If you want to know the significance of the recent pullout from Afghanistan, I invite you to organize a flash mob to perform in Kabul. You can choose any musical piece, maybe something by Beethoven. He’s universally loved, isn’t he? Just about everyone knows “Ode to Joy” from the Ninth Symphony. Surely the Taliban know it, also. Why, YouTube hosts a number of flash mobs playing and singing the piece in different parts of the world. And always, the result is the same: Smiles and applause in the surprised audience. Should we expect less from surprised shoppers in Kabul, from people out for a pleasant day in shops, restaurants, and esplanades?


Right! I know the flash mob won’t play well on the stage of the new-old Afghanistan. Something about an obsession with enslavement, cruelty, and death. Something about a culture so foreign to much of the rest of the world that people in countries around the world cannot understand.


Oh! Don’t get me wrong. Almost all cultures have had their bad moments, even savage ones. I’m thinking of a YouTube video of a flash mob in Nuremberg, the site of the trials for the Nazi war criminals. Yep, there in a square a group of musicians gathered to perform “Ode to Joy.” The crowd seemed to love it, little kids, young adults, the elderly. It seemed to be a moment of unity as all such flash mobs seem to generate. Ah! What a difference a half century or so makes! Where the horrors of WWII were once the focus of the crowd, musicians took to a public square to play some uplifting music.


But in Kabul?


Does that highly unlikely flash mob in Kabul say anything about the culture left in charge?

Joe: “I was sure I had a solution.”


Jumble of Everyone, or “Joe 2”: “To what?”


Joe: “I could never find my charging wires.”


Joe 2: “Forget where you left them?”


Joe: “Yeah. But then I realized that if the whole room was a charger, then it wouldn’t matter where I was. I would live in a charging station.”


Joe 2: “You know, that kinda makes sense. I know that wireless charging is possible, but only over short distances. I have to place my watch on its magnetic charger, so it really isn’t ‘wireless.’ I suppose you have the solution.”


Joe: “Well, I do. I just invented a system that can deliver 50 (aside: Does that say 50?) watts through magnetetic fields.”


Joe 2: “Magnetic? You, YOU invented that?”


Joe: “Well, I thought about it. One day I thought, ‘I wish I didn’t have to remember where that damn wire is. I wish I could just walk around and my phone would be charged.’ At first, I had the idea of an extension cord, but if I flew around the country, I’d need one about 3,000 miles long, and that would be heavy. Besides, I’m always untangling wires—How the ‘h’ ‘e’ ‘double toothpick’ do they get tangled like that? Or how do hoses get kinks in them? You know—where was I? Oh! Yeah. Wires. I thought, ‘Why not have a room that charges everything in it?’”


Joe 2: “But YOU didn’t actually invent one.”


Joe: “But I thought of it, so it’s my idea.”


Joe 2: “I just read an article on rooms as chargers. Just saw that people at the University of Michigan and the University of Tokyo just figured out how to make a room a charger. I don’t think that qualifies you to claim inventor’s status.” *


Joe: “But I thought about it.”


Joe 2: “You know, just because you thought about it doesn’t mean the idea was yours. You can’t plagiarize. Too many sources of discovery, what with the Internet, old videos, and such.”


Joe: “But look how good the idea is. What could go wrong?”


Joe 2: “So, the FCC has guidelines for electromagnetic energy exposure. Let’s say you get your wireless-charging room. Let’s say it works to your satisfaction. And then let’s say that your grandma walks into the room.”


Joe: “I love my grandma. Grammy used to sit me…”


Joe 2: “Set.”


Joe: “What?”


Joe 2: “Set. You need a transitive verb.”


Joe: “Uh. Grammy used to sit me on her lap and tell me about how she worked in the Chinese laundry downtown sometimes 23 hours a day.”


Joe 2: “Just get to the point.”


Joe: “Why were we talking about Grammy?”


Joe 2: “Wireless room. What if Grammy had a pacemaker? You want her to walk into a room filled with electromagnetic fields swirling around?”


Joe: “What would that do? Did Grammy have a pacemaker? I didn’t kn…”


Joe 2: “Hey, you’re the ‘inventor.’ You tell me. Could the wireless room charger interfere with her pacemaker? Don’t they caution people with pacemakers to avoid magnets? As it is, we are wired through our nerves. We all know what a taser can do.”


