Outing Myself

In case anyone is wondering, here is my Twitter feed. I don't Tweet very much at all, so don't expect to find much of interest there. If I do post, mostly it's just a simple retweet without commentary of a message I consider to be Christian. Sometimes, rarely, I go on a bender and I actually compose my own content. Often I wind up deleting these tweets.

In the past, I've retweeted Catholics, Protestants, Orthodox, Armenians, and Copts. In that way, I'm still a typical Episcopalian ecumenical omnivore after all these years. Catholics tend to dominate my feed lately, as among other things, Twitter seems to be made for Catholicism in a McLuhanian way (the way that broadcast television was made for Evangelical Protestantism). 

Mostly, whether it is my own content or others, I retweet just to give back a little, to turn the crank of the app, out of some tiny obligation to the people who follow me but whom I don't know. By far the biggest reason I use Twitter is to follow others. I don't watch television, nor listen to public radio, nor do I visit news sites that Apple endorses for me in its curated selection, so I get much of my news and commentary from other people's tweets. I wind up seeing most everything important in the news that way anyway. And yes, I see lots from the other side. Lots.

Sometime down the line I'll share the names of the select group of people I follow most closely, the ones whom I've chosen to trigger a notification on my iPad, when they post. Almost none are blue check marks. You wouldn't recognize most of their names. And no, I don't mean the 17th letter of the alphabet, or anything like that. One needs no "secret sources" to know the truth these days.

Rather I mean plain old gumshoe-type of investigation and reporting, of patiently sifting through endless press releases, legal decisions, legislative records, court filings, press conferences, youtube videos, treaties, foreign news sites. I mean the kind of slow-motion processing of the real world that requires lots of reading.

These people I most admire, and which I follow most fervently, are the true journalists of our time, working for bit pay or donations in an era when mainstream "professional" journalism has degenerated to posing for cameras while scoring boo-yah points against political enemies and auditioning for late-night television spots. It is infinitely easier just to "speak your lived truth" to "craft a narrative" that will change the world at the speed of light. We all know where we want to go. We can sort out the details later.

Without these intrepid truth-tellers in my feed, no doubt I'd be foundering in a sea of confusion about current events, as many people are, even on my side. I might have lost hope about the world.

But I'm not confused, nor in despair. I feel a great serenity and confidence. Because of the intelligence I've received from smart people, I've rarely been truly shocked by anything that has happened over the last few years, even in how the unexpected developments have played out. Can you say the same? My sources are very reliable that way. They are manifestly smarter than me on manner levels. They can patiently sift through many solid sources, digest the information, and provide it in a way that makes coherent sense, even before it happens.

I don't follow any of my personal friends from real life. Twitter is not for that. It is not at all like Facebook for me, where I was very active and connected with people I know personally, before I abandoned it. I don't want to know what my friends and family post about on social media, as it is usually too much to bear, and usually strains my charity from the first few posts I read. I've regretted the few times I've broken that rule. If any of them wanted to follow me, I wouldn't mind, of course, since this is all public, but I would not solicit that.

Why am I outing myself like this now? It is certainly not because I expect anyone I know will care much, or that I expect anyone to follow me. I am, I've realized, highly uncomfortable with online discussions and purposely avoid online back-and-forth. The last thing I want is lots of "followers." And the short form enforced by Twitter is not my natural mode of expression (as one can see by the length of my blog posts). 

Mostly I just want to make sure my personal accounts are connected, amidst all the databases, and that anyone who might come for me, to investigate my heresies in order to cancel me, as the kids say, has all the fuel they would need to build the bonfire. I'm very small potatoes, of course, but it's clear they will come for everyone eventually, even me.  Even you. There was a time for lying low, and avoiding the growing madness. But that time has passed. If nothing else, it is time to stand up and be seen.

Here's a hint about Twitter, in case you didn't know---if you want to know what someone's real interests are,  their Tweet feed per se will tell you only part of the story. Often the page that comes up first is groomed for public consumption, and can often be somewhat sanitized. Click instead on their "Likes" tab.

Edit: By the way, I made my Twitter profile background image (the collage) myself a couple years back with Adobe software. As far as the profile image itself, I couldn't find a decent photo of myself that would do, so I use a stylized photo of this man. Many physicists would say he was the greatest physicist of the Twentieth Century, if they had to name someone. Not the man you expected, eh? Curiously for most of his life he was, as many in the modern era have been, a strong atheist.

Lars at Midsummer

A friend of mine called me yesterday and we chatted a while on our smartphones. We used a popular Internet-based communication app, one that he introduced me to a few months back.  He has been in South America all during the shutdown, having gone there as part of a recent nomadic phase in his life, after having nobly rid himself of almost all of his possessions last year and converting to remote work. Using this particular app on his smartphone like this cuts down on his phone bill.

My friend is Swedish by birth and nationality. He lived for over thirty years in the U.S., however, and has a green card. I met him nine years ago when we were both working in Boulder at a start-up. He loves Colorado because he is an avid downhill skier, but he wanted to take a break from the U.S. for a while, while his circumstances allowed it. That was before the shutdown hit.

Lately we have talked every couple weeks, usually because he calls me. That in itself is refreshing, since many of my friendships have long depended on my keeping up the contact over the years.

Among the reasons he wanted to call was to notify me that it was coming up on the solstice in a few days, and that according to Swedish custom, the midsummer celebration period had started as of that day. In the past he has shared with me photographs of St. John's Eve celebrations he attended in Sweden or among Swedish expatriates, usually wearing festive headgear with flowers and ribbons in the Swedish national colors, and of course holding a glass of beer.

This year, in his isolation abroad, he was wistful about the event, missing the custom more than usual. The city in which he had been stuck during the shutdown is almost directly on the equator, and the days and nights there vary little in length throughout the year.

We are both of us in the tech industry--that's how we met---and we inevitably discuss topics in that field. The business of tech, that is, not the details, as our specialities overlap only at the margins. We joked about how much a relief it is, to purposely forget certain tech knowledge when it becomes outdated, or more commonly, when one resolves to narrow one's speciality and to henceforth leave certain duties to others.

"I love jettisoning useless knowledge overboard," I told him. The metaphor made him laugh hard from recognition of the same satisfaction in himself.

During the shutdown, he has been using the isolation time he has spent inside in his AirBnB rental in a South American capital to study for and to ace a series of certification exams for cloud computing, which he will need in his upcoming remote job. He is planning to move to Spain once the borders open up. He wants to work a few more years, build up some savings, and retire in the world somewhere cheap.

As we both are well aware, our political views are divergent. This usually doesn't cause any issues in our friendship. In fact, it has never caused any serious problem at all.  We have many other things to talk about, and which bring us together. Sometimes the conversation veers into politics, and when I see it going there, I usually try to steer it away,  as I do with everyone. This is not because I don't like talking about politics---if you know me, you know I can freely talk at great length about such things--but out of interests of preserving the peace.

I'm not always successful at this diversion, however, and as it did during our most recent phone call, the conversation sometimes finds itself going there. No doubt in this case it was because recent events have evoked political expressions out of almost everyone.

As always, the political questions he posed to me reflected his genuine curiosity as to why I hold certain views. He always asks his questions in a respectful way, in good faith, even while expressing his disagreement.

As I like to tell him, I find this candor refreshing. I try to give him as calm and direct an answer as possible, without argument or justification, and without hiding anything I believe out of shame, as I am not at all ashamed. I specifically don't try to convince him of anything except the veracity of my statement regarding my own views, and my own steadiness in my beliefs. I want to give him accurate information about what I believe, as if giving an objective summary. He is free to use that information as he pleases.

Few people on the other side seem curious in the way he is. As so many others on my side have lamented, in almost the same words I would use, the other side seems so eager to ascribe to us opinions we may not hold, based on their beliefs about what our side supposedly thinks. Even when they get our opinions right, they usually err greatly as to the reasons we hold those opinions, in a way that strikes us as a diametrically opposed to the reality we experience.

For Lars and me, it helps ease our exchanges on this topic that we have a mutual friend, a long time close friend of his, another Swede of our age, who lives in Switzerland and who also disagrees with Lars on many issues. They regularly have long phone conversations with each other, and have traveled the world together for decades, getting in and out of various weird scrapes. I cannot keep up with their activity, when they are together. They are a force of nature, the two of them.

"Stefan agrees with you," my friend tells me often, about our mutual friend, having just discussed the same topic with him.  Because I'm not the only example of a person on my side that he knows and trusts, I am relieved of the burden of representing my side in its entirety.

When during our recent call the conversation turned to politics and became more animated than normal, I didn't mind responding to his interrogation per se. But there was something unsettling about the way it played out this time, compared to previous ones. After nearly every question he asked me, me I was compelled to tell him that any sense of accuracy about my answers forced me to dispute the very premises embedded the question, even over the meaning of certain words.

