One of the motivations that prompted me to start what seems to be becoming the first draft of Through The Cockpit Doors was the way I felt the first few days after Sept. 11. I have never been more proud to be an American. I even found myself singing Amazing Grace and God Bless America on my morning hikes. One or two of you might have read my Echoes of 9/11 on this site. Refresher >>
On the morning of September 11, 2001, we the people were faced with naked reality. Our government was busy hiding in bunkers, or making excuses, or failing to communicate effectively. For a few hours on that day we were not governed--- not even dishonestly. No spin doctors to tell us the towers were not really collapsing. We were alone, and we were great! What became crystal clear that day was that the American Spirit was alive and well. But that spark of life soon started to grow dim as we once again let ourselves be governed. At the most global level, the problem is simple. When we formed ourselves as a nation one of the charges we accepted was to have a government by the people. What did we mean? All too soon, the enormous individual responsibility commanded in those original words became a government selected by the people. To simplify matters, we decided that the way we would do that was to have elections at regular intervals, and the individual citizen's sole responsibility was to vote.
Gradually, any individual responsibilities intrinsic to the process of voting became less and less. It was not really necessary to trouble ourselves with the arduous tasks of deciding exactly how we wanted to accomplish the details of living and working together. We greatly simplified the process of governing ourselves by voting for someone else, and leaving the everyday details up to them. Eventually the research duties of most citizens was reduced to reading bumper stickers. The average dolt on the street (thanks, Gurnie Dobbs) began to put more and more of their efforts into the more important everyday activities--- getting laid and getting rich. There were a couple of periods of resurgence; Women's Suffrage and the voter registration drives of the Civil Rights Movement, but more and more we came to treat the right to vote as a tedious chore. Many came to believe that their vote was a pointless ritual that had no real impact on their everyday lives, a view strongly supported by the state of Florida. Nevertheless, 9/11 and subsequent events have produced a third resurgence of voting interest. Voting registrations are exploding in segments of our society that previously were strongholds of voter apathy.
The cavalier attitude we had developed toward individual citizenship duties was dealt a serious blow on September 11th. Unfortunately, attitudes are seldom recognized as attitudes. The few hours we spent that day genuinely being thinking and acting citizens did not lead to a revival of our greatness, a fact that went unnoticed as I marched proudly through the Colorado woods singing patriotic songs at the top of my lungs. [ Come to think of it, that was the most Boanergean public display of patriotism I had exhibited since my impassioned speech on the meaning of patriotism had brought tears to the eyes of some of the hapless recruits who had the misfortune of being placed at my mercy in my capacity as acting flight commander in basic training. AF 18388581, Lackland AFB, 1957. In contrast, the forest critters of 2001 didn't seem to notice.]
As a result of the quirky way our memory seems to preserve random bits of minutia, I recall an article years ago in Time on the decline in voting in which one woman was quoted as saying "Oh, I never vote, it only encourages the bastards". Today is the second day after the second debate between Bush and Kerry, and it is too close to election day for me to concentrate on my primary thesis, which I have tentatively titled Through the Looking Glass. Rather than develop my ideas on Chaos Theory and the processes that led to our concocting the mythical perspective of 9/11 we have, I will just apply my [choose one a. theory, b. hypothesis, c. hairbrained idea, d. dogma from a vast liberal conspiracy] to the events that occurred.
So this is my vote. Regardless of whether I actually toddle off to my local fire station and deposit my registration card on election day, this is my real vote. My authorized voting opportunity is now in South Carolina, and whether I go through the meaningless gesture of making a mark by Kerry's name will probably be a function of how I feel that day. The last sentence automatically and universally generates the following response from THE VOICE, which I will document in the form of a short play. I will play myself, you know who the voice is.
THE VOICE:
If you don't vote, you give up your right to complain.
ME:
Listen you naive nincompoop, I will bitch all I want too, and if you don't like it you can kiss my ass.
THE VOICE:
But you lose your right to complain if you don't vote. No one will listen.
ME:
Listen you ill-informed idiot, which part of the First Amendment to the Constitution do you think you are quoting?
THE VOICE:
You are not a responsible citizen, If you are too dissatisfied with America to vote, get the hell out!
