An Amrikan Chimaera at Jollybengali.net

I was flipping through the channels last weekend when I saw that Jurassic Park was on TV. I watched for a few minutes before re-starting the channel flippage. Later in the day, I watched some vague story about the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.

The first Jurassic Park and the book that spawned it popped into my head. There is a scene at the end where the park’s creator, John Hammond, declares his intention to rebuild Jurassic Park, that he sees now that they relied too much on automation and the next time they’d get it right. “Creation is an act of sheer will!” Ellie Sattler, the main female lead, shouts him down, pointing out that one can’t control creation and that the only thing that matters are people, the ones we care about.

The book and the movie are, in part, a repudiation of technological worship. (And there is a certain irony that Jurassic Park itself was a leap forward in cinema techmology). I’m not a luddite but when I see coverage of the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, I can’t help but think that perhaps we’re letting our technologies get out of control. Insatiable demand and shrinking supply is leading us to tap ever more precarious stores of natural resources. Drill, baby, drill. So we just up the techmology and don’t ask whether we should be pursuing such supplies in the first place.

Technology as an sheer act of will? Now, I’m not a communitarian fantasy seeker. I lean towards the side that believes in the steady march of progress but I’m not sure that our salvation lies in the endless bounds of technological development. At some point, humankind will need to re-approach living in equilibrium with this planet, lest we be subjected to whips and scorns of an angry nature. Lest we really do become the interplanetary corporate looters of Avatar or the virus of The Matrix’s Agent Smith’s imagination. And the problem with a virus is that it eventually dies once it’s consumed everything available to it.

Photo Credit: AP

Survival of the fittest. It is an intrinsic component of nature’s wilds and an essential building block of just about every aspect of modern human civilization. The strong rise to the top and the weak fall off. Or so we believe.

From sports teams to multinational corporations, our societies reward those who go after what they want, regardless of the cost to their individual or our collective soul. A few years ago, I wrote a post wherein I made the classical economic point that morality is irrelevant in corporate governance. The market would correct those companies that got out of line (at the time, my example was Enron) and so the middle-ground would be re-established. It is the essential point made by free-marketers the world over and certainly by those who want to keep the Amrikan gum’mint out of the financial sector today.

In the handling of the Ben Roethlisberger case, we see a correction of sorts by the NFL. Roethlisberger will be punished, he will be reviled for a time and then we will all go about our merry ways. But the ultimate ethic of the sports fan isn’t to overlook a man’s failings or even to condemn them. It is avoidance; time and distance will do more to heal the wounds of faux-raged fans than a 4-6 game suspension. Those predisposed to disliking Roethlisberger will continue to dislike him and those predisposed to liking Roethlisberger will continue to like him. Many of us will make weak jokes for years afterward (as we do with Ray Ray Lewis or Kobe Bean Bryant) because in truth, we don’t want to confront the ugly implications for much longer than half a season.

A wise man once said, “I have no mercy or compassion in me for a society that will crush people and then penalize them for not being able to stand up under the weight.” But societies are not built upon compassion or mercy. They are organized so that the few powerful will dominate the many powerless. Until the guillotine starts to swing again and the new members of the few powerful trickssess the many powerless again.

The biological imperative of survival of the fittest ultimately leads to a society built upon the libertarian ethic. Leave me the frak alone to do what I want to do… even if it is to stab you in the back. Because if you were weak enough to turn your back to me, then I can’t be blamed for taking advantage of the opportunity.

This worldview will give rise to a powerful and elite class of men. And in the cases of such powerful men gone astray (Roethlisberger, Woods, LT, Edwards, Lay, Madoff), we see the rotted underpinnings of this philosophy exposed. Ultimately, any form of power (political, celebrity or otherwise) corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Make a correction for that, if you can.

In his seminal treatise, Bring the Pain, the bard Chris Rock expounds on the premise of “keepin’ it real”.

N*gga’s love to not know.
You can ask a N*gga any question, “Hey N*gga, what’s 2 times 2?”
“I don’t know that sh*t! Keepin’ it real!”
N*gga’s love keepin’ it real. Real dumb.
Wanna know the best way to take care of your money?
Put in a book. Because N*gga’s don’t read!

I find a parallel here between the characters of Mr. Rock’s imagination and certain segments of the white population, we shall call them Rednecks or the Git-er-dun folk.