It was a brutal slog for a while during our call. It was like two people speaking entirely different languages. Especially over our digital devices this exchange made me feel as if no real communication was happening at all between us. Nevertheless we pushed on with our conversation, and we even found some things to agree about, and other things to disagree about, and then we moved onto other topics.

What was most grievous, however, was not the specific frustration we had both just experienced with each other.  That was relatively minor in importance in regard to our friendship. Instead I was struck with sorrow from thinking that if he and I, who make a point of fostering the goodwill between us, find this activity difficult, then how much more challenging it must be for so many others out there, among whom a similar resolve of mutual charity has not been pledged?

How painful it must be for many out there at this moment who are trying to bridge these most fundamental epistemological gaps (to borrow a phrase popular in contemporary Critical Theory). Human nature dictates that many of these interactions are probably not turning out well, leaving wounds that will not soon heal, if they ever do.

The experience has heightened my existing chariness, won by bitter experience, that activates during any conversation these days. Even when not discussing current events, politics seems only a sentence or two away from barging in.  I am thus on guard against accidentally climbing any set of rhetorical gallows that might have secretly been erected for me, in order to out me and condemn me, thus proving to the other person the invalidity of my intellect or the dissolution of my sanity.

I've had this happen and it is not fun. It never persuades me of the other person's cause, but most of the time I don't get the idea like that was the point. Their plea to me takes the form of saying: don't get the idea that there is ANY common ground between us on these things, You must abandon everything you believe right now if you wish for me to consider your opinions as worthy of any respect.

Some might demand my capitulation in this way believing it is their duty to do so, in the fight of Good against Evil.  In their eyes, my opinions mean that at best I am ignorant, and thus I need to be informed of such out of charity. In this case, they might deliver their opinion with a tone of voice that suggests that they believe, like a stern professor lecturing a yokel freshman, that it has never occurred to me that not everyone shares my parochial viewpoint.

They convey the impression that they are delivering news to me by their rebuke of me. Why else would I have sought their fellowship, if I did not naively expect a reflection of my own opinions? Can it be that I just don't talk to enough people, or don't read the right news websites, to be yet aware of the consensus shared by all decent, good, intelligent people? No doubt I've been led astray by bad influences. Now that I have been corrected by them on this point, however, they expect to me to fall in line and to get on the right side of history.

If I fail to fall in line, however, then perhaps I have gone bad in the worst possible way. Perhaps, as they might have already suspected, I am truly one of the irredeemable ones, as wrong as wrong can be. Sadly, for my own sake, I need to be humiliated, to have my ego crushed without mercy if necessary, lest I draw others into my whirlpool of error. My continued resistance to fact and reason is a danger to others and to humanity, It is doing violence, which must be stopped

Remembering such exchanges, or even imaging the possibility of new ones in regard to certain individuals who might contemn me, I struggle to hold my choleric self from internal outbursts of uncharitable thoughts. Repenting for these petty imagined skirmishes to my brothers and sisters is a daily task of prayer, even as I would, I am certain now, hold my tongue in person, to the point of allowing them to believe that their rebuke had wrought its desired effect in me. If they need to report my fallen state, as well as their triumph over me, on social media to any mutual friends we share, I'm fine with that.

Thankfully none of this applies to Lars and me so far, Beneath the contentious debate there is still mutual respect, cordiality, and even curiosity. I think we can keep pulling it off. For this I am extremely grateful. Lars is a rare gem of a soul. Perhaps I will find other friends on the other side for whom this applies as well, with whom I have erroneously written off the possibility of fellowship in the current era. In any case, I will keep looking, and trying, albeit cautiously and selectively. At the moment, in most cases, I prefer to stand and wait.

The worst of this kind of thing is probably yet to come for all of us as a nation, however. It does not make me despair to think of this situation we are all in, That's a vice in which I refuse to indulge. I pray for everyone I know. 

They Shall Run and Not Be Weary

All about the hills the hosts of Mordor raged. The Captains of the West were foundering in a gathering sea. The sun gleamed red, and under the wings of the Nazgûl the shadows of death fell dark upon the earth. Aragorn stood beneath his banner, silent and stern, as one lost in thought of things long past or far away; but his eyes gleamed like stars that shine the brighter as the night deepens. Upon the hill-top stood Gandalf, and he was white and cold and no shadow fell on him. The onslaught of Mordor broke like a wave on the beleaguered hills, voices roaring like a tide amid the wreck and crash of arms.

This passage is a from a book I'm reading---actually re-reading for the first time in forty years, when I was a sophomore in high school. This passage is the start of a chapter I just read. I'm sure the source is easily recognizable.*

I started reading the story about six weeks ago, as part of the reading I do on Sundays, and before retiring for the evening. It's a lengthly tale, so it has taken a while to make my way through the three volumes. I didn't want to rush it, as the writing is very good. It was written by a man who saw his share of real-life war.

I confess I haven't read a great many books from this genre of contemporary literature---but I have read some of the classics from it.

My late father, however, was a great connoisseur of this type of fiction. He devoured the paperbacks. He had stacks of magazines of the short stories. In the old days you would have found him to be a regular at the tiny mom-and-pop used book store in Fort Collins, next to the Sinclair station that used to be on Drake, which specialized in the trade of these books. He once considered starting that kind of book store himself, but it wasn't his path. At the end of his life he wrote and self-published several books from a tale that he had been forming for years.

For most of my life, my father and I saw eye-to-eye on political and worldly matters. As a child, and as I grew up, I adopted his values and viewpoints without reservation.  This accord between us lasted throughout most of my adult life as well. In the last decade of his life, however, we had come to diverge sharply in how we saw politics and world events, for many of the same reasons that have taken me away from fellowship with friends. For a while he was bewildered by what had become of me. Yet there was never true estrangement, and in the last year of his life, even before he went into his final decline, all of that divide between us was healed. IF you've been in the same place yourself, you can know what kind of peace that now gives me.

He was a believing Christian throughout his life, to his last conscious moments. That too made things much easier in the end. He always said his favorite book of the Old Testament was Isaiah. Four years ago I spoke at his memorial, at the church he and my mother attended at the end of his life. I went through an encapsulation of the entire Gospel of John, which was his favorite Gospel, and which is perfectly in line with his character, if you knew him.

It was not easy to give a short eulogy that summed up all of John, at least not one that does it justice, but for this occasion the Spirit helped me. At the every end of the talk I read aloud the last two verses from the very last chapter of John. I had not paid much attention to this last scrap of writing from all the canonical Gospels until I was preparing that memorial talk. It's not one of the passages from the Bible that gets quoted very often. When I read it, it struck me as one of the most compelling bits of writing from all of Scripture.

*Edit. I think the passages directly following this one are even more stirring. I am fascinated by the command that the central character here gives to the men around him, at the moment of truth in the battle. The author was famously a devout Catholic Christian. That has meaning here. I can't help but compare it to the last line in this famous poem written by an English Protestant.

That Spirit Here

For several years now I have wondered how it would all end, this celebrity-centered social media maelstrom which has mercilessly forced us all to live as extras and bit players on the backlot of a Hollywood-without-borders. We are handed our scripts and we see that the producers have cast us as toxic, unhappy, dishonorable, damaged, and deficient. Our role is to follow the leaders, and keep up with the program. We are allowed to see inside the windows of the luxuriant trailers where the nobility live---the famous, that is---and to covet the attention they receive, as if it were oxygen. Yet we see their lives are the most toxic of all. We are supposed to disregard that.

It has gotten worse every year, yet this culture for our nation has come to seem so natural, almost self-evident. How could it be otherwise? Is it inevitable that this is the price we pay for the opulent prosperity of the 21st century? Is there no going back from post-post-modernity? No, we can only go forward and hope we come out the other end some day.

This is where my thinking was at the beginning of the year. Everything now feels different of course. Among the strange twists of the last few months, we have been granted a glimpse into a world in which the power and influence of celebritydom and fame has been suddenly greatly reduced.

Early during the shutdown, I was talking to one of my friends, and I told them how I had walked down to the neighborhood grocery store to look for foodstuffs. There was a quietness about things that was uncanny, even though the scene appeared ordinary. There was a group of boys outside standing with their bicycles. Something struck me about the way it all felt.

"It feels like 1968," I said.

I didn't mean that as a comparison to political events of that era, although many are now making exactly that particular comparison. I meant that everyday life felt to me as it last had in the late Sixties---not just because I was a young child, but because the world felt different.

For the first time in living memory, the attention of the most people was on the immediate circumstances of their life, unburdened by having their free time filled with everything else that was going on in the world, fed to us by media and social media, concerning people we don't even know.

