Saint Francis

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With the death of the most saint-like Pope in living memory, it feels a little like fate that I’d seen Conclave just three days before.  Francis was the only Pope I’ve seen, and am likely to see.  He cared for people more than dusty doctrines that still repress.  He laid hands on the sick and genuinely loved human beings.  Given the reactionary world of politics, I suspect his successor will be conservative, but I would be glad to be wrong.  All this seesawing on the way to progress makes me a bit seasick.  And Francis was a man who, from a humble background, understood the necessity of moving forward rather than pretending things always stay the same.  I already miss him.

It was on the rare occasion of being invited to a New York City church to offer a program that I saw him.  Since I’d be staying a couple nights in Manhattan, my wife joined me.  On the way to meet her after work on that Friday, I saw large crowds along 34th Street in Herald Square.  The buzz indicated that the Pope would be going this way on his way out of town.  The police refused to confirm that, but it seemed like a good bet.  I asked Kay, “Do you want to see the Pope?”  We found a place in the crowd (this was pre-pandemic, of course) where we had a good view of the street and eventually the motorcade rolled through, Pope Francis in his trademark Fiat, the window down, waving at the crowd.  And then he was gone.  

In New York City you see motorcades.  I’d seen President Obama’s go by once, on the way to the United Nations, I think it was.  But still, seeing the Pope was incredible.  Not shielded behind bulletproof glass, his care for the nameless crowds felt genuine.  I empathize with those raised in humble circumstances who manage just to survive, let alone become the head of the largest branch of Christianity.  I like to think he was a reluctant Cardinal, and a reluctant Pope.  Conclave is fiction, of course, but the idea of choosing someone who really doesn’t want the job is immensely appealing.  How different from world leaders we’re now burdened with!  Men (almost always) who see themselves as God’s gift to us, clawing at power.  At the same time, Francis, who was a divine gift, actually remembered what Jesus said and did.  The world is poorer for his death but richer for the lessons he taught by example.

Easter Gathering

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On Easter I’m thinking of Conclave.  My wife had been wanting to see it and we watched it on Good Friday—a work day, of course, in this “Christian” nation.  In any case, it’s fascinating for a couple of reasons.  One is that, as a drama surrounding the election of a new pope, it draws you in.  The politics and intrigue are, I assure you, quite real within in the church.  People are, in seems, incurably political.  Conclave is fiction, of course.  And in reality, very few people are ever admitted to the chambers where a world leader is elected by those priests who’ve risen to the highest levels of church hierarchy.  This fictional reconstruction may give a window into that.  The other reason that I found it so fascinating is that it was quite a box office success for being a movie about a religious subject that isn’t biblical.  Appropriate viewing for Easter weekend.

There were a few striking scenes.  Here’s the outline, though: a pope has died and Cardinal Lawrence is the deacon in charge of the conclave to elect a new one.  Four main candidates exist—one a staunch traditionalist, one a liberal, one an African who is conservative, and the last a moderate American who has a past.  The pope had appointed a new cardinal shortly before his death and some people think he’d make a good pope, despite his relative youth.  One of the striking scenes is Cardinal Lawrence’s homily to open the conclave.  He preaches against certainty.  Not only is this a powerful scene, for some of us watching he is absolutely correct.  Certainty is the death of faith.  That scene alone is worth watching the movie for.  Go ahead, it’s Easter.

The other striking scene is the twist ending, which I won’t reveal here.  Anyone who’s honest and who’s lived long enough to become a pope has secrets.  Not all of them reach to the level of scandal, but the movie also emphasizes that the pope is also a sinner but must be willing to seek forgiveness.  Indeed and amen.  The problem we face today is that, even and perhaps especially in Protestantism, many people look to condemn sinners without realizing their own faults.  The movie points out that even the holiest acknowledged person within Christendom can’t make any claims to perfection.  If we’d all admit that we’re doing the best we can not to offend deity or fellow human being, perhaps there really would be cause to celebrate this Easter.  Even without a conclave.

Space Rocks

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The thing from another world.  No, not the movie, but an artifact.  My recent post about the asteroid sent me looking for something.  When we lived in Wisconsin, we purchased a small piece of a meteorite while on a visit to the Yerkes Observatory.  It is, quite literally, a thing from another world.  The problem is, I can’t find it.  Our house isn’t that big but the fragment is quite small.  I’ve been told our house is like a museum—there are curios pretty much everywhere, and they each have some significance.  But the meteorite: where could it be?  I find that moving is one of the most disruptive activities known to those of us in the “developed” world.  As much as I wanted an organized move, the fact is that you can’t have such a move without taking at least a month off work in advance.

