Anniversary

It's been almost exactly one year since I got out of the hospital after my tandem bone marrow transplant. The tandem bone marrow transplant didn't quite kill my cancer, but subsequent radiation treatments apparently got the job done - at least for now, and these days I don't look any farther ahead than my next PET scan.

This was my hospital room. Note the potato chips, which I couldn't bear to eat, and the pile of model magazines. The red octagon stuck to the wall identified me as a "fall risk", and it's there because somewhere on the lower left side of the mural painted on the wall is a smooth hemispherical dent I made in the wall with my head when I passed out. (One of my chemo drugs caused my blood pressure to hover somewhere around 90 over 50, and that was while I was lying down. Once I stood up to use the facilities - I find those jug-like "urinals" undignified - and passed out cold on my feet and bounced my head off the wall on the way down.)

I don't dwell on it too much these days, because I really do feel frightfully good and I prefer not to waste too much of my time and energy on cancer or its treatments. But it did seem suitable to at least make a passing reference to this particular anniversary.

I did a lot of writing on the laptop, visible beneath the purplish vomit bucket, but none of it was very good. Chemo has a lot of weird and unpleasant side effects, but the most unpleasant side effect, to me anyway, was the way it destroyed my ability to read and write. I could read individual words and know what they meant, and I could type lots of words and know what they meant, but I couldn't assemble words into any kind of context. I was unable to extract any meaning from anything I read, nor could I express myself in writing, even though I knew perfectly well what each individual word meant.

All told, I spent about a quarter of a million dollars out of my own pocket fighting cancer. I don't regret spending the money - it was either that or die, and I wasn't too keen on the dying part. But now that the memory of cancer is fading, I find myself saying things like "Well, gee whiz, how come I can never afford to go on cruises like all my friends?" And then I remember why.*

But I'm not complaining. It turns out that just being alive is pretty cool.

*If you're wondering, no, my employer didn't provide health insurance, and the health insurance I bought privately turned out to actually cover next to nothing, and I made too much money to qualify for any kind of government assistance or charitable grants. For a while I couldn't get insurance at all, but now one of the provisions of the "Obamacare" that people screech about allows me to get insurance despite my pre-existing condition.

SF Philosophies

I enjoy having philosophical discussions with friends about science fiction. Well, not science fiction generally; it's more along the lines of Star Trek versus Star Wars, which the SF elite might well regard as the equivalent of debating the differences between lunch meat and hot dogs - same crappy stuff, just in a different forms.

My friends are mostly Star Wars fans, and they assault me endlessly (but in a good-natured way) about the alleged "socialism" in Star Trek. In Star Trek, nobody seems to be motivated by greed or tries to get rich (well, the villains sometimes do, but not the Federation personnel themselves). This is taken to be proof of some kind of shambling socialist conformity in action - "It's like the USSR and the UN rolled together" is one comment I hear fairly often.

But I think that's a pretty fundamental error. The point of Star Trek is that certain enabling technologies (specifically, more or less free energy and replicators) have completely transformed societies and economics to the point that labels like "capitalist" or "socialist" don't apply at all. Star Trek isn't a socialist nightmare; it's a libertarian dream. When you no longer have to sell your labor to sustain yourself, you're free to do whatever you want, and the real value lies in the act of creation, not the act of production.

I suppose greed still exists in Star Trek, but when the replicator can give you practically any material good you could ever want, I'm not sure what the point of greed would be. It isn't that everyone has the same amount of stuff; it's that everyone can have everything, so in the end "mere stuff" no longer matters. What matters is the mind, the act of creating something new.

You want a gold goblet to drink Romulan ale out of? You presumably tell the replicator what you want, it it synthesizes it on the spot. But the replicator can't synthesize new works of art, new scientific discoveries, new technical approaches, new theories, new music. It can only reproduce what has already been made. So the value, the point, lies in creating, not having. The mind becomes the defining quality of a person - you're important not for what you have, or what you can produce in a material sense, but for what you know, what you can figure out, what you can create. I like that.

"I wouldn't want to live in that system," my friends say. "There'd be no ambition, no drive, no spiritus, no reason to strive; it'd be nothing but a bunch of couch potatoes eating bon-bons from the replicator and watching crap on what passes for TV in the future."

And I admit that the possibility exists that within the Federation, a large segment of the population sits around eating junk out of the replicator and doing nothing. But maybe they eventually get bored with doing nothing and decide to create something new. Or maybe the ambition to amass material possessions has been transformed into the ambition to be recognized as the most surpassingly important mind in whatever field of endeavor interests you. Maybe you like to design phasers. And maybe being recognized as the best phaser designer in known space is what gets you out of bed in the morning.

"But that just leads to a society of snobby intellectual elites!"

