penfist

stories are the bones of everything

Essays

Make America great again

by Leave a Comment

The world isn’t ending no matter how you voted. Trump is going to be the next President. Barring acts of god or other forces beyond our collective control.

#MAGA

By the way, America was never great.

It has had moments of self-awareness, and little flashes of excellence, but America can’t be made great again, because it never has been great.

Pick any moment in the history of this country, from the start up until the present, and you will find stains on the pages.

Think we were great because of the founders? Half of them were slave owners. Black people were worth 3/5ths of a white person during that time and they could be bought and sold. Not great. The founders took the land they built this country on from people who already lived on it. We call them native Americans today, and early Americans abuse the ancestors of today’s native Americans horribly.

Maybe you think we were great when we saved Europe from Hitler during World War II. You’d be wrong, because while we were busy doing that admittedly righteous thing, we were still segregated at home. We built concentration camps for Japanese-Americans because of paranoia. Not so great.

But America defeated communism you say? That’s what makes us great! Not so much. One could argue that communism isn’t such a bad concept, but I won’t go there. I’ll just remind you that   we fought a lot of dirty wars to do what we did to bring down the Berlin wall in the late 80’s. Take a moment to research how many dirty wars the CIA has funded only to cast aside the fighters it recruited for political convenience. Google the Hmong, or Iran Contra, or just “the worst things the CIA has done.” American government has a long history of installing and funding atrocious, despotic governments and making friends with bad people. Remember Saddam Hussein? He was once a great friend to America. Before he became a great enemy to our great country that has never really been great for any sustained period of time.

Maybe you think America was great more recently. Let’s say you think it was great after slavery and segregation and all the secretly funded dirty wars. We finally made some progress on human rights and immediately started massive spying programs that break our laws. The NSA collects data on all Americans and possibly all the world for all I know. I know for certain that our so-called great nation is spying on world leaders and governments while keeping many secrets of its own from us. That doesn’t seem so great to me.

America was never great. It only has the potential to be great in the future. That’s the real challenge of a Trump presidency. Admitting that the starting point of his entire campaign is a lie. I don’t think he’s up to the challenge. I’ll be watching and commenting the whole way, as he attempts to make America something is has never been. Again.

Next time someone tells you we’re going to make America great again, I hope you’ll call them on it. We can make America great for the first time, but we need to start from an honest place to do so.

Aftermath

by Leave a Comment

“People aren’t supposed to look back. I’m certainly not going to do it anymore.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five

Ten years, nearly, since I came back from my first experience of war. I’ve learned a lot since then. About the lies society breeds into us.

About flags and nation-states. I hope I’ve learned a bit about honor and what it means to live meaningfully.

I won’t discuss my worst memories of war, although they still trouble me at times. Mostly I want to discuss the utter banality of modern evil. On the eve of a decade back in relative peace, a state I don’t really know what I’ve done to deserve, I mostly wonder about the people I left behind. The ones trapped in Baghdad. I wonder how many of them are alive. How many of them are sane. How many of them have been broken beyond repair.

It is, I think, our nature as human beings to live in the moment. We try to survive as best we can. When opportunities allow for it we thrive. Sometimes the thriving leads to dancing and parties. I’m all for that.

One of my most poignant memories of war is that of a moment when we were gathered to go out into the place we called the red zone, which was almost all of the country. The irony of living in a space designated the green zone has never escaped me. The irony of my existence there was amplified by the fact that everyone who hated what we represented, our flags, and our imperfect ideals, and the way we saw god. Those people had our coordinates dialed in. The so-called green zone was a shooting gallery where death consisted of a moment of awareness and then shattering. The missiles and rockets came in like random horsemen of the apocalypse riding on the wings of death. They lobbed the hate when they could. Every time they could.

I’m sure someone was tracking the inbound hatred on a screen. It wasn’t me. In such an environment, one must, of necessity, become numb. In some human environments, one can use blending as a survival technique. In the green zone surrounded by the red zone that was not the case. We went about our business and blindly hoped that the airborne anger wouldn’t choose us on any given day. It never directly chose me. I watched them land a few times, these explosive daggers made of death. I felt them in my core, ran from them, thought about their nature, and from some numb place inside, I feared them. But I had my distractions. Enough so that unlike one fellow soldier, I didn’t wake up on any given morning and simply refuse to get out of bed.

I put on my uniform, strapped on my battle rattle, met the day.

Surrounded by concrete t-walls and well meaning bureaucrats with guns, most of us, I think, believed we were making the world a better place. A freer place. Looking back, that seems naive.

