I'm a serious fellow. I've been told more than once in my life that I think too much, and probably have merited that assessment on a number of occasions. Being a person who can't help it, though, I do have the added benefit of knowing the limits of ivory tower logic, limits learned through hard-won experience.
There are benefits to being serious, to trying to reduce things in life to singular causes. If that weren't the case, our society wouldn't be what it is today, with our highly refined, well developed technology. With that in mind, even scientists are finding that some systems cannot be well understood from their component's characteristics alone. We call those kinds of systems, which are quite common in the real world emergent.
Trouble is, much of our philosophy and our attitudes are shaped by those centuries of time in which our culture alternated between romantic irreducibility, and pragmatic reductionism- people either believe that the world was a big mystery which the logic mavens did not understand half as much as they liked to believe, and those who believed the Romantics overlooked much of the undergirding order of the world. The cliche of both being right and both being wrong applies here.
It's not a very meaningful way of approaching things, on either end or in the middle. Additionally, neither side really has an approach that takes advantage of the way things really work. Of course, you could say each side must necessarily be an abstraction of the way people really work, and I guess you could say that is true. Unfortunately, in times of stress, people can sometimes run home to their philosophical momma, and start applying their perspective on the world with a vengeance.
America prospers, I think, in large part because it doesn't allow one way of thinking to exclusively rule the roost. From individual freedom emerges a robust discourse, with redundant backups, if you will, ready to take over when the former majority opinion loses favor. Some, though, react to that prospect with fear, and so try and push their ideas relentlessly.
We see such a situation in politics today, but not just there. We see it in the arts, particularly in the movie business. We see it in business culture, and even in religion. We see people who believe that they can reduce the good conduct of all these things to a list of rules, or at the very least a philosophical system.
Folks try to apply scientific methods (scientific in that they draw a conclusion by scholarly and/or systematic methods) to enterprises that are quite human in character. It can work to a certain extent, but only to the extent that people are willing to be skeptical about their own conclusions and how they came to them.
In trying to unravel the character of the world we live in and the things in it, we must recognize that we human beings can imagine the counterfactual quite easily. We must also recognize that in dealing with our fellow human beings, there are some facts which cannot be freed from subjective perspective, but which nonetheless have as great if not greater influence on the way things work than the cold, hard facts themselves.
We're flawed creatures, who can misjudge the world around us. This is why we have to keep both our eyes and our minds open as we try to establish the character of the world around us. This is also why we must do this on a permanent basis.
Only when we allow ourselves an awareness of how fragile our hold on reality truly is do we appreciate what an intellectual sin it is to have no room for error or different opinion in our plans. We need our discourse to be more fluid. Critics of what I say here may point out that not all new or different ideas have equal quality. This is, in many ways, all too true- in fact, that sensibility informs my argument here. What must be understood, though, is that the approach I suggest is all-inclusive in its skepticism. Both new ideas and old can be and often are wrong, in part or in the majority.
In fact, if you take a long enough view, all our ideas are wrong, illusions that cause us to stray from appropriate action. You could in fact call this original sin, if you are religiously inclined, though you could also call it human fallibility if such a morally drenched term seems over the top. Either way, like a ship on the sea, there is the course we intend to take, and the direction our vehicle of thought takes on the seas of reality. It is important, every now and then, as a sailor might do on a long voyage, for us to gauge where we really are, where we're really going, and what conditions our journey is taking us into.
Which brings me to this point, and the reason I portray the necessary course of action as neverending: As with sailing, a course correction cannot erase the path the vessel has taken to that point, nor make the current position a different one in the blink of an eye. It can only serve to reorient ourselves towards the right course for the destination we seek.
The relief from the consequences of the errors we make, to the extent that we can have it, is dependent on the quality of our next assessment of the situation. We can get that wrong, and remain off course. Or, more worryingly, a change in the weather or in the certain conditions along the leg of a journey could invalidate the course we are on, forcing us to reconsider what if any path could bring us to our goal- that or dare the approach anyways, our pride justly or unjustly refusing to buckle against the obstacle.
Regardless of all that, finding the right course to take, maintaining it, and deciding whether to keep to it or abandon it, is a dynamic process, especially if we put a premium on getting things done right. The corrupt, the lazy, and the unmotivated find no reason to make a friend of change. To those who wish to get things accomplished, to fulfill the noble impulses, and to keep a system pure, change (or at least it's potential) is their best ally.
Change, though, is not achieved all at once, nor are our current means of bringing it about always the best. If this sounds like it complicates things, it does, but these are complexities that were there to start, like a car engine is under the hood. The exterior may allow us the illusion that the car is a simple, unified entity, but that doesn't change what we find beyond the chrome. What we are rendering more complex is our appreciation.
But the complexity does carry with it costs of mental overhead. We get into what Jack Cohen and Ian Stewart call Ant Country, where a reductionist approach leads us to bewildering uncertainty as to how to manage things. The fearful approach to Ant Country is part of what motivates people to react and move towards romanticism and it's philosophical relatives.
This brings us back to a quality that we've long neglected: judgment. Critical thinking, rather than just procedural. It's easy once we've fallen into our mental arrogance to head in this direction- after all, if you've figured it out, why bother wasting the effort to refigure things? But since our notion of things is often imperfect, it's necessary and advantageous for us to peer past the veil of ignorance that surrounds us and reassess things. What brings many to fear this is the requirement that one exercise personal, subjective judgment. It becomes a practical moral act, rather than the inevitable result of a process that can't be wrong as long as you follow it.
The trouble is, conditions can and often do change in the world, and many of the systems that we attempt to address with these approaches are both dynamic and emergent in their character. Even if such process works once, it doesn't necessarily follow that such processes will remain a way to do the right thing. The process can become not unlike the food pellet system in a lab rat's cage, rewarding folks for doing things a certain way arbitrary of true utility of their actions. This is the hidden trap of the market, of any political party, of any means of managing people that does not reward open eyes open minds, and a sustained involvement with the going-ons of the world.
We have to be willing to risk being wrong to do things right, and having taken that risk, we must face up to the consequences of our actions with integrity, courage, and humility. To wall ourselves off in process and argument will not preserve us from error, it will only serve to sustain us in it.
Friday, March 10, 2006
Sunday, January 22, 2006
Let's shed a little light on my extracurricular activities.
In the midst of all pontificating about politics and philosophy, it's understandably difficult to think of me for what I was trained at college to do: Make movies. Video. Digital Photograph, and as the character of that Image above demonstrates, Digital modelling and animation.
I will take some steps, at this point, to remedy this from time to time, now that I've found the means to do so. I hope this will serve two functions: give me an audience for my work, and give you an additional layer of meaning and enjoyment as a reader of this blog.