It’s one thing to take down those who believe that learnin’ is the be-all, end-all. It’s quite another to put forth people who believe that being simple and home-spun is more important in our leadership than thought and nuance. I don’t give a damn if the President is down-to-earth enough that I’d want to have the proverbial beer wif him.

The Right often likes to deride Ivy-league educated liberals (despite the fact that GW Bush went to Yale). They cultivate a base that pronounces itself the “real America”, the so-called down-home, plain-spoken folk who don’t care about all that fancy edumacating. “We don’t need no education. We don’t need no thought control. No dark sarcasm in the classroom. Teachers, leave them kids alone.”

It’s a central facet of the American dream that hard work alone should be enough to lift a person off his bootstraps and establish a decent life. If only that were the case anymore. Education, learnin’, are the tools that people use today to lift themselves up by their bootstraps.

I find it unconscionable that the Right goes out of its way to decry such thought and refinement. After all, it was William F. Buckley, if I don’t miss my mark, who cultivated a certain refinement even as he advocated conservative principles.

A quick thought about Avatar…

Wasn’t the evil corporation in Avatar missing a huge potential profit center by ignoring the ways in which the Nav’i uploaded and downloaded information thru their network of trees?

We’re essentially talking about organic computers, aren’t we. The information techmology possibilities are staggering, to say the least. It makes my MIS brain explode.

According to Jodie Holt, chairwoman of the department of botany and plant sciences at UC Riverside, who consulted for James Cameron on Pandoran plant life:

Since life on Pandora was intended to adhere to our known laws of physics and biology, it was not credible to me to suggest that the plants had any kind of nervous system. Instead, I suggested that communication among the plants could credibly be explained by signal transduction, an area of research that deals with how plants perceive a signal and respond to it. Since this process is still not well understood but is under active investigation, it made sense to use it as an explanation for Grace’s more futuristic understanding of plants.

I’d be willing to bet that if I spent some time digging, I would find efforts to harness signal transduction in nano-computing or some other type of information technology endeavor.

Even though the company in the movie is in the business of mining unobtainium, it still employed a science department to study the planet. My feeling is that they should have been paying more attention to potential practical applications of the research.

Photo Credit: James Cameron’s Avatar: The Game

One of the more interesting sites in my commute to work everyday from the suburbs to downtown Pittsburgh is passing through Wilkinsburg. Like other parts of Pittsburgh, it is a study in contrasts. There are parts of it that are certainly depressed; the store-fronts are rundown or closed. The houses are boarded up and dilapidated. Then you can see attempts to renovate, to bring in new housing blocks and raise the standard of living.

In looking at the depressed areas, however, I’m struck by how quickly our standards of acceptable living can change. I’m willing to bet that around 30 years ago, these houses and the families that inhabited them were considered solidly middle-class. I’ll bet most of them worked in the steel mills where workers earned a decent wage. When the mills closed and many of those middle-class families left, the communities suffered. Some areas have never recovered though Pittsburgh as a whole is once again pretty strong (most livable city in the US; 27th most livable in the world according to the Economist).

I think I grew up middle/upper-middle class. We didn’t live as well as my friends in Fox Chapel or Upper St Clair. But by and large I got a nice present for my birthday or Eid and there was always food on the table. I had a bike and my parents got me a basketball hoop for my 10th birthday; the best present I’ve ever received.

Today, parents throw huge birthday parties at catered restaurants because they’re are too busy earning money, which they then spend on huge birthday parties thrown at catered restaurants seeing as how they don’t have/can’t/won’t take the time to plan a party due to their being so busy earning money. These aren’t necessarily upper-class folks; they’re mostly middle/upper-middle class by the old definitions.

I think it says something that the economic changes of the past quarter-century have so skewed our perception of a decent, middle-class city life. Don’t get me wrong. People should have to work hard. Life shouldn’t be a hand-out. But the brass-ring has moved quite far out of the reach of ordinary Americans.

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While watching the Oscars on Sunday, I was struck by the obvious passion of and ridicule engendered by actors and those in the film industry. They dream all their lives of winning an Oscar and when the moment comes, many get blubbery, fumble with their speeches, take too much time and then get cut off by the music.

It is passion that most ‘normal’ folks try to find in one area or another. It’s not always at work; it more often lies in other pursuits – following a sports team, scrapbooking, watching movies or hunting.

