Born at the Turning Point of the War

My grandparents got married in California in August 1942 right before my grandfather left to go overseas as a newly commissioned lieutenant in the U.S. Army. My grandmother worked as telephone operator in Los Angeles, living there with her half-sister Frances (I think. I can ask Uncle Dick if I talk to him again before he dies).

My mom was born the following May back in Nebraska, where had grandmother had returned while she was pregnant. At one point, when my mom was an infant, they lived on Long Island near Jones Field. My grandfather tried to undertake flight training, but he "fortunately washed out" as my Uncle Mark put it. The causality rate among fliers was so high. As such he made it through the war with only one significant injury, having been strafed by a German fighter plane while he was on the ground in Italy. He earned a Purple Heart that was displayed in small array on framed green felt in the den of their house in Ames during the time I grew up. Later he was buried with his metals when he died in 1993 in Florida. My grandmother spent the rest of her life wanting to join him in Heaven. When she died in 2007 she was buried next to him in the military ceremony between Tampa and Orlando.

Years ago, when studying the history of World War II, I learned an interesting thing about the month my mother was born, May 1943. In many ways it was the true turning point of the war in Europe. It is not too much of exaggeration to say that the theater of war changed drastically from the start of the month to the end. By the start of June, a full year before D-Day, the war had essentially been won from a defensive point of view. That is, although Nazi Germany was not yet defeated, they were no longer a threat to most of the rest of the world. The Allies had set the stage for the final victory.

At the start of May, the "front line" of the war was the coast of the United States. These were the days when those submarine observation bunkers were sorely needed.

Any American ship venturing out to sea, even half a mile, including a fishing boat, could be sunk by patrolling U-Boats. German submarines were a threat to land on the coast to unload spies (something that actually rarely happened) or to launch an invasion of the North American mainland. A month later, this threat had largely evaporated. The front line of the war had been rolled completely across the ocean to the shores of Europe. It was an enormous, stunning victory.

What had happened? In short, in the short weeks of May 1943 the U.S. and Britain won the War of the North Atlantic. Among other things, they had closed the "Greenland Gap" in air coverage that had allowed German U-boats to continue to sink Transatlantic shipping. After May 1943, the U-boat fleet was essentially defeated and the German navy was driven from the open ocean. The Allies had control of the high seas.  This allowed Britain to become the "forward base" of the war in a way that it couldn't before, during the dark days of the early part of the war. 

After May 1943, crossing the Atlantic became a lot less scarier. There were much fewer telegrams sent to homes saying that their sons had died at sea crossing the ocean. Without this victory, there would have been no D-Day invasion of the European mainland. It took a year after this development for that invasion to take place.

Anyone who knew my late mother well would tell you that she was obsessed with the war. Towards the end of her life, especially after the death of both her parents, she practically lived in that time in her head. This was especially true about her father's service in North Africa in Italy in the Army She would almost always find a way to link the subject of any conversation  To say that she was a child of that era is an understatement. I miss hearing her talk about those things. How I miss that.

Graduation Day with the Tool Man

 As I type this I am watching the live commencement exercises from Hillsdale College in Michigan live on Youtube. The college president Larry Arnn is giving the opening address.

Two years ago, I hadn't even heard of Hillsdale College. Now it is the only place I would consider going, if I were a high school student. It is, to my mind, perhaps the last legitimate institution of higher education in the country. Among other things, Hillsdale does not accept any federal funds, and is thus exempt from the various myriad regulations laden on both public and private institutions, many of which enforce and encourage the social policies that have a created the current network of uber-woke academia.

It is an explicitly Christian institution. Students must take a curriculum that is classical in foundation, and also learn about the U.S. Constitution. 

The college is Michigan, which is one of the most restrictive tyrannical states in the Union right now. The last I heard, one could not even buy paint in the hardware stores. Entire aisles of stores are still blocked off, while the governor takes trips with her husband, proving the maxim that Lefties never believe they have to live the rules they force others to do.

President Arnn is a personal friend of Donald Trump, not surprisingly. At the baccalaureate sservice this morning he mentioned that he was not sure that the ceremony was even legal. But he didn't care. "We would sue," he said, just now in the commencement address. He is openly mocking the governor.

The baccalaureate was held in the chapel and was essentially a traditional Anglican ceremony, even though it is not an Anglican institution. It proves the maxim that all traditional religions are converging towards a common creed and liturgy. God is rallying his people. Divisions are ceasing, as the old Christmas hymn says.

I almost wish Hillsdale has a degree exchange program. I could send my own undergraduate B.S. degree from Willamette to them and they could retroactively make me an alumnus, and I could have my old Alma Mater purge me from their records. But I remind myself, amor fati.