Our attention collectively was no longer centered on the virtual. We weren't spending our free time talking about, pinging cultural references off each other to determine friend and foe in the great cultural struggle. Those things still continued to exist, but their magnitude was diminished. The buzz had ceased. The world of the here-and-now had suddenly leapt back into prominence. It felt strangely like peace.

I had noticed that almost everyone had begun compiling a list of things that had gone away or been suspended during the shutdown that they wished would never come back. The shutdown had released a yearning in us for something different that a dystopia from which we could see no exit.

The Lord in his mercy had granted us a vision of it, and with this vision now implanted in us, there is no going back to the swaddling cocoon of media culture that existed just a few moments ago. It can never again have exclusive sway over us.

This irreversible historical gate we have passed through is, I believe, is one of the deep psychological reasons that we are seeing the frantic lashing out. The madness only nominally arises from the specific events that supposedly triggered it. Instead I see it arising from a panic that the control over American society exercised by media culture, one that has seemingly only grown for half a century, and which has served certain cultural and political aims, has been irreparably broken. No longer does anything feel inevitable.

We are seeing the last-gasp all-out assault to regain that control, the last chance to marshal that kind of force by the leaders and acolytes of Mediadom. It feels like a suicide charge, all the while proclaiming its triumph.

The charge is not made in the name of any of the noble-sounding ideals being mouthed by them--for those change at a moment's whim---but rather in a much broader cause, which is at the very heart of Postmodernity. It is the idea that by crafting the right narratives, and we can take control of our own historical destiny as a people reshape human nature and history by our will. The specific goals are not so important as the fundamental idea of how we can change society.

The point is not that you are supposed say any specific slogan--for those change with the seasons---but that you say what they tell you to say at any given moment, that you take your direction from the movement. Pay attention to what the good celebrities say. Pay attention to what the good people are saying on social media. Pay attention to how the corporate accounts change their logos for marketing. Rinse and repeat. The details will be sorted out later. You'll be happy with the outcome. Just let yourself take your direction from the movement. Be plastic and we will mold you.

We represent all the good things you want to come into being. We are building the Kingdom here on Earth. We can right all of History's wrongs. Anything is possible--a just, rational, and fair society---so long as we all just get on board.  All bad things can be torn down and destroyed. We can reimagine everything.

The other side---those awful people--are trying to stop this better world from coming into being. They are outdated and are ignorant. They just don't get it. They are the old model of human being is that is being replaced by the new. It is obvious to any intelligent rational observer that we are the side that represents the good, the just, and the fair, Those virtues are built right into our slogans. We have trademarked them. 

Oh, you still need to believe in God? That's ok for now, I guess. A legacy concept like that can still serve the cause. But make sure you use the right pronouns in your prayers. We have our eye on the churches, so don't get any funny ideas. We've spent a lot of time over the years making sure churches won't be a problem for us. Can't you see that fearful, nervous look in your pastor's eyes, talking about current events in his sermon?

We are love. We are compassion. They are hate. Anyone can see that. Anyone can tell you that. Look it up in the dictionary, if you need to, or take a college class. You'll come around. You'll see things our way. And if you don't, well, then we know what kind of person you are, and we'll put you a list and deal with you in a way that is appropriate. You'll regret not taking this advice.

Certainly we shall se the rage continue at least through the election in November, for tactical reasons, but it feels weak. We will see the all-out assault to convince us that great change is underway. Change is underway, of course, but not in the way they think. All of the slogans that people are being forced to mouth will soon get old. Politics is everything to them, and after the colossal political defeat they are going to suffer, it is going to be very difficult for some folks on the other side to adjust. Fortunately for them, our side is much more merciful and forgiving than they imagine.

'Tis true, the stuff I bring for sale
Is not so brisk a brew as ale:
Out of a stem that scored the hand
I wrung it in a weary land.
But take it: if the snack is sour,
The better for the embittered hour;
It should do good to heart and head
When your soul is in my soul's stead;
And I will friend you, if I may,
In the dark and cloudy day.

The Savage Triumph of Celebritydom

American Pop Culture came into being out of the nationwide hunger for entertainment in the form of nationally distributed music, movies, sporting events, and prime-time television shows. But it is no longer dependent on these categories of spectacle for its legitimacy except in a secondary sense.  All it requires now to exist is celebritydom.

Pop music has been in decline since the 1980s. Actual performed and recorded music has long been usurped in national importance by news and events about musicians. The direct influence of individual television programs likewise peaked in the 1970s, when each episode of prime time programming had to function as a self-contained story. People continue to watch, but individual movies and television shows have been eclipsed within the public attention by their respective awards shows, which in turn have been supplanted by commentary about the awards shows themselves, and reaction to that commentary, and so on.

People still listen to music, of course, but the canon of pop music has been closed for years, with only a few minor additions allowed. The canon itself has long since been relegated the soundtrack for movie trailers and television commercials selling consumer products. People listen to their niche Spotify feeds alone with their headphones. Contemporary pop music itself exists primarily to justify the existence of pop stars whose names are among the most famous names in the world, even as many people could not sing a note of their music.

Music, television shows, and other spectacle of Pop Culture now exist primarily to justify celebritydom. We have, effectively, only one television program, the episodes of which are carried by all mainstream broadcast networks in various form, whether as news, entertainment, or sports. It a giant, never-ending, round-the-clock backstage reality program in which the galactic cast includes all of the famous people in celebritydom, playing themselves with overlapping and interweaving plot lines. Most of the cast is allowed to extemporize most of their lines, opining on anything they want. They stay within the cast so long as they do this correctly, receiving the right cues from other celebrities. At sufficient frequency they may perform the nominal activities which made them famous to begin with---releasing an album, publishing a book, winning a sports championship, or starring in a movie---although this is increasingly optional.

Show me someone's Twitter feed and I can tell you their political leanings without reading any of the words directly. Which other users do they retweet, or comment upon? I don't want to know the names they retweet. Just tell which whether the list of voices they choose to amplify are dominated by users with a coveted blue verification badge,  i.e. the ones that Twitter staff deem worthy of the designation of a public figure. If so, then that person is almost certainly a progressive. For progressives it is important that we all listen to the right voices, by which they mean the right well-known voices. Hey y'all, check this out. Why retweet nobody's tweet, no matter how eloquent and on-point, when a famous person's tweet saying providing an equivalent message is available, one that carries the imprimatur of celebritydom?

Political journalism and screenwriting have merged.  In recent presidential debates, one could hear the candidates insist repeatedly on their desire for national unity. Can't we be unified again as a nation, they asked? By this vague statement they mean unified in listening to the same celebrity voices, while the dissenting ones are confined to the oblivion of non-coverage.

The cultural political goals sought by the Left demand first and foremost their adoption within the sphere of Pop Culture, with the assumption that this will seep into everyday over time.

Decades ago, self-described liberals decried the conflation of political leadership with celebritydom. They made fun of this in their comedy. They decried the "manufacture" of public opinion, and "selling-out." There are fewer complaints about this situation these days---at least not believable ones. Corporate media becomes its own opposition by hosting the debates that attack corporate power in a way that increases it. And of course there is no comedy but mocking.

Cultural conservatives, so long as they choose to accept the ground rules of Pop Culture, have no defense against it. Few spectacles have been more pathetic to watch over the last fifty years than the cultural conservatives waging their rear-guard retreat, ceding territory from Pop Culture to the Left.

Just as the victory of the progressives within Pop Culture is now utter and complete, so is the victory of Pop Culture in becoming the undisputed axis of American culture itself. What used to be mainstream American culture is now a subculture exiled from Pop Culture's ecology. It is a subculture that the Left has grudgingly tolerated up until now, but various reasons, now seeks to annihilate.

It could never have been any other way, I would assert. But of course I am a die-hard McLuhanian.

"I'd rather live in any period (of history), if they would leave it alone for a while."

Dropping Out of the Countdown

In secular terms, the greatest divide in the nation right now, the one I believe gives rise to the spectrum of current politics, is whether one believes in Pop Culture. By that I do not mean whether you believe Pop Culture exists. Rather I mean whether you believe that Pop Culture is, and should be, the center of American culture as a whole.

That Pop Culture is synonymous with American culture would appear to many people as self-evident But this is true only if one gives precedence to the voices from Pop Culture itself, above other sources of information.

I confess to having long been fascinated with Pop Culture, to put it mildly.  I am still to this day a walking almanac of the politics, sports, movies, television, music and other cultural trivia for certain years of the late Twentieth Century (but not past a certain date).

