On thePlayground

As I write this, the kids are arguing about Special Investigator Mueller's report on whether Donald Trump or his gang colluded with Russia during the 2016 presidential election. The argument will certainly grow into a playground brawl, and would perhaps best be used as an X-Files mini-series. The Truth, we are told, is out there. (We just don't like it, so there must be a conspiracy.)

Trump is saying that he has been exonerated, an interesting choice of words for someone who, as Mueller has revealed, has run his campaign and his business surrounded by crooks and thugs who will keep a casting director busy for months when the movie, God Father IV and V and maybe VI, depending on how things play out between Donnie Jr. and Jared Kushner play out, is made.

But I view the findings not as an exoneration for Donald Trump, but as a failure. Collusion means playing together. Certainly Trump has wanted to play with Vladimir Putin, who is the best example of a right-Hegelian Romantic Great Man on the playground this decade. He is the sort of man that Donald Trump wants to be, with military parades and fanfares and people standing at attention. Certainly little Donnie wants to play with Vlad, to be his friend. (Little Donnie wants to be friends with all the best dictators, the biggest bullies and aspiring bullies, on the playground, including Rodrigo Duterte, Kim Jong-un, King Salman, Jair Bolsonaro, and Benjamin Netanyahu. (If he knew more about Nicolas Maduro, he would like him, too. Trump really should listen to more briefings from his staff, rather than going with his admittedly ample gut.)  Had Trump been president during the thirties, I suspect that he would be bragging about his close relationships with Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini and Joseph Stalin.

But, sadly for Trump, Putin will play him, as did Kim and Salman, but not play with him. Why would anyone want to be friends with anyone who so easily turns on his friends as Donald Trump has done? Besides, Trump is not interested in colluding with Russia. He knows, it seems, very little about Russia, except that it's big. Again, he avoids his advisers and briefings and goes with his gut, and in his gut he admires Putin. If Putin were the dictator of Mexico, Mexico would be great again in the gut of Trump.


Sadly for the rest of us, Trump is not the only one who is dazzled by the right-Hegelian Great Man whom Thomas Carlyle presented as the only possibility for our meagre lives to have meaning and excitement. Both Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders campaigned--and continue to campaign--as the only one who can save us from our situation, which they insist is a crisis. Hillary Clinton, too, wanted to be a Great Man, campaigning as our Champion like some Joan of Arc in tweed. Many people, it seems, are more willing to be told that they are living in a crisis which needs a great solution rather than to consider the situation in which they are living as something which can be understood and used for our great advantage.

Nor, sadly, is Donald Trump the first american president who wants to be a Great Man and to play with other Great Men. Franklin Roosevelt's special friendship with Uncle Joe cost the people of eastern Europe dearly, as could yet be the case were Trump to develop his friendship with Putin.

Fortunately for those of us who prefer not to go off to fight the wars of our Leader, who prefer to post photographs of our grandchildren and our pets on Facebook, a platform developed by men and women working to bring us together rather than to divide us, using smartphones made in China and dependent on international trade, Trump, too, will pass. Fortunately, he is a buffoon more than a Great Man. He must be taken seriously only because the voters of the United States have given him the keys to the White House for a while. But the voters of the United States are a fickle bunch, and the next president might not want to play the same game of bullies. Uncle Joe found Harry Truman much less obliging than he had found FDR. (No one else seems to have recognized the ephemeral nature of US leadership and used it to his advantage so well as Kim.)

I can't end my little post-script to the Mueller's tale without noting one other sad and fortunate situation in which this playground fight is taking place. Sadly, it is the increasingly obvious that the men and women behind the green curtain are making themselves irrelevant.  Given what seems to be immense power, the 'leaders' of the United States use it almost entirely to accuse each other of low crimes and misdemeanors rather than to guide the country through the biggest changes that have ever happened in human history. Fortunately, human intelligence is not confined to a central agency.

That grandeur of humanity, the creativity which has in times past been called the image of God, 'will flame out, like shining from shook foil;/It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil/Crushed.'

So, I say, let the Great Men (and Women) have their squabbles and parades and accusations. Don't blame me. I voted for Sergey Brin, a Russian. In fact, I wrote this essay on an app I bought from the Google Playstore.

Not for Orphans

There is a charming bit of Dorothy Parker lore in which Miss Parker, an orphan, is staying with friends who, as she is coming down the stairs to breakfast, are red in the face from a heated argument about whose mother is worse. Embarrassed to be seen so disturbed, they ask Miss Parker if it isn't too warm in the house. 'Not for orphans,' she replied. In the heated exchange about global warming, I feel a bit like an orphan. I am not particularly worried. Let me explain why.

First, let me say that I think 'climate change' is a better term than 'global warming'. Certainly the average temperatures are going up, but more days of higher temperatures with fewer days of lower temperatures will drive up the average. But if the warming were even around the globe, there would probably be fewer big storms generated. Some of the biggest events of climate change which we have already seen may be an increase in big hurricanes.

