Notes on Yuval Harari's "Homo Deus"

"Is there anything more dangerous than dissatisfied and irresponsible gods who don't know what they want?" 

Yuval Harari

Born in 1976, Yuval Harari is an Israeli historian and professor of history at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. The quote above is from his previous book, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, (2011), which makes the point that human culture in the post-tribal age of large populations (over 300) derives its coherence from "fictions," mental constructs with no concrete reality, such as gods, money, laws, nations and human rights. 

In Homo Deus, A Brief History of Tommorow, (2015) Harari describes our future: Through bio-engineering, artificial intelligence and advancing medicine we will become, by definition, gods, with indefinitely long lives and complete creative license to design ourselves and our environments.  

Harari's logic is compelling, though one might add that we don't know what a god is, only what it does.  As in physics, where we label atomic particles in terms of their behavior and effects on other particles- not in terms of what they are, which we don't know- so, even though we may define a god as "a super-human being or spirit worshipped as having power over nature or human fortunes" (OED), that describes what a god does, not what it is.   Whatever a god is, though, that's what we're going to be, Harari writes.  The transformation will usher in the age of Homo Deus, and herald the eclipse of Homo Sapiens.  In other words, we're about to go extinct. 

Harari writes: 

"Every day millions of people decide to grant their smartphone a bit more control over their lives or try a new and more effective antidepressant drug.  In pursuit of health, happiness and power, humans will gradually change first one of their features and then another, and another, until they will no longer be human." 

Harari is as much concerned with our progeny's difficulties in figuring out how to be gods as he is with our extinction: 

"When humankind possesses enormous new powers, and when the threat of famine, plague and war is finally lifted, what will we do with ourselves?  What will the scientists, investors, bankers and presidents do all day?  Write poetry?" 

He may have answered his own question.   Others have come to the same conclusion about our final purpose.  In Arthur C. Clarke's The City and the Stars (1956) a vision of ultimate humanity features two small human settlements on a desert-covered Earth of the far future. One of the groups lives in a self-sustaining mechanical environment of which no one knows the origin and which no one has any idea how to operate or repair (fortunately it operates and repairs itself). Inhabitants spend their time writing poems and sending them to each other.  The other group lives a tribal, nomadic life in portable tents. Their distinguishing feature is that they are telepathic, so no one can lie. Presumably they handle honesty by communicating in poetry.

Speaking of which, I ran the Homo Deus idea by my friend Harry the Human and his friend Robert the Telepathic Gila Monster (see link below). Robert was skeptical. He said humans will need a little practice before they can be proficient gods. He said gilas have dabbled in it for millions of years, adding that the transformation represents a re-bonding with the cosmic womb, which Robert says is humankind's goal anyway, though we won't admit it. 

Harry responded with a poem:  

Deus ex machina

By Harry the Human 

If I were a god

I'd find it odd

that even a clod

who'd been so awed

by seeming divinity

though he felt no affinity

would be flung to the void

feeling scared and annoyed

where a soul should have buoyed

godlike views, not destroyed 

them.

Yes, imagine! We are gods, writing poems like this for all eternity!  

Be that as it may, Harari is an exceptionally thorough, clear and fascinating author, the perfect antidote to the infantilism of the U.S. electoral season now unfolding.  

[For my desert friend Harry the Human's take on Harari, along with that of his companion Robert the Telepathic Gila Monster, see: http://harrythehuman.harrythehumanpoliticalthoughtsfrombeyondthepale.com] 

Walter Lippmann

When I was ten years old, in the summer of 1956, I took a four-day train trip with my maternal grandmother from Los Angeles to Syracuse, New York, where my mother was raised. I can’t recall the thinking behind this trip, but it was memorable in many ways. 

Syracuse was memorable for being hot and not Los Angeles. I walked down my mom’s childhood street, East Genesee, where young Rod Serling (doo-doo-doo-doo/doo-doo-doo-doo) used to greet her. There were strange names of things, like Onondoga Lake, strange at least to me because L.A. has no lakes or onondogas. The city seemed small in my mind because I thought the size of L.A. was normal. 

I stood in front of Syracuse University and watched a young man throw rocks at the lights over the entrance, smashing some. He looked at me and said, “I’m just upset.” 

We stayed with my grandmother’s two surviving sisters, who were memorable for sure. More about them some other time. I’ll just say that Lithuania must have been some place! 

There was another memory- this one from the train ride back to L.A.- that was jiggled into my frontal lobe this morning while I watched a vintage Youtube clip of Noam Chomsky discussing Mikhail Bakunin, 19th century proponent of “collective anarchy.” Can you guess the connection between these random elements and the train trip with my grandmother? Give up? Well, in the Youtube clip Chomsky makes a reference to Walter Lippmann, American journalist prominent from the 1920’s to the 60’s, whom Chomsky refers to as a “progressive intellectual.” Long story longer, on the trip back to Los Angeles, Lippmann was on the train. 