Joe: “You’re making this into something it’s not. I don’t intend to electrocute Grammy. She can sit—or is it ‘set’?—in her rocker in the room. I’m all about safety. Nobody’s gonna hurt Grammy. Nobody’s gonna get hurt.”


Joe 2: “Just sayin’. Untangling a wire through a slow methodical untwisting might be much safer for Grammy in the long run than trying to untangle all those invisible electromagnetic force lines twisting through a room and through her pacemaker. Would you have a failsafe, something like a circuit breaker, transformer, or non-conductor? Would Grammy sit on a rubber rocker?”


Joe: “Grammy used to tell me stories about Gramps and how she had to wash the coal dust out of his clothes every night even though she spent the day in the Chinese laundry with Mr. and Mrs. Bok Choy and their twenty three kids. See, I know what it means to work. That’s why I have so many good ideas.”


Joe 2: “But magnetic fields twist in somewhat circular patterns. How do you get the charge into the corners of a rectangular room? How do you control the…”

​Joe: “What. Corners? What were we talking about? Twisting….”


Joe 2: “The room-size charger that needed no wires you say you invented.”


Joe: “Have you seen my charging wire? Damn thing always disappears. And then it gets tangled. All those twists…They tell me I’m not supposed…You know, I thought of making a wireless charger….”


*U. Of Michigan. 30 Aug 2021. ‘Charging room’ system powers lights, phones, laptops without wires. Phys.org.  Online at https://techxplore.com/news/2021-08-room-powers-laptops-wires.html  See also Sasatani, T. Et al, Room-scale magnetoquasistatic wireless power transfer using a cavity-based multimode resonator. Nat Electron (2021). doi.org/10.1038/s41928-021-00636-3n.  Accessed August 31, 2021.

Repurposed, abandoned, and decayed cities are nothing new. No one says that ancient Göbekli Tepe, Ur, or Ilium are what they once were. There’s an entropy principle at work.“Things fall apart,” as Yeats wrote in his post-WWI pessimistic “The Second Coming” that relates the failed promises of civilization and religion, both lying in the rubble of that great war.


The “centre,” as Yeats writes “will not hold.” Nevertheless, history repeats. City planners continue to plan, always with the intent to create a new “centre,” some utopia, always with the idea that “this time we’ll get it right.” And yet, every attempt is merely temporary for a variety of reasons, the latest of which are the pandemic and a governmental collapse. The disease emptied inner city office buildings, sending people into the suburbs, where they found that in white-collar jobs they could do what they do without the rush-hour traffic. The Afghan city Kabul has become yet another example of the vulnerability of “centres” that yield easily to sinister forces like armies and criminals.


In her book The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Jane Jacob writes, “…all the art and science of city planning are helpless to stem decay” (5). * From those ancient cities lying in ruins through the Massachusetts Bay Colony’s promise, in the words of Puritan John Winthrop, of a “city on a hill,” to twenty-first century Chicago, “Cities,” in the words of Jacob, “are an immense laboratory of trial and error, failure and success, in city building and design…[that have resulted in] “a monotonous gruel” [both within and outside their boundaries]” (6). “Extraordinary governmental financial incentives have been required to achieve this degree of monotony, sterility and vulgarity. Decades of preaching, writing and exhorting by experts have gone into convincing us and our legislators that mush like this must be good for us, as long as it comes bedded with grass.”


Think public parks. To make that last thought meaningful, think Brasilia, the gleaming city of wide avenues and grassy areas built in the middle of a leveled rainforest. And then think of its suburban ramshackle villages. And how does the gleaming neighborhood maintain its gleam? It’s a capital with public capital at its disposal; it’s the seat of government spending, with the poor in the villages pouring their money into the coffers of bureaucrats. Think Washington, D.C. The city planners promise a return on the investment only to discover the city requires ever more spending for maintenance, the promise of filled coffers becoming a bottomless pit of incurred costs.


Or Pittsburgh. Yes, think Steel City. With about half the population of its heyday steel-making days, the city powers decided to revitalize, first in the 1950s at the “Golden Triangle,” the confluence of the Allegheny and Monongahela where the Ohio begins, and then on the North Side, where the city built Three Rivers Stadium, eliminating the neighborhoods of the poor in favor of a monument to sports, a stadium that no longer exists because it was further replaced with a new stadium, a science center, and also a casino. And farther up the Allegheny the city decided to build another stadium, eliminating more neighborhoods. To make the gleam, the city had to move out the people. What, pray tell, is the purpose of a city where no one lives? What happens to the people replaced by shine and gloss? So now the city is undergoing yet another “revitalization” to move people back in with condos that crowd humans into one large building after another, making a “planned” neighborhood where an organically evolved one once stood.