Now the commencement speaker has begun his address. It is Tim Allen, the famous actor, who is a well-known conservative, whose television show was set in Michigan, who is loathed by liberals. The host of Wheel of Fortune, Pat Sajak, another conservative, is also on stage. The number of celebrities who are openly on our side is so small, they can be gathered in one room.

"I regret not going to Hillsdale,' says the famous actor, in the midst of his humor anecdotes. "I would rate this school top of the heap."

The actor talks about the weird experience as a child when he family moved from to Denver to Detroit, right during the race riots that were unfolding in the last 1960s. 

He talks about his time as an undergraduate at the party school in Michigan he attended. His life was changed by a classic film class. He goes on to speak at length about the bad decisions he made in life, as well as his time in federal prison, and the insights he had while incarcerated.

"I started reading biographies of people unlike me. It was a moment of clarity."

He speaks about the day he could proudly call his mother and tell he had got his own cell in prison, "graduating" from the group cells.

He is making me laugh talking about free will and God's will.

He finished his address by talking about a recent incident being in the hospital in California and being told by his doctor that "things are going to get much worse." He had looked out the window, as humiliated as he could feel, and begged God for help. One could sense he had made great connection with the crowd. It was a splendid commencement address.

After he concludes his speech, President Arnn confers an honorary doctorate of fine arts on the beloved actor.

Now the college choir is singing America the Beautiful, which I once had the chance to perform years ago with my high school choir, right in the shadow of Pike's Peak, which partially inspired the lyrics. Singing the bass line of that tune, like any song, is a feeling unaccessible to the other voices of a choir. 

As a bass, one almost never carries the melody. One does not get to soar in solos like tenors. One is usually providing the rock foundation for the rest of the choir. Usually one's voice is supposed to blend into the rest of the voices unheard.

As such, a bass is often singing the root of the chord, and because of it, at some peak moments of the song, such as when a minor-scale line suddenly bursts forth into a bright major chord, you can feel the entire harmony resonant out your body as if radiating from your own chest. It can feel like being part of a thunderclap from heaven.

Every time I hear that beautiful patriotic song I am carried back to a day I spent walking around downtown Los Angeles. It was the end of the first week of July 2007, almost fourteen years ago.

I was out in Los Angeles to help my friends Heather and Randy move their belongings from California back to Colorado. They had two young sons and they did not want to raise them in Los Angeles.

That summer of 2007, three years after leaving New York, was a moment of a particular crisis in my life about the world and this nation and its history. I had felt as if the three years since 2004 had been one descent downwards into a form of enlightenment that was also a form of madness. 

I felt like I had been waking up from a dream about what I had thought the nation was about all my life. I had begun to doubt so much of what I had believed at that point. Among other things, I had begun to doubt all politics I had once believed in.

It was a crisis of belief that made me obsessed with the lyrics of America the Beautiful and what they really meant.  I came out of it with completely different view of the nation, its history and my place within in. It would be the most radical change of secular worldview in my life. It would take a few more years to unfold, but it would be big before and after moment that would reorient my trajectory through life and lead me to where I am now (although I would still face a spiritual crisis and transformation to get where I am now).

My grandmother had just passed away. She had spent the war years in Los Angeles partially working as. telephone operator, a common job for young women in those years. She had later given birth to my mother while my grandfather was away in Europe with the Army.

That day in 2007,  I had gone downtown with Randy to his office. During a break, on my own, remembering my grandparents lives, I had walked to the cathedral in downtown to see its modernist design. I went inside and looked at the religious ornamentations I remember muttering lines from America the Beautiful that had come to puzzle me:

 "thine alabaster cities gleam, undimmed by human tears."

How absurd, I thought. Undimmed by human tears? Hadn't there been so many tears in these cities? Somehow I wanted to believe there was meaning in those words. But all I could feel was the irony and the sorrow. I stumbled in the sun over to the Angel's Flight and took it downward, counting the arches as I went. I felt plagued by numerical symbolism. I felt weak in spirit and body.

It took me years to understand what those words asserted. I finally figured it out. It was not the cities of America had not seen those tears. It had seen trillions of tears, enough to fill oceans. 

But the assertion of the hymn is that the reflected light of those cities, despite all those tears, was yet undimmed. This was because of the Grace of God upon us, and this was because we have asked for this Grace, even begged for it. 

Our cities remain undimmed inasmuch as they submit themselves to God's Grace.

