Fear and Loathing*
We appear to be entering a new world, a world difficult to imagine even just a few weeks ago, one in which the world is wondering just what the heck happened, a world in which we are seeing our compassionate and caring side, but also our fear, greed and feelings of what we think we need (toilet paper???). But what of the countless people now locked out of work or locked down in their apartments? The servers and staffs, the fast food cooks and the counter folk, the hotel and vacation people who realize that nobody is coming and that soon their paychecks will also not arrive, and the elderly in rest homes now stuck in their minds and their rooms. To pay the rent or to feed the child?; to keep the power on or to scramble for that roll of toilet paper?; to eek out that last bit of savings or to worry about what to do tomorrow? As libraries and gyms, restaurants and corner shops, everyday stores and schools close down. children are now staying home so how does one go to work, that is IF work is still there. And now, as with any emergency, people and governments are asking why weren't we prepared? Said a piece in The Week: As Laurie Garrett writes in Foreign Policy, back in 2018, Trump "fired the government's entire pandemic response chain of command, including the White House management infrastructure." That same year the CDC cut its efforts to fight global diseases by 80 percent due to lack of funding. Trump's administration slashed funding for disease combat across the board, and eliminated a $30 million Complex Crisis Fund. His recent proposed budget would gut $3 billion in funding for health security. He would slash funding for State Department and USAID global health programs by a third, cut the CDC budget by 7 percent, cut the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria by 58 percent, and reduce U.S. contributions to the World Health Organization by half. Just three weeks ago Trump tweeted this: Low Ratings Fake News MSDNC (Comcast) & @CNN are doing everything possible to make the Caronavirus look as bad as possible, including panicking markets, if possible. Likewise their incompetent Do Nothing Democrat comrades are all talk, no action. USA in great shape! Added the article: On his radio show, Rush Limbaugh scoffed: "Yeah, I'm dead right on this. The coronavirus is the common cold, folks," and asserted the media was hyping up the disease in an attempt to harm Trump. He said the fatality rate was a mere 2 percent, adding, "That's less than the flu, folks."
Of course it is easy to lay blame at this point, to ask why more of this wasn't anticipated. And yet I can stare at my own delay in filling out my POLST, a document meant to be placed on an entry wall or a refrigerator, a directive (meant to be filled out with your doctor) asking some questions many of us don't want to face: What disease(s) or medical conditions does the patient have?...What is the likely course of the disease or condition? What will happen to the patient over time?...What treatments are available to the patient?...What is important to the patient? What makes a good quality of life? But wait, I'm healthy, I have my routine, I have plans. What, me worry? And then suddenly things change. There's an accident, a heart attack, an injury, a fire, a robbery...or maybe a virus which we know little about. It becomes a time of re-evaluating life. There was a piece in The London Review of Books that asked that question about creating a life: If we live long enough, we are unlikely to die without having at least considered what it means to bring a new life into being. Whether or not you have children, whether you want to have a child, or dread it, or both, whether you feel confident in your desire never to procreate or find that you are not able to procreate, at some point before you reach the end you will have navigated the question of whether or not to be a biological parent. If you are reading this sentence, it is almost certain that at some point, perhaps as you are making toast in your pyjamas, or taking a bus to work while looking out at the grey right angles of a city block, or dancing barefoot, or lying awake at night with the pillow too hot against your cheek, the modern fantasy of choice and control will whisper to the age-old fantasy of ‘self’ knocking about your brain that having or not having a child is a decision. And you will make it. Or you won’t. Or you will feel --with rage, or sorrow, or relief-- that it has been made for you. But the fantasy of choice quickly begins to dissipate when we acknowledge that the conditions for human flourishing are distributed so unevenly, and that, in an age of ecological catastrophe, we face a range of possible futures in which these conditions no longer reliably exist.?
One could say that this is indeed a time of change, of thinking of life throughout the world undergoing a change. As the R.E.M. song goes: That's great, it starts with an earthquake, birds and snakes, and aeroplanes...Eye of a hurricane, listen to yourself churn, world serves its own needs, don't mis-serve your own needs...And a government for hire and a combat site...But it'll do, save yourself, serve yourself, world serves its own needs, listen to your heart bleed...It's the end of the world as we know it and I feel fine. We're used to times always changing but we often appear to be caught of-guard when that change occurs suddenly. As if to emphasize this point, an 5.7 earthquake arrived this morning, rumbling our home and shaking us out of our reverie. Wake up, our planet seemed to be saying. Famed science fiction author William Gibson told The New Yorker podcast that his observation was that as writers age they begin to focus more on the end of times (guilty). After all, as one gets older the inevitability of life coming to an end becomes more and more difficult to deny, but surely not quite yet we tell ourselves. We can always prepare those documents later, those instructions that would help others figure out our passwords and accounts and wishes; our thinking is that of course our spouse/child/friend would know what we treasured and what we wanted to pass on to others (my wife has already told me that most everything of mine would be headed for a dumpster). But realistically one has to think of what you have kept of your parents, or grandparents, or great-grandparents? A picture, a plate, a necklace? We all pass on, and those tokens of material goods we once thought so valuable soon become only a few things at most.