I'd rather have a society of snobby intellectual elites than a society of snobby materialistic elites, but I guess that's the difference between me and them. Though it does amuse that whenever a "noted scientist" is the episode's antagonist, he (usually it's a he, but not always) is almost always a complete asshole - they may celebrate the mind, but nobody likes a smug scientist.

Not that I have anything against Star Wars. They're fun movies (most of them, anyway), and the pulp fiction starkness of the black-versus-white moral issue allows one to watch the movies without being assaulted by moral ambiguities. But there aspects of the underpinnings of Star Wars that don't resonate with me very much. Royalty, for one. I don't have any problem with ceremonial heads of state, even hereditary ceremonial heads of state, in the manner of the United Kingdom. But I'm not too keen on the idea of someone being entitled to power and privilege simply by virtue of birth - I'd want to know what their qualifications for being in control of my life happen to be, and I don't accept "Because my daddy was king" as good enough.

There are, it must be admitted, certain things about Star Trek that rub me the wrong way. The show sometimes descends to almost hysterical moralizing. One of the episodes in Next Generation that particularly galled me was the one where they found the disconnected Borg, named him Hugh, and contemplated using him as a means of introducing a computer virus into the Borg collective that would essentially eliminate them. But no, Doctor Crusher goes off on some great crusade about how they can't just arbitrarily wipe out an entire species, using the "we'd be no better than them if it we did" argument. Does that mean that when a man destroys a nest of wasps on his doorstep that he's no better than the wasps? Maybe so - but it beats being stung every time you go out to check the mail.

What's next? We can't throw away rotten food because even rotten food has a right to be eaten? I don't think so. At some point people have to think about the matter and decide that it's either us or the Borg, period, and all the hand-wringing won't slow the Borg down by so much as a millisecond when they come to assimilate Earth. Starfleet Medical wouldn't hesitate to wipe out a dangerous virus that causes some serious disease, after all.

But what the heck. It's all in fun, and it isn't like it's really important, like whether I should have a salad or a sandwich for lunch.

Speaking of which...

Next Book

I think I may read Laura Hillenbrand's Unbroken next.

Horse racing isn't something that interests me very much, if at all. I don't have a moral stand against it, PETA-style; it just isn't something that normally interests me. I don't hate it, but I don't love it either. But because of the popularity of the movie Seabiscuit, and on the basis of my wife's solid recommendation, I read Laura Hillenbrand's Seabiscuit, and I found it time well spent. The book probably means even more if you have some specialist interest in or knowledge of the word of thoroughbred horse racing, but she managed to write a book that I found pleasant, interesting and worthwhile even though I knew nothing about that world (to cite just one example of my ignorance, if someone said the word "Manowar" to me, I'd think of Lord Nelson, not race horses).

So I marked her down as an author I'd read again - if she could write a deft book and make me feel as though I was interested in something that I wasn't actually interested in, she could look forward to getting more royalties from me in the future (and I'm sure with the royalties she'll get from me, she'll be able to afford to add a new wing to her toothpick model of Monticello - assuming she has one).

I also confess that I feel a human compassion for her as a person. I don't have Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, but I went through an awful lot of chemotherapy, and I'd say that I probably have at least some idea of what CFS is like. Mine went away, fortunately, when my cancer treatments eventually proved successful (thus far, anyway). Hers is still around, and I can just imagine all the people out there telling her "Oh, CFS is all in your mind; you're just lazy; get off your ass and do something!" My answer to them is "She IS doing something; she's writing interesting and reasonably successful books."

And I wish her continued success too, though not at the cost of continuing to suffer from CFS.

I think my favorite example of her writing was in Seabiscuit, when she described how, in period photographs, a certain trainer's head seemed to dissolve into the sky behind him, as though his head ended at the eyebrows. I don't know why that stuck with me, but it did, and since I read that, I've looked at old family photographs with an eye for that kind of thing and actually found an example of my grandfather's head fading into the background.

Purists probably sniff at that and say "commenting on faded period photographs isn't real literature, or real journalism, or real history, or real criticism, or..." Maybe not. But I liked it, so to hell with the purists.

Crappy Novelists

I've been reading "Atlas Shrugged" lately. Or more like, beaten over the head by "Atlas Shrugged." It's a struggle.

Whatever one does or doesn't think of Ms. Rand's political and economic philosophies, I think it has to be admitted that she's one seriously bad novelist. One could argue that she's making a series of philosophical arguments and thus one shouldn't evaluate the novel as a novel - but then again, I'm not the one who described it as a novel, and ye gods, is it ever a clinker. Between the endless philosophizing, the cardboard-cutout characters, the utterly impenetrable dialog, and the irritable nastiness of the whole thing, it's decidedly unpleasant to read.

If you took the word "contempt" out of the novel, none of the characters would ever have any emotions at all.

