Last year’s newspapers were full of stories about Giuliani, Trump and the junior Biden and their chances of escaping the long arms of the law. I found myself very pleased to know those arms are there and grasping appropriately. Since I am not entertained by the news and its memeplex, I find only a certain set of stories worth following. They are almost always about large and slow moving parts of our society. These are the things that give me comfort precisely because they cannot be changed rapidly. It is because of these slowly changing dimensions of America that I can always find reasons to be patriotic, even when it means “Americans don’t know what it means to be American until they travel abroad.”
In this way I have been fortunate to adhere to that which is exceptional and great about America since I was a kid. That meant learning how to replace the tubes in our television set. That meant passing the physical fitness test and getting the certificate signed by President Kennedy. That meant having the same first name as the man who piloted the command module Columbia on the Apollo 11 mission to the moon. Especially for my Black Nationalist family, it meant not leaving the country and going to Brazil or Ghana. By the time the bicentennial rolled around and we all went to the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum to party with KC and the Sunshine Band, we were all in. I have to say it is more important because I was seriously considering not being in at all, it was the presumption of my own family. Today, having seen enough of the world to consider it a realistic alternative, I remain unhappily but steadfastly American.
A couple months ago I visited family in South Dakota and South Dakota itself. We’ve had property up there for about 15 years now, and I’ve checked it out. I’m confident that it’s someplace I could retire, less comfortably but assuredly. It is where my brother found respite and rejuvenation from all that is grimy and morally ambiguous in Los Angeles. Yet it is at a strange distance. Even when you leave a pit of snakes, you still dream about those you leave behind and how their snakebitten hallucinations still rule the corrupted metropolis. Nobody forgets being mugged, raped, assaulted, defrauded. No one forgets the sister who was murdered, the father forced into bankruptcy, the conscience that was once free.
The Coward and the Tiger
In legend there is a story about three men crossing through a jungle. The first man thought he heard a tiger above the sound of the rushing wind. So he froze in place and then ran away. The second man heard the same noise, but stood his ground because he thought the first man was a coward and didn’t want to be shamed as one himself. The third man dismissed the idea that it was anything but the wind. Yet it was a tiger and only the first man survived. Evolution has replayed this drama over the millennia and we still imagine tigers and monsters under our beds, because the chickenshit tend to have more children than the mauled. Thus we have minds in which there is plenty of room to entertain suspicion and paranoia. We will heed ghost stories, superstitions and negative campaign advertising. It’s evolutionarily baked into the human psyche.
Flight isn’t our only option. Adrenaline equally prepares us to be badass and fight through pain. The same imaginations that see us as bait, also envisions us as heroes. The woman who lifted a car off her pinned child resonates in our collective memory. Some of us still remember Audie Murphy and the dramatized exploits of Paddy Mayne can be streamed today. Eight percent of men think they can beat up a gorilla in an unarmed death match. I can’t even say that I’ve killed a rat in combat, but like most men, I have overcompensated by arming myself with an array of tactics and weapons for my imagined tigers. I am reminded by the patch I bought from Amazon that in the War of Independence, only three percent of the colonists took up arms. Sometimes, that’s all it takes.
In a crowd of 100, wherever I go, I can always count on one hand, those whom I would invite into my house, let alone those who would make the trip. So I cannot really get annoyed at XTwitter for presenting me with annoyance. After all, it was I who decided to follow 495 souls. Some things worth defending simply cannot be crowdsourced. That counts especially when we are called to deal with the tiger. As they say in my favorite videogame:
Devotion inspires bravery. Bravery inspires sacrifice. Sacrifice leads to death.
The Velocity of Institutions
I alluded to the idea of the speed at which institutions in our country change. I think that if I had been more aware of what a twitchy person I am, I would have chosen scientific research rather than business. I guess I should be satisfied by computer science which has moved at ludicrous speed in my lifetime. I say that now that the Rust language is real and Linux is mature. Here is the hierarchy of speed.
Geology
Human Evolution
Psychology
Mythology
Theology
Philosophy
Society
Law
Political Economy
Culture
Business
Real Economy
News
Rumor
Suspicion
Attention
Computation
I think at some point I will try to justify these estimate and have more complete definitions. But I definitely see that chaos ensues when the mutation time, or the half-life if you will, of these entities are accelerated or decelerated. Also when there are inversions. For example when the society changes faster than the law can accommodate, or when computation accelerates news faster than attention can be paid.
The Arena
So how exactly am I an American? Well I can certainly trust that the Mississippi River is not going to dry up and blow away. Despite what Frank Sinatra sang, the Rockies won’t crumble. The geology of America is fixed for my lifetime. So my relationship to that land is something I have to be able to accommodate. There are very very few dangerous homeless derelicts on the streets of Salt Lake City in February, I assure you. I was there last year. I should be able to configure myself to deal with harsh winters, sweltering summers, wicked wind and drenching rain. BTW, lets put climate change into the mix. It’s probably somewhere between society and philosophy. By the time it’s 3 degrees warmer, we will have easily moved our law and political economies into adjusting. So I don’t even worry. Yet I am amazed at how much suckers are buying so-called green goods and technologies, fueling that pervasive marketing meme, at least here in the WEIRD world. Politics will not change the weather. The planet is fine.