So the virus, the earthquake, that wayward car hurtling my way...should any of those take me away tomorrow I would miss much of what is waiting to be discovered. Wild pigs with razor-sharp tusks that are growing in number (said The Week: Hunting them to control their population hasn't worked: You'd have to shoot 70 percent of the feral pig population every year just to keep it static). Who exactly are the Kurds? (said the same magazine the Kurdish peoples are...the fourth-largest ethnic group in the Middle East...have their own distinct culture and language...now numbering some 30 million.) Robots entering the construction industry? (said Fortune: SAM, a clawlike metal arm extending from a cage, moves back and forth along the walls, buttering and layering a brick every 8 to 12 seconds...MULE (another bot) can quickly lift tools, stones, and concrete panels of up to 135 pounds. The bricks being used, by the way, are much larger and heavier than what one would normally picture) Or asking what it takes to protect a single aircraft carrier? (said the London Review of Books: It has to be accompanied by two anti-submarine frigates, two air-defence destroyers, a nuclear-powered attack submarine, two tankers and a supply ship...Deploying a warship in distant waters for months on end requires two backup ships for each one in action: one working up or in transit, and one in refit or repair.) Fortune also noted that changing industry of commercial ships (300 electric/hybrid ships already exist, and cruise lines among others are embracing fuel-efficient "bubble" hulls, an idea that originated in 1865). Audubon jumped back to land and noted that the wildlife trade "is the fourth-largest global illicit trade (after narcotics, human trafficking, and counterfeit products..."); so there's certainly ivory and pangolin scales (China's lockdown exposed 20,000 illegal wildlife farms in that country), but songbirds, tegus and reptile markets? (100 alone in the U.S. of which over 200,000 people attend) So what's the big deal about capturing songbirds, you ask? The piece had this to say about birds and Newcastle disease: Capable of infecting both wild and domestic birds, Newcastle causes respiratory and nervous system problems. It is also transferable to humans. Experts are concerned that such exotic diseases could go rogue, threatening people, wildlife, and domestic birds sold legally as pets or for food. Or what about these questions such as why is space black? (hint: it isn't) or how is it that a dolphin's echo-location is 10x that of a bat, or that a harbor seal's whiskers have nearly 8x more nerve endings than a cat, or that a sheet web spider can sense upcoming atmospheric changes and release negatively charged silk which "binds" to the wind and allows them to glide nearly 1000 miles, or that an elephant can "feel" low-frequency communication through the ground and coming from another elephant up to 9 miles away (these questions and more both asked and answered by Popular Science).
In space no one can hear you scream, said Ridley Scott in his movie, Alien. But there is loneliness. With much of the world going on "lockdown" or quarantine, being alone may soon become yet another test of ourselves. People alone at sea or in space give new insight into some of our reactions to those feelings of not being able to get help or to return home quickly. In another article from Popular Science, behavioral anthropologist Jack Stuster had a chance to review anonymous diary entries from astronauts, one astronaut writing: My list of things I miss most has grown. Family first, then a shower, then a latte, then rain...I miss being under a blanket of clouds and guess I'll always be a child of the Earth." Psychology Today put it this way (regarding the possibility of extended isolation on a trip to Mars): ...consider how eager you might be to spend a romantic weekend retreat with your partner in a remote log cabin, with good wine, and a roaring fireplace. Now take away the cabin, the wine, and the fireplace, not to mention sunlight, gravity, fresh food, and a decent toilet, and image yourself marooned there for 17 months. By day 100 romance will be the last thing on your mind. Indeed, a couple on a trip to Mars would likely end up wanting to avoid each other as much as possible (which is not easy to do in a tiny space capsule).
