Rhinocrisy

Here’s one to add to the “list of insights other people have probably already had”:

This morning I was at Mission Comics staring at some comic books - graphic novels, in fact - which are a medium I find attractive for reasons too numerous to list here. If you’ve read Michael Chabon’s “The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay” you’re probably familiar with his presentation of the comic as a truly modern art form, whose loud, brash strokes and larger-than-life characters are appropriate allegorical vehicles for the oversized problems of the world. And as our cynical self-critique has become more elaborate, as the demand for analysis has become more stringent, comics, and the characters in them, have become more complex and fraught - a post-modern art-form, a digest edition of the contemporary mind. By peering through its pages we may get a glimpse of the cross-section of our gyri.

As usual^* I am meandering towards my point - Anyway, I was looking at these comics; my companion commented on the revisionist nature of a lot of the work - hashing and rehashing old characters and storylines, reinventing them and updating them to reflect more modern sensibilities, or merely to explore the familiar tropes when pressed and extruded through the gears of a new apparatus.

This is nothing new, of course - art has always been collage-work, and maybe there is even a kind of prestige to be found in the artifice of reference. Shakespeare relentlessly plundered, from Plutarch and Ovid and many others. Did he even have a single original story? Is there such a thing? Perhaps not - the diet of words we’re fed on is itself formed from the regurgitations of thousands of generations preceding us; we are creatures built of contingencies. And of course, as Qohelet said, there is nothing new under the sun.

However, I don’t feel out of place in suggesting that contemporary art - contemporary media in general - elevates this kind of autophagy to a central principle. Practically all we produce is reconstructed from existing fragments - mashups, remixes, samples in music, “reboots” of film and television franchises, an endless parade of sequels, retellings of fairytales or children’s classics as seen through the bleary, fever-reddened eye of the present.

And simultaneously, as the lexicon of our culture expands, our memory (and therefore the body of reference we can draw on) narrows - we’re quickly going to proceed from chewing on our toes to swallowing up our own esophagus, Klein-bottle-like. Check out this Wired article suggesting reboots of scifi film and television stories, including the still-active television show Heroes, itself a shameless digest of superhero comics. The culmination of this trend will probably be publications composed only of chapter-heading quotes and a bibliography.^†

To visit and revisit the past - even the recent past - is either the product of trauma - we are so overwhelmed by the events of the past century that coprophagia is a nutritional and digestive requirement - or else it is the product of fear. We fear the future, and we fear the presentation of new ideas, now that we are all so well-trained in the art of deconstruction. The scope of our problems is ever-broadening, but we long ago eradicated our traditional frameworks for addressing them. There is no way to imagine our future. So we re-imagine our past, again, and again, until all our flesh is consumed.

Meanwhile, the dragon looms ahead.

^* I really ought to stop having these fanciful asides to my habitual readership, which surely does not exist. One can’t form habits around such an irregular basis.

^‡ A disgusting coinage if ever there was one, as if words and ideas were so much birdseed to be held in vessels to attract the maddened and voracious flocks (viz., you, my dear readers). We ought to find the invidious bureaucrats who created the term “content provider” and scourge them till their skins are a tartan of bruises.

While deriving a sense of fiendish pleasure from cataclysm and horror is a relatively normal, albeit contemptible, form of behavior, still, one should maintain a measure of good sense in one’s ghoulish delights. That is to say, it is best to cackle gleefully a safe distance from the burning house, and not when you are still standing amidst the flames, and the beams are coming down around you. But, alas, I have to confess to this level of imprudence.

I was in India when the financial markets first began to melt down, and I noted with some dismay that my initial reaction was NOT alarm, or concern, or brooding, or even a detached calculation, but real satisfaction that the whole mess was at last unraveling. I’ve been waiting for this.

The reasons I felt this way are straightforward: aside from my experiencing the normal thrill that any serious gravitational gyration produces, high finance is the keenest and clearest distillation of a doctrine that I’ve ideologically opposed for a long time. And, to be clear, my opposition is wholly ideological: while I had some expectation this was coming, my expectation was born out of faith rather than theory. It’s the same satisfaction the chosen will feel, as they’re being whisked away in the Rapture, when they look down to see the earth crack open, and a wave of demons riding on a tide of magma pours forth to engulf billions of pitiful, wailing human beings in their fiery, merciless clutches: “My God! I was right the whole time!”

But there is another reason. There’s also the germ of hope: after ruin comes rebuilding. I have great plans for this human race! I believe that we can be so much more than we have been, that we can aspire to greater things. Now that this dazzling, glamorous fog has been blown away by a rather ill wind, we should turn our heads up and look again at the stars. These are the moments, on the brink, at twilight, when the veneer is thinnest, for us to examine ourselves and our surroundings and find a new way. This is the right time to dream.

Dream loudly.

Dear friends, I apologize for a long silence. It’s been hard times lately, and there’s been much weeping and gnashing of teeth in my corner. As a remittance for my inconstancy, I tear off this small piece of myself and give it to you.