In the meantime, that crisis of faith in the nation left me fortified and impervious to so much of what is happening lately, and has happened. I see others going through that same crisis now, that I went through years ago. I know what they are going through. I have compassion for them.  I feel very strong now, at least in spirit if not in body. My health is sufficient for me now, but as 56, I begin to feel the truth that our earthly bodies are not meant to last forever. I understand this in a way that I could not have done so even ten years ago.

It is strength way that lets me be strong for others, I feel. I am not afraid of the present or the future. I fear only God.

As it happens Heather and Randy's oldest boy is graduating high school next year. A couple days Heather messaged me about possible college suggestions for him. I mentioned Hillsdale specifically. She loved she loved the institution, but her son had gone to a charter school and encountered Christian students who turned him off to the idea of a place like Hillsdale. 

Fair enough. Perhaps St. John's College in New Mexico, she asked?  I mentioned that had almost transferred there after Georgetown instead of going to Willamette. I hadn't brought it up because I thought maybe it had gone woke. Every school is Evergreen State now. Every place except Hillsdale, perhaps.

Does St. John's mandate the arm jab? That's an important point for Heather.  It's not easy to figure these things out these days. It was so easy back then

The ceremony at Hillsdale is almost over. The graduates have crossed the stage by major. Finally  after the theater majors, the chairman of the board of the trustees comes on stage to wrap up the commencement exercises. He speaks for a few moments. The chairman is Pat Sajak. It is delightful to hear him speak "out of character" as an academic board member.

The chaplain ends with a prayer. A real chaplain with a real prayer. We didn't have that at my Alma Mater in Oregon. At least not a Christian one in the sense I understand no, even though Willamette is nominally a Methodist institution. I spent more than a few hours and never heard him say anything I cannot recollect anything he said that was explicitly Christian. I I never heard him pray. (Of course we had many campus chaplains at Georgetown, but they were all Jesuits).

Is Methodism (and most other forms of mainstream Protestantism) anything more than a retrofitting of Christianity to justify every latest form of Left Woke Secularism, to be subsumed in the Pantheistic Global Religion to Come?  I have come to respect no Protestant pastors who can't deliver that hard news that sometimes your own will and God's will may not coincide. This is the most heretical thing possible to say according to Woke doctrine. It is the essence of the idea that there is the Truth that may not be "your Truth."

There was something about the way Tim Allen quoted Mark Twain about fear. He quoted Twain's remakr about the unfortunate turns in his life, "most of which never happened". The way he intoned it reminded of my old friend Kim Stafford, who had been one of my teachers at Willamette, and with whom I had a chance to spend time with as recently as 2014 in Portland. Amor fati. I'll keep my degree for now.

The choir ends the ceremony with "The Lord Bless You and Keep You," from which the lyrics are the rabbinical blessing in the Book of Numbers, and which is a standard for these events, and which I performed the same familiar arrangement in high school and college. 

Best. Amen. Ever

From a Friend in Jerusalem

 Today I got an email from my friend Martin, a physics colleague who lives in Jerusalem, and with whom I serve on board of an organization that holds a biennial conference. Like me, he makes his living with computers, in this case as a professor teaching computer programming to male students at one of the universities in that famous ancient city.

He wanted to know if I was still on board with submitting an article to the proceedings for our conference last year. The article was not to be about physics research, but a memorial to my advisor, the late William C. Schieve of the University of Texas, who passed away last year at age 91 in his home in Fredricksburg, which is out in the Texas hill country. 

He had retired there. years ago. I last saw him in 2012 when I went down to Austin for his retirement banquet. It was a grand affair at the alumni center, as it honored multiple retirees. All of the famous names of the department that I recognized---the ones that were still living---were in attendance. 

It was the first time I had been back to Austin since leaving for New York 1999. So much had changed. I was stunned as I drove down Lamar Avenue to see the new skyline of downtown looming above me, as if encountering a completely different city.

I knew at the time that it would probably be the last time I saw my old advisor and co-author. I was grateful that he lived as long as he did, until last September, and that I was able to send him Christmas cards and letters.

My career in physics following my time in Austin was probably a disappointment, one for which he partially blamed himself. He never understood why I didn't get the research appointment in Berlin that he was sure I would get with his help and connections. But I could have gone to Maryland and worked for NASA in 1999, if that had been my path. I had a clear shot at that, given the articles I had published. I chose not to do so. I didn't want to go back and live in suburban Washington, D.C. or the Baltimore area. ]

I wanted to go to New York and leave academia at the time. I wanted to dive into the "real world" and get knocked around by it, which is what happened. I often wander what would have happened, if I have pursued that opportunity with NASA and moved to Maryland. It was the second time in my life that I turned down the chance to pursue a life centered in Washington, D.C.