Go back to ancient Ilium, Troy as we all know it. When Schliemann excavated it, he found layers. City built on city, not just in one cycle, but in numerous cycles: The ancient inhabitants did what modern city inhabitants do. Where neighborhoods grew organically, they built gleam after destroying whatever originally lay decaying in place.


And as populations change with migrations into an out of cities, the structures they leave behind fall into decay. The promise always reverts to the reality that humans aren’t predictable and that transitory utopias spring up unexpectedly, not from the heads of theoreticians, but rather from the hearts of residents. As Jacob writes, “Meantime, all the art and science of city planning are helpless to stem decay—and the spiritlessness that precedes decay—in ever more massive swatches of cities” (5). As cities expand into the “nature” that surrounds them, they carry their innate tendency to decay, their potential for entropy, with them.


This was Jacob’s prediction in the 1960s: “The semisurburbanized and suburbanized messes we create…become despised buy their own inhabitants tomorrow. These thin dispersions lack any reasonable degree of innate vitality…or inherent usefulness as settlements..Few of them, and these only the most expensive as a rule, hold their attraction much longer than a generation; then they begin to decay…Thirty years from now, we shall have accumulated new problems of blight and decay over acreages so immense that in comparison the present problems of the great cities’ gray belts will look piddling…This is exactly what we, as a society, have willed to happen” (445).


And so today as I write this, in the United States Congress contemplates a utopia built by yet another “infrastructure bill,” another attempt to rebuild Ilium, to make that “new Troy” upon a hill of previous Troys.


*Vintage Books Edition, Dec. 1992. Original copyright by Jane Jacobs, 1961 and renewed in 1989.

Here’s an interesting thought, I think,
It has to do with food and drink.
A group just studied some pairs of smells
Like pizza and wood on olfactory cells. *
And what they found I know you’d guess
A hungry fellow, I must confess,
Will follow his nose to cinnamon buns
That waft their smell into the street
And lure him in for a sweet treat.
Sometimes he’ll walk; sometimes he’ll run,
Until the food is on his tongue.
And then, it seems, his sense will change;
He’ll broaden his olfactory range.
He’ll sense some cedar and maybe more,
Enough to pass the bakery door.


“I know,” you say. ‘What’s new in this?
“A hungry lad finds food a bliss.”


“Yes,” I say, “that’s true, indeed,
“But it says something about our need.”


“What’s that?” you ask, without concern.
“There’s nothing new for me to learn.”


“Well, first and foremost, it makes the nose
“The avenue to foods we chose.
“It’s why some are fat and others, trim;
“Why some seem fit without the gym.”


“But that makes sense ‘cause foods have smells
“That ring our nerves like little bells.
“The chimes that clang inside our heads
“Are Sirens’ call, ‘Come eat sweetbreads.’
“I still see nothing new in this;
“A hungry lad finds food a bliss,
“And everyone has fav’rite food
“A smell and taste for every mood.”


“But there’s a larger lesson here,
“One I’ll whisper in your ear.
“It has to do with how we think
“In Either/Ors, not food or drink.
“When we are hungry for a change,
“We don’t decide; we prearrange.
“Just as we know the smell of bread
“That wafts into our hungry head,
“We also know a favored choice,
“It calls to us like Sirens’ voice.
“Our history primes us for decision,
“Ideas are bakeries of provision;
“The choice is either what we know,
“The ideology on which we grow,
“The foods of thought that we’ve consumed,
“The diet of what is now presumed,
“Or something else, a stranger dish,
“For which the nose has no wish.
“We often choose the foods we love,
“And thoughts that fit us ‘like a glove,’
“That’s why our choices are the same,
“Regardless of that which we proclaim
“About our freedom to think anew,
“To order from a strange menu.
“It’s hard to break old food traditions,
“Or ideological positions.
“The bakery smells that draw us in
“Are like some inner driving auxin
“That roots a smell deep in our brain
“Or ties us to ideas arcane.
”When we are full and satiated,
“Then bakery’s smell is quite abated;
“The lure is lost; we tire of food,
“We once longed for because of mood.
“Old appetites are as hard to lose
“As are our faulty former views.”


“It seems to me that you believe
“That all of us are quite naive,
“Thinking that the way we thought,
“Is always how we should and ought,
“And only when we can’t eat more,
“Do we walk past the bakery store.”