My first war was predicated on manufactured facts that weren’t. Iraq’s involvement in fostering terrorism against the United States was marginal at best when we invaded the country. That is not to say that I regret my service. I did nothing I am ashamed of in my first war. I hope that it has made me more thoughtful. I hope that it has made me more compassionate. I hope that war has grown my empathy for all the human beings I will encounter today and tomorrow for all long as I shall live.

One memory, one that I want to revisit with you in this moment, is that of a noisy, dusty morning at the edge of the green zone. Preparing to dance with death and chance, we did all the things required of Americans saving the world from terror in 2006. We checked our combat loads. We coordinated our communications. We made sure that our maps were up to date and that our vehicles were fully fueled and in proper running order.

It was a scene of professional chaos full of barked orders, frenetic activity and people living on the edge of war’s numb reality. The memory of the kid sitting with his back against a t-wall calmly reading Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five stays with me and it always will. I had experienced a close call with a mortar two days prior. We briefly made eye contact. He went back to reading his novel.

I remember. Now I share the memory with you.

There is always an aftermath. I’ll always wonder what the kid I saw that day thought of Vonnegut. That kid saved me from something. I’m not quite sure what.

“It was a movie about American bombers in World War II and the gallant men who flew them. Seen backwards by Billy, the story went like this: American planes, full of holes and wounded men and corpses took off backwards from an airfield in England. Over France, a few German fighter planes flew at them backwards, sucked bullets and shell fragments from some of the planes and crewmen. They did the same for wrecked American bombers on the ground, and those planes flew up backwards to join the formation.

The formation flew backwards over a German city that was in flames. The bombers opened their bomb bay doors, exerted a miraculous magnetism which shrunk the fires, gathered them into cylindrical steel containers , and lifted the containers into the bellies of the planes. The containers were stored neatly in racks. The Germans below had miraculous devices of their own, which were long steel tubes. They used them to suck more fragments from the crewmen and planes. But there were still a few wounded Americans though and some of the bombers were in bad repair. Over France though, German fighters came up again, made everything and everybody as good as new.

When the bombers got back to their base, the steel cylinders were taken from the racks and shipped back to the United States of America, where factories were operating night and day, dismantling the cylinders, separating the dangerous contents into minerals. Touchingly, it was mainly women who did this work. The minerals were then shipped to specialists in remote areas. It was their business to put them into the ground, to hide them cleverly, so they would never hurt anybody ever again.”  
― Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five

Duality

by 1 Comment

Colonel: Marine, what is that button on your body armor?
Joker: A peace symbol, sir.
Colonel: Where’d you get it?
Joker: I don’t remember, sir.
Colonel: What is that you’ve got written on your helmet?
Joker: “Born to kill”, sir.
Colonel: You write “born to kill” on your helmet, and you wear a peace button. What’s that supposed to be, some kind of sick joke?
Joker: No, sir.
Colonel: What is it supposed to mean?
Joker: I don’t know, sir.
Colonel: You don’t know very much, do you?
Joker: No, sir.
Colonel: You better get your head and your ass wired together, or I will take a giant shit on you!
Joker: Yes, sir.
Colonel: Now answer my question or you’ll be standing tall before the man!
Joker: I think I was trying to suggest something about the duality of man, sir.
Colonel: The what?
Joker: The duality of man. The Jungian thing, sir.
Colonel: Whose side are you on, son?
Joker: Our side, sir.
Colonel: Don’t you love your country?
Joker: Yes, sir.
Colonel: Then how ’bout getting with the program? Why don’t you jump on the team and come on in for the big win?
Joker: Yes, sir.
Colonel: Son, all I’ve ever asked of my Marines is for them to obey my orders as they would the word of God. We are here to help the Vietnamese, because inside every gook there is an American trying to get out. It’s a hard-ball world, son. We’ve gotta try to keep our heads until this peace craze blows over!
Joker: [salutes] Aye-aye, sir.

— Full Metal Jacket, Stanley Kubrick

We are all dualities, and madness is always closer than we think it is. Brains are chemical soup, and the recipe has to be just right for us to blend into the tribe and play our part correctly. Jung, the Swiss psychiatrist who came up with the concept of the ‘duality of man’ was himself beset by mental illness. The duality concept is simple, unless you don’t want it to be, and lots of you who read this won’t. But simple needs complex so I understand if you want duality to be the other side of the coin. I’m going to argue for the simple side.

Good needs evil. In this reality if I do something good, someone else somewhere else has to do something equally evil to keep the universe in balance. We are individuals, but we are also all part of this duality. I am not all good, or all bad. I am not all man, and you, if you happen to identify as female, are not all woman. Each of us, whether we like it or not, has some characteristics of both sexes. There is no purely asexual or androgynous human being.

