ESSAYS

Weaned on Slaughter

   Take a good look at all those video games given to kids for Christmas. Take a look at all the movies coming out of Hollywood during the last year. Now tell me just what percentage of these games and movies do not involve guns; and blasters, bombs, missiles all delivered to destroy. Our kids, and especially boys, do not take in a taste for murderous violence with their mothers' milk. They wait a few years until they are old enough to watch movies and play electronic games. Is this true of all cultures? MORE:

                          The Universality of the Stupid.

   We will get nowhere consoling ourselves by calling Trump supporters stupid. Even if they are, they certainly have no monopoly on that quality. What about our friends at the DNC who did all they could to subvert the candidacy of Bernie Sanders (who, by the way, could have beaten Trump handily) and then, ignoring all the signs that voters were sick of the same old policies, forced Hilary Clinton, devoid of charm, suspiciously supported, and terribly vulnerable to attack, down our throats? What about Clinton herself, who doesn’t know how to keep her emails organized and wanted to win liberal voters all while cozying up to Wall Street? What about the “pundits” who couldn’t track the downward angle of a ball dropped out of a third-story balcony in a dead calm?

Now the hounds of greed, barely leashed up to now, are loosed and in full cry. Stupidity is what they feed and batten on. Let’s not blame rust-belt workers, screwed repeatedly from Reagan on, and call them stupid, when there is more than enough stupidity to go around.

The True Discovery of America

   What America really discovered was the rich potential latent in the ordinary person. The tired, the poor, the huddled masses of Europe and Asia and now of other continents bloomed once they were transplanted to fresh soil, given a chance at the sunlight, and rendered free of many of the weeds and parasites that had so weakened them and depressed their talents previously. Once they were free of kings and warlords, of prejudices that by law relegated them to a narrow field of endeavors, once they were treated as people and not as chattel, their talents and energies flourished and made this country into the envy of the world. MORE:

                                      The Beauty of the Earth


Will snow someday exist only as a memory or as a description books, if memories remain or books? Imagined a child reading about snow, when none was left to see. Would she not think it something from a dream? Imagine trying to convince this child that in a hour a landscape could be transformed and in a day changed out of recognition. That all the colors of the ground could be melded into white. That sharp angles could be softened, that earthly contours could be ethereally shaped by the wind. How completely unlikely this whiteness, self renewed, immaculate would seem to that child.

                                                               The Plague

The sense of unreality that I cannot shake is generated by how much the current situation resembles a piece of mediocre fiction. Everyone seems to be in his element. The bad are very bad, the good are very good, the threat to life seems inexorable, at times ineluctable.

Vampires are abroad and biting everyone they come near and thus making new vampires who will go abroad. 

We have run out of garlic.

The best among us offer to share their food, their money. The very best of the best are risking their lives daily, by the minute, caregivers, doctors, nurses, those who respond to emergencies.


The learned and the wise tell us how to protect ourselves. They tell us that total protection, quick remedies, are fantasies, but that we are not completely powerless. These wise words slide off the unctuous film of stubborn ignorance some of us maintain. Those who foster this shield unwittingly ally themselves with the plague and fortify it.


The ignorant find comfort in their ignorance. They cling to their trust in those who are so saliently untrustworthy. They let these leaders take their money and their health, and they thank them for doing so.


Picking on the picayune does more harm than good. Kellyanne was sitting funny on the couch? Sure. That's the killer story that will force impeachment. Trump spends a lot of time on the links? A story even more lethal for his government. The President didn’t turn around to wave on boarding Air Force I and thus broke with tradition? Another long nail in his administration’s coffin. Got the story wrong about Sweden? President Pence, here we come.

What I am trying to say is that emphasizing the trivial is a good way to deflate the important. Are we just having a good time here or are we trying to sway people? Sure it’s fun to point out this guy’s sub-literacy, his bad taste, his narcissism, but pointing those things out, while it might be fun, does nothing to further our ends. Worse, peppering the guy with criticisms of little consequence vitiates our attacks on the things that really matter, things like his war on the press, his questionable relations with a hostile foreign power, the appointment of racist


On Domestic Politics

No candidate who will not fight to reform our tax system is worth notice. No candidate who will not put a leash on Big Pharma is worth noticing. No candidate who will not foster a health-insurance policy that makes sure that no American has to die for want of cash is worth noticing. And a candidate who has no firm practical policy to combat climate change? Guess what. 

Peter Grudin

Perhaps the term “travel” is a trap here. If time is nothing more than the way in which we keep track of events, then I have to agree that travel on it, into it, through it, would be beyond my imagination. I admit, by the way, that my imagination is limited, but it is the only one I have.

On the other hand traveling back in time, or, rather, being able to see the past is not only possible it is ineluctable. If someone asks me how I can make so extravagant a statement and especially since I have only a superficial knowledge of science, I will reply: “Look up.”

“‘Look up?’ Look up what?”

” I am not using the transitive sense of the verb here. I am using the intransitive. Look up. Oh, yes, and do it on a clear night.”

Since what we see is conveyed by light, and since light has a limited speed, everything we see is already in the past. Of course with nearby objects or even relatively distant ones like the moon, the passage of time between event and our perception of it is infinitesimal. When we look up at a star however, even a relatively nearby star like Alpha Centuri, which is 4.37 light years away, we see that star in the past. We see it as it was 4.37 years ago.

Now let’s imagine that “aliens” are sending us video. They are sending the video from a star that is 10 billion light years away. What will we see when we watch the video? We will be seeing the past, a past much more profound than the past most of us normally imagine. We will see actions that occurred 10 billion years earlier. And there is no escaping this fact if we want to see what is–was–going on on that star.

(I am a writer of fiction, but it is science that fuels my writing.)






On Columbus Day: I note that there are no "days" for Jews, Poles, Chinese, Vietnamese, inter al.. I, personally, am not alarmed by this dearth. Certainly Columbus initiated a frenzy of greed and cruelty perhaps unmatched until the 20th century. On the other hand, anyone who believes that native Americans themselves were completely innocent of aggressiveness and cruelty needs to read more and better history. We are all--and always have been—“in this together.” The definition of what is wrong with us is not limited to particular periods or nationalities. It is is coextensive with our very species.