Wednesday, January 11, 2006
Opening Up to Our Non-Ideal Past and Present
We would like to think our ancestors were fair-minded, and harbored none of the out of favor biases of our age. That is the bias of our age. I believe our modern rejection of many of the sins of the past- racism, sexism, etc- are justifiable and noble in spirit, but they cannot change the fact that they were evolutions in thought from mindsets that were not free of these prejudices.
The tendency among some educators is to try and smooth these things over, conceal the extent to which western culture and our nation in particular once had these qualities. Frankly, I think that's a mistake.
This is especially true when dealing with the books of the past. Some folks commenting on The Chronicles of Narnia noted the sexism and the occasional racism dealing with the Arab/Muslim analogues known as the Calormenes, and held it rather harshly to task.
Were this a modern book, I could see where the criticism would be just. This is The Chronicles of Narnia, though, and it is representative of its times, not ours. It is the product of Mid-20th Century England, and all the attendant prejudices and values. Not all of these beliefs are alien to our own, but quite a few are guaranteed to be, because of the source of this work.
It's important that we recognize two things:
1)the intentions of authors in the past were like ours: good bad and indifferent.
and
2)That we ourselves are not perfect.
Our values didn't spring from nowhere. They are the result of how people thought and lived before us. We have the tendency as human beings to view the past through the lense of the present sometimes, and that is to some extent unavoidable. That said, we can be conscious of this tendency and take a compensatory approach in our analysis, or we can leave the numerous errors in that, and suffer the consequences of having such a distorted picture of things.
One such consequence is that we do not recognize these prejudices in ourselves. We assume the irrationality of racism, and forget that there are often very rational ways of justifying the bigoted and the unfair, traps for the unwary thinker. We ourselves probably hold such prejudices without even realizing it. Another consequence is that we will often shape our attitudes toward such groups in ways that allow us to believe that we are without blemish, but which nonetheless allow some form of uninformed belief through. Witness the blandly uncritical way some multiculturalist have of examining foreign societies, neglecting their darker sides, even while their opponents focus on nothing else.
The important thing to learn here is critical thought, and an appreciation for not just truth about how things are, but also about other's viewpoints. In trying to push toward a better and more just society, it is insufficient to understand one's own viewpoint alone. We need to understand what we we are persuading people from, as well as to. The thing is, it is difficult enough to understand other folk's points of view, if we fail to withold judgment until we understand their thinking in their own terms.
The tendency among some educators is to try and smooth these things over, conceal the extent to which western culture and our nation in particular once had these qualities. Frankly, I think that's a mistake.
This is especially true when dealing with the books of the past. Some folks commenting on The Chronicles of Narnia noted the sexism and the occasional racism dealing with the Arab/Muslim analogues known as the Calormenes, and held it rather harshly to task.
Were this a modern book, I could see where the criticism would be just. This is The Chronicles of Narnia, though, and it is representative of its times, not ours. It is the product of Mid-20th Century England, and all the attendant prejudices and values. Not all of these beliefs are alien to our own, but quite a few are guaranteed to be, because of the source of this work.
It's important that we recognize two things:
1)the intentions of authors in the past were like ours: good bad and indifferent.
and
2)That we ourselves are not perfect.
Our values didn't spring from nowhere. They are the result of how people thought and lived before us. We have the tendency as human beings to view the past through the lense of the present sometimes, and that is to some extent unavoidable. That said, we can be conscious of this tendency and take a compensatory approach in our analysis, or we can leave the numerous errors in that, and suffer the consequences of having such a distorted picture of things.
One such consequence is that we do not recognize these prejudices in ourselves. We assume the irrationality of racism, and forget that there are often very rational ways of justifying the bigoted and the unfair, traps for the unwary thinker. We ourselves probably hold such prejudices without even realizing it. Another consequence is that we will often shape our attitudes toward such groups in ways that allow us to believe that we are without blemish, but which nonetheless allow some form of uninformed belief through. Witness the blandly uncritical way some multiculturalist have of examining foreign societies, neglecting their darker sides, even while their opponents focus on nothing else.
The important thing to learn here is critical thought, and an appreciation for not just truth about how things are, but also about other's viewpoints. In trying to push toward a better and more just society, it is insufficient to understand one's own viewpoint alone. We need to understand what we we are persuading people from, as well as to. The thing is, it is difficult enough to understand other folk's points of view, if we fail to withold judgment until we understand their thinking in their own terms.
Friday, January 06, 2006
Christ in a Free Speech Society
Every few months or years, we hear about one program or another that's run afoul of the self-appointed Guardians of Christian Decency. Another news program runs with a story of how us nice Christians are pouring a nice warm glass of vitriol down the backs of yet another liberal/secular/atheist filmmaker. Another station cuts off an unwanted show unseen. Another movie gets picketed because it's content is offensive, sacreligious, or whatever else.
And what do we gain? A reputation as being stiflers of culture, backwards mouth-breathers whose anti-elitist sentiments drive us to tear down other in our intolerance. Worse yet, there's another unintentional effect. strong, or even casual religious expression in movies becomes radioactive, as both sides threaten filmmakers with boycotts and picketting for daring to put something more than lukewarm spirituality on.
In a way, we Christians are somewhat responsible for the lack of Christian content and religious values on the air. We simply make it not worth the trouble for people to get their hands dirty with it. Yet one movie after another successfully plays on themes present in religious material, and evokes spiritual sensibilities during their run times. What's going on? There's obviously a market for transcendance, for religious experience in the cinema and on television.
The thing is, though, we're not providing nearly enough of it. Typically, we're either getting ham-handed with it, making hysterically bad or mundane films. The real values of Christianity are not being presented in the dramatic fashion that values of character and philosophy are on a regular basis. Secular values, being more universal, and unradioactive enough to be regularly pondered upon, are presented with both greater grace and greater saturation. Artists and thinkers are encouraged among the more secular to think for themselves, to take exciting new directions. These are the things any culture should do, if they wish for it to remain alive in people's hearts and minds.
The solution of some folks is to surpress the offensive, but that not only carries with it the negative connotations, that encourages groupthink and stagnation, as people rest on their assumptions. For values-based thought to come back to the fore, it has to be more than a spirit of weak, didactic, message-sending. It has to be a full fledged dive into the problems and concerns from which our cultural responses emerge.
But to do that, we have to give people the freedom to mess up, and to say things we don't want them to say. We have to give the broadcasters and moviemakers the freedom from controversy that would encourage them to treat your average piece of cinematic religion as no big deal.
