Saturday’s Bumper Sticker
Makes You Think, Don’t It?
“I am not a crook.” (Nixon, on Nixon)
“I never had sex with that woman.” (Clinton, about Monica Lewinsky)
“It could last six days, six weeks. I doubt six months.” (Rumsfeld, about war in Iraq)
“I am a very stable genius.” (Trump, on Trump)
Tuesday’s Theme Music
New Year. Don’t know about you, but on a personal quantum level, I feel good about it. Feel like I’m in tune.
Which is a nice segue for today’s music. Here’s Daltry and the Who with the Pete Townsend composition, “Getting In Tune,” from 1971, as fine a year as there is. The song starts soft and then rises and quickens, a perfect metaphor for 2018.
Thursday’s Theme Music
Today’s theme music is a courtesy of Don Henley and Mike Campbell. The song is, “The Boys of Summer.”
This song, with lyrics like, “I saw a Deadhead sticker on a Cadillac,” about looking back and change, and coping with it. I’m a person that looks back a great deal. I’m not obsessed with it, but looking back helps me re-imagine where I’m going. It’s one of those arrows of time. Looking back helps me keep straight.
A little voice inside my head said, “Don’t look back. You can never look back.”
I thought I knew what love was,
What did I know?
Those days are gone forever,
I should just let them go, but-
Today’s technology encourages looking back. I can watch movies that star actors that died, leading me to wonder, are they still alive? I can check a friend’s post, even though he died a few years ago, and replay movies, television shows, and interviews from the past, and pretend that past is today, or yesterday, although it was created decades ago.
It’s nostalgia, isn’t it? It is for me. Television, pop and rock music, and movies were part of my scenes as I grew up. Songs come on and take me back to a happier moment, as do smells, and touches. I like going back there; I like feeling happy.
There are fewer happier moments today. Experiences temper my expectations, and I’ve become jaded. It could be from looking back, or simply being cursed with too much ability to recall times and events. It’s part of who I am, so I don’t decry it.
Well, maybe I decry it a little, because that’s who I am, as well.
The Cusp of Revolutions
I’m pretty excited this morning. Awoke in that state. I owe this excitement to a teenage woman.
I didn’t meet her, but I saw and listened to her. It was during our weekly beer meeting of the BoBs, the pretentious and silly name of our group, “Brains on Beers”. It’s actually a group of retired doctors, scientists, engineers, professors, etc, that meet to have a beer each week and talk. We mostly talk about science, technology, politics, and beer.
We also collect and donate money to buy materials to help local schools and their STEM educational programs. One of the projects we support is the southern Oregon robotics team. The teenager was with that group when four of them came to us to pitch their project for a donation.
An adult leader and three local high school students were making the pitch. Christina, the young woman that I found so inspiring. She loves science. My sense, from listening to her, is that she loves life, knowledge, and learning. Her dream is to join Space X and go into space and colonize other places. Her enthusiasm was like gulping a dozen shots of espresso at once. It was beautiful to behold.
Her comments and enthusiasm trickled into my thinking streams. Eventually, a week later, thoughts came together and bubbled up from my subconscious thinking, and I realized, we’re on a cusp of a revolution.
No, make that revolutions.
People feel and see them coming. That scares and intimidates them. Many people dislike change, or are uncomfortable with change. I’m not too good with it, myself. Processing change requires time and energy. I often feel like I lack enough of either, and just want to climb into bed and cover my head.
Yet, I could see the revolutions coming so clearly in my thoughts this morning as I contemplated my fading dreams. I saw at least another industrial revolution as we move away from fossil fuels and introduce more robotics and automation.
We’re undergoing an information revolution right now. How we acquire, process, and spread information has evolved, and that evolution is speeding up. To combat it, guerrilla warfare comprising of false information and false equivalencies have been
We’re undergoing gender revolutions, and revolutions that are overturning Business As Usual. Sexual assaults, bigotry, and prejudice are being exposed. In a sense, we needed the Trump Administration, because its existence turned on the lights, revealing the ugliness that we’ve institutionalize and accepted as normal and standard.
Of course, the technological and digital revolutions are underway, as well. These are leading to social and cultural revolutions. These revolutions will cause yet greater economic and political revolutions. The great democratic revolution will itself undergo another revolution because the representative form of government, with its elections that establish a ruling class, has been outgrown. So have nation states, as we conceive of ourselves more and more as humans sharing a planet with finite resources, with a need to improve how we use those resources, and begin developing plans to seriously use exo-resources on other worlds.
That’ll launch the space revolution.
It’ll all be a bloody mess for a long time, of course. We know that economic, social, political, and regional stagnation and siloing reduce cooperation and create obstacles and roadblocks. Some like these obstacles. They even want to build walls, because they’re afraid, or they don’t want their comfort zone to change, which is wholly understandable.
But, smart people are out there. They’re perceiving these problems, and they’re conceiving solutions and new approaches.
Trust me. I heard one.
Turncat
Turncat (catfinition) – a cat who switches sides; a traitor.
In use: “We would have struggled to find her,” authorities said, “except for a turncat who betrayed their owner to save Mr. Obama. The cat hair on the Obama package was microscopically consistent with the hair of one of Poff’s cats.”
