Perhaps pointless pondering on a summer''s day.

I certainly don''t expect to come up with anything so swell as a theory of gravity.  Besides, I'm sitting under a fir tree, not an apple tree.  Still, pondering during a time of plague remains popular, and it's pretty near free.

Many science fiction writers and entrepreneurs  and I expect the world to be organized rather differently in the future from what we know now.  Some, like William Gibson expect a dystopia.  Some, Mark Zuckerberg among them, expect the connected world to be better for everyone.  I, who look at the world as evolving from smaller to ever-more-inclusive units of identity, expect that there is no pre-determined outcome.  Barringthe complete collapse of human societies, which seems more likely during the Covid pandemic than it has for a while, the trend will almost certainly be towards larger units that we rely on for our identities and to provide us services.  In the struggles between Google and the European Union, I expect Google to prevail over the long run.

But in the longer run, I must admit that we are only seeing the beginning of really large  pan-national organizations.  Trying to think of antecedents, the British East India Company comes to mind. If I weren't so lazy I would study it more closely.  It's popular these days to denounce imperialism and look at the East India Company as some sort of evil empire at its worse.  But, empires are old news.  I think that the East India Company's role in exposing the British to the thought of the world beyond Europe.  Think, for instance, of Max Muller's Sacred Books of the East project, which introduced me to ideas beyond those of the narrow protestant town in which I was raised. The experience of the empire set the stage for the development of classical liberalism, which was concerned with the rights of all mankind, not the just rights of Englishmen. Those ideas with the more material goods then spread to a world in which they were revolutionary.  I suspect that the trade of the East India Company was necessary for the sort of world view that lay behind Jefferson's Declaration of Independence, and it would be such ideas on which reformers from Gandhi to King relied.  

Today's multi-nationals, however, dwarf the East India Company in scope and influence.  Perhaps none of them are overtly imperialistic as Facebook, but they all are focused on growing both in size and function.  Apple long ago quit being Apple Computers and became just Apple, moving into more and more areas of service, most recently health and banking  Samsung don't seem to be in the same league as the giants, but it has its own military division.  Microsoft and Alphabet (Google) are both led by men who can only be seen as heirs of the British Empire.  We might  think of Amazon as a store--I can if I want with my voice tell the cute little red cube sitting on the corner of my desk to send me anything the card tied to my Amazon account will allow, but Amazon make most of their money storing data.  Indeed, I am typing this

ponder on a computer that I bought from BestBuy through Google Shopping.  Despite all of these competitors for  influence of my life, I can usually ignore two of the biggest players, Alibaba and Ten Cent, while Walmart, which remains the company with the largest gross revenues, to which I contributed only yesterday, is quickly escaping its brick and mortar fortresses to become a big player in William Gibson's cyberspace.

So, you may wonder, if you have stuck with my meandering this far, what am I pondering, exactly.  Well, I am wondering how these empires will survive the death of their founders, and I think I have found some clues/answers already.  The most valuable company in the world currently, Saudi Aramco, has the most complicated history of all, having been multi-national and complicated from the beginning.  Walmart has not only survived the death of Sam Walton, but has gotten over the 'what would Sam have done?' problem, akin to the 'what would Steve think of this?' question that still hovers over Tim Cook.  Apple seems to have had its War of Spanish Succession while Jobs was exiled on Corsica, if I may mix a metaphor.  The next similar battle seems always to hover around Zuckerberg  at Facebook.  Google has had both a Regency and an abdication, and seems to plow on smoothly, making an ever-wider world for right-think.

But I also suspect that these companies, which seem huge, are more like what we nowadays call the 'petty German Principalities' that began to gather power when the printing press and the Reformation rocked--disrupted--Europe and overthrew the hegemony of the Papacy.  

Damn, it's a fascinating time to be alive.  I suspect that now we see through a glass darkly.  I only know in part.  Then will I know as I am known to Facebook?

National Politics as Breakfast Cereal

I had thought that I would use a photograph of new improved Cocoa Puffs to head this post, but I found Lucky Trumps, which is even better.