I had been staring out the window at midwest flatlands when my grandmother, an accomplished schmoozer, rushed up to tell me that a famous journalist was on the train, and he wanted to meet me.  Of course I didn’t know Walter Lippmann from Adam, but I dutifully followed my grandmother through several cars, particularly relishing the rocking chaos and noisy intrusion of the elements in the connecting platforms. 

We stopped in the aisle in one of the cars and looked down at a well-dressed and groomed man in his 60’s who was sitting alone reading. My grandmother introduced me to Walter Lippmann, the first famous person I had ever met, though he was not famous to me. I felt the familiar pressure of not knowing how to respond to an adult. Lippmann looked fondly at me, but he did not say anything about progressive intellectualism, which makes sense because I was a dumb kid with no virtues beyond the sweetness of youth, and I would not have understood a word he said. 

I don’t remember what he did say. He probably asked me how I liked school. I would have found that question as hard as any other.  I was near mute in my responses. 

As I watched the Chomsky clip I remembered how frustrating and wasteful the encounter with Lippmann had seemed to young me.  If only I had known anything!   In later years the feeling of waste grew as I learned that Lippmann was a critical political interpreter for millions of people. He was behind President Woodrow Wilson's "14 Points" at the close of World War I.  He coined the term “cold war” and created the modern meaning of "stereotype" (formerly "relief printing plate").  Few people have this much impact on their language, and all I could do was stare at him.  

Well, through the magic of literature, I’m going to attempt something rather daring.  If you will bear with me, I plan to initiate a “wormhole” through which my mentality will travel back to that train in 1956 and infuse my prepubescent brain with the requisite knowledge for a decent conversation with Walter Lippmann.  That’s the theory.  I have a wormhole spell I picked up from a character of my acquaintance. Would you like to try it too?  Ok, here goes.   Repeat this with me and perhaps we’ll meet: 

I call you from a crevice near

Have no regret and have no fear

Oh wormhole mine forever dear

Collapse a distant past to here! 

Man, what’s happening?  Oh yeah, I’m entering the mind of ten year old me!  First observation: No wonder I was uncomfortable meeting Lippmann.  Talk about a blank slate!  My young brain is devoid of understanding or perspective on so many levels.  Any personality in there is a restless sea of emotion and longing.  There is no basis whatever for discourse with Lippmann. 

Now for the delicate operation, as I insert the "stereotype" and “cold war” material into my young head.  Upload complete!  Now to activate voice control.  I’m pushing metaphorical buttons.  Uh oh, something’s happening…did we just lose an hour?  Do you remember?  Here’s what I recall: 

Hello Mr. Lippmann, it’s nice to meet you.

Nice to meet you, Douglas. 

My grandmother is beaming.

Mr. Lippmann, how did you get everyone in the world to use the new definition of ‘stereotype’ that you made up?

I don’t know. I didn’t expect that to happen.

Did you expect everyone to start using ‘cold war’ too, after you made that up?

The phrase was from my book, ‘Cold War.’ It’s flattering that so many people found it apt.

Yes, it certainly was apt. 

Young me is getting into it, never suspecting where the useful knowledge is coming from.  Now young me’s enthusiasm for the new normal is taking an unexpected turn, as young me grows neurons which invade my adult mind, making permanent connections to my knowledge base.  The results appear bizarre if not disturbing, as my first more youthful questions are replaced with questions of a more adult cast. 

Mr. Lippmann, are you an elitist?

Hmm, Douglas, do you know what an elitist is?

Yes, it’s a person who thinks they’re better than everyone else.

I don’t think that I’m better than everyone else. Do you think you are?

I…well…. 

Strangely that question is as hard for adult me as young me.

I mean, I don’t know what’s better or not better, Mr. Lippmann, but you wrote that you don’t think the general public can run humanity’s affairs. 

My grandmother frowns. 

Is that so? You read on a high level for a ten year old!

I do? I mean, thank you. You wrote that when people watch the news they are not educated by it.  You said the news constructs a picture of reality that is 'imperfectly recorded,' and 'too fragile to bear the charge as an organ of direct democracy.'

Lippmann glances at my grandmother, who is in a suppressed rage. He looks back at me. 

Very good, Douglas, but you are conflating a critique of the media with a belief that elites should rule. 

I'm feeling something strange happening, a sort of merger of youth and age.  I'm not sure how to form my words.  Lippmann notes my hesitation. 

Douglas, do you know what ‘conflate’ means?

I think it’s when two people fart at the same time. 

What is happening to me?  Is there a hint of smile on Lippmann’s face?  There is no such hint on my grandmother’s face.  I try to salvage the situation. 

Mr. Lippmann, do you think that elites should rule? 

Lippmann is looking at me the way you might look at a chess-playing chicken. 

That’s not a valid question, Douglas, because elites do rule, by definition. You might as well ask if birds should fly. 

Should they? 

 Lippmann laughs.  I feel clever.  I want more approbation, so I continue. 

Mr. Lippmann, you wrote in 1922 that ‘mass man functions as a bewildered herd who must be governed by a specialized class.’

Douglas, I’m just describing reality, not saying it’s good.

Have you heard of Noam Chomsky?