“Would-be Obama assassin identified by cat hairs, authorities say”
h/t msn.com
Assumptions
The other day, I wrote a short post, “End Game.” I’ve been amused by the position that people won’t accept other genders because, God, and the Bible, or some other deity and religious document. I assumed that were it true that a deity created the original one or two sexes, they may now have decided to add more sexes. I assumed they could agree with that.
That might be a wrong assumption.
After posting that, I read an article about conservative American thinking in Salon. I infer from the article that Conservatives have a difficult time accepting change. So if God created two sexes and stopped, that’s it; the end. That chokes the life out of my position. They were taught one thing, so they believe one thing, and they can’t change their thinking to believe anything else. It’s a fascinating conclusion, because it’s not about politics or religious beliefs, but about brain structure and how our brains develop and work.
That leads to another assumption, embraced by so many, that we are all the same. An intriguing dichotomy arises: if you have a hard-wired conservative brain and were taught that everyone is the same, then you can’t change your mind, and yet you’re the very evidence that we’re not all the same. That explains why so many conservatives will drop back and point to differences in gender and sexual orientation as either choices or sicknesses. They can’t conceive of the third choice, that either their God has more in mind for the sexes and variations for humans, or that humans continue to develop and evolve. Like generals fighting the last war, their thinking is predicated on the past situation. To think that gender changes might be required for humanity’s survival is unthinkable, and unimaginable.
Now we’re entering X-Men territory. Yet, medical science can point to evolutionary changes and mutations beyond genders and sexual orientations that indicate, yes, human beings are dynamic and evolving. Changes have emerged, and will continue to emerge. Unfortunately, my recent reading about conservative thinking is that they have a hard time with science, too.
The way we learn has an impact, as well. We’ve learned that what we first learn often stays with us; it’s difficult to overcome what we initially learn, even when new information is later added that shows that we initially learned was wrong. Part of this also has to do with with our brains, memory, and wiring.
I wish I was more intelligent and better educated so I could understand and explain it all with more clarity and nuance. Sadly, I ponder if humans might end up destroying humanity trying to stay the same as were were when they believe they were created.
I hope that I’m just assuming the worst.
Saturday’s Theme Music
Something from nineteen seventy-seven. Billy Joel had already established himself as a star by this year, but his album, “The Stranger,” gained him critical acclaim, awards, and increased popularity.
I enjoy the album. It came out the year I returned from my fifteen month assignment in the Philippines. The album seems like rock and roll and Americana. My favorite song is one called “Scenes From An Italian Restaurant,” but the album includes “She’s Always A Woman,” “Just The Way You Are,” and “Only The Good Die Young.”
However, I woke up streaming, “Movin’ Out.” The song expresses Joel’s disappointment with people moving up by buying consumer grades and making purchases to impress others. It’s a favorite theme for me, so here we are.
Tuesday’s Theme Music
My wife and I were picking up fur last night. The cats leave it like Hansel and Gretel left crumbs to find their way back. I guess the cats, worried about losing their way from the litter box to their food bowl to their sleeping locations, leave the fur clumps to help them find their way. “I’ll just leave this fur and follow it back.”
Doing this task last night, I streamed, “I’m a fur picker. I’m a fur picker. Picking up fur. Fur, fur, fur.” The song was to the head music, “I’m A Girl Watcher,” a song from nineteen sixty-seven. I thought, that’ll be my Tuesday theme music.
Then, I began thinking about the song and the times. The song objectifies women. The attitude incubated at that point can lead to some of the rapes, molesting, and harassing now revealed across America.
Or I am overthinking it? I’m prone to such things. I can hear other argue, the song is about a boy who is growing up and developing an interest in sex, in this case, in girls. It’s completely innocent. To which I hear others say, it’s not completely innocent. It’s mostly innocent, but it’s part of larger cultural and social trends about women’s roles and men’s attitude toward women in America.
It was a lot to think about before my morning coffee. I decided not to do that song. Instead, I give you song from a year later, The Moody Blues with “Tuesday Afternoon.” I believe the song’s line, “The gentle voices I hear, explain it all with a sigh,” perfectly exemplifies my thinking conundrum about being a girl-watcher.
It’s a complicated world. My thinking probably makes it appear more complicated than it is.
Thursday’s Theme Music
So much has been written about this song and its lyrics. After it became a hit in America, our local newspaper, The Pittsburgh Press (or maybe it was the Post-Gazette) had an article with the song’s words in it. My sister, two years younger than me, told me that she’d memorize the lyrics. She seemed proud of doing that. The lyricist himself, Don McLean, has avoided analyzing the lyrics. He says they’re poetry. I recall McLean once said something like, the artist should put it out there and then keep a dignified silence when others ask what the song is about.
I but into that. People often uncover their own meanings in books, stories, movies, songs, and poetry. I like that, that people can take words, sounds, and images, anchor them to their lives and events, and affix unique interpretations to them.
Here it is, “American Pie,” from nineteen seventy-one. It’s a piece of Americana.
Michael Seidel, writer 