Just To Be Clear, I Am In Charge of Exactly Squat

Lots of folks want to talk about the rest of the newspaper. But all I'm in charge of is my own column in the metro section, which is mostly about state and local stuff.

I'll answer for my own words all day long, but not anybody else's.

If you really are just dying to talk about what's wrong with the editorial page, the A section, the news coverage, the comics or the Awful Liberal/Mainstream Media in general, you should write a letter to the editor. You can do that by clicking here.

Comments

[Jon McPhee]

If you have the time, please read all of this before dismissing it as not local enough.

I read a science fiction story in ANALOG Magazine, back in the day when the genre was about thought experiments in culture and sociology and politics – you know, Frank Herbert’s informative Dune series and all that. It posited a galactic culture of planets tied together in part by regular Olympic-style games that produced a best-human hero known as the “Winner.” This cycle’s hero was sent to a planetary system to investigate the death of the previous Winner, and figure out what was going on in a war between the populations of two different planets. The leadership of the inner hotter semidesert planet was arming up to send nuclear weapons via some kind of instantaneous transport to detonate on the outer, cooler and wetter planet, whose military power could vaporize the desert planet with its weapons, and which has warned planet A that will be the outcome if planet B is attacked by even one nuke from planet A. Planet A’s leadership proceeds irregardless, out of unfathomable motivations, while propagandizing their citizenry about its “strategy” and the evils of Planet B.

The protagonist Winner is attacked on his way from the spaceport to the capitol of planet A, escaping to the desert where he meets up with a local nomadic resident. This nomad turns out to have a highly developed knowledge, ala Bushmen and Aborigines, of how to survive and prosper in the scarcity of the desert, via understanding of symbiosis, parasitism and other such concepts – e.g., a drink of water from a particular plant costs a human some spine pricks around the mouth as the plant extracts a little hemoglobin in return for water. The basic words distinguishing healthy symbiotic relationships from dead-end parasitism resulting in the death of the host are “medverk” and “umedverk” – the Dutch-Germanic roots ought to be obvious.

The two of them have the usual heroic adventures and narrow escapes, and discover the cave in which the dudes in gray robes are prepping the warheads to shoot at their enemies. They capture one of the Grey Robes and observe an autopsy involving the removal of his upper skull. The Grey Guy’s brain turns out to be invaded by some parasitic form that destroys empathic centers and parts of the intelligent brain, while maximizing the amygdala and other structures that have let this group rise to power but now threaten the whole world with extinction, since the drive to conquer and destroy that allowed the Grey Guys to ascend to power doesn’t leave them awake to or concerned about the mortal threats to their own existence, let alone the rest of the planet.

Of course wisdom prevails, and the Grey Guys get packed off to be healed of their brain parasites, and interplanetary war is averted.

What all that has to do with anything, especially anything local, is the thought that there may be some very simple tests to separate public and large-scale behaviors that are symbiotic and healthy from those that are deadly – medverk vs. umedverk, as it were. Far be it from me to suggest that our leaders who promote self-interest, enemy-thinking and hatreds are infected with some kind of alien brain parasite – you’ve observed enough high-powered people up close to form your own judgments on that.

But it might be nice if all our educations included some exposure to the idea that some ideas, and behaviors, are easily identified as “medverk,” and others, which generally are the ones that promote some particularized madness or selfishness, are “umedverk.” I don’t think the FCAT and intelligent-design parts of the curriculum come anywhere near exposing people to modes of mentation that can help separate the gold from the dross. That takes folks like you, to point out where the Emperor has no clothes and so forth.

And of course there is no guarantee that being aware of the concepts and the facts would lead to right behaviors in the sense of “cultural homeostasis,” but it might be a step in the right direction.

[Senor]

Do you still have goldfish in your cement pond or has the cat eaten them all?

(Howard again. Different house, no fish pond these days.)

[Reggie Hall]

More Howard is what we need. I believe your columns have made a positive difference for our communities. Long live the Trox Blog!