My first reason not to be worried is not a very valid one, but it still influences my perspective. I am seventy-two years old and I have lived through several potential world-ending crises that have come and gone. There was the cloud of impending nuclear war, with duck and cover drills at school and the movie 'On the Beach' to scare us. Then came overpopulation. The depletion of the ozone layer was in there somewhere. Acid rain was going to turn us all to grey goo. I can understand why younger people are rather worried. Climate change is their duck and cover moment.

But, one might say, climate chance is different. It isn't like any of those other things. No, it isn't. Nor do I deny it. The earth has been warming for the past 12,000 years. I am sitting on a hill side in Northwest Washington that was under a deep cover of ice not that long ago in terms of the age of the earth. The curve seems to be rising more steeply lately, and in the time period during which humans have been letting a lot of carbon dioxide (and other gases) loose into the atmosphere. It is always sketchy scientific methodology to assume correspondence to causation, but of course 'most competent scientists' agree that it is human activity which is the cause. I am skeptical of science by democracy. If it had been left to 'most competent' scientists, we might never have heard of Albert Einstein's equations which explain almost everything that we can observe happening in the universe. But even then there is that pesky 'almost everything'.

The earth's climate is a very complex system. Even fairly regional weather patterns are very complex systems. Ask John von Neumann, who supported the development of early computers in order to make better weather reports available to the allied air forces that were bombing Germany. Eighty years later, with much better data reporting and much more powerful computers, the forecast for rain on my little hill has dropped in the last three hours from 62% to 34%, and I won't really know if it rains tomorrow until tomorrow happens.  For all I know there is some sort of synergistic force in the world's climatic system which will either stop the warming trend or ignore any of our efforts to curb it. (The other great impetus for modern computers, led by John Maunchly among several competitors, was to compute firing tables for artillery. Although Maunchly's Eniac wasn't completed until after the end of World War II, it was more successful at projectories than weather.)

Assuming that it is human activity which has caused the spike in rising temperatures, then it is almost certainly too late for us to do anything much about it. Instead of preparing for the results of the climate change we are wring our hands about, we run around blaming other people and proposing draconic governmental programs. The panic-propelled programs might not do much to stop climate change, but one may be sure that their draconic powers would not be given up.

Many people panicked about climate change act as if the idea that changing the ratio of gases in the atmosphere might have some sort of effect on their lives was hidden from them by the companies that came to their doors in the night and forced them to buy cars and fly to exotic locations to have fun. They had never thought about the fact that one way of committing suicide is to sit in a car with the motor running in a garage, nor that one might think of the earth as a garage in which we all live, in which we all share each other's exhaust.

Now, however, climate change has been presented as a crisis, and something must be done. Not of course done by me, but forced upon everyone by some wonderful bureaucracy.

I don't think most people are as concerned about what they are calling the crisis of climate change as they are about proclaiming other people guilty. I bases this notion on the evidence that my friends who claim to be terrified by climate change are most often the same ones who send me photos of their skiing trips in the Swiss Alps or their new electric cars. How cute. The fuel that powers your Tesla is burned in somebody else's back yard, and transported over great distances to your green power outlet.

So: I would not be at all surprised if in the next few years the climate changes dramatically. Species will become extinct, just as they have for as long as there have been species. People will have to migrate to new homes, as people have done since Lucy's kids left their African Eden. Miami may be flooded. I don't think anyone has claimed that the civilization of Miami surpasses that of Atlantis, also said to have flooded. But humanity may survive. The destruction will perhaps not be greater than that occurring to Berlin or Coventry or Tokyo in World War II. There will perhaps not be more refugees than following that war. Perhaps the death total will be no higher than it was in World War I, although since the population of the earth is about seven times what it was at the start of World War I, a smaller percentage of fatalities would still be a large number.

The inconvenient truth is, I don't think people really care much about human or other deaths. I have already suggested my evidence: the great popularity of wars, and not just wars among 'savages', who certainly fought ads savagely as they could with their limited technologies, but among the world's most civilized people. We seem to have much more concern to blame other people for our problems, to expect other people to solve them, and to escape the consequences ourselves. (Clue the substitutionary atonement meme.)

The pleasant truth is that there are some men who do solve problems, often accidentally, it is true, and therefore the very real possibility that we will be able either to temper climate change or life with it and prosper.

The stark truth is, the universe will continue. I suspect that the world will continue with humans, and with the next evolutionary creatures that already seem to be making their appearance on the darwinian/de chardinian stage, which we call AI. Little sea creatures will survive that will feed on the rich molecules of what we, from our aesthetic position, call plastic waste. Bigger creatures will eat them. It will soon be turtles all the way up again. Then we will probably drink again the fruit of our vine, and lie naked in our tents. Then we will be around to see the next rough beast that slouches towards our new Babylon, our new Atlantis. Or we may not be around. The AI may have inherited the earth, a species sui generis, a species of new orphans.

Twenty-nine Years in a Line Drawing.

