Holy or Holey?

“The Conversion of St. Augustine” by Fra Angelico

Merriam-Webster defines holy, as “set apart for the service of God or of a divine being: sacred.” On the other hand, holey is defined simply as “having holes.” The words are what is known as homonyms to the extent that they sound alike but have radically different meanings. But there is one school of thought that hones to the idea "if it quacks like a duck it’s a duck." A tear which is a break doesn’t sound like a tear which is the fluid that drips out of the eye when someone is crying. However, soul and sole sound alike and as everyone knows have much in common to the extent that the sole of the foot or shoe is what one employs in the course of the kind of  journey that nurtures the soul. The fact that holy and holey sound so much alike begs the question of their similarity since the holy man or woman is one who has a hole in the sole of his shoe to the extent that he or she in all likelihood has taken a vow of poverty. The holy man or woman may also have a hole in their soul which eventually turns them into a person who is more enlightened. This was true of great sinners like Augustine. "Religion is for those who're afraid of going to hell, spiritualism for those who have already been there,” goes the old saw. There are lots of righteous people who follow the tenets of religion, but the truly spiritual person is one whose holes, frailties or failings have caused him to undertake a journey or reckoning or to make a confession in which he or she's forced to reach out for help from God.

Celebrity Apprentice

Is a person whose behavior's above reproach engaging in a clandestine form of mudslinging? If there is no spiritual summit that is reached by any human, can we agree with Ruben Rufino Dri, an emeritus professor of the sociology of religion at the University of Buenos Aires who regarded Pope Francis' actions as just one more example of power politics. In an article entitled, “A Humble Pope, Challenging the World,” 9/18/15), the Times quoted Dri thusly, “Francis is a great showman. His repositioning of the church is paternalistic. It is not a strategy for empowering its followers. This is by no means a revolution.” It’s easy to compare the culture of backstabbing amongst say Republican presidential candidates invidiously to the behavior of a pope who talks continually of peace and reconciliation.  But don’t all roads, in the end, lead to Mecca? Is Pope Francis' behavior really just a different means to a similar end, ie prosperity and peace? And is there not something suspicious about it in that it conceals an even darker objective which is the perpetuation and even growth of the power of the Catholic Church? The Vatican might be a country, but it has previously wielded relatively little influence on the world stage. Almost singlehandedly Pope Francis has made himself into a major player in international politics. Everyone, it seems, wants to talk to the Pope. The dirtiest and most underhanded thing Donald Trump could do is not to continue to criticize Carly Fiorina’s face, it would be to transform himself into a figure of peace and humility. With a little tutelage under Pope Francis, Donald Trump could amass the kind of power that would really make him a threat to both fellow Republican contenders and Democrats. Imagine Donald Trump as the Pope’s Celebrity Apprentice.

Liking Facebook

In a story entitled  “Coming Soon to Facebook: A ‘Dislike’ Button," (NYT, 9/15/15), Mark Zuckerberg is quoted thusly, “Not every moment is a good moment, and if you are sharing something that is sad, whether it’s something in current events, like the refugees crisis that touches you, or if a family member passed away, then it may not feel comfortable to like that post. So I do think it’s important to give people more options than just like.” But what will these be. Of course the obvious default mode to like, as the Times headline indicates, would be dislike. However, that doesn’t adequately address the palette of human emotions which is supposedly Facebook’s currency. Why not offer three categories in descending order: love, like, hate. It’s similar to what Hamlet says about Claudius,  “a little more than kin and less than kind”-- as love is more than like and hate is the opposite of love. Here also you're offering Facebook users a chance to avoid equivocating and play upon their passions. Like is really a namby-pamby word. It’s so easy to hit the “like" button but much harder to love or hate unless you're a liar. Of course you can always make a negative comment about a post, but how about making it easy to show revulsion? Similarly people often wax enthusiastically in response to pictures of children and pets, but such responses take, time and energy. Love can be exhausting. Here you see someone’s favorite dog and you can instantaneously embrace the creature with  “love." And there are people like Donald Trump who elicit basically love/hate reactions. You don’t “like” something Donald Trump says. You either love it or hate it. In introducing two more passionate options, Facebook would be diminishing the importance of that mealy mouthed middleman, “like.” And isn’t it true that even if you don’t like someone, you may deeply love them.

