Universal Health Care = Freedom

One argument no one seems to be making is how universal healthcare will unlock tremendous potential in thinkers and entrepreneurs. So many brilliant people are locked into boring, unfulfilling jobs simply because they are terrified to be without health care. How many Bill Gates-es are sitting around in offices unable to pursue their dreams because if they quit and decided to bartend instead, or live on savings or squat in their parents' garage, while they put their inventions and ideas together, they would be utterly exposed either to the predatory pricing of insurance companies or the possibility that one misstep, one mutated cell, could put them in debt for life?

Universal health care = freedom. Isn't that what America is supposed to be all about?

What is neither Law nor Chaos?

For 'Dynamic Quality' you can substitute the word 'Tao' or whatever you want -- basically the thing that organizes the universe, that 'decides' which state an electron assumes and informs the universe of which configurations are 'better' than some more chaotic or more rigid alternative. No bets on whether it is 'intelligent' or 'conscious' or whatever other human-centric word we want to use to try to describe it...

Another excerpt from Robert Pirsig's Lila:

“It seems clear that no mechanistic pattern exists toward which life is heading, but has the question been taken up of whether life is heading away from mechanistic patterns?”

He guessed that the question had not been taken up at all. The concepts necessary for taking it up were not at hand. In a metaphysics in which static universal laws are considered fundamental, the idea that life is evolving away from any law just draws a baffled question mark. It doesn’t make any sense. It seems to say that all life is headed toward chaos, since chaos is the only alternative to structural patterns that a law-bound metaphysics can conceive.

But Dynamic Quality is not structured and yet it is not chaotic. It is value that cannot be contained by any static patterns. What the substance-centered evolutionists were showing with their absence of final “mechanisms” or “programs” was not an air-tight case for the biological goallessness of life. What they were unintentionally showing was a superb example of how values create reality.

Science values static patterns. Its business is to search for them. When non-conformity appears it is considered an interruption of the normal rather than the presence of the normal. A deviation from a normal static pattern is something to be explained and if possible controlled. The reality science explains is that “reality” which follows from mechanisms and programs. The other worthless stuff which doesn’t follow mechanisms and programs we don’t pay any attention to.

See how this works? A thing doesn’t exist because we have never observed it. The reason we have never observed it is because we have never looked for it. And the reason we have never looked for it is that it is unimportant, it has no value and we have better things to do.

Because of his different metaphysical orientation Phaedrus saw instantly that those seemingly trivial, unimportant, “spur of the moment” decisions that Mayr was talking about [“No program controlled or directed evolution. It was result of spur of the moment decisions of natural selection.”], the decisions that directed the progress of evolution are, in fact, Dynamic Quality itself. Dynamic Quality, the source of all things, the pre-intellectual cutting edge of reality, always appears as “spur of the moment.” Where else could it appear?

~ Pirsig, Lila, 142

Freedom and Order

Excerpt from Robert Pirsig's Lila.

Freedom. That was the topic that would drive home this whole understanding of Indians… Of all the contributions America has made to the history of the world, the idea of freedom from a social hierarchy has been the greatest. It was fought for in the American Revolution and confirmed in the Civil War. To this day it’s still the most powerful, compelling ideal holding the whole nation together.

And yet, although Jefferson called this doctrine of social equality “self-evident,” it is not at all self-evident… There is no “self-evidence” in European history that all men are created equal. There’s no nation in Europe that doesn’t trace its history to a time when it was “self-evident” that all men are created unequal. Jean Jacques Rousseau, who is sometimes given credit for this doctrine, certainly didn’t get it from the history of Europe or Asia or Africa. He got it from the impact of the New World upon Europe and from contemplation of one particular kind of individual who lived in the New World, the person he called the “Noble Savage.”

The idea that “all men are created equal” is a gift to the world from the American Indian. Europeans who settled here only transmitted it as a doctrine that they sometimes followed and sometimes did not. The real source was someone for whom social equality was no mere doctrine, who had equality built into his bones. To him it was inconceivable that the world could be any other way…

The Indians haven’t yet lost this one. They haven’t yet won it either… the fight isn’t over. It’s still the central internal conflict in America today. It’s a fault line, a discontinuity that runs through the center of the American cultural personality. It’s dominated American history from the beginning and continues to be a source of both national strength and weakness today… this conflict between European and Indian values, between freedom and order…

...

A depression always came over him when he came East like this… He was a Midwesterner and he shared the prejudices of many Midwesterners against this region of the country. He didn’t like the way everything gets more stratified here. The rich start looking richer and the poor start looking poorer. What was worse, they looked as though they thought this was the way thing ought to be. There was no sign it was going to change.