As I told my dentist the other day, as he asked me questions about my career, I said the experience reminded me of something Kurt Vonnegut had writtten: "Any man can call time out, but no man can say how long the time out will be."

Martin had asked me to write the memorial about Schieve as he was one of the founders of the organization in 1998, when we had our first conference, in the conference room of a motel in the suburbs of Houston. It was next to a miniature golf course. I mentioned this to my advisor during the conference and he suggested we go next door and play a round. I have always regretted that I turned down the offer. It would have made for splendid memory with him.

Martin was at that original conference as well, as a graduate student. His advisor was one of the other co-founders of our organization, the esteemed Professor Larry Horwitz, whose work with Schieve on relativistic dynamics was the basis for nearly all of my own published work in physics.

As it happened, life events distracted me in March. I wrote a first draft for the memorial, but I didn't have the gumption and the energy to revise it as I wanted. So I let the deadline pass that Martin had sent out to the conference attendees. I was delighted to hear that I still had three weeks. There is no way I'm going to let the deadline pass this time.

Build Up in Oregon

 Ginger has made a habit of watching the daily earthquake update from the geology savant called TheEarthmaster on Youtube. By savant, I mean that he is one of those guys (and they are almost always men) who obsessively watch some genre of phenomenon online using available tools. Because they have an obsessive interest, they have a library in their head of what is normal and what is abnormal.

TheEarthMaster gives daily updates. We don't see him, only his computer screen as he scrolls the globe showing the various tremors over the last twenty-four hours, giving his opinion on various geologic events.

One of his recent curiosities has been the amazing number of tremors---tens of thousands---along the western side of Oregon, uncannily coinciding with the the length of the state from approximately the Columbia River south the California border, encompassing Portland, the Willamette Valley, Roseburg, and Medford.

None of the quakes has been particularly large. But TheEarthMaster's interest has been piqued because this part of the Cascadia region has been amazing quiet in recent years. Wsahington and British Columbia are notorious active. But Oregon has been a quiet gap between California and the Columbia River.

What does this mean? Being an amateur he can only speculate. Everyone knows by now that the Northwest is coming due for a "Big One" on the order of a magnitude 9. The last one was in the year 1700. Everyone knows that such a quake would be devastating beyond imagination. I dare say every educated person in the Northwest has been informed about this, at least since this famous 2015 article in the New Yorker, that was published when we still lived in Portland. Life goes on.

The recent spate of quakes in Oregon cannot help but remind us of this eventuality. Does it portend such a quake? Probably not. But one's mind leaps to it.

The biggest question is: do these recent quakes put pressure on the off-shore subduction fault (where the Big One would happen), or do they relieve pressure on this fault/ One cannot know the answer.

After watching today's report, Ginger has loaded up several videos on Chromecast about the Cascadia Big One and what it would mean, including one that shows animation of the destruction of the Burnside Bridge in Portland, followed by a discussion of the ongoing retrofitting of houses in Portland. Of course there would also be a tsunami that would wipe out entire towns on the Oregon Coast.

Then we watched another video by a fiction author who wrote a series of books depicting the horrific scenario in the Northwest after such a quake (these are avialable on Kindle BTW). Watching these videos made me pray that we are many decades away from such a event. Whatever I say about Portland and how much I don't care if people there burn there own cities to the ground to propitiate the Gods of Wokeness, I cannot imagine the sorrow at having these same places suffer through the Big One in the near future. I can only pray that by the time it happens, we will be a place as a nation where the damage is greatly mitigated (as it was in Japan in 2011, due to the longtime construction practices). Even a puny quake like the 2001 Nisqually quake had heartbreaking consequences. I remember a wonderful old small town movie theater outside Portland, the centerpiece of the old downtown of a small community, that had to be demolished because of that quake, even though it was a "mere" 6.8, and the theater was over a hundred miles away from the epicenter.

O Lord, give the Oregonians time to retrofit. Spare them your wrath, we beg you.

(

(video from TheEarthMaster). We also just watched this excellent video from 2015. From the very end of it, I learned that the zone of tremors in the above paragraph, which sit in the area between the Coastal Range and the Cascades, sits approximately over the underground section of the Juan de Fuca Plate which is undergoing constant slippage (as opposed to the shallower subduction area out to sea which is "locked" under the North American Plate). The CWU lecturer in that video also mentioned this book about the Big One to Come, which I include here as reference for myself.