For years, I didn't vote in the presidential elections.  The candidates were usually twiddle-dee and twiddle-dum, and I didn't want to recognize their legitimacy by choosing one.  The last time I supported a major candidate was 1964, having been told by all of my liberal teachers that Goldwater would start a war.  Then Mr. Kennedy brought us to the brink with Cuba. Each president seemed like a bowl of breakfast cereal, each claiming to be new and improved, what Jordan Peterson called, if I remember correctly, normal incompetency.  I would prefer a president who took seriously the job as described in the constitution rather than trying to convince us that his Great New Plan will solve all the problems of the universe, including failed marriages and crabgrass.  It was always obvious that none of their Great New Plans would do anything except cost a lot of money and usually make a lot of problems worse.  I can't help but be amused and saddened that although the democrats under Lyndon Johnson told us that they would solve all the problems of race and poverty with a series of very expensive programs that included a Head Start program to feed kids, snatched from their families, with hearty breakfasts of Cocoa Puffs, the democrats are now telling us that they need to spend more money doing more of the same.

I considered voting for McCain in 2008, but he had a full bozo zonkers VP running mate.  There's nothing more vacuous than hope.  Mr. Obomber was a wonderful poser, publicly pondering wisely what options he might have before dropping the bombs that less hopeful presidents would have fired off immediately.  I don't think any other  Nobel Peace Prize Laureate has bombed so many people.

Then came the 2016 circus, with candidates from both parties who were far below the level of ordinary incompetence to which I had become accustomed.  I voted for Gary Johnson.

Now, 'liberal friends', please don't stop reading because of what I am going to say next.  I have been pleasantly surprised that the Trump presidency has been less of a disaster than I had feared.  Don't worry.  I still think that he's a fucking moron, but some of his [administration's] policies have been pretty good.  (Some of them were probably the work of Paul Ryan, who had the good sense to get out of Dodge before the big showdown at noon.). He remains an egomaniacal nitwit, but most of his 'policies' are bluster and show.  Yes, the nation is very divided, but the divisions within the nation are encouraged by both sides who don't seem to want to allow for any real diversity but to impose an intellectual unity that I find scary as hell.  

The worst part of the Trump regime, IMHO, is that he has destroyed much of US influence in any world wider than his Twitter followers.  He never understood that NATO was a cornerstone of a real 'America First' policy, nor that our economic engagement with China, which made China dependent on the US to continue to fuel their manufacturing growth producing the physical models of US ideas, was a strong ring in the nose of the Chinese water buffalo.  I suspect that had Trump not insisted on making China the enemy, Hong Kong might not have become more fodder for the buffalo.

And now we're in the midst of the vacuous promises wars of Great New Plans again, and Joe Biden seems as demented as Trump ever has.  One might wish--hell, I do wish--that if Biden were elected, he would try to make the US the strong force in the world again, not because I think the United States is some perfect place--I'm no utopian--but because the Pax American has for all of its bumbling, still kept wars at a lower-than-usual level and, most importantly, it has been central to the sort of global economic growth that has been ending poverty for more people than at any other time in history.

But, enter the Diabolus ex Machina:  the virus.

Trump is stumbling and blustering, belaboring decisions much longer than Obama ever did, but without the posture of careful thought.  If Biden has any intentions of trying to return the United States to position of trust-worthiness and influence beyond Coney Island and Disney Land, he ain't talking about it as he tells us that he will make us well and rich again, even if the inflation from  the Great New Plan would mean that probably my first purchase with my next hand-out will be a wheelbarrow.

Because, here's the problem:  eating the all-new breakfast cereal will not really make us strong and healthy.  Cocoa Puffs are full of hot air, with a lot of sugar to make them go down easy.  The United States needs, even if we don't deserve, considering our recent actions, a full English breakfast.  We need Locke and Hobbes, if we are to avoid collapsing into chaos.  And the world needs all the help it can get from the United States, not in foreign aid, but in global engagement.