In a state like Minnesota or Wisconsin, you can be poor and still feel some sense of dignity if you work hard and live fairly cleanly and keep your eye on the future. But here in New York it seemed as if when you’re poor you’re just poor. And that means you’re nobody. Really nobody. And if you’re rich you’re really somebody. And that fact seemed to explain ninety-five percent of everything else that went on in this region.

Maybe he was just noticing it more because he’d been thinking about Indians. Some of these difference are just urban-rural differences, and the East is more urban. But some of these differences reflected European values too. Every time he came this way he could feel the people getting more formal and impersonal and… crafty. Exploitative. European. And petty, too, and ungenerous.

Out West among the Indians it’s a standing joke that the chief is the poorest man in the tribe. Every time somebody needs something he’s the one they go to, and by the Indian code, “the generosity of the frontier,” he has to help them. Phaedrus didn’t think you’d see much of that along this river. He could just imagine some strange riverboat man pulling up at Astor’s mansion and saying, “I just saw a light on and thought I’d stop in and say ‘hello.’” He wouldn’t get past the butler. They’d be horrified at his impertinence. Yet in the West [or in most areas of Palestine, I found] they’d probably feel obliged to invite him in.

It just got worse and worse around here. The rich got glitzier and glitzier and the poor got scuzzier and scuzzier until you finally got to New York City. Homeless crazies hovering over ventilator grates while billionaires are escorted past them to their limousines. With each somehow accepting this as natural.

Milk Cow

August 22, 2008. It’s clear that the universe is ‘amoral,’ in the same sense that Pakistan doesn’t care about the Stigler Panthers women’s softball team. Morality is a local little human invention designed to temper the worst expressions of ego to the ultimate benefit even of the egotistical—because we simply wouldn’t last long as a species without some kind of check on the insanity of ego. Morality is a tiny little sign of a certain level of self-preservational maturity, and it can even reach a certain level of ‘truth’ when it is applied universally and intelligently. But something higher than our self-preservation is clearly at play. Concepts like ‘good’ and ‘bad’ only have meaning at some fuzzy local level. The things we see as ‘good’ can be broken into two categories: the lower category, which feeds our ego, and the higher category, which feeds our true joy of consciousness.

But I worry sometimes that even my true joy of consciousness feeds something I might not, in the end, agree with—something sinister or foolish. That the universe is just using me as a milk cow.

But how ludicrous is that? Concepts like ‘sinister’ and ‘foolish’ probably don’t even have any meaning outside of our tiny human context. And so what if I’m a milk cow? How can I complain when I’m built to love my pasture and love giving milk? It’s control I’m really worried about giving up—as if I could somehow exert any control over the destiny of the universe! No organized committee of dinosaurs could have dug in their heels and refused to go extinct. The universe had other ideas.

The universe gave me the capacity to be happy and useful right where and when I am. Honestly—do I have anything better to do? Straying from my own heart’s path would be like insisting on breathing bottled helium because I don’t want the outside world to control me by choosing which air I should breathe, when in fact all the outside world ever did was provide a limitless supply of exactly what my body needs.

Love Palestine

October 2004. I’m starting to figure out why Palestine grabs me and won’t let me go. Nature is generous, content, unsuspecting. Yielding and conciliatory, disorganized but fairly stable. If something new manages to take hold, it’s given the benefit of the doubt. Nature spreads a wide blanket and then culls itself until there’s about enough to go around. It seeks overall balance and stability. As a child of this system, I crave it.

It’s strong enough to withstand anything but the profit motive. The profit motive unbalances. It hoards and concentrates, it asks for guarantees in a world of chaos. Anything that yields is destroyed by it. Anything that fights it and doesn’t become it is destroyed by it. I’m not asking for feudalism or to become hunter-gatherers, but just the mindset that we’re all human, the world is generous, we’ll all die some day so we might as well enjoy the time and the abundance we have, that the very last thing we should do in a cruel and beautiful world is to accentuate and dwell on and worry about and increase the cruelty, create our own human-born cruelty and try to dominate each other, fight each other for control when control is a great illusion.

When I sit in a coffee house with Westerners, there’s always an undercurrent of worry, of self-consciousness, of judgment. When I sit with Palestinians, every little funny thing we or anyone else does, it’s just that—funny. Delightful. Just people. Masha’Allah. No judgment unless actual harm is intended. And why would harm be intended? People who intend harm are considered surprising and kind of pitiful. Crazy a little bit, and sad. Something to avoid, something dangerous and incomprehensible and not worth our good time. Not something to fight—something to walk away from, like a sick person who’s contagious and refuses to seek treatment or even cover their mouth when they cough. Like some poor kid with a flame thrower attached to his arm that burns himself and anyone who comes near, and who can see a reason to walk up to them and risk being burned? It’s sad that they have isolated themselves, but life is too short to walk into sickness and fire and get nothing but sick and burned. And of course whenever they get well and cool down, they are welcome back.