Reading: The Mysterious Island, aka Lost: The Death of Western Narrative

 After finishing Conan Doyle's The Lost World, which was a marvelous listening/reading experience, I decided to follow it up with another one of the classics available for free on Kindle Unlimited, many of which also have audible soundtracks. My checked-out list on Kindle Unlimited is always at the maximum of ten, and so when I find something I want (that I can thus read for free), I have to return one of the ones on my list. It's always fun to be able to return one that I've actually read, instead of one that has been sitting on my library list on my iPad for two years running, but which I don't want to return, lest it not be available for free any longer.

I decided the next logical choice was one of the suggestions that Amazon provided for me, The Mysterious Island by Jules Verne. I had never read a Verne novel before. My late father was a science fiction fanatic, devouring paperbacks one after another, and he considered Verne to be the father of that genre. I felt a connection to my father in finally being able to read a Verne story. I thought of beginning with Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, but I discovered the Mysterious Island was. prequel to that story, so I resolved to read it first.

Moreover, I knew that both The Lost World and The Mysterious Island were supposedly inspirations used for the television series Lost, which I watched in real time without a DVR (the old school way) as it was broadcast on ABC from 2004-2010.  It was the last such television series I watched that way, for reasons I'll describe.

I loved Lost when I first started watching it. I debuted in the fall of 2004 during the Presidential election. At the time I had just left New York and began a cross-country trip on my own, at the start of what would be years of wandering. Without going into much detail I'll just say that it was not a happy time in my life. Five years after gong to New York in 1999, I had left broken, confused, and disoriented.

The premise of the television show seemed to capture not only the confusing surrealism I experienced personally, but of the entire country. The premise---of a group of survivors of a plane crash who find themselves stuck on an island in the Pacific, where weird things begin happening, and where they seem to be cut off from the world in some unexplainable way, seemed to reflect exactly what America had become in the wake of 9/11 and the Iraq War. Nothing made sense. There seemed to be no way back to the reality we knew.

I picked up watching the show a few episodes into it, while I was staying in Portland with my friends Adam and Marie, who were generous and to let me stay their attic bedroom, where I rigged an old television to get the broadcast. At the time Marie was about to deliver her first child. I was imposition on them being there, while working out some disastrous consequences of personal decisions in my life. For this I am forever grateful to them and nothing that has come between us since then could ever change that. Despite our estrangement, Adam gets a lifetime pass from me in regard to mending fences due to political differences, although I think it will be a long time before that comes to pass.

I was hooked on Lost from the beginning---the characters, the spooky storylines, and the plot twists. I was blown away, as most people were, by the season finale. During the following summer I eagerly awaited the start of the second season and the mad rush of ecstasy when it premiered. Damon in the bunker listening to Cass Elliot. Why was that so perfect?

Of course nothing made sense in Lost. It was one weird unexplained mysterious twist after another, all told with multiple overlapping storylines from point of view of different characters, and jumps back in time to the life of the various passengers before the crash. Somehow we got to learn what put each of them on that plane.

All during the show's run, people speculated online as to what things meant. This was before social media had taken off, so such discussions were much more limited than now. I didn't spend time pursuing these thoughts shared by others, the way I might do now. I simply enjoyed and savored the show in real time as it was broadcast, the way people used to do.

Or at least I did so until the final season, and the series finale. As I would tell people later, when the series finale was done I felt like throwing my television set out the window. 

I felt like I had been taken on a six-year long con job. Almost none of the storylines and mysterious plot elements that had been established by the writers was resolved. It was a big chaotic wreck. What resolution we did get was on the level of a children's story. There was no sophistication. There was no satisfaction of anything making sense.

Instead all we got was a strung-out spooky set of premises that was left mixed up and in pieces. It was clear the writers never had any grand plan for the strange plot elements they had introduced. It was just the feeling of a storytelling.

Nevertheless the writers and showrunners were hailed as creative geniuses. One of them has gone on to be one of the highest paid directors and storytellers in Hollywood, and was gifted the direction and writing of one of the Star Wars sequel movies. He commands the highest of salaries today. 

He has done so by wrecking nearly every story he touches. He destroyed the entire universe of Star Trek, for example. His reboot of that old series, featuring a young Kirk and Spock, was brilliant in the feeling it conveyed, but the story was junk and made no sense. In fact, he destroyed the canoncical narrative of that series.

The fact that he is regarded as one of the greatest geniuses in Hollywood tells you a great deal about what has happened to the industry of cinematic storytelling. To be blunt, it no longer exists as it once did. All you need now is a premise. You don't need story. You don't need narrative.

