What is a Dickhead?

 illustration by Henry Vandyke Carter

A pothead is someone who smokes lots of weed. A Deadhead is a someone who likes the Grateful Dead, who listens to their recordings, attends their concerts and was infatuated with Jerry Garcia when he was alive. The thing that potheads and Deadheads have in common is an addiction to mind altering forms of substances (if we look at music as having the same properties that drugs do with regard to consciousness). A Dickhead similarly gets off on works like Minority Report and The Man in the High Castle written by the science fiction master, Philip K. Dick. Of course a dickhead is also a person who is a dunce, a person who just doesn’t get it. Dickheads are unavoidable. They’re the people you can’t get through to, no matter how hard you try. If you are an Enlightenment rationalist, a follower of Voltaire, Locke or Hume, you’ll be especially confounded by dickheads, who demonstrate the limits of human reason. A dickhead can also be a person who’s actually malevolent. Such a person possesses ratiocinative abilities which they choose not to employ for opportunistic and often expeditious reasons. They know exactly what you’re saying, but they play dumb because they don’t want to listen to reason. A dickhead is someone, for example, for whom the ends justify the means. When it’s pointed out to a dickhead that the American judicial system depends on due process and individual rights such a dickhead will simply give one of those chuckles which is supposed to indicate we’re all in agreement about the real truth— which is that none of these things, which are ultimately the groundwork upon which democracy is based, really matter.

The Clash of Civilizations

What if you woke up to find that the pieces on the chess board had changed and there were no more pawns which moved one or two spaces ahead, no castles moving perpendicular to each other or knights with their L-shaped choreography. “The only constant is change,” goes the old saw, but the politics of the Middle East and by proxy the rest of the world is going through a cataclysmic shift equivalent to those periods of history like the fall of the Roman Empire and the Rise of the Ottomans or the fall of Czarist Russia and the rise of the Communist bloc. Of course at the end of the Hegelian dialectical day, the geography of Europe and the Middle East is the beneficiary of these earlier historical watersheds. Nothing is what it seems to be. Isis was once an Egyptian God. British archeological thrillers of the 30’s are filled with neocolonialists whose excavations ignite her rage. You remember the OxBridgian explorers in their safari hats prospecting among the tombs of Egyptian royalty with their pipes and copies of The Golden Bough and uttering “I say there old chap,” as sarcophagi come to life. Now ISIS represents an Islamic State that threatens to swallow up Syria and Iraq, not to speak of Libya and those parts of Yemen, the Sudan and Nigeria which are its potential clients. By employing the example of the Crusades, President Obama attempted to show that the current generation of Jihadists have no monopoly on terror and violence. Tomas de Torquemada was the model for Dostoevsky’s Grand Inquisitor. But how will the world look when the dust has finally settled? Will Iranian Shiites attempt to wrest the torch from the hands of their Sunni counterparts, as Netanyahu prophesied in his recent speech before congress? Will the Muslim world continue to be divided or will the vision of pan-Islamism put forth by millenarian thinkers like Sayyid Qutb produce an even more frightening juggernaut. In The Man in the High Castle Philip K. Dick imagined the axis powers in control of the United States. Perhaps only a science fiction writer like Dick could foresee the realignments that will result from our current geopolitics. Democracy and liberty were products of the mercantilism of 17^th Europe. But we now seem to be living in age of extremism, in which technology itself doesn’t provide the leveling anodyne to ideology (that proto-capitalism did in earlier age). The late Samuel P. Huntington wrote a book entitled The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order which might turn out to be prescient. Visions of utopia whose pay off may occur in the after life are a tough nut to crack.

And the First Shall Be Last

Augustus John

Think about all auspicious personalities whose last names are typical first names. At the top of the list you have Anne Frank and Pope Francis. But there are also Dick Francis and  Philip K Dick, Rand Paul and Ru (ok Paul is really part of his first name, but why miss a beat), Phyllis George, John Irving and Deborah Harry. Anthony Lewis was a distinguished journalist and Susan B. Anthony a famed social reformer. And what more classic case of the carriage preceding the horse than David (Jacques-Louis), the pre-eminent l9th century painter. Jacob Joseph was a l9th century rabbi after whom an Orthodox Jewish school was named and don’t forget the comedian Larry David who created Curb Your Enthusiasm, a title that will resonate with anhedonics for eternity. Do you remember the sixties soul singer Joe Tex? He performed magic with microphones which he turned into pendulums and can we not say that Ben is Big Ben’s last name?  It’s rare that you have a person who has the same first and last name. It would be unlikely that Irving was one of the names on the list of possibilities that John Irving’s parents came up with before they finally settled on John and in spite of Nabokov’s Humbert Humbert it is also unlikely that any parent would be gauche enough to name their male offspring Dick Dick. You don’t want to bring a child in the world who is going to live up to his name and behave like a Dick, no matter how much you might like the name. Augustus John was a famous Welsh painter, but there was no chance his parents would have named him John. Among other problems it wouldn’t have been august enough. Washington Irving could easily have been Washington George if his parents had changed their last name to another common first name, George. And the father of our country could easily have been Washington Irving if George Washington’s parents had liked idea of retaining their surname as a first name and decided to make the common first name Irving, their last.