There's a scene where Henry Rearden and Dagny Taggart have managed to collectively (no! not that word!) build a new railroad, and incited to heights of animal passion by the dull roar of locomotive engines and their own bloated senses of self-importance, succumb to long-suppressed desire and have a night of volcanic sex.

So they wake up the next morning after this night of long-delayed, oft-desired sex, and the first words out of Ole Hank's mouth are "I feel nothing but contempt for you." Then he goes on for about six pages, describing exactly why he feels contempt for her, and plumbing the depths of his contempt for her. Maybe this is what passes for pillow talk among 'achievers'. And all of this happens before breakfast! I'm not typically that contemptuous, hostile and bitter until about lunchtime.

The book is worth reading to understand what all the fuss and hype is about. But as a philosophical argument, I find it unconvincing. I'm trying to be charitable and not describe it as "hysterical, histrionic and grandly over-wrought", so let's just leave it at "unconvincing". And as a novel, it's... Well, it isn't very good. At all. It's kind of fun as a sort of ultimate "nerd revenge" novel, but once the trained pony has shown off that one trick, there just isn't much left to like.*

The average Star Trek novel presents a more lucid philosophical argument, and is a lot more fun to read to boot.

You like it? Enjoy it in good health, by all means. But I for one won't be going back for seconds.

*Lots of TV commercials these days hype the notion of people getting special treatment because the carry the Chase Plutonium Card, or because they spent extra to get special tickets. And yet people like me, who have worked in the commercial avoinics industry for 30 years and who played a not entirely insignificant role in building the modern air transport system, are stuck in the long security line with the sweathogs and have to fly in coach with our kneecaps being compressed to the density of lead by the seat in front of us.

Yet how many of these Chase Plutonium card holders who get all the special treatment (and who emit waves of almost unendurable smug snottiness as they pass through the special short security line) would know an ATCRBS interrogation if one fell in their cappuccino, or could replace the brakes on a 757, or could design a wing that generates a lot of lift at high angles of attack, has clean and predictable stall behavior, and is efficient at high speed and high altitude? It does kind of irk me that it's the smug schmucks with the Plutonium cards who get all the cream, not the people who built and maintain the system.

Maybe - just maybe - some of what Ms. Rand said rubbed off on me...

Historical Illiteracy

History is a tricky subject. Some historical facts (especially dates, times, locations, persons and so forth) can be known with considerable certainty, while other things are either too complex to analyze, or we simply don't know enough to say anything useful. We can have interpretations and hunches and even present pretty convincing arguments, but we'll never actually know.

A good example is the French Revolution. We know when it happened. We know the flow of events. We know the majority of the personalities. But why it happened? Jeez. There are probably as many reasons as there were participants, and the best we can do is say "Well... These seem to be the main reasons..."

It's hard to know where to draw the line. What can be accepted as a more or less concrete historical fact, and what is more or less a matter of opinion? (Possibly very well informed opinion, but still, in the end, opinion.)

Postmodernists seem to argue that there is no historical objectivity, that everything is a matter of opinion and that all interpretations are valid. While there is some truth in that (how can we, at this remove, ever possibly begin to imagine we know what Julius Caesar had in mind, except through his admittedly self-serving dispatches from Gaul?), I think it leads in the end to a kind of intellectual exhaustion where scholarship has no meaning - since any one interpretation of history is as valid as any other, why not just dump all the old books and documents in the incinerator, clear out some space in the library for books by Foucault, and imagine that pink bunny rabbits were the prime motivators in human history?

But I didn't really want to go there. Mostly I wanted to discuss the recent revelation that Hitler was a socialist. I can think of three reasons why people would believe this mistaken contention.

The first is that they were fooled by the Nazis themselves. Though Hitler was pretty much the complete opposite and mortal enemy of socialists, and though the Third Reich remained a more or less unfettered capitalist system throughout, the Nazis went to the trouble of calling their party the "National Socialist German Worker's Party". Sounds pretty socialist, doesn't it? And it was meant to sound pretty socialist too - Hitler and the early Nazis hoped to lure the German working class away from its alignment with the German Socialist Party by pretending to be socialist and hoping that most people wouldn't go to the trouble of looking deeper. But in practice, the best way to interpret the name of the Nazi Party is to skip every other word - National German Party. "Socialist" and "Worker's" was just more artful Nazi PR work.

The second is that thanks to postmodernism, we can say anything we want about history and it's still right - or at least just as right as anything anyone else says. Research? Fah. Facts? Fah. Screw it, we'll just make it up as we go. And I think this sort of moral exhaustion is infectious - people catch it, give up on any kind of intellectual rigor, and believe what's easy.

