Monday Morning Live

CNN reported on a telekinesis stunt engineered by he producers of the new version of Carrie. A young girl goes berserk in a coffee shop. "Up against the wall motherfucker" is a good expression for the powers she unleashes. It’s Candid Camera and Orson Welles’s War of the Worlds, a put on which caused mass panic, rolled into one--since the customers have not been forewarned that the girl and her victim are both actors. A similar stunt, this time taking place in a beauty shop, was engineered by the producers of the television remake of the The Exorcist. CNN then went on to document a spate of other videos used to create buzz, including one in which a murder is taking place in an elevator, with bystanders looking on in disbelief. What does the average person do when confronted by a murderer or someone with telekinetic powers? The answer is that they usually freeze up. The videos are hysterical, but they replay the sad story of our contemporary world in which outrageous atrocities occur and the crowd simply gawks, grows paralyzed or simply walks away. The mock elevator murder was particularly unsettling since it brought back Kitty Genovese, the young Queens woman who was stabbed to death back in l964 and whose screams for help were met with inaction. After the humor of these staged events has past, we are reminded that  paranormal happenings are a good description of what is going on in Syria, in Egypt, in Somalia, in North Korea—to name just a few examples of very public bludgeonings from which the rest of the world often turns its head.

Will Ed Snowden Use Liberty Travel?

Taking the cue from Vladimir Putin who has said that “As a transit passenger, he (Ed Snowden) has the right to buy a ticket and fly wherever he wants,” (“Vladimir Putin: Edward Snowden Still in Moscow Airport Transit Zone, Won’t Be Extradited,” The Huffington Post, 6/25/13) apocryphal travel agents with suspiciously suggestive names are vying to work on his itinerary. The American chain Liberty Travel may not have yet gotten into the fray, but amongst the contenders are such mythological giants as Fugitive Travel, Lost Continent, Trudge the Path of Happy Destiny, Witness Protection Tours, Vanishing Point and New Horizon Line Travel. Whether some of these fictitious agencies will be contacting Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic remains to be seen, as it’s unclear whether Mr. Putin’s statement about Ed Snowden being free to go where he wants applies to outer space. For instance, if Snowden were to be landed on the moon, could he still be extradited by United States authorities (ditto the International Space station or comets which may be approaching the orbit of the earth). Some other potential destinations that fictitious travel agents might be considering include Waziristan (the mountainous region of Pakistan favored by the Taliban), Somalia (home of the sea piracy industry) and Pyongyang, which are all considered extradition proof by most experts in the field. One of the nicest properties that is also on the list is the peak of Mount Everest, from which no fugitives have ever been known to be extradited—though as a vacation property its magnificent views are often obscured by inclement weather. Meanwhile, further questions have been asked about whether Snowden will be able to transfer U.S. course credits to universities in countries where he might be offered asylum. For instance if he had ever taken an introductory course in Public Speaking at an American or European University would he get course credit in Havana or Quito?

The Naked Ape

“Analysis of Neanderthal Genome Points to Interbreeding With Modern Humans” was the headline of a recent Times piece (5/7/10). In philosophy, a tautology is a phrase like “the red dress is red.” Isn’t the above headline a tautology? Was it it really necessary to fund this research? Should scientists set out to prove the oft-stated proposition, “men are dogs”? It seems obvious that at some point in evolution a Pegasus-type situation occurred, in which either a man accidentally impregnated a dog or a dog impregnated a woman. Cross speciation is not common, but it’s been known to occur, and this anomaly turned out to be naturally selective. In American law we are deemed innocent until proven guilty, but the Napoleonic code is just the opposite. Taking the a posteriori evidence of experience in both our own backyards and in such far-flung places as Bosnia, Chechnya, Somalia, Burma and Rwanda, we would have to conclude, employing the Napoleonic code, that man is guilty of being more beast than human. The cerebral cortex is a wonderful device which in fact enables us to think about the structures of our own brain and about questions like whether we exist or not, along with right and left matters, like ratiocination versus intuition. But far too much has been made of this development in brain structure. What seems to be causing much of our current suffering are expectations. We expect our fellows to act like men, while more often than not they behave like beasts, as Desmond Morris pointed out in his classic tome, The Naked Ape. Men have brains enough to argue about the nature of the self, as Locke and Hobbes started to do during the Enlightenment when Hobbes, perceiving the untamed side of human nature, proposed checks and balances to deal with animal appetite. But thinking is delusive. Cogito ergo sum. However, cogito doesn’t release us from the desire to hump thy neighbor’s wife.