No. 

He said that you believe that 90% of the population are "ignorant, meddlesome outsiders," and that we need to be ruled by "the wise men…you know…the smart people."

Is that so, Douglas? Sounds like Mr. Chomsky is one of those smart people himself. 

He is a professor of linguistics at MIT.

So, is he a member of an elite?

I guess, maybe. 

Out of nowhere I have an intense need to pee, and I'm so restless I long to turn from Lippmann and my grandmother and skip down the aisle, push the heavey metal door open and step through, finally expressing my energies and maybe fluids in the interstitial madness of the coupling platform.  

But my grandmother has had enough. She thanks Lippmann profusely and demands that I shake his hand and thank him, which I do.  A quick glance into Lippmann’s eyes tells me that little harm has been done to the universe.  On the walk back to the restroom and our seats my grandmother is silent.  When we sit, she sighs. 

Dougie, sometimes I don’t understand you. 

I'm too busy trying to unplug the weird connections in my head to reply.  Through the window I see vast plains roll by. 

What controls us?

Why do people do the self-destructive things they do? Why is the human brain, so impressive in its versatility, overrun with dangerous and ill-advised impulses, inducing us, for instance, to build complex civilizations based on fantasies and wishful thinking, then compress ourselves into cramped, frustrating living spaces where we long for violent outlets?   We fancy ourselves to be exceptionally intelligent, as animals go, but much of the time we appear to have no more mental heft than the blindly self-destructive victims of parasites.

Parasites have been on my mind since reading Carl Zimmer's book, Parasite Rex which describes the perpetual struggle between large multicellular creatures like us and the parasites who feed off them. In the course of this struggle, parasites often employ mind control against their hosts.  Zimmer describes numerous instances where parasites invade the brains of their hosts to make them, for instance, forget their fears of natural predators, the intent being to get the host eaten so the parasite can embark on its next life-stage in the predator.  For the benefit of parasitic reproduction, fish float in front of herons, ants wait atop grass stalks for hungry birds, caterpillars leave the safety of their camouflage.  

Some parasites are multicellular, large creatures themselves.  The parasitic emerald wasp injects chemicals into a cockroach's brain that turn it into a "zombie slave," then lays one egg on the cockroach's underbelly.  The roache's brain has been changed so that all interest in caring for roach offspring is replaced with deference to the wasp larva.  As the larva grows, it burrows into the roach, eating its internal organs in a precise order ensuring that the roach stays alive long enough to function as a wasp womb.  After that, the young wasp tosses the shrivelled roach corpse away.

We have no evidence that familiar human compulsions are caused by parasites, but it's likely they are caused by something other than the human intellect.  What sort of intellect would go to war for no good reason, which our species will do on a dime. Desire for war on its own merits might be diagnosed as abnormal and suicidal by human medical practice, and those suffering from it could well be victims of mind control, whether by parasites or fellow humans (who themselves might be under parasitic control).

If we find however that our thralldom to irrational behavior does not derive from parasites, we might investigate transposons, mysterious genetic manipulators which originated, somehow, "outside" us, and have since taken up residence in our DNA. Geneticists don't know much about transposons, other than that they can edit our DNA and affect our basic structure.  There is conjecture that transposons account for the non-inherited differences between identical twins, and for significant non-inherited behaviors in everyone.  Exactly what those behaviors are and what purposes they might serve is unknown.

Transposon theory provides less explanation than parasite study, because at least with parasites we know the host is forced to serve the survival interests of the parasite.  We don't even know if transposons are alive, let alone promoting an agenda.  We only know they are there, influencing us.

Zimmer describes a theory of sex, including human sex, common among parasitologists, in which the purpose of sexual reproduction is to provide a continual reshuffling of host-species' genes, a process necessary to keep pace with and defend against parasitic evolution.  Reproduction is hardly a non-survival oriented activity- we only survive if we reproduce- but could the system be hijacked?  Our compulsion to sexually reproduce without resources to care for our young, with no concern about overpopulation, resulting in seven billion anxious, pessimistic humans trapped on earth to plot against each other, is clearly not the result of an intellectual process.

Our longing for war could very well grow out of a parasite enhanced obsession with reproduction, after which the parasites lead the resulting oversized human population to war and mass death.  The human die-off may then enable some further stage in the parasite's life cycle.

Our intellects are muffled and controlled by forces we can't see. These forces might emanate from parasites or transposons, or from members of our own species. Maybe our next step will be to truly elevate the human intellect, perhaps meeting parasites mind to mind and working with them. Or maybe we could continue to float on the surface waiting for herons.  

Our shrinking frame story

A frame story is a story within a story.  Maybe the most famous is One Thousand and One Nights, a collection of Middle Eastern folk tales framed by a story about a sultan who, in order to relieve the pain of his first wife's infidelity, decides to marry a new virgin each day, sleep with her that night, then have her executed the next morning before she has a chance to cheat on him.  After a few years of the sultan's madness, the realm is almost out of virgins.  The court frantically wonders what to do, when Scheherazade, the daughter of the grand vizier and a virgin, offers herself to the sultan.  Her father objects, but she has a plan.  On the night of the wedding, after her deflowering, she beguiles the sultan with a compelling story.  It is too long to finish in one evening, so she promises to continue it the next night.  The sultan is so engrossed by his wife's endless story that night after night he implores her to continue, each time extending her life by one day.