“Yes, that’s when we think anew
“And bid our old views fond adieu.
“The lesson’s simple, the mind gets trained,
“The ideas baked within our brain
“Are why we choose a steady diet
“Instead of thoughts that will disquiet.”




*Northwestern University. 26 Aug. 2021. Your sense of smell may be the key to a balanced diet. Phys.org.  Online at https://phys.org/news/2021-08-key-diet.html. Accessed August 27, 2021.

In whom would you rather place your trust, a fickle or a steadfast person? 


Let’s set up the pros and cons. First, the pros of fickle people. A fickle person offers you novelty. We all enjoy that, don’t we? Keeps us alert. Novelty renews us. Quirkiness has its charms. Who wants to be an “old stick in the mud,” relegated to doing the same things day after day, year after year, resident of a mental office cubicle? Who wants to be locked in lockstep with the unchanging dullness that the lack of creativity and surprise bring? Second, the cons: Where does one find any stability in fickle people, any trustworthy assurances? Wake up one day to find the world has changed dramatically? Come home to a different house after work? Creativity and surprise, yes. Constant unpredictability, no. Everyone wants some stability. Everyone wants to trust the floor will hold, that the basis for a relationship will underlie it through time and trial. How can anyone plan anything with a fickle person, one blown about on swirling winds?


The pros of steadfastness differ, of course. A steadfast person makes stability the foundation of relationships. Creativity can occur, but in a context of a consistent drumbeat, a march toward the next goal, a purposeful response to a changing world. A steadfast person provides an unwavering commitment based on principles. But there are cons in everything. In steadfastness lies the potential for stubbornness born of inflexible plans and ideas. Of adherence to questionable, untenable, or even selfish principles. In steadfastness lies a potential inability to adapt as circumstances warrant. 


Inflexibility has proven itself to be as flawed a character trait as capriciousness. So, there are types of or degrees of steadfastness. There is the steadfastness that provides a knowable and strong foundation and a steadfastness that makes a foundation that is brittle and unable to withstand the tremors of change. It cracks rather than bends to the forces of Man and Nature. Inflexibility befriends the obsessive and the elderly who are set in their ways; it befriends the fundamentalist view, or rather, fundamentalists of any kind, religious, political, and ideological. It invites disasters of every degree by clinging to faulty assumptions, and it finds itself constantly justifying by a tyrannical dismissal of questions. It is the “grumpy old man” of human characteristics. And its fixed nature often reveals itself in heartbreaking folly. 


In Rigoletto, the Duke, ironically a fickle man, sings about the fickle nature of “women” in one of the most famous of Verdi’s arias. He desires Rigoletto’s daughter, but Rigoletto, knowing the Duke’s reputation and intentions and being steadfast in his love for his daughter, pays an assassin to kill the Duke. To protect his daughter, he sends her away dressed in disguise as a man. Fickle Nature, however, intervenes as a storm turns her back to the inn. In the meantime, the assassin’s daughter convinces him to spare the Duke and kill the next man who walks through the door. And yes, if you haven’t guessed it or seen it acted out on stage, that “man” is Rigoletto’s daughter. 


Why should I relate that story? Consider steadfastness and fickleness in the context of the American hasty withdrawal from Afghanistan. For twenty years, America was steadfast in its commitment to Afghanistan. In a blink, it withdrew. Now, no country’s commitment to another is permanent, as evidenced by, say, France and England, often at war—heck, one of those wars lasting more than a hundred years—and often at peace with each other—as in the First and Second World Wars. So, alliances come and go, and the one between the late Afghan government and the United States has gone—abruptly. But in what context did the steadfastness end? Was it in a capricious move? Could it have been planned so that those now in jeopardy did not have to be in jeopardy? Twenty years and about a trillion dollars went all for nought in a moment of capriciousness. 


As I write this an embodiment of Rigoletto has asked the daughters of Afghanistan to escape a brutal and enslaving group, but they can’t because a storm is turning them back. Let’s pray that they do not meet the same fate as Rigoletto’s daughter when they walk back through the door of the inn. 

A: “I confess; I didn’t see it happening this fast.”


B: “What?”


A: “Humans dependent upon nonhumans in a substitute world.”


B: “What, again? Are you talking about pets? If so, you have to realize that pets have been around as consolers and companions for millennia.”


A: “No. Machines. Machines as friends. Machines, or rather, AI.”


B: “Where’s this coming from.”