Full disclosure:  I don't expect the United States to survive very long.  We have entered, as many science fiction writers have suggested, a post-national age.  I think the history of how humans have organized themselves suggests the same thing.  We have evolved larger and larger units of organizations, of 'usness', as we have come into contact with more and more people beyond our little families.  But the understanding of a larger unity than our tribe, whether it's a family or an ethnicity or a race or a religion or a choice of breakfast cereal or smart phone brand, has, as McLuhan warned us it would, been eroded by a growing neo-tribalism.  The present pandemic may result not only in a lot of deaths but in a lot of retreats into intellectual as well as physical isolations.

So:  am I foolish to hope that we might get over the delusion that all we need to have strong bodies [and minds] eight ways is to eat the right breakfast cereal, to hope that we might even lift, bro, and do the hard work to try to understand the maelstrom of the 21st. century?

Alas.  I probably am.  But, I am old, and there's no fool like an old fool, especially one who remembers when he wanted his mother to buy him Frosted Flakes for breakfast rather than oat meal, because Frosted Flakes had 'free' prizes in every box.

Declaring Independence from Air Strip One.

It's a miracle.  Not so big a miracle, as the occupier  of the White House says will happen with the disappearance of the corona virus, but it's still a miracle.  I found something really helpful in a discussion of Facebook.  I had posted the following photograph with a caption from George Orwell's 1984 A Novel.

'Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book rewritten, every picture has been repainted,  every statue and street building has been renamed, every date has been altered.  And the process is continuing day by day, minute by minute.  History has been stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right.'

A few people gave the post a thumbs-up.  One person said that the only thing Orwell had wrong was the size of the screen.  But more people said that I was having a 'OK boomer moment', and that I was over-reacting, that books hadn't actually been burned yet.  Since most of the woke folks don't read a lot of books, it was the erasing people with whom they disagreed that concerned me.  Having been accused a few days earlier of being an old head, which is apparently someone who thinks that there are complexities to issues that are known by woke people to be simple, I realized that the idea that I might learn from listening to different positions on an issue was no longer fashionable.  But then I was told that the destruction of statues of people who have been dead for 150 years is important to generate a discussion that it's important for us to have. No discussions without  destructions, eh?

My own feeling is that monuments to people who held values 150 years ago today can be very helpful, if we would have our discussions in the context of human history. Since Shakespeare has been deconstructed as a white male chauvinist, we need them to remind us, among other things, of what fools we mortals be, to remind us that people who consider themselves marvelously moral can  make mistakes.  I suspect that nearly all of the folks who are on the side of tearing down the monuments now would have been subscribers to their erection 150 years ago.  I remember a discussion at a United Methodist Church in marvelously woke Bellingham, Washington, about how evil the United Methodist Church is in Georgia, where the Methodists weren't fully behind gay marriage.  It took no great courage or critical thinking to support gay marriage in liberal Washington.  In each case the Church was just adopting protective coloration which helps them to 'grow', since it is having trouble paying its retirement expenses.

But it seems I was making a simple situation complex. If we don't tear down the statues of the folks who lost the civil war, NYU students will start opening slave markets in Union Square.  We need, I am told, to be rehashing the arguments of the 1850's and clearly state the virtues of being on the side of the winners.

In that discussion the small miracle of enlightenment by social media occurred.  I remembered again how right McLuhan had been to  say that as  we  move into the future:  'we tend always to attach ourselves to the objects, to the flavor of the most recent past.  We look a the present through a rear-view mirror.  We march backwards into the future'. We no only are fixated on what we see in the rear-view mirror, we are rioting about it.

So, although I still think the demand for the destruction of past monuments is really, really short-sighted and foolish, and even though I tend to be snarky by nature, I am going to try to change the way I interact with people who are fighting about what they see in the rear view mirror.  I am going to continue to suggest that Rightthink is almost always Party jargon that destroys freedom.  I am going to try to be as truthful as possible about what I really think, even if it means deconstructing NewSpeak.   I am  going to try to encourage folks to think of ways  we can make the future better based on probable results rather than on warm fuzzy intentions.   I am going to try to encourage people to look at ways we can understand our future rather than just argue about the past. 

What could go wrong?