Just like Scheherazade's, our stories interlock with frames that turn like gears, promoting the arrow of time with beginning, middle and hopefully end.

On December 26, 2004, my story was that I was camping in Death Valley, and the frame was the life in Los Angeles I had left behind, but when the car radio reported that a giant tsunami had killed 200,000 people near Indonesia, that became the main story of the world, framing mine and everyone's stories.

The opposite would have happened- my world would have shrunk- if Ubehebe Crater, a few miles from my camp, had erupted that morning, as it did thousands of years ago in a phreatic rage that dug a hole 777 feet deep.  The shock wave would have flattened the camp, eliminating the tsunami entirely from my frame, diminishing the world to a few local square miles.

There was frame shrinkage in Los Angeles after the magnitude 6.7 earthquake in 1994.  Earlier that week, an L.A. Times headline read, "Serbs' heavy weapons pound Sarajevo."  Before the earthquake, that seemed like a relevant topic; after the earthquake there was almost no consciousness of war in Sarajevo because our frame story did not extend beyond our city.

In the last few months a number of events have been powerful enough to attract worldwide attention and frame everyone's story.  Often these frames had the stage to themselves for a few days, so the whole world could think about them and decide what if any action to take.  Some were conflicts, e.g. Israel vs. Palestinians; Russia vs. Ukraine; Armenia vs. Azerbaijan; Myanmar, China and maybe all governments to varying degrees vs. elements of their own people.  Some were slow-moving but threatening, like climate change.  Some were medical tragedies, like India's lack of oxygen for covid victims; some were natural, like several powerful volcanic eruptions.  Each defined a global frame story.

Our minds are accustomed to alternating between global frame stories and local ones, but disasters of a type that formerly might have captured world attention are hitting the human sphere with such regularity and frequency that everyone's frame story is at risk of shrinking down to their immediate environment.  If the time comes when every place on Earth hosts a catastrophe such that everyone's frame story becomes local, we will experience mass, unconscious censorship.  

Such censorship happened in a limited way on January 6, 2021, when Business Weekly broke the news about possibly dangerous covid variants.  The story was urgent enough, you would think, to frame and reorder our lives, but because of the D.C. insurgency on the same day, covid news seemed trifling, out of the frame.

In most populated areas it wouldn't take more than a disabled Internet to shrink everyone's frame story down to their visible world.  Adding a few more calamities- like failure of a power grid or a new pandemic- could force a reversion to the provincialism of the agricultural Middle Ages, when most people stayed within forty miles of home their whole lives, and information about the world was rumor.  

The tendency of disasters to limit broader perspectives renders them useful to those who might want to curtail the population's worldview and ability to influence events.   Even earthquakes and hurricanes are suspect, at least if you believe magazines available in City Lights Bookstore in San Francisco which claim that the CIA has an earthquake producing machine and that China can control the weather.  I have not seen allegations that volcanic eruptions can be induced, but how hard could it be?

We seem poised to enter a period of increased catastrophes and shrunken world-views.  At its most extreme, a shrunken world-view translates to a total lack of influence on one's surroundings and society.  For now, through voting and regular pummeling of newspapers with letters to the editor, we have the illusion of influence.  The illusion may pass.

People will look for ways to stay sane as our frame stories shrink.  Some will find solace in religion and worship.  Some will read novels or watch movies.  Some will study their own dreams.  

In my case, I have a fantasy that there will be a new American political party based on the reality of our shifting world.  This party will expand people's frame stories beyond the purview of local catastrophe.  It will produce strong feelings of trust.  People will think the party is speaking to them, that it is authentic.    I know what you're thinking: "Don't hold your breath."  But I am holding my breath.  

Boundary waters

In early August my wife and I took a trip through North Dakota and Minnesota.  We found recurring themes of boundaries and borders, of centers and outliers.  

For starters, North Dakota features the geographic center of the North American continent, in Center City, where you can stand on the spot.  We did not go to Center City.  Our trip started with a flight from Los Angeles to Denver, where we boarded a twenty-seat plane to North Dakota's capital, Bismarck, about 50 miles southeast of Center City (and 150 miles southwest of Rugby, the geographic center of North Dakota).  When I was born there, Bismarck's population was 8,000.  It is now 77,000.

A word about why we began our trip in Bismarck: Herman, my paternal grandfather.  He left Ukraine at age 14 after his father was killed in a pogrom.  He was the second in his family to leave after his older brother Sam, who went into the fur business in the Dakota's.  Sam helped Herman get a leg up in Bismarck, where, in 1925, Herman built a two story brick structure downtown on the corner of Fifth and Main, across from the glitzy Patterson Hotel and kitty corner from the train station.  The building housed, at various times, a men's clothing store, a liquor store and a pharmacy.  My grandfather's family lived above the store.  When he was five, my father watched from his bedroom window as the local Ku Klux Klan burned a cross in front of the building.  He recognized the ringleader as the chief of police (and husband of his kindergarten teacher).  On a Fourth of July, when he was a little older, my dad fired a rocket from his window that crashed through a window of the Patterson.  I lived my first two years in the same second floor rooms, until we made the big jump to Los Angeles.  