A: “I just read a report on the increased popularity of Xiaolce’s fake friend app.”


B: “Fake friend?”


A: “Yeah. I’m behind the times on this one. Didn’t see its rapid rise. Out of touch with the modern world. I think I’m getting…No, I’m not going to say it.”


B: “Old? Senile? Tell me.”


A: “Okay. Here’s what I know that I didn’t know until recently. There’s an app that substitutes for a friend or counselor. It’s a ‘good listener’ app that some people are using as a stand-in for human companions, an AI that ‘listens’ and responds sympathetically to the lonely, the downtrodden, the friendless. There are about a gajillion Chinese on the app and who knows—well, I guess, the Chinese do—how many others outside China? You can tell the AI your problems. It responds. And people, I guess, have accepted it as a companion, friend, or counselor.”


B: “And you find that disturbing, I guess.”


A: “You can bet your bot I do. Communicating with robots never concerned me until people began adopting them as serious companions. I think of all those old films and TV shows with robot companions that I took lightly. As a kid, I liked that robot in Forbidden Planet and the one in Lost in Space, but those were my days of innocence.”


B: “Why does a pretend friend bother you? There are lots of lonely people out there who might benefit from a companion real for unreal? I can see advantages: People in nursing homes, for example. There’s a HAL out there waiting to befriend you, to play chess with you, to compliment you by complementing you. And look, there’s only a limited amount of practical advice anyone can give anyway. Nothing much new under the Sun, as they say. Advice? Heard that before; heard most, if not all of it, before. Anyway, what’s the harm in a friendly listener?”


A: “As imperfect as human advice is, even the guidance from one trained in counseling, it becomes truly dangerous when it’s a process placed in the control of a few with an agenda. Even without verbalizing advice, an AI can subtly agree with a course of action. I’m envisioning that lonely Chinese woman confiding in an Artificial Intelligence only to be ‘guided’ by an algorithm written by a malevolent human. Maybe worse, by a well-meaning, but foolish technocrat. Where’s the set of ethical checks and balances? Where’s the protection for the vulnerable, for the weak, for the lonely? For the children! We are developing a new set of victims, victims who willingly give away their innermost secrets to a machine whose control lies in the hands of government, Big Tech, or pompous fools who assume they know what’s best for the rest of us. And the influence is growing. Not just millions, but probably soon billions might submit to AI controls—many not even realizing they are under control. It’s like having advertising tricks on steroids, salesmen’s pitches on the downslope of a roller coaster, and the constant chatter of a 24-hour news cycle always in one’s ear—the ideal propaganda machines. I suppose what bothers me most is that people are actually ‘choosing’ to communicate with the app as though it is, in fact, real. Well, I should grant it is, I guess, for them. The AI can mimic a ‘real human.’ And some, I hear, get hooked on the friendship. Scary, I think. We might have millions of people walking around right now living a pretend life. Once removed from reality, can people ever understand the ‘real’ again? How will this affect the young and mentally immature? And what will it do to books, to reading and contemplating, and to introspection?”


B: “Okay. But before you criticize, let me say that I’ve heard you use SIRI.”


A: “Sure, but you never hear me say, ‘SIRI.’ I just start with a question like ‘Where’s the nearest restaurant?’ I don’t personalize SIRI. It’s a disembodied voice and a trigger for a search.”


B: “All right. I am getting the picture. You’re worried that we—if I might suggest—just invented another ‘drug’ to distract us from a ‘real world.’ Allay your concerns, my friend. Allay your fears. Even it it is true, you won’t be able to put a lid on that bottle, so fretting about it is useless. Pandora has seen to that. No sense in trying to stop the unstoppable. For centuries no one has been able to stop the use of chemicals as escape mechanisms or comfort blankets. Just as drugs proliferated, so will AI controls over a population willing to yield its freedom to others. Drugs and AI. There’s no real control on either. To think otherwise is to ignore the size of the human population and the multiple intentions under which it operates. So, AI is proliferating like drugs, maybe faster. Every time we think we have some control some new drug enters the system. I just read that the Vietnamese are about to okay the use of kratom. No doubt that’ll be used more widely. That’s another drug to distribute. And after kratom runs through the population, there will be another drug. Humans appear to hunger after that which ‘dehumanizes’ them in their search for ‘something better,’ an escape of some sort. Lured by the promise of a better personal world where, as the song goes, ‘troubles melt like lemon drops,’ people turn to anything; that used to be drugs, and now it is both drugs and AI. There are just too many people to caution, too many eager for ‘the easy way out,’ and too many far removed from daily realities. For centuries, people took refuge in religions and in political movements. I guess I could as easily argue that religion, politics, and psychoanalysis have long done what Xioalce now does for its millions of users. And I agree with you that like abuses by religious leaders and politicians, abuses arise from the use of AI.”


