The Lure of the Past

Yesterday, Notre-Dame de Paris burned. Nine centuries ago, Notre-Dame de Paris was started. Already, the president of France has vowed to rebuild it, and promises of donations to reconstruct it are being spoke around the world. It's the French version of MAGA.

My thoughts on its reconstruction will of course not be on the list of considerations for its rebuilding, but I think to replicated it would be a mistake.  The cathedral was built with the best engineering knowledge of the middle ages, and it has stood as a symbol of church and state and culture, both loved and hated, ever since. Paris and France now have the opportunity both to honor the valuable remnants of the past and to build something symbolic of our time, keeping the west front and the sanctuary but building a nave and choir with modern methods and modern values, and almost certainly at a lower cost than replicating a relic. A museum could be built to give access to parts of the previous building to far more people than could see them scattered across the huge structure.

The lure of some past, golden age, is always with us, and is especially strong in times of great social and technological change.The gothic revival in the midst of the industrial revolution, which fueled Eugene Violet-le-Duc's nineteenth century restoration of the cathedral, was one example of that lure. I would suggest that such revivalist movements are mostly acts of fear in the face of the new. While Violet le-Duc was recreating a vision of France at  a time of ancient glory, Isambard Kingdom Brunel was building the Great Western Railway in Britain, creating a vision of Britain in a time of new glory.

France, along with the rest of us, is once again in a time of crisis, with people again in the streets, complaining ostensibly about taxes on fuel, but more importantly about the many and deeper discomforts with the seemingly chaotic changes of the contemporary culture. I would suggest that France, and the rest of us who are saying that this week we are Parisiennes, would be better served to find another Isambard Kingdom Brunel than  another Eugene Violet-le-Duc.

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.

Einstein’s Apple:  Entanglement


1


Aidan Prydudd took another sip of his coffee. It was one of the many  things he had been surprised to enjoy in his new time. He put down the porcelain cup that would not even graced the table of a king in his old time, and picked up another of the new time’s wonders: his Lenovo Chrome Tab. Every time he used it in public he had to suppress a gasp of surprise. Lighter and smoother than any slate he had known, it was entirely magical. Kenneth had given it to him thinking it would be a quick way for him to not only learn English but also to learn about contemporary customs and events and artifacts. It was all of those. It was also a way he could write, and he had quickly started a sort of career as a writer of fantasy stories. Writing and performing at live poetry/story-telling events let him continue the role he had hoped would be his when he had set off with Owen Redhand nearly seven hundred years before. His career also helped him develop an identity beyond the strange boy that Kenneth Owens had mysteriously brought back from a week-end adventure one Halloween three years ago.


Explaining Aidan to his mother, Kenneth had said that he was older than he looked, and that he had known him for a long time, actually. He hadn’t mentioned that Aidan was pushing 700. After she was better acquainted with her son’s new companion, she asked  him his age. Aidan had blushed and said it must be 679 or so. She said that next he would be telling her that he was one of the faery folk. No, he had said, but he felt as if he had spent some time with them. She knew she had to introduce this one to her mother. No  one enjoyed a good yarn better than did Blanche Davidson.


Yanto Owens and Aidan had gotten on well immediately. No one had ever seemed so interested in Yanto’s metallurgical antiquities as Aidan. Yanto was very impressed when Aidan showed him his own knife. It was the best reproduction of a medieval knife he had ever seen. Did Aidan know who had made it? It had been his father’s, Aidan said. The man who had made it was dead, as was his father.

ndeed one of the mysteries of Aidan Prydudd was that all his family were dead. He offered no explanation, and no one was rude enough to ask, how they had died. Yanto wondered if their deaths had happened in a rare auto accident. Although cars almost never had an accident, there were occasional failures in the ancient infrastructure that remained the pride and bain of Britain, especially in the fringe areas like Wales. Still, it was odd that he didn’t even have any photos of them on his phone.


