My father was a Yiddish literary star, writing short stories, essays, and novels. He lectured in Canada, the U.S., Argentina, Venezuela, the former Soviet Union, and more.  He was a Scholar-in-Residence at Oxford University.  Nobel laureate Eli Wiesel said he was “the novelist of the Warsaw Ghetto,” whose book “Ship of the Hunted” was “…cut from the cloth of truth- of creative truth.”

Yehuda Elberg was a member of the Jewish Underground during the Holocaust.  Captured three times by the Nazis, he saw friends and most of his family brutally murdered.  There is no darker view of the cloth of truth. Yet he retained a keen sense of optimism, and a drive to rebuild his family and his people after the war.

Combine Words

I’ve inherited some of his ability to combine words into a story. Thankfully, my life has been much less eventful than his.  Most of my interesting experiences were by choice, rather than life-or-death situations. Although it was exciting, marching in protest at the Pentagon is not the same as Nazi storm-troopers coming down your street to kill you. Isolating (during Covid) in an apartment with a big-screen TV and high-speed internet is not the same as hiding inside a dark cellar, where making a sound could cost the life of your family.

I want my fiction to be “…cut from the cloth of truth- of creative truth,” like my dad’s.  I want it to be exciting, and get the reader to consider some relevant truth or issue.  For example, as an anthropologist, I learned about transgender shamanism.  It’s nothing like the phenomenon in contemporary popular culture. The transgender shaman in Quantum Cannibals is a complex, conflicted, frightening person, reflecting indigenous shamanism rather than contemporary Western ideology.  Quantum Cannibal’s fictional shaman is an elucidation, rather than a lecture.

The novel The Red Badge of Courage is known for its realistic depictions of the Civil War, even though the author Stephen Crane was born after it ended.  Hans Ruesch never met an Inuk (Eskimo) in his life, but his novel Top of The World is an accurate depiction of traditional Inuit life and culture.  These writers didn’t experience the lives or events they portrayed.  They didn’t have access to Google to do research.  Nonetheless, their fictional portrayals were accurate and their stories moving.

Dangerous Truth

Creative truth can be dangerous when it crosses the floor from literature to journalism. A documentary by a “journalist” won several prestigious American journalism awards. This journalist is a member of a terrorist organization that participated in the mass slaughter in southern Israel on Oct. 7. Worse than that, the terrorists who participated in the kidnap, rape, and butchering of women and infants were honored for photographs of their barbarism.

In snuff porn films, men actually murder the women they have sex with, and sick viewers get off watching what they believe to be the truth. Some question whether the filmed murders happened, whether they emphasized ‘creative’ rather than ‘truth.’ The barbarism that the Hamas photographers documented was a reality. These were snuff films and photos in their worst sense, and it definitely happened. The creativity was in the mental gymnastics that allowed Western media to ignore the savagery in front of their eyes. The ‘cloth of creative truth’ can be used to enlighten or conceal.

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There is a sad children’s story about a Czarist Russian soldier who threatened an elderly, terrified Jewish man.  The brutal soldier rolled up his sleeve to administer a beating, revealing an ugly scar on his forearm.

The old man looked at the scar and froze.  “Yossele?” he said to the soldier.

“Huh?  Who’s Yossele?”

Tears streamed down the old man’s face, but not from fright.  “You are, my son.”

“What are you talking about?”  The soldier was confused.  “I’m Grigory.”

“Yossele, when you were a little boy, you loved to watch the Shabbat candles.  One day you went too close and burned yourself. Look at the shape of your scar.  I can never forget it.  Do you remember?”

“It was so long ago.  I don’t really—”

“Yes, you were eight years old when the Khapers (“catchers”) took you away to be a soldier.  Your mother and I didn’t even get a chance to say goodbye.  Do you remember anything?”

“When I was first taken away I was beaten for being a…  I don’t remember what.”

“A Jew, my son.  The Czar wants us to be Christian, he wants us to be regular Russians.  He took you into the army, my child because he didn’t want you to be a Jew.”

This past October (2021) I hosted (on behalf of the Canadian Institute for Jewish Research and Indigenous Bridges) a webinar From Turtle Island to Zion: Native American /Jewish/ Israel Ties Today.  The Native American participants touched upon the Residential School system, designed to isolate indigenous children from their heritage.  Just as the Czar didn’t want Yossele to be a Jew, the American and Canadian governments didn’t want Cree, Sioux or Navajo children to live as Indians.  The horrendous conditions at many of the residential schools only became a public concern in recent years.