A: “I guess I’m just frustrated by what I see as humans losing more control over their lives.”

I suppose that I like others have been under the false impression that Bishop George Berkeley, English philosopher, thought that all was thought, that perception made reality. I suppose, also, that I like others have a problem understanding what today’s physicist might mean by wave and particle duality, that light, for example, or an electron, appears as a particle when we test for particularity and as wave when we test for wave, both photon and electron appearing to be what we want them to be. But Berkeley did say, “The horse is in the stable,” and physicists do say that photon and electron simply have a particle-wave duality. Both horse and subatomic entities are real and independent of the human mind. Life and the world around us do exist outside our perceptions. The real world is, in fact, real and not a figment.


But I like others wonder whether or not we aren’t at times characters in pure fictions. I wonder whether or not we don’t live allegorical lives like some Swiftian or Dantean character suffused in a pool of irony, our world either a world of Gulliver, where things like little relatively imperfect Lilliputians only appear to be perfect and big relatively perfect Brobdingnagians only appear to be imperfect, or a world like the Hell or Purgatory through which Virgil leads us, where the evil, sinful, and the indifferent make up the populations we encounter.


Fiction, specifically as allegory and irony, is what I perceive to be our circumstance in the world of politics and media through which some “Virgil” guides us. I know this is round-about for your mind at this point, but let me add some context that should bring your thoughts together. In Dark Conceit: the Making of Allegory, Edwin Honig writes that in reading works like those of Swift, Dante, and others who write allegories, ironies, and satires, “We suspend belief in witnessing another world bound by its own necessities, and layered with the purpose, irony, paradox, wisdom, justice, and truth which the fictions realized”  (171). *


Now for some necessary definitions as Honig explains: “An allegory starts from the writer’s need to create a specific world of fictional reality…he ordains the reality by designating it according to its function…Each allegory starts with a tabula rasa assumption, as though the world in its view were being made for the first time” (113). Honig says that this allegorical world differs from “the world as-is,” that reality that most of us, including the Reverend Bishop Berkeley, know exists outside our minds, the world in which a real horse is in a real stable.


And irony? Honig says, “Irony is felt immediately through the rapid conversions and the startling juxtapositions of dissimilars…It first proposes a basic congruence between two things which have a patent incongruence underlying them. Then it presents for consideration certain instances of this incongruence…In effect, then, the absurd possibility of similarity, or even of equivalent and interchangeable identities, is momentarily taken as a serious fact. Irony pretends in this way to confirm a union of opposites…irony is the …mode of the satirist hunting down the disparities which are understood to exist between man’s moral and physical natures, between all sanguine expressions of hope in social ideals and in the benevolent intentions and the unregenerate condition of human actuality” (130).


Are you seeing the relevance to your world in this summer of 2021? There is, regardless of what politicians and utopian idealists tell us, a real horse in a stable. It does not exist because we say it exists. There is a reality outside perception, and in Afghanistan in August, 2021, that reality plays out in the desperation of a people fearing for their freedom and safety. It’s as though the politicians are writing the incongruence and acting it out, the incongruence lying between the fictional world they proclaim and the real world “as is.”


When the leader of the free world proclaims in an interview and in press conferences that the chaos in Afghanistan was inevitable, he speaks a perception of his own making. He sees no alternatives beyond his own allegorical and ironic composition, and even if he sees alternatives, he determines they are equivalent. Could a different story have been written? Is the obvious not obvious, and is it not that which is evident to many the reason for the irony played out on the world stage in August, 2021? Is it not obvious that those who faced the dangers of August could have been evacuated before the withdrawal of soldiers? Is it not obvious that the military did not have to abandon an impenetrable military air base called Bagram (and its weapons) so that evacuees might have an alternative point of departure?


We live in a world of allegory and irony, apparently, a world of perceptions in which the “ideal world” is conjoined to the “real world” in the minds of academicians and politicians more concerned about writing their legacies in fictions of their own making than in assessing realities. And as they write, real people suffer, very “real” people, the horses that really exist in the stable. The same can be said for those who seek to make the free world a socialist world, aiming to do so either in their ignorance of the 162 million people murdered in democides by socialist governments in the twentieth century or in spite of those murders.