Looking back I can chart those years between 2004-2010, I see the decline of narrative in America until we have worthy storytelling left. The last two years of that series overlapping with the obsessive movie watching I did while traveling the country and starting this blog. At the time I was in search of narrative. I was trying to discover how stories are told. Movies of that epoch still held together, but I don't think they do anymore. All storytelling is about affirming political truth now. It is about being woke. All story elements are codified elements of political messaging. Hollywood has destroyed itself on this principle, but first it had to destroy narrative, and Lost was the vehicle by which this was done.

I did not watch Game of Thrones. My sister and her husband were big fans of that show, and they introduced me to it while I was staying at their house. I watched part of an episode and zero interest in watching anymore., My impression of how that show ended its run in 2019 is that a great many of those watching it were as upset by the lack of story resolution as I had been with Lost in 2010. My sister told me she was satisfied with the conclusion, but the hesitancy with which she answered my query on this made me suspect that she was deceiving herself, and did not want to admit she had wasted so much time on a narrative trainwreck.

But this trainwreck is par for the course now in Hollywood. A coherent meaningful story is rare now. Meaninglessness is in vogue. Meanwhile our culture cries out for meaningful narrative. The video bloggers I watch, such as Nerdrotic and Overlord DVD* and others, emphasize this point constantly, while expressing their disappointment in one Hollywood failure after another. The situation is always the same. The story starts out with some exciting premise, and then descends into incoherence, asserting its own genius on the grounds of its correct political posturing after race and gender. 

The revolution was televised after all, and it sucks.

Yes, we cry out for narrative. We yearn for a narrative that bring the country and the culture together instead of contributing to the further disintegration of meaning. As I said before, I regard this.current political conflict as a War on Meaning. I spent a full year understanding Derrida and Deconstruction in part so I could fight back against it. It was like ninja training against the Critical Theorists, who have only one weapon in their narrative arsenal---take things apart and leave them broken, then pat yourself on the back for changing the male heroes into female ones, and showing how white supremacy is at the root of all bad things in human nature. Yuccch. 

The only good thing about Lost I can say now is that is that it predates most of the Woke Cultural Revolution that took over our society after 2014. There are elements of that in there, to be sure---the idea that the little black kid has magical powers because of his blackness---but they seem downright harmless by today's hyper hamfisted standards.

I wanted so much to like that show. Even looking back, there are elements of stylistic genius, such as the Dharma Initiative, which was a 1970's era techno-utopian cult with the values of the counterculture. I remember when that kind of thing was in vogue in the future---the promise that the space age would create new types of human beings with new values in a better world, in balance with each and nature, all while living in geodesic domes. In the 2000's this was so wild and retro. Those decades seemed long in the past. It was a refreshing nostalgia to the culture I saw in paperback books in the tobacco store, the bestsellers that told us how psychology was changing our cultural awareness. This was of Lost was brilliant because it turns out to have anticipated exactly where we were heading in our nation. We got throw into surreal confusion by 9/11 and landed in a totalitarian woke cult. 

But they never paid off on that premise. Instead they squandered it in ridiculous character arcs and meaningless plot twists. At the end of the show it had all the depth of a Hallmark greeting card. The final scene was in a room that evoked an airport chapel (I have a hobby of visiting those when I can). All that promise of the premise crumbled away because the story failed. The warning about where we were heading as culture---into the nightmare of woke cults and transhumanist hyper-processed Beyond Meat diets---landed without an impact.

This brings me back to Verne. By today's standard, the movie is absolutely reactionary and white supremacist, even though the main character (at least in the early story) is Union soldier who is an abolitionist, and the island is named after Abraham Lincoln. It even has a strong black character. We know that counts for nothing now. The only thing we have now is obese lesbians of color marching down the streets of Pacific Northwest cities followed by obedient white kids in their slave masks haranguing people in their homes about how awful they are. You are supposed to take it and grovel in humiliation, and if you don't you are labeled all sorts of words, none of which have any meaning to me now, and to which my response is whatever.

I love The Mysterious Island for all the reasons that would now get it labeled as white supremacist literature. Verne truly loved American culture, and found much virtue in it. The five Americans (four white, one black) who land on the island at the beginning of the story are clearly meant to represent the best of American society in the 1860s. 

As for the narrative, well I can't make a judgment about that part yet. I assume that it's going to hang together. So far I'm 22% into the story (as Kindle tells me). Verne is only beginning to reveal the "mysterious" parts of the island. But somehow it's gripping as I watch Captain Harding use his pocket watch and stick to reckon the latitude and longitude of their location in the middle of the South Pacific.

Now that's a hero. Heroes require meaning. Someday we will have them again. Maybe sooner than we think.

*Overlord DVD has spoken of Lost in almost the same words I have used, and with the same furious anger whenever the subject comes up. He can go on for minutes on end about it during his livestreams.