For people now isolated in their homes or their rooms (particularly nursing homes and hospitals), time can almost become an enemy. Pareidolia and uniformity illusions, those aspects of our brains that either make us see things that aren't there or to arrange patterns into something normal, are natural and are often relegated to the back of our minds because let's face it, there's often too much to do and places to go and people to meet and those pesky bills to pay. But now, much of that is fading away (except for those bills). We are being forced to look at walls that once welcomed us as home but now are beginning to look like a prison, those walls now eerily beginning to mirror our fears and paranoia and our wants and desires, maybe forcing us to acknowledge all of those people and pieces of life that we took for granted. Whether we reach out or reach in, shift into a survivor mode or into a help-others mode, begin to start hoarding or begin to start sharing, these times will become interesting reflections of our inner selves. We can always lay blame on others and express our criticisms but the more we tire of this being alone and waiting for answers, the more we may come to see who we really are. How we look at things during these times --and it would appear that the changes now happening might just be the start-- may bring out both the best and the worst of us. There is a lot of good out there but also a lot of people in need. Whether we decide to be a part of that change may prove the main question in our lives, one we haven't had to face in a long time...but that may turn out to be a good thing. We appear to be entering the great unknown and perhaps in the process, recognizing that the big unknown may simply prove to be ourselves...
*This is a reference to Hunter Thompson's classic, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, a book which Wikipedia described this way: Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream is a 1971 novel by Hunter S. Thompson, illustrated by Ralph Steadman. The book is a roman à clef, rooted in autobiographical incidents. The story follows its protagonist, Raoul Duke, and his attorney, Dr. Gonzo, as they descend on Las Vegas to chase the American Dream through a drug-induced haze, all the while ruminating on the failure of the 1960s countercultural movement. The work is Thompson's most famous book, and is noted for its lurid descriptions of illegal drug use and its early retrospective on the culture of the 1960s. Its popularization of Thompson's highly subjective blend of fact and fiction has become known as gonzo journalism. In my opinion, the book and not the movie, says it all...
Of course it is easy to lay blame at this point, to ask why more of this wasn't anticipated. And yet I can stare at my own delay in filling out my POLST, a document meant to be placed on an entry wall or a refrigerator, a directive (meant to be filled out with your doctor) asking some questions many of us don't want to face: What disease(s) or medical conditions does the patient have?...What is the likely course of the disease or condition? What will happen to the patient over time?...What treatments are available to the patient?...What is important to the patient? What makes a good quality of life? But wait, I'm healthy, I have my routine, I have plans. What, me worry? And then suddenly things change. There's an accident, a heart attack, an injury, a fire, a robbery...or maybe a virus which we know little about. It becomes a time of re-evaluating life. There was a piece in The London Review of Books that asked that question about creating a life: If we live long enough, we are unlikely to die without having at least considered what it means to bring a new life into being. Whether or not you have children, whether you want to have a child, or dread it, or both, whether you feel confident in your desire never to procreate or find that you are not able to procreate, at some point before you reach the end you will have navigated the question of whether or not to be a biological parent. If you are reading this sentence, it is almost certain that at some point, perhaps as you are making toast in your pyjamas, or taking a bus to work while looking out at the grey right angles of a city block, or dancing barefoot, or lying awake at night with the pillow too hot against your cheek, the modern fantasy of choice and control will whisper to the age-old fantasy of ‘self’ knocking about your brain that having or not having a child is a decision. And you will make it. Or you won’t. Or you will feel --with rage, or sorrow, or relief-- that it has been made for you. But the fantasy of choice quickly begins to dissipate when we acknowledge that the conditions for human flourishing are distributed so unevenly, and that, in an age of ecological catastrophe, we face a range of possible futures in which these conditions no longer reliably exist.?
One could say that this is indeed a time of change, of thinking of life throughout the world undergoing a change. As the R.E.M. song goes: That's great, it starts with an earthquake, birds and snakes, and aeroplanes...Eye of a hurricane, listen to yourself churn, world serves its own needs, don't mis-serve your own needs...And a government for hire and a combat site...But it'll do, save yourself, serve yourself, world serves its own needs, listen to your heart bleed...It's the end of the world as we know it and I feel fine. We're used to times always changing but we often appear to be caught of-guard when that change occurs suddenly. As if to emphasize this point, an 5.7 earthquake arrived this morning, rumbling our home and shaking us out of our reverie. Wake up, our planet seemed to be saying. Famed science fiction author William Gibson told The New Yorker podcast that his observation was that as writers age they begin to focus more on the end of times (guilty). After all, as one gets older the inevitability of life coming to an end becomes more and more difficult to deny, but surely not quite yet we tell ourselves. We can always prepare those documents later, those instructions that would help others figure out our passwords and accounts and wishes; our thinking is that of course our spouse/child/friend would know what we treasured and what we wanted to pass on to others (my wife has already told me that most everything of mine would be headed for a dumpster). But realistically one has to think of what you have kept of your parents, or grandparents, or great-grandparents? A picture, a plate, a necklace? We all pass on, and those tokens of material goods we once thought so valuable soon become only a few things at most.