I have also long been interested in the phenomenon of Pop Culture itself. I've had an awareness of its important as a thing unto itself, from my earliest days of childhood. What is Pop Culture, and what does it mean that we live with it, and in it?

Among other things I am interested in its roots---Broadway, Tin Pan Alley, Vaudeville, Minstrel Shows, Protestant revivals, the Chautauqua movement, the Victrola, the kinetoscope, and all the other strands that went into the creation of Pop Culture at its genesis.

But Pop Culture is a Postmodern phenomenon, and I've been most interested in the phases by which Pop Culture, after its birth, came to dominate the nation to exclusion of just about all other forms of culture, to the point which American culture as it existed before Pop Culture is now a subculture.

As many have pointed out, Pop Culture could exist only in the era of mass media. This is easy to acknowledge with the merest reflection. It required the existence not only of the discovery of radio waves, and the invention of the wireless, but above all, the invention of the first radio and then television broadcast networks. I love this era of media history, during when the networks as we know it were being formed, as corporate entities. In this sense Pop Culture in America dates from the late 1920s, specifically from around the year 1927, if one could pick a single year.

Before that era, Americans certainly appreciated music. They watched theater performances. They went to sporting events. But after that time Americans increasingly gave their attention during their free time to these on a scale that would not have been possible to them. Moreover, and perhaps most significantly, they began to give their attention en masse to the same tiny set of musicians, actors, and athletes, as well as to the radio and television news broadcasters who reported on these people.

This captivation of the entire attention of a nation upon a small set of people was entirely new in the history of civilization. Certainly there was precedent in how Christianity was practiced, especially through its art and architecture. But this was something very different. Compared to earlier forms of European civilization, it was if we were all suddenly living in the same duchal court, and our society began to take on aspects of that type of interpersonal communication.

Up until that time in history,  for the vast majority of people who had ever walked the earth, one's attention was by sheer necessity, focussed primarily on those things in their immediate, physical vicinity. This physical radius was typical small, even for dwellers of great cities.

One's attention could turn to physically distant events and people only through vehicles such as prayer, or through the written word, first books (post 1500) and then later newspapers (the first modern mass medium, arising around 1850 in the rise of Victorian middle class prosperity). But of course the printed word is a slow method of transmission, even in mass form.

As great thinkers have pointed out, the use of any particular vehicle of information-transmission, however simple or complex, necessarily creates certain psychological states inside the individuals who use them, and which can thereby come to dominate an society, inevitably shaping its culture, politics, religion in certain predictable ways, despite any surface intentions of the people living in the society.

Throughout my life I have been besotted with Pop Culture as much as anyone of my cohort. Yet perhaps because of that, I have been fascinated by people who lived in the era before Pop Culture became dominant. My grandparents, whom I was very close to as a child, were like that. I recognized from my earliest conscious days that they were a different kind of people than myself and the people my age. This awareness was strong in me from at least age seven.

We of the new type of human were so agile of mind in thinking about Pop Culture things. We could skip from one reference to another seamlessly. Even though the older ones watched television, they didn't have that kind of dexterity with Pop Culture references. For them television was something one watched for entertainment. After the show was over their mind turned to other things. The shows and music weren't something that someone lived.

It occurred to me a couple years ago that the people of my own generation with whom I am now most comfortable are in fact folks who, for whatever reason, grew up at least partially insulated from the Pop Culture during the 1970s and 1980s, when Pop Culture was at its height.

They are the people who might mysteriously miss my offhand references to a television show from the 1970s, or an Eighties pop music song. I thought this was weird at the time. Now I am thankful that I crossed their paths when I did.

It's not as if I envy these people for their having been spared Pop Culture's full onslaught on their souls during their formative years. I wouldn't trade my experiences for theirs. We all have our paths.

I realize it was my own path to become a hard-core follower and believer in Pop Culture, even as I cringe with sadness remembering it all. I can recollect in 1977 ditching church early, right after services ended, to sit in the passenger seat of our orange VW van to turn on the car radio and listen to Casey Kasem's Top 40 Countdown. It was very important to me to find out what the number one song was---had it changed?. It more important to know this than to linger inside with my family and the other people inside our little mission church on the north side of Ames.

Of course I was a teenager, so it is all forgivable. But oh, what utterly wasted time that feels like now, filling my mind with the riffs and lyrics of recorded performances made by people who did not know me personally, and would never know me personally, all of it urging me to feel emotions and imagine situations far outside the ken of what the thirteen-year-old me might have otherwise been focussing on.

If instead I had ditched my family to walk in the nearby sumac woods, down by the creek along the Skunk River, as my grandfather might have done, it might still be painful to remember for the exclusion I created, but at least I would have gained something tangible from that escape into the woods. Instead I allowed my plastic mind to passively absorb the nuances and by-laws of a fantasy simulation of the world served to me from afar by people of often questionable character and less-than-noble motivations.

How well all that time spent listening to the radio and television trained me during those years to feel, act, and react as a Pop Culture adept.  This is what being a human being is about. How seductive it was, finding other people my own age who watched the same t.v. show or knew the lyrics of the same familiar songs. I understand almost all of recent history and current politics because of it, even as I recoil from it now.

How grating and banal those preserved-forever notes and lyrics strike me now. What I would give, to have those few moments back, and to go back inside St. David's and linger with those people who are now gone.

The Desert Fathers and Modern-Day Heretics

When I pray for my friends with whom I disagree about worldly things, I never pray for them to change their political opinions. To do so would be.a degradation of prayer. Who am I to say what someone else's political opinions should be, unless they should invite me to help shape them?

Even if they themselves should open up a critique of my own opinions, at my invitation or otherwise, to me this is not an invitation for me to render my own critique of theirs, although one could argue that it is possible to take it as permission to do so without loss of honor.

There are stronger considerations in my motivations than even honor. These include the very difficult striving for humility, which according to one early Desert Father, is the one virtue that the demonic cannot counterfeit.

I could imagine praying for people I know to be liberated from certain possessions---not demonic possessions, as I am not qualified to judge that. Rather I mean possessions of mind. According to one latter-day Protestant writer who is not rarely cited as a Christian authority by Catholic priests, demons rarely need to possess us directly these days. In the Modern era we choose most of our possessions by own our will, without the assistance of the demonic.

These possessions I may judge to have taken hold in other people I know, and for which I might wish for them to be liberated, are ones I see active in them by using my own faculties, which are highly fallible. So when it comes to individuals, I must tread lightly here, and very rarely pray for this kind of thing directly. In the case of individuals, one should probably strive to limit oneself to the most basic principles of charity by praying for their health, joy, peace, and salvation.

When might I pray for liberation from possession? I might do so in the case of nations (a concept endorsed by God throughout Scripture), on which level judgments of possession are arguably more legitimately made (but probably only for one's own nation, or a nation in which one has spent substantial time). 

Sursum Corda: Prayers for the Diversion of Giant Asteroids and Other Petitions

Some mornings, like this morning, I wake up earlier than usual. I don't keep any kind of clock or electronic device next to me in the bedroom, so to know the time I go out into the kitchen. This time the little blue digits on the stove told me it was just past 2:30 a.m.

If I wake up and find it is before 2 a.m., I almost always go back to bed and fall asleep. Between 2 and 4 it is optional what I do, depending how I feel. This morning I felt like starting the day, so I went out onto the porch and sat in the rocking chair. The darkness was thick and silent. Being Sunday morning, there were no sounds of night construction crews coming from the distance, as there might be on other days of the week in the hot part of the year. 

I savored the moments, and time before me. It would hours before I would make coffee. Immediately I found the Rosary beads and began praying, in Latin as usual. My mind skipped around as recited the prayers, and I pulled my thoughts back towards sacred as much possible, as I must always do, as we all must do, except for the great saints among us. 

I remembered the words from a Youtube video from a Catholic priest I'd seen the night before, about meditation. Meditation has a very long tradition of the Church and is an integral part of the practice of Catholicism, even though the word itself has been co-opted to now mean mostly Eastern mysticism in our culture. In the video the priest explained the difference, including how the objective of meditation is different in Christian meditation than in Eastern.

He also mentioned how St. Ignatius of Loyola, as well as Teresa of Avila, both advocated meditation in which one more or less pretends to talk to Jesus, or Mary, or another Saint, as if facing them directly. It is the original method acting, I thought to myself. I had already been doing that, as it happens, often imagining Mary---the terror of demons---being able to see me, and into my soul, as I recited the greetings to her that are part of the Rosary.

This morning, after going once through the five decades of the Rosary (a decade is a set of 10 Ave Marias/Hail Marys), and before the usual ending prayers, I decided my early rising was a gift to devote to additional prayer. So I went immediately into a second set of five decades, alternating the decades in multiple languages as I like to do---Latin, Greek, German, French, English. Then I decided two rounds were not enough on this morning. For the first time ever I went for three---the full Rosary, as they call, of 153 in total (counting the 3 that one recites at the very beginning). The last round of five decades I did entirely in English.