There are some who would worry that such an approach would encourage antagonistic messages. It could indeed, but that's the price of carrying messages that are antagonistic to other folk's beliefs. This has always been a matter of competition between different ideas, different views, and not usually in the neat sort of camp vs. camp fashion. The charisma of the different works is what carries them forward. Because of the vibrant cultural melieu that constitutes secular society in America, they are more free to experiment, to dare, to be visionaries. They can present movies to people that have power, narrative drive, which ask questions, and reveal new corners of humanity. Some may look at that and resent it, claiming that it represents an ominous temptation to the unwary. Whatever it is, though, we would be well advised to confront it with something else than just scorn. We need to confront it with a new culture of ideas and charismatic artistry of our own.
Otherwise, we have no excuse to talk about the direction our culture is taking, since we won't be doing enough to truly take it in another direction.
And what do we gain? A reputation as being stiflers of culture, backwards mouth-breathers whose anti-elitist sentiments drive us to tear down other in our intolerance. Worse yet, there's another unintentional effect. strong, or even casual religious expression in movies becomes radioactive, as both sides threaten filmmakers with boycotts and picketting for daring to put something more than lukewarm spirituality on.
In a way, we Christians are somewhat responsible for the lack of Christian content and religious values on the air. We simply make it not worth the trouble for people to get their hands dirty with it. Yet one movie after another successfully plays on themes present in religious material, and evokes spiritual sensibilities during their run times. What's going on? There's obviously a market for transcendance, for religious experience in the cinema and on television.
The thing is, though, we're not providing nearly enough of it. Typically, we're either getting ham-handed with it, making hysterically bad or mundane films. The real values of Christianity are not being presented in the dramatic fashion that values of character and philosophy are on a regular basis. Secular values, being more universal, and unradioactive enough to be regularly pondered upon, are presented with both greater grace and greater saturation. Artists and thinkers are encouraged among the more secular to think for themselves, to take exciting new directions. These are the things any culture should do, if they wish for it to remain alive in people's hearts and minds.
The solution of some folks is to surpress the offensive, but that not only carries with it the negative connotations, that encourages groupthink and stagnation, as people rest on their assumptions. For values-based thought to come back to the fore, it has to be more than a spirit of weak, didactic, message-sending. It has to be a full fledged dive into the problems and concerns from which our cultural responses emerge.
But to do that, we have to give people the freedom to mess up, and to say things we don't want them to say. We have to give the broadcasters and moviemakers the freedom from controversy that would encourage them to treat your average piece of cinematic religion as no big deal.
There are some who would worry that such an approach would encourage antagonistic messages. It could indeed, but that's the price of carrying messages that are antagonistic to other folk's beliefs. This has always been a matter of competition between different ideas, different views, and not usually in the neat sort of camp vs. camp fashion. The charisma of the different works is what carries them forward. Because of the vibrant cultural melieu that constitutes secular society in America, they are more free to experiment, to dare, to be visionaries. They can present movies to people that have power, narrative drive, which ask questions, and reveal new corners of humanity. Some may look at that and resent it, claiming that it represents an ominous temptation to the unwary. Whatever it is, though, we would be well advised to confront it with something else than just scorn. We need to confront it with a new culture of ideas and charismatic artistry of our own.
Otherwise, we have no excuse to talk about the direction our culture is taking, since we won't be doing enough to truly take it in another direction.
Friday, October 14, 2005
Planet Starbucks (or Stephen's Post about Naming Rights)
Fans of Fight Club will get the joke. For those who haven't seen it, the title relates to a passage where Edward Norton's unnamed narrator reflects on who will get the naming rights to the various places we will explore in space. The joke hits pretty close to home nowadays.
Virtually every sports arena you hear about nowadays has some corporations name attached to it. Every event has some company's name attached to it. We in Houston have Reliant Stadium, Reliant Astrodome, the Toyota Center (formerly Compaq Center) Minute Maid Park (formerly Enron Field, for reasons we're all aware of.).
I'm sure y'all folks have your own local example. They call it selling the naming rights. Yeck. I agree with capitalism, to be sure, and look forward to making plenty of money in the future, but when do we get a break from Business?
I remember when the custom was to name places permanently after either people (safely dead, most of the time), or after nice sounding locations or concepts. Calling it the Astrodome was fine and dandy without a power company's name attached. Calling a place "The Summit" was an acceptable name. Even Minute Maid Park (formerly Enron Field) had a nice evocative name before the juice started flowing: Union Station. Doesn't that sound American to you? Doesn't that sound like the proper name of a ballpark?
I know it makes money for people to sell these things, but they're selling so much anyways. There are whole industries worth of profits one can make without having to be so crass as to use an establishment's name to sell corporate awareness.
In the old days, names were intended to have some power, some resonance for people. They weren't intended to merely function as somebody's marketing. They had weight and oomph; most importantly, they had identity. The Astrodome. Even without the corporate name added, it's a place, a known quantity, an almost living thing in people's memories.
I remember times when that is what identified a place. I'm no big sports fan, but I can recall names like Wrigley Field, Soldier Field, and Yankee Stadium right off the top of my head. I'm sure readers could provide more examples.
As a society, I think we need more breathing room, more space between us and the constant presence of the workplace in our lives. In short, I think people need to relearn the meaning of free time. Not everything has to serve somebody's profit.
Virtually every sports arena you hear about nowadays has some corporations name attached to it. Every event has some company's name attached to it. We in Houston have Reliant Stadium, Reliant Astrodome, the Toyota Center (formerly Compaq Center) Minute Maid Park (formerly Enron Field, for reasons we're all aware of.).
I'm sure y'all folks have your own local example. They call it selling the naming rights. Yeck. I agree with capitalism, to be sure, and look forward to making plenty of money in the future, but when do we get a break from Business?
I remember when the custom was to name places permanently after either people (safely dead, most of the time), or after nice sounding locations or concepts. Calling it the Astrodome was fine and dandy without a power company's name attached. Calling a place "The Summit" was an acceptable name. Even Minute Maid Park (formerly Enron Field) had a nice evocative name before the juice started flowing: Union Station. Doesn't that sound American to you? Doesn't that sound like the proper name of a ballpark?
I know it makes money for people to sell these things, but they're selling so much anyways. There are whole industries worth of profits one can make without having to be so crass as to use an establishment's name to sell corporate awareness.
In the old days, names were intended to have some power, some resonance for people. They weren't intended to merely function as somebody's marketing. They had weight and oomph; most importantly, they had identity. The Astrodome. Even without the corporate name added, it's a place, a known quantity, an almost living thing in people's memories.
I remember times when that is what identified a place. I'm no big sports fan, but I can recall names like Wrigley Field, Soldier Field, and Yankee Stadium right off the top of my head. I'm sure readers could provide more examples.
As a society, I think we need more breathing room, more space between us and the constant presence of the workplace in our lives. In short, I think people need to relearn the meaning of free time. Not everything has to serve somebody's profit.