Aidan took another sip of his coffee and pondered the irony of his situation. He pondered that irony often. He had left his home on the banks of the Tefi when he was only eighteen, taking the presumptuous name of Prydudd--Bard--in hopes for adventures beyond what he might have had as a fisherman and farmer. His family were indeed dead. His parents had lived to what seemed  ripe ages in his little village of Cenarth. His mother had died one cold winter when she was in her mid-forties, having given birth to seven children, three of whom had survived childhood. His sister Anwyn, the oldest of the three, had died in childbirth when she was fifteen. His brother Dewi had gone off east to work in a mine, which had caved in. His father was a broken man after his wife died, and joined her in the holy ground of St. Llawddog when he was fifty. It was then that Aidan had set out, and he had indeed adventured beyond his wildest imaginings.


2


While Aidan sipped coffee at Costa, Kenneth asked Home for a cup of tea. Since returning from what must certainly be one of the most amazing adventures anyone could have, he had sunken further into academic obscurity. Before setting off to the Tor in Atilla that fateful Samhain evening, he had not thought much about publishing his discoveries. He had not known if he would have any discoveries, or if he would survive the journey. He had expected it to be a solo journey. But, he had come back with a companion, and he had no desire to expose Aidan to the scrutiny and insanity that would follow the story that a reclusive Pilton scientist had built a time machine by modifying a Korean car, and had traveled back in time to retrieve a 700-year-old Welshman.


Kenneth analyzed and organized his data. There was a lot of it. One of the things he had not really considered when he started his awesome adventure was how places wander through time. He had thought if he could travel through time that he would still be in the place of the Glastonbury Tor parking lot. Owain and his companions woke up in what they thought would be France. Neither of these expectations proved to be true, and when Kenneth and Aidan returned, they still were not at the Tor but at a shopping center in Burnham-on-Crouch. They might have ended up in the English Channel. If he were ever to try to go surfing in Atilla again, he wanted better tide tables, so to speak. So he was studying the variations and progressions in the earth’s rotation and revolutions. He was beginning to think that he would have to join the ranks of many discoverers and scientists before him who had not allowed their findings to be published until after their deaths


It had been both a joy and a challenge returning with Aidan, who had saved his life, and with whom he had shared an intimacy he had never had with anyone else. There had been almost no discussion about whether Aidan would accompany him on the attempted return. But when they returned, the identity of Aidan would be a continuing problem. It was easy to dress him as a contemporary Englishman, to give him a cell phone and earbuds. Any sort of identity card was a much bigger problem. Aidan had no birth certificate. No national diploma. No National Insurance Number. No embarrassing stream of Instagram photos of his growing up, posted by a loving mother. Kenneth could share things, like a debit/credit card. He resorted to forging a few documents to obtain Aidan a ValidateUk Card. With no passport, Aidan would remain a sort of prisoner in Great Britain.


Then there was the problem of friends. Aidan had none, at least none living. And whenever Kenneth introduced him to his friends, they were often full of unanswerable questions. It was easy enough to say that they had met on a hiking trip in Wales. It did not, however, seem like Kenneth to invite someone he had known only a few days to move in with him. And why did Aidan not return home? The story of a dead family and wish to study the lore of Glastonbury was true, but seemed as slight as his luggage.


Aidan’s arrival was particular difficult, understandably, for Marcus Rutschman. He--and Nora Davidson--had hoped that he might become more than a some-time lover for Kenneth. Kenneth’s hiking partner from Pembrokeshire seemed to put an end to that hope. Yet Marc, too, admitted to himself that Aidan had a particular charm and could not dislike him.


Indeed it was not long before Nora was suggesting to Aidan what a good father she thought her son would be, a suggestion that implied things Aidan could not begin to understand.

Once again.

I had considered skipping Christmas this year because it presents what has proved to be pretty much false hope. And yet we drag it out every year. And yet, there is certainly much beauty in its music and imagery. And yet, without it, events might have been even worse. Besides, without Christmas and its coincidental Santa Claus, would my parents have ever spent the princely sum of $24, if I remember correctly, to give me a chemistry set?