This mentality, to me, is so relaxing. It fits. It feels like home. I feel at ease, I feel warm and perfect and unworried. The point is not that we’re perfect; the point is, we don’t stress about being perfect. We’re doing our best. We’re here. We’re fine. It’s quite enough. So it’s perfect.

Oh, but the profit motive comes, the drive for control and domination, and we can’t walk away when there’s a bulldozer on our lawn and a boot on our neck and a bullet in a child’s brain. If we do nothing we lose. If we fight fire with fire we lose spectacularly and become what we hate in the process. How in the end can we fight without fighting when they are treating us so violently and brutally? How can everything strong and yielding just get mown down with steel blades? How did this happen? Am I just a reactionary? But to what end all this brutally precise machinery? What the hell are we doing?

The ones who seek domination at the expense of all else live in perpetual fear and eventually fall. The ones who yield and smile and trust, they would last longer, endure and be stronger and happier and live more genuinely, but the cowboys have to come and take it all in a swipe. Take a strong, graceful citadel and cram it into an ugly, ill-fated house of cards. For what? Even the vaunted middle classes are popping pills. We can do better.

Class Warfare?

It just occurred to me that when I first watched the cartoon version of Robin Hood as a young kid, I was so ignorant I didn’t understand the concept of class. I didn’t realize that Maid Marion was anything but a girl Robin liked, and I couldn’t understand why there was any problem with them being together. The clothes they wore didn’t send the right signals to my brain because I was unaware of their context. And even if they had, back then I was so ignorant I would have thought it was foolish and childish to separate people based on such petty, meaningless things.

How nice if we could raise all kids like this!

Booby Trap

One time in April of 2007, my friend Liz was visiting me in DC (her plane to Beijing out of Dulles was delayed by a day), and we walked down U St. to find a place to have dinner. At one point she was looking around and saw a mysteriously abandoned set of golf clubs in a tattered golf bag leaning against a column in the shade of a street lamp.

She pointed it out to me, and just being a smart-ass, I said, "Don't touch it, it may be a roadside bomb."

She started laughing helplessly, maniacally, far out of proportion to whatever amount of wit my comment may have had. I waited for her to calm down and tell me what was so funny. Finally, still gasping, she said, "It's like a booby trap for politicians!"

Yes! The perfect bait. We both started laughing then, imagining Carl Rove walking by, noticing the golf clubs out of the corner of his eye, stopping in his tracks, looking around surreptitiously to make sure no one was watching, creeping slowly toward the loot, and then...

Words

January 25, 2004. I was thinking today how I write in my journal partly to try to capture, crystallize, remember beautiful moments that would otherwise just pass by like a fart in the wind. And I thought how that was impossible. I can't capture anything, and I don't need to, because if I keep playing my cards right, life will be an almost ceaseless stream of exquisite moments. I mean, it will be, but if I play my cards right, I'll notice it. And I thought of all the other billions of people and their countless peak moments, their numberless teas drunk in the clear morning light, finding a new friend squatting in the turnip patch, moments that don't yet have a place in my imagination they're so far from my experience. And they're all there, stuck in the timeline, all at the same "moment," and that's tremendous power. Tremendous to imagine inhaling into your head for a moment all the clear, peaceful, pure, gorgeous, calm, quietly blissful moments from a billion lives lived (at least sometimes) well. The potential we have for that, it could quietly shake the world.

People are so amazing. All our private, disjointed, unique, compartmentalized moments that words would shatter, cheapen, diminish... The Tao that can be spoken is not the real Tao. The most reliable way we have to communicate is through words (there are probably better ways that we haven't developed yet), and sometimes they can't touch, can't fit the feelings we have. I find different feelings and find myself using the same words to describe them. Yes, calm, yes, bliss, yes, exquisite. But so much more that I have no words for. Words tire and grow pale, but the feeling is always new and never hackneyed or tired. It can become that way if you try to box it in. Why do we keep doing that? How can we tap a power we're so bad at expressing, sharing, communicating? So often we have trouble even feeling it. But it's there. I guess we have to believe in it.