Friday, October 07, 2005
Package Deal
Beneath my Television, in the cabinet of the entertainment center, are stacked just about every Clamshell and gem case I've ever bought. And their former contents? In the storage devices mentioned in the title.
I own 69 DVD titles at current count, with the total number of disks way over a hundred. It is about four cubic feet of packaging. I store the actual disks in a space about a third of a cubic foot, and I can carry these thing without the risk of scattering packages all around if I move wrong. I do the same with all the CDs and PC gamegame discs I get. There's a similar disparity.
I recall a time in which your average game package usually measured about the size of a thick textbook. Now, such games come in packages about the size of a thick trade paperback, if they don't come in gemboxes.
But the disks themselves? 4.75 inches apiece, typically. But size is a deceptive measure with Digital media. A regular DVD measures around 9 GBs on average. The latest RAID hard drive storage can put the information of about 277 DVDs in a machine that could fit inside my monitor.
Even that proportion fails to get to the scale of things if you realize that all the data we're talking about is imprinted or encoded on extraordinarily thin surfaces, that much of the machinery is purposed towards supporting. Your CD or DVD is merely a stable plastic surface on which is glued the actual material carrying the information, whether that's some polymer or the ultra-thin aluminum of a professionally pressed digital media disc. Hard Drives take it even further. The information is encoded on thin layers of a special material that stores information in incredibly small spaces. New internal harddrives carry 500 GBs of information apiece.
That's if you don't compress. Compress with something like the DiVX codec, and the storage of thousands of DVDs worth of visual information, tens of thousands of CDs, is available in that space (or more appropriately, that surface)
And surface is right. New technologies may take information storage for consumers into the third dimension, adding the advantages of cubic space to a field where information density is measure in squared units.
More and more, physical packaging becomes irrelevant to getting what we're looking for in the midst of all that: the meaning.
People tend to throw away packaging They see a bunch of it all over the place, and anybody who's seen disks stacked on one another directly (a great sin in my book), or laying around (don't even go there) knows that people can't always be bothered to put it back. The packaging after purchase is at most a convenient place to put things before and after they've been used.
Oh, but it's to be expected. This is an artistic business, and there are standards to be maintained, of course. I think it helps to understand how much the balance has changed. With film, then and now, the film occupies much physical space. Place all the canisters necessary to show 69 movies in a row- well you need a library. that many tapes would occupy a shelf. that many disks, I carry around in two thick wallets. I could toss them in a backpack and easily carry them. I guess, in a time where what contains the media is bigger and bulkier than the media itself, the packaging's got to have something nice to do.
I own 69 DVD titles at current count, with the total number of disks way over a hundred. It is about four cubic feet of packaging. I store the actual disks in a space about a third of a cubic foot, and I can carry these thing without the risk of scattering packages all around if I move wrong. I do the same with all the CDs and PC gamegame discs I get. There's a similar disparity.
I recall a time in which your average game package usually measured about the size of a thick textbook. Now, such games come in packages about the size of a thick trade paperback, if they don't come in gemboxes.
But the disks themselves? 4.75 inches apiece, typically. But size is a deceptive measure with Digital media. A regular DVD measures around 9 GBs on average. The latest RAID hard drive storage can put the information of about 277 DVDs in a machine that could fit inside my monitor.
Even that proportion fails to get to the scale of things if you realize that all the data we're talking about is imprinted or encoded on extraordinarily thin surfaces, that much of the machinery is purposed towards supporting. Your CD or DVD is merely a stable plastic surface on which is glued the actual material carrying the information, whether that's some polymer or the ultra-thin aluminum of a professionally pressed digital media disc. Hard Drives take it even further. The information is encoded on thin layers of a special material that stores information in incredibly small spaces. New internal harddrives carry 500 GBs of information apiece.
That's if you don't compress. Compress with something like the DiVX codec, and the storage of thousands of DVDs worth of visual information, tens of thousands of CDs, is available in that space (or more appropriately, that surface)
And surface is right. New technologies may take information storage for consumers into the third dimension, adding the advantages of cubic space to a field where information density is measure in squared units.
More and more, physical packaging becomes irrelevant to getting what we're looking for in the midst of all that: the meaning.
People tend to throw away packaging They see a bunch of it all over the place, and anybody who's seen disks stacked on one another directly (a great sin in my book), or laying around (don't even go there) knows that people can't always be bothered to put it back. The packaging after purchase is at most a convenient place to put things before and after they've been used.
Oh, but it's to be expected. This is an artistic business, and there are standards to be maintained, of course. I think it helps to understand how much the balance has changed. With film, then and now, the film occupies much physical space. Place all the canisters necessary to show 69 movies in a row- well you need a library. that many tapes would occupy a shelf. that many disks, I carry around in two thick wallets. I could toss them in a backpack and easily carry them. I guess, in a time where what contains the media is bigger and bulkier than the media itself, the packaging's got to have something nice to do.
Sunday, October 02, 2005
The Binding Problem And Storytelling
The binding problem is a problem in Neuroscience regarding how we bind together the disparate senses and mental processes that we have into the conscious experience we all live our lives through.
It comes across in the stories we tell in the difference between how we live a story, and how our telling of that story comes across. Language is an approximation, and our memories are a distilling and reconstruction of what we experience.
The consequences of this come into play as Hollywood remakes films, and makes formula pictures for the benefit of perceived audiences. Heck, this comes into play when you got bad movies and movies that almost made it. We're subjective creatures, and what's more, our brains throw away from our conscious notice much of the information we use to flesh out the feel and understand we have of the world.
This is particularly troublesome for those portraying real life events, as the sense of events changes with the adaptation from real life to one media or another. With any "true" story on film, even in documentary form, there is always something left out.
Human beings dwell in a rich sea of information, interpreting and experiencing it in real time as billions of neurons work in parallel. As we interpret it, we too throw away information. As a result, though there is much potentially discoverable in front of us, our minds take a certain course through life, and ignore the rest of the riches.
Effective storytellers, to create the desired effects, must do two things: discover those riches and make them accessible and desirable to those who haven't thought to seek or wanted to seek these things out, and translate them effectively from the author's experience and understanding to that of the audience. It's a dance, a high-wire act. It's no easy task.
It's this, not any lack of cultural high-mindedness or business savvy that makes storytelling so difficult a business to get right. This is the real challenge of show business, and the reason that financial success is not deterministically predictable from the basis of a high culture, big business, or even the putative quality of the work. The landscape of mind and heart in this country is constantly shifting, so the fitness of a story in the scheme of things (to borrow evolutionary terminology) is not a stable or predictable thing.