And the third is that I think certain people in America in particular wanted to recast Hitler as a socialist so that they could link President Obama and Adolf Hitler - linking someone with Hitler is pretty much the hydrogen bomb of political rhetoric, and it works. What one thinks of Obama or his policies is irrelevant, and none of my business anyway. In a democracy, we settle such issues at the ballot box, and all the screaming and howling is a waste of energy that could be put to better use elsewhere. But I do think it's cheap and shabby to deliberately distort and even falsify history just to provide ammunition for a modern-day political attack. I am not implying that only certain right-wing commentators do this. I've seen it from both sides. And it irritates me no matter who does it.

But let's make this clear: Hitler was no socialist. In fact, by destroying the German trade unions, denying German workers the right to organize, shutting down socialist and communist newspapers, kicking socialist organizers to death, and so terrorizing the SPD and KPD that their leaders actually fled Germany in fear of their lives, the Nazis produced a Third Reich that was profoundly less socialist than it had been during the preceding Weimar years. One could argue that the early Nazi economic programs like the construction of the autobahn system had socialist overtones, but they were a good deal more cynical than that - the Nazis knew that a particularly good way to buy a man's loyalty in economic hard times was to give him a job so he could feed his family. It had nothing to do with socialist notions of equitable distribution of wealth and everything to do with boosting the popularity of the regime (with a side-dish of giving the German army improved interior lines of communication).

There were, it is true, some Nazis, particularly some of the early ones, who placed more emphasis on the "Socialist" part of the name than the "National" part of the name. It is true that some of the Immutable Points promulgated by the Party in the early days had socialist overtones, such as vows to break up big businesses and seizure of war profits. But in actual practice, none of the economically-focused Immutable Points were honored, and in fact the suppression of socialist thought in the Nazi Party and in particular the SA was a sine qua non for Hitler's eventual appointment as Chancellor. It was part of the deal - Hitler offered the generals the prospect of rearmament and national revenge, and he offered the industrialists the prospect of amassing huge profits from rearmament without those dratted trade unionists and socialists getting in the way. And, it must be said, Hitler delivered on that deal, to the detriment of the world.

Alas.

No Alternative

I'm going to have to drink about 27 beers and listen to music for a while - there is no alternative.

Today someone opened fire on a public event in Tucson (about an hour south of here) and killed a judge and a nine year old girl, and wounded a great many other people, including a member of the US House of Representatives. I don't know why this tragedy happened. I don't know who, or what, set this guy off. But I've been reading comments on various news websites, and everyone seems to be trying to make something out of the books that this obviously disturbed individual listed on some website or another.

"He read Mein Kampf, therefore he's a Nazi!"

"He read The Communist Manifesto, therefore he's a Communist!"

I read The Lord of the Rings - does that make me a hobbit?

Give it a rest, people. I've read most of the books on this guy's list, and I'm not a Nazi, a Communist, an anarchist, or a murderer. Sometimes a book is just a book. (Speaking parenthetically, it sometimes surprises me that books like Mein Kampf and The Communist Manifesto are not required reading in modern Western society - if only to serve as examples of how things can go terribly wrong when intellectual rigor does not keep pace with ideological fervor.)

There's a bizarre and to my mind most disturbing anti-intellectualism brewing in America, where just reading a book makes people suspect that you're a pinko commie fellow-traveler or a schnapps-fueled SA thug. And even listing them as favorite books doesn't make you a believer either. I really liked 2001: A Space Odyssey, but I don't think that I'm Heywood Floyd or imagine that black monoliths really tinker with us. And it's entirely possible for one to read Mein Kampf and find it an important book without putting on an armband and setting fire to synagogues (though I caution the reader that I view it as important in the sense of helping us to recognize that kind of institutional insanity and head it off at the pass before another 50 million people have to die).

This is one of the reasons I have some trouble defining myself by any one given political label - I don't like the idea of party elders sitting in judgment on my intellectual orthodoxy or telling me what or how to think. And this sort of thing is becoming very common in America. Not that I necessarily regard myself as an intellectual - but I hate being told what to think.

The right seems to demand ideological orthodoxy in the face of facts, such as the modern right's definition of Nazi ideology as "socialist" - ask Gregor Strasser just how socialist the Bavarian Nazis were. Go on, just ask him.* The far left demands obeisance to bizarre postmodern ideas like the relativism of science, that a "feminist physics" would be just as "valid" as the physics promulgated by all those Dead White Europeans like Max Planck and Niels Bohr and Albert Einstein (don't get me started on postmodernism - it makes me foam at the mouth).

Sorry, I just can't roll with any of that.

And in the end, a book is just a book. One of the mantras of the political right is "Guns don't kill people, people kill people." If that's true, then books don't have bad ideas; stupid minds have bad ideas. And leave the books out of it, please.

*He's dead. You can't.