On the Road

I remember feeling impatient and disappointed reading the book many years ago. It didn't seem to live up to its reputation. Last week I rented the recent film version, which played in our local art-movie house for about a week. It seemed a bit slow in spots, but the acting, cinematography and music were excellent. A great story about crazy friendship and being young. Made me want to revisit the book.

Arguably by Christopher Hitchens

A collection of essays of uncompromising intellectual clarity and honesty. I listened to the audio, then bought myself a hard copy --it was so good I couldn't believe my ears.

The Fight for Abundance

I recently had an invigorating vision of the future. This came as a result of my encounter with Abundance by Peter Diamandis and Steven Cotler. By rights I should be too old at 57 for wide eyed optimism, but the authors have marshaled their arguments so convincingly, from the broad outlines of global infrastructures to the nanoscopic gadgets that will soon rebuild broken body parts, that one is as much compelled to jump on the bandwagon as to look for ways to break the spell. In no time I was showing high school students You Tube clips of people printing wrenches and building their own drones, recommending the book to friends and colleagues, haranguing my wife with all I’d just learned of the singularity that would transform the world in the next twenty years.

I knew I had to be careful: There’s not much value in being easily impressed. Abundance prints an invigorating picture, but some problems lie beyond the scope of its discussion. For example, the work that needs to be done requires engineering skills many humans have no interest in acquiring. What happens when the unemployed billion can’t find anything to do with all the leisure abundance will afford?  What’s to keep us from winding up like Star Trek’s Borg –a real possibility when people have internet access implanted in their brains, an eventuality the authors wholeheartedly embrace? How long before we become the human batteries powering the matrix? And won’t considerations such as these inspire anti-evolutionary fundamentalist conservatives to even greater acts of rage and sabotage?    

Well, there’s a lot to be done. This is a fight where if we win we win big and if we lose we lose it all. Diamandis and Cotler say it’s a fight we can win. Sticking with the amygdale-serving negativity of assault rifles, government gridlock, incarceration nation, zombie Apocalypse, CNN and fiscal austerity is more than a little like paying attention to the wrong kind of news and not having the faintest clue as to what’s needed to solve problems.

I’m going to continue monitoring our progress toward the singularity because the very idea of it excites me. It flies in the face of Biblical warnings about the Tower of Babel, the acceptance of suffering, and the poor will always be with us. For that reason alone I think it’s pretty damned daring. I’ll bring it to the students in my classes and scatter it here and there on the internet. I’ll take care of myself so I can be around to see it through.

MLK Day 2013

Forty five years. How much has changed. Two steps forward, one step back.

Someone with the politics of George Wallace, would he or she be able to drum up a similar following?

Maybe it's not so much black/white as give and take. Those who see themselves as givers don't want the government telling them to give what they have to the takers. But who among us sees themselves as takers?

I agree with Michelle Alexander: Pointing out a few individuals of color in leadership roles only serves to mask the reality of the prison-industrial complex. King's work is far from finished.

Cloud Atlas

This is a good movie. Some reviews suggest that it's messy and unfocused, and that it hits you over the head with a message that's maybe a little too trite.  I think the reviews got it wrong on both counts. Cloud Atlas isn't any harder to follow than the last Woody Allen movie. As for the message, that we're all connected in one way or another: That's only the surface theme. There's an underlying theme of deception and abuse of those with less power by those with more.

Jeff Faux and the Servant Economy

Jeff Faux, an economist who spoke on Book TV last week, wonders why we don't amend the constitution of the United States to deny personhood and citizenship status to any and all corporate entities, and to keep money from being classified as speech. I know it's negative, but if money can be defined as speech, why can't violence? Faux thinks that amending is a good way to stop businessmen from buying politicians and to keep the middle class from becoming a servant class. I signed. Here's the link: Move to Amend.

Years of Red Dust by Qiu Xiaolong

In The New York Times review of this book Jess Row says that the stories are treated "sketchily, as illustrations rather than fully formed narratives." I wonder if he would say the same about the characters. Many are a bit Dickensian, humorous caricatures with nicknames like Old Root, Big Bowl and Bamboo Chopsticks, all caught up in social upheavals on the magnitude survivors of the industrial revolution would surely appreciate.

For this and other reasons Row finds Years of Red Dust interesting more "as a historical text" than as "a work of fiction." But the historical significance is itself compelling. With free market capitalism in full sway on a global scale it's no wonder conservatives and Republicans in the US are impatient to deregulate, end taxes and watch that economy grow.

Which is fine if you don't mind squalor, pollution and war --sure to be the byproducts of unbridled competition. During the Reagan years I worked for a big corporation that tried to convince its employees that cooperation and collaboration were more productive than competition.

It would be nice to be around when that idea comes back in style.