However, as long as we're not looking for deterministic predictability (That is, I do A, therefore B will happen), then the more successful stories, in whatever medium you might chose, are those that relay a great deal of unexpected meaning in the given period of time. Does that mean packing things to the gills with details? Not necessarily. In the case of a TV show, it might be to the storyteller advantage not to force the audience to remember too much from the last show, or if so, make the recall easier by inserting the proper cues in the episode as needed. Even that can be problematic, as anybody who's had to watch the "on the last episode of ______" montage can attest. Information always takes time to move between author and audience, and the less spent telling parts of the story you've already covered, the better.
No, what we're looking for is content organized in such a way that it expands people's sense of the world as they can know it and as they can imagine it. We're looking to give people an intense experience makes enough sense, whether it's that of the real world or that of a fictional one, that people lose focus on the prepared, artificial nature of the medium, and lose themselves in the story. To do that, we must understand better how the subjectivity that defines our existence and our conscious experience can shape our world, and how we interpret sensory cues, and assign meaning to different objects.
We don't have learn this explicitly, but we must have some intuition, some process of working out practical storytelling beats that do their job in such a way that it's not merely trial and error. Otherwise, we will tend to stick to what's already been done, and will continue down a path of formula and replication of earlier works. To get new life into new stories, we must be willing to confront what it is that gives life to our ordinary normal experiences.
It comes across in the stories we tell in the difference between how we live a story, and how our telling of that story comes across. Language is an approximation, and our memories are a distilling and reconstruction of what we experience.
The consequences of this come into play as Hollywood remakes films, and makes formula pictures for the benefit of perceived audiences. Heck, this comes into play when you got bad movies and movies that almost made it. We're subjective creatures, and what's more, our brains throw away from our conscious notice much of the information we use to flesh out the feel and understand we have of the world.
This is particularly troublesome for those portraying real life events, as the sense of events changes with the adaptation from real life to one media or another. With any "true" story on film, even in documentary form, there is always something left out.
Human beings dwell in a rich sea of information, interpreting and experiencing it in real time as billions of neurons work in parallel. As we interpret it, we too throw away information. As a result, though there is much potentially discoverable in front of us, our minds take a certain course through life, and ignore the rest of the riches.
Effective storytellers, to create the desired effects, must do two things: discover those riches and make them accessible and desirable to those who haven't thought to seek or wanted to seek these things out, and translate them effectively from the author's experience and understanding to that of the audience. It's a dance, a high-wire act. It's no easy task.
It's this, not any lack of cultural high-mindedness or business savvy that makes storytelling so difficult a business to get right. This is the real challenge of show business, and the reason that financial success is not deterministically predictable from the basis of a high culture, big business, or even the putative quality of the work. The landscape of mind and heart in this country is constantly shifting, so the fitness of a story in the scheme of things (to borrow evolutionary terminology) is not a stable or predictable thing.
However, as long as we're not looking for deterministic predictability (That is, I do A, therefore B will happen), then the more successful stories, in whatever medium you might chose, are those that relay a great deal of unexpected meaning in the given period of time. Does that mean packing things to the gills with details? Not necessarily. In the case of a TV show, it might be to the storyteller advantage not to force the audience to remember too much from the last show, or if so, make the recall easier by inserting the proper cues in the episode as needed. Even that can be problematic, as anybody who's had to watch the "on the last episode of ______" montage can attest. Information always takes time to move between author and audience, and the less spent telling parts of the story you've already covered, the better.
No, what we're looking for is content organized in such a way that it expands people's sense of the world as they can know it and as they can imagine it. We're looking to give people an intense experience makes enough sense, whether it's that of the real world or that of a fictional one, that people lose focus on the prepared, artificial nature of the medium, and lose themselves in the story. To do that, we must understand better how the subjectivity that defines our existence and our conscious experience can shape our world, and how we interpret sensory cues, and assign meaning to different objects.
We don't have learn this explicitly, but we must have some intuition, some process of working out practical storytelling beats that do their job in such a way that it's not merely trial and error. Otherwise, we will tend to stick to what's already been done, and will continue down a path of formula and replication of earlier works. To get new life into new stories, we must be willing to confront what it is that gives life to our ordinary normal experiences.
Sunday, September 25, 2005
Enabling the Politicians
How did it get this bad with the Bush Administration? The simple answer to this can be found in what many Republican voters have been doing, or moreover, failing to do.
It's not so simple as a failure to hold people accountable, though that's part of it. Some Democrats, Liberals, and independents resort to demonizing Republican voters, but that misses an important and much more universal point.
This society has a bad habit of abstracting purpose-driven behavior to the point of absurdity. Perfectly reasonable motivations become objects of unreasonable worship, idols of ideology, if you will. The notion that's missed is this complex world, is that few ideas are really that healthy when taken so far.
We didn't evolve these marvellous brains to get stuck in a rut like that, but to respond and adapt to our situation. What makes this tricky is that our brains are also evolved to allow a certain level of perseverance, and belief in unseen order, and that often times this is an utterly necessary thing to do.
The brain, one could say, is like a car. It can be functioning perfectly, even as it takes it's owner over the nearest cliff. The Republican party has functioned fairly well as a political organization for the last twenty or thirty years. Unfortunately, it's driving personalities have been heading for the cliff for the last generation.
You see, they cut the brake lines. They discouraged independent inquiry, encouraged a cloistered kind of groupthink, and encouraged their constituents to think that any trouble on the part of their leaders constituted a liberal political play to be resisted by Republican voters.
What happens when charges are true, like those related to recent events?
I think most Republicans have already been primed to disbelieve the truth of the charges. Most don't set out to deny the truth. Even those who do, often weigh their party's fortunes in the equation, convinced by years of propaganda that America's fate and that of the GOP are one and the same: with it's rise and fall, so go the fortunes of The United States.
This all came to a head with Bush 43's election. Here was a president who had no problem with alienating everybody outside the GOP and its natural constituency. He had no problem with resurrecting the monsters of McCarthyism to unleash on Democrats, no problem with running his policies strictly according to the political whims of consultants and special interests, no problem with using the Right-Wing Media Machine to keep America on message.
What he was not prepared to do was get down to business. There's a reason this guy takes long vacations, even when Category 5 storms are set to barrel down on the Gulf Coast. There's a reason it took Bush several minutes to get up and acknowledge what he had been told by his Chief of Staff. There's a reason that Bush doesn't say "I'll get right to it." and does what needs to be done.
That reason is plain: his idea of leadership is itself an abstract sense of vision and expectation, a deterministic view of the world that does not allow for the notion that one could do what's supposed to be the right thing, or just not obviously wrong, and still end up being wrong and needing to correct one's mistakes. If you do the right thing, know what's right, are guided by what's right (or at least realistic in his view), then things should turn out well.
