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.”

The recent finding that the genetics of Canadian grizzlies parallels the human language families of coastal British Columbia is a remarkable demonstration of the Power of Place. *


Here it is, August 18, 2021. Summer in western Pennsylvania. Thought I’d do some outside work—the woods that surround me encroach if I don’t exert some defensive control on undergrowth. But I’m currently in Fred’s path; flash flood warnings accompany the rainy forecast. Think I’ll stay inside rather than get drenched by heavy rains. I left Florida three days before the tropical storm hit, but I knew that my home would likely lie in its northeastward path, as the Westerlies and the Coriolis bent it into a curve over the Ohio Valley. Yep. Here it is. A friend driving on I-70 just called from the car to say she couldn’t see (an obvious overstatement) as she drove among trucks and other cars at 35 mph.


Where I live—where you live—presents us with weather patterns we grow to know. Sure, there are anomalies. Sometimes the jet stream dips south of you; sometimes, north. Depends on your location. But even the anomalous weather patterns become rather familiar phenomena. We become acclimated. We might complain during the extreme events, those exceptionally hot or cold days, but we usually continue to live where we live.


Why?


Place has shaped us.


How much? I invite anyone to take a drive from the coast of North Carolina to the state’s mountains. Notice the cultural differences, the dialect differences, the architectural differences from sea to mountain. Drive from Coastal Plain, to Upper Coastal Plain, to Piedmont, to Blue Ridge and note how people live in each of those physiographic provinces.


And now we see that grizzlies in three regions have genetic identities indigenous to the region in which they live. And their ranges coincide with language families. The resources of the regions include salmon, food for both humans and bears. With adequate local resources, there was little reason for either bears or humans to be nomads. That stay-at-home lifestyle unified language and bear genetics.


How has your place shaped you? How has it marked you with identifiable characteristics—physical, cultural, linguistic?   




*Fritts, Rachel. 13 Aug 2021. ‘Mind blowing’: Grizzly bear DNA maps onto Indigenous language families. Science. Online at doi:10.1126/science.abl9306.   Accessed August 18, 2021.

In Act I, Scene 1 of Coriolanus, Meninius Agrippa tells a rioting mob of hungry Plebeians that the Patricians are like the belly. The food controlled by the aristocracy is best distributed by that class for the good of the people, just as the stomach gathers in the food from which it sends nutrients through the body. Menenius has the belly say to the body,


    'True is it, my incorporate friends…
That I receive the general food at first,
Which you do live upon; and fit it is,
Because I am the store-house and the shop
Of the whole body: but, if you do remember,
I send it through the rivers of your blood,
Even to the court, the heart, to the seat o' the brain;
And, through the cranks and offices of man,
The strongest nerves and small inferior veins
From me receive that natural competency
Whereby they live: and though that all at once
You, my good friends’


The passage is and is not an allegory, depending on one’s definition of allegory. Its subject has been a matter of debate both in Roman times and in ours. Should the Plebeians depend on the people in power, the Patricians, to control the distribution of food—or anything? What of information, also.

I suppose the social and pundit-driven media are also “bellies,” distributing information to the masses—for their own good. And recently, we see that with regard to information, there are those in the military and in other government agencies that control the information for which we hunger. So, as in the case of the Vietnam War, now we see that the military chooses to send faulty information to the “seat o’ the brain,” specifically, to your Plebeian brain and mine. An upset stomach reveals that the Afghan food we’ve been served isn’t as healthful as we were told. We know because we see it in the regurgitations of a collapsed government. And another tummy ache reveals that we can’t fully trust the food provided by the CDC, health “officials,” and reigning politicians, those Patricians who pick the menu and the quantity we are allowed to eat and digest. In fact, the belly of nanny government does the digesting for us, sending whatever nutrients it deems necessary into our veins.

Now, we have governors and mayors--our Patricians-- dictating COVID restrictions, including the wearing of obligatory masks that might or might not have any real effect save making people breathe in bacteria accumulating on the inside of the mask. We’re all on a restricted diet, the belly choosing the food according to its ideological appetite.

I find restraint difficult in the context of current humanitarian crises linked to purposeful actions by American leaders. I have to comment.


In the second half of the nineteenth century, Prussia (Germany) passed a series of laws designed to limit the influence of religion, specifically Catholicism. Bismarck’s government engaged people in a culture war that resulted in the expulsion of Jesuits and sundry religious organizations, including groups of nuns. Forced out of the country by an intolerant government, five Franciscan nuns boarded the SS Deutschland in 1875 and perished when the ship wrecked.


