June '06 Pot Poury
Neighborhood Natterings
Neighborhood Natterings
Since firecracker day is just around the corner, I want to honor a group that has been much maligned by the jingoistic country clan, but have steadfastly displayed the true spirit of patriotism---- the Dixie Chicks. Their new album is an excellent collection of real world songs about real world issues, in real world America and environs--- that being the rest of the world. You go girls! Since the end of WW II, freedom has not been some abstract, slogan generating gift we receive by sending our sons and daughters off to war. Freedom is something you don't have at all unless you use it---- and if you use it, you don't need anybody's approval to do so.
Interviewer: Jim, don't you think it is a bit presumptuous of you to write about scientific matters when it is obvious you are neither a mathematician or a scientist?
Jim: Yes.
Interviewer: Well then, why do you keep doing it?
Jim: That of course very much depends on what doing it is.
Interviewer: Oh. Thank you for clearing that up.
Jim: You're welcome.
Other people are stupid.
If you don't believe me, just ask anybody, they'll tell you that it's true.
As far as I have been able to find there has not been a well documented survey to determine what percentage of the population has been labeled stupid by someone else, but I suspect it would be a large enough percentage to state that the average person is stupid, and perhaps the percentage would be much higher. I have been equally unsuccessful in trying to pin down any sort of standardized criteria upon which such classification is based. There has been a great deal of research purporting to document how smart people are, but even that research is fraught with controversy. Further, the number of intelligence measuring instruments used
to make determinations about a person's level of smartness is constantly expanding. If the reliability of these instruments is getting better, shouldn't the number of them be decreasing?
While there is a wide range of ways to determine smartness, determining stupidity seems to require only a very narrow and easy to use methodology, perhaps requiring only a single statement. Oddly enough, there is no real sense of comradery among stupid people. One never hears "Well hello there, I see you are stupid. I'm stupid too, it's good to see you". In fact, it seems that stupid people are invisible to each other, and the only ones that can spot them are smart people. True to the dictates of evolutionary processes, smart people are subsequently the ones that rise to positions of leadership, and the utopian world we live in is directly attributable to them.
[At this point, the author requests the readers to assist him with his metaphorical diagram addiction by visualizing a football stadium. The playing field will represent the activities of the smart folks in charge of whatever. The sidelines contain the rules and guidelines for the on field activities, you know, things like the constitution. The broadcast booth will represent the "professional" descriptions of the activities on the field (media, speeches, etc). The crowd will represent the public perceptions of the activities on the field. Their role is pretty much limited to either cheering or booing the field doings. Typically that section of the crowd considered the "home team fans" feel compelled to cheer every decision on the field. Now visualize a reasonable area surrounding, but not part of, the stadium, This outside layer will be labeled "The Neighborhood".]
I got busted when some smart mathematician observed that I couldn't resolve a simple differential equation. So, not wishing to be evolutionarily insensitive, I toddled dutifully off to the sidelines when numbers or computational issues were being discussed. Then, one miraculous day while I was sitting meekly on the bench I heard "psssst", at the same time, a crumpled piece of paper landed on the bench beside me. Slowly, so as not to be a bother to the smart people on the field, I unfolded the note. It read "come through the tunnel behind you to the other side of the stands". Curiosity got the best of me, and as unobtrusively as possible, I stood up and entered the tunnel. (It was not until later that I learned that I need not have been quiet, the smart people on the field seldom pay attention to the sidelines.) As I made my way down the dimly lit tunnel, a shadowy figure emerged from the darksomeness. There was something vaguely familiar about the shadowy shape, and as I drew closer, I couldn't shake the suspicion that I knew that soubrettish silhouette. Suddenly, as we both stepped smartly into a splash of sunlight slithering through the steel stands and shining on the slick surface, signification shocked me. Standing there before me was Mr. Rogers.
"Welcome to your neighborhood, Jim", he said pleasantly.
"Why what do you mean my neighborhood, Mr. Rogers? ", I said inquisitively.
And so with another obtuse introduction, I finally start getting to my point. The issue of whether one is as stupid as someone else thinks is about as irrelevant and inconsequential as such things can be. The issue becomes a bit more weighty if you think of yourself as stupid, but since that is beyond the scope of this treatise, you will just have to work that out for yourself. The animus here is that stupidity is no goddamn excuse. How dare one leave decisions about one's neighborhood up to someone else under the pretense of some stupid>>smart scale. You/we/me are equally responsible for the status of our species. One simply adds us all up and divides by N - - it's that simple, and it is carved in granite.
Now about the neighborhood thing. Obviously I am using the term in a far broader sense than just the few blocks surrounding where you live. As a start, suppose you are sleeping alone, and you wake up in the middle of the night. You recall something someone said earlier that day that you didn't really pay much attention to at the time, but suddenly you realize that what they said was a clever play on words that now strikes you as very funny, so you laugh out loud. You have just used your neighborhood assessment tool. It's a very private thing, an entirely subjective process; once something has been noticed, allowed to marinate for a while in your mental stew, and then recalled in the absolute secrecy of your own mind before it can be filtered through social communication guidelines-- what does it seem like to you?
Continuing with our Mr. Rogers thingy the neighborhood could be partially defined as that area surrounding the stadium within which perceptible elements originating on the playing field can be noticed, although ostensibly they are unrelated to activities inside the stadium. What goes on in the stadium is pretty much choreographed by our social structure, and poking around outside in the neighborhood is discouraged. [ I know I am taking the long way around here, but if it's good enough for the Dixie Chicks, it's good enough for me.] The evolution of our social structure has become so convoluted and dishonest that the descriptions coming from the broadcast booth are an unreliable source to determine what is really going on in the playing field. An accurate assessment of the playing field activities can only be gleaned from clues in the neighborhood, and that requires a hell of a lot more work than we have been willing to invest. To start with an example far enough removed from today that no one should become uncomfortable...