We learned that the building still exists and is designated a historic structure, and we wanted to visit it.  Thus our first stop in the rental car was the "Lasken Block," as the old cornice proclaims it to be.  Standing across the street, I gazed at the second floor windows and wondered what rights my brief sojourn there gave me now.  Could I go upstairs, knock, and tell whoever answers, "I entered the world in these rooms.  May I come in and look around, meditate, maybe find a morphogenetic field and channel my lost and barely remembered ancestry, like in Dune?"  I felt the correct answer would be No, that my connection, if it was one, did not afford me passage across the boundary between longing and property rights.  Or maybe I was afraid that if I did visit, nothing would happen.  I would see some nondescript walls and maybe a linoleum floor while the people who lived there watched me and noted the futility of my search- and it would be, well, nothing, not a science fiction or ghost story, or any kind of story.  Ironically, not going up those stairs is a story.

Our next stop in Bismarck was the capital building, two miles north, through pleasant residential streets.  Along some of them grew American Elms (the state tree) that had escaped Dutch elm disease- tall, beautiful, brave trees.  The capital building is referred to locally as a "skyscraper," though it's only 14 stories high, a mere bump in L.A.  But it was as imposing this time as it was the last time I saw it, at age 8.  Standing atop a long grassy rise, it is a good 12 stories taller than any other structure within hundreds of miles (with the exception of distant wind turbines and grain elevators).  The 30's era art deco design, plus the phallic layout (a broad two-story base housing the state legislature and governor's office, with the fourteen stories rising in the middle) gives it the aura of the Emerald City of Oz, with its palace of the Great Wizard.

As luck had it, the quarter mile loop running around the sloping lawn in front was occupied that Saturday by the annual North Dakota craft fair.  Stall after stall featured stunningly wrought items of wood, glass, paint and fabric.  Here was a boundary between bias and reality.  My bias, barely known to me, was the idea that humans are more self-aware and artistic on the coasts than in the Midwest.  No such difference exists.  Thoughtfulness, concentration and skill characterize North Dakotans.  Film at 11!

All the people we saw were white.  Perhaps we were at the white center of North America.  These are the people who are endlessly ridiculed and vilified these days in most American media and much university pontification. They are deemed undeserving because life has been so easy for them, and because they suck life out of non-whites.   I personally saw no one sucking life out of anyone, near or far.  Nor did I see signs that life is easy in North Dakota.  Many striking paintings in the craft fair evoked angst and alienation.  None evoked any kind of "supremacy."  

In 2016, Donald Trump won 63% of North Dakota's vote; Hillary Clinton won 27.2%.  Here was the boundary between red and blue.  I was in a red state.  And yet, no one seemed red.  Nor could anyone tell what color I was.    

When we left Bismarck, heading east on I-94, we found more boundaries in the content of radio shows and billboards.

Over some stretches it was difficult to find NPR on the car radio, though there were many evangelical stations.  It must be lonely sometimes on the North Dakota plains, when the only company might be a man telling you about your soul, that you have one, and that it is important for the universe and will last forever.  Why not?  If I'm from a blue state, a blue person, does that mean I can't believe in the soul?  Not that I'm certain the soul exists.  It is a compelling idea, that we aren't just reflections, flashing for a few moments then gone- memory, identity, time, space...all gone.  You can argue that our evanescence is too awful to be true, that the soul is necessary to give existence a point.  You can argue anything. 

The billboards often conveyed political content.  Every half-hour we passed an anti-abortion message.  Here was a boundary made intense by the language used by politicians and other "leaders" on both sides: If you support abortion rights, you support murdering babies; if you oppose abortion rights, you support harms to women.  The formulations eliminate nuanced boundaries, creating two simplified stories of good against evil, one for each side.  

Both formulations recognize a conceptual boundary between a newly fertilized egg and a more developed fetus with a heartbeat.  There is agreement that these are both living things, but do they both have souls?  I don't know if a fetus with a heartbeat has a human consciousness or a soul.  Maybe it does, and maybe we should care; I'm just guessing, like everyone else.  It seems unlikely that a newly fertilized human egg would have a human consciousness, or a soul.  It's a single cell, with no developed brain tissue.  It would make more sense to believe that the soul is attached later, when there are elements of human consciousness.  None of this is proven, or can be proven, of course.  The question becomes: if none of the essential considerations about abortion can be proven or known, how can anyone argue about it?