The Moony Mile

July 19, 2005. I've been in kind of an exalted, subdued state of mind today. I've been reading Stephen King's The Green Mile, and I know it's not the deepest drink of literature out there, but something in it, so mundane and human as death and stars, kind of breaks your heart down a little. To think of the sprawling night sky we never see anymore because we're in big cities watching TVs, to think of the joy it gives to a simple man sprung from death row for the night...

I want more than anything on earth to go to that Bedouin camp on the Sinai with Patrick in September when there's a new moon, I want to show him the galaxy over the Gulf. I want to show him the starfields in the water and those mountains changing color and God himself hanging back in awe of his own creation, of the life it's taken on so dazzling and exquisite and intense and vast even he can't really believe it. For us... All we can do is be knocked back on our butts and worship in drunken awe and gratitude. We're wholly unworthy... And yet we're every bit as much a part of it, every bit as gorgeous and intricate as the clear crescent moon itself. How empty the sky is over the Sinai! There's nothing between you and heaven when you're there. It's a terrifying, humbling, awesome place. So naked and raw and unspeakable.

Of course there are always Percys and Brads to stomp on every sacred thing and make you feel foolish for your starry-eyed worship of simple, everyday things. I even chide myself sometimes, but I don't care. Jesus said to be like the little children, and so did Khalil Gibran, and I think they had the right idea.

I called Patrick after I finished the book at 11:15. I couldn't bear to go to sleep utterly alone after that. He was sweet and smart and insightful as usual. He's living in the Old City of Nablus now, seems to like it. I just want him to go to the Sinai with me, that's all I want. I promise I won't steal him from his girl back home. I'm just tired of worshiping alone.

So cheap and mundane the exalted thrills of the human heart. We mock ourselves out of self-defense. We're terrified of being helpless children on death row. But that's exactly what we are. Hoping some kind of grace comes our way. Doing our pathetic, valiant best.

Pat said it was good to hear from me. I waited a week to call. He's got his own life, and I'm sure he thinks about his girl. I wonder if he thinks of me. It doesn't matter. Love is an absolute good, and we spoil it worrying all the time about whether it comes out even. When love becomes obsessive and possessive, it becomes a kind of madness, a kind of evil. I'm just glad I got to love Patrick for a bit. He's not my first or last or best or only love, but I do love him and love the times we shared together. And that's also as sacred as the clear crescent moon.

Choke Hold

May 1, 2003. Ross, one of the older black belt instructors, attacked me pretty hard the other day, was choking me from behind to prove a point, and I panicked a little, couldn't think clearly or escape, and I felt I'd black out before I could break the hold. He let me go, told me to grab the arm that was choking me and loosen that grip first, then he told me how to put my weight on him and throw him better. He attacked me again and I escaped.

But that feeling the first time, of surprise and helplessness, fear and confusion, it made me think of all the people in Iraq and elsewhere who are being and have been and will be overpowered and killed or disappeared, that helplessness and sadness and fear and rage, it seemed more immediate to me, and it made my stomach hurt. That is so many people's reality, and many don't make it to learn from their mistakes.

Rum Night

October 2003

I took a deep breath, peeled myself off the Sinai, and caught the ferry up through the Gulf of Aqaba to Jordan. The first box to check on my guidebook-driven itinerary was Wadi Rum, the spectacular desert valley where Lawrence of Arabia was filmed. The valley was punctuated by ancient stone mountains that had been sculpted into grotesquely beautiful shapes by the erosive currents of ancient seas and a billion years of wind. Some of them looked like slightly melted gothic cathedrals with flying buttresses and everything. I took a Jeep tour to see some natural bridges, ancient rock carvings, and watering holes where Bedouins served tea and sold five-minute camel rides to shirtless Hungarian tourists.

At night our guide set up camp against a sheer rock cliff and rustled up some burnt, undercooked chicken and delicious roasted tomatoes and onions. After dinner we had tea and fruit next to the cliff while a friend of our guide played his lute. The moon lit up the sand and mountains to the west and south while we were still in the moon-shade of the wall, and it was otherworldly beautiful. The border of the moon-shadow advanced on us until midnight, when the full moon cleared the cliff above us.