Here's a quote from one of the smart folks in charge.
Lewis L. Strauss, chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission.
"... our children will enjoy in their homes electrical energy too cheap to meter; will know of great periodic regional famines in the world only as matters of history.."
[New York Times, August 7, 1955]
Many, if not most, of us are the children of whom he spoke. How about in your neighborhood, folks enjoying that free energy? Any rumors about famines floating around? Anybody in your home town with not enough to eat? And wow! How 'bout them 24 hour work weeks?
Neighborhood (in this metaphor) is sort of like all the things that you experience directly, the houses up and down your block, the people walking by, your job, the way you learned to look at things, your daydreams, the way you see what you see on television and in the news---- everybody has one. It is not some abstract table of demographics compiled objectively and run through the latest statistical voodoo. It is just the everyday world you live in as seen from your own perspective. Your neighborhood characteristics may be quite similar to your cousin Charlie's neighborhood in the next town, quite a bit different from Donald (Combover) Trump's neighborhood in New York, and very different from the neighborhood of Jirón Carabaya on the outskirts of Lima. Yet all these neighborhoods are made of the same sort of things endemic to that locale and time. And it is the universality of the composition of the various neighborhoods of which I speak.
Poking around in one's neighborhood searching for information about the veracity of the "professional assessments de jour" of the world can be a bit tricky. One almost never finds the proverbial smoking gun out here, and not keeping that distinction in mind can lead to serious errors in judgement. That sort of hasty perception is at the heart of almost all conspiracy theories. For example, when Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin planted the American Flag on the moon in 1969, the light weight, collapsible framework to which the flag was attached vibrated slightly after it was released. As a result the flag continued to move briefly--- a conspirator theorist's Holy Grail---- AHA! There is no atmosphere on the moon, yet the flag is flapping in the breeze, so obviously the moon landing was a hoax! Be warned that every street corner in the typical neighborhood has at least one nut on a soapbox trying to turn some minor anomaly into a major conspiracy.
Determining the true condition of one's neighborhood is conceptually a very simple process, but a tedious one, If a given professional assessment of some activity on the playing field is accurate, it will have congruency with things one can observe in one's neighborhood. In the terminology I have been using on my site, there will be soft signs in the neighborhood reflecting the stadium activities. There is not, and there never can be, a single step rule to measure professional stadium assessments. One can observe, and frequently does, something that should not, and perhaps could not, be true if what the broadcast professionals say is true. Just as one should not be too hasty to cry conspiracy, one must not forget observations that don't fit in with what is claimed by the smart folks. One of the sleaziest, and most successful, tactics of our leaders when they screw up is to create a diversion. Time after time after time, we become outraged over some event, and time after time after time our attention is directed elsewhere. That is the tedious part, you owe it to your neighborhood to not forget. The checks and balances we built into our system of government stopped checking and balancing long ago. It's almost as though the path to insanity has been reversed. Time was playing field activities and the professional reports about them were the standard for reality, and if one had thoughts contrary to that state, one's sanity was doubted. But now it's the playing field activities and media reports of those activities that are mostly fantasy, and each day we must make our way in a world that does not exist.
The rhetoric coming from the broadcast booths and the soapboxes has much in common. First, they all lay claim to some version of expertise, which means they are smarter than we are so we best pay attention and not ask too many questions. Obviously in this increasingly complex and technological world there is often a substantial body of truth to such claims. So, in their wisdom and generosity they supply we plebeians with handy little guides that we are to use to prove to ourselves that they are surely correct. A prime example would be the economy.
Historically, one of the most complex activities to take place on the playing field has been the development of economic theories. Most of us have some vague idea that we practice capitalism, but giving a precise definition of exactly what capitalism means is certainly out of reach of most of us, and given the raucous exchanges on the Sunday morning talk shows, seems to be out of the reach of everyone. What it is, is not nearly as important is how it is doing, and that is even more confusing. The financial wizards in charge of telling us how the economy is doing use an awesome array of factors, all engaged in some labyrinthine interaction from which they magically pluck their assessment. Coincidently, these official assessments are almost always positive and consistent with the stated policies of whatever administration is then in power. This assessment allowed Natalie's good friend George to report in his State of The Union address: "Here at home.... Our economy is growing, it is strong. This economy has created millions of new jobs..." So there you have it. The economy is growing, and it is strong- - all is well.
Sitting here in our metaphorical stadium, we have now observed the smart folks on the playing field engage in their economic machinations and we have been provided with all we will need after we leave the stadium. Whenever the economy comes up in conversation, all we need do is wave our banners; one says growing, and one says strong. I beg of you, toss those banners in the recycle bin as you exit ( you can come back and get them later if you choose) and take a tour with Mr. Rogers in your neighborhood.
How are money things in your neighborhood:
You, your friends, family, or neighbors had the pension they worked for all their lives taken away-
You, your friends, family, or neighbors have more money to spend on fun things than five years ago--
You, your friends, family, or neighbors able to send their kids off to college OK----
You, your friends, family, or neighbors have good health insurance-
You, your friends, family, or neighbors able to sock plenty away for a rainy day-
You, your friends, family, or neighbors happy with the upkeep on the local infrastructure -
You, your friends, family, or neighbors happy with the salaries of CEO's ----
You, your friends, family, or neighbors know someone making minimum wage- if so, how are they doing-
You, your friends, family, or neighbors think your elected officials have your best interest in mind- ???
You get the point. When you are done with your neighborhood inventory, simply put them all together. And that is how the economy is really doing--- feel smarter now?
Interesting place, your neighborhood. We'll be back.
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