We Are Building Up to Something Huge

 Yesterday morning we checked out of the hotel in downtown Salt Lake City, and after taking a short Uber ride out to the airport, we flew back to Phoenix. We took separate flights, as we used completely different airlines, since Ginger's flight was paid by the company she works for, whereas I used my never-diminishing Southwest frequent flier miles. Neither of us was looking forward to being back in the heat. We had both enjoyed the perfect temperature of early spring in Utah.

Because we took different flights, I arrived about a half hour before her, and at a different terminal at Sky Harbor. After collecting my bag, I took the sky train out to the economy parking lot that is east of the line of terminals. As soon as I could, I took the escalator down to the ground level, stripping off the mask I had been wearing in the terminal, faithfully obeying the rules there. The signs in the Phoenix airport emphasize that wearing masks is a federal mandate. One can infer much from this in regard to the attitude in Arizona.

Likewise I couldn't help but smirk below my mask at the incessant announcement from Kate Gallego, the mayor of Phoenix. "Masks must be worn at all times in the airport without exception."

"B---sh-t," I muttered. Everyone knows that the statement is false. One can remove one's mask while eating and drinking. One can wash one's face in the restroom. 

But Mayor Kate doesn't say this. She says "without exception."It's like setting the speed limit to an absurdly low number so that everyone ignores and becomes a scofflaw. It creates automatic disrespect for the rules in general when they are stated so stupidly. It is one more reason why people have started giving the middle finger to these ridiculous public officials. They can't help but lie, even when stating a rule.

People know it's ridiculous, even the pro-maskers. How do I know this? Because of all them, without exception ignore the equally stupid rule about six feet social distancing, which is also blared over the speakers and in signs at every turn in terminal. We all sit next to each other in the waiting lounges. We sit next to each on the planes. Everyone ignores it because they know it is impossible to fulfill. They wear masks because they can, not because they know it does anything. Underneath it all, we all know it is theater. We all know that we are wearing masks for a reason that has nothing to do with preventing the spread of a disease. Some people are on board with that other reason, and want us to keep wearing masks. They very much want us to obey the people they assert as experts

At the bottom of the escalator I found a bench and sat next to my bags in the shade of the elevated station. A cool breeze swelled up mercifully under the station. Outside the shadow of the station where I sat I could see the brown landscape out to South Mountain. It felt like a perfect welcome back into town.

Something huge is brewing. One can feel it everywhere on our side. Trump is hinting at it. It seems that the Maricopa County audit is at the center of it. But I see it also in the streams from traditional Catholic and Orthodox priests. There is an assumption that what is playing out has a spiritual dimension, and that this dimension is perhaps the essence of what is happening. The Book of Revelation (aka the Apocalypse of St. John) is a popular topic of discussion across the spectrum of online Christendom. 

On the earthquake savant Youtube channel that Ginger likes to watch on Chromecast, the host is convinced that great tension is building up on the Pacific plate. Well they always seem to be saying this, but the lack of any aftershocks, even tiny ones, following the 6.2 quake off the coast of Japan has him scratching his head.

Even the alien researchers, none of whom I follow but whose video titles I sometimes see suggested in my Youtube feed, seem to be bubbling with excitement over the question of why the government seems bent on telling us that there are real UFO sightings happening. What does it mean?

Across the spectrum of countercultures there is a growing universal assumption that something massive is about to be unleashed that will bring about sudden, mind-blowing changes in the way of bringing justice.  

Today the Governor of Florida basically said enough of this.

It will be a disappointment if something along these lines doesn't come about in the next month or two. But of course who knows. This is all just a feeling, but a shared one. Everyone is waiting. Most of us seem patient because we know somehow that what is going to happen is going to be good.

Can things go out as they have been going/ No, they can't. At least I know this much is true.

How Beer Came to Utah

 On Friday afternoon as Ginger finished her week of on-site work in Salt Lake City, she texted me "where are you taking me out for dinner?"

I suggested the Beerhive Pub, which looked like a lively place with outdoor seating a few blocks up Main Street. The name was obviously a play on "Beehive." I'd passed in several times and saw folks drinking the outdoor seating area. I had noted it was next to Edinburgh Castle, a whimsical boutique that sells only Scottish imports and looks like a time machine from the 1970s when it was founded. Only in a place like Salt Lake City would you find a Scottish import store in downtown. (Side note: in 1985 I was scolded by a tour guide at the actual Edinburgh Castle because I tried to kibbutz on a paid tour while porting my backpack. It felt like a very Scottish moment).