When I was a boy, my father once spoke this poem to me, and, written on the velvet fabric of his accented cadences, I have worn it close to my heart ever since. Its letters are plain and round, but it contains all that I have ever found one needs to know of wisdom.
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I went to drop off my dissertation with the registrar today, the last possible minute finally having arrived. It’s strange hearing the congratulations of strangers. I think to myself that they are praising me out of ignorance, because if they knew what little I have actually done, they would know I didn’t deserve it. This is the same doubt that has haunted me my whole life. My path has simply been navigating a maze that someone else built - there was a solution and a goal at the end that was already set out for me. It only required that I walk to the end. The truly intrepid, the brave and praiseworthy, cut their way through the maze and blaze their own trail, exploring the wide, wild country outside its walls. Now, what do I know about setting my own goals? The ones I imagine are far away, in the most untamed corner of the wilderness. And here I am, unknowing, feeling my lack. Can I navigate that wilderness, or will I be lost in the thicket, trapped by endless rows of snarls and thorns?

Sometimes I lose patience with people assuming what my next course will be - employment, marriage, stability. Should I continue to play my life out by rote? Can others truly bear to live their entire lives that way? Is it possible to never leave the boundaries of the maze, and to follow its familiar, monotonous walls back and forth in perpetuity? Other times I fear their assumption is correct. Only a fool ventures off into the unknown in pursuit of fabled treasures - the sort of romantic idiot who likens life to a fantastic voyage.

This is not how I imagined adulthood - learning to accept that you are a bug, and dreams are false, and heroes do not exist (or at least: you will never be one).

I am riding my bike from the bookbindery, to deliver my two copies of the document, and these dark thoughts cast a veil over the sunlit day. I lift my head to shake it away, to catch a glimpse of blue sky. A light rain strikes my face, just a kiss of descending mist. I’m gladdened by this bit of fairy magic. I look around me for the inevitable rainbow, but it cannot be seen. Its arch descends from directly above me. I am the pot of gold.

Governments throughout history have been tools of oppression; they need not be.

A large part of the reason for my new-found Mike Gravel fanhood is his National Initiative, a piece of legislation/Constitutional amendment he has been promoting for several years. In his own words, the problem with representative democracy:

We’re accustomed to thinking that, when we go to the polls on election day, that we’re exercising our power. Really, what we’re doing is we’re giving our power away, and giving it to politicians who have manipulated the electoral process; and then, once they get in office, they obviously - dictates of human nature require that they will put their interests before the public interest. That’s the way representative government works.

This gives me paroxysms of joy to hear. Yes! finally, someone who actually believes in democracy!

Gravel proposes changes allowing a national initiative process, whereby people can vote directly on federal laws. The details can be read here, if you’re curious. I’m sure there’s room for improvement (for example I’m dubious of the use of public opinion polling as part of the qualification process), but at first pass it seems well-organized and attempts to address some of the major pitfalls of state-level ballot initiatives. Read the section titled “A Strong Deliberative Process” and you will hopefully get a warm, happy feeling in the pit of your stomach.

An interesting twist, as Gravel acknowledges, is that Congress is unlikely to enact legislation which directly undermines its power. To answer that, Gravel proposes that the people vote directly on the issue of creating the initiative (as organized by his non-profit company Philadelphia II, where you can, in fact, start the first part of approving the initiative right now). Would it fly? Who knows? But it’s certainly worth trying, and I think if it did NOT fly, despite approval by a majority of the electorate, it would be quite revealing enough to shake the foundations of this country.

Finally, here’s Gravel himself on the subject. If you don’t already know, you can get your fill of Gravel on YouTube - he posts Q&As with random questions from folks on a regular basis. Golden.

!

I have not paid my taxes yet for 2006.

If I were to pay my taxes, it is likely that a significant portion of those dollars will go towards funding the Iraq occupation, nuclear weapons, and a host of other military-industrial projects that I somehow can’t bring myself to masturbate about.^*

I am a poor individual, and my contribution in this regard will be meager. Specifically, I estimate that my total contribution to the Iraq War will be about $160,^† a mere billionth of the total cost of the war. I’m not sure what can be purchased for this amount, but I find it an alarmingly large quantity from my own perspective. I’m somewhat dismayed that my material contribution is so substantial. I could certainly do a lot that was less damaging to the world with that $160.

I’m not sure how guilty I should feel about this - refusal to pay means I might end up with severe debt or, in extremely unlikely scenarios, prison. Should I balance this against the fact that I’m purchasing bullets? Maybe those bullets go unused - maybe they’re only fired off in warning and not into someone’s spine. Maybe I pay for a soldier’s insulin supplement or boots. Whatever the case, ultimately I’m pitting a bit of my well-being against that of someone else.

Thus conscience does make cowards of us all.

^* Am I un-American?

^† Roughly, assuming I pay ~2700 in taxes and the Iraq budget is about $161 billion out of a total of $2600 billion in outlays for 2008.

When do we say “enough” to new building construction?