Such thoughts occupied many soporific hours driving across the plains, but there was also the news, which on this trip was dominated by the shootings in El Paso and Dayton, especially horrific because they happened on the same day.  The radio presentations suggested an America coming apart, with violence ready to erupt at any time or place.  Of course that's not even remotely what is happening.  The number of mad killers as a percentage of the population is small, and would be negligible if assault weapons were not so easy to procure and if any homicidal lost soul couldn't get worldwide attention from a media that thrives on their crimes.  

It was a disconnect to hear over and over about the violence while driving through hundreds of miles of wheat fields, where the violence is microscopic, involving insects and chemicals.  No crazed person acts-out here, swinging wildly with a machete while railing against mono-culture.  That's why wheat fields are not in the news.  

In the evening we arrived in Fargo, on the Minnesota border, and got a room at the Radisson Hotel near the Red River, in the historic downtown, where socioeconomic boundaries are mixed.  There were depressed areas with homeless people and local teenagers defending turf, alongside art galleries and stately mansions.  

We saw "Rocketman" at the vintage (and well kept) Fargo Theater, in which Elton John invites us to contemplate one of our favorite subjects: the pain famous people feel when they discover that not only are they as lonely as they were before they were famous, but it's a new kind of loneliness, even more brutal and cosmically empty than the loneliness before.  Elton John was able to survive his ordeal.  There is a boundary between people who can handle fame and people who can't.  Rock singers seem to have the worst of it.  Politicians generally do ok with fame.  Why is that?  

Next stop was the Twin Cities, where my wife's family lives and mine used to.  We stayed with my wife's sister and brother-in-law in St. Louis Park, a suburb of Minneapolis which is within Minnesota's fifth congressional district, represented by Ilhan Omar.  She is intensely opposed by much of her district.  Omar put herself on the political map with statements like, "Israel has hypnotized the world; may Allah awaken the people and help them see the evil doings of Israel."  Omar crosses the boundary between church and state when she invokes deity to fight enemies, suggesting that she envisions herself operating in a theocracy.  Interestingly, she does not follow her logic to invoke Allah against America because it took land by force from people who were here first.  On the contrary, Omar seems comfortable living and prospering on formerly Native American lands.  She feels differently, it seems, when the sin is hers.

We saw a family of wild turkeys strolling around my in-laws' house, digging up gardens in the front and back, crossing the boundary between human and animal.  Another animal crossed a boundary at my wife's parents' place in St. Paul: a bat flying around in the lobby.  In order to get out, the bat needed two doors opened at once (the two doors enclosing the warm-up space typical of Midwest lobbies).  My wife held one door open while I held the other.  A trapped bird would have taken minutes to figure out that there was an escape route, but the bat figured it out immediately, presumably using echolocation.

More animal encounters occurred when we traveled north to the Boundary Waters area.  En route we spent a night and a morning in Duluth, on Lake Superior, which was filled with lovely butterflies and aquatic birds.  Another boundary appeared in the Skyway, an elevated passage, unventilated and very stuffy, between our hotel and the canal area along the lake.  The passageway was empty of all people but us.  We checked a side passage that led to a movie theater showing Tarantino's "Once upon a time...in Hollywood."  We thought of seeing it, but it was scheduled too late. When we re-entered the Skyway and turned left towards the canal, there was a tall, lean young black man reclining against the wall, watching our approach.  He was wearing a baseball cap and jeans that hung below his waist, exposing an inch of boxer shorts.  His tank top revealed long, sinewy arms.  There was no one else around.  As we advanced and looked his way, he hopped forward five inches, held his arms out and said, "Ha, ha."  It was funny, in a theoretical way, crossing at it did a racial boundary in which he knew what stereotypes might rule us, and we knew that he knew, and he knew we knew he knew.  Ha ha, indeed.

We didn't go to the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness (within Superior National Forest), so called for its proximity to the Canadian border, but toured areas to its south.  Birch and pine forests extended to the horizon.  We stayed at a lodge near the town of Bibawic, which features a fiberglass moose near the bandstand in the park.  We walked all of Main Street at night, encountering no one.  Everything was closed except several bars hosting locals who were nursing drinks and talking with people they had known for years.  We could have gone into one of the bars, crossing the boundary between people we know and people we don't, creating perhaps intimacy with the other, but we didn't.  



On the trip home we crossed one more boundary- that between moving by your own power, and moving via advanced technology.  I refer to the two flights, starting at Lindbergh Airport in Minneapolis, and connecting in Phoenix, that got us home to Los Angeles.  The flights were similar: each left on time, and each included lengthy periods waiting on the tarmac after landing while a gate was secured.  These waiting periods were stressful, as people sank into thoughts of busy schedules now messed up, and perhaps into deeper waters about the meaning of modern life, perhaps concluding that a life spent in joyless cylinders waiting for release belied an existence without meaning.  On the other hand, the flights landed safely, we did not die, and we were able to have ten days of experiences we wouldn't have had without air travel.  The final boundary, then, is the one between what we're grateful for and what we're not grateful for, and the final lesson is that we're grateful and not grateful for the same things, in the way that we support and oppose the same things.

Pandemic peace

Pier, Ventura, Ca.

Las Vegas getaway!