In short, Bush does not plan with Murphy's law in mind. If I were to venture forth an idea of what kept him dazed in a world of his own those seven minutes after Andy Card told him what had happened, one possibility might be that he was trying to reconcile a national security policy he was told was best for America with results that explicitly demonstrated that policy's failure. How could this happen? I think that's been Bush's question every time something bad happens, and he hasn't learned to deal with it by working the problem. Like many CEOs, he doesn't see himself as integrated with his company, but above it, his purpose being to inspire other people to solve the organization's problems for him. Unfortunately, real world decisions, especially those that are rich in conflicts and problems, require a leader whose knowledge of the world is great enough to where his advisers are there to provide choices, not merely a recommended course of action that may go wrong in part or in whole.
His problem echoes the problems of the Republican party as a whole, and from there the rest of society as whole. Purpose taken to excess. The capability to do what one wants and what feels right worshipped and unquestioned, considered apart from any integrated look at the results, or any forethought of possible means and problems. That and submission from those whose best interest is to question.
I would submit that the central cause of our neglectful supervision of our politicians is this: the complexity of our society has outstripped our understanding of the world it exists in. Because of that, delegation or simplification is understandably welcomed. The simplistic notions of the world that once served us well, though, are now deeply problematic. We need to rework the way we learn and the way we understand. What was once obscure knowledge about the way the world works must now be common understanding. What we once judged ourselves too stupid or unsophisticated to understand, we must now grasp with all the intelligence that our gifts allow.
Confronted by a confusing, changing world, our first response has been nostalgia, the wish to return to the securely understood past. When we do that, though, we commit ourselves to a system of thought out of sync with the world as it now is. We can no longer idolize the past, idolize the images and illusions of things no longer meant to be. We must figure out what to do now, how to deal with the problems that threaten our peace and freedom now. We cannot wait for ideals to resurrect themselves, nor our ideologies to be made flesh.
We cannot continue to make ourselves slaves to dead systems of logic. The price of our freedom is that we not continue to support and enable leaders to simply do as they please, but hold them accountable. We must make the price of our continued support greater than applause lines, party loyalty and ideological correctness. We must make practical men and women of our elected officials, at least as far as having them match practical benefits to their political dreams. To do that, we have to stop underestimating ourselves, and underestimating what we deserve in terms of leadership.
(Revised edition, alterations made during publishing to Watchblog)
It's not so simple as a failure to hold people accountable, though that's part of it. Some Democrats, Liberals, and independents resort to demonizing Republican voters, but that misses an important and much more universal point.
This society has a bad habit of abstracting purpose-driven behavior to the point of absurdity. Perfectly reasonable motivations become objects of unreasonable worship, idols of ideology, if you will. The notion that's missed is this complex world, is that few ideas are really that healthy when taken so far.
We didn't evolve these marvellous brains to get stuck in a rut like that, but to respond and adapt to our situation. What makes this tricky is that our brains are also evolved to allow a certain level of perseverance, and belief in unseen order, and that often times this is an utterly necessary thing to do.
The brain, one could say, is like a car. It can be functioning perfectly, even as it takes it's owner over the nearest cliff. The Republican party has functioned fairly well as a political organization for the last twenty or thirty years. Unfortunately, it's driving personalities have been heading for the cliff for the last generation.
You see, they cut the brake lines. They discouraged independent inquiry, encouraged a cloistered kind of groupthink, and encouraged their constituents to think that any trouble on the part of their leaders constituted a liberal political play to be resisted by Republican voters.
What happens when charges are true, like those related to recent events?
I think most Republicans have already been primed to disbelieve the truth of the charges. Most don't set out to deny the truth. Even those who do, often weigh their party's fortunes in the equation, convinced by years of propaganda that America's fate and that of the GOP are one and the same: with it's rise and fall, so go the fortunes of The United States.
This all came to a head with Bush 43's election. Here was a president who had no problem with alienating everybody outside the GOP and its natural constituency. He had no problem with resurrecting the monsters of McCarthyism to unleash on Democrats, no problem with running his policies strictly according to the political whims of consultants and special interests, no problem with using the Right-Wing Media Machine to keep America on message.
What he was not prepared to do was get down to business. There's a reason this guy takes long vacations, even when Category 5 storms are set to barrel down on the Gulf Coast. There's a reason it took Bush several minutes to get up and acknowledge what he had been told by his Chief of Staff. There's a reason that Bush doesn't say "I'll get right to it." and does what needs to be done.
That reason is plain: his idea of leadership is itself an abstract sense of vision and expectation, a deterministic view of the world that does not allow for the notion that one could do what's supposed to be the right thing, or just not obviously wrong, and still end up being wrong and needing to correct one's mistakes. If you do the right thing, know what's right, are guided by what's right (or at least realistic in his view), then things should turn out well.
In short, Bush does not plan with Murphy's law in mind. If I were to venture forth an idea of what kept him dazed in a world of his own those seven minutes after Andy Card told him what had happened, one possibility might be that he was trying to reconcile a national security policy he was told was best for America with results that explicitly demonstrated that policy's failure. How could this happen? I think that's been Bush's question every time something bad happens, and he hasn't learned to deal with it by working the problem. Like many CEOs, he doesn't see himself as integrated with his company, but above it, his purpose being to inspire other people to solve the organization's problems for him. Unfortunately, real world decisions, especially those that are rich in conflicts and problems, require a leader whose knowledge of the world is great enough to where his advisers are there to provide choices, not merely a recommended course of action that may go wrong in part or in whole.
His problem echoes the problems of the Republican party as a whole, and from there the rest of society as whole. Purpose taken to excess. The capability to do what one wants and what feels right worshipped and unquestioned, considered apart from any integrated look at the results, or any forethought of possible means and problems. That and submission from those whose best interest is to question.
I would submit that the central cause of our neglectful supervision of our politicians is this: the complexity of our society has outstripped our understanding of the world it exists in. Because of that, delegation or simplification is understandably welcomed. The simplistic notions of the world that once served us well, though, are now deeply problematic. We need to rework the way we learn and the way we understand. What was once obscure knowledge about the way the world works must now be common understanding. What we once judged ourselves too stupid or unsophisticated to understand, we must now grasp with all the intelligence that our gifts allow.
Confronted by a confusing, changing world, our first response has been nostalgia, the wish to return to the securely understood past. When we do that, though, we commit ourselves to a system of thought out of sync with the world as it now is. We can no longer idolize the past, idolize the images and illusions of things no longer meant to be. We must figure out what to do now, how to deal with the problems that threaten our peace and freedom now. We cannot wait for ideals to resurrect themselves, nor our ideologies to be made flesh.