So, I am up before -6:30, well before sunrise, to listen to BBC World Service broadcast Eric Milner-White's Festival of Lessons and Carols. It is a singularly poignant celebration this year, the centennial of the end of the war to end wars. Milner-White had just been released from the Army. Small wars smoulder around the globe this morning as I sit in my cozy home amidst the firs, the stock market is teetering, the US is 'led' by an idiot who is casting aside all ties to sanity, and Russia, having survived communism, has a new Czar who seems to be seeking an empire.  I am reminded of the first Christmas of the Great War. The troops had been told that they would be home by Christmas. But they were not home, they were freezing in trenches trenches dug into northern France. The troops, not yet adjusted to total war, am insanity such as the world had never before seen, and certainly not expecting to spend nearly four more years in the mud and the blood, stopped shooting each other for a day, and sang carols, played a bit of football, smoke cigarettes together. Their commanders responded with court-marshals and threats of executions. There would be a small attempt at such a truce in 1915, but by 1916 the armies of Christian Europe had pretty much given up on the rule of the Prince of Peace.

Much of the current world turmoil, especially the immigration and Brexit turmoils in Great Britain, can be traced to events and decisions made during that war and the treaty negotiations that followed. None of these of course will be mentioned in Chapel of King's College this Christmas Eve. The words spoken and the songs sung will recognize strife and turmoil of course. But they will also remind us that such things are timeless, as of course are hope, and joy. That joy and hope remain timeless is perhaps the biggest failure of Christianity.

Having sung o come, o come,  Emmanuel for four weeks, making joyful noises about God with us, we will pack Emmanuel away for another year, the baby Jesus joining God in Heaven where he belongs so that we may get on with the affairs of Caesar. We will join with Herod in the continual slaughter of the innocents.

What is remarkable about the story of the birth of Jesus is that it is meek and lowly. Gods are supposed to strike people dead with lightning bolts, to make war with invincible hammers, to fly through the air in war chariots. God the son is the son of man. God the son is born to a poor woman in a country province of the empire. And his kingdom, if there is to be one, depends not on the work of gods but on the work of women and men who do not seek power.

Many times have I recited the boastful words of the creeds, 'he shall come again in great glory, and judge the quick and the dead.'. it being so wonderfully convenient that we have sent him into heaven to sit at the right hand of the father. But the truth is that I don't await his coming in glory, the second coming, because the first has been  such a fizzle. Great music, magnificent buildings, wonderful art, yes. But peace, not so much.

I am, however, a fool. I don't expect the first coming to take effect. But I hold onto a silly hope that it could be a possibility. So once again, I wake early on the morning of 24 December 'to go even unto Bethlehem and see this thing which is come to pass . . . .'  Hope springs eternal in the human heart, because the human heart is a very slow learner.

On Swedes: difficulties of immigration

In the divided territory occupied by the United States these days, few issues seem to be so divisive as immigration. The Presidency is occupied by a minor reality tv  personality who has made his political career by stirring up fear, and it seems his greatest success has been increasing the fear of immigrants. Most of my friends tend to be in the  liberal-to-progressive faction, and they lean towards an open border policy. 'We come in peace. All men are brothers.' (Except of course one is not allowed to say 'All men are brothers' because it's sexist and fraternalistic.)

I am uncomfortable in both (all) of the factions. So far as I know I am fully human, with no Klingon ancestry, but I distrust emotions as a basis for political policies. Fear is, in my opinion, probably the most dangerous emotion, especially when it is misdirected by refusing to face our real fears and transferring them to some other object. But cheap 'love' sometimes can be as dangerous, in that it lets us lure those we like to think we love into very dangerous situations in which we can then do nothing, or easily choose to do nothing to help them.