Ironic, isn’t it? Those who proclaim a championship for women’s rights have acted to enslave women under a repressive Taliban regime. This who proclaim freedom have acted to censor speech. Those who proclaim help for the poor have acted to impoverish many by closing businesses.


Is this a Dantean world of allegory and irony? Are we all following Virgil as he leads us on a tour of a Hell in which perception has become reality?


*Honig, Edwin. 1966. New York. Oxford University Press. Copyright by Honig in 1959.

Alien #1: “I’ve been watching these humans for years, and I still don’t quite understand them.”


Alien #2: “What’s to understand? They are born, procreate, and die. While they live they do the useful and the useless; they exploit where they can or they have others exploit for them; and they all seem to believe that they have ultimate control over everything—except, that is, for those who have been trained to relinquish control to others.”


Alien #1: “I just observed that the Chinese government is going to allow families in some areas to have up to three children. * They went to one-child families about fifty years ago, raised it to two-children families not too long ago, and are now allowing three-kid families. They realized that their workforce is aging, and they need to breed more workers to sustain the aging.”


Alien #2: “All that tech, and they still need to breed workers? Haven’t they heard of Elon Musk? He’s developing a robot that will make physical work ‘a choice.’ ** That’s the direction China should go with its 1.411 billion people.”


Alien #1: “Yes, but that Muskbot isn’t yet a reality, and even when it becomes one, it’s design specifications are rather limited: It can’t lift much; can’t beat a human in a race; and can’t carry more than 45 pounds.”


Alien #2: “Well, that’s certainly enough carrying capacity to replace most Amazon, UPS, or FedEx employees. And surely, it’s enough to do what robots already do on that scale. Big lifters already exist on car assembly lines. The Tesla Bot will be more mobile than those fixed machines. It will use the same computer tech that enables a Tesla car to move from point A to B.”


Alien #1: “So, I’m trying to understand here. The Chinese limited the number of people a family could have without realizing that humans age. Now they need to reproduce themselves to make workers who, as the planet spins, will also age. If they overproduce themselves, will they then need even more Chinese to support a larger aging population a half century from now? And if they go to Muskbots to do the work, what will they have for a population, a bunch of do-nothing late-middle-agers? And I have another question. If they invent diseases that kill off or disable their workers, will they then have to produce even more workers only to find that they age as well?”


Alien #2: “No, they will have a people freed to do whatever they desire. Creative stuff and whatnot. And they’ll get a handle on that disease stuff simply because they have to. At least, I think that is what they’ll do. Why would anyone make something that would threaten its own species? Anyway, with robots, people won’t have to do menial tasks; that will free them to reach their individual potential.”


Alien #1: “Oh, like the Americans? They have recently decided to pay people not to work. Unfortunately, Musk hasn’t given them the robots they need to support their new lifestyle. But maybe in the near future…”


Alien #2: “I haven’t been paying attention. I do remember that female politician, Nancy something, saying about a decade ago that with free health care, people won’t have to work; they’ll be able to stay home and do creative things, paint, I suppose, like that Hunter guy.”


Alien #1: “Yeah. How’s that not working working out for them? A decade or so later do you see increased creativity? Has a population of people who have ‘a choice’ not to work led to utopia?”


Alien #2: “As I said, I haven’t been paying much attention to the Americans. How are they doing with the pay-not-to-work policy? Well, I can’t say, but I have noticed that of recent, they appear to be walking around like robots, rather mechanically, like a Muskbot with only eyes showing in the head. What’s with those masks?”


Alien #1: “Disease prevention, I think. That’s where those Muskbots you mention will be superior. No colds, no flu, no SARS, no COVID-19, or 26, or 105. No masks, but, then, no noses or mouths. Hey, maybe each American human is like a Muskbot, muzzled, no need for a mouth nowadays. Soon as one opens a mouth to be creative, the authorities shut it with laws and restrictions, or their contemporaries ostracize them. It’s a bit like the Chinese restricting families from having more than one child. What humans do often leads to the opposite of what they intend. That’s why when we started to observe these beings long ago institute plans to make a better world, I asked, ‘What could go wrong?’ They always seem to make sense at the time, at least they seem to make sense to those who institute the plans.”


Alien #2: “Strange species. Maybe we should spend our time observing another planet.”