Finding Yossele

I read the Yossele story many years ago, but never thought about it much.  Ira Robinson, a Jewish Studies professor contacted me after the webinar.  He said the Indian Residential Schools reminded him very much of the Cantonist system of Russia.  I looked it up, and found Yossele and his father.  Jewish boys from the age of eight, were taken to serve in the Russian army for twenty-five years.  Rather than save the child, it amounted to a literal death sentence for many of them.  Boys too young to fight (under eighteen) were taken from their homes and families and brought up in the interior of Russia until they were old enough to join a regiment.

“They brought the children and formed them into regular ranks: it was one of the most awful sights I have ever seen, those poor, poor children! Boys of twelve or thirteen might somehow have survived it, but little fellows of eight and ten… Not even a brush full of black paint could put such horror on canvas. Pale, exhausted, with frightened faces, they stood in thick, clumsy, soldiers’ overcoats, with stand-up collars, fixing helpless, pitiful eyes on the garrison soldiers who were roughly getting them into ranks. The white lips, the blue rings under their eyes, bore witness to fever or chill. And these sick children, without care or kindness, exposed to the icy wind that blows unobstructed from the Arctic Ocean were going to their graves” (A. Herzen, My Past and Thoughts, 1 (1968), 219–20), cited in https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/cantonists.

The conscripts were needed to fight wars, but this was not the only purpose of the Cantonist system.  Czar Nicholas considered the army to be best residential school in Russia, so Jews were conscripted at twice the rate of Christians.  The children were forced to violate the Sabbath, eat non-kosher food, and forbidden to speak their language.  They were tortured until they agreed to convert, at which point their names were changed, and they were considered to be children of non-Jewish sponsors.  It was a policy of “kill the Jew, save the child.”

It didn’t matter if it killed the child

“The last awful scene connected with that system of recruiting children took place at Orel, when one winter’s night more than a hundred little boys were taken to town on sledges, but on taking them out they were found to be frozen to death, like poultry carried to market.”   –From: The Occident and American Jewish Advocate, January 1863

The Residential School system developed in Canada about fifty years after the Russian Cantonist program.  It had a similar agenda: to de-culture and integrate an alien population.  Some schools were near the native communities.  Many were boarding schools that tore families apart, transporting young children halfway across the country.

The pedagogical methods were not particularly effective in promoting literacy or teaching simple arithmetic, but that didn’t really matter.  The goal of the schools was not what they could put into the student, but rather what they could remove: a culture, a way of life.  Speaking your native tongue, even to your fellow students was a serious offense.  My friend Robert recalled the heavy stick hitting his back; punishment for speaking Cree.

Another friend’s grandfather had a mousetrap closed on his tongue for the same offense.   In a scenario more appropriate to a prison rather than a school, there were small manacles attached to the walls, to keep the students from running.  Often children were shackled to their beds.  Many had their faces rubbed in urine and excrement.

Students had to work on the schools’ farms, but the only vegetables given them were animal fodder.  They got one egg a year from the farm’s chickens.  Covered in lice, weak from malnutrition and the cold, it’s no wonder that in the early twentieth century, a quarter of the previously healthy children died in the schools.  It’s estimated that of the children who were sent home because of their illnesses, half to three quarters passed away after being released.  It was an odd way to save the child.

Sexual abuse was rampant.  Some contemporary religious institutions are infamous for their treatment of people they were responsible for.  In the Residential Schools, more so.  My colleague Amos described how the teenage boys were lined up after their shower so the missionary’s sister could inspect them.  It’s estimated that at some schools upwards of seventy percent of students faced some form of sexual abuse.  Rarely were any of the perpetrators punished.

Reasons

The Czar had his reasons to implement the Cantonist conscription program.  He primarily wanted to make the Jews into non-Jews (Christians), force them, ostensibly for their own benefit, to modernize.  One of the leading Hassidic rabbis had supported the Czar against Napoleon because he didn’t want Jews to be free to modernize.  So instead the Czar ripped tens of thousands of Jewish children from their homes in order to ‘modernize’ them.  His policy was to kill the Jew, save the child.

The governments of Canada and the U.S. had their reasons for implementing the Residential School programs.  They wanted to make the Native Americans into non-natives (Christians), force them, ostensibly for their own benefit, to modernize.  Government officials felt that way of life of many communities (eg. the fur trade) was no longer economically viable and would lead to starvation.  But by the time students were eighteen years old, most students had reached no higher than grade five.  This gave them little economic advantage in exchange for the torture, abuse, and death they suffered.  The policy of kill the Indian, save the child very often killed the Indian and the child.

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Happy New Year (we hope)

It’s the five thousand, seven hundred and eighty second birthday of that fourteen-billion-year-old ball of rock and water we call home (see Happy Quantum New Year for the math).  The day is relevant to all humans, not just the Jews.  After a year like 5781, everyone should take it seriously.

It’s not just that the COVID pandemic is so intractable.  There’s also the inability of many to have a calm discