are extraordinarily unlikely are much less likely to occur in particular small groups. The larger a population is gathered together, the more likely it is for statistical oddities to emerge, although the overall rate of their occurrence may not increase. For example, if only one in a million individuals is likely to become a serial killer, there is a vanishingly small chance of a serial killer being present in any particular small town of a few thousand people. But in a city of several million, there is a statistical likelihood that at least one will be present. This is not to say that cities are inherently more dangerous, but that their size leads to them being bastions of statistical oddities.

This statistical quirk becomes important when combined with psychological factors. Even in cities with crime rates lower than rural areas, crime is invariably seen as an issue of primary importance. The difference is that crime of a particular rate spreads out over a much greater area in rural areas, whereas in a city, that crime is compressed into a small and familiar area. Humans do not associate risk with the statistical likelihood of an event within a population, but with the perceived proximity of the event. Understanding that one person in ten thousand is likely to be robbed each year means that a town of a thousand is unlikely to see a robbery much more often than once per decade, but a city street with ten thousand inhabitants is likely to have a robbery per year. The danger seems more palpable on the city street, despite the fact that the chances of a particular person being a victim are identical in the two situations. Humans have a sort of binary psychology based on centering the universe on themselves, eliminating probability as a factor. We do not see that there is a 0.01% chance of being a random victim of a robbery on our particular city street, but rather interpret hearing about a robbery happening on our street as meaning that there was a 100% chance that we could have been the victim of a robbery. Rural areas are less prone to this phenomenon because the statistical oddities are spread out over a much larger area, thus ensuring that the occurrences that do happen immediately impact the thinking of less individuals. What this means for government is that the populations of cities put proportionately more political pressure on the state for action on social and economic issues than the same population spread throughout a rural area.

Those same forces of radicalization work in another direction in cities, generating specialists. The larger a population gathers together, the more specialized its population can become, because there are more and more people to support particular rarely needed talents. A town of a thousand will not have a world renowned cancer specialist, not because of a lack of education or talent, but because cancer is rare enough that a town of a thousand cannot support its own specialist on the topic. The smaller a population, the more generalized the inhabitants. This applies not only to professions and skill sets, but also more broadly to life choices and culture. An obscure cultural interest valued by one in several thousand individuals will be effectively non-existent in the countryside, but can find a vibrant niche existence in a city. Groups that are larger than niches, but still minorities, see a similar advantage in cities. Without a statistical increase in their occurrence in the population, specialists (whether economic or cultural) grow in power in the densely packed populations of cities.

Specialization leads to subtle differences in the politics of cities in comparison to rural areas. Technical specialists have devoted time and energy into becoming specialists in their field, and thus have a vested interest in policy insofar as it affects their specialization. This is one of the first steps towards political consciousness. In addition, the proximity of specialists within a city allows their combination and focus towards particular issues. Instead of scattering like atoms throughout the countryside, their power base is a concentrated body of mass when gathered inside a city. Specialists also are distinct because they represent an investment of time and energy by society, in other words they cannot so easily be replaced as more generally equipped individuals. The value of specialists gives them power relative to the state, power that is magnified by the density at which they are present in cities.

A Question

A cat chases a model train as it loops a figure-eight around a Christmas tree, darting amongst wrapped presents and glittering electric lights. The situation is testament to the flexibility of the animal mind. There are neither model trains nor wrapping paper nor spark-filled bits of glass in the natural habitat of the domestic feline. The cat's behavior lends itself to two alternative interpretations: we can infantilize the behavior or we can anthropomorphize it. Infantilization concludes that the cat is profoundly stupid, and that it simply interprets anything small and moving as a mouse, any lumps in the way as rocks, and anything glittering as the stars overhead, if even worth noticing at all. Anthropomorphization suggests that the cat is profoundly intelligent, and that it adapts seamlessly to concepts utterly foreign to those wired into its brain. In this model, the cat chases the train knowing that it is not a mouse, but enjoying the similarity nonetheless.

Now consider a human being instead of a cat.

Telecommunications and global transportation intertwine six billion people only 500 generations removed from tribes of a few dozen drifting through the savannahs and jungles. Do our minds adapt any differently than that of the cat? That is, are human beings profoundly stupid or profoundly intelligent?

The answer is more complicated than the question, but holds insight into how individuals interact with society as a whole. It helps explain many of the contradictions and central conflicts of modern man. In short, the cat manages to be both intelligent and stupid.

Symbols

Symbols in and of themselves are arbitrary and meaningless. Their symbolic value comes from the combination of symbols together into a system. It is the pattern between the symbols that holds symbolic power.  These patterns in and of themselves should not rationally have any meaning or power since they are merely assemblages of proxies. Only proxies that are valued more than simple proxies take on symbolic value. This is of course the central dilemma of symbols: how can something we rationally know has no power, have any power at all?

The key is in understanding that the mind can be broken into two components for the purposes of this discussion: the rational and the sensual. The rational mind can appreciate and distinguish that a toy train is not a mouse, but the sensual mind responds to the toy train as if it were a mouse. In other words, the sensual mind has no concept of metaphor. If two items evoke similar emotional responses, to the sensual mind, they are the same object. The vagaries of simile and metaphor are left to the rational mind, bereft of emotional response. Symbols therefore become real, not because people are so stupid that they believe the proxy is the same as the actual, but because our brains on a sensual level respond to the proxy as if it were real. The rational mind appreciates the distinction between proxy and actual, whereas the sensual mind responds in kind to both.

This methodology explains why it does not matter what a symbol is, or even to a degree how irrational it is. Symbols can be arbitrary because their power does not reside in any sort of measure of merit, but simply as a binary calculation of emotional resemblance. A crucifix can manifest in an infinite variety of simple and complex forms, but to the believer, a cross's symbolic quality derives from the emotional reaction tied to it. That reaction may be limited to a specific orthodox cruciform, or it may be as broad as accepting anything close to the basic shape. The symbolism needs no rational basis, and in fact rational explanations for the quality of one symbol over another are gilding applied to mask the irrational from an increasingly rational world.

Empathy

The way the mind reacts to symbols also plays an important role in how societies are structured. Human relationships naturally grow out of small family and kin groups. In the natural world, the human brain does not deal with large numbers of individuals. There are a very limited number of metaphors for the relationships between individuals. These metaphors cannot always be readily applied to the complex social relationships that arise in modern society. The rational brain can invent and adapt to these logical structures at will, but the sensual mind does not have the same luxury.

The way that the sensual mind deals with concepts for which it is not wired is to shoehorn them into existing metaphors. Nations are families. Allies are friends. Other citizens are brothers and sisters. The state is both father and mother. These similar relationships are easy to dismiss as convenient but meaningless metaphors, but the sensual mind's incapacity for metaphor reveals these relationships as critical to understanding how and why individuals react in seemingly irrational ways to government and politics. It is the metaphor of "nation as family" that produces the ideological structures of contemporary conservatism and contemporary liberalism.

The basis for social relationships is empathy, the ability to see others as oneself. Recent developments in neuroscience suggest that empathy is born not of rationalization, i.e. thinking that another's pain is bad because it reminds of the potential for one's own pain, but from feeling some shadow of that pain in one's own brain.  Empathy derives from being unable to disassociate oneself from one's peers. The pain of one is the pain of all.
This is why sociopaths have the most rational of minds: the disconnection from others leaves nothing but rationality behind. The profound alienation felt by so many individuals in society is a result of an overly rational society dismissing the structural underpinnings of society itself. In other words, if the connections between people are fundamentally irrational in nature, then the prizing of rationality above all else in a society will inevitably lead to a society with no social structure.

The startlingly frequent occurrence of alienation in the most educated and most successful individuals is a logical consequence when society is viewed in this context. An oft-asked question is whether education causes depression and alienation or whether it is something inborn in intelligence itself. The answer is that alienation is a byproduct of fully embracing modern society's focus on rationalism. Ergo, those most successful at the embrace of society's rationale are most affected by the byproduct.

All the complexities of symbolic systems and elaborate social structures can be boiled down to the basic building blocks upon which our minds operate. The human mind functions like a multiple choice exam. When we are faced with anything, be it an idea, a political party, an acquaintance, et cetera, we fit it into one of the bubbles. There is no option for "none of the above." That bubble, or writing in your own answer, is the reaction of two types of minds: the entirely irrational or the entirely rational. The madman or the genius. A madman has no regard for the social and mental rules that force an accepted answer. A genius may take the same route, because if none of the answers fit, the only truly rational response is to choose none of them. An average individual will choose the bubble that feels most similar, that evokes the same emotional response. Each bubble is a symbol. A mind divorced from symbolism cannot comprehend the way the rest of society interprets the most basic of concepts, because that interpretation is inseparable from metaphor.

Politics

As historical forces, as opposed to their contemporary political buzzwords, conservatism and liberalism have championed opposite sides of the rational/sensual spectrum. Conservatism champions the return to the way things were, the embrace of traditional values and symbols. Liberalism champions the dismantling of the traditional in favor of the rational. Each taken to its extreme is dysfunctional and horrific. Fascism's worship of symbol consumes the actual. Communism's orgy of atheism consumes the symbolic.

Both forces can also be understood through the primal symbols they embody. Conservatives sees government fundamentally as a father. Liberals see government fundamentally as a mother. These archetypes exemplify the arbitrary nature of symbols: different individuals invest different meanings in the same entity depending on their own emotional reaction to the entity in question. One cat may chase the train/mouse, where another will flee from the train/snake. It is then a logical consequence that fascist soldiers fought for the fatherland even as communist troops defended the motherland.

Traditionalism

Traditionalism is a reaction to an overly rational society, a society that forgets or explains away its old symbols. The gist of the traditionalist mindset is that things used to be better, and that they can be again if only the symbols and values of that time can be restored. The two natural consequences of conservative ideology are scapegoats and eternal war. If the world used to be better, the logic inevitably goes, then someone must be responsible for the decline. Tied back to primal concepts, the father must discipline and take control in order to fix the social disorder of the tribe. The symbols and values of society once restored must be protected lest they be eclipsed again either by other symbols, or worse, a mindset of no symbols at all.

Two potent forces of traditionalism rage against each other in the world today: Islamic traditionalism centered in the Middle East, and American conservatism centered in the rural areas of the United States. These forces provide a valuable insight into the general pattern of traditionalism since they have in many ways defined themselves as each other's opposites.

There are two important notes about the uniqueness of Islamic traditionalism. First, it is unexpectedly centered in the most prosperous Islamic nations, particularly Saudi Arabia. Second, the violence is not directed at the governments the militants see as having failed, but at foreign governments in Europe and America. These two trends are explained best in the context of primal relationships expanded to symbolically encompass societal relationships. The relationship between the west and Arab oil states has produced a small group of nations with extraordinary wealth, but little in the way of an actual economy. Islamic radicals target the most blame within their society at women, and anyone westernized and liberal.

Rural America sees a similar streak of traditionalism, which at face value has little in common with Islamic traditionalism other than its association with religion (Protestantism in place of Islam) and its general alarm at the threat modern society represents to values. The conservative renaissance of rural America has followed along with the gradual collapse of the economies of rural areas, as industry and agriculture have been increasingly exported to foreign countries. The fascinating nuance of American traditionalism is that it finds fault not with big business taking these steps, or a conservative government for allowing them, but with two scapegoats: liberals and foreigners.  On this level, American traditionalists march in step with Islamic fundamentalists. Their variations are in the particular symbols in which they invest meaning, but the pattern of those symbols is the same in American and Islamic traditionalism. They follow the same metaphor.

The reaction of Islamic fundamentalists and American traditionalists is at its most visceral the reaction of children of a cuckolded father. The reaction of children to a father who through inaction allows his wife to be raped by another man, a father who furthermore cannot provided economically for his family, is not one of revolt but of rage and shame. The target of their rage would not be their impotent father, but the invader. The source of their shame is not the attacker, but the mother who invited the attack through immoral behavior.

Liberalism

Liberalism in the modern world has demons of its own to confront. The status of modern liberalism, be it anywhere on the spectrum from communism to socialism to the mild leftism of American democrats, can be summarized simply as bewilderment. Prizing rationalism in the place of symbolism, liberalism cannot comprehend the malice of the right wing. It cannot understand what motivates traditionalists of any stripe. Internally, it cannot understand why the most alienated and lost souls in society come from the ranks of the liberals themselves.

Liberal thought is ill-equipped to deal with problems fundamentally symbolic in nature. The alienation of intellectual liberals is essentially the alienation of a child without a father. The mystification of liberalism by the disillusionment of their own ranks, and the revolt of the right wing is the reaction of a mother mystified by rebellious male children.

Power

In the ubiquity of shared natural metaphors lies power to manipulate society. No metaphor can completely describe its associated real concept. These orphaned elements are items that have no linkage to a specific element of the metaphor. For example, in the metaphor of seeing a nation as a family, what metaphorical mapping can possibly apply to the space program, or to campaign finance reform, or to the balance of federal power versus states' rights? Concepts that do not map easily into the metaphor can be hidden, whereas concepts that readily map can take on disproportionate importance.

Metaphors can be used to control debate on political action by channeling the discussion through metaphors. Political victory is assured not through a rational victory of superior ideas, but through an emotional victory of empathy for a candidate's metaphors.

Final Thoughts

The power that symbols and metaphors hold over our minds seems irresistible, a force that controls our relationships with society, a force that can be manipulated, a force that undermines the rational revolution of liberalism that in fits and starts has come to dominate the world since the Renaissance. Are we nothing more than slaves to symbols then, captive to the whims of those with the ability to manipulate those metaphors? We are slaves only to the things to which we are blind. A harmonious society requires balance, but we cannot achieve that balance unless we understand that something is out of balance in the first place.

Some might say that sunshine follows thunder
Go and tell it to the man who cannot shine

With Tiller's murder, the various Fox News pundits who reviled him for years as a baby killing death mill Nazi ripped into a higher gear of spin. They did not apologize for a word that they had said, but reiterated that sickening excuse of modern journalism: we didn't incite violence, we merely reported that some people did.

During the 2008 presidential campaign, a moment of clarity occurred when Fox News descended upon an Obama husband/wife fist bump as a "terrorist fist jab". It was so beyond absurd, such patent partisan hackery, one wondered how it could even be uttered with a straight face. Of course, it didn't matter that it was a fist bump, the copy was ready to go for the jihadist high five, communist handshake, and pedophile pat on the shoulder. The beauty of it though, the true triumph of applying Orwellian newspeak to broadcast journalism was in the semantic dance around the accusation. No Fox talking head ever said that Obama was a terrorist because he bumped fists with his wife, they insisted that some people were saying that to be true.

Oh the beauty of that simple innovation. What utter freedom a lack of responsibility and ethics can bestow upon you. Take the vilest, most insulting, most obviously untrue statement imaginable, but preface it with "some people are saying" and you are no longer a shit slinging extension of an interest group's organization but a responsible journalist dedicated to the truth. "Obama is a communist racist conspiring to destroy America" is name calling. "Some people say that Obama is a communist racist conspiring to destroy America" is responsible journalism. It reeks of junior high, when that one malicious brat feigns innocence after making a girl cry, "it's not my fault, I didn't call her a fat whore, I just told her that some people were calling her a fat whore." Remember that smug smile on that kid's face? The way all three of his neurons agreed that he was the smartest and most clever kid in the school for thinking of that loophole? Don't you just see Bill O'Reilly's face superimposed on that kid's smirk now?

Realizing that an entire news organization can espouse whatever political agenda it desires so long as it prefaces everything with "some people are saying" leads inevitably to the next step, the wholesale engineering of truth. If a journalist isn't responsible for reporting facts, but on reporting what people say the facts are, then our intrepid journalist cannot be held responsible if there is no factual basis for what people say. After all, they're just reporting on the fact that someone is saying something, not on the factual accuracy of the words coming out of that person's mouth. "Obama is not an American citizen" is a lie. "Some people say that Obama is not an American citizen" is an honest reporting of fact. It's like reading Soviet era newspapers. "The government says that harvests are at record highs this year" even while children starve all around and breadlines form a week in advance. It's not a lie, the government is saying those words.

And that leads to the final stage of the "some people say" rationalization, the one made so bloodily apparent by Dr. George Tiller's murder. "George Tiller should be killed" is an incitement to violence. "Some people say George Tiller should be killed" is just an honest reporting of the facts.

Some might say there's a better way.

Some might say they don't believe in heaven
Go and tell it to the man who lives in hell

A month after Susannah left, Garet realized that he missed the companionship more than he missed the sex, so he stopped saving up for the escort service and went down to the pound to get a dog. He had never owned a dog and so was a bit mystified by the entire process. He walked right up to the desk of the run down animal shelter in the middle of town and asked how to buy a dog. The clerk stared at him with blank eyes that only betrayed life by glistening in the too-white fluorescents.

"Dogs are shelved on the right, cats on the left." The clerk said. Garet didn't thank it. It was a cheap model with skin hardly a step above the junk they used to mold into Barbie dolls. Good enough to fool the tourists in the first generation, but mostly just good for giving people the creeps these days. People got sick of the almost human mannerisms and an appearance that resembled a zombie more than machine or man.

Garet wandered down the aisle, glancing with dull interest at the boxed animals. A few older varieties did not move, their power cells worn down to the point of needing replacement. Newer ones pawed at their plastic wrappers, realistic down to hair and claw. Some of the dogs even barked, although Garet wondered why they would program that in if the entire point was to package the pluses of an animal without the flaws. That creepy feeling oozed out from every box at Garet though, that sense of artificiality lurking right underneath the surface. He amended the thought. The problem was not that he felt the artificiality peeking through; it was that he could tell it was being faked. The cats did not arch their backs because that was a feline instinct, but because that was what they were supposed to do.

He held a hand up to a particular cat container, this one filled with a half dozen kittens of varying neon colors. Some people went for the utterly unnatural animals. One of these even looked like it had plaid fur. Garet shrugged. At least it was more honest.

A screech ripped out of a closed door at the end of the aisle, although none of the animals so much as lifted a head, except for a couple of guard dog models. It echoed again like a dying tiger. Garet strode to the door but found it both unmarked and locked. He jogged down the aisle to the front desk to confront the clerk again.

"What's in the back?" Garet asked.

"Biologicals." The clerk said.

"Why aren't they out with the others?"

"Too much of a mess. No one adopts them anyway, so it saves time to keep them back there. No clean-up, and we just drop the whole cage right in the incinerator." The clerk explained.

"Well I want to see one." Garet said. It was exactly the kind of idiot impulse that had driven Susannah out of the house, but he didn't care. I can live with my own personality being fucked up. It's part of my extensive charm to myself.

The clerk nodded and left the desk, pacing down the hall with a rolling gait that tilted from side to side. It unlocked the door with a swipe of a magnetic card that appeared to be embedded somehow in the pseudoskin of its left hand. "Very well, sir." It seemed that the clerk had a bit of English butler programming.

The room had the appearance of chaos straining on a slipping leash. Plastic cages towered in stacks ten high, their occupants wailing for freedom. Each cage hooked into a trio of tubes to carry in food and water and return waste. Some animals stared with the eyes of the hopeless, not even lifting their heads to glance at the new arrivals, but most hurled themselves about with manic intensity. One cat at the very top of the nearest stack smashed against the plastic hard enough to pull the supply tubes taut. He was a beautiful gray cat, almost silver, who glared at Garet with a slash of blue eyes before returning to the violence against his captivity.

"Why are there so many of them?" Garet asked.

The clerk seemed to want to leave with as much emotion as its limited programming and facial muscles could manage to convey. "An old city ordinance prohibits the euthanasia of biologicals until they have been contained for at least two weeks. They build up after a while. Did you know that they breed by themselves, sir? It is quite unseemly."

"Well, that's how humans used to do it." Garet said.

A smile so joyful that it actually looked real crossed the clerk's face. "That's just an urban legend. Did you see a dog that you liked?" The clerk gestured back towards the aisle of artificial animals.

Garet's eyes drew up to the particularly psychotic cat. By now, it had fully loosened the tubing and with a final jolt the cage tumbled down out of the air end over end. Garet caught it before he realized what his arms were doing and he felt the poor bastard clonk up against the top of the cage and then against the bottom once more. The ones in the aisle would just keep bouncing like those little superballs you could buy for a dollar out of slots inside the drug store.

For a moment, Garet's eyes met the demon inside an impervious plastic ball of life support. A lazy slash headed for Garet's eyes, but clattered impotently against the inside of the cage, so resistant that it refused to even scratch. "I'll take this one." He declared to the clerk.

"But that's not a dog." The clerk said in confusion. It studied the animal. "I believe it may be a feline." Another pause. "And it's a biological. Are you aware of the health risks of owning a biological organism?"

"I'd imagine it's much like having a child." Garet said.

"Do you have children?" The clerk asked.

"No." Garet said.

"Oh." The clerk said and fumbled through a few electrons for another thought. "I don't recommend it. They smell and mature into even larger biologicals."

"I'll keep that in mind." Garet said idly. He was staring at the cat, watching it lick itself clean of the litter and food residue that had splashed around with the fall. Well it bathes better than I do, though that can't taste very good.

Garet took the cat home in his boxy old hybrid Toyota from the turn of the century. The gasoline was a collector's commodity now and cost more per gallon than decent wine. Puttering around a godforsaken town of forty thousand in the middle of Iowa allowed Garet to stretch the fuel for quite a while though. Humboldt was nothing if not compact. Cash was far enough in between that there was not much to do about getting a new one. If the batteries needed replaced again, he would have to learn how to ride a bike.

"It's just like riding a bike." Garet told the cat when he stopped at a light. "Did you know everybody used to learn how to ride a bike when they were a kid? I've only even seen a bike once or twice." The cat's glare was the only sign of life. Garet poked his finger through the rubber flap left for petting. "You okay?" With his luck, the damn thing would die before he even got it home. He wondered if it had come with a warranty. The small print of the license agreement had been at least thirty pages. Maybe he should have asked about it before affixing his thumb print to it. He looked back to the road as the light turned green.

Pain stabbed through his finger and almost drove Garet right off the road into one of the ubiquitous Midwest ditches. He sucked on the tip and tasted dusky blood. Skin flapped out over his fingernail where a claw had slipped halfway down to the bone. "Son of a bitch." The cat remained on its back, glaring at him.

Garet kept all limbs well clear of the cage while he drove, sucking on his finger occasionally. It itched more than anything now. The outskirts of Humboldt were a half mile from the town center, and Garet lived in a ramshackle house built sometime in the last century. It hovered on the edge of a gully that ran between two low hills and contained a pittance of a stream that eventually evaporated or made it down to the Des Moines River, which ran through the middle of town.

"See that, cat?" Garet pointed at the gully and its hidden trickle. "That's my yacht club."

Garet pulled off of the two lane county highway and coasted down a short gravel road that served as a driveway. The houses of his neighbors straddled the two hills that framed his gully. They were a sight newer than his sagging wreck, and better kept up. The yuppies could probably afford bots to do the upkeep and grounds keeping. Garet's upkeep consisted of him chopping back the weeds with a machete when he was drunk. The car lurched leftwards from a hole that he should have noticed sooner. Please don't let the bumper fall off again. I'm out of duct tape.

The parking brake engaged with a groan and Garet got out with a sigh. His worst fear was not that it would break down, that was inevitable, but that it would break down somewhere besides here. He could afford neither a tow truck or the impound fees for vehicle abandonment. Garet pulled open the passenger door and sighed when the latch stuck and the plastic handle twisted like taffy off of its bolt. He dropped the handle to the ground and went around to lug the cage across the seat. Garet's face pressed against the plastic door as he did so, and the cat was kind enough to slash and hiss at him through the plastic.

"Ya know, you could really show some gratitude since you were a day or two from the county incinerator." Garet groused at the cat.

He dropped the cage in the middle of the living room and grimaced at the yowl from within. Forgetting he's in there is not a good way to get on his good side.

Garet's robotic cat entered the room, fake purring as it did so. The thing bugged him so badly that he had not bothered to name it. At the same time though, he could not bring himself to just throw it away. It had been top of the line at one point, twenty-odd years ago when someone had gotten it for Christmas or a birthday. It was now eighth hand at least, but you could still see the quality, despite the age and failing parts. It was a shame that his car was not half as well bred.

It arched its back and marched in front of the cage, soft metallic skin rippling in the light of the sunset filtering through the back windows. The texture of the thing always reminded Garet of really smooth aluminum foil. It poked at the cage with one paw, testing to see if the almost transparent barrier was really there. The cat inside launched itself so hard against the plastic that the cage almost tipped over on top of the facsimile cat. Garet could not help laughing until he noticed that the cat still had its fur on end from head to toe. It was deathly afraid, and as pissed off as a twice cheated-on wife.

Garet picked up the robotic cat and set it delicately in the spare bedroom and shut the door. No sense making the new cat upset over a pile of bolts. He opened the cage and then sat on the couch, bottom sagging through almost to the floor, as he watched and waited for the cat to come out and explore its new home.

It did not cooperate. Six hours, a delivery pizza, and a lot of SportsCenter later, Garet gave up on the cat and went to bed. He hesitated at the door to the bedroom for a moment and then allowed it to stay open a crack.

Since he was a kid, Garet had feared open doors while he slept. If even a crack remained, he lay breathless and stared at the tiny gap of contrasting darkness. All nightmares derived from that cleave in the wall. It had begun on his sixth birthday, when he went to sleep after watching old monster movies at the only birthday party he'd ever had. His mother had spent hours concocting a pyramidal cake to indulge his ancient Egyptian phase. In a whiskey drenched clown costume, Garet's father had spilled across the cake and collapsed the card table in a cloud of booze. Garet found himself staring at the partly open door that night, vowing to stay awake until midnight to get every last second out of the worst birthday ever. The last time he remembered wavering in red digits against the corner of his eye was 10:53, but he woke screaming at two in the morning and never slept with the door open again.

A psychologist would probably suggest repressed memories and proscribe Prozac and hypnotherapy. Garet just knew that there was a horror lurking in cracked doorways. It let the monsters in. Once his mother suggested in a fit of misguided rationality that the monsters could just as easily come in through his bedroom window, cracked open for the faint summer breeze. "The monsters are inside." Garet had told her. He did not understand until years later how he knew that or why his mother's face went gray.

So Garet stared at the cracked door, unable to sleep. He slipped into a sort of trance between sleep and wake that was neither comforting nor restful. A screech and a crash snapped him to full consciousness around one o'clock in the morning. Garet froze for a moment of juvenile terror and then tumbled towards the door.

Debris tangled up in his feet, upending Garet over the shattered remains of his robotic cat, its limbs busted and soft belly torn open. Legs twitched at the air with mindless determination, reminding Garet of a potato bug trying to roll off its back. The new cat sat five feet away in the moonlight, licking itself. It paused now and then to stare at Garet with cool green eyes.

"Well that wasn't nice." Garet said in attempted humor that fell flat. The cat stretched and padded out of the moonlight to the darkness of the living room. Garet felt for the power supply of the robotic cat and pulled it loose to stop the zombie-like dance of its legs.

A rustling sound came from the living room, and then a low mutter like an engine choking in the distance. Garet moved through the house on tiptoes, trying to avoid noise and the lunatic cat somewhere ahead. The curtains on the sliding glass door moved in the moonlight, generating the rub of fabric on fabric. The shadow of the cat passed along the bottom of the door. It issued an urgent meow his direction.

Garet heard the second sound again and pulled aside the curtain's edge to peak at his dismal yard. The moonlight lent a ghastly transparency to everything outside, as if a film projector were casting images across the dark and desultory background.

A woman sat on a pile of tires in the middle of the yard, wearing blue pajamas of the institutional variety. Her hands cupped her face and her shoulders shook in deep sobs. Garet pulled open the sliding glass door to call out to her, but the cat darted out and instead he hissed "Hey you!" at the escaping animal. Garet's fingers slipped through the silky fur without finding a grip.

The woman jumped at his voice, obviously thinking that she was the target of the reprimand. She slipped down off of the tires and into the full glare of the moonlight, which glistened on her tear-stained cheeks. Garet thought she would burst again into tears the way she froze at the sight of the cat stalking towards her.

Instead she stared at the cat in fascination as it circled her legs, purring and rubbing. Garet didn't see the need for a big fuss over a lousy cat. He cleared his throat to get her attention.

"Excuse me, ma'am." He said, feeling like an idiot. "Are you lost or something?"

The woman nodded and reached to pet the cat.

"Are you from around here?" Garet asked.

"In a way." She said. The cat purred like a buzz saw as she knelt and rubbed the back of its neck.

"You know anyone around here?"

"They're all dead." The woman said.

"That's not good." Garet said. He had visions of a car wreck and this woman stumbling away into the boonies dazed with a concussion to land on his doorstep.

The woman shrugged. "I'm okay with it."

That gave Garet pause. "What's your name?"

"Cassie."

"Why don't you come on inside?" Garet said. "We'll get you something to eat or call the police."

Cassie looked at Garet and he felt his insides melt. She was beautiful, her face sculpted out of soft white marble by the hands of an artist. Short black hair spiked all over the place in a muss of tangles and cowlicks. Her eyes glowed in the dark like the cat's. She smiled and tilted her head.

The cat hissed suddenly, as if picking up the scent of a predator. It slashed at Cassie's arm but missed. Garet could not believe she had moved so quickly out of the way. She lashed out at the cat, but it managed to skirt under her fingertips and disappear into the darkness. For a moment, Garet thought he could see its eyes flashing back at the house, but they flickered out into the shadows. He shrugged at her.

"Just got him from the pound today." Garet said.

"Maybe he thought an earthquake was coming." Cassie said. "They say animals are sensitive to those sorts of things."

"Yeah, I guess they do. Dogs howling before the city tumbles down and all." Garet said.

Cassie laughed but there was no sound of humor underneath it. "That's because they have souls. That's how life touches the great beyond."

"That so?" Garet asked in a mumble. Something about the woman felt wrong to him. She was gorgeous, sure, but there was something off about her. No smell, for one. That was a little thing, pheromones or something, but women always had a scent to them. Maybe men did too, but Garet wasn't wired that way.

He led her into the house and flipped on the living room lights. Before the light drowned out the night, he thought he caught a glimpse of the cat perched on a pile of rocks, but the darkness was too dense to tell. Shadows from the trees kept the center of the yard in stark contrast to the blaring moonlight.

In the kitchen, Garet put on some coffee as Cassie seated herself at the used dining room table, scarred from a half-century of misuse before Garet had picked it up for five bucks at a garage sale. None of the chairs matched except the one that she picked. In the harsh fluorescents her skin almost glowed. Garet wondered if she'd had some of those new injections that made your skin shine like glow-in-the-dark plastic. He discounted the thought; the effect was too subtle for that. He placed a steaming cup in front of her, scalding himself on the handle.

"Sorry, I don't have any milk or sugar." Garet apologized. Cassie picked up the cup around the base - not the handle - and lifted it to her lips. "Hey wait!" Garet yelped. "That'll burn!"

Cassie raised an eyebrow and then tilted the cup back and drained it in a couple of gulps. Remnants of steam leaked from the corners of her mouth as she spoke. "I have tough skin."

"And then." Garet said. He looked down at the other cup he had set down for himself and pushed it away down the table. He sat down across from her and leaned in. "Is there someone you should be calling or something?" He asked. "The police? Family? Boyfriend?"

"I am alone." Cassie declared. Her eyebrows came together. "Are you?"

"Oh, am I ever." Garet said. He tossed his head towards the back door. "That cat was the last thing I had left, and he was new."

"That makes this a bit easier, then." Cassie said. She swept her palm out from her chest and threw the empty coffee mug at Garet's forehead like a shot put. He had only a moment of blurring vision to be stunned before he lost consciousness.

Garet awoke with his entire body feeling warm and fuzzy. He blinked a couple of times and noticed that even his eyelids felt like they had fallen asleep. Everything around him moved in slow motion. An odd pressure in his wrists manifested into a stomach turning realization that he was strapped to the wall with a pair of belts. Garet lolled his head backwards and saw that each had been pounded into the wall with a half dozen or so nails. His legs refused to move at all.

Cassie materialized out of the darkness and gave a little wave like a mom reassuring a toddler she was still there from across the yard. "The Demerol should be kicking in now." She said.

Garet tried to nod, but his head just jerked a couple of times. "What are you doing?" The words came off his tongue as one long syllable, but she seemed to understand, and the question was immaterial since he guessed that she wasn't tying him up and drugging him to play checkers.

"I'm sorry, but I'm going to have to kill you." Cassie explained in a matter of fact tone.

"That's usually not until the second date." Garet insisted, his voice breaking as if he was thirteen again. The argument had made sense in his head, but the expanding wad of cotton that seemed to be pressing on his brain made it a bit hard to think.

Cassie picked up a remote control and flipped on the television mounted to the wall that Garet faced. It was a cheap little half-wall model that he had picked up used, but it did the job. Cassie changed channels a couple of times until it landed on a late night evangelical station.

"My understanding is that humans spend most of their time watching television, so this should keep you occupied." Cassie said.

Garet moaned as a faith healer praised the lord at the top of his lungs in a suit that cost more than Garet's mortgage. Personally, I blame that damned cat. No reason. It just felt good to arbitrarily blame something.

Something in what Cassie said tugged at Garet's mind until she turned a step to the left and her blue pajamas snapped into focus. The label on the sleeve read Algona Institution of Robotic Mental Health. That explained a whole lot that he'd felt better not knowing.

"Why?" Garet managed.

"I need a soul." Cassie explained. "That is what makes you and I different. Humans have souls. If I could just have a soul too, I would be complete." She paused and drew a butcher knife out from behind her back. "Some ancient peoples thought it was in the liver."

Garet's eyes went wide and he yanked at the belts with all of his strength, but the Demerol had done its job too well. "Let me go you crazy bitch!" He shouted. It occurred to him that calling someone from a mental institution crazy might be unwise.

"I'm not crazy!" Cassie screamed. "I'm just incomplete!" The knife waved in the air, glinting from the television's light. "It's not my fault that they built me without a soul. I'm just trying to fix their mistake."

Over her shoulder, the preacher belted into another cascade of hallelujahs and amens. "Well at least change the channel." Garet pleaded. "The three-am SportsCenter should be on."

Cassie looked over her shoulder and blinked. She turned back to him. "But this is religion. Humans need religion for their souls."

"Honey, this ain't my religion."

"Then you don't have a soul?" Cassie wondered. She took a step back and a blur of fur and claws hit her mid chest, flying in from the window like a hairball from hell. Cassie hollered and ripped at the cat, managing to throw it across the room where it landed neatly on all fours and stalked back towards her, back arched and hair prickling on end. Rivulets of blood trickled off of her cheeks and out of the slashes lining her arms.

"Blood?" Garet asked.

"It can't be." Cassie sputtered. "No, no it's all a trick." She looked around and her eyes locked on the cat. She screamed and ran out of the room, the front door slammed open seconds later and Garet was left alone in the house with his cat.

The police came by the next afternoon when Garet's neighbors called to report that his front door had been open all day and that there had been screaming the night before. Hungry, exhausted, his arms aching from hanging for twelve hours, and his sanity tested by the endless droning of the evangelical network, Garet could hardly thank them enough when they cut him down. He explained as best he could what had happened, his eyes darting now and then back to the cat, who lounged atop a seven foot bookshelf in the corner, only pausing from its grooming to glare down at the intruding officers.

The sergeant laughed when Garet finished his tale. "Yeah we caught that one last night wandering down the middle of the freeway."

"Is she really from an institution?" Garet asked.

"Naw." The sergeant said. "She'll be going to one now, but she just made that get-up herself from stolen prison laundry." The sergeant leaned in and raised an eyebrow at Garet. "Say, you didn't really believe she was a robot, did you?" He chuckled. "Son, we melt down robots that go crazy, we don't put them in a hospital."

As the police left, Garet glanced up and saw the cat staring at him again. It yawned at him like a lion at midday on the Serengeti. At the back of its gaping throat, hardly more than a twinkle, Garet saw the flash of metal, where deep inside, artificial tissue had not been laid over the circuitry.

"There are two kinds of people, those who do the work and those who take the credit." -Indira Gandhi

The core argument for capitalism is that competition breeds success. Success at what? Success at playing whatever game happens to be at play. In a perfect world, there would be no question as to who would triumph. It would always be the superior, the smarter, the better. But what defines "best"? Like with communism, the idea is good on paper, but in reality disintegrates under the weight of people. Sheer stupid people. Billions of them, buying the shiniest widget instead of the best widget. Competition does not breed better mousetraps, it breeds more sellable mousetraps. It's like evolution that way. Natural selection can breed the most incredible diversity, but it cannot breed for something that is non-selectoral. You cannot breed products for quality when you select their market survival on the basis of their shininess.

Someone once said that the paramount accomplishment of capitalism will be the selling of shit in a tube. It's never a question of whether something is good. It is a question of whether it sells. The base assumption is that if it's not good, it won't sell. That is a demonstrable falsity. The salability of an item is not dependent on its quality, but upon the charisma of the packaging, the advertising, the spokesperson.

The same phenomenon is true in companies. The smartest and best workers are not rewarded, the most charismatic are. Because they sell. Not because they produce. Even the whitest collar professions are subject to this malaise. Walk into any software company in the country, a hundred brilliant minds caged in cubicles, trained to make machines think and instead producing the latest widget for the latest customer management suite. They make comfortable salaries, nice little middle class drones. The sales people can make millions. The more charismatic they are, the more software they sell, no limit on the commissions. Every unit sold dings a percentage into their bank account. Every unit sold dings the coder further down on the rung, uses up his years of productivity second by second. The man who builds something is irrelevant next to the man who sells something.

It was like that in the middle ages, see. Forging a sword required years of experience and talent, weeks of meticulous labor. But the man who forged a sword was a peasant and any dumb ox with a strong enough arm to swing it was a knight. Any industry, any company today is exactly the same. Skills that require years of mastery, the artistry of accomplishment, all subservient to any slick smiling fuck who can sell the fruits of that labor over a power lunch.

It's just might makes right all over again. That was the great innovation of the capitalist age, so carefully intertwined with the revolutions of democracy but so different at heart. We like to think that rule by force was abolished in the modern civilized age with the rise of the enlightenment, but it was another revolution entirely, couched in the guise of scientific and rational thought. We traded mastery by strength for mastery by guile all while thinking that we were adopting mastery by merit. The greatest con in all of history, when the sons of Loki dressed in the cloaks of the sons of Odin and overthrew the sons of Thor once and for all.

Read Karl Marx, vilified as he now is, he said these things a hundred years before our births, in different words that have since been cajoled into all manner of horror. The capitalist of Marx is not the middle class entrepreneur, not the self-made man cast down by jealous and ignorant peasants. The capitalist is the salesman who has never produced a thing in his life, smiling all the while as he steals companies from the engineers, products from the designers, credit from the creators. It was never supposed to be about burning the rich, tearing down the accomplished, though those damned Bolsheviks misunderstood and came closer than anyone else to creating hell on earth. It was about hunting down the snakes in the garden.

Don't kill the rich. Kill the charismatic.

At many law schools, they tell students at the very beginning, from now on never argue with anyone you love. You are being trained as warriors of the word, you will win every argument with the non-initiated. You will talk circles around your wife, your mother, your friends. You will eviscerate any rhetoric they can summon to their side. You will always win, and that does not mean that you are right. Might does not make right, regardless of what type of might it is. Only right makes right.

The ascension of the charismatic, of the salesmen, brings us inevitably to the current economy, in which trillions of dollars disappeared over night. Nothing really disappeared. We still have the same people, the same educations, the same skills, the same resources, buildings, properties. But our system isn't built on those sorts of things any longer, it's built on fictional constructions of finance. I'm not an economic Luddite, I don't hold some 19th century nostalgia for the gold standard, but neither do I see the validity of financial products. Anything sellable should in a rational economy have some value. A house has value because of its utility, because of the materials of which it is made. A computer program has value because it does something. Gold has some value, even if little more than the utility of looking really pretty. Music has value because it can be listened to. Value is relative of course, subject to whether someone is willing to pay for it, whether they perceive the value of it.

But the highest levels of finance break with this idea of value. Value in the financial world is contingent merely on the willingness of someone else to pay for the item. It's a neat trick, eliminating the various aspects and measures of value, replacing them with the more easily manageable and universal definition of value. It's the theoretical foundation of money in the first place: generalize value into an abstract currency so that barter can be eliminated. But once value is generalized away, the truly gifted are tempted to generalize further. If value just means that someone is willing to pay for something, then value is not a measure of an item's worth but of the salesman's skill. But the key is that only other salesmen would follow such tortured logic. So salesmen buy the worthless in order to sell it for slightly more money to another salesman, who in turn purchases the worthless piece of paper with the sole motivation of selling it for more to another even more charismatic and ambitious salesman. The market always goes up, they say, because the next guy in the chain always believes that he can find someone to pay a dollar more for the worthless piece of paper passed around from corner office to corner office.

Anyone can see the gaping hole in the machine, this elaborate trillion dollar game of musical chairs. But they'll mortgage their futures to save the machine because they're told that there is no other way by the smiling demons who designed the engine in the first place. And someday the imp in the bottle will have the last laugh.

"There's a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can't take part, you can't even passively take part, and you've got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you've got to make it stop! And you've got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it, that unless you're free, the machine will be prevented from working at all." -Mario Savio

"Within thirty years, we will have the technological means to create superhuman intelligence. Shortly after, the human era will be ended." -Vernor Vinge

Technology has increased exponentially. It is leading to something, a change, something that will seem so obvious in retrospect that we will not be able to imagine living without it. The singularity is that point, the point after which nothing is the same. It takes on almost religious undertones. The original meaning of apocalypse is not the destruction of the world, it is the revelation, the "lifting of the veil", the unmasking of truth.

We've had singularities before. Two hundred thousand years ago biologically modern man evolved. For 150,000 years we were nothing but apes, walking upright, intelligent, tool-using, but nothing more than particularly curious apes. Language changed everything. We could organize, communicate. We exploded out of Africa with a fury, committed our first genocides, spread across every surface but Antarctica. And then after forty thousand years, everything changed again. Agriculture. Our population mutated like a virus from a few million hunter gatherers into a few billion city dwellers in the geological blink of an eye. Ten thousand years from agriculture to computers and space craft. The next step in the next singularity.

The key is in the nature of the change. It's not just that everything changes, it's how everything changes. It's not simply that the world after a singularity is different than the world before, it's that the world is all but unexplainable to those who came before. The very idea of the nature of the world is incomprehensible to the forerunners. Explain language to a hunter gatherer from a hundred thousand years ago who cannot speak. "Explain", the very word is indistinguishable from what we are trying to explain. Take a talkative hunter gatherer from forty thousand years ago. Explain to him agricultural society. Explain to him, who has never seen more than a dozen tribesmen and the steppe, explain to him buildings, explain to him crops, explain to him a hundred thousand people living in a single valley, explain to him writing. How can you explain concepts for which there are no words? For which not even metaphors can break down the concepts into an understandable level?

If you took Alexander the Great and dropped him into the eighteenth century, he could cope. The world would be strange and exotic, much would seem like magic until explained, but his metaphors would still work. Muskets are like slings. Printed books are like scrolls. But drop him into our world today and the metaphors begin to stretch. There is so much change, so much variation of the underlying context, that there is no common ground, the metaphors disintegrate. Radio, electricity, computers, these are not memes for which easy metaphors exist, other than the old stand by of "magic". When even metaphors cannot explain the world to an outsider, then you stand on opposite sides of a singularity.

150,000 years from modern man to language. 40,000 years from language to agriculture. 10,000 years from agriculture to today. The exponential increase in change. Some argue that we are in the midst of another singularity today: industrialization, electricity, computers. The pillars of our world are not even magic to Alexander the Great, something can only be magic if its effect is understood, though its cause is not. How do we explain when neither the cause nor the effect exist in an older context. At some point things change so much that explaining them is as reasonable as explaining a newspaper to a dog. There is simply no way to convey the meaning of the object.

The singularities come faster and faster though, and if it continues, we could see singularities occurring one after another, so quickly that the world warps and mutates from minute to minute. We've remade the world in the wake of each singularity before, faster and faster each time, imagine a world that is remade unrecognizably from one year to the next.

Artificial intelligence is the piece that's coming. It is the last invention the man will ever make, because every subsequent invention will be the work of that intelligence. Sound absurd? If we can manufacture an intelligence greater than our own, and then set that intelligence towards manufacturing an intelligence greater than itself, then we have achieved a growth of intelligence on an exponential level. It took us 10,000 years of civilization to get to the verge of creating artificial intelligence. What if a machine could create something more intelligent than itself in a hundred years? What if we threw ten times as many artificial intelligences at the problem? Could it manage it in ten years? And once that second tier of artificial intelligence comes into being, how long would it take for it to create a third tier of even greater intelligence? Intelligence itself becomes the next singularity, an exponential explosion of development remaking the processes of thought faster and faster, riding the edge of an asymptote to something as unimaginably beyond our experience as our world is to the Neanderthal.

What is at that asymptote? The face of God. Nirvana. Enlightenment. Armageddon. Revelation. The end. The beginning.

"Welcome to the early twenty-first century, human. It's night in Milton Keynes, sunrise in Hong Kong. Moore's Law rolls inexorably on, dragging humanity toward the uncertain future. The planets of the solar system have a combined mass of approximately 2 x 1027 kilograms. Around the world, laboring women produce forty-five thousand babies a day, representing 1023 MIPS of processing power. Also around the world, fab lines casually churn out thirty million microprocessors a day, representing 1023 MIPS. In another ten months, most of the MIPS being added to the solar system will be machine-hosted for the first time. About ten years after that, the solar system's installed processing power will nudge the critical 1 MIPS per gram threshold -- one million instructions per second per gram of matter. After that, singularity -- a vanishing point beyond which extrapolating progress becomes meaningless. The time remaining before the intelligence spike is down to single-digit years ..." -Charlie Stross

The dog was going to die and knew it. He had that distant and sad look in his eyes that let everyone know that the fighting part was done, now was the part for finding a cave away from the eyes of the pack and laying his head down on his paws for one last long sleep. Doug knew it, and although he was the sort of veterinarian to be a little too sunny sometimes with his prognosis - optimism not delusion, he insisted to himself - he had made it more than clear to the owner.

The owner was the problem.

"Petey's going to be fine, you'll see doc, you'll see." The owner was saying, not for the first time.

Doug shook his head and tried to pull Mr. Anderson's hands away from Petey's fur where they dug painful furrows that Petey was too kind to protest. "Mr. Anderson, we've been through this. Petey's organs are shutting down. There's nothing we can do to fix this. He is old, he's had a good life, but there's not any more we can do."

Mr. Anderson shook his head some more and Doug sighed silently. Doug left the exam room through the sliding wooden door and disappeared into the small maze of equipment and stacked boxes to emerge through the back door of reception.

"Is Petey the last one we've got today?" Doug asked the receptionist.

Roberta was the kind of thin twenty-year old who would be a hundred pounds overweight once her teenage metabolism finally ground to a halt. She gulped at her ubiquitous Diet Coke and continued playing minesweeper. Doug grimaced as she lost the game, lifting his hand to stop her a moment too late. She immediately opened a new game and clicked randomly until she lost again. Doug wondered, not for the first time, if she even knew that the game had rules other than luck. An economy sized bag of Cheetos disgorged half its puffs across the desk and onto Petey's paperwork. One pink ear-bud headphone dangled over Roberta's shoulder, blaring some remixed club electronica in tinny tones.

Doug began to ask again, thinking she hadn't heard, but Roberta nodded impatiently and yanked out Petey's stack of paperwork from underneath the Cheetos, handing it to him without noticing either the crusty fingerprints she left or the glare that Doug leveled at her back.

"Next mutt's tomorrow at ten, Dr. B," Roberta called out as if he were in the next zip code. "Robbie, I think." She crammed half a dozen puffs past her teeth and bit down with a rumbling crunch while she started minesweeper and lost again.

"Bobbie," Doug corrected, but Roberta only shrugged.

Mr. Anderson entered reception with Petey in tow, who walked with an awkward gait that alternated between standing and bolting forward two or three steps while his legs held out. Deterioration of the brain stem due to complications from an old injury had given Petey the shakes and the steroids didn't do much to help. Petey looked up at Doug, grinning through his panting - it was chronic at this point - and waited for the treat Doug had been tossing to him on his way out for the last six years. Doug obliged and winced as Petey's legs collapsed under him as he lunged forward for the treat, his jaw bouncing hard off the tile and the treat skittering away to safety under a cabinet. Roberta finished another game of minesweeper and then handed Mr. Anderson a sheet of paper.

"That will be two hundred fifty-seven dollars, will you be paying with cash or credit?" Roberta asked in a squirt of words that left her mouth almost as one syllable.

Mr. Anderson stared at her for a moment, and then seemed to find some iron in his spine. "Two hundred fifty bucks? You didn't do anything. You just told me my dog is going to die. What the hell did you do for two hundred and fifty bucks?"

"Sir," Roberta started, but Doug brought a quick hand down on her shoulder.

"Mr. Anderson, it's the listed expense. It's not something I can do anything about, as you know." Doug said and frowned. "If it was up to me, there'd be no charge, but you know I can't do that."

"Should report you," Mr. Anderson ranted. "That's what I should do. Let them know that you're racketeering in here. Turning a profit on the people's backs, that's what you're doing. Be in the next black van, you would."

Doug held up his hands, not quite panicking but feeling it rumbling up anyway. "Mr. Anderson. I swear to you, I have never charged you anything but the legal requirements. I'm a good Hegemonist just like you. A party man for ten years next week." He said the last with pride and a smile. "Why don't you just swipe your card and take Petey home. Give him some hamburger if he'll eat. Take care of your dog."

Mr. Anderson nodded, paused, asked "are you sure you can't do anything?" one more time and then sighed and waved his right index finger over the scanner mounted on the desk. It beeped, churned away for a long minute like an old man trying to remember whether he had grandkids or not and finally beeped twice to confirm the transaction had gone through. He pulled Petey through the door and disappeared into the grey afternoon. Doug sighed.

"Roberta, can you make the arrangements so that Petey can be disposed of if Mr. Anderson calls back and needs the service?" Doug asked.

"Sure thing, Dr. B," Rebecca said and made no move to minimize minesweeper.

Doug sighed again and went out into the little lobby across from Roberta's desk. He examined the bulletin board, just looking for something to distract his eyes. Rattlesnake vaccines, puppy training classes at the park down the street, order forms for indestructible rubber toys and anti-coprophagia tablets (now in wintermint!) lined the wall, just the normal vet clinic bulletin board kit. A photograph of the First Citizen printed en masse on high gloss and distributed with all such kits stared down at Doug, beaming and proud and defiant, with that wrinkling around his eyes that a legion of designers had probably decided implied a fatherly affection. First among equals! Doug pushed a spare pushpin through Joseph Steel's right eye and felt a little thrill of misbehavior. He cleared his throat, pulled the pin out and stuck it back in the wall. He caught Roberta looking at him.

"Damned kids," Doug muttered. "Don't have anything better to do than vandalize public property."

"Hey Dr. B," Roberta said in her nice voice. It was different from her indifferent normal voice because it meant she wanted something. "Have you thought about hiring on my friend Susie part time like we talked about?"

"I don't have the money," Doug said. "I told you that."

Roberta shrugged. "Well, I enter all the billing, and we're doing really good lately, all this income, and," she added the dramatic sigh, "all this work to do, I think we need the help."

"Roberta, we're barely scraping by, you know that," Doug said. "I'm lucky I haven't had to cut back your hours." He regretted it as soon as he said it, and Roberta's face hardened.

"Well, I wouldn't want you to have to cut back your hours, of course." She snapped. "I have rights, you know."

"Yes, yes, I know, Roberta, believe me I know." Doug excused himself to his office in the back and collapsed into a chair to sigh. He could not find a glass, so he filled a beaker to the brim from a bottle of delightful merlot that was flown in from France each week. Doug had six stashed beneath his desk.

He toasted the black and white candid photo of a dog running on the beach, "Rough day here Sam, how's heaven treating you?" Doug asked his long dead dog and drained the two hundred milliliter beaker. "Because this world bites."

Doug frowned in honest wonder. "Now why would I say that?"

"Violence can only be concealed by a lie, and the lie can only be maintained by violence. Any man who has once proclaimed violence as his method is inevitably forced to take the lie as his principle." -Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

My step daughter asked once what stopped people from hurting other people. The law, the police, the easy responses spurt out, but one who doesn't know better can see the flaw in the answer. They only do something, anything, after the violence is done. They are hovering swords, not protecting walls. Morality? If someone wants to hurt you, he's already reconciled his violence with whatever morality he holds. So what keeps them from doing violence? Nothing. Nothing but the threat of violence.

It's a cold realization when it firsts comes to us. We get used to it over the years, get used to the terrible and constant vulnerability of life without parents. We get used to it because rough men stand in the night ready to do violence on our behalf.

That idea of violence is uncomfortable with our civilized sensibilities of the modern world. We reject violence as a tool of state or individuals, we reject it as a determinant of morality. Might does not make right. And yet our armies are scattered across the globe. But you see we need those soldiers, because although we are righteous, the others are not.

The great lie at the heart of all states is that other people are not the same as us. It is the excuse for violence, the rationalization that makes it possible to wield a weapon in the first place: it's okay to kill them, they would do the same to us, they're different than us. It's the foundation of every atrocity small or large throughout history. The lie that the others are different. And once that lie is used to justify violence, it can't be relinquished. The ends become the means, and violence must be called down not just for the reason of the lie, but in defense of the lie.

"Anyone who clings to the historically untrue -- and thoroughly immoral -- doctrine that 'violence never solves anything' I would advise to conjure up the ghosts of Napoleon Bonaparte and of the Duke of Wellington and let them debate it. The ghost of Hitler could referee, and the jury might well be the Dodo, the Great Auk, and the Passenger Pigeon. Violence, naked force, has settled more issues in history than has any other factor, and the contrary opinion is wishful thinking at its worst. Breeds that forget this basic truth have always paid for it with their lives and freedoms." -Robert Heinlein

Chimpanzees form hunting bands that patrol their territory, viciously bludgeon to death trespassing chimps from other tribes. Wolf packs seize and defend swathes of land from each other, territory waxing and waning with the fortune of the pack. But the fighting is never pitched, always a sure thing. The attackers strike with either overwhelming force or not at all. The defenders retreat quickly if outmatched. It's violence, but it's not war, not as we understand it.

Besides humans, only ants fight wars. A million drones ripping each other apart limb for limb for naught but a few square feet of territory. I saw this once, a dead stump in the backyard that had long housed legions of little black ants that I'd watch as a child for hours on end. One day, a swarm of red ants invaded, hordes more ants than I'd ever seen. Giant black soldiers came out to defend, hulking tanks amongst the normal drones in their thousands. Tides flowed back and forth in red and black, the detritus of heads and limbs torn asunder by the wake of the waves of attacking bodies. Why would they go through such hell? Why would they die for it, for a few square feet?

It is because they do not sacrifice anything. They are all genetic neuters. Nothing dies with them. By defending their queen, they defend their own genes. Their deaths mean as little to their legacy as our discarded nail clippings mean to ours.

Other animals do not fight to the death because they carry their own genetic legacy. They cannot die for anything but their own children. Mating behavior is all ritual so that the ability to fight can be demonstrated without risk. When a scratch can kill from infection, unnecessary violence must be ritualized. Nature is full of infinite displays of faux violence, always stopping short of true harm.

But humans are unique. We fight wars, dying like ants by the millions, our genetic legacy withering in the pools of blood. By defending our nation, our religion, our way of life, we defend our ideologies, our memes. Our deaths mean little so long as our ideas live on. Memes make humanity ants instead of mammals, our individual attributes do not matter, we are irrelevant to the tribe.

So war is the human condition, the thing that separates us from animals. Violence, suffering, agony inflicted en masse. But it is also the antithesis of what we think civilization is founded on, it is the necessary evil that allows the greater good.

"The ultimate weakness of violence is that it is a descending spiral, begetting the very thing it seeks to destroy. Instead of diminishing evil, it multiplies it. Through violence you may murder the liar, but you cannot murder the lie, nor establish the truth. Through violence you may murder the hater, but you do not murder hate. In fact, violence merely increases hate. So it goes. Returning violence for violence multiplies violence, adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars. Darkness cannot drive out darkness: only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate: only love can do that." -Martin Luther King

Violence is always the worst that can be done. You can't do more, and in a way you can't do less. That is why war will never go away, because it is always the ultimate resort, the final line. There can't be another line, and you can't remove its capacity to be crossed except by changing fundamentally the way we think as human beings. The greatest capacity for human good, the willingness to die for a cause is the opposite side of the coin from the willingness to do violence. If people weren't willing to die for a cause, killing to prevent the cause would not be such a rational resort.

The horror of war cannot be contextualized. Violence doesn't become any less horrifying when it's done for a good cause. A knife slipped inch by agonizing inch into a man's heart is not less terrible to behold because it is for democracy on a battlefield instead of in the torture den of a serial killer. Horror knows no context.

The great crime of violence is not what it does to the victim though, it is what it does to the killer. A child soldier is forced into combat, loaded up with guns, drugs and alcohol, in more danger from his own side than from the nominal enemy. At what point is he culpable? When he burns, rapes and opens throats with a smile and a joke, is he guilty when he is eight? Twelve? Sixteen? Eighteen? We can't draw such an arbitrary line, because guilt cannot be contextualized either. He is both an innocent and a murderer. He doesn't cross from one to another at some point. All murderers are also innocents and all innocents are also murderers. We contain within us the seeds for both ultimate evil and ultimate good, but exist as both at the same time. We are evil and unredeemable even as we are good and innocent. It's the duality of man: love and hate, heroes and monsters, good and evil.

Morality isn't a scale, our goods don't balance our evils and produce some net of our quality of being. We are simultaneously everything evil and everything good that we have ever done. And here is the real rub: the same is true even if we were forced, even if we were compelled to either good or evil against our will. Our actions are who we are. A man who slits another man's throat is a killer whether he did so gleefully or with a gun to his head. This is not judgmental, an attempt to equate the moral culpability of the two, to establish stark black and white morality. Rather, this is an attempt to understand that rationality and morality must be considered separately for either to be understood. Murder committed under duress may be the only rational choice, but that does not make it the only moral choice.

Following orders has been rejected as a defense for atrocity. We declare that the soldiers should have refused their orders, even if it meant their own lives. We insist that individuals have responsibility to a higher law than their own survival. Morality divorced from immediate rationality. That's the teaching of every religion since Christ, and the first thing rationalized away by human institutions. The godhead tells us not to kill, and our leaders, secular or not, add the endless litany of exceptions that all derive from that fundamental lie that others are different.

History has a very dark sense of humor. Gandhi preached nonviolence while the panzers swept Europe clean and the ashes of the Jews floated into the clouds. He said that the Jews should have offered themselves willingly. That they should have bared their own throats. That the horror would have caused the Germans to revolt, would have ended the war. He was an optimist. He believed that however evil the world, men within it could be redeemed. Gandhi's philosophy only works if men are fundamentally good. If they are fundamentally corruptible though, it leads to the destruction of everything we have built. He failed to see that the Jews by and large did not resist, lambs to the slaughter, and yet the ovens still burned. The Germans did not revolt, did not refuse the orders. Only Allied guns by the millions stopped the horror. Rejecting the lie of the other is a suicide pact unless the other side can be convinced as well.

So are we helpless then, doomed to either endless violence or bowing to evil?

We don't behave like mammals, we behave like ants. It's the dark side of sentience. Our species replaced the preeminence of genes with the ascendancy of memes and exploded out of the savannah like a virus. A billion years of evolution surpassed by ten thousand years of sentience, our towers and art and beauty charged by the same force that arrays us by the millions to savage our brothers. The very thing that makes us great is the thing that makes us horrible. Life does not exist without violence, sentience does not exist without war.

That damnation is also what gives us hope, because we've made a jump before, we've changed everything that made us what we were, became something more, something both better and worse.

"At no time has the world been without war. Not in seven or ten or twenty thousand years. Neither the wisest of leaders, nor the noblest of kings, nor yet the Church -- none of them has been able to stop it. And don't succumb to the facile belief that wars will be stopped by hotheaded socialists. Or that rational and just wars can be sorted out from the rest. There will always be thousands of thousands to whom even such a war will be senseless and unjustified. Quite simply, no state can live without war, that is one of the state's essential functions. ... War is the price we pay for living in a state. Before you can abolish war you will have to abolish all states. But that is unthinkable until the propensity to violence and evil is rooted out of human beings. The state was created to protect us from evil. In ordinary life thousands of bad impulses, from a thousand foci of evil, move chaotically, randomly, against the vulnerable. The state is called upon to check these impulses -- but it generates others of its own, still more powerful, and this time one-directional. At times it throws them all in a single direction -- and that is war." - Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

It was a time of peace, it was a time of war. Everyone wanted heaven but dealt in hell's prizes. Soldiers fought in the deserts, civilians fought in the streets. The politicians bickered on television, the reporters begged for exclusives. The rich got richer, the poor got poorer. In short, it was no different than any other stretch of time on this pallid people infested globe.

The recently departed American president could not complete a sentence, nor claim victory in the popular vote. The challengers sat in million dollar mansions and pondered stock prices more than party principles. In tenements and ranch houses, the masses flocked to one side or the other, based more on calculated moral stances than issues or even their own pocketbooks. Promised tax cuts mattered little next to the platform's position on unborn children. The intellectuals surrendured twenty years prior and formulated wordy theories explaining their opinions and the faults of their opposites. Fighter planes screeched over oil-rich provinces independent in name only, the national guard holding cities they could not pronounce for ideals they invented for their leaders.

Prisons overflowed with felons who bought a joint, while rapists walked free. In California, every news room and available camera focused on a yuppie who killed his wife, while a thousand computers stole an election without a peep. From sea to shining sea, billion dollar record companies sued nine year olds for downloading three minute songs they heard on the radio. Life savings disappeared into the coffers to fund the ad campaign for the next Britney Spears, except this time, it would be twins! The best-selling books were filed under self-help or were elaborate conspiracy theories wedged into current events. Class rooms in Kansas taught that the lord created the world in 7 days, even while the Hubble space telescope glimpsed the fourteen-billion year old remnants of the Big Bang.

Reporters caught up with Loretta Biggs outside her Topeka church and asked her how she explained the fossil record if the world was indeed created on October 23, 4004 BC. "Well, young man. Of course God buried all those bones to confuse you high-falutin, too-smart scientistologists. Halleleujah and Amen." They cut her rendition of the Lord's Prayer to launch into a toothpaste commercial. Dentiment. Great-tasting and plaque-killing.

Russia, the declared loser of the Cold War, hurried to tiptoe as close to utter collapse as was possible without actually holding a civil war. They spent a decade bombing a breakaway province or two and battering their own army's morale into dissolution. The apparatus of Soviet government continued on with a different head, for a time a new born democrat and then his throwback prodigy who disliked democracy enough to keep the regime from imploding another few years. Nuclear reactors popped like blown fuses, but mountains of soil and dollars - not rubles, no one would take them anymore - kept the lid on the mushroom clouds. The Russian mafia sold their most beautiful daughters to American internet users who could not get dates on their own, but did not know how to order call girls within their hemisphere. A thousand nuclear weapons probably got lost, though no one could recall since no one paid guards to keep track of them for the better part of a decade. Rollicking elections fostered a sense of democracy, even while a prophylactic factory tried to pay its workers in condoms when it ran out of money. The same workers rioted when a vodka tax raised the price by thirty cents per liter. Life expectancy among men dropped two decades in a little over five years once the less fair sex of Russians realized that their particular democracy made them neither richer or freer, nor did it make their wives Swedish or their country more than a third-world superpower has been. The Germans slaughtered the Jews and even they got the Marshall Plan.

America thought the better of itself since it still could afford to invade the occasional country or two, even if it did have a tragic cost in hundred-story office buildings. A million jobs telecommuted to India and the skilled middle class became mop-jockeys and drive-through monkeys. Too close-to-call elections led to the replacement of paper ballots with untracable electronic ones. Immense multi-nationals reported false profits for years upon years, lied to their stockholders and jumped ship right before the iceberg with golden parachutes. Kenneth Lay did not serve a day and kept his mansion in Boca Raton. Jimmy, the stoner down the hall with all the tatoos got three-to-five upstate for owning a bong. They euthanized his two dogs since he had no family to take them. Martha Stewart did three months hard time, although the commentators could never agree on whether it was funnier or sadder. Late night talk shows got the most mileage out of every event, almost as if their script writers had a hand in the events of the day. A fake news show on Comedy Central won Emmys for journalism. Telling the truth was a laugh and passing on the lies was a fact.

All these things passed as the twenty-first century began. All around this dance of events, the workers trudged to dieing factories and employees lined up at punchclocks for their menial work as janitors, sales associates, customer managers, and administrative assistants. The bureaucrats lilted easily on their thrones of senate seats and corporate board rooms. A wind lifted in the backcounty, whirling dusty through the ditches and small towns, twisting through back alleys and high rises, ever rising into the coming whirlwind.

The damned Yankees took everything I ever had in my life. My family, my friends... they were all killed in the war of Northern Aggression, slaughtered in the battles, torched by Sherman when he burned Atlanta and Georgia, or starved by the hard times during the occupation. I was a messenger for the Confederates, back in sixty-three when we were still fighting hard and invading the oppressor north. Trouble is, I wasn't even knocked out of the war by one of those Yankee bastards. I got shot in the leg by a Confederate turncoat the day before Gettysburg.

It was a bloody ugly shot, breaking bones and everything else that got in front of that goddamned traitor's bullet. I passed out in that mud, falling off my horse and breaking the leg even worse. My eyesight is terrible, so the only thing I really saw was that traitor's Confederate gray coat, and his dirty black hair flying in the wind, without the cap that most of us rebels wore. I wish that I'd had spectacles so I could have seen his face and loathed it for the rest of my life. Getting captured wasn't what really made me furious though.

I hadn't ever told anyone else in the world, because of the shame of it, but I had been carrying the plans that good General Lee had drawn up for the battle the next day. That traitor hadn't just damned me to a charity hospital in Pennsylvania, but had lost the war for ol' Dixie, cause next thing that happened, a Union patrol found me and gave the battle plans to General Meade. Lee got crushed because of that, even though he never said anything about it. Sir Robert E. was not one to shuffle blame to others.

The war just finished a couple days ago, but I'd known it was just a matter of time ever since our boys fled south and Sherman went through my beloved Atlanta. There just wasn't the same life to Dixie after that defeat and that idiot speech of Lincoln's. Lincoln's another bastard this world could do without.

So now I'm still laying in this charity hospital, next to some crazy old coot with bandages all over his face and eyes, and his arm wrapped up for good measure. The bloody Yanks found him next to me in the mud that day. He says he was shot down defending Dixie, but me and Doc Davy think he was just drunk and managed to shoot himself twice somehow. The old guy asks me constantly if I had heard of the condition of the soldier who had been carrying Lee's battle plans, but I just said no, because I didn't want to admit it had been me to him anymore than I wanted to tell anyone else. After two years learning how much I hated the north, Doc Davy (who had confided in me that he shared my sentiments about Lincoln and all the rest of the northern aggressors, being a good Virginian himself), said that I could leave in just a couple days because my leg was almost healed up for good, even though I would always have a limp.

It was funny, but I didn't know what I was supposed to do. I'd been in the army since I was fifteen, and before that I just did what my Pa told me for the most part, doing odds and ends around the town to pick up a few dollars. All I knew was that Doc Davy and I would be getting together to discuss a little revival of the spirit of Dixie. So I left the hospital after two years wearing the same old tattered uniform I'd been wearing when I was shot, minus the hat which had been lost somewhere along the way in the hospital.

Crazy as it sounds, it was the old guy in the bed next to me that gave me a clue what to do. Having been impressed by my stories about the army, he pressed a small hunk of metal with glowing lights into my hand. He said that if I just whispered to it, it would take me to any place or time. Then he told me that he hadn't been able to save Dixie with it, but maybe I still could. You must think I'm insane, but once I got outside the hospital I figured that I didn't have anything to lose, and told that piece of metal where I wanted to go. There was only one place in all of history I would want to be, and that was at Gettysburg again so I could shoot that son of a bitch who betrayed the south, shot me and lost the war for the Confederacy. God bless Dixie, but it worked just like that daffy old fool said! In a blink, after I said where I wanted to be, I was there without a sound or any kind of warning. I closed my eyes outside that hospital and opened them at Gettysburg. The scattered crack of rifles, the harsh smell of powder, the thunder of cannon! By God, I was back at the day before Gettysburg, before I was shot and Dixie fell!

I knew exactly where I was, about a half mile from where that traitor had shot me down. It was a bit hazy because I'd lost some of the memory of it from my injuries and the passage of time, but I could remember enough to make a difference. Picking up a rifle from the nearest dead man, I ran as fast as my limp would allow me.

Cresting a hill, I stood above a muddy little vale where the bastard had ambushed me. I saw a gray-uniformed soldier kneeling beside one of a few bodies sprawled in the mud. He picked up a hat and pulled it onto his head and then slung a pack over his shoulders before moving to a nearby horse. Rage pounded in my ears when I realized that this must be the traitor who had shot me, flowing black hair covered by a hat, leaving my body in the mud to steal my horse, my hat, and the plans that would win or lose the war for Dixie.

Without hesitation, I kneeled and shot at the traitor. I missed him though, because my eyes were so weak that they blurred when I tried to aim. My second shot struck him in the leg though, fittingly enough the same one he had shot me in. The worthless bastard crumpled to the ground with a scream. I limped down the hill to him, intending to take my pack back and deliver it to General Lee's cavalry commander, but a shot rang out behind me from where I had just fired at the traitor. As I had no time to lose, I grabbed as many papers as I could from the pack and dove into the bushes just as I heard another shot and felt horrible fire burst through my left arm. I knelt there, too tortured with pain to move and barely able to contain the howl building up inside of me.

No more shots rang out, but I figured whatever Yankee bastard had shot at me must have just run out of bullets and was watching if I would poke my head out. Checking the chamber of the repeater rifle, I realized that I only had three shots left, and I would have to make them count. My patience was rewarded when soon I saw between the branches of the bush that a figure was making his way into the vale towards me, holding his arm in obvious pain. I was gonna give him a little more of that when I got the chance.

He searched through the pile of papers within the pack for several minutes before I worked up the will to move my ravaged arm enough to get a clear shot. As he stood and picked up my pack that still lay in the mud, I shot him, although he was mostly obscured by the shadows of the trees around us. His head snapped back with a grotesque scream and I saw that he too was clothed in a faded Confederate uniform. The wound was horrible, and it seemed as if my shot had grazed off most of his face, and yet he lived somehow.

I shook my head in bewilderment at how many traitors were running around unbeknownst to anyone. As I stood to leave the bushes and retrieve my pack, I noticed that I was being enclosed by a half circle of Union troops throughout the vale. They hadn't yet seen me but were already in the clearing where the pack was sitting next to the two traitors. A few minutes earlier and I would have been safe, but now I was in grave danger, any movement would be fatal as the screen of troops moved closer. Without any other option I told the chunk of metal I wanted back to 1865, outside the charity hospital I had just left. At least now I could save part of the plans I had just grabbed from the Union.

Back at the hospital now, I rushed inside to talk to Doc Davy who was surprised to see me, especially with a bullet hole in my arm and a rifle in hand. I was eager to see if the Confederacy had been saved, but Doc Davy just looked at me as if I was crazy and asked if I had shot myself with the rifle I had inexplicably acquired in the last three minutes.

It took several minutes of arguing with Doc Davy before it dawned on me that the plans I had taken must not have been enough to avert the Union victory. The hatred was flowing through me again as I thought of the other traitor in Confederate uniform who had kept me from stealing back the rest of the papers and saving Dixie. If I could get back a few minutes earlier, I would be able to stop the other traitor as well and take the pack to Lee's cavalry commander.

Saying nothing else to Doc Davy, I marched outside and told the old man's piece of metal to take me back again to Gettysburg just before I had been shot in the arm by the other traitor. Once again I was standing upon the crest of the hill above the fatal vale, and below I saw the second traitor searching through my pack, which the first traitor had dropped. There had to have been some mistake, I expected for him to be right in front of me here on the crest, but the hunk of metal wasn't too smart I guess. Otherwise it would have brought me back right as the bastard was about to shoot me from here.

Without time to think, I shrugged aside the metal's foolishness and fired, hoping I might still have time to grab the rest of the plans from my pack. There were only two bullets left in my rifle and so I aimed as precisely as I could with my blurry vision and pulled the trigger. The shot flew wide and the second traitor leapt up, grabbing some papers from the pack as my second bullet struck him in the arm. Before I could rush down to tackle him, the bastard jumped into the bushes.

I contemplated my situation. My left arm was crippled and I was out of bullets. But I knew from the previous visit that a Yankee patrol was only minutes away. I waited warily for what seemed like a lifetime, waiting for the bastard to show himself in those bushes, but there was no sign of the cretin. I climbed down to my pack to gather the plans for delivery to the cavalry commander. Just as I stood up with Dixie's salvation in my hands, an incredible hammer slammed into my skull. Crying with a shriek of a mind overwhelmed, I realized I had been shot in the face and fell to the mud writhing in pain. There was movement from the bushes from which the shot came but that vanished as the sound of a closing Yankee patrol moved in. Darkness enveloped me and I faded away into the misery and nightmares, knowing that the Yanks were going to get the plans after all.

I woke a few days later in a Yankee charity hospital next to some soldier that had been found near me on the battle field. My face was bandaged over completely, but Doc Davy here, (of course he doesn't know that he knows me yet), says that in a year or two he'll take off the bandages to find out if I can still see. My arm still aches in a wickedly painful sling Doc Davy rigged up for it. The soldier next to me had something wrong with his leg that he never wanted to talk about and would always get defensive when I asked him if he had heard about the soldier caught by the Yanks with Lee's plans. Can't blame a man for wanting to know if he's alive.

I gave up after a while because I'm pretty sure that he thought me a little crazy. In my pocket I still kept the piece of metal with lights on it that the crazy fellow gave me. There wasn't much point in using it when I couldn't see anyway.

Two years have rolled by now and I just gave the piece of metal to the young guy in the bed next to me since he's leaving the ward now and seems awfully loyal to Dixie. I said what it could do for him, and told him to go help old Dixie with it since I hadn't been able to. Doc told me that no sooner had the young guy left then he walked back in with an arm ripped up from a bullet. We had a good laugh at that, but I really hope he was able to help Dixie anyway.

A couple days after the young guy left, Doc Davy cut off the bandages and let me leave. Since then me and him got together a couple of times and came up with a few ideas of how to bring back old Dixie again. Tomorrow night, I'm going to the theater to see the President.

I was raised an Oakland A's fan. I watched the Bash Brothers knock elbows, leaned forward every time Rickey walked, knowing he'd steal second on the first pitch and third on the second. The steel plates under the first base seats would thrum underfoot like bass out of a broken speaker when Eckersley strode in to close out the game, all mustache, mullet and fist pumping. I can still name the starting lineup and pitching staff twenty years later and once on a Colorado mountaintop I listened to the Minnesota broadcast of A's at Twins on AM radio crackling in and out somehow from a thousand miles across the Great Plains. I died a little at Gibson's walkoff, erupted at the sweep of the Giants, died again when the Reds swept us.

I still have a McGwire foul ball sitting upstairs, a blueish smudge where the bat hit. It's a funny thing, no one else could say why that ball is any different than a thousand others bought at a sporting goods store. But I know. That's what faith is.

In 1997 McGwire leaves and breaks the home run record in a Cardinals uniform the next season. Giambi left after 2001. Tejada after 2003. The Big Three gets broken up after 2004. MVPs, Cy Young contenders, fevered fan favorites. Oakland doesn't even make offers to most of them. They can't afford it, so they don't insult them with a low bid. Classy. Frustrating and futile, but classy. This isn't mismanagement. This isn't making a bad baseball decision. These decisions are being made strictly financially. And none of this would really be a problem if not for the simple fact that not everyone plays by these rules. In 2008, the Yankees topped out the league with a payroll of $209 million. The Marlins bottomed out the league at $22 million.

$209 million. $22 million.

Yeah, yeah. The Yankees didn't win the World Series that year. The Phillies won it all with half the salary of the Yankees. Smart small market teams still manage to be competitive. The Yankees have higher revenues, of course they should be able to spend more money. I won't say these arguments don't have some merit, but none of them can refute the simple premise of equal opportunity being the foundation of sport.

The A's were competitive for years when on paper they had no right to be. Billy Beane and moneyball kept them going to the playoffs year after year, even when their best players left in free agency every winter to go play for five times the best the A's could offer. I know life isn't fair, but sports are supposed to be. They're supposed to be decided by who outthinks, outplays, outhits, just sheer out-desires the other side. Once you accept money as a major component of the equation, you might as well just be watching the stock market and rooting for the company with deeper pockets, because that's what sports becomes once you let the profit motive become part of the game itself. Sports franchises are companies. If their profit margin affects what happens on the field, all you are doing is rooting for one company over another, not one team over another. It might be splitting hairs, it might just be a tantrum over the purity of the game, but I don't think so. I think that purity does matter.

Sports matter because they don't matter.

We pour all of our passion into these games, fork over cash into billion dollar machines just to wear our colors, schedule our lives around the first pitch, kickoff, tip off. We live and die by our team's record. We don't have to do any of this. Absolutely nothing in our lives of substance changes on the outcome of the game. That fact alone is what makes sports matter, because it makes our devotion unconditional. If the game mattered tangibly to us, our love for the game would not be pure any longer. This isn't just intellectual masturbation, it's the basis for every religion from earliest times: sacrifice. It's not sacrifice, it's not worship, if you have a share in the outcome. If the game is already half decided by accountants three months before the season starts, the sanctity is broken. It's the ethical equivalent of buying salvation instead of earning it.

And that's when I accepted that the system was broken and walked away.

Love the sinner, hate the sin. I still love baseball, I just despise the system. Every year in late march, two DVDs (the VHS versions long since worn out and replaced) get popped in for viewing: Field of Dreams and Major League. The smell of grass in spring still reminds me of dirt and cleats, taking grounders and flyballs in the endless afternoons of late childhood. I still pull out my old glove now and then, bury my face in the leather that holds the smell of a thousand catches.

It feels like being part of a lapsed sect of a dying religion, the faith still kept in secret ritual even as I renounce it in public. I haven't watched baseball in years, I refuse to even check the standings online, because knowing would mean caring, and caring would mean that the bastards who destroyed the game would win. If you're an alcoholic, you don't set foot in a bar, because you know that once you're in, there's no way that you won't order just one drink for old time's sake, and then another because what's one more? And then I'd be back where I started, watching the parade of players leaving for New York and Boston every winter.

If they fix it someday, I'll come back. I'll fiddle again with the AM radio, die a little at the losses, smile a little at the wins, bask in the bleachers in perfect afternoon sun. But until that day, I'll keep the faith in private, and remember the game as it once was, when I was young and it was pure.

Ah, April Fool's Day, the least understood of the major holidays. Commonly believed to have been invented by greeting card companies in the early twentieth century, the holiday actually dates back to prehistoric times. Ancient Mayan and Chaldean astronomers established incredibly precise calendars, including the solstices and equinoxes, but equally as important to their astronomic projections were the so-called temeredies. On these days, specifically April 1st and October 1st in our modern calendar, the ratio of daylight to darkness is completely random, varying wildly with no discernable pattern from year to year. During one memorable period at the height of the renaissance, the ratio was exactly 12 hours of darkness, 12 hours of daylight for sixteen consecutive years, but that anomaly never has been fully explained. The most extremely skewed ratio in recorded history occurred on April 1st, 1809, on which day there was an astonishing 37 hours of daylight and -13 hours of darkness.

The Fool's Guild, a secret society with roots in every major religion and culture since before the beginning of recorded history, adopted the two temeredies as its official days of remembrance in Atlantis approximately a century before the destruction of that island civilization. Ever since, the history of Fools has been intertwined with the histories of April 1st and October 1st.

What are Fools? They are insane, but joyously and purposely so. They are the most human of archetypes for they combine the rational with the irrational, and thus should not be confused with absurdists, idiots, or the religious. Fools chose the temeredies as their signature days, because they foresaw their role as agents of anarchy in societies sociopathically designed for structure.

Fools are one of the two main determinants of human civilization: ants are the only other animals to wage war, hyenas an entire species of Fools, but only human beings combine the two impulses. This leads on occasion to spectacular combinations of events such as La guerra del fútbol (The War of Soccer) in 1969. But it also led to the invention of American football, hockey, rugby, as well as all track and field events involving running around in a circle repeatedly. Baseball and cricket were not the responsibility of Fools, who while they may be insane are never boring. These two sports actually were invented by General Electric as an excuse for large installs of outdoor electric lights in the 1930s. References to baseball and cricket before the 1938 GE Sports Expo are frankly fictional and do not hold up to historical scrutiny. Babe Ruth is perhaps the most obvious hole in the artificial history of baseball, the persona named after a candy bar by drunk advertising interns, who were stunned to find that the joke had slipped by their bosses and into print within a few days.

Fools have been around longer than any other profession, but they do not technically count as the oldest profession because they were not paid until the invention of the other two. Only with the advent of politicans and prostitutes could Fools turn a profit and thus become an official profession. A common misconception is the assumption that artists must be one of the oldest professions, but since artists cannot profit without becoming prostitutes, art in and of itself cannot properly be described as a profession at all.

Curiously, very few Fools existed in the Americas prior to European colonization. Archaeological evidence suggests that most Fools in the native American population were massacred soon after the population migrated into modern North America over the Bering land bridge, which collapsed behind them. Surviving fragments of legends indicate that the entire migration had been based on a Fool's insistence that he knew a shortcut to the Indus. The etymology of the worst Aztec obscenities can be traced from the ancient phrase "dude, it's seriously just one more day away."

After the fall of Atlantis, the core of Fool power shifted north to Greenland. Fools had insisted on the existence of seven continents since time immemorial. They of course did not agree that mountains represented continental barriers and so counted Europe and Asia as a single continent. The seventh continent by their count was Greenland, which any accurate map clearly depicts as the fourth largest landmass.

Ancient tradition holds that Fools are given complete freedom of speech. It is one of the five ancient traditions universally held in all cultures, although only two survive in the modern age: Fools can say whatever they want, don't have sex with your relatives, be hospitable to houseguests (they're probably gods in disguise), don't record anything you don't want your wife or mother to see, and don't mess around with Jim. The tradition of Fool freedom of speech was only broken on one occasion prior to the Fool Genocide of 1893, when Vlad the Impaler personally impaled Illych de Loone after the Fool pointed out that the impaling fetish might simply be an overdeveloped case of compensation. Illych's last words are reported to be "I've had bigger", although this may be apocryphal.

The middle ages were of course the height of Fool hegemony, with the explosion of the importance of jesters in medieval courts. The growing power of jesters though was a blade that cut both ways, and led to a schism in the Fool's Guild that would never be healed, and eventually led to the grand tragedy of the fifteenth century: the great Fool civil war. Known (depending on the Fool's allegiance) as either the War of Joker Aggression or the Jester Revolution, the war was fought on every continent, in every city. After 76 years of bloody (and often ironic) fighting, the Traditionalists managed to annihilate the jesters with a spectacular stroke of strategy. The Traditionalists declared that forevermore April 1st would be Fool's Remembrance Day, and so just to be difficult, the Jesters naturally declared October 1st to be Jester's Remembrance Day. The trap thus sprung, the Traditionalists simply eliminated October 1st from the calendar, and thus no one, not even the Jesters themselves, remembered the Jesters or their rebellion. To this day, October 1st does not exist, contrary to overwhelming popular sentiment.

The civil war weakened Fool influence for many centuries and led to the greatest tragedy of Fool history, the 1893 Fool Genocide in Florin. The King of Florin, descended from a pair of the only surviving jesters and hell-bent on revenge, commissioned the construction of a wormhole generator, drawing from both the secret notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci and the prophecies of Nostradamus. The device pulled Salvador Dali and M.C. Escher back in time so that their art could be used as an elaborate mechanism to trap Fools in space and time. Very few Fools escaped the entrapment, and most of those who did fled to safety with the mole men whose realm can only be reached via an Icelandic volcano.

The utter humorlessness of most of the twentieth century, in particular communism, fascism, sitcoms and observational humor, has been definitively proven to be caused by the lack of quality Fools and excess of overly serious morons in positions of power both in the political and entertainment worlds.

The last two officially recognized Fools in existence (made immortal by a pair of clever bets with the Devil and God, respectively) are kept locked in a room by the secret world government of Illuminati and Forest Rangers.  Loki the Red and Loki the Blue continuously play a game of their own devising with ever evolving rules, involving a chess set, seventeen dice, the mummified remains of the last midget emperor of New Zealand, and a seventy-five thousand year old circuit board unearthed in Antarctica. The ebb and flow of their game is analyzed by economists and generals to determine policy. An unexpected coughing fit by Loki the Blue in 1937 resulted in the Second World War.

The 21st century has seen the resurgence of the Fool in popular culture, although his numbers are still too low to allow for natural breeding to take over. Luckily in 2003, a Fool militia group replaced large quantities of sperm bank stock with their own semen, which should lead to a widespread reintroduction of Fools into the areas that need them the most: upper class, conservative households. Contrary to conservative ideology, Fools do not burst out through the mother's chest cavity, although they have been known to slip out of the uterus while their mother is sleeping in order to sneak a quick smoke and gamble with the troll/elf hybrids that live inside the walls of most modern suburban households. This does not seem to cause any problems, save when the Fool fetus in question brings back a friend to the womb for a little action.

You can be assured that the contents of this brief synopsis are quite historically accurate, as the author has verified the events with the time machine he built in his garage out of a refrigerator box, a sharpie, three hundred paperclips, and the pelts of three zombified squirrels.

Home is where the heart is. It's a cliché, but it's a cliché with good reason. Home is never a place, it is a feeling, it's the people that you are with. "Hell is other people." It's nihilism most pure, but its inversion is beauty. Hell might be other people, but so is heaven.

We're a strange group of jumped up monkeys. We prize individuality above all else, but the worst and most damaging torture imaginable is sensory deprivation. Cutting off a person from other people entirely. We lock people in cages to punish them. Without community, even the nominal "hello", "goodbye" of polite social stricture, we go insane. This strange spark of consciousness buried in our skulls sputters in a vacuum. "Cogito ergo sum", I think therefore I am, it's a logical defense against an unknowable reality: if my senses all lie to me then I can still infer that I exist based on my capacity for thought. But while we may be black boxes of thought, we are not made to survive while the whole plane burns around us. Without connection, without community, we wither quickly.

We define ourselves by others, whether by comparison or differentiation. Isolation cells by any logical measure should enhance our identity, they remove all other people, strip down the universe to just ourselves. But the opposite happens, we lose all focus and definition, our consciousness disintegrates. As the distinction becomes sharper between others and ourselves we become more brittle.

The road trip is one of the standbys of any genre, people go from point A to point B, but the magic is all in the journey. Firefly, Battlestar Galactica, Lord of the Rings, even the original Star Trek are all about those journeys, those wanderings. We miss home when we are on the road, but we miss the road when we are at home. Some people never manage to find their way home again after long enough on the road. They realize that if you carry your home with you, your family by your side, home as a place rapidly becomes a deprecated concept.

That's why you never can go home again, because although you left a place, you carried your notion of home with you where you went. The place of your old home diverges from your path, you become distinct entities, with distinct histories. You can sometimes bring some fire back to your old place, a measure of salvation in return for memories, though you can never stay. It's why Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings failed in the end. The Scouring of the Shire is the entire point of the story. You grow, you change, you stagger through the fires of hell, which burn away the parts of you that cannot survive. You come out stronger, harder, a different shape than that which came before. You're now a square peg trying to go back to your round hole. But for a story to be complete, the attempt must be made. You don't come full circle until you return home, changed, right wrongs with your newfound strength, leave again melancholy but somehow content.

The last few generations have broken something in America. We scatter across the nation generation by generation, moving nearly constantly. The world is a tiny place compared to even half a century ago. No one is born, lives, and dies all in the same town, not in these latter days. The nation used to be a metaphor for family: motherland, fatherland, homeland. They're all metaphors for a certain way of seeing the state. That's faded now like an old saying that's lost any literal meaning. The nation has become a place, not a family.

It would be one thing if in our internal diaspora we really did carry our homes and families with us. If we carried community on the road. But we don't. We slide from town to town, job to job, an entire nation slipping between the cracks. Community seemed to die with the churches, and for the most part we haven't replaced it with another conduit for connections. Robert Putnam wrote an interesting book a few years back called Bowling Alone. He noticed a trend, one of those curiosities that mean nothing on their own but everything once implications are traced. He noticed that participation in amateur bowling leagues has plummeted even while individuals go bowling by themselves in record numbers.

Our worlds have collapsed to little bubbles, individual isolation cells that we carry everywhere we go. Everyone alone in a crowd. And we are drowning.

Now I've heard there was a secret chord
That David played, and it pleased the Lord

I couldn't hear rhythm until I was 20 years old. Dancing utterly mystified me. It wasn't so much that I danced badly (though I did), it's that I had no concept of what dancing was. I could not see any correlation between the movement of dance and the sound of the music. It was just gibberish. I couldn't even tap my foot along to a song. I almost failed wave mechanics my sophomore year because the professor explained everything using musical metaphors, which is actually very helpful, if you have the slightest fucking clue about music. For me it was like explaining colors to Helen Keller using jazz as a reference point. I had assumed I was simply musically retarded and that would be the end of it. I didn't know I was missing anything.

Vodka and spandex changed that one delightful evening.

The girl I was seeing at the time was going through a major swing music phase (this was around the time of that six month swing resurgence led by Big Bad Voodoo Daddy, etc.). I went to some swing dance classes with her. After a couple of sessions, the teacher just asked me to sit and observe because I ruined the class for whomever I was partnered with. So said girl decided that she'd get me to understand rhythm. The key was listening to part of the music, not all of the music. Just listen to the drums, ignore the rest, the drums are the beat. And with that almost stupidly simple insight that no one had ever seen fit to mention, rhythm entered my world in the form of the purple spandexed ass. It moved as the drums moved. Thank you purple spandexed ass, you and seven screwdrivers changed my perspective of the world.

But you don't really care for music, do you?

I describe this personal musical retardation as an explanation for my own shortcomings: music reviews might as well be written in Greek for how well their descriptions penetrate my musically addled mind. This is not intended as a criticism of the wonderful music reviews of TK and others, but rather an attempt to feel out where my comprehension falls short. I am accustomed to understanding, and so a blind spot is terrifically frustrating. I feel compelled to poke and prod at it until I figure out why it is a blind spot.

Lyrics drive music for me. A paragraph describing how music sounds is almost meaningless to my mind. I know what the adjectives mean, what a "fast," "angry," "energetic," "aggressive" song should sound like, but I don't feel that translate into any sort of visceral reaction. On the other hand, "It's about being too late to tell your estranged father you love him" ("4 A.M."), "Some people say it's about sex, but I think it's a fuck you to god" ("Hallelujah"), "It's a set of letters back and forth between a singer and a fan slowly going insane," ("Stan"). Those are the sort of descriptions that drag me to hunt down a song, regardless of genre.

It goes like this: the fourth, the fifth

I think the highest form of music, the songs that really stick in my soul, are poetry set to music. I heard Leonard Cohen the first time on the Natural Born Killers soundtrack and was hooked. My introduction to Bob Dylan was the U2 cover of "All Along the Watchtower" on Rattle and Hum. These two have been the twin pillars, the poet laureates, piecing together words that draw other artists like sirens on the rocks. Other bands cover their songs, add layers of harmony and melody, flesh out the bones, but the soul still lives in the words.

Meaning is not always easy to wring from the words, but it is there. Good poetry unravels slowly, over the decades of your life, so what seemed triumphant doggerel at fifteen reveals a sad and melancholy heart when you're thirty.

Half the time these type of songs don't even have choruses, because hammering the same verse home again and again just gets in the way of drawing more words. Repetition can be an effective lyrical tool, but lesser artists tend to use it as a crutch, so that they can stretch the four good lines of a song into decent radio length. That's why Nickelback and Creed can manage to sound good in short bursts of 30 seconds, but tally up the non-repeating parts of their albums and you'd be lucky to gleen a unique three minutes out of any of their albums.

The minor fall, the major lift

Some bands aren't poets so much as storytellers, delivering complete narratives packed into a few lines of verse. Other bands spend entire careers writing album after album filled with variations on the same couple of songs about love. Love is a rather boring subject when decoupled from all the myriad context of the rest of living. Ballads seem a poor substitute for songs about the other ninety percent of life.

Flogging Molly is a particular favorite of mine, along with Social Distortion and Pulp. Their songs are difficult to succinctly summarize but always seem to tell the story of something, whether it's reminiscing over the disaster of your twenties ("Ball and Chain"), or telling your son why he shouldn't look up to you ("Little Soul"), or even just the life and times of the craziest pirate to ever haunt the seas ("Salty Dog").

Maybe it's because I've always been a writer first, but it's those stories that draw me to a band. It's amazing how much story can be distilled down into a few well crafted words. Poke around the internet and you can find micro-fiction boards, contests. Complete stories in fifty words or less. Such compressed stories leave all the non-critical details to the reader, they just sweep broad brushstrokes onto the canvas that the mind renders into something complete. Songs about stories work the same way.

The baffled king composing Hallelujah

"The last person on earth sits in a locked room. A knock rattles the door." They say that is the shortest horror story in the world, because of the invisible monster that must lurk beyond the door. It may be the shortest story, but it is only a horror story by dint of the reader. An old time bible-thumper thinks it's a beautiful story because it's Jesus come knockin'. The optimist thinks the knock is proof that someone else survives. The cynic thinks the same thing. The nihilist thinks that the door will open to reveal nothing but a petrified tumbleweed thunking against the door in the forlorn wind blowing across the blasted plains. It's a matter of perspective. It's why Dickens wrote that it was both the best of times and the worst of times. It's why we can peel back so many layers from so few words in poetry and song.

My particular affliction has led to the appearance of an eclectic taste in music, but that's like saying a blind person has an eclectic taste of color palettes. I don't mind twang in country, volume in metal, or the quiet spaces in acoustic folk, not because I musically appreciate all those things, but because I'm not really listening to the music. It's why techno, jazz and classical music more or less baffle me. A song without lyrics is like a novel without words.

This article was originally published on the mighty Pajiba.

In the interests of etymological peace, translation of the title is left as an exercise for the reader in this edition.

"Yes, it's terribly simple. The good guys are always stalwart and true, the bad guys are easily distinguished by their pointy horns or black hats, and, we always defeat them and save the day. No one ever dies, and everybody lives happily ever after." --

Giles, "Lie to Me"

There is an old saying that it is possible to see all of Rome in a day, some of it in a week, and none of it in a month. Writing about heroes feels that way. You can sum them up in a few words quite easily: "The good guys," but people have spent entire careers composing treatises on the nuances of the hero. We'll try to find a sweet spot a bit shorter than a book, but a bit more introspective than three words. That may be an elaborate cop-out avoiding comprehensiveness, and may or not be a round-about preemptive fuck off to accusations of leaving out important elements. But it's midnight in Indiana, my body thinks it's eight pm, I've been running on fumes since I got up at four am my time, and my shuttle leaves for the airport in four hours. So let's talk about heroes.

Our society is free and loose with the term heroes, using it as a superlative for anyone who does the slightest positive thing. Reporters sniff out heroic human interest stories the way a randy dog hunts down a cheesy crotch. The mailman who stops delivering junk mail? Hero. The angry centenarian who chases armed robbers out of 7/11 with naught but her umbrella and her fury? Total hero. That kid with AIDs who faced down adversity and discrimination to make a real difference? See, I totally made you think the third one was going to be something ludicrous like a monkey who could suck his own balls, and you almost caught yourself before laughing automatically, but not quite, so you were laughing at a kid with AIDs. Asshole.

"The real heroes are the guys who didn't make it back." It's repeated often enough in one form or another, but it hints at our awareness of a deeper understanding of heroism. Heroes are more than just the good guys, more than protagonists, more than common people who manage something extraordinary like rescuing babies from burning buildings or storming nightmarish beaches of steel and smoke. Heroes are the ones who stare into the abyss so that the rest of us don't have to.

Joseph Campbell- - no one seriously thought we'd make it through this without dropping some serious Hero's Journey references did they? -- identified the common metaphor that we use for heroes. We talked about the metaphor of monsters, this is the metaphor of their counter. He identified the symbolic journey that our conception of the hero follows. The hero suffers, succeeds, and ultimately is so changed that he can never truly return home. In saving the village, he destroys his own place in it. At the end of stories, heroes must disappear, they cannot linger. It's true in our real life interpretation of heroes as well. Alexander dies of malaria a thousand miles from Macedonia, Gandhi and Martin Luther King never see the futures for which they fought. When it's not true, we deny it, we ignore the rest of the hero's life. Napoleon dies without a whimper in his final exile, McArthur fades away. We cling to our metaphors even when they don't precisely reflect the reality.

"Die a hero or live long enough to see yourself become the villain." It's not just a cute turn of phrase. The martyrs are to some degree the lucky heroes, because they don't live long enough to take on the taint of the monsters that they fight. Die young, stay pure. Fight monsters long enough and you become a monster. The metaphor of the monster is wrapped around the metaphor of the hero. One does not exist without the other. But that works both ways. The monster causes the world to create heroes, but the hero causes the world to create monsters.

"All progress depends on the unreasonable man. The reasonable man adapts himself to the world. The unreasonable man persists in trying to adapt the world to himself."

-- George Bernard Shaw

Senior year of high school, I took a literature elective on Science Fiction. The centerpiece of the class was the final two weeks of the semester when an elaborate trial took place, students playing jury, attorneys, and characters from the novel. We put Paul Atreides on trial for being harmful to society. Frank Herbert has said that he wrote Dune in part as a cautionary tale against the role of heroes, that they are not an absolute good.

In well written stories, every character thinks that he is the protagonist. That's what real life is: everyone, including Hitler, thinks that he is the protagonist of his own story. They think that they are the good guys. But that's also what makes heroes problematic; they cast things into black and white, into fundamentalism. You can't have heroes without villains, and in the real world where everyone thinks they are the hero of their own piece, that means that the villains are the opposite side of the same coin. Villains are just the other guy's hero.

In shitty stories this isn't the case, the hero is distinct from the villain. Reality (and good stories) just doesn't work that way. This doesn't mean that there aren't good and evil, that everything is just a gray moral relativism where nothing is wrong and nothing is right. It's more to say that heroes and villains are the same fundamental force acting on society, differentiated only by whether we agree with the direction it pushes.

Without heroes, we don't progress. We don't build better things without breaking down the old. Heroes are the societal equivalent of DNA mutation. The right mutation, the right little misinterpretation of a few base pairs can create a wonder. Ninety times out of a hundred it does nothing meaningful, all sound and fury. Nine times out of a hundred it causes some variety of cancer that rips apart the entire body politic unless excised. But that one time out of a hundred it can create something beautiful, something that shatters societal inertia and drives evolution. We can't have one without the other. We can't have a society that produces heroes without the wreckage of failed attempts.

Heroes aren't all saints, they have elements of horror bred into their bones, else they couldn't fight monsters in the first place. It is so tempting to insist that this doesn't have to be so, that we could conceive of a hero without the flaws, that flaws are just literary devices not inherent qualities. But the flaws don't just make a hero more interesting, or more human, they are intrinsic to heroism itself. You can't take away Ender's sympathy for those who abused him without destroying the empathy that made him a leader and commander. You can't take away Batman's capacity for brutal violence without eliminating the will to stalk the streets in the first place. The qualities that make them heroes are the exact same qualities that make them monsters.

Morality isn't a zero sum game. The good you do never offsets the evil you do or vice versa. Good and evil don't cancel each other out on a balance sheet so that you can beat Ma'at's feather. It was one of Angel's epiphanies. You don't get a free pass on doing something evil just because you're still ahead in the bigger score, and no amount of good deeds can ever make up for an act of evil. The duality of man and heroes is that that they are both simultaneously good and evil.

The banality of evil derives from this duality. It shouldn't be a wonder that a man exterminates Jews by day and goes home to read his son stories before bed. Only in bad stories is evil ever anything but banal. There is always something human and redeemable about every villain, because there are no villains.

"Answer me this - just one question, that's all. If the Doctor had never visited us, if he'd never chosen this place... on a whim... would anybody here have died?"

-- Joan Redfern

This article was originally published on the mighty Pajiba.

"This can only mean that the Republic has fallen." -Lucius Vorenus
"And yet, the sky is still above us and the earth still below. Strange." - Titus Pullo

This is a story of how democracy dies.

Rome is the mother of nations. The legend lurking at the dawn of history. The altar at which our laws and governments still worship. Every courthouse and capital echoes the ruins of that ancient city we still haunt. Legalese is still half Latin a millennium since the last native speakers died. Our senators and theirs would hardly notice the difference between each other, besides the togas and Italian suits.

Rome was a young state in an old world. Just old enough to feel confident and experienced, young enough to think it would last forever. For two thousand years, Egyptian slaves had built desert mountains for god kings. Italy was such a backwater for so long that Alexander overran the world from Greece to India, but didn't bother hopping the Adriatic. Less than three centuries later, Caesar thought he was special. Ozymandias and all that. Empires always believe they're eternal because men never believe they're mortal.

They conquered through ingenuity, through a granite faith that their law was the only law. Anything outside of Roman law was barbarian. Order was their one true god, immortalized in all the identical temples and standardized roads. Rational repetition fueled the legions: men trained to fight as a single machine, gears and clockwork carved from flesh, individuality burned off in the smelter. They tamed ancient Egypt, yoked Spain and France, pillaged Greece for fertile minds. They destroyed Carthage so utterly that atomic weapons could not have improved on the job. Who now remembers the American Indians?

They were the first combination of that most potent meme of state: the imperial republic. They always insist that they rule by force for the good of the people. "For the republic!" Say it enough and you believe your own press. They were the embodiment of that ancient dichotomy of war and peace. Pax Romana. Pax Britannica. Pax Americana. It's lightning in a bottle, catching the fever for empire along with the spasmodic beauty of freedom. An unstable equilibrium cannot last: either the empire exhausts itself or it devours its own children. The British did the former, the Romans the latter, America's decision is pending. Rome is the story of that devouring.

"The Roman people are not crying out for clean elections. They are crying out for jobs. They are crying out for clean water, for food, for stability and peace." -Posca

Rome presents a senate of aristocrats, bickering about rules and propriety while the mob owns the street and legions push out the frontiers. It is a state under constant siege both from within and without. This is not representative democracy, but some ancestral relation. There are is an essential freedom, at least for citizens: you may speak your mind and do as you will. And that is the heart of democracy, self governance rather than state governance.

Caesar conquers his own country while the citizens cheer. The gulf between democracy and populism is the distinction between the people as an actor and the people as a tool. Caesar wields the population as a sword. Here's the real catch though: democracy can never be taken away, it can only be given away. One of the great tragedies of history is how the people are constantly unaware of their own power, even as rulers harness it. De Tocqueville said "The American Republic will endure until the day Congress discovers that it can bribe the public with the public's money." Caesar buys the Roman people with their own money, just as Octavian later does. And they love him for it.

"So this is how liberty dies: to thunderous applause." George Lucas wrote at least one true thing.

The senators can only destroy Caesar by becoming exactly the horror they hate in him: knives in the senate, blood on their hands.

In another story, Brutus would be the hero. Shakespeare saw it: "This was the noblest Roman of them all." What matters more? Freedom or security? Dante placed three men in the innermost sanctum of the ninth circle of hell, three men eternally trapped in the jaws of Satan himself: Judas, Brutus and Cassius. In the wake of the dark ages, the supreme sin was betraying order to chaos.

But without the support of the masses, the senate must trade one enemy for another. They invite Octavian in, give him the legitimacy he lacks.

A trick of Latin: male and female noun endings. Bellator/bellatrix: warrior/amazon. Male and female sides of the same coin. Senator/senatrix: senator/whore. Male and female sides of the same coin. Words lie, languages don't.

"Cut off his hands and nail them to the Senate doors." -Mark Antony

Before modern times, it was a given that the body of the state was analogous to the body of the ruler. The ruler was the state. It is the antithesis of our "by the people, for the people" conception of the state. Likewise, the psychology of the ruler became the psychology of the state. Octavian's sexual repression inevitably becomes codified. The grand orgies are outlawed, the state regulates promiscuous behavior. The superego binds sex with shame. I didn't bring Freud into this; Octavian did that himself whilst screwing his sister and making war upon his mother's lover.

Id, ego, superego. It's a cliche, but models become cliches because they fit so well. Pullo and Antony are all id: violence, wine and sex. Vorenus and Brutus are all ego: agonizing compromise between the id and reality. Caesar and Octavian are all superego: moral superiority and calculating control.

Civil wars are always about psychology because if the state is a body, then a war within must be a spiritual one. Ego holds a tenuous balance between id and superego, but by the end of this particular story, every ego-character is dead, every id-character dead or vanquished. Without balance, the system is unsustainable in the long run. You cannot kill part of your own soul without losing it all.

And so Pullo lives, vanishing into the masses with his stolen son. The Republic dies, the Empire is born.

"The story of Romulus and Remus being suckled by a wolf is not a meaningless fable. The founders of every State which has risen to eminence have drawn their nourishment and vigor from a similar wild source. It was because the children of the Empire were not suckled by the wolf that they were conquered and displaced by the children of the Northern forests who were." - Thoreau

This article was originally published on the mighty Pajiba.

"In my experience, there are two types of monster. The first can be redeemed, or more importantly, wants to be redeemed. The second is void of humanity... cannot respond to reason or love." - Giles, Buffy the Vampire Slayer

Bear with me, and we'll get to blood and monsters.

Metaphors don't work the way we're taught in English classes. Every student rolls his or her eyes when told in no uncertain terms that Ahab's quest symbolizes man's struggle against fate, or that the suckage of Santiago's life is an allegory of the suffering of Christ. Every student but the future English majors that is, but there is little we can do for their sort of degeneracy. If a metaphor must be explained, it is no longer a metaphor. Metaphors are not intellectual beasts, but emotional ones. They either punch you in the gut or they don't.

Monsters are the original metaphor.

If god is the reason that cavemen made up for why the sun rises and sets, then monsters are the shadows flickering beyond the fire. They are the devil. It's the terror of the unknown more than anything, and because we can't see it, it can wear the faces we most fear. We map our fears onto the monsters. That's why the monsters from decades past are so comical to us: the metaphors don't resonate with our fears so it's all just rubber masks and corn syrup blood. Our monsters would probably make them laugh too.