I wandered away to find a nice dune to sit on and take it all in. The moon had a bright ring around it about twenty moon-diameters across, which made it look like the dome of the great cathedral. The jagged stone mountains were like pillars conjured by God, and the surrounding sea of silken sand softly refracted the moonlight’s radiance. The stars, subtly colored, brilliant, three-dimensional, embedded in the silvery ink of unlikely existence, took my breath away. The breeze, neither warm nor cool, seemed to blow through me. And then—

A sudden crescendo, and I was overcome. My cup wasn’t just running over—it was being made a sheer mockery of, like a wine glass placed under a thousand-foot waterfall; I was battered utterly senseless by warm, weightless bliss and wonder. It was as clear as a diamond that there was nothing to fear and nothing to hope for; the universe was already more perfect than my wildest reckoning. Even the air shimmered, and the universe appeared as a thrillingly brimming void, a perfect sanctuary, crystalline in perfection yet warm and inviting in its carefree chaos. There was no meaningful distance between me and the stars. The only distraction from perfect happiness was a sweet, desperate longing to be a bigger vessel so that I could feel more of this vast surging current of benevolence within me all at once. Gratitude exuded from me like a scent...

Alas, alas. My reverie was punctured by my Bedouin guide ambling up the side of my dune to investigate whether the romance of the setting might incline me toward romance with him. I couldn’t bear to desecrate this setting with anything as banal as his foolish hopes or my irritation. Claiming exhaustion, I walked back to camp and lay down next to the fire, sighing as my head descended slowly out of orbit and back toward the shared reality of the everyday.

Money, cars, hotels... That was my incomprehensible tomorrow. For appearance’s sake, I knew that I would have to pretend, to convince myself, that it was all more real and more important than that moment on the dune.

Somehow, by the very next morning, I managed to.

But while I was on the dune, in my mind I wrote a poem to try to capture it, although no poem should be mistaken for the reality it tries clumsily to point toward.

A barren moon
reflects
a barren earth.

The silvery sky
mocks my best attempts
at reverence.

Elsewhere life rages.

Here it is subtle,
hushed,
as if in the presence
of divinity.

The mountains
may once have been
high as the Himalayas;
after a billion years
of seas and wind,
they are sculpted
down to unfathomable
stone hearts -
cathedral islands
in a sea of silken sand.

Reflections echo
each other
in the brimming void
of nature's holy sanctuary.
Silent gratitude
is drawn from my soul;
the night needs me
like I need it.

The breeze
- neither warm nor cool -
makes me feel
like I'm not here
on this impossible planet
whose atmosphere
I suddenly
fail to see
and fail to feel.

There is nothing
between me
and the stars.

Meaningful Casual

April 16, 2005. I have very warm feelings for Sean. I miss him viscerally right now. Thursday night we stayed up late talking, it was so nice, and then he kissed me good-night. It's confusing to act like lovers even though we're not in love. Mentally I understand what we're doing. I understand we're both at points in our lives that favor freedom over stability and commitment, and yet we can't get by without a good snog now and then, and a regular snog partner is even better.

But physically and emotionally I get attached. Not super-attached or long-term attached, and I can detach when I have to, no big problem. But I like being attached, even if it's short-term. I like a warm kiss good-night. I want to hug him right now and be warm for a boy who feels bad over his wrecked car and hates living alone in his echoing aparment in Jerusalem. It doesn't matter if he's as attached or not, and I'd much rather he be not one bit more attached to me than I am to him. Of course I love to love, and I'd love to be loved, even if it's understood that that love is subordinate to my love of freedom right now. It's still love. Love is grand, and it's so possible to kiss it as it flies. I hope.

Shelling Peas

Great Moments in Small Town Eastern Oklahoma History

The other day my mom and I were having lunch with one of the high school English teachers at the Eaton Hole, a fine establishment whose decor includes at least four dead animals, a cardboard cutout of the Ten Commandments, and enough camouflage to outfit the Viet Cong, and whose preferred sandwich bread is as white and tasteless as its clientele.

The English teacher was talking about shelling peas all day on her porch and how long it took, how annoying it was, and how few peas she actually got out of all that work.

She leaned in close to us and whispered earnestly, "You know, now I understand why people had slaves. If I had one, I'd definitely not be shelling all those peas."

This has been Great Moments in Small Town Eastern Oklahoma History. Stay tuned for our next installment...

Tumblin' in the Seaweed

One time in late 2002 or early 2003, a little boy looked at me and said, “Tumblin’ in the seaweed,” when I was tumblin’ in the seaweed while trying to surf in Santa Cruz. He said it just like that. Just looked at me and told me what I was doing, as if he or I might not have noticed it otherwise, as if the words brought the action from abstraction to reality, and then to far deeper abstraction. Just a kid! Tumblin’ in the seaweed. Just making note of something beautiful and interesting and curious. Something banal and uninspired on the one hand—the mechanics of waves, my lack of skills, the nuisance of slimy seaweed. Another Santa Cruz beach day. But the kid said the words, and I’ll never forget it. Suddenly it was cosmic, magical. What would possess a kid, of these soulless times, to say a thing like that? I still wonder.