By the last few of the 15 decades, I found myself in a place of peace that was rare. My mind drifted towards petitions on behalf not of myself, or anyone I know, but for the whole world at once. It was a gift. 

It might sound silly, but among the directions my mind took was to praying for diversion of all giant asteroids from Earth, that might destroy us. I sometimes prayer for this. It is not as if I particularly fear this type of event. I believe we are protected from these so long as God wills it, but I know there are people out there who have explicitly wished for this event, jokingly or not, even printing bumper stickers to that effect. I think it is good that these diabolic intentions are countered explicitly by prayer, and as a part-time astrophysicist who is also a Christian, who else should do this but me?

In these moments of feeling opened to the whole world, which are gifted from time to time to non-saints like me, what usually comes is an awareness of the magnitude of suffering that exists out in the world at that very moment. I don't mean the kind of suffering that politics and media want us to focus on---the collective amorphous kind that are supposedly experienced by groups of people based on what in academia has come to be called identity. 

I mean the real kind of suffering, experienced by individuals, the kind that is unique to them in its variation. I mean serious suffering. 

It is as if all at once I can feel the pain of everyone suffering at that very moment in the entire city, or nation, or the world. Or I imagine I can, in my limited capacity.  

Perhaps at that moment, I might feel no personal suffering, having been granted a respite from grief, physical pain, and from anguish over worldly situations of myself and the people I love. But in that moment the suffering comes as a flood that overwhelms me from the certain knowledge that out there, in the world at this moment, every type of horrible situation that you can imagine happening, or fear could happen, or that has happened to you, is happening to someone, and their suffering is as real as any suffering can be. Right now, as I type this, as you read this, someone out there is feeling exactly that.

Someone is dire physical pain, almost unbearable that cannot bear the thought of continuing to live. Someone just got a fatal diagnosis. Someone was just told by their doctor that they will probably lose their eyesight. Someone else just gave up on last hope for the cure of lifelong disease. Someone just learned that the cancer has metastasized and invaded their bones. Someone just threw up from chemo. Someone is in a hospital bed bandaged head to toe from from burns that will never heal.

Someone is breathing their last breaths with the horror of confronting morality suddenly in their last seconds, never having suspected that today would be their last day on Earth.

Someone is weeping unconsolably from having lost their last companion, unable to bear the thought of what is to come. Someone is in a nursing home unvisited for years, forgotten and neglected, unable to even express the torment they are in. 

Someone is deep despair from loneliness or torments of inner demons, from seemingly unconquerable addictions, mental illness and trains of thought that enslave them to being confined to a living torture chamber.

Someone just found out the person they thought they were going to marry has left them to be with another person. Someone just learned their spouse has been having an affair. Someone is watching their prematurely born baby gasping at the edge of life in a NICU unit. Someone just woke up in the middle of the night to receive word that their child was killed in a car accident.  Someone just learned their spouse died of sudden heart attack before they could even say good-bye. Someone has to remember, each day for the rest of their life, a squad mate bleeding to death in front of them as they were helplessly pinned in bomb wreckage.

Someone, somewhere, is about to receive that type of phone call. Someone just woke up and remembered what happened the day before, and from that moment of peaceful waking, the horror came over them like a demon, and will stay with them until they fall asleep. 

The world is raging at the moment, but of what do they rage? I have no use for pleas to bend my knee in obedience to political causes and to mouth slogans that are supposed designed to address group suffering. I have no use for the litany of collective-identity pain from "systematic oppression." I have no use for pleas for submission to a movement that already knows what my sins are based on my demographics 

Such pleas may be well-meaning, but they are ultimately designed to lead us towards advocacy of certain political action supervised by individuals seeking worldly power. They want you to line up behind the celebrities and public figures whom they respect.  They offer nothing but deception and distraction from the real suffering in the world, that kind that is experienced by each individual, each one of us, who without exception is made in the image of God. 

You can discern the phony pleas for compassion by how people react when you decline to join in with their revolutionary comment thread. How do they react when you politely take a pass on adopting the latest noble-sounding slogan-du-jour, to go with the six slogans you should already have adopted by now,  in a constantly shifting hierarchy. Do they express judgment of you, or even quiet anger, perhaps with a warning that you have put yourself on the "wrong side of history"? If so you know what their true intentions were, and in my opinion, it has little to do with relieving suffering.

Lord, who didst decree the charge of the electron and the speed of light, and all the dimensionless constants in the fundamental laws, in Thine infinite mercy, let it be Thy will that the positions and velocities of all celestial bodies of the Solar System,  evolving in time from their initial conditions in accordance with the quasi-deterministic laws of  classical mechanics as applied to non-integrable many-body systems and approximated by perturbative convergent solutions of Newton's laws, General Relativity, the yet-undiscovered equations of quantum gravity and other theories yet unimagined by Science, be such that all giant asteroids and other bodies that could destroy life on a large-scale be strongly diverted from the Earth, even before our detection of their presence, and that they career harmlessly into the vacuum of space, never to approach this planet in any menacing way. 

For Thy continued protection, we thank Thee, O Lord. We know all power belongs to Thee, and it is in Thy power completely to destroy all life on Earth in this way, or any other way, in an instant without warning. For the sake of Thy children, in all nations and on all continents, who still need time to repent, and to come to Thee, and for the sake of the suffering of Thy Son Jesus Christ on the cross, spare us.

Lord, hear our prayer.

Charles Lockhart McVicker, Capt. U.S. Army

Based on information provided to me by my late mother on several occasions, I believe I am a descendant of this man. My dear sister, with whom I have many disagreements, and whom I love beyond measure, and whom I look forward to seeing later this summer in Estes Park as usual, would know the answer for certain, if it's the same man. My uncle Mark is named for him, by his middle name. We are Scotch-Irish on this branch of the family. Fittingly, the family line weaves in and out between Catholicism and Protestantism.

From

History of Allegheny County, Pennsylvania, Including its Early Settlement

We See the World Differently, You and I

There has never been a greater distance between me and many of the people I know. For the majority of people I have called friend, and for many of my family members, communication is almost impossible lately.

This is of course because of worldly events, specifically domestic politics. Even before the recent events, while talking to many of friends, online or in person (or by letter, which I use, and still prefer over all other ways) I felt a great amount of stress, which I likened to tiptoeing through a mine field. Always below the surface in them is an anger.

Some friends are aware that I disagree with them. They know my positions, and they know that I voted differently from them in the last Presidential election. Perhaps they figure, based on their own news media, that surely I must have changed my mind by now, and have come to my senses, and will vote the same as them in the upcoming election.

Perhaps they know the truth---that unless they have changed their side, we will vote differently from each other again in November.

None of this difference between us bothers me in the sense of friendship. I feel no anger or animosity towards them. I am, I believe, perfectly capable of calm discussions, about politics or other subjects. I have no need to hash over our differences, but if they come up, I feel capable of addressing them with a sense of charity and respect towards the other person, and to answer with honesty and candor any question they pose.

Experience has taught me that for those who hold such deep anger about these issues, there is no way to avoid politics in any lengthly conversation. Some of them are genuinely unaware of the difference, figuring that all sane and decent people must agree with them,

They will smoke out the difference, sometimes when I fail certain purity tests they provide me, to test my loyalty to certain ideologies and positions. Sometimes they bait me, thinking that if I disagree with them, I am surely stupid and can be easily led into outrageous statements that prove that they are right and I am horrible.

Experience has taught me that when the contempt arises, or the anger flashes out in full, I become a stranger to them. I am no longer any person familiar to me. It is as if I never knew you, is what they communicate to me.  They have names and labels ready for me. I've been accused of murder. Surely you can't be one of those people? You're joking, right?

All of this can happen without my barely saying a word. I usually stand back and let the other person vent. I try to understand the hurt place they are coming from. I never argue, even as try may try to put me on the spot, as if we are arguing on Facebook and they are summoning the posse of our mutual friends to shame me. Nor do I seek to justify or explain. Of course I will pray for them, extra hard.

Bitter experience has taught me that once this spasm of anger erupts, and once the look of fear or contempt comes into their eyes, then the friendship is beyond repair at least for the foreseeable future.  Only in the case of blood kin can the relationship be repaired.

There is nothing to do but to go away and let it cool down, but this will takes years, maybe decades, if ever. Most of them will not seek me out to mend fences. If any of them did reach out, I would welcome communication with them as if they were a long-lost brother or sister. True bonds of friendship or so amazingly rare these days, and each one that I still possess is a treasure that I will go far out of my way to keep alive. Communicating with them, even over normal thing, can feel like passing coded resistance messages in an occupied and conquered nation.