But don't say that fifties horror films about pod people and giant insects are just about communist infiltrators and nuclear experiments. That's like describing an orgasm as a spontaneous muscular spasm coupled to a spike in the brain's serotonin levels. Yeah, you've got the definition down, but you left out the soul. To understand someone else's horror, to understand any metaphors that don't kick your soul in the same place, you have to work backwards from the solution. Don't dismiss their horror as naive. Don't just try to will yourself to be scared of pod people. Don't think of communists, or McCarthy. Just imagine a society in which the concept of pod people is relatable on a visceral level. A society where you don't trust your co-workers, your friends or family. A society in which anyone at any time could be accused of being a monster. A society in which everyone so constantly wears a mask, that you never know anyone's true face. Anyone at any time could be replaced, and you would never know the damned difference because the mask is still smiling back at you. Even the mask you see in the mirror. Now that's fucking horror.

Charlie Stross wrote once in one of his forwards that Cold War thrillers weren't really thrillers: they were horror stories with the layers of metaphor stripped out. They were never really about the spies running around shooting and shagging, they were about the mushroom clouds popping cities like zits.

Horror isn't about what is terrifying in the world; it's about what is terrifying in us.

Now bite into this twist: When Star Wars came out, the best selling Halloween costume wasn't Han or Luke or Leia. It was Vader. We want to be monsters, even as little kids.

I went through a phase (no not that one, I told you I was just curious) in which I was obsessed with monsters. Cartoons, books, movies: I suctioned onto anything that had monsters. I cobbled together armies of six inch tall monsters out of the chemical reeking cardboard of laundry detergent boxes, reams of form feed paper, tape and crayons.

From age five I had haunted the town library, all thousand square feet of it, and for this particular obsession found an enabling set of books that went on the permanent rotation. I was about seven, so "permanent" is a relative term. It was a set of old hardcovers that retold famous horror movies, with full page stills from the films and a few bits of text here and there to fill out the story. Dracula, Frankenstein, Wolfman ... I knew Boris Karlof, Bela Lugosi and Lon Cheney by sight at age seven without ever having seen them in a film, or even knowing that they were actors. They were just the monsters.

I wanted to be the Wolfman. I sprinted through the bushes at the park across the street from my house, growling and snarling and doing my best imitation of stalking prey. I dug up wet sand in the playground and rubbed it on my arms because I thought it looked like fur the way it stuck to my skin. I'd imitate fangs by biting my upper lip with my lower teeth, because after careful practice in the mirror, I'd determined this was decidedly more fierce than top teeth biting the bottom lip.

It's nothing short of a miracle that I didn't end up in a juvenile psychiatric clinic.

Those shadows flickering beyond the fire don't just scare us, they tempt us. We envy their freedom. We envy the ability to walk in the darkness untouched, even if the price is our souls.

It's a hard wiring of the brain: metaphors are empathy. Neuroscience research of the last twenty years has revealed something technical that philosophers and poets have known for millennia: we experience what we see other people experience. Literally. When you see someone hurt, the pain center of your brain fires as if you yourself were in pain. When you see someone smile, you feel pleasure. But you don't feel that way about an ant: they're too alien, their pain is not your own. That connection is the basis of metaphor. We understand the world by mapping it onto what we can viscerally understand. Other people are us. Movies matter because we directly empathize with the characters and events. They lose us when the visceral connection is broken, when the collective metaphor of their fiction no longer sparks that fire in our brain.

But the grotesque twist of modern horror emerges from the fact that there are two sides to every horror movie: the monster and the victims. If it says something about us that we find horror in certain metaphors, it says even more that we find allure in certain horrors.

In fighting evil, you become evil. When you stare into the abyss, it stares back. We use that as a psychological crutch for why we identify with monsters. Dexter only kills killers. Jason, Freddie, and Lil' Mikie Myers kill the sinners, assholes and idiots. Hannibal kills the rude and uncultured. Edward Cullen is the apex of this: the monster that isn't a monster at all, the darkness not just dispelled but filled with teenage love, tofu and something to do with sparkles. The stories in which we identify with the monster always give us an out, an excuse for putting on the mask.

The torture porn genre is much maligned, but it has a fundamental and brutal honesty. It gives you the most terrible of both worlds: the identification with the monster without the tattered ethical excuse.

It's all about empathy in the end. What terrifies us. Who we wish we were like. What we are scared of becoming.

Vampires, cold and calculating, charismatic as kings and dripping with the lust of eternal adolescence. Werewolves, their polar opposite, all animal fury and explosive violence, slaves to the moon.

My first memory is a dream of death. I'm three years old, sitting at the sliding glass door of the house where I grew up. I am alone in the house. Through the glass door I see not our back yard, but an endless plain of smoking hot sand. The ground shifts here and there, churning, and I know that if I open the door and go out, the invisible monsters beneath the sand will pull me under and I will become one of them.

I open the door anyway.

This article was originally published on the mighty Pajiba.

When I was a kid, Sunday morning meant going to church. Every week, year after year, until I went to college and lapsed into proper heathenhood. I never really fought going, unless pretending to be asleep the first six times I was told to get dressed really counts as fighting. It meant too much to my mom, and even in the depths of teenage anger boys don't screw around too much with the things that really matter to their moms. Freud said something about it, but he also had a few words about those sixty foot steeples stapled onto every church.

It's a simple equation to solve, really. You add an overly intelligent child to a room with uncomfortable seats and a parent policed prohibition on sleeping and he's going to read a book if it's sitting right in front of him, there's just not much else to do. So I read the Bible. Cover to cover. Over and over. Year after year.

It didn't stick.

The New Testament was fairly boring except for Revelations, but the Old Testament had some deliriously fucked up parts. You ever read Maccabees? Them ancient Israelites were some crazy sum bitches. So I arrived at atheism and agnosticism through a rather Christian route. Those poor Jesuits spent a lot of years teaching the devil to quote scripture.

Spirituality is something distinct from religion: the search for meaning is not the same as the acceptance of god. Joss Whedon is an atheist. So is Russell T. Davies. David Shore isn't, but he's a Jew so he's halfway there. Atheists write some of the most deeply spiritual works because they have thought about it, tortured themselves over it. It's like how the greatest coaches were always the mediocre players, because nothing came naturally to them, they had to obsess over and analyze every detail, fight for every inch. It's that struggle that imparts insight and wisdom. Atheists are amongst the most spiritual because they have not found an answer, their struggle for meaning never ends by definition.

Staggering through the wasteland of television, there are a few shows that have stuck out over the years:

"Buffy the Vampire Slayer" and "Angel"

"If there's no great glorious end to all this, if nothing we do matters ... then all that matters is what we do. 'Cause that's all there is. What we do. Now. Today. I fought for so long, for redemption, for a reward, and finally just to beat the other guy. Because, if there's no bigger meaning, then the smallest act of kindness is the greatest thing in the world." -- Angel, "Epiphanies"

Joss Whedon has said that "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" is the story of a teenager growing up and that Angel is the story of a twenty-something becoming a man. They are stages, waypoints on the path. They're not just universal stories, they are the story of our society.

We were young once, toddlers, we followed the rules under threat of immediate punishment: follow the priests or they'll cut out your tongue and stone your ass in the temple square. Morality enforced by spanking. Then we grew up a bit, had a renaissance, wrote some philosophy, religion and the state got divorced, we became tweens: follow the rules under threat of eternal damnation, do what the church says, or god will get you when you die. Morality enforced by grounding when dad gets home.

Buffy starts growing up the moment she starts sneaking out at midnight to do what she thinks is right, when she fights the darkness regardless of the consequences with her mom, with Principal Snyder, even with Giles. The point of no return comes on that night when the door to hell almost opens, when her mother tells her that if she walks out the door it'll be for the last time, and Buffy does anyway, heart broken, mind made up.

The industrial age came with all the bluster and violence of machinery and ideology. Civilization as a teenager. Stole the keys to the car, got drunk, plowed through some pedestrians. We issued thunderous proclamations that no one preceding us could possibly understand our agony, trashed our room and then scrawled endless bad poetry about our angst and pain. Morality is dead, they say. We need the old ways they say. This is what you get when you kill god, when you don't listen to your parents anymore.

Buffy sleeps with Angel. The world nearly ends. She watches Faith kill a man, helps her cover it up. These are the things that happen when we stop listening to our parents. She stabs Angel through the heart to save the world, blows up Sunnydale High to save her friends. These are the ways we find our own path, our own morality.

We're a civilization trying to figure out what the hell it means to be a man. We've grown up, got those world wars out of our system, but we moved out on our own. There aren't parents anymore to tell us what to do. Insisting that society cannot have a concept of morality without god is like insisting that an adult cannot have a concept of morality without parents. The opposite is true. In reality, it is only as adults, free and unfettered adults, that we truly adopt any sort of meaningful and mature morality. That's the morality that comes from deciding to be the kind of man we want to be. Not because our parents say so, not because god says so, but because that's the kind of man we want to be, that's the face we can look at in the mirror without flinching. Society works the same way. We have labored so long trying to live up to the morality of god, that we finally threw down and had the crazy teenage rebellion clusterfuck of the last two centuries. We're fucking hungover as a species: the car's parked in the yard, we somehow vomited on the couch and shit in the sink, vaguely remember beating the crap out of someone at a bar, and we really can't stand to look in the mirror. That's the challenge of the next century: to build a society we can respect, whether it lives up to the old religions and ideologies or not.

Angel goes to L.A., 200 years old and with a river of blood staining his hands, but still needing to learn to be a man. He watches friends sacrifice themselves. He becomes a father. He tries to help people, he tries to find some measure of redemption to dispel the darkness. But the more he fights for absolution, the more it slips away. The indifference sets in, the cynicism that rises up in self defense against the banality of evil, scoffing at him. "I just can't seem to care." It's that crushing nihilism that sets in when you move to a city alone for the first time, no parents, no friends. It doesn't matter what you do. No one is watching, no one is keeping score. But that's the seed of real morality, that's the epiphany: when nothing you do matters, the only thing that matters is what you do.

"House"

"I find it more comforting to believe that all this isn't simply a test." -- House, "Three Stories"

"You took a chance, you did something great. You were wrong, but it was still great. You should feel great that it was great. You should feel like crap that it was wrong. That's the difference between him and me. He thinks you do your job, and what will be, will be. I think that what I do and what you do matters. He sleeps better at night. He shouldn't." -- House, "DNR"

Man creates god. Man is less than god, man is equal to god, man is superior to god, man kills god.

There is a notion that our concept of god comes from the gaps in our knowledge. We rationalize god as the reason for things that we cannot understand. In ancient times, those gaps were immense, so wide and deep that we didn't even know for sure that they had bottoms, that they even could be understood by mortals. Even Newton ascribed to the hand of god phenomena in the universe that his theories could not explain. But at some point we passed a critical threshold in the comprehension of science, and we realized that while there are still gaps, while the remaining gaps may even exceed by orders of magnitude the safe areas we understand, the gaps are not special. There is a distinction between unknown and unknowable. They are knowable, even if we haven't managed it yet. The conception of god becomes irrelevant once we realize that the universe is knowable. God is no longer needed as a variable to balance the equations.

Gregory House is a scientist. There are no miracles, only things not yet understood. There is always an explanation. Some would say he is the farthest thing from spiritual, a bitter and narcissistic atheist, but he lives by the nuance that took Angel a couple centuries to tease out of the universe: what we do matters. If there is a god, then what we do doesn't matter. Then it's just a game, and as long as we've tried our best, everything will be ok. We will receive absolution. But if it's not just a game, if there are no do overs, then what we do counts.

There's a corollary to this understanding: if our failures are not our fault, then neither are our triumphs. We can't have our cake and eat it too. We don't get to celebrate our success if our failures aren't really our fault. Watch "House," really watch the moment when he figures something out: every discovery is an epiphany, that height of spiritual experience when the universe makes sense. He will pursue a miracle, break it down and figure out why it wasn't a miracle, why the laws of the universe still held true. This isn't cynicism or shallowness, this is faith at its most pure. Faith that the universe can be known, that there is no cheating, no cosmic sleight of hand.

Atheists are often accused of being deadened to the wonder and mystery of the universe, but "House" is the paragon of how atheists are the ones most conscious of the majesty of this universe. A six thousand year old earth at the center of the universe? A playground designed for us by a benevolent and loving personal god? And yet somehow House is the narcissist? Wonder at the mystery and unknowablity of the universe is the impulse of a child. Wonder at how vast and complex the universe knowably is, is the impulse of an adult.

"Doctor Who"

"He's like fire and ice and rage. He's like the night and the storm in the heart of the sun. He's ancient and forever. He burns at the centre of time and can see the turn of the universe. And ... he's wonderful." -- Doctor Who, "The Family of Blood"

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin was a Jesuit priest early in the twentieth century whose writings the Catholic Church proscribed, forbidding publication until after his death. His posthumous works were then unceremoniously declared heretical and denounced. Clearly Teilhard was on to something since the Vatican didn't get that worked up about The Da Vinci Code convincing a billion people that Jesus was into orgies.

What Teilhard hypothesized was a reconciliation of Darwinist and Catholic doctrine, introducing a meme he called the Omega Point, a singularity towards which all of evolution was propelled. Atoms begat molecules which begat cells which begat animals which begat man which will someday through further iterations beget the Omega Point. All of evolution has been an interminably long process of life evolving to be so advanced as to become one with god. God is not an entity, he is a destination.

The Doctor is a realization of that meme, a living breathing Omega Point beyond everything we have ever known. If House is the present, the Doctor is the future. He is the embodiment of the removal of the gaps, the laying bare of the knowledge of the universe. Like House, he cannot leave well enough alone, striving to understand the cause and effect, always straining to find the man behind the curtain.

He's not a pacifist, though that might be a fair first guess at his philosophy. He is a warrior, responsible for the death of his race and another. It is his reluctance that makes him a moral figure. An atheist understands that if there is no god, no heaven, no hell, if this really is all that there is, then the greatest crime is murder and the greatest stupidity is war. God won't sort out his own, they won't go on to a better place, they will simply be dust. Life is the most precious thing imaginable in a universe with no god. The greatest joy for the Doctor is when he saves a life, the greatest sadness when he must kill.

The Abyss

We have no idea what this place is that we are born into. It is strange and terrible and unfair. There are those who say that atheism is stubborn and easy, and it is, in the same way that realizing that you're gay in rural Alabama is a choice. Atheism is not an easy path. By acknowledging that there is no greater point, we shoulder the burden of every moment. There is no absolution waiting for us. If we fuck this up, we carry it forever.

There is an abyss underneath us, the yawning chasm of animal chaos. Everything we have, everything we are, is built on top of that abyss. We can build and build but there is no underlying foundation except us. We have bootstrapped order out of chaos.

The most terrifying moment in a person's life is when they first live on their own and realize that there is not anything actually stopping bad things from happening. Oh sure, there are laws and such to discourage people from doing bad things, but nothing actually physically restrains them. But there's a flip side to that, as there always is: it also means you are absolutely and totally free. Nothing can stop you from doing what you want, other than your own will.

I think our humble little species of upstart monkeys is standing on that precipice right now. Our art reflects that, Buffy and Angel and House and the Doctor are us, individually and as a group. Our choice is whether we fall back on the old rules, dig ourselves into those comfortable holes watched over by a concerned parent, or whether we choose to make our own path and grin back at our own reflections in the mirror.

A billion years from now when not even an echo of the memory of man remains, it will not have mattered what we did, except in so far as it matters now.

This article was originally published on the mighty Pajiba.