I had been a priest for about four months and four days, Richard Gundrey a Bishop for a few months more, when we stood in the snow by a black pine at Amelia White Park for Richard to receive my Rule for the Order of St. Chad. I didn't know the term LARP then, but it would be one of my most involving and revealing LARP's. I was inspired from reading about St. Chad in Bede's Ecclesiastical History. Chad, it seemed to me lived in a time not unlike our own. Print was making a new world around him just as the digitized web is making a new world around us. I wanted to encourage myelf and others to take a step back from the confusing explosion, a step far enough to see what was happening, but not so far back as to run from it. Of course the ideas of Marshall McLuhan were undergirding my effort as well, although I did not actually mention him in any of the St. Chad documents.

I vowed to poverty, stability, and obedience. Poverty not with deprivation, but with the recognition that there was enough for everyone in the newly emerging economy of abundance. (Clue the Star Trek theme music.)  Stability not in the sense of living in a hole in the side of a mountain, although I have occasionally in the years that followed come very close to that model, but in the sense that we all live on this same 'island Earth, our fragile home' (Howard Galley)., and it behooves us to understand it. (Obviously this was before Elon Musk had entered the scene.) Obedience not in the sense of obeying some 'superior' but in the more radical sense of listening. Of trying to hear what is going on. Of not just reacting but in trying to understand. We were also expected to pray a daily office.

At first I was a bit evangelical about the Order. It was Santa Fe, after all, a place too spiritual for its own good, perhaps, and soon there were twelve of us. We had a newsletter, Peregrinations with St. Chad, which would later become the title of a blog I wrote. But then the copying machine was all we had. I confess I haven't been a very good Abbot and kept up with everyone in the Order. One woman moved to Magdalena and started an orphanage. We lost one member to the Benedictines in Minnesota,  One young man got all caught up in 'native american spirituality' and started wearing moccasins and carrying a flint knife.  Another member decided to dedicate his life to remembering that one time he was abused by a Roman Catholic priest when he was a teenager and making it famous. I don't know if any of the other twelve have continued to follow the Rule, either rigorously or casually.

My own practice of the Rule has fluctuated in its nature over the twenty-nine years after the pine tree. For a while I would sign documents with O. S. C. after my name. Very impressive, I suppose, on wedding registers. (I had fancy wedding certificates printed up with the St. Chad cross as a watermark.) My office would sometimes become rather elaborate, sometimes be reduced to sitting and watching the sun rise and set. I had a very beautiful  St. Chad's cross, made as a gift by a member of St. Bede's Episcopal Church, appropriately enough. Paul was another member who wandered off into a move primitive live style, taking his family off line in some north woods or another. I wore the cross for many years before giving it to a young woman at a sort of coffee shop where I was volunteering.  She was seriously depressed and who kept drawing it. I told her it had served me well for years, and I hoped it would serve her well, too. Sor a wmetimes I wore a fairly traditional monk's habit--one of the most practical sorts of clothing, actually, but I cheat and ride a bicycle more often than I walk, and long robes and bike chains don't play well together. For a while I wore my hair in an authentic celtic tonsure, but in general I find hair care a waste of time so now I usually just let it grow everywhere until it becomes a nuisance then whack it off for another year or so. 

Despite the passage of time and my increasingly taking myself and everyone else less seriously (Clue Shakespeare's Puck.), I find that the Rule at least implicitly continues to help me through these revolutionary times. Just as written books replaced Chad's memorized 'texts', so digital devices have replaced my books. It was kinda hard to claim to be living in poverty when I was surrounded by 35,000 books. Now now one can see how many digital texts I have literally at my finger tips. But, I try to use all of my toys as tools to help me listen to the events of the earth--poverty, stability and obedience in one convenient Chromebook--and to consider whether the way they extend myself are something I want or not. So, Chromebook yes, car no. Spending less time earning has let me have more time for learning, but I try when I take a job for it to be in some environment new to me so I can learn something different. 

I confess to being a complete place slut. I have never lived anywhere that didn't seem to have its own particular bit of paradyse--although I don't enjoy heat so much as I did when I was younger. So, I have worn my St. Chad's cross from coast to coast and to a few foreign countries exploring this place I share with 7.53 billion other folks. My veinous problems have become more severe as I have aged, so travel  now is really comfortable only on trains. Go, Google Earth.

Obedience has been the most difficult vow to maintain, not because I don't listen, but because as we have become a  planet of 7.53 folks, very inter-connected, there's a lot to hear. Many people lament the abundance of information available to use, making some sort of distinction between data and wisdom. I must demur. I have never known anyone wise who didn't want to know more. The difficulty for me is to maintain perspective, not to be caught up in this weeks' Twenty Years War.

Whatever else the past twenty-nine years have been, they have certainly been interesting and entertaining. I am a bit amused that as I have dribbled on this morning, I have been listening to Enigma, who were of course the shit-and-fell-in-it of Santa Fe when Richard and I stood in the snow. Life remains an enigma for me. I have already lived longer than I had expected. If I live another twenty-nine years, I hope I can at least casually follow the example of  good old St. Chad.