Fortunately there have been only a few total write-offs of friends due to anger. For most of my friends, I have not spoken to them in so long that we remain in a state of quantum-like ignorance of what each other thinks about the world, and this is probably a very good thing. I send Christmas cards to them, and for a select few, I even offer the chance to meet up, thinking they may be an exception to the rules I listed above, or may have even become sympathetic to my side on certain issues.

I feel sad for the one that I must keep at arm's length for now. Better to keep silent and hope that one day we can speak.

I feel sad for the time we live in. But I can't change the way I see the world. It would be refreshing to have one person of the other side, at least once, be curious about why I see the world as I do, and ask me why I hold hold the positions I do. They think they know this already, I would wager, and the answer satisfies them about my character.

If the past and present is any measure, I vote as I do with great enthusiasm, hoping, and perhaps even expecting, that for the good of everyone, and for the nation, and for the world, that their side will be defeated in a landslide of unprecedented historic proportions, in a such a way that will shake them out of their possession by wrath. I think the country is begging for this kind of reset, which is why it will happen, just as it has happened before, in my living memory. But this time it probably needs to be even bigger than previous times.

I had never wanted to crush their side, as they have wanted to destroy us (even with physical violence), but an electoral wipeout of this magnitude seems like the only thing that will save the country at this hour.

Yet that is the only will I need to see enforced. I know that almost every horrible thing they imagine happening in the wake of their defeat is complete hallucinations.

One side is going to win and one side is going to lose. There is no way around that. You can wish the sides to not exist but they do exist, and one is going to win this battle and one side is not. I think we all realize that now. There is no retreating. But there may be mass defections from one side coming soon. I think I can speak for everyone on this side of the battle that we were welcome you, without reservation and without condition of changing your mind on just about anything except who we are.

Whatever God wills in this matter, I will accept of course. He has a better view of things than I do. Perhaps he has a creative solution in mind that I haven't thought of, that no human being has yet thought of.  If God strips the nation of its hedge of protection, we will surely suffer the joke of oppression. What do I pray for specifically? I pray that God spares us that. And I pray for peace of course.

No shootings. No violence. No massacres. No assaults. For everyone, everywhere.  If you really needed to hear that from me, then we have work to do, with understanding each other.

And if you are one of those friends I mentioned, if you can bear what I've written above, and ready for the challenge of speaking with each other again, consider this an open invitation. I welcome your words remotely and hope that we can sit down in friendship in the near future. You can scream at me if you need. I've been screamed at by the best of them. I can be as stoic as it takes while you speak your mind at me, if that is what is needed to bring us together again. We can make friendly wagers about the election. All I ask is after the (figurative) smoke has cleared, that we can speak as one person to another, and not as virtual representations.

Prayers for Others, Easy and Difficult

After reciting my last prayers in the morning,  I put down the Rosary beads on the small table, and before going inside, I often linger briefly on the rocking chair in meditation directed at sacred and other things. That is, I seek to direct my mind towards sacred things, but often I must do so by great force of will against the drift towards worldly thoughts,  for which I remind myself there is plenty of time later in the day.

After a few minutes I go inside to the dark kitchen and begin making coffee, flipping the switch on the electric kettle, which will have been filled with water the night before. The LED around the switch lights up like a supernova in the dark and the kettle begins simmering immediately, a comfortable sound of morning underway. Then I pick up the little electric spice mill and grind the beans that were placed inside last night. The screeching of the grinder rudely penetrates the darkness of the kitchen for a few seconds then ceases.

I take the glass Chemex carafe out of its holder place it near the edge of the counter in front of me. Then I pull a folded square paper filter from out of the vertical stack of filters in the side slot of the carafe holder. I spread out the square filter open with my fingers, the way one is supposed to do for the Chemex, and place it loosely in the upper cone-like chamber of the glass device, the paper still stiff in its dryness, not yet conformed to the cone of the glass.

While the kettle gently increases in intensity, I linger at the sink for a moment or two, looking out the window towards the west at the lights and the White Tank Mountains far in the distance against the still-dark horizon. I invariably give myself a brief eye checkup, closing both eyes alternatively, and then using both at once to actively focus on the horizon and on things in the foreground,

Then I go back outside to let the water boil, which takes seven or eight minutes. I take a seat once again in the chair, sometimes to meditate, although now I don't prevent my thoughts from  turning to worldly things if that is where they need to go.

But I often strive to take this time to pray more, not in the form of recited prayers, but petitions to God for other people individually and specifically. I pray for certain souls every day, people close to me, living and dead. I regularly make a point to scour my memory at length to remember and to pray for as many individual people in my life that I know and have ever known---family, friends, non-friends, rivals, acquaintances, long ago co-workers, bosses, former in-laws, teachers, classmates, students, collaborators, brief traveling companions, doctors, cops, priests, pastors, and every other category of person who has crossed my path. Each one is a chid of God, and worthy of that dignity. Each interaction was a gift, and a test.

Some names are more painful to remember than others, so I try to pray for those people more often. I dig into my soul to ask God to give to each one of them joy, love, and peace in this life, knowing that if God does so, they will not ever connect this to me, or any intentions I would have for them.

Prayer for others is part of the atonement that comes from the forgiveness we are promised. Sometimes it is the only atonement possible.

But if I feel the pain in recollection of certain names, I don't beat myself up about the same old things over and over. I believe that God will forgive me of sins for which I repent, and certainly I have repented of so much wrong I've done. Yet at times I discover layers of my sinfulness in certain long hashed-over episodes of my life, facets of of having failed to live up to what God would have wanted me to do. The righteous path that I should have taken is now revealed in more detail, vividly and unmistakably, in contrast to what I actually did. At times I thus have to repent all over again, given this new awareness of the Truth. Each such unveiling, no matter how unsettling  at the moment, gives a feeling of liberation and peace that encourages one to go onward in this quest of self-reflection.

I pray for public figures as well---the leaders of government to whom God mandates our temporal obedience, providing we can obey without incurring certain types of sin, and in accordance with conscience. It seems fitting of our time that the most difficult prayers are in this category, even though they are for people whom I have never met.

Praying for the folks you agree with, that's easy. It is a gut punch to have to pray for individuals you privately wish could begin enjoying a long and healthy retirement, who you wish could cease their opposition to what you see as a public will for the Good, and even for ones to whom you think certain Justice is due. I confess to not praying often enough for public figures whom I have ridiculed or about whom I have spoken ill, sometimes even in the midst of mediation or prayer, just moments before, if my mind wanders. 

Thankfully God has a better view of things than you and I, and He has a far better plan than any of us could ever begin to dream of making. It is such a relief not to have that burden of deciding all of the course of the world, only the part that my individual duty, role and conscience prescribe and permit me to do.

That I May Be Diminished in Opinion

In my normal morning routine on the porch, the last prayer I say, as an additional prayer after the Rosary, is one in French---the Litany of Humility.

I say it in French because it was originally composed in that language, supposedly by a French bishop in the Nineteenth Century. Among other things, reciting it after the Rosary gives me a chance to practice speaking French each day first thing in the morning. Speaking different languages exercises different muscles in one's mouth and face.

I prefer the French version to the English version for several reasons. I think it flows better. The English version feels a bit clunky. Moreover, the French version uses the subjunctive mood, which is more common in French than English, and which I find pleasing and beautiful to use in speech.

The English translation doesn't quite work for me. In the English version, in one of the lines one says "From the desire of being loved, deliver me, Lord." In the French, the verb used in that line corresponds more appropriately to "From the desire of receiving affection, deliver me, Lord." That makes more sense to me in a deep way. The desire to be loved is perhaps holy, I think, so the English verb is deficient here.

I know French well enough that the prayer has immediate emotional impact as I say it. I don't have to think about what the words mean as I say them by making an internal translation. This is important because the prayer is a difficult examination of conscience, and sometimes my pride rebels against wanting the things the prayer expresses. It goes against everything the world tells us we should want. That's another reason I save it for last before facing the day.

Astronomical Twilight: Vita, Dulcedo

Two years ago after  I came back from Europe, I took advantage of the westbound jet lag to craft the new habit of rising much earlier in the morning than I had during most of my life. Usually I strive to be up well before five. It took months of discipline of going to bed at eight p.m. until it became normal. Now this routine happens naturally.

I prefer to get up during astronomical twilight or before. This time of year, near the apogee of the summer solstice, usually the light will have broken out across the eastern sky by the time I make it out to the patio.