There are things (from this world) that I haven’t found in the six-plus years in this house.  Most often they’re like the meteorite in that I don’t think of them often, and when I do I wonder where I might’ve packed them.  Knowing where they might’ve been packed gives a clue to where they might’ve been unpacked.  And no matter what, some things get lost on every move.  There’s a book I had in New Jersey that is simply not here in Pennsylvania.  I’m sure I packed all our books.  One, at least, did not make it over the Delaware.   The fragment of meteorite, which is unique, is only about the size of a small ladybug.  Where might I have put it?  

That small fragment of rock traveled through the solar system.  It likely came from distances no human has ever gone.  Unimaginable distances.  Only to get lost in a house in Pennsylvania.  If it’s here at all.  Back when it was legal to pick up petrified wood, a family friend gave us two chunks from the petrified forest (for now, a National Park in Arizona).  One of them came to me and I treasured it for years.  I haven’t seen it since we moved to Pennsylvania.  There are boxes that haven’t been fully unpacked.  The squirrels make a mess of the garage every winter and I can’t go in there without feeling I should clean things up first, before emptying out the remaining boxes.  To a squirrel the thing from another world is just one more thing to ignore.  It has no value except for to an aging guy who remembers buying it at the very spot where Edwin Hubble worked and Albert Einstein visited.  Only to mislay it when moving fifty miles from state to state.

Not my meteorite. Image credit: Meteoritekid under the GNU Free Documentation License, via Wikimedia Commons

Mass Market

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The mass market paperback.  This may very well be one of the best symbols of my younger years.  One of the largest distributors of mass market paperbacks (Readerlink) has announced that it will no longer distribute them.  It seems that the writing, instead of in readers’ hands, is on the wall.  Mass market paperbacks are the least expensive formats of books to buy.  Publishers have increasingly been tending to push trade size (about 6-by-9 inches)—they can charge more for them.  They don’t fit easily in your pocket, however, and well, they cost more.  Often, as someone who reads in public, I find myself wishing more literary fiction was still produced in mass market form.  Only the best selling authors ever make it down to that size.  I miss being able to stick a book in my pocket.  

The mass market paperback’s story began with railroad books, once innovated by my erstwhile employer, Routledge.  The form we recognize today only really took off in 1935.  When I was growing up, I considered all other formats somehow too big.  My book collection and reading habits began with mass market size.  When we moved to our house a few years back, I repurposed an old dresser as a bookshelf.  The top drawer slots were just tall enough for mass market books.  I discovered that I really didn’t have enough of them to fill that shelf.  Books have grown bigger.  Now, working in publishing I realize profit margins are thin in this industry.  Many publishers need the big sellers to help make up for disappointing sales of other titles.  (You have to have thick skin to be an author, I know from experience.)  They need to stay solvent.

But still, this feels like the end of an era.  Books in this format have been around really only less than a century.  Literacy—reading for pleasure—among the masses hasn’t been around much longer.  Books were expensive and were afforded by the elite, then cheaper forms and formats became available.  The electronic revolution has made much of life more convenient but some of us miss the challenge of having to fold a road map and never really knowing, for sure, where we are.  We’re also the ones who likely have a book in the car.  On the occasions when I don’t, I often regret it.  And one of the ways to encourage people to take books with them is to make them of a size that would sell thousands.  So many, in fact, that they would be given the title “mass market.”

Going Viral

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Okay, so there are some pretty big plot holes, but Viral is nevertheless an effective horror film.  The “virus” is actually a parasite spread by blood, which carriers cough in your face, if they don’t kill you first in a fit of parasite-induced rage.  The really scary thing is that this movie was produced before Covid-19 and the government response, as presented in the movie, is somewhat believable.  Nevertheless, it retains its ability to be a story about family and loyalty.  There are some missed opportunities in that regard, but overall it’s fairly well done.  It certainly keeps the tension going and I feel some spoilers coming on so I’ll warn you here.  A Blumhouse production, it seems to have had a reasonable budget.  And there’s a solid attempt to have a storyline with characters you care about.