The average occupied American home in 2005 — renter and homeowner, apartment and house — was 1,795 square feet. That’s an 11% increase from 1,610 in 1985 (big PDF).

At the same time, the median number of square feet per person in occupied units rose by 18% to 752 from 633 as the number of people per unit declined.

The current population of the USA is about 302 million. By returning to the cramped, miserable living conditions of 1985, we could house the next 48 million Americans — about 15 years’ worth of growth at one new resident every 11 seconds — without building a single new unit of housing.

By advancing to a more collectively oriented culture in which real estate investment isn’t considered the be-all-and-end-all of middle class existence, by opening up to more coop living or extended family living, who knows how many more could fit while increasing happiness.

edited 5:20 a.m. to correct math errors

I’ve spent the morning getting mad about Al Gore.

It seems that soon after Al received his Oscar for “An Inconvenient Truth”, the Tennessee Center for Policy Research released a report about his profligate consumption:

The average household in America consumes 10,656 kilowatt-hours (kWh) per year, according to the Department of Energy. In 2006, Gore devoured nearly 221,000 kWh—more than 20 times the national average.

Last August alone, Gore burned through 22,619 kWh—guzzling more than twice the electricity in one month than an average American family uses in an entire year. As a result of his energy consumption, Gore’s average monthly electric bill topped $1,359.

Since the release of An Inconvenient Truth, Gore’s energy consumption has increased from an average of 16,200 kWh per month in 2005, to 18,400 kWh per month in 2006.

Gore’s extravagant energy use does not stop at his electric bill. Natural gas bills for Gore’s mansion and guest house averaged $1,080 per month last year.

Now, this is an absurd amount of power. Reportedly Al Gore’s house is 10,000 square feet (data not shown), which is maybe twice or three times the size of my house, depending on how you reckon things. I live in a northern clime, so presumably our consumption in this eight-person household should be much greater than in Tennessee. So I’m not clear what, exactly, Gore might be doing to burn so much power, and that makes me suspect there’s a little more to this story. But, be that as it may…

This story was widely reported with great glee across the blogospore, with many pointing out that since Mr. Gore was such an unmitigated tool, he was in no position to tell them what to do.

[Pause for dramatic sigh.]

This blog is called “Rhinocrisy”, for reasons of fancy more than anything else. But it behooves us to reflect for a moment on our sister-word, hypocrisy. The moment will be brief, and we will use it to say only this: hypocrisy is not important.

We’ve had precious little reflection on hypocrisy, here. I have always firmly believed that one bears responsibility for one’s own behavior. I attribute this to my Hindu upbringing, which inculcated in me the idea of “dharma”, which Spike Lee translated quite well: do the right thing. That’s all. So it doesn’t matter whether someone else says one thing and does another, or whether you yourself can’t reconcile your speech and actions. The balance of your sins is determined simply by whether you did the right thing, plain and simple. Whether or not Al Gore is a sinner has no bearing on your own sin, or on your right to sin. The Dude said it clearly two thousand years ago:

Why do you look at the speck of sawdust in your brother’s eye and pay no attention to the plank in your own eye? How can you say to your brother, ‘Let me take the speck out of your eye,’ when all the time there is a plank in your own eye? You hypocrite, first take the plank out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to remove the speck from your brother’s eye. (Matthew 7:3-5)

So, when we speak of “rhinocrisy”, we mean to say: failure to do the right thing.

There is no shortage of clever ideas for solving climate change once and for all. I’m not talking about amateur-hour stuff like electric cars or planting lots of eucalyptus trees. I mean serious proposals with at least a little scientific backing that might screw everything up for everyone but would solve some aspect of climate change. They might prevent some of the tipping scary feedback loops from accelerating out of control. And the good news is they are guaranteed against any unforeseen effects. After all, everyone knows that reengineering the world’s climate is a simple, linear process that has no possibility of failure.

Here’s one that was presented at a scientific conference in December with the I-wish-I-were-joking title, “Are Salps A Silver Bullet Against Global Warming And Ocean Acidification?” No, the term “silver bullet” isn’t being used sarcastically. It’s a concept by this fellow to pump nutrients out of the deep ocean to increase the population of salps, strange jelly-like creatures, which then shit out lots of carbon-rich excreta which drop to the bottom of the sea, sea-questering it for “ever.” The nice inventors appear to be positioning themselves to make money with this kind of scheme when carbon credits go above $26 a ton, as companies will pay them big bucks to sequester carbon so they can keep pumping out more CO2 into the atmosphere.

Another idea is to spray sulfur compounds into the upper atmosphere to reflect light and “counterbalance most of the warming associated with the greenhouse gas forcing. Surface temperatures return to within a few tenths of a degree(K) of present day levels. Sea ice and precipitation distributions are also much closer to their present day values. The polar region surface temperatures remain 1-3 degrees warm in the winter hemisphere than present day values.” They note that they didn’t study “the important ethical, legal, and moral issues that are associated with deliberate geo-engineering efforts.”