The Mexicanadian Threat

European and Middle Eastern countries are often bounded by hostile neighbors. The Battle of Britain was a turning point in the Second World War. Yet if the English had lost the Germans still would have had to cross the Atlantic to invade the United States. Philip K. Dick’s The Man in the High Castle imagines the colonization of America by the Axis powers. In Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America, it’s a homegrown fascist backlash that makes the country vulnerable. But before we feel a smug superiority to the geographic turmoil abroad, we should be aware of the threat of invasion from the South or the North, from Mexico or Canada, who someday may turn into the equivalent of the Axis powers. While the landmass of Mexico or Canada might not rival Russia, China or even India, they are both greater than Japan, Italy and Germany, our enemies during the second world war. Why are we being complacent? Why are we not arming ourselves against an invasion, particularly by the Canadians? Back in the 50’s there was a popular television series called Sergeant Preston of the Yukon. The series was a thinly veiled manifesto of Canadian superiority. Remember Canada boasts Alice Munro one of the greatest short story writers in the world and lest we forget Dan Aykroyd emanated from Canada. The Canadians will start by taking over organs of culture like The New Yorker, where many of Munro’s stories have appeared, and SNL which Aykroyd once dominated and before long their will be mounties and dogsleds lined up along our borders. It might seem like an unholy alliance but who is to say that one day Canadian short story writers and humorists won’t join forces with the followers of Mexican culture heroes like Carlos Fuentes and Octavio Paz. In a deadly pincer movement Canadians and the Mexicans will place their puppets in The White House.

How To Build An Android

Eric Matthews

David F. Duffy’s How To Build An Android sounds like a book one would want to read, despite a lukewarm review of the writer’s prose in the Lawrence Downes review that appeared in The New York Times Book Review (“Talking Head,” NYT, 6/22/12) “It explains how a team of researchers at the University of Memphis collaborated in 2005 with an artist and robotics expert, David Hanson, to create what was then the most sophisticated android anywhere, a replica of the science-fiction writer Philip K. Dick. They called him Phil." “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sleep” is, of course the title of a famous Dick short story. But it’s as if Dick actually came back to life and scripted the event itself, if Downes review is an reflection on the story Duffy tells. Apparently, Phil, who was made from a “polymer called Frubber” and was capable both of “making faces” and meeting "a visitor’s gaze,” was “left…in a carry-on bag in the overhead bin” on a flight “from Dallas to San Francisco” when “Hanson changed planes in Las Vegas.” So there are two elements of great interest: the disappearance of the head and its inception. How To Build An Android would definitely be a good title for the fiction, if the author of the non-fiction book doesn’t object. The details would suggest one of Dick’s most advanced stories and a story which has no end. The head which was so over programmed that it couldn’t be shut up, was never found. Could it have engineered it’s own escape and then constructed its own equivalent of a witness protection program, where it furnished itself with a new identity? Remember an android doesn’t require much in the way of TLC and it certainly doesn’t require food, water or sex. Perhaps Phil made himself at home in the fun house of a carnival where he now reenacts Linda Blair’s 360 from The Exorcist, to the screams of terrified teenagers.

Xuetong's Prince

Yan Xuetong, a professor of political science at Tsinghua University recently wrote an Op Ed piece in The Times entitled “How China Can Defeat America." Mr. Xuetong is also the author of a book entitled Ancient Chinese Thought, Modern Chinese Power. One can be sure his Op Ed piece was studied by our own intelligence services as Mr. Xuetong is uniquely qualified to talk about power in a mysterious country that maintains two parallel systems: one a competitive market economy and the other a dictatorship of the proletariat as represented by the continued importance of the Communist Party. Xuetong begins his piece by saying that though he is often considered a hawk, he is "a political realist." He goes on to point out that “realism does not mean that politicians should be concerned only with military and economic might.” Xuetong cites “the ancient Chinese philosopher Xunzi" who described “three types of leadership: humane authority, hegemony and tyranny.” Essentially Mr. Xuetong has written a 21st Century version of Machiavelli’s The Prince that is a benign prescription for Chinese dominance. “Humane authority,” Mr. Xuetong avers, “begins by creating a desirable model at home that inspires people abroad.” He goes on to conclude, “thus the core of the competition between China and the United States will be to see who has more high-quality friends. And in order to achieve that goal, China has to provide higher-quality moral leadership than the United States.” In The Man in the High Castle Philip K. Dick imagines a parallel universe where Japan (along with is fascist allies) wins the Second World War. The implication of the book is that Japan wins by military might. How would Dick describe the triumph that Xuetong envisions? How would the economic juggernaut that is modern China assert its moral superiority? Confucius say, country with population well over billion have many mouths to feed.