I take a seat on a wooden rocking chair that sits on the patio. It is made in rough-hewn naturalistic style, and was brought from the banks of the Ohio out to the Arizona desert in a moving pod. The chair is backed up the corner of the wall with just enough room to rock, and faces at an angle out towards the sky. The view outward is partly obscured by a rice paper folding screen which will serve to block the harsh sunlight later in the morning when the sun will have risen above the neighboring building to the east.

After taking a seat, I reach down in the dark with my right hand to the small folding table next to the chair and fumble to find the green agate rosary beads. I went for almost six months saying the Rosary daily without a set of beads, relying only on my fingers or my memory to keep track, until I bought these beads online last year. It is foolish not to use beads, I found. It is much more relaxing to use them. It is best to get a set with proper round beads and bits of chain between them. It is the small links of chains between the beads which you clasp as you say each prayer.

On most days I say the Rosary entirely in Latin, as well as the several additional prayers afterwards. I learned the Lord's Prayer in Latin in college in Oregon, for my Latin class. It took weeks and months to learn the rest of the prayers. but now they all came out with fluidly.

On some days, or if I say the Rosary for a second time on a given day, then I will often switch up the languages, usually using Greek for the second decade and the accompanying the Lord's Prayer and the Glory Be. Learning the Greek prayers took the longest, even though I knew some Greek before this. I had to watch Youtube videos with the playback slowed down to half speed, mouthing the syllables slowly.

All the languages have a special feel and beauty in the prayers. One find insight in the variations of syntax and vocabulary. Greek feels so beautiful and elegant after so much Latin.

Then I use different language for each of the three remaining decades, and the accompanying Lord's Prayer and the Glory Be. When saying these prayers in a modern language, I often think of myself as offering up the prayers on behalf of the native speakers of the language, and the nations that have turned away from God in such large numbers. Usually I save English for the last decade, as by then the words have an amazing potency in my native tongue.

I always go back to Latin for the Salve Regina at the end, as it's the only version I know. Even the post-Vatican II Catholic priests often do this in their masses. In the dark, it's impossible not to sing it, softly to myself.

On Not Knowing God's Thoughts

After I had spoken my peace with comment about induction in science, the thoughts pouring through my head meant that I was only half-listening to the comments that followed. Yet I was trying to pay attention as they were on the same topic.

Out of the noise that followed, one comment leapt out at me and stuck deep into me. It was made by an Israeli woman named Norma, who was the only woman in attendance this time. She was from a generation older than me, and there was something beautiful about how we almost never saw her full face, as her laptop screen camera was aimed at the wrong angle. Mostly I just saw her hair.

There is an almost built-in Luddite nature of physics. We are among the last to adopt any kind of communication technology. The last time I had given a talk, for example, physicists were using overhead slide transparencies, which are ideal for science, as one can write directly on them during the lecture using a Dry-Erase marker. Two years ago when I came back to the field I was saddened to see that physics had succumbed to the digital revolution, with Powerpoint and PDFs. Something had been lost, but there was no fighting it.

Norma was agreeing with some of the points I had made. What truly got to me was something almost out of the blue. I wish I remembered the exact wording. It was something like: "the universe does not have to follow mathematical laws."

It was not the first time I had heard this remark, but for the first time in my life I think I understood it deeply. But at last I was ready to hear it. It almost staggered me, the realization of what it implied.

In the minutes and hours that followed, the realization came to me. Like all  physicists, I had been predisposed to the notion that of course the universe follows mathematical laws. The essence of physics is the discovery and testing of these laws. Furthermore we know what the fundamental laws of the universe are---the laws of Quantum Mechanics. These laws are expressed in a formal mathematical way.

Then it hit me that I had been thinking about it all in a very limited way. Of course she was right. The universe does not have to follow mathematical laws. It appears to follow mathematical laws. But we do not know if this is true in general. We know it is apparently true for the limited sub-systems of the universe that we can examine with experiment and observation.

For four hundred years we have lived with the civilization mindset that our ability to induce mathematical laws about the universe in our limited fashion means necessarily that the universe as a whole, at large, is a giant mathematical machine, playing out via the ballet of understandable numbers from one state to the next.

But there is absolutely no reason this has to be true. Our success so far is not in the slightest way a proof of this statement. To state that the universe is a giant mathematical machine, even a quantum one, is a giant leap of faith regarding the application of our knowledge about nature that we have induced through experiment. Moreover, our current ability to successfully apply mathematical laws to nature is so limited, and will always be so limited, that will never be able to prove this.

But how could it be otherwise, one might ask? The universe has to be a giant mathematical machine, like a giant computer program, because what else could it possibly be?

To which the answer is a simple: the universe is in no way obligated to follow mathematical laws simply because we as human beings cannot conceive of it being any other way. The Sherlock Holmes type of proof doesn't work here (i.e. once you eliminate every other possible explanation, whatever remains has to be true). Nor does Occam's Razor. There is no guarantee our "simplest explanation," no matter how successful so far, can be generalized to the entire universe.

To think it can be generalized is perhaps the height of human folly, and the greatest leap of logic I can imagine. We can insist all we want that the universe must be understandable by us, but in the end it is a belief that cannot be supported by evidence except in the most peripheral way. There are plenty of folks who would claim that this leap of logic is the most grounded proposition they can imagine, and that anyone who believes otherwise is foolish.

Physicists by and large are more humble than that, thankfully. Most of them know too well the limitations of physics, much more than non-physicists. In some sense, maybe I became a real physicist when I realized this.

There is great freedom in this realization for it allows one to bring the tools of mathematical analysis to the parts of the universe for which we can indeed make valid statements without the burden of believing that we are "knowing God's thoughts," as Einstein supposedly put it. Even atheists probably understand what he meant with that remark.

I often wonder if this last notion---the idea that fundamental theory in physics is somehow the discovery of the "thoughts of God" is one of the principal reasons that theoretical physics largely ground to a halt for the last half century, after such rapid progress up to the mid 1960s.

Personally I am happy just thinking that I am toiling away in a small way, revealing a tiny bit more about the "material plan" of the universe with equations. I am happy seeking God's thoughts elsewhere.

Fact, Fiction, and Physics

One of the nice things about our organization and our conference is that we welcome a wide variety of subjects and speakers, so long as they are connected to relativistic dynamics in some way. Everyone who has gone to the conference over the years knows this, and the newcomers find it very refreshing to be able to explore a wide variety of topics that might not be possible at other conferences.

There was a talk on the third and final day of the conference that reminded me of this. After a morning of heavy-duty math-laden talks on quantum field theory, one of the attendees from Israel named Uri presented a talk about something I was just talking about, namely the nature of the determination of truth in science, and how it touches on the topics we had been discussing.

I could tell from the discussion that all of us in the Zoom conference found it a welcome break. There were quite few comments after the talk. Even yours truly chimed in (I am famous for asking questions from the last conference, but I had been holding back this time because we had such little time between he talks to keep on schedule and I found that others' questions were usually better than mine. But in this case, I jumped in to ask a question because I had to know the answer.

What I wanted to know was if the speaker was familiar with the work of Nelson Goodman, an American philosopher who was popular in the 1960s, and who influenced many others. Noam Chomsky was one of his students.

The speaker said he was not familiar with Goodman. Not surprisingly, no one had heard of this influential man either. I got excited and a flood of thoughts went through my head.

"Goodman wrote what was once considered to be one the most important books of philosophy since World War II, called Fact, Fiction, and Forecast.," I said. "It is considered by many to be the most important statement on the inductive reason since David Hume. Everyone was reading it in the 1960s for a while. I was actually reading it two years ago during the Mérida conference."

"Goodman specifically addressed the problem presented by counterfactuals in logical systems that rely on induction, which of course physics does utterly and completely."

"Counterfactuals are logical statements along the lines of 'if something (that didn't happen) had happened, something else would have happened as a result.' Goodman picked apart the inherent problems that this presents for induction and the determination of natural law."

"Of course in physics we tend to fall back into a positivist defense of what we do, almost instinctively. Hey, I can derive the spectrum of hydrogen or the orbit of Mars, and go then measure it, and voilà, I found my numbers are correct. But of course we know there is much more to the story than that."

That was about all I could express in the tiny amount of time I had to comment. I didn't want to hog the bandwidth. While others put in their comments, my mind drifted and I began to assemble the idea for a talk on Goodman, and how it applies to the "unsolvable" problems of physics. Within about five minutes I put together the entire outline of a talk I could give at the next conference, and a possible paper to publish out of it.

The best time to prepare a conference talk is at another conference. You'll never have as much motivation as you have in those magical hours when you together with other people who are eager to discuss these kinds of subjects.

In Saecula Saeculorum

One of the reasons one can cite for the reason that we are in an Era of Patience as far as astrophysics goes, is that some of the great open questions in that field will simply never be settled.