I’m all for making fun of people who take themselves or their pursuits too seriously, be it in sports (OMG, I’m soo depressed that [insert team name] lost!), fashion (you don’t know what the color Cyan looks like?!), movies (You liked Matrix Revolutions?! Ugh!) or most anything else. There’s passion and then there’s self-involvement. I’m as guilty of it when it comes to Pitt or the Steelers as anybody. And for the record, I do know what Cyan looks like.

But as risable as Sally Field’s “You like me. You really like me!” speech was, I still envy those whose passion leads them to dream up 10-feet tall blue aliens or the start the next Google.

From Slate: http://slatest.slate.com/id/2244122/entry/8/

This concerns France’s recent attempts legislate its culture… banning the burqa, specifically. If this were done in the USA, I think I’d be against it. But in a country like France (or Italy or Turkey), which has a predominant character or cultural history, I’m okay with it. I’m definitely okay with Immigration Minister Eric Besson denying a man citizenship for forcing his wife to wear a burqa.

If the USA is a fundamentally immigrant country (except for that part about exterminating the Natives), I don’t subscribe to Conservative America’s notion that they get to define Americanness to/for me. So even though I may not like the burqa, I think an American Muslim should have the right to wear one. She, of her own volition, must create an America that is true for her.

In France, if they determine that the burqa is fundamentally un-French, then go ahead and ban it. It opens up a Pandora’s Box, I know (“France for the French” could be extended to limit religion at any turn), but I can’t kick the feeling that “ethnic” countries should be be allowed to define their national character. What are the limits of that national character… I can’t say.

Best ad from this year’s Superbowl.

This afternoon and evening, Pittsburgh experienced an extended blackout due to high winds and rains. (I say extended blackout in the western sense because it lasted less than 4 hours). It was rare for us to have blackouts in Nigeria but we did have them. In Bangladesh, blackouts aren’t uncommon though that may depend on what part of Dhaka or the country in which you live. So I’m relatively experienced in them.

A couple weekends ago, I went to see the movie adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. It’s an emotionally draining movie; one that is true to the book’s vision, according to my sisters and the Ezdaa. In short, it’s an end-times movie about how a man and his son try to survive against marauding gangs, cannibals and an environment gone crazy. Needless to say, it left an impression.

Back to the blackout – despite having been through many in the past, I can’t say that my reaction to this was one was all that good. No panic but I definitely felt unsettled, sitting in a slowly growing cold living room, listening to the wind whip all around the house. It felt, in some sense, like the beginning of The Road. That I have recently had ACL Reconstruction and couldn’t even begin to survive as in the movie/book did not help.

It’s one thing to wean one’s self off too much techmology but basic electricity is quite another. Most people can unplug for a short period if they’re on vacation. Being forced to unplug as in a blackout is a different story in and of itself because you are robbed of control.

Still, I’m going to try an experiment. I’m going to institute a short blackout period for myself every evening. No power, TV, computer, internet, etc. Candles and flashlights only. I’ll start out at 15 minutes and slowly increase with time. I’m not trying to be a luddite. But forcing an unplug, I think, will help me to learn calmness, appreciate silence (well, such as it can be) and maybe develop an appreciation for really doing nothing.

Photocredit: Silence III by foart

NY Magazine recently asked a question regarding the Kanye West/Taylor Swift ‘controversy’:

Does his mission to acknowledge the greatness of contemporary musicians not amount to a worthy cause?

It’s a legitimate question to ask and in principle, I probably come down on Kanye’s side but he does a disservice to this mission by employing methods such as he did during the MTV Video Music Awards. Many people seem to acknowledge that Swift didn’t have the best female video almost in passing. Or they’re now so defensive about not liking her video that they sound like spoiled, angry jag-offs.

Sometimes it’s not enough to be right. You hafta ackrite.

I remember in 1988 when the Grammys’ first instituted an award for Best Metal Performance. Jethro Tull, which featured a flute solo by its lead singer that year, won the award over Metallica’s Black Album. The Black Album lost to a flute! It was generally viewed as an outrage that Metallica lost. But I don’t remember anyone going off at Jethro Tull during the show. So almost 20 years later, we remember the real issue here – that Metallica lost even though they made a far-reaching, ahead-of-its-time work. Not that some punk decided to steal the spotlight all to himself.

We can debate the relative importance of the VMA’s as opposed to the Grammys’ or any other award shows. (I didn’t even know they were on until I started seeing a bunch of Facebook updates on the incident). But Kanye West stole the spotlight from Taylor Swift AND Beyoncé. And that was the first time I mentioned Beyoncé in this post.

Photo Credit: Getty Images