Jonah Complex

 

Testla Cybertruck (2024)

Due to the tech and now AI revolution you have people with huge amounts of money who can acquire everything and literally inhale the world, in a biblical sense. One might employ the Yiddish word pisher to describe formerly big fish such as Bill Gates and Warren Buffet who recently resigned as chairman of Berkshire Hathaway, compared to the world's first trillionaire Elon Musk.  Larry Ellison of Oracle who just gobbled up Paramount, which now includes CNN and CBS exemplifies the power of this kind of big money. Then there are Sam Altman of Chat Got and Dario Amodei of Anthropic whose intelligences are literally out of control, devouring both data and people.

Read "The Great Bonac Footrace of '83" by Francis Levy, The East Hampton Star

The Seventh Seal

The world right now is an ailing patient. You keep trying to reassure them everything is OK. What are the ailments?AI would be the most pressing, if it weren't for the environment. After a summer of record breaking temperatures, Europe is only beginning to cool down, but glacial melting and consequent flooding of the kind that created the horrible tragedy in Nepal vie with avalanches and the changes in El Niño. It's almost biblical in times of great upheaval. False prophets offer simple palliatives. According to DJT both AI and the environment are hoaxes. Denial is not a river in Egypt. Not surprising, as in the Dark Ages, there's an Inquisition carried on by DHS which has its own Savonarola and QAnon like conspiracies abound.  Who would have thought of North Korea emerging as a super power (whose wealth is based on arms dealing) or for that matter that diseases that had formerly been eradicated like say scarlet fever and measles would return as faith healing replaced science. The title of the famous Bergman film cites Revelations  8:1, And when he had opened the seventh seal, there was silence in heaven about the space of half an hour. 

Read "The Great Bonac Footrace of '83" by Francis Levy, The East Hampton Star

Permanence

H. Rap Brown (in case you didn't know)

The baby boomers for whom concepts like Trilling's Liberal Imagination were as immovable as the Pyramids or Angkor Wat--are witnessing the demise of the humanistic project. Seemingly overnight they awakened into a Brave New World,  it's Soma, SSRIs and a host of Benzodiazepines such as Klonapin which are as available and ubiquitous as toothpaste and "as American as cherry pie," to quote H. Rap Brown. Where have all the flowers gone? Indeed, it's like the dream of the old professor in Wild Strawberries, in which he enters a town in which the legends above storefronts are written in an indecipherable script. Goodbye to All That is the title of the famous Graves book about the loss of another way of life--in the wake of the enormous casualties following World War I.  Humanism is dying in obscurity. One doesn't need to ponder the potentially destructive effects of AI. Indifference is the killer. There's a whole world of it, a black hole and juggernaut that sweeps away the past and anything else that gets in its way.

Read "The Great Bonac Footrace of '83" by Francis Levy, The East Hampton Star

Empress Traveler

Inside Geneva's Large Hadron Collider

The micro and macro worlds are pleasant places for a vacation. If you're lucky, you may even achieve quantum entanglement with the body of your choice. Neither are a stone's throw from the visible universe with its joys and sorrow. Kepler planets which a spectral analyses reveal to evidence carbon  (a sign of life) are 1200 light years from earth. That's a 365x24x60x60x186,000 mile journey. Climb into your biosphere "Rollin' rollin' though the streams are swollen, keep them doggies rollin'" was the theme song of a 60s TV series, Rawhide. If you're a cow puncher, you're going to have to be patient. Crossing, The Milky Way, though it's only one galaxy, is no  mean feat. On the other end of the scale are the bosons which occasionally make guest appearance in the LHC. Everything must come to an end. When your two weeks of vacation are expended, you're back, a rat on a treadmill, going back and forth between equally elusive failures and successes which dominate your day.

Read "The Great Bonac Footrace of '83" by Francis Levy, The East Hampton Star

Hypergraphia

Jack Torrance's typewriter

Hypergraphia is the compulsion to write. One of the known antidotes is rejection, but it doesn't always work. Just as the body rejects transplanted organs, the area between the prefrontal cortex and the hippocampus, which regulates the balance between rational thinking and emotion, doesn't always produce a negative response intense enough to prevent the overly avid scribbler from inflicting his or her craft on the world. In fact the DSM-IV makes note of certain neurotransmitters which jump at the shock which may come from a seemingly innocuous phrase such as "we're going to pass on this one."

Read "The Great Bonac Footrace of '83" by Francis Levy, The East Hampton Star

Schrodinger's Cat

Schrodinger's cat?

Trump like Orpheus? After all his angry women tore him apart, was he able to sing? The president himself named the pathology affecting his critics, Deranged Trump Syndrome, but it actually derives from the fact that he doesn't stop talking. If you look at the history of MAGA starting when Kelly Anne Conway was Trumps's press secretary, you note that the Gatling Gun is the preferred mode of rhetoric. It's a steady ratatatat which brooks no interruptions. The object, of course, is to beat your opponent up with words. The president looks at debate as an MMA fight of the kind he staged on The White House lawn to celebrate the 250th anniversary of the country. Gaslighting, of course, is one of the figures of speech and it's actually similar to the quantum idea expressed in the parable of Schrodinger's Cat which can exist and not exist in its box, as long as it's not perceived.

Manifest Destiny

newspaper report of annexation of Hawaii in 1898

Manifest Destiny comprises the notion not only of eternal expansion, as we see in the eyes of the current ruler (once president) of the country,  but also of ultimate possibility. In this sense the current incarnation of the concept is a form of romanticism not entirely shy of fascism. the ultimate instantiation of this feeling is the simple Jimmy Cliff lyric "you can make it if you really try." Really? At one point every door must close. Kafka's "Before the Law" is a wonderful embodiment of the reality which underlies all endeavor, and also the delusion of breadth within the relatively narrow window one terms "life."