There is no doubt that the United States have benefited from immigration. A quick search of sources will find a long list of liberal and libertarian arguments for the past benefits of immigrants to the United States. Most recent presidents and presidential candidates have made speeches containing the phrase 'we area a nation of immigrants.' That phrase is often followed by some statement like 'immigrants built our railroads, mined our coal, manned our factories, grew our wheat, . . . .' Not dwelling on the distinction between 'immigrants' and 'our' in such statements, I would point out that one of the most important parts of those claims is that they are in the past tense. There are certainly many immigrants making America great in the present time. One of the founders of Google is an immigrant. The CEO's of Microsoft and of Google are immigrants. The founder and CEO of Amazon is an immigrant. The founder of Tesla and Space X and whatever else he's doing this week is an immigrant. Even Steve Jobs biological father was an immigrant. And without H-1B visas, many critical contemporary American industries would be crippled, something which the current US regime seems to be trying to achieve.

But, there are very many folks who are seeking asylum or residency in the United States who do not have the skill set of Sundar Pichai, and who are certainly not entrepreneurs. They are the 'tired, .  . 
. poor, . . . huddled masses yearning to breathe free, . . . [the]  wretched refuse of . . . teeming shore, . . . the homeless, tempest-tossed.'  Unfortunately, these are just the sorts of people for whom jobs and opportunities are missing in contemporary America, where railroads are not being built, where mines are closing, where factories are closing, and where the current regime's trade policies are shutting down markets for wheat, even if there were still jobs in the wheat fields.

I began thinking about writing this essay as I overheard a discussion in a produce department about I had called rootabagas only to be corrected by another man that they were 'swedes'. i thought about Carl Sandburg and the America in which he was raised and in which he wrote, an America that still sent posters to European lands seeking immigrants, and America that would produce Garrison Keillor's Lake Wobegon. But even in that past Americans were not so welcoming as we like to remember ourselves. Just a few miles south of the quiet forest in which I write, in Edmonds, Washington, where Boeing is dependent on workers all around the world to produce it's 'American' airplanes, a 'fact' that the current occupant of the White House liked to warp when he landed to shock and awe his supporters in his Boeing 757, Chinese workers were forced to 'commit suicide' by jumping off a bridge, sometimes several times when their 'first attempts' failed, because other, European workers were reaching Edmonds from the eastern states.

The United States today face one of the biggest changes in economics--which at one level we see as jobs--that has ever occurred, as we move from a scarcity state to an abundant state. We aren't yet at Star Trek levels of capabilities, but we're getting there fast. But the discussion about it has not reached the politicians who want to make policies for the future, unless seeing something is happening here that they don't understand and so want to forbid can be considered policy. Until we begin to adjust our understanding and options, I fear that open borders will simply make having such a discussion even more difficult.

I hope that the word will reach those on the 'teeming shore' that the United States are little better prepared for the future than anywhere else. Indeed, the United States may be worse prepared than many areas of the world because it has long been in the vanguard of change, and therefore also bears the brunt of that change. But few states are founded on the liberalism of Locke and Smith and Company that has encouraged the United States towards inclusion.  I can't imagine a Salvadoran emigrant expecting to be welcome in Ghana.

(An interesting side note is Japan, which has long opposed immigration, preferring to keep Japan Japanese and preserving as much of its weird culture as is possible in the day of Sony and Toyota, is finding it helpful to invite skilled immigrants to fill the labor gap that has not yet been solved by robots, but Japan is not issuing permanent immigration visas.) 

In the meanwhile, as the number of emigrants/immigrants grow, partly because so many nations are in turmoil and partly because there are just so many of us folk nowadays, the United States probably have more ability to absorb immigrants than the much smaller European states such as Sweden or Germany or England, where there are real immigration crises.  But this is a comparative ability only, simply because of the scale of the United States.  Neither the Republican fear-mongering of immigrants nor the Progressive love fest over immigrants does anything to solve what will may become a very difficult situation without intelligent, serious, data-based investigation of what the future may hold for economic residents of the United States.  A much more comprehensive policy than a wall or a cache of bottled water is needed.