For example, the theories of galactic dynamics are only partially complete. One of the big open questions is something called the rotation curve of galaxies. Basically this refers to how the speeds of stars in spiral disk galaxies such as our own drop off as you get farther and farther form the center of the galaxy. The speeds get slower but not at the rate predicted by any accepted theory. Predicting the proper rotation curve is one of the aims of any good modification to gravitation, and was the subject of multiple talks at the recent conference.

But there are many deep problems to answering this question definitively, and it is the same problem as in any theory of galactic dynamics. It is that we will never be able to verify many of these predictions by experiment.  We can spin all the mathematical theories we want, but we can never be sure many of them actually refer to a physical reality.

Why is this so? In the case of galactic dynamics, when we look out and observe them, we see only a glimpse in time, and from the standpoint of the lives of galaxies, we may as well see only a snapshot and the briefest possible motion, if you can even call it that.

Even with the planets, which Kepler observed over decades, we can gather meaningful data over the course of a human lifetime, and settle questions of theory. With galaxies, even if we had been observing them since the dawn of civilization, our data would be only a tiny window in the motion and evolution of these large-scale structures. Even if we observe for the ten thousand years, we will have barely any data that can tell us what will happen in the long run, and thus our theories will be guesses.

It is a problem that goes deep to the heart of what science means and the kinds of questions it seeks to answer.

We are like mayflies who live and die in a daylong flick of time on the scale of the universe. Our possible to do experiments on the cosmological scale is nil and will always be so. We are human, we know so little. In this sense, the Era of Patience will be permanent. It is one of many reason that there may never again be a time in the history of mankind where physical sciences like the first half of the Twentieth Century.

Of course, this does not even factor in the notion, taken seriously by many scientists, that we may actually be living in a simulation. If so, is what is out there even truly "out there."

Absurd, you say? We can see into deep space. Of course all those deep space objects we see in the night sky are physically there, at the distance and scale we think they are. Sure. All right then, go ahead and prove it.

Or do you want us to take it on faith that it is all really there? It's the simplest answer, right? Surely there's nothing wrong with using Occam's Razor to prove that the entire universe out there exists?

It makes the problem of the galactic rotation curve look pretty simple after all.

Side note: in any case anyone is wondering, I am not at all a fan of this man. I don't consider what he does to be science but entertainment. He is the favorite deceiver of people who claim to "f-ing love science." Yet I've never found anything he said to be intellectually stimulating or worth discussing in any serious way. Worse, after leaving the University of Texas as a graduate student he slandered some very good people in the astronomy department I happen to know personally accusing them of racism (of course). Some things never change. I have no use for people like him. That's all I'm going to say about politics and current events for the moment.

Experimentum Crucis

What good is the physics work I have done--the equations I derived, the thoughts put in logical order attempting to understand some little corner of how the material operates in axiomatic and mathematical fashion?

I ask myself that question, not only in regard to what I did years ago, but also what I am doing now, and the virtual conference I just attended, that was so pleasing?

It's a question for my ego. I don't know the answer of course. Even back in Austin, I asked myself whether the results I spent so hard to achieve and publish were ultimately mathematical curiosities that no relation to anything measurable and observable. Such were the nature of the physical systems I looked at---far into the hyper-relativistic regime, too far to be something modeled by experiment in any near term, it seemed, if at all. Could anything I found, even in theory, be verified by experimentum crucis?

These are the questions that can keep circling in your mind for years, if you are a physicist. Probably it is my pride now, bragging about how this question plagued me, because in complaining about, I am telling that I was indeed a true physicist, even if I couldn't answer the question.

In my talk in the Virtual Prague conference, I emphasized how many of the open questions of relativistic particle mechanics have been open for a long, long time. I specifically focussed on this beautiful equation from classical electrodynamics, which turned 100 years old this month. I was very fascinated by this equation in graduate school, and my thoughts about it became a core motivation for much of my dissertation. Despite the fact that is only a low-order approximation, I pointed out in my talk, it is still "state of the art" after a century. We are still looking for the "non-approximate" generalization, to complete the theory.

On the other hand, as I said in my talk, two years ago at the conference in Mérida, when I came to physics after being away for twenty years, I was delighted to hear the talks that were using novel applications relativistic theory to explain experimental results, mostly in the astrophysical realms, in regard to the behavior of galaxies, neutron stars and other systems. Slowly experimental data had been coming in, and people were working with it, churning it over, doing "real physics," as I said. I was envious of them, I confessed, getting their hands dirty that way with the observable universe.

We are living in, I said in my talk, and "Era of Patience," not unlike the time in Prague four centuries ago when the great scientists Brahe and Kepler did their work in that city. Every physics knows the beautiful of Kepler's laws, the concise and achingly beautiful mathematical encapsulation of the orbits of the planets. In order to come to these results, of course, it took decades of the meticulous gathering of precise data on the positions of planets against the night sky, all before invention of the telescope.

"We are living in the Era of Patience now too," I said. Everyone understood my point, I'm sure. In the Twentieth Century, we got used to amazingly rapid progress in the physical science, with mind-blowingly novel theory being derived almost every year, and verified rapidly by experiment.

Then things slowed down, to put it mildly. The most significant advance in physics in the last few years was the verification* of a theoretical predication from three months before I was born. Coincidentally, this transition happened in the mid-1960s, when just about everything else in western civilization underwent a profound transformation.

That last point is something I am probably way more obsessed by than physics lately.

*alleged verification. I have my doubts that it will hold up over time.

The Octave of Pentecost

The calendar I made at the beginning of the year, the schedule of events for the next twelve months, had me in Prague this week, for a physics conference.

Of course the conference didn't happen, at least not in the physical-space sense. Instead we gathered in a virtual version, researchers from a dozen different nations, to give talks and listen to each other.

The host was in Jerusalem. We've known each other for many years, having been at the first conference together in Houston twenty-two years ago. We were both graduate students of two men, an Israeli and an American, who had co-founded the organization and had organized that first conference, but who had since retired. My friend in Jerusalem stayed with physics in Israel kept the organization going.

We had planned on Prague while the last conference was still in session in Mexico. My friend, who is the organization president now, had already contacted someone at the Czech National Technical University, who like many European regulars hadn't been able to make it to the Yucatán conference, but who was willing to organize the next one, as by alternating tradition it would be in Europe.

Through incredible effort, everyone involved (which didn't include me) was able to adjust all the contracts last minute to turn the conference into a big Zoom meeting, which is what everyone has been talking about having to do in business, because of recent events and folks working from home. I'm used to video conferences from tech, but this was my first one as a physicist, and the first one since before the shutdown a couple months ago, in the New Normal.

I had asked the Holy Spirit to help me with my talk. It was the first real physics talk I'd given since Houston. Fortunately I had plenty of material for a dozen talks back then, so it was easy to present some old stuff, which was very new to everyone else, since many of the same issues that were open and unresolved in physics in 1998 are still unresolved today.

This last point was a central part of my talk, along with a look back at relativity over the last century (since a famous 1920 equation) and also since that first conference.  At the end I gave everyone lots of equations I myself had derived and published with my advisor, so it was a real physics talk, even if it was old stuff. I made fun of myself back then and told them I didn't even have the chance to see if the orbits I derived were real ones made by real particles, and not just mathematical artifacts of our axioms. We had run out of time, I said. There was so much left to do back then. As I prepared my talk I knew could still give a dozen talks on that old material, just using the overhead slide transparencies I made back then, which are now relics of a different era of science.

Now for this talk I used a computer program to create a colorful animated slide show, which was distributed on the conference website in PDF form beforehand, so folks could peruse them. I was shy about submitting mine, as it was the first one I'd ever done. I brought all of my design and presentation skills to bear on making it.

I used techniques from tech conferences to introduce humor, to provide at a retrospective of the organization, and to give everyone a brief Virtual Tour of Prague with photos of famous art work and historical figures of Prague, including some great scientists who did their work there.

Right before it was my turn to present, I got very nervous. I asked the Holy Spirit to help me, and that if my talk had no merit, to make it sound like jibberish, but if it had merit, to help me make it clear to my audience.

The talk turned out well, as it happened. People liked it mostly and had many comments. I was asked to give the opening talk at the next conference two years from now (location undetermined), and by acclamation it was agreed so, and I accepted.

It is much, much easier to receive gratitude from others, when, even in your own mind silently, you can pass the gratitude onward to Whom it belongs, and not have to bear it for yourself, with your stumbling ego.

It is one of the many psychological tricks available to a believing Christian, which to my experience arrive only after the decision to believe, but which in the wake of that decision seem to furnish a method of living in a state of Joy and Gratitude amidst the great Suffering that exists in the world, and to find Peace.