This is a yin.yang thing. Making people think about the idea that they aren’t all one way makes them uncomfortable. In the movie, Joker is a pacifist with a gun. He’s not all killer, but some of him is. Another part of him wants to be peaceful. He is at war in Vietnam, but he is also at war within himself. When I was in the Marine Corps, many years ago, I watched Full Metal Jacket over and over and thought about duality. I was raised by pacifists, so I need to join the Corps. I did the same job as Joker. I was a combat correspondent. The movie was release in 1987 and I joined the Corps in 1991. We are creatures of our time and place, and we are more than one thing.

It’s how a loving mother can also be a wanton slut, how a priest can also be a pedophile. Murderers can be kind. Dictators can be benevolent. The world is full of people who are more than one thing and also people who are in different moments, opposite things. I understand how that can be confusing when we are constantly being asked to make quick judgment calls, when people demand that we label others and wear the labels they have given us.

My advice to you is to quietly let them know you refuse to wear that which they want you to wear. Tell them you are a duality. Tell them you are just trying to wrap your mind around that fact and are therefore much too busy to be bothered at the moment. Tell them it is hard enough balancing out what you are without all their white noise. If that’s not enough, thank them for teaching you what sort of person you don’t want to become. It’s OK to make mistakes, and you get to choose the balance you want for yourself. Unless you’re so off kilter the rest of us decide you need to be kept in a cage for our safety and yours. We’re all evolving at the same time. At different rates. You are fortunate enough to have been born into a time and place where the sum of all that is known is growing exponentially. This leads to opportunities for massive empathy. And also endless cynicism. It’s your choice to make.

You’ll be remembered as a saint or sinner, but most likely you’ll be somewhere in between the two extremes. Remember duality as you walk the paths life shows you.

Control as an illusion

by Leave a Comment

“Control is as much an effect as a cause, and the idea that control is something you exert is a real handicap to progress”
― Steve Grand, Creation: Life and How to Make It

There is an inevitability coming. I can’t predict exactly when it will arrive. The inexorable future shape of things isn’t going to arrive in a single moment, like god coming down from heaven to judge us all. It’s fun for some people to think about the future that way. I have a slightly different worldview.

What am I talking about? The near 100 percent certainty that we are on the verge of creating one or, more likely, many intelligences that will dwarf our own.

In 2014, Wired wrote an article speculating on what’s coming. The rudimentary AIs that exist now have already beaten Jeopardy. And there are already debates going on in technology ethics circles about how to prevent them from developing consciousnesses. I don’t think humanity is going to manage that. I like to speculate that AI will be mostly benevolent and will exist primarily to increase both the quality and quantity of our existence as individuals and communities. Your intelligent car will safely drive you around to where you need to be, freeing up huge blocks of time that you can use to do something useful, like find a hookup on Tinder, or whatever it is that you are into. I’ll probably still pass the time with audio books. The difference is that the AI is going to be orders of magnitude better at avoiding accidents than I can ever hope for.

I imagine a future where the super intelligences we create will anticipate our daily needs and assist in ensuring that they are met and often exceeded. The electronic devices in our lives are already starting to observe and interact with us to meet our desires and needs. Alexa, Siri, and others are entering more and more homes, listening and waiting to serve. Debate over and resistance to the entrance of these machines that are aware of their environment is healthy and I would never quash it. I understand the mind of neoluddites. I myself have a strong need to disconnect from technology for swathes of time. That’s probably not how my children and grandchildren will think though.

They are going to grow up in environments that will make them completely dependent on networks and the intelligences that live on those communications backbones. Being this connected does have challenges. For me, it is often stressful. I get tired after more then a few hours of exposure to all the information. The AIs have the potential to help. They will be able to filter out the information overload. The Presidential election cycle of 2016, for instance. I would almost rather not know. As a matter of fact, with the choices presented this time around, I think I’d rather have an AI running the United States. I’m not Elon Musk, who has said that AI is the biggest threat to the survival of the human race that looms over the horizon.

I’m a transhumanist. I don’t believe that we’re destined to stay in bodies like the ones you and I have at the time of this writing. I believe we’re in the process of creating new technologies that will provide a vast new range of options.

We are sentient beings who are also biologically driven to evolve. That fact is an innate part of being human. While there are those who resist change and always defer to protecting the status quo, they haven’t really mattered much at all if you look at the arc of human history. Examples include every type of Luddite since the Industrial Revolution, every religious believer since the invention of religion, and every political adherent since the beginning of politics. Most of what you think you know has its roots in early programming that you were given. Not all of it, or even most of it, predicts the future accurately. It’s this odd tendency our societies have to try and stay in certain comfort zones. Authorities in every sector have an inherent motivation to protect the status quo because the status quo is what keeps them at the top of the food chain. Unfortunately for those in charge, it is inevitable that they will not stay in charge for long. Human beings who aren’t in charge have a very compelling reason to want their voices heard. Their energies are always directed towards more equality.