To paraphrase Gerard Manley Hopkins who wrote about that shipwreck in “The Wreck of the Deutschland,” I’ll say that on August 16, 2021, as it did on that December day in 1875, hope has grown gray hairs. In Afghanistan, a panicked crowd attempted to board an Air Force plane in an attempt to escape the sinking ship of the Afghani state in a different version of the Bismarck government’s anti-religious laws. This time it was a group of extreme fundamentalists that, in imposing a theocracy, forced the exile. This time the departing ship was not an ocean-going vessel, but an US Air Force troop transport plane. The world watched as Afghanis tried to board the enormous plane as it taxied on the tarmac, some clinging to its belly until they fell to their deaths as the massive plane climbed. They risked and lost their lives in anticipation of implacable dire consequences of remaining in Afghanistan with no American protection.


Does it bother you that the people “in charge” often acquire a sense of entitlement born from a retinue of “yes-men” and ideologues? Does it bother you that those in charge sometimes think they can impose a wishful reality on actual reality? Are Americans being led by a generation of gamers whose developmental reality was Tron in an affluent nanny society? Has a culture in which even  many of the poor have more luxuries or conveniences than the rich had a century ago shaped a generation of dreamers out of touch with the harsh realities of a world outside an Xbox or PlayStation console? Take the current Administration’s comments for what they imply about its level of wisdom. Essentially, spokespersons for the Administration said they didn’t expect the fall would happen as fast as it did. What? “As fast as” implies that the Administration knew the fall was inevitable. If the Administration knew the Afghan government was likely to fall, why did it not evacuate those Afghan allies and NGOs from the country to avoid a Vietnam-style panic.


The disaster in Afghanistan comes upon us in the context of social engineering, a movement that dominated the airwaves for the last two or three years. And that disaster piggybacks the one on the American southern border, where over 1.2 million people, including unaccompanied minors and people sick with COVID, have crossed into the country since January 20, 2021.


The Kulturkampf of the current milieu is one between the forces of common sense and those of failed ideologies like socialism. The current American administration decided that it is important to fight a culture war against those who disagree with its “new morality” concerning social issues, such as the use of public restrooms, transgender women on women’s sports teams, use of gender-appropriate pronouns, and unrestricted abortions paid for by tax dollars. The Administration’s perceived enemies are those who would protect the country’s borders against the intrusions of drug and human traffickers. Under its supposed empathy for humanity, the current Administration has caused humanitarian crises at home and abroad. And, as in all culture wars, this Administration has the support of compliant and willing propagandists: In Bismarck’s day, the newspapers; today, the social, network, and cable media.


There will always be culture wars. Some of those wars, like the Chinese Cultural Revolution, result in persecution, reductions in human freedom, humanitarian crises, and even deaths. Are we now witnessing the modern analog of the wreck of the SS. Deutschland?


What will be the consequences of the current Kulturkampf at home and abroad? More innocents forced to flee and perish on ships doomed to wreck?

Phil: “Have you noticed how a chief concern is naming? In fact, it appears to have been one of our earliest concerns if not the earliest.”

Bill: “So?”

Phil: “Look, here’s what I find in Genesis. It indicates that the authors of the text thought naming was important”:

    ‘And out of the ground the LORD God formed every beast of the field, and every fowl of the air; and brought them unto Adam to see what he would call them: and whatsoever Adam called every living creature, that was the name thereof. And Adam gave names to all cattle, and to the fowl of the air, and to every beast of the field; but for Adam there was not found an help meet for him. And Adam named one of the beasts “Virus +,” but that was only after much debate.’

Bill: “You made that last line up. It isn’t in Genesis. I can explain the reason that Genesis has that passage on naming. Thousands of years ago people looked for explanations for why things were the way they were just as we do today. They didn’t have linguists, philologists, and etymologists researching documents. Heck, they didn’t have many documents, maybe some scrolls. I don’t blame them for trying to figure out why humans had language or how it originated. Language is ‘organic’; or, at least, it was organic. Now, just like your fictional last line, we have added words by conscious invention. Lots of words are the product of debate as much as they are of organic development. Take Tyrannosaurus rex as an example. Big meat eater, king of the dinosaurs, the ‘terrible lizards.’ Paleontologists are great at naming; so are botanists. They love to use Latin and Greek words.”