So the virus, the earthquake, that wayward car hurtling my way...should any of those take me away tomorrow I would miss much of what is waiting to be discovered. Wild pigs with razor-sharp tusks that are growing in number (said The Week: Hunting them to control their population hasn't worked: You'd have to shoot 70 percent of the feral pig population every year just to keep it static). Who exactly are the Kurds? (said the same magazine the Kurdish peoples are...the fourth-largest ethnic group in the Middle East...have their own distinct culture and language...now numbering some 30 million.) Robots entering the construction industry? (said Fortune: SAM, a clawlike metal arm extending from a cage, moves back and forth along the walls, buttering and layering a brick every 8 to 12 seconds...MULE (another bot) can quickly lift tools, stones, and concrete panels of up to 135 pounds. The bricks being used, by the way, are much larger and heavier than what one would normally picture) Or asking what it takes to protect a single aircraft carrier? (said the London Review of Books: It has to be accompanied by two anti-submarine frigates, two air-defence destroyers, a nuclear-powered attack submarine, two tankers and a supply ship...Deploying a warship in distant waters for months on end requires two backup ships for each one in action: one working up or in transit, and one in refit or repair.) Fortune also noted that changing industry of commercial ships (300 electric/hybrid ships already exist, and cruise lines among others are embracing fuel-efficient "bubble" hulls, an idea that originated in 1865). Audubon jumped back to land and noted that the wildlife trade "is the fourth-largest global illicit trade (after narcotics, human trafficking, and counterfeit products..."); so there's certainly ivory and pangolin scales (China's lockdown exposed 20,000 illegal wildlife farms in that country), but songbirds, tegus and reptile markets? (100 alone in the U.S. of which over 200,000 people attend) So what's the big deal about capturing songbirds, you ask? The piece had this to say about birds and Newcastle disease: Capable of infecting both wild and domestic birds, Newcastle causes respiratory and nervous system problems. It is also transferable to humans. Experts are concerned that such exotic diseases could go rogue, threatening people, wildlife, and domestic birds sold legally as pets or for food. Or what about these questions such as why is space black? (hint: it isn't) or how is it that a dolphin's echo-location is 10x that of a bat, or that a harbor seal's whiskers have nearly 8x more nerve endings than a cat, or that a sheet web spider can sense upcoming atmospheric changes and release negatively charged silk which "binds" to the wind and allows them to glide nearly 1000 miles, or that an elephant can "feel" low-frequency communication through the ground and coming from another elephant up to 9 miles away (these questions and more both asked and answered by Popular Science).
In space no one can hear you scream, said Ridley Scott in his movie, Alien. But there is loneliness. With much of the world going on "lockdown" or quarantine, being alone may soon become yet another test of ourselves. People alone at sea or in space give new insight into some of our reactions to those feelings of not being able to get help or to return home quickly. In another article from Popular Science, behavioral anthropologist Jack Stuster had a chance to review anonymous diary entries from astronauts, one astronaut writing: My list of things I miss most has grown. Family first, then a shower, then a latte, then rain...I miss being under a blanket of clouds and guess I'll always be a child of the Earth." Psychology Today put it this way (regarding the possibility of extended isolation on a trip to Mars): ...consider how eager you might be to spend a romantic weekend retreat with your partner in a remote log cabin, with good wine, and a roaring fireplace. Now take away the cabin, the wine, and the fireplace, not to mention sunlight, gravity, fresh food, and a decent toilet, and image yourself marooned there for 17 months. By day 100 romance will be the last thing on your mind. Indeed, a couple on a trip to Mars would likely end up wanting to avoid each other as much as possible (which is not easy to do in a tiny space capsule).
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Do these figures look the same? Now move closer to the image
and check again. It's our brains making a "uniform illusion."
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*This is a reference to Hunter Thompson's classic, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, a book which Wikipedia described this way: Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream is a 1971 novel by Hunter S. Thompson, illustrated by Ralph Steadman. The book is a roman à clef, rooted in autobiographical incidents. The story follows its protagonist, Raoul Duke, and his attorney, Dr. Gonzo, as they descend on Las Vegas to chase the American Dream through a drug-induced haze, all the while ruminating on the failure of the 1960s countercultural movement. The work is Thompson's most famous book, and is noted for its lurid descriptions of illegal drug use and its early retrospective on the culture of the 1960s. Its popularization of Thompson's highly subjective blend of fact and fiction has become known as gonzo journalism. In my opinion, the book and not the movie, says it all...
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