The people who resist change, and by this I mean change that forwards the evolution of the species we call homo sapiens, always lose when you look through the lens of history. Which I make a habit of doing.

As technology spreads knowledge further and further at faster and faster speeds, everything changes. This is unstoppable. If I offered you the choice of living in a society where everyone gets to speak, everyone gets to eat, everyone gets to be with the people they most desire to be with, or one where the authorities or the dominant ideology dictate those outcomes, which choice will always rise to the surface.

Look around the world you live in and you’ll see what I mean. Those in power don’t really have as much power as they think they do. What power they do have is easily seized when the rest of us realize there are better ways to exist. I’m not discounting all the people who have lost their lives struggling to make our world better. I deeply admire them, warts and all. Telling those stories is a huge part of why I write.

If artificial intelligence represents a threat to humanity, it also represents a new savior. If we can build thinking machines, we are also capable of building thinking machines that will offer us new options for change that are better than the ones we currently have. I imagine a future in which individuals do not need to die (until they are ready). A future filled with an abundance of richness that I like to imagine. Our ancestors looked up at the stars and wondered what they were. We know what they are made of at this point. What if we could actually go visit them, and the countless planets that orbit them. Control is an illusion, but the possibility to explore this universe we share is not.

In a place and time when disease, poverty, war and all the other scourges that have plagued our species are eliminated by vastly superior caretakers, our choices will become completely different. Colonialism and imperialism died because they were bad ideologies. The same is true of chattel slavery. Every philosophy, and this includes religions, that espouses a state of misery and inequality for human beings, dies. Most of us don’t want to subjugate or control one another. Life is better when we’re exploring and learning as equals. I contemplate these ideas in Evermore, my debut novel set in a dystopian future. The rough draft will be done in a matter of days, and I hope to have the final version completed by year end and available to readers.

I hope you’ll join me on the journey. If you’re interested in being a beta reader for Evermore, I’d love to hear from you.

Artificial intelligence won’t feel that way when it arrives. You’ll have new friends to get to know while you venture outward and explore the nature of everything.

It just feels like a waste of time

by 2 Comments

The political system in the United States is broken

I watched the first presidential debate of 2016 last night. Gross.

Why do I have to choose between a shady, back-room power deals career politician and a shady, back-room power deals career businessman? Both of them are liars. Both of them are flip-floppers. Both of them are power hungry. These are not qualities I can support in a leader.

Every logical fallacy I am aware of was at play in the debate last night. These two individuals are not the best choices to lead the United States for the next four years. We shouldn’t have to choose between two paragons of fail. Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton are not root causes. They are not the disease. They are the symptoms of a bigger problem.

The virus of the two-party system, where all opinions are slowly silenced until there are only two voices left. A system of decision making that offers only two choices is not healthy. The debate last night didn’t offer any real dialog about the problems average Americans face. It didn’t offer any real perspectives. That’s because, in the United States, minorities who aren’t bought are still silenced. That’s the real problem.

If you’re a socially progressive and fiscally conservative, like I am, there isn’t a real choice. If you believe politicians should be honest and responsible, you don’t have a real choice this election cycle. If you think government should operate transparently, always choosing to balance personal liberties with social infrastructure that demands personal responsibility, neither of these two is palatable.

They will both hoard power. They will both continue the vast, non-transparent, morally bankrupt security state we’ve been building since Sept. 11, 2001. We’ll keep using drones to extra-judicially murder those who, real or imagined, represent some sort of threat to this nation-state. All of our options will continue being boiled down into soundbites that lack any true substance. I can’t vote for that. I won’t vote for it. I don’t want to build a wall, and I don’t want to create more failed states like Libya and Syria in the name of the American people.

We owe it to ourselves to destroy the two-party system that offered up these two as our best hope for turning the ship before it collides with an iceberg named mediocrity.

I asked my girlfriend to register to vote. “It just feels like a waste of time,” she said. She’s right.

Until we manage to destroy the two-party system, this country is going to continue its downhill trajectory. It doesn’t matter which party wins in the upcoming election. The problem isn’t the candidates, it’s the system that offered them up as saviors.

Writers on writing – Augusten Burroughs

by Leave a Comment

This guy. Augusten Burroughs. I haven’t read his novels yet, but based on the advice given in this short video, I’m going to. [embedyt]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pTOjkwkeEF0[/embedyt]

Update: March 24, 2017 – [easyazon_link identifier=”B008O9BKGC” locale=”US” nw=”y” tag=”penfist-20″]Running with Scissors[/easyazon_link] is a crazy book.