Disintermediation

Merriam Webster defines disintermediation as “the elimination of an intermediary in a transaction between two parties.”  Disintermediation which can be used to describe the kind of shakeups that perhaps are occurring in the television industry where many of the most popular series are streamed as well as produced by Netflicks rather than appearing on traditional cable channels like HBO. It’s really a latter day form of Joseph Schumpeter’s “creative destruction,” which is itself a kind of Spencerian social Darwinism, where unplanned obsolescence actually becomes a catalyst to innovation. Disintermediation is the kind of auspicious sounding word that you might hear bandied about in an august setting like the recent John Singer Sargent show at the Met, which is precisely where our friend the real estate developer David Fox first brought it to our attention while talking about a Harvard professor named Clayton M. Christensen. Christensen is the author of a business classic called The Innovator’s Dilemma which deals with “disruptive technology." When you take the word disintermediation apart it sounds simply like removing the middle man, but in order to do so, a multitude of marketplace innovations need to take place; capitalist competition forces a number of hands, eventually resulting in a change in the number and nature of fruit stands that populate the agora. Simplicity is really the name of the game and it would be wonderful if the disintermediative impulse were applied to the stock market where complex derivatives like the nefarious credit default swaps and collateralized debt obligations of the financial crisis, financial instruments which exist for their own sake without any basis in production and consumption, have caused debacles like the infamous London Whale. Disintermediation is already occurring in a number of drug and supermarket chains where electronic scanning has replaced the usual wait on the checkout line. But it would be welcome in some other areas. How would disintermediation work in terms of our justice system where those who can’t post bail face inordinately long jail time before their case comes to trial—something whose  economic cost to society is only overshadowed by the emotional damage it reeks on those innocent prisoners who can wait inordinate amounts of time for their cases to come to trial. Arranged marriages and matchmakers are anachronisms, but disintermediation in the marketplace of love might actually be facilitated by the decline of social networking and in particular dating apps which have so greatly increased the choice of mates that it’s become increasingly difficult to make any decisions at all. And finally disintermediation needs to become a part of our voting system, where a simple count of the number of votes for or against a candidate will prevent what happened in the Gore /Bush contest of 2000—where the electoral college prevailed over the actual majority vote changing history in ways which we are still paying for today.

Homeless or Estranged ? II

Drawing of Dickens’ Uriah Heep by Fred Barnard

You’ve seen him on the N or the R, thin with jaundiced skin and cropped gray hair. He humbly apologizes for interrupting but he hasn’t eaten for two day and has prostate cancer too. He offers his services, as a Mr. Fix-it, though he doesn’t look in any condition to fix anything. When no one responds he says now that I’ve helped you, I’m asking you to help me. He asks for food or spare change and still no one responds. He’s actually playing Uriah Heep, but when no one appreciates his umbility, he drops the guise. He faces the lot of every premeditated extemporizer and standup comedian. Improvisation can fall flat, especially when it’s rehearsed too many times and when decibel level replaces true spontaneity. Perhaps they're not hearing me, he must be thinking since he now starts to interrupt a pair of woman who are deep in conversation, the guy whose head is hidden in his Times and a young girl plugged into her headset. Your heart might have gone out to him, if he weren’t so threatening and insistent. You identify because you've overstayed your welcome or written that e mail to someone who hadn’t responded to your query. Under the guise of getting a fair shake, you’ve become a stalker and you know what it’s like to find your spiel fall flat. You know how it is when the audience, whose favor you want to curry, walks out on you in the middle of your speech. However, it’s particularly hard to harangue strangers for food and money and he looks disconsolate and beaten as he walks out of the car at the next stop, totally unrewarded for his effort. You watch him entering the next car with his plastic bag of belongings in his hand. The curtain is about to go up; the spotlight (in this case the fluorescent light of an MTA train) is turned on the figure at the mic, as he shores up his courage and prepares for the next act.