ME:
Listen you arrogant asshole, I will live wherever I damn well decide to live.
[The actual play goes on and on, but since we are all hard wired to recite the sacraments at the slightest provocation, I will simply add the equally expressive ...]
The application of chaos theory to human behavior has led to some surprising observations, Immediately prior to an epileptic seizure, brain wave patterns cease their rambling, seemingly random firing patterns. They suddenly become ordered. In a process neural engineer Leon Iasemidis calls dynamical entrainment these ordered patterns originate in the flawed area of the brain and rapidly spread throughout the brain, culminating in wave patterns that become "stuck". The process leads to epileptic seizures and unconsciousness. Similar circumstances appear preceding heart attacks. Our training (which we mislabel intuition) leads us to desire a good old, steady, rhythmic heart beat. In truth, the healthy heart would be kicked out of the rhythm section of any self respecting band. The precision kathump, kathump, kathump, heartbeat is a signal to call 911. That ominous kathump, kathump, kathump, is rapidly becoming the loudest sound in our current election year politics, an alarm bell we don't seem to be able to hear.
For reasons I hope to speak to later, our leaders exhibit the same maladaptive, ritualistically repetitive decision making patterns that precede disorder and chaos. These patterns show up in many facets of our lives, but are nowhere more clearly evident than in our language. Shades of 1984 ! The exploratory, dynamic exchange of words, the gradual clarification of issues as communicators seek to find common ground in the intent of their words is slowly languishing, like a retrogressive morphogenetic seed slipping sluggishly sideways into the sphacelated sintrifuge (speaking phonetically) of seeming security from syntactical speculation. Ahem!
The reason I feel compelled to vote now is that I am shocked that the 2004 presidential race is almost a dead heat. George Bush and the Congress totally misrepresented the reasons behind 9/11. We were lied to, but our leaders lying to us has been the status quo for a long time, it is just that the consequences have never been this severe. This time, we have been set on a course as dangerous and irreversible as any road we have ever taken. Pandora's Box rides again, [metaphorical consistency be damned]. The richness of our language has been reduced to a few "god terms", the meanings of which are totally unrelated to what Webster might have thought, and anyway, even if we were to be able to precisely define the terms we are using, it would be a fruitless gesture, because the meaning of the terms is constantly changing. Bush is presented as being strong and steadfast and that is supposed to be good. Kerry is presented as a flip-flopper, and that is supposed to be bad. [ I don't really hate Bush, or love Kerry. One, I think it is too late to make much of a difference which one we elect. Bush couldn't do us much more harm in a second term than he already has, and Kerry doesn't stand a chance of reversing our course, and doesn't have the guts to admit it. The world our politicians live in has little freedom of movement, and that is a function of the evolution of organizational structure. We have abdicated our citizenship duties to the point we believe all we have to do is vote and avoid as many taxes as we can: we have precisely the kind of government we deserve.]
The colors are fading on the flag I love. And they will fade further if we turn out to be a stupid as Bush and Cheney think we are. Their nebulous words have been tolerated so long they have the nerve to "lie straight faced while [we] cry". It is a bald faced lie that we would have gone to war against Iraq even if we knew then what we know now.
We believed (maybe they did too, but they heard the intelligence they wanted to hear) that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction, that he was on the verge of having nuclear weapons, and that he was a danger to our freedom. Bush would never, never, never have been able to get enough support in congress or from the American people to start that war, hell, even Tony Blair would not have supported him if he knew the truth, which currently is that Saddam had no weapons of mass destruction, nor did he have an active program to develop them, but just as soon as he could steal enough money from the oil for food program, he was going to start developing those weapons. Oh, I see, thanks for the clarification. So we bundled up our soldiers in chemical protection suits, and maybe a few of them died from heat stroke, but none of them were protected from poison gas because there was none. As we marched toward Bagdad we were warned to expect heavy losses from the fiercely loyal Republican Guard who were, to a man, prepared to die to protect their leader. But when we got there the loyal generals cut and ran, and the elite guard dropped their weapons. And this powerful evil dictator who we were told threatened our country had such little control over his own country that he was forced to hide, alone and scared, in a spider hole. Cheeze, even Hitler had a bunker at the end. Nuff said about that for now. Your turn. Don't forget to vote.