We cannot continue to make ourselves slaves to dead systems of logic. The price of our freedom is that we not continue to support and enable leaders to simply do as they please, but hold them accountable. We must make the price of our continued support greater than applause lines, party loyalty and ideological correctness. We must make practical men and women of our elected officials, at least as far as having them match practical benefits to their political dreams. To do that, we have to stop underestimating ourselves, and underestimating what we deserve in terms of leadership.
(Revised edition, alterations made during publishing to Watchblog)
Friday, September 23, 2005
An Idea That Should Quickly Be Nipped In The Bud
There's no doubt that the response to Katrina came far too late and too ineffectively, and that the Federal Government bungled it's part of it badly. Few debate that.
What's really annoying me at this point is that there are people who are making this a case for limited government. I agree that nobody should look at this situation, and take faith in this big government on its account, but I don't think it represents an inherent failing of the strong government response.
The reason we can say this, is that we have few complaints about the handling of the rounds of epic disaster that occured during the Category 4 Hurricane Hugo or the vast Mississippi floods. The people in Clinton's FEMA knew that their job was taking care of business, and they did so, and won bipartisan praise for that.
The myth about Democrats and Liberals like myself is that we love bureaucracy. In all actuality, we love results, and bureaucracies of appropriate size to maintain them. To suggest that we go to the state and local officials (or even private businesses) to bear the greatest burden of disaster response, is to ignore a crucial aspect of disasters of such scale- their overwhelming nature. That is not to say that local and state officials should not put their plans together, nor prepare supplies and whatever else is needed to deal with the worst of a disaster's onslaught. That is not even to discourage the open cooperation of businesses in helping disaster victims. That is to say that we should not count on ourselves to be that lucky, to expect the resources for preparation and recovery to survive disasters locally.
To use the negligence and unprofessional behavior of FEMA and other disaster handlers who were supposed to help the victims of Katrina as a excuse to pull back the federal government from supporting locals in these hard times is to justify laziness on the basis of irresponsibility, as well as add grave insult to grave injury.
I think the worst thing about these attitudes towards Federal government in today's world is that it creates an atmosphere of low expectations, coupled with an internal culture of negligence that develops because those inside the still existing government Bureaucracy don't feel the need to do their jobs right. Why, if you don't believe it's supposed to work, why make it work? This disrespect for the business of government becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. People must at least believe in the responsibilities they are given, if not not the decision to have those given to them. America may or may not need a government of our size, but it does not need half-hearted government from those who seek their offices, knowing they won't give it their all.
What's really annoying me at this point is that there are people who are making this a case for limited government. I agree that nobody should look at this situation, and take faith in this big government on its account, but I don't think it represents an inherent failing of the strong government response.
The reason we can say this, is that we have few complaints about the handling of the rounds of epic disaster that occured during the Category 4 Hurricane Hugo or the vast Mississippi floods. The people in Clinton's FEMA knew that their job was taking care of business, and they did so, and won bipartisan praise for that.
The myth about Democrats and Liberals like myself is that we love bureaucracy. In all actuality, we love results, and bureaucracies of appropriate size to maintain them. To suggest that we go to the state and local officials (or even private businesses) to bear the greatest burden of disaster response, is to ignore a crucial aspect of disasters of such scale- their overwhelming nature. That is not to say that local and state officials should not put their plans together, nor prepare supplies and whatever else is needed to deal with the worst of a disaster's onslaught. That is not even to discourage the open cooperation of businesses in helping disaster victims. That is to say that we should not count on ourselves to be that lucky, to expect the resources for preparation and recovery to survive disasters locally.
To use the negligence and unprofessional behavior of FEMA and other disaster handlers who were supposed to help the victims of Katrina as a excuse to pull back the federal government from supporting locals in these hard times is to justify laziness on the basis of irresponsibility, as well as add grave insult to grave injury.
I think the worst thing about these attitudes towards Federal government in today's world is that it creates an atmosphere of low expectations, coupled with an internal culture of negligence that develops because those inside the still existing government Bureaucracy don't feel the need to do their jobs right. Why, if you don't believe it's supposed to work, why make it work? This disrespect for the business of government becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. People must at least believe in the responsibilities they are given, if not not the decision to have those given to them. America may or may not need a government of our size, but it does not need half-hearted government from those who seek their offices, knowing they won't give it their all.
An Object Lesson in Chaos
A couple day ago, Houston was in the bullseye, and the hurricane rated a Category 5.
A week ago, Rita did not exist, even as Tropical Depression 18.
And now, the Hurricane rates a Category 3 and it's hooking its way towards Texas/Louisiana Border. There are probably some news viewers who are tearing out their hair at the imprecision. They shouldn't actually. The Weather services are doing the best they can.
Some observant viewers will take note of those segments where the Weatherfolks show a "spaghetti tangle" of possible storm paths. These maybe the more intellectually honest of the storm prediction. But people ask, why so many different possible paths?
Prediction is a funky game with the weather, and even funkier for phenomena like hurricanes. The famed Butterfly Effect has its origins in a program meant to model the weather, and for good reason. I guess what we have here is what we could call dense history, and what matters and what doesn't is often unclear.
It's not a matter of direct causation, though. It's more like being in a crowd where everybody's jostling everybody else towards some threshold, and which gate or exit one ends up depends on who one bumped into, where, when, and in what order. If you could find that out, you could predict where the person would end up. What if, though, you were incapable of working out that complete of a history, or that history involved not individuals, but groups within that crowd? Your perspective would blur, and actions beyond the scope of your ability to observe would be able to throw monkey wrenches into your predictions.
It gets even more interesting when organization becomes involved. Let's say some people in that crowd were sent randomly in, and then given instructions to stay in sight of each other. In nature, intelligence is not necessarily needed for organization, just physics. Thunderstorms sustain themselves by drawing in most air from below, which augments their organization, The rules complicitly act together to take what's unlikely on the atomic level, and change the odds, allowing complex behavior to result from these simple rules.
Hurricanes are emergent phenomenas that the laws of physics conspire to make not only self sustaining, but also a strong influence on their environment, to the point that they seem to act with volition. Getting back to the crowd, those people given instructions, if clearly marked, might seemed to be acting by an external intelligence, somehow moving in one direction or another by a collectively made decision, even though they are only working from a simple, basic rule. It is in this way that bird flocks can be simulated with a few rules with astonishing realism.
Emergence is the key word. Life is a common form of emergent behavior. Despite all the talk of a unique animating force in this culture and others, we acknowledge in common sense one profound truth about man's existence: The whole is greater than the sum of its parts. Emergent phenomenon are a direct result of the combination and configuration of substances and energies whose presence cannot be reduced to the simple consequence of any one part.