Phil: “Facetiousness aside, I’m guessing that Adam had to debate Eve on what to call anything. Facetiousness included, I have to note what Mark Twain had Adam say about naming things in his The Diaries of Adam & Eve:

    ‘Been examining the great waterfall. It is the finest thing on the estate, I think. The new creature calls it Niagara Falls-why, I am sure I do not know. Says it LOOKS like Niagara Falls. That is not a reason, it is mere waywardness and imbecility. I get no chance to name anything myself. The new creature names everything that comes along, before I can get in a protest. And always that same pretext is offered -- it LOOKS like the thing. There is a dodo, for instance. Says the moment one looks at it one sees at a glance that it "looks like a dodo." It will have to keep that name, no doubt. It wearies me to fret about it, and it does no good, anyway. Dodo! It looks no more like a dodo than I do.’

Bill: “No doubt you have some point to make. So, what is it?”

Phil: “In June, 2021, Maharashtra State officials announced a new COVID variant, at the time of this writing named Delta Plus. So, from “Wuhan virus” to “China virus,” to Greek-letter virus, to proposed Zodiac or constellation-virus, the COVID names have mutated only slightly slower than the virus itself. Remember the fuss about the name in the spring and summer of 2020? Remember how people who referred to the virus by its point of origin were vilified? Remember the focus on the name?

“Apparently, we’re not good at killing viruses that can harm us, but we can kill their names. We seem to have done the actual job killing only Small Pox and maybe another virus, that cow virus I can’t think of, Rinder or Reindeer or something. By the way, we really don’t know if that job is complete because governments keep Small Pox on hand, maybe for remaking and redistributing vaccines, maybe for biological warfare.

“Now we have another mutating virus, one that has put the world in a panic. And it’s doing what viruses do—indeed, what all bio-entities do —they mutate. That is a bit scary, but maybe the current threat of COVID viruses will do what some past viruses have done—mutate themselves into relative harmlessness or extinction. Of course, Nature isn't the only controlling entity as it was in all past pandemics. There are those lab people who think it’s a good idea to alter viruses not for their extinction, but rather for their military use. So, we’re probably stuck with variations of coronaviruses for an indefinite period. And some will be very deadly, and some won't be very deadly. And with every reincarnation of the virus, we will feel obligated to give it a name, an ‘appropriate name,’ at first some Linnaean-type designation, but now in our current culture, a name ‘appropriately inoffensive to one group or another’ according to the dictates of those who find offense in any term they choose to find offensive.

“What I find interesting is that at the outset of this current pandemic, some Americans got themselves into emotional extra-small Spandex over calling the virus "Chinese" or "Wuhan" because the names were perceived to be offensive and "racist."  We’re all about naming, all about words. Remember the sing-song sentence of childhood “Sticks and stones will break my bones, but words will never hurt me”? Seems we were wrong.

“Apparently, words do hurt some of us in this touchy-feely age. So, here’s a story my dad told me. One of his relatives, a cousin, I believe, moved to the Midwest in the 1940s and into a town with no one of Italian descent. At a gathering of some kind (the story was not filled with details), one of the Midwesterners said to the relative, ‘You know what a Wop is?’ The relative, unfazed by the attempt to provoke him, said, ‘Yes, it’s the sound you make when you slap two cow patties together.’ Having taken the comment lightly, he turned a potentially ugly encounter into a disarming one. He soon gained acceptance in the community and never received another slur. 

“The problem we seem to have on steroids is that so many Americans have lost a sense of self-deprecating humor and a sense of reality. Perspective is shaped by the decorum of the ‘ruling class.’ And that perspective is centered on words those in charge find acceptable or offensive. I'm not advocating offending, but I am advocating a change in perspective based on the following:

“Consider that today as I write this, the Afghan government just collapsed. Women and girls are under the threat of enslavement, and men are under the threat of murder. Thousands are trying to flee the country, to board departing cargo planes and helicopters before the murdering and enslaving begins. Today, as I write this, Haiti is recovering from its second devastating earthquake in eleven years—with a tropical storm threatening the survivors. I wonder whether or not the Afghanis or the Haitians are concerned about names at this time the way we were as a deadly virus wreaked havoc on the American economy and on American lives.

“Sorry to speak sarcastically, Bill, but I suppose if the Afghanis and Haitians were touchy-feely Americans, that is all they would be thinking about.”