On the morning of September 11, 2001, we the people were faced with naked reality. Our government was busy hiding in bunkers, or making excuses, or failing to communicate effectively. For a few hours on that day we were not governed--- not even dishonestly. No spin doctors to tell us the towers were not really collapsing. We were alone, and we were great! What became crystal clear that day was that the American Spirit was alive and well. But that spark of life soon started to grow dim as we once again let ourselves be governed. At the most global level, the problem is simple. When we formed ourselves as a nation one of the charges we accepted was to have a government by the people. What did we mean? All too soon, the enormous individual responsibility commanded in those original words became a government selected by the people. To simplify matters, we decided that the way we would do that was to have elections at regular intervals, and the individual citizen's sole responsibility was to vote.
Gradually, any individual responsibilities intrinsic to the process of voting became less and less. It was not really necessary to trouble ourselves with the arduous tasks of deciding exactly how we wanted to accomplish the details of living and working together. We greatly simplified the process of governing ourselves by voting for someone else, and leaving the everyday details up to them. Eventually the research duties of most citizens was reduced to reading bumper stickers. The average dolt on the street (thanks, Gurnie Dobbs) began to put more and more of their efforts into the more important everyday activities--- getting laid and getting rich. There were a couple of periods of resurgence; Women's Suffrage and the voter registration drives of the Civil Rights Movement, but more and more we came to treat the right to vote as a tedious chore. Many came to believe that their vote was a pointless ritual that had no real impact on their everyday lives, a view strongly supported by the state of Florida. Nevertheless, 9/11 and subsequent events have produced a third resurgence of voting interest. Voting registrations are exploding in segments of our society that previously were strongholds of voter apathy.
The cavalier attitude we had developed toward individual citizenship duties was dealt a serious blow on September 11th. Unfortunately, attitudes are seldom recognized as attitudes. The few hours we spent that day genuinely being thinking and acting citizens did not lead to a revival of our greatness, a fact that went unnoticed as I marched proudly through the Colorado woods singing patriotic songs at the top of my lungs. [ Come to think of it, that was the most Boanergean public display of patriotism I had exhibited since my impassioned speech on the meaning of patriotism had brought tears to the eyes of some of the hapless recruits who had the misfortune of being placed at my mercy in my capacity as acting flight commander in basic training. AF 18388581, Lackland AFB, 1957. In contrast, the forest critters of 2001 didn't seem to notice.]
As a result of the quirky way our memory seems to preserve random bits of minutia, I recall an article years ago in Time on the decline in voting in which one woman was quoted as saying "Oh, I never vote, it only encourages the bastards". Today is the second day after the second debate between Bush and Kerry, and it is too close to election day for me to concentrate on my primary thesis, which I have tentatively titled Through the Looking Glass. Rather than develop my ideas on Chaos Theory and the processes that led to our concocting the mythical perspective of 9/11 we have, I will just apply my [choose one a. theory, b. hypothesis, c. hairbrained idea, d. dogma from a vast liberal conspiracy] to the events that occurred.
So this is my vote. Regardless of whether I actually toddle off to my local fire station and deposit my registration card on election day, this is my real vote. My authorized voting opportunity is now in South Carolina, and whether I go through the meaningless gesture of making a mark by Kerry's name will probably be a function of how I feel that day. The last sentence automatically and universally generates the following response from THE VOICE, which I will document in the form of a short play. I will play myself, you know who the voice is.
THE VOICE:
If you don't vote, you give up your right to complain.
ME:
Listen you naive nincompoop, I will bitch all I want too, and if you don't like it you can kiss my ass.
THE VOICE:
But you lose your right to complain if you don't vote. No one will listen.
ME:
Listen you ill-informed idiot, which part of the First Amendment to the Constitution do you think you are quoting?
THE VOICE:
You are not a responsible citizen, If you are too dissatisfied with America to vote, get the hell out!
ME:
Listen you arrogant asshole, I will live wherever I damn well decide to live.