The Beerhive pub was lively place, a nice tavern with the front open to the outdoor seating. It was early after work, so we easily found a high top near the front windows. Ginger is not at all a beer drinker, but it seemed to be the thing to drink there, so we ordered rounds for ourselves, choosing from among the list of local drafts. I also am not a beer drinker, but I can drink as much stout as I want, and so I ordered the only local stout on the menu. 

The number of local beers and ales available ran to almost twenty. As we drank our rounds, and waited for our meals, we enjoyed the ambiance of the pub and its Eighties music, songs we both recognized. 

Our waitress was a friendly woman in with many tattoos on her arms, a feature that is about the most unattractive thing possible on a woman in my opinion. She asked if we were locals and we said we were from Phoenix. She joked about the oppressiveness of the Mormon culture.

It still seems strange to drink beer in Utah. Until about twenty years ago when they changed the laws for the Olympics, it was difficult to get a drink with a meal, because of the Mormon cultural influence. Even today, the alcohol and pub scene here seems like a counter-culture, a niche culture within the larger society.

"I actually don't mind that," I said. "It seems healthier to have the society run by teetotalers who allow alcohol, than having it the other way around." 

I compared it to Portland. "It seems easy to relax the rules," I said. "But then it runs amuck."

Comparing things in Phoenix, or anywhere else we go, to our former home in Portland is always a good way to appreciate where we are at the time. Neither of us would ever want to move back to that place. We both think that we rode it out until the last possible livable movement in Stumptown.  Every couple days I show Ginger a Youtube video of riots there. "They smashed the downtown Apple Store....again," I told her last week. "Right after it re-opened." Now the mayor is trying to dial back the protests, but the genie is out of the bottle, as they say. 

Across the street we could see the civic theater auditorium named after George Eccles and his wife. I remarked that I knew the last name from Mariner Eccles, who had been a famous chairman of the Federal Reserve from Utah. Presumably they were from the same family, a fact we soon verified by bringing up Wikipedia on our iPhones. Within ten minutes I knew the whole history of the Eccles family as Utah royalty. Then Ginger pivoted to reading about J.Willard Marriott, another famous Utahan, who had founded the Marriott hotel chain.

It was a fascinating story. He had been inspired to start a restaurant business in the 1920s after visiting Washington, D.C. and seeing the undersupply of lemonade and other refreshments to tourists in the sweltering sun. He had then acquired the rights to A&W root beer franchise in Washington, D.C, and later started his first hotel as a motel lodge in Arlington, Virginia.

That last part I found ironic, as I remember the high rise Marriott in Arlington that sat across the Potomac from the Georgetown campus, almost in the line of sight of my old dorm in Xavier Hall. My dormmates Pat D. and Dan F, the helicopter pilot, both of them children of privilege, had checked into that hotel during finals of our first semester, just to get some study time in peace. Also our food service at Georgetown had been Marriott, as it was at many campuses, but and to add the surrealism, my freshman economics professor was named Mary Ott. Of course she was a specialist in agricultural economics. I just found this article about her.

I didn't mention any of this to Ginger. It just flashed in my memory quickly as I listened to Ginger narrate the story of J. Willard Marriott. Most of the ironies of life are unexplainable that way.

As she finished reading the article on Wikipedia about Marriott, she added one last comment that she read, namely that Mitt Romney's real first name is Willard, as he was named after the illustrious founder of that hospitality empire. Not surprisingly, given the famous clubiness of powerful Mormon families, Mitt's father had been a business associate of Marriott.

As it happens, the company Ginger works for is owned partially by Mormons and Mormon money, including a famous NFL quarterback who played for BYU and who was MVP of the Super Bowl a couple decades back. It feels very tight-knit.

We both voiced our low opinion of him as a man and a politician. He seems to be one of those people who invariably takes a stance which seems weak and cowardly.

As it happened, he was about to have a particular bad day. The next afternoon, I loafed in our hotel room on Main Street for one last day while Ginger attended a medical education conference at the nearby Hilton, and with the towering sculpture of the 2002 Olympics in view out the window, I saw a post on one of my Telegram groups about how Mitt, who had been instrumental in bringing those Olympics to Utah, had been roundly booed the Utah State Republican Convention just a few miles away.

Poor Mitt. No one much likes him, and many hate him, even though he was partly responsible for alcohol laws being liberalized here (because of the Olympics). 

I remember how in October 2012, visiting my super-Lefty friends David and Elizabeth in Oakland, my only comment about the election was "I have nothing against Romney not being President." I didn't even bother to vote in that election, as I was on the road in California. I didn't care. How things change. My how they change indeed.