Over President's Day weekend my wife and I drove from Los Angeles to Las Vegas to meet family members.  The string of storms coming over the Pacific through the previous week, part of the Polar Vortex, paused to allow our passage between Saturday's departure and the return on Monday, so that the mountains and deserts had been washed down to their elemental colors, and the sky was a swirl of meaningful whites, blues, pinks and purples, changing hues and messages through the day.  The message I wanted, and received, was, "Come to me.  I will cradle your mind and soul for a while."

Los Angeles was gone!

The air too, always cold and loving, never faltered in its embrace.

Restaurants and retailers along the way have discovered how to stand out in the desert, with gratifying food and flamboyant exteriors.  We stopped at the Mad Greek Cafe in Baker, where I-15 to Vegas meets Highway 127 to Death Valley.  Many eateries in the wild serve dismal, ungenerous food, because there's no competition, but the Mad Greek's fare is plentiful and delicious.  Gleaming white plaster faux Greek statues around the perimeter and within the restaurant engage patrons with their naked torsos every five feet.  Down the road is Alien Jerky, a two-story metal structure depicting a wheeled rover with stereotypical aliens looking out of their control room through a broad upper window.  Within the store were large crowds of travelers browsing many varieties of jerky (e.g., Abducted Cow; Weed Killer Hot Beef).

The desert and its human diversions were enough to slow the downward pull of the news, which reminds us every day that we are at the receiving end; we are to sit and watch.  In past desert drives we looked for NPR news on the hour, hungry for "breaking" developments to counter the disconnected state.  This time the goal was the disconnected state.

Interest in Las Vegas goes way back in my family.  In the 1950's my grandmother would take the Vegas train from L.A. to play Bingo and often came back excited by her winnings.  She had a strange kind of luck.  I tried to emulate her at the Saturday kids' matinee at the Encino Theater, which held ticket raffles.  Once, to my amazement, I won.  My mom and my grandmother picked me up after the show, and I proudly held out my winnings: a cellophane wrapped carton of butterscotch LifeSavers!  My grandmother's response: "Is that all you won?"

As a kid I disliked Vegas, with its gussied-up attempts to distract kids from the grownup gambling.  Then one summer day when I was thirty-something, while my daughter's crayons melted in the car, we walked into the Luxor Hotel and I discovered kitsch!

Per Merriam-Webster, kitsch refers to art objects or designs considered to be in poor taste because of excessive garishness or sentimentality, but sometimes appreciated in an ironic or knowing way.

The Luxor comprises a pyramid with a black exterior, three-fourths the size of The Great Pyramid of Giza, with a spotlight at its apex shooting a column of light into space (visible from airplanes flying over L.A.) in which bats swarm at night, and a Sphinx two stories taller than the original, and murals everywhere depicting skirted Egyptians looking out of the sides of their heads.

The irony of the Luxor: Its spiritual icons, formerly employed in guiding the migration of souls (at least the royal family's), are now guardians of regular folk hypnotized into giving their money away.

The Luxor pyramid used to be the first Vegas structure we spotted coming in from the west, and it set a playful mood, but now the adjacent Mandalay Bay Hotel, from an upper window of which, on October 1, 2017, a deranged shooter killed 58 people attending an outdoor music festival below, adds somber meaning.  A shadow crossed our hearts as we sped past.

We unloaded at the Cosmopolitan Hotel, glitzy, huge and efficient, but short on stunning kitsch.  What mattered, though, were the remarkably powerful and well maintained elevators that took us to the 57th floor numerous times without crowds or delays.  I also liked the giant pillows on the beds, and the quiet one can find 57 floors up.

Las Vegas was an important location for the Paiute and Mojave tribes because of its natural springs.  Later, for the same reason, it became a pioneer settlement, then a railroad hub, and finally, in the 1930's- recounted by the informative Mob Museum (in the old post office/courthouse building)- it was reborn as the city where organized crime went legit, much like the pharaohs' ancient scam. 

On Sunday morning we drove twenty minutes north to Red Rock Canyon, where stunningly beautiful sandstone strata, oxidized red, erupt in geologic slow motion.  At one point I left our party to wander up a path, following signs to the remains of a fire circle used for festivals by both the Paiute and Mojave. The signs ask visitors not to disturb the surroundings, as the site is holy to Native Americans.  I was sure I could smell burnt wood as I approached, though only whitened stones were visible around the fifty-foot circle.  What is a holy place?, I wondered, finally deciding that it is a place with memory.  This place remembered a life now gone, when the mystery of the surrounding terrain- then mostly devoid of people, unowned- continued on and on, for tens of thousand of miles, all around the earth, interrupted only where humans lived in small, scattered bands.  What did it feel like, to live in that world?  If I think about it too much I start to ache.

I considered the grounds outside the Mandalay Bay, where many people died or were harmed.  Is it, too, holy ground, soaked in memory?  Will people hundreds of years from now stop there and feel a chill, like the chill of loss I felt at the fire circle?