[The actual play goes on and on, but since we are all hard wired to recite the sacraments at the slightest provocation, I will simply add the equally expressive ...]
The application of chaos theory to human behavior has led to some surprising observations, Immediately prior to an epileptic seizure, brain wave patterns cease their rambling, seemingly random firing patterns. They suddenly become ordered. In a process neural engineer Leon Iasemidis calls dynamical entrainment these ordered patterns originate in the flawed area of the brain and rapidly spread throughout the brain, culminating in wave patterns that become "stuck". The process leads to epileptic seizures and unconsciousness. Similar circumstances appear preceding heart attacks. Our training (which we mislabel intuition) leads us to desire a good old, steady, rhythmic heart beat. In truth, the healthy heart would be kicked out of the rhythm section of any self respecting band. The precision kathump, kathump, kathump, heartbeat is a signal to call 911. That ominous kathump, kathump, kathump, is rapidly becoming the loudest sound in our current election year politics, an alarm bell we don't seem to be able to hear.
For reasons I hope to speak to later, our leaders exhibit the same maladaptive, ritualistically repetitive decision making patterns that precede disorder and chaos. These patterns show up in many facets of our lives, but are nowhere more clearly evident than in our language. Shades of 1984 ! The exploratory, dynamic exchange of words, the gradual clarification of issues as communicators seek to find common ground in the intent of their words is slowly languishing, like a retrogressive morphogenetic seed slipping sluggishly sideways into the sphacelated sintrifuge (speaking phonetically) of seeming security from syntactical speculation. Ahem!
The reason I feel compelled to vote now is that I am shocked that the 2004 presidential race is almost a dead heat. George Bush and the Congress totally misrepresented the reasons behind 9/11. We were lied to, but our leaders lying to us has been the status quo for a long time, it is just that the consequences have never been this severe. This time, we have been set on a course as dangerous and irreversible as any road we have ever taken. Pandora's Box rides again, [metaphorical consistency be damned]. The richness of our language has been reduced to a few "god terms", the meanings of which are totally unrelated to what Webster might have thought, and anyway, even if we were to be able to precisely define the terms we are using, it would be a fruitless gesture, because the meaning of the terms is constantly changing. Bush is presented as being strong and steadfast and that is supposed to be good. Kerry is presented as a flip-flopper, and that is supposed to be bad. [ I don't really hate Bush, or love Kerry. One, I think it is too late to make much of a difference which one we elect. Bush couldn't do us much more harm in a second term than he already has, and Kerry doesn't stand a chance of reversing our course, and doesn't have the guts to admit it. The world our politicians live in has little freedom of movement, and that is a function of the evolution of organizational structure. We have abdicated our citizenship duties to the point we believe all we have to do is vote and avoid as many taxes as we can: we have precisely the kind of government we deserve.]
The colors are fading on the flag I love. And they will fade further if we turn out to be a stupid as Bush and Cheney think we are. Their nebulous words have been tolerated so long they have the nerve to "lie straight faced while [we] cry". It is a bald faced lie that we would have gone to war against Iraq even if we knew then what we know now.
We believed (maybe they did too, but they heard the intelligence they wanted to hear) that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction, that he was on the verge of having nuclear weapons, and that he was a danger to our freedom. Bush would never, never, never have been able to get enough support in congress or from the American people to start that war, hell, even Tony Blair would not have supported him if he knew the truth, which currently is that Saddam had no weapons of mass destruction, nor did he have an active program to develop them, but just as soon as he could steal enough money from the oil for food program, he was going to start developing those weapons. Oh, I see, thanks for the clarification. So we bundled up our soldiers in chemical protection suits, and maybe a few of them died from heat stroke, but none of them were protected from poison gas because there was none. As we marched toward Bagdad we were warned to expect heavy losses from the fiercely loyal Republican Guard who were, to a man, prepared to die to protect their leader. But when we got there the loyal generals cut and ran, and the elite guard dropped their weapons. And this powerful evil dictator who we were told threatened our country had such little control over his own country that he was forced to hide, alone and scared, in a spider hole. Cheeze, even Hitler had a bunker at the end. Nuff said about that for now. Your turn. Don't forget to vote.
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