Sisters Stacy and Emma are trying to adjust to a new school system as news reports increasingly focus on a new, and lethal, virus.  Their California community is the site of the first U.S. outbreak and the initial panic isn’t unlike what happened in 2019.  I’m a little surprised that, given that development, the movie didn’t gain more residual watching.  In any case, a quarantine and curfew are set up, but the teens of the housing development decide to have a party.  Kids will be kids, after all.  Of course, an infected guy is there and Stacy, the older sister, gets infected.  Their parents were caught outside the quarantine zone, so they have to try to survive on their own.  Emma has a new boyfriend—the guy next door—and he urges Emma to leave her sister, but she won’t.  Martial law is declared and “nests” of the infected are being bombed by the government.  Emma and boyfriend manage to survive, but the rest of the town’s a wasteland.

As I say, the implications are the really scary part.  Governments have the mandate to protect the greatest number of people—isn’t that utilitarianism, by default?—and decide to cut their losses and destroy infected communities because there’s no stopping the disease.  Even as the gaps in the story kept coming up, I was asking myself would our government do such a thing.  I could find nothing to dissuade me that it would.  Self-preservation is human nature.  As is might makes right.  Our government, for my entire life, has consisted of the wealthy and one thing we know about those with money is that they’ll do whatever they can to protect their interests.  Oh, and there are a number of effective jump startles as well. But they’re not as scary as the government.

Fabric of Time

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I’m not a sewer.  I mean, a person who sews.  I know people who are, though, who are quite distressed that JoAnn Fabrics is going out of business.  In an effort to console such folk, I indulged in an online search for fabric shops that led to a couple of conclusions.  One is that the internet is lousy at clean-up, and the second is that big box stores have ruined the ability to find things, funneling all purchasing to Amazon.  Let’s take these one at a time. 

If you’ve ever searched for a physical store (fabric or otherwise) online, you know that sites like Yelp are full of artifacts.  Stores that closed a long time ago and have never been removed.  In fact, when I commuted to New York City I sometimes walked several blocks on my lunchtime, looking for a store only to learn that it had closed five or ten years ago.  It still beamed happily on the web, though.  I have driven to bookstores that no longer exist, based on their location being proclaimed loudly online.  Regarding fabric, I located directories for Enright’s Fabric Warehouse, in nearby Bethlehem.  Nothing online indicated that they were long out of business.  I street-leveled the address on Google Maps and found a building I’d driven past many times; I’d actually driven by it the day before.  It obviously was a large factory-like building, but it hadn’t been a fabric store in the seven years I’ve lived in the Lehigh Valley.  This isn’t the only time I’ve searched specifically for a company/store with the query word “bankrupt” or “out of business” to find Hal-9000 saying, “I can’t let you do that, Steve.”

The second point.  Big box stories come to town, drive smaller stores out of business, then fold themselves, leaving us all poorer for it.  As big boxes go, I liked JoAnn’s.  Probably because they were failing, they had lots of things besides fabrics that I could look at on family outings.  But the fact is smaller fabric stores (which still appear online as existing) went out of business when JoAnn came to town.  There were two JoAnn stores in the Lehigh Valley.  Smaller places closed, and now we’ll be running around naked before we can find a fabric store willing to sell.  I’ve seen this happen with other industries as well.  There was a fine office supply store in Oconomowoc, Wisconsin when I was at Nashotah House.  Staples came to town and closed them down.  If you’ve been in a Staples lately, you know the writing’s on the wall.  I know we’re stuck with big boxes.  More often we turn to Amazon where a few keystrokes will get you what you need.  Check and mate.

Think

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Those of us who write books have been victims of theft.  One of the culprits is Meta, owner of Facebook.  The Atlantic recently released a tool that allows authors to check if LibGen, a pirated book site used by Meta and others, has their work in its system.  Considering that I have yet to earn enough on my writing to pay even one month’s rent/mortgage, you get a little touchy about being stolen from by corporate giants.  Three of my books (A Reassessment of Asherah, Weathering the Psalms, and Nightmares with the Bible) are in LibGen’s collection.  To put it plainly, they have been stolen.  Now the first thing I noticed was that my McFarland books weren’t listed (Holy Horror and Sleepy Hollow as American Myth, of course, the latter is not yet published).  I also know that McFarland, unlike many other publishers, proactively lets authors know when they are discussing AI use of their content, and informing us that if deals are made we will be compensated.