As it happened, both the restaurant we chose that night- the excellent Fleur- and the show we saw, Michael Jackson One (by Cirqe du Soleil) were at the Mandalay Bay.  Insulated within, I felt nothing from the recent horror outside, and I was comforted by the idea that our merriment was designed to heal local wounded spirits. The Michael Jackson One show was riveting, not only because of adept mixing of Jackson songs and images, but because the performers did things with their bodies that most humans cannot do.

The next morning anxiety attended our departure when we read on Googlemaps that all lanes of the southbound I-15 north of Baker were closed due to a crash.  Before GPS, this would have ensured a travel nightmare, but thanks to our newly intelligent car, it meant a short, well-planned detour on two-lane roads through beautiful desert, with adventures en route. 

After a spell on Highway 95 South, my car was low on gas.  The first gas station appeared in Searchlight, a boom or bust mining town and birthplace of Nevada Senator Harry Reid (from Reid's memoire: "We had a little tree in our yard for a while.  It died.").  The station was large, with many pumps, but it was experiencing difficulties related to the closure of I-15.  In addition to much more traffic than usual, several of the pumps were malfunctioning, but you could not tell until you were close.  I approached them slowly, angling against other cars hoping to find a pump that worked.  At one point I was behind a white pickup.  The pickup turned left, away from the pumps, so I proceeded straight alongside it, but then the pickup veered right, the driver seeming to change his mind.  The pickup was one second away from hitting the front of my car.  I halted and honked, and the pickup stopped, and a man in the passenger seat turned and glared at me, menace pouring from a hardened face.  My flight-or-fight brain engaged, and I glared back, trying to remain neutral but feeling something involuntary within that boiled and overflowed with drops of rage.  His drops and mine fell to the asphalt below, staining it with memories of hatred towards the other, of self versus non-self.  The drops sizzled and steamed, hopefully evaporating before establishing themselves on earth.  I drove slowly away from the white pickup.

The remainder of the trip was one long exposure to Earth's beauty: dark purple storm clouds in the distance, geologic turmoil frozen in time, Joshua trees thinking their secret thoughts.  When L.A. appeared, it was a sudden jump from empty expanse to millions of humans interacting in a way our planet has not known before in its five billion years.

                                                              Coyote watching

California in pain and anger

It's 6:30am, Saturday, November 10, 2018.  The winds have died down in Woodland Hills, and the "Woolsey" fire, attacking now in Calabasas to our immediate north, has slowed, so at present we don't have to evacuate.  That could change later in the day.  The cold air smells nice, like a wood fire (last night the Santa Ana winds blew the smoke out to sea), but the meaning of the smell is dire.  The gym at my school down the street is filled with refugees.  At the Ralph's, displaced newcomers look for alternatives to Red Cross pizza.

The news media is correct that this fire is unlike any other Southern California fire we've experienced, partly because of its breadth and ferocity, and partly because of two other things: its timing after a mass shooting near its origin and its proximity to a midterm election that left the U.S. in crisis.

I found a strange perspective and further meaning to the fires in a local news report.  A man from Camarillo whose house burned down told a reporter, "I still count myself lucky- I didn't have to go through what they did in Thousand Oaks."  He was referring to the shooting, in which a crazed man with an assault weapon- which he finally used on himself- killed 12 people at a music club. 

Right after the shooting, within a few miles of it, the fire started.  The man with the destroyed house had combined, in his mind, the two catastrophes, so that the shooting in Thousand Oaks and the fires were parts of one attack that struck differently in different places.  After the man spoke in the clip, the news anchor remarked, "Yes, the people of Thousand Oaks experienced the shooting right before this fire erupted around them," understanding what the homeowner had said.  In her mind, too, the shooting and the fires were connected, even as one story.

A BBC reporter who had covered other mass shootings in the U.S. had this observation about Thousand Oaks: "The chilling difference I'm finding here is that, unlike in past shootings, there is no sense of surprise.  It's as if people feel, 'Yes, this is what happens.'"

The resignation and despair plus the blending of the shooting and the fires- and perhaps the sense of uncertainty after the midterm- have induced, I think, an "act of God" feel to the catastrophes, invoking in some, perhaps, a Biblical guilt: What have I done to deserve this?, and in others a guilt infused with assertiveness and anger: Why have I allowed myself, my family and friends to accept a society that has no power over itself, that cannot control weapons or crazy people or much of anything? 

President Trump this morning threw more anxiety into the mix when he insulted hundreds of thousands of distressed Californians by stating that the Woolsey fire and the Camp fire (in Northern California, with over 1,000 dead) were caused by the state's "gross mismanagement," and that the penalty for this should be "No more Fed payments!," an abusive statement reflecting his anger that California refuses to knuckle under to him.

Yet I counsel against putting much energy into anger at Trump, because it won't do any good.  He thrives on it.

Instead, let's take our anger and guilt and direct them at a vacuum, the vacuum where a political party should be.  Democrats and Republicans are done.  They are phantoms floating past the carnage in California, using outrage at each other to mask their ineffectiveness.  We need a new political party, and we need it by 2020.   We should put our anger and/or guilt into that goal.