*Phys.org. 21 Aug 2021. China allows couples third child amid demographic crisis. Online at https://phys.org/news/2021-08-china-couples-child-demographic-crisis.html.  Accessed August 21, 2021.


**Ryan, Jackson. 20 Aug 2021. Elon Musk unveils Tesla Bot, a humanoid robot that uses vehicle AI. Cnet. Online at https://www.cnet.com/news/elon-musk-unveils-tesla-bot-a-humanoid-robot-utilizing-vehicle-ai/  Accessed August 21, 2021.

Have you named your home or apartment? You know, something like "Wayfarer's End," "Wandering Brook," or "The Falcon's Nest"? What about a name for an apartment floor in a high rise, such as "Golden Hall," "The Corridor," or "The Cavern"? No? You haven't named it yet? Get busy. So much lies in a name. Call that studio apartment "Nature's Expanse." Call that row house "The Brickyard." 

"Where do you live?"
"I live at 'Nature's Expanse.' Come visit, and bring friends."


Chief among the places with which most people—I’m making this up because I don’t have any survey to support it—would not want to be associated is prison (jail). But maybe not anymore, especially with the new definition of prison (jail) as a “residence” in Dane County, Wisconsin.


First, a digression. A  number of years ago, I received a letter from the IRS. In it, the bureaucrat writing the letter said that the IRS was having trouble contacting me because it didn’t have my address. I’m pretty sure the letter telling me that the IRS didn’t have my address had reached me at my address. And, of course, the obvious questions are: “If you didn’t think you had the right address, why would you send a letter to the wrong address? Who did you think was going to respond?” What was the logic behind sending a letter to tell someone that his address was unknown. But, I digress from my digression; I easily resolved the minor issue without difficulty, by the way (Whew!). However, in the process, I called the IRS to ask a question. As you might guess, I got to listen to music until an agent could speak. Now, here’s the point of this digressive story: Both the letter and the wait message referred to “customers.” You can imagine my elation to know that the IRS considered me a “customer.”


Right. Perplexity, not elation. An agency with the sole purpose of extracting money from me thought that I would be happy if it referred to me as a “customer.” Can anyone say ‘doublespeak,” “obfuscation,” and “1984”?


So, now back to Dane County, Wisconsin, where county officials decided to call prisoners “residents.” According to a report in the Wisconsin State Journal, the reasoning lies in a decision to “humanize” inmates. “‘I view this change in name as a way to humanize those who are within our care,’ [Kalvin] Barrett said at a press conference outside of the Public Safety Building in Madison.” * So, when a “resident” leaves the “county residence” and applies for a job, a former “resident” can say in a job interview that his last place of employment was a government facility.


If the HR interviewer then asks at what facility the person worked, the “former resident” can say, “county residence.” But when the reality of a place with bars and guards becomes clear to the HR interviewer, will there be empathy for or doubt about the former “resident”? Will the HR interviewer think “this ‘resident’ is hiding something”?


I’m for humanizing inmates; I’m for helping them to change their lives. But making a name change doesn’t alter the realities of the past. Just about everyone is capable of change, and many former “residents” have become productive members of society, overcoming their self-imposed incarceration in a “county residence” state “correction institute,” or federal prison. But we live in a society obsessed with euphemisms that make many—I don’t have a survey to support this—just shake their heads in disbelief. Remember Homeland Secretary Janet Napolitano’s referring to terrorism as “man-caused disasters” because she didn’t want to say “Islamic terrorism”? If you do, you’re re-shaking your head.


Those who change the name of an unpleasant reality believe they are somehow changing the reality itself. I guess such word coining assuages fear, concern, and anxiety. But reality always catches up to those who try to run away from it.


Hamer. Emily. 17 Aug, 2021. ‘Inmates’ no longer: Those in Dane County Jail to be called ‘residents,’ ‘those in our care.’ Wisconsin State Journal.   Accessed August 19, 2021.

Robert Burns: “Aye. I did write that line Faulkner used in his title. It came to me one day as I walked upon the moor. The farmer’s plow was wreaking havoc with the ground. And I thought of that field mouse, waiting for the inevitable destruction by hiding in its little burrow. I just asked myself, ‘If the mouse could see the coming disaster, why did it wait until the last minute to evacuate?’ But then, I realized that the mouse has a mouse brain, one incapable of anticipating or even making a plan with rational alternatives, like leaving before the farmer began plowing.”


American in Afghanistan: “Yeah. I think I know what you mean about a mouse brain.”