I dislike nearly everything about AI, but especially its hubris.  Machines can’t think like biological organisms can and biological organisms that they can teach machines to “think” have another think coming.  Is it mere coincidence that this kind of thing happens at the same time reading the classics, with their pointed lessons about hubris, has declined?  I think not.  The humanities education teaches you something you can’t get at your local tech training school—how to think.  And I mean actually think.  Not parrot what you see on the news or social media, but to use your brain to do the hard work of thinking.  Programmers program, they don’t teach thinking.

Meanwhile, programmers have made theft easy but difficult to prosecute.  Companies like Meta feel entitled to use stolen goods so their programmers can make you think your machine can think.  Think about it!  Have we really become this stupid as a society that we can’t see how all of this is simply the rich using their influence to steal from the poor?  LibGen, and similar sites, flaunt copyright laws because they can.  In general, I think knowledge should be freely shared—there’s never been a paywall for this blog, for instance.  But I also know that when I sit down to write a book, and spend years doing so, I hope to be paid something for doing so.  And I don’t appreciate social media companies that have enough money to buy the moon stealing from me.  There’s a reason my social media use is minimal.  I’d rather think.

Release Date

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July 16.  That’s the release date for Sleepy Hollow as American Myth.  If you’re so inclined, preordering helps to earn a book attention.  (I know it’s pricey, but thanks for considering it for a second.)  This book has been, like most books, a long time in the making.  As my wife will attest, reading the proofs nearly sent me into a spiral this time around.  It wasn’t because they were bad (I only found 7 mistakes) but it was because of my own doubt about how well I’d done this one.  I found myself between elation at some parts, and dread at others.  I really like this book but I spent my proofreading journey anticipating what critics would say.  I do take a few chances in this one and it has what I believe to be an important message.

Writing books is like walking into a library naked.  There may not be many people there, but those who are can see more than you want them to.  I love the Legend of Sleepy Hollow.  I learned a lot about Washington Irving doing this research.  I learned a lot about Halloween—that’s one of my favorite chapters.  I also like the conceit I applied to the book itself as a labyrinth.  And I’m already looking forward to reading more renditions of the myth once the dust settles a little.  Reading the proofs took a good portion of the weekend, as well as after-work time the previous week.  I could focus on little else.  Books, you see, are parts of their authors.  I feel a little bit crazy for even writing them in the first place.

That having been said, I’m chuffed with a July publication date.  The best time for Halloween books to be available is the summer.  My last two Halloween titles (Holy Horror and Nightmares with the Bible) both came out in November or December.  Not that there were angry mobs at Barnes & Noble demanding them at the end of October.  The other deadline I’d set myself was to have this published before Lindsey Beer’s reboot of Sleepy Hollow hit theaters.  I seem to have managed that one by quite a margin; there’s still been no release date announced.  For her, that is.  I just received mine yesterday.  I guess it’s time to start touching base with those good folks in the Hudson Valley who expressed an interest in the project when I first told them about it.  I’m anticipating Halloween already.

Therapy with Books

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I’ve been doing this for years and just found out there’s a name for it.  Bibliotherapy is a treatment method that uses reading to deal with anxiety.  It is closely related to writing therapy, which I also use.  Both have been self-moderated, in my case, and both have been part of my way of coping for decades.  I was actually surprised to learn that these are valid methods of treatment that some therapists use.  I knew about journaling (I suppose blogging counts), but the larger picture was never in focus.  We live in stressful times.  We went through a very stressful four years about, let’s see, eight years ago.  This time I’m intentionally using bibliotherapy.  Reading a book (eyes off the screen, please!) is a way of entering another reality for a while.  Already this year I’ve stepped up my reading, as much as work will allow.  (And now, proofs.)

Writing is therapeutic as well.  Both reading and writing engage your mind.  And can remind you that there are other things to life besides headlines.  I’ve been writing a lot of fiction lately.  That doesn’t mean I’ve been publishing a lot of it—that part’s still very difficult for me—but writers do it because that’s what writers do.  And it makes me feel better.  More balanced.  One of the truly difficult things in my life is when I’m on a roll, particularly with fiction, then I have to stop for work.  The whiplash is almost too much some days.  I realize that you can’t make a living out of pouring your soul into words, unless you’re very lucky.  And even then I suppose it might soon start to feel like work.  Maybe some day I’ll find out, but until then reading and writing will see me through.