The land in America is not going to change, but perhaps land use will. Warming will be good for corn. Perhaps we’ll eat more corn. Our diets can adjust. A friend and I were just discussing how flimsy houses built in the 1990s are turning out to be. I understand that pain personally. There are lots of steel frame houses built up in South Dakota. We could use some of that low cost tech here in Los Angeles County. Another friend is a water engineer. In California that’s a big deal. Where will we get water over the next 50 years? That’s a very slow change. I’ve seen one possible future in Bagigalupi’s The Water Knife. As crazily as the Genius Class is fretting over the possibilities of AI, you can be certain that wealth will be preserved somehow - so there is safety in eyeballing their moves, nobody is truly stopping us from knowing about the rich and famous, and in fact AI can assist in that regard.
Religion, mythology and human psychology are not going to change. In fact, I’d say that the most perceptive social observers have seen the emergence of Progressive + Postmodern thinking in terms of its religious devotion, impervious to particular axes or reason yet reasonably predictable nonetheless. A close reading of ex-Harvard President Gay’s very public resignation letter cites feudal loyalty to Harvard Education despite racial animus. Nobody saw that coming, right? All the ingredients are there, including demonizing antagonists. I’m not fretting this New Age Religion. What they have built and will continue to build are cathedrals of a certain shape whose buttresses are in plain sight. I must say I’m happy to see a martyr of her achievement stand in place of St. George; she’s a minor saint but a saint nonetheless.
The big wheels of America continue to turn slowly, but there is some reckoning on the horizon I see for this year and beyond. The primary thing I see that few outside of California and NYC can see is the growing political activism of Asian-Americans, especially Chinese and Japanese. I would add to this, the increased artistic contributions of Koreans to our cultural landscape particularly in food, and in film. Third generations here in LA County are willing to speak up and speak out especially on the prerogatives of parental choice in schooling and matters of public safety.
Infrastructure
City politics can change. I don’t lose sleep. I’m looking at longer term matters, and particularly about our infrastructure, and when I look at my world, I am looking towards STEAM to lead us forward. Absolutely the arts are necessary, as Douglas Murray reminds us on a regular basis. His quoting of Auden is apt.
Our apparatniks will continue making the usual squalid mess called History: all we can pray for is that artists, chefs and saints may still appear to blithe it.
As evanescent as creative works can be, all it takes is a slight bit of inspiration to let us get through another week. So I keep the hopper full. This year I’m going to find a way to get some sort of national library subscription, because despite what has befallen Harvard, there remain hundreds of universities who still have some respect for the open society. I’m kind of leaning towards Princeton and Auden’s Chicago. We’ll see how aesthetic appreciation and discipline will be applied as the revolution in computing changes the locus of learning from the campus towards superdistribution. I’m predicting that AI will break copyright as we know it, and more competent scholars will choose to open source their research. The monetization model of academic production and artistic production cannot survive the current oligarchical arrangements in publication. I am listening to my longtime friend Bryan Alexander whose sense of humor is even darker than mine.
Therefore I am not decrying ‘the failure of higher ed’. The smart rats are abandoning very particular sinking ships. We will have more advanced ways of harvesting the flotsam as those forced to walk the plank tread water as their Titanics hit bottom. Brains will survive as will brain work. I want to get my brain work from friends.
I noticed yesterday that you can get a variety of cordless power tools from Home Depot. Each of the major brands have tooled up their motors on different voltages.
The biggest tech story of last year for me was the introduction of the Cybertruck by Tesla and what it meant for auto manufacturing for Elon’s company to design and build a 48 volt electrical system, when we have been using 12 volt systems since WW2. What car is worth beans without a full blast air conditioner and stereo system?
We still build things in America, and we should keep in mind how much we share in common with Japan, more than just Godzilla movies and Cowboy Bebop. Similarly, our manufacturing agreements with Mexico seem destined to remain strong. These relationships are going to become richer, I think, in the future. The same will be true of India sez me.
What I am looking for are clear signs that near-sourcing and home-sourcing will bulk up our supply chains. I happen to be working a deal that looks at this for medical equipment. We build a lot of that too, and COVID put a good scare into their JIT logistics. If we keep electing lame presidents, we’re going to have to have smarter CEOs that understand manufacturing closer to home. What Amazon has proven is that we can revolutionize logistics whether or not we do so with electric vehicles. Let’s see if we can grow domestic suppliers. BTW, did I tell you how much I love a company called Atom Power? Several years ago they built the first reliable solid-state high voltage breaker system. They are one of those gems that are not listed on any exchange. Super smart people.
As I’ve been saying from day one, the Genius Class in America has a deep bench. They are not always made starters by the Rulers, and some, like those at Atom Power, get along fine without Wall Street or Silicon Valley funding. So we don’t know about them and sometimes we pretend that if NPR doesn’t broadcast it, it doesn’t exist. Pull your head out of the memestream. There’s good stuff to know, and a lot of it doesn’t change as rapidly as they would have you believe. Harvard will get another president. Corn will survive global warming. Religion will provide stable and predictable values. Human psychology will not change. Death Valley will still be the lowest point in America and ultramarathoners will still run there. Not all of us, maybe just 3 percent of us will get all of us through. Who are your friends?