The motion the crowd takes in it's flow, as far as the details are concerned are not spelled out in any one individual. However, the context of a crowd's movement (that is, each person's physical presence, their range of their stamina, their speed of travel, and their own sense of self preservation and purpose, among other things) all contribute to an overall behavior that seems organized by intelligence, rather than the traditional laws of physics.
I guess the point people should draw from what I write here is this: Our world, if it can be described mechanically, runs with great complexity, and though we are just beginning to understand these phenomena, in many ways, we will always have the disadvantage of imperfect observation and ability to process that information.
Will our ability to model these storms improve? Well, meteorologists and other scientists studying these phenomenon continue to discover the peculiarities and ideosyncrasies, and those can help us refine our models. But if there is any lesson to be drawn, it's that our perception has its limits, and that we should allow for that. What does that mean? We plan as if things won't necessarily go our way because the next time, we may be the unlucky ones. It is a gift not to be in the way of nature's wrath, and nature is not always that generous.
A week ago, Rita did not exist, even as Tropical Depression 18.
And now, the Hurricane rates a Category 3 and it's hooking its way towards Texas/Louisiana Border. There are probably some news viewers who are tearing out their hair at the imprecision. They shouldn't actually. The Weather services are doing the best they can.
Some observant viewers will take note of those segments where the Weatherfolks show a "spaghetti tangle" of possible storm paths. These maybe the more intellectually honest of the storm prediction. But people ask, why so many different possible paths?
Prediction is a funky game with the weather, and even funkier for phenomena like hurricanes. The famed Butterfly Effect has its origins in a program meant to model the weather, and for good reason. I guess what we have here is what we could call dense history, and what matters and what doesn't is often unclear.
It's not a matter of direct causation, though. It's more like being in a crowd where everybody's jostling everybody else towards some threshold, and which gate or exit one ends up depends on who one bumped into, where, when, and in what order. If you could find that out, you could predict where the person would end up. What if, though, you were incapable of working out that complete of a history, or that history involved not individuals, but groups within that crowd? Your perspective would blur, and actions beyond the scope of your ability to observe would be able to throw monkey wrenches into your predictions.
It gets even more interesting when organization becomes involved. Let's say some people in that crowd were sent randomly in, and then given instructions to stay in sight of each other. In nature, intelligence is not necessarily needed for organization, just physics. Thunderstorms sustain themselves by drawing in most air from below, which augments their organization, The rules complicitly act together to take what's unlikely on the atomic level, and change the odds, allowing complex behavior to result from these simple rules.
Hurricanes are emergent phenomenas that the laws of physics conspire to make not only self sustaining, but also a strong influence on their environment, to the point that they seem to act with volition. Getting back to the crowd, those people given instructions, if clearly marked, might seemed to be acting by an external intelligence, somehow moving in one direction or another by a collectively made decision, even though they are only working from a simple, basic rule. It is in this way that bird flocks can be simulated with a few rules with astonishing realism.
Emergence is the key word. Life is a common form of emergent behavior. Despite all the talk of a unique animating force in this culture and others, we acknowledge in common sense one profound truth about man's existence: The whole is greater than the sum of its parts. Emergent phenomenon are a direct result of the combination and configuration of substances and energies whose presence cannot be reduced to the simple consequence of any one part.
The motion the crowd takes in it's flow, as far as the details are concerned are not spelled out in any one individual. However, the context of a crowd's movement (that is, each person's physical presence, their range of their stamina, their speed of travel, and their own sense of self preservation and purpose, among other things) all contribute to an overall behavior that seems organized by intelligence, rather than the traditional laws of physics.
I guess the point people should draw from what I write here is this: Our world, if it can be described mechanically, runs with great complexity, and though we are just beginning to understand these phenomena, in many ways, we will always have the disadvantage of imperfect observation and ability to process that information.
Will our ability to model these storms improve? Well, meteorologists and other scientists studying these phenomenon continue to discover the peculiarities and ideosyncrasies, and those can help us refine our models. But if there is any lesson to be drawn, it's that our perception has its limits, and that we should allow for that. What does that mean? We plan as if things won't necessarily go our way because the next time, we may be the unlucky ones. It is a gift not to be in the way of nature's wrath, and nature is not always that generous.
Thursday, September 22, 2005
AAAAAAAUUUUGH!
That's better.
Having learned that Rita was going to strike right at us, I was feeling like it was the end of the world. CAT 5 hurricanes, of course, are no joke, and we have no illusions about how strong our house is or how snarled the traffic is (We live close to I-45, the main route of evacuation for Galveston). Even now, going to a shelter is our likeliest course of action, if the storm's course sticks close to us.
So there I was, feeling like the world was dropping on my head, like there was no escape. The news was going on about this being the Third-Worst Hurricane In The Atlantic Basin. I remember being terrified about the Absolute Worst, our old friend Gilbert when I was a kid.
Then suddenly, I realized it was still just Wednesday night, and this thing was going to make landfall early Saturday morning. I broke out laughing, relieved and embarrassed at how panicked I had become. I don't know what God has in store, but whatever happens, it's not going to do much good for me to fear a threat I'm not directly faced with. We'll see what we can do here to stay out of the way of the worst, most damaging effects of this storm, but I'm not going to curl up in the face of all this.
Having learned that Rita was going to strike right at us, I was feeling like it was the end of the world. CAT 5 hurricanes, of course, are no joke, and we have no illusions about how strong our house is or how snarled the traffic is (We live close to I-45, the main route of evacuation for Galveston). Even now, going to a shelter is our likeliest course of action, if the storm's course sticks close to us.
So there I was, feeling like the world was dropping on my head, like there was no escape. The news was going on about this being the Third-Worst Hurricane In The Atlantic Basin. I remember being terrified about the Absolute Worst, our old friend Gilbert when I was a kid.
Then suddenly, I realized it was still just Wednesday night, and this thing was going to make landfall early Saturday morning. I broke out laughing, relieved and embarrassed at how panicked I had become. I don't know what God has in store, but whatever happens, it's not going to do much good for me to fear a threat I'm not directly faced with. We'll see what we can do here to stay out of the way of the worst, most damaging effects of this storm, but I'm not going to curl up in the face of all this.
Tuesday, September 20, 2005
Sorry for the change of address.
Well, what is this blog about? Nothing in particular, and I like that. Science, Religion, Technology, Psychology, The Nature of Truth, the Nature of Storytelling. If it sounds profound, it's not. it's going to be essays that wouldn't feel right on my other blogging home, Watchblog.
I'll see about having something to y'all by tomorrow. Rita's going to come in, and things are going to get pretty interesting around here.
I'll see about having something to y'all by tomorrow. Rita's going to come in, and things are going to get pretty interesting around here.
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