I know I’m not alone in this.  There are other people out there who spend as much time as possible between the pages and/or with pen in hand.  There’s nothing like it.  These therapies can change your mood.  Give you hope.  Make you feel complete.  And this can happen whether something you’ve written gets published or not.  I admit to having seen therapists from time to time; I probably should do it more.  None of them, however, have suggested bibliotherapy.  It’s something I stumbled onto myself.  That’s probably no surprise.  I bumble my way through life most of the time.  We all know, I suspect, when our brains are firing properly, what makes us feel better.  The shelves that surround me most of every day certainly know.  And there is a name for it.

Call Me AI

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Okay, so the other day I tried it.  I’ve been resisting, immediately scrolling past the AI suggestions at the top of a Google search.  I don’t want some program pretending it’s human to provide me with information I need.  I had to find an expert on a topic.  It was an obscure topic, but if you’re reading this blog that’ll come as no surprise.  Tired of running into brick walls using other methods, I glanced toward Al.  Al said a certain Joe Doe is an expert on the topic.  I googled him only to learn he’d died over a century ago.  Al doesn’t understand death because it’s something a machine doesn’t experience.  Sure, we say “my car died,” but what we mean is that it ceased to function.  Death is the overlay we humans put on it to understand, succinctly, what happened.

Photo by Possessed Photography on Unsplash

Brains are not computers and computers do not “think” like biological entities do.  We have feelings in our thoughts.  I have been sad when a beloved appliance or vehicle “died.”  I know that for human beings that final terminus is kind of a non-negotiable about existence.  Animals often recognize death and react to it, but we have no way of knowing what they think about it.  Think they do, however.  That’s more than we can say about ones and zeroes.  They can be made to imitate some thought processes.  Some of us, however, won’t even let the grocery store runners choose our food for us.  We want to evaluate the quality ourselves.  And having read Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, I have to wonder if “quality” is something a machine can “understand.”

Wisdom is something we grow into.  It only comes with biological existence, with all its limitations.  It is observation, reflection, evaluation, based on sensory and psychological input.  What psychological “profile” are we giving Al?  Is he neurotypical or neurodivergent?  Is he young or does his back hurt when he stands up too quickly?  Is he healthy or does he daily deal with a long-term disease?  Does he live to travel or would he prefer to stay home?  How cold is “too cold” for him to go outside?  These are things we can process while making breakfast.  Al, meanwhile, is simply gathering data from the internet—that always reliable source—and spewing it back at us after reconstructing it in a non-peer-reviewed way.  And Al can’t be of much help if he doesn’t understand that consulting a dead expert on a current issue is about as pointless as trying to replicate a human mind.

Dangerous Driving

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It reminded me of the time my manager fell down into the basement.  It also makes me think I must be neurodivergent.  Yesterday we were helping my brother in New Jersey get some things in order in his house.  He lives about an hour and a half from us and when the GPS showed us our options to get home we decided to go shunpiking.  I find something atmospheric, and maybe a little haunted, about driving along roads next to a river.  We crossed into Pennsylvania just north of Trenton and followed “River Road” home.  This stretch of road, mostly highway 32, is almost impossibly quaint.  I’d driven sections of it before, but not the whole stretch.  It was a pleasant day but we’d just come off of a period of rain and high winds.  The winds were still up, and have been gusting for about a week now.

After somewhere over an hour on this pleasant drive, we saw a motorcycle stopped in the road.  I slowed way down, unsure of what I was seeing (this starts the neurodivergent part), and I saw a man staggering across the road to lay down on the berm.  I could see branches on the road.  Unsure what to do, I pulled up next to him and offered to call 911 (my wife actually suggested that, since I didn’t know what to do. She’s better in a crisis than me.).  By then the people in the cars behind us had gotten out and one of them indicated they had medical training and that help was on the way.  The man indicated he’d been driving his motorcycle and the branch came down on him, or right in front of him—he was pretty dazed and confused.  Not wanting to throw my own ignorance and ineptitude into the mix, I pulled over, and my wife and I got out of the car and started clearing branches from the road.  Kay and I, and by now others, had pretty much cleared the road and, unsure what to do, and since there were many people attending the man, I drove off.

Image credit: Doug Kerr, Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic license, some rights reserved, via Flickr

That incident made me very reflective.  When I worked at Ritz Camera in Brookline, Massachusetts, one day my manager didn’t see that the cellar door (inside the store) was open.  We heard a scream and a thud and I ran to the door and pulled it back open.  The door had to be held by a hook and eyelet being joined and while I was trying to do that, one of my coworkers brushed past and down the stairs to help our manager.  Later, my co-worker ribbed me for being more concerned about the door than the person.  I was actually trying to help our manager, but in my mind, going down the stairs only to have the door fall on my head made no sense.  It turned out the manager was fine; a trip to the ER showed nothing seriously wrong with her.  I don’t know about that man by the side of the road.  I was only glad that, as my wife noted, so many people had stopped to help.  I just hope he, like my manager, was okay.

Indigenous Gods

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Engulfed by capitalism, it is too easy to ignore the indigenous population of this country.  I grew up thinking, in some way, that American Indians were extinct (this was small town America, after all).  Then we visited a place—in upstate New York, I think, but the recollection’s hazy—where there were real Indians.  This was before exoticism was a bad word, and I thought them quite exotic.  Maybe it was the way I was raised, but I’ve never thought of myself as better than anybody else.  Certainly not on the basis of race or gender, or even personal worth.  In any case, there were still Indians.  I’ve always been an admirer of their culture.  Jennifer Graber’s The Gods of Indian Country is an informative monograph on, as the subtitle says, Religion and the Struggle for the American West.

My interest in American history is relatively recent.  Growing up, I always found European history of greater interest, and then, for many years, the ancient history of the states along the eastern coast of the Mediterranean.  It was the antiquity of it all.  History feels safer when it’s at a great distance.  American history is not old.  When hearing that some of the events discussed by Graber took place in the 1910s, I kept thinking, “were we really that naive just over a century ago?”  Or was our nation willfully blind to the plight of the people who lived here before the Europeans arrived?  The narrative has changed.  And if it hasn’t, it must.  How would we like it if, say, aliens landed and assumed the right to take over capitalistic America?  It’s only our arrogance that prevents us from treating Indians better.

Religion, particularly Christianity, fueled many interactions with the Indians, as Graber ably demonstrates.  The assumption was that Indians had to assimilate to capitalistically-fueled Christianity.  Private ownership.  Free trade.  Otherwise the cultures could not share the land.  Treaties were broken because the “Christian” rules of the new overlords demanded it.  Graber also explores some Native American religious practices as well, chiefly among the Kiowa.  Since the book is fairly brief, it doesn’t include any kind of comprehensive coverage of Indian religion, nor, of course, of early American settler religion.  What happened is that religion and politics joined forces to justify stealing what belonged to someone else.  Those who study the history of religion recognize this pattern.  It isn’t a rarity, unfortunately.  Although my interest in American history is recent, it is growing.  What happened in your own backyard determines so much of how we’ve become who we are.

First Tower

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In these days when daring to think feels dangerous, R. F. Kuang’s Babel: An Arcane History feels dangerous to read.  Good literature is like that, even if it’s uncomfortable to read as a “white” man.  A fantasy largely set in Oxford, it’s based on the premise that languages, when placed next to one another, engraved in silver, have enormous power.  The power to run an empire.  This is a post-colonial story, and I took comfort in the working class support, for their own reasons, of exposing the very dangerous world of capitalism.  With its “human capital” as we’re now being called by businessmen.  But I digress.  Four students, three from abroad, are brought to Babel, a tower in Oxford that houses the Royal Institute of Translation.  Their use of their native tongues helps build immense power in this Oxford tower.  Power that fuels Britain’s imperial goals.  But all is not well in academic paradise.

Slowly three of the four scholars come to realize that their home countries are being exploited for purposes of yet further exploitation.  The wealth always flows back to England, and even the small emoluments it offers to those other nations cannot negate the fact that the end goal is British superiority.  The protagonist is Chinese, taken from poverty to live in academic luxury, in exchange for what was his birthright—his linguistic ability.  It doesn’t end well.  This is not a happy novel.  But it does highlight something we seldom consider; our language ability is truly an amazing thing.  We try to convey a fraction of what’s going on in our heads to another person, and that person has some ability to understand it.  And languages are ways of thinking.  I used to tell my students that all the time.  It’s more than just words.

This is also a fairly long book.  As with most fairly long books, you’re left feeling it once the story concludes.  Even though language allows us to communicate, it’s sometimes uncomfortable to hear what someone else is thinking.  We don’t have to be woke to realize that Black, or Asian, or indigenous experience is quite different from what we call “white.”  And such voices deserve to be heard.  We live in a time when white men don’t like to be told that they’ve participated in oppressive behaviors.  Probably most of them (for I believe people are generally good) are not intentionally evil, but they participate in a system which can be.  And often unthinkingly so.  Thus these days thinking feels dangerous.  And this book will make you do so, nevertheless.

Asteroid

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So, that asteroid.  Good thing Trump won’t be in office in 2032.  Well, it’s only a three percent chance it’ll hit us, but chances are things can’t get much worse anyway.  It might be a good idea to make some plans now—but wait, we currently deny science is real and spend our time renaming bodies of water.  Hmm, quite a pickle.  If science were real it would tell us that an asteroid is not the same as a meteor, although it can become one.  Back in high school astronomy class—yes, our Sputnik-era high school had its own planetarium—I learned that the difference between a meteoroid, a meteor, and a meteorite.  Want to go to school?  Here’s the quick version: a meteor is something in Earth’s atmosphere (thus, meteorology).  A meteoroid is a space rock, or even dust, in the solar system somewhere.  Once it enters our atmosphere it becomes a meteor.

Most meteors burn up as shooting stars and never hit the ground.  Yes, that atmosphere is a pretty good idea.  If a piece does make it to the ground, that piece is a meteorite.  Although your chances of being hit by a meteorite are minuscule, they can be impish.  Not far from here, a few years back, a meteor smashed through the backseat window of a car after a couple had just put their groceries inside.  The meteorite stopped inside a carton of ice cream.  The window had to be replaced, and I can just imagine the conversation with the insurance company.  Or take that meteorite heard on a recording for the first time.  In Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island, a doorbell camera caught a meteorite strike just outside someone’s house.  Both of these were tiny critters, though.

Our 2032 friend is quite a bit bigger.  Sometimes when large meteors heat up, they’ll explode in what is called a bolide.   In western Pennsylvania back in January of 1987 (if I recall correctly) my brother and I were working on a jigsaw puzzle during the holiday break when our house shook.  A loud bang had us worried—we lived in a refinery town, and explosions weren’t a welcome report.  We ran outside to find neighbors also outside looking around.  We later learned that a flaming fireball had gone overhead before exploding, a bolide.  The actual explosion took place quite a distance from us, but sound travels in our atmosphere.  So a possible near miss is scheduled eight years from now.  Let’s hope people show some sense at the polls before that happens. Or we could just rename it MAGA and hope that it hits somewhere else.

An asteroid. Image credit: NASA, public domain

Staunching Stigma

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Independence Day is not a great movie.  As my readers know, that doesn’t stop me from watching.  I’ve seen it a few times.  Watching it post-UFO/AUP disclosure via the New York Times, I was struck by something.  Even in the diegesis of the movie, where alien craft, clearly visible, hover over major cities, when Russell Casse tells the military he’d been abducted, people roll their eyes.  Of all the stigmas our culture has invented that of the “crazy people” who see “flying saucers” is one of the deepest and most persistent.  Even after the Times, and the US Navy admitted they were real, and their tech is not of human origin, people refuse to believe.  I’ve followed this for some time.  I read a book by Donald Keyhoe before I was old enough to drive.  Like most thinking people on the topic, I kept quiet about it.  Stigma.

When I received Luis Elizondo’s Imminent for a Christmas present, I was secretly very pleased.  You see, the evidence has been in plain sight (Poe nods knowingly) for decades, for those who don’t accept ridicule as an immediate response.  The Keyhoe book I read was published in 1955.  It was my grandfather’s book.  For sure, the stories casting doubt on Elizondo’s reputation and sanity began almost immediately after he cooperated with journalists in 2017 when a fraction of the truth made the New York Times.  Between Keyhoe and Elizondo, many insider, “death bed” books had revealed that this was something we should pay attention to.  People laughed.  Oh, we love to laugh.  Imminent, however, is quite a sobering book.  I’m not sure full disclosure will ever happen, but it’s trickling out and a finger in the dam can’t hold forever.

Stigma as a means of social control is unfortunately effective.  I’ve always felt that mocking what you don’t understand is a poor way to get smarter.  Still, for those willing to consider the evidence over the years, there’s been plenty to study.  Either there’s something to this or our government and military are filled with pathological liars (outside the Oval Office, I mean).  It seems far more reasonable to examine the evidence, when it becomes available.  There are contractors in the military-industrial complex (Eisenhower warned us about this decades ago) who benefit from keeping secrets.  Imminent is an eye-opening book.  Hopefully it will be widely read and the implications taken seriously.  It’d be too bad if a catastrophe were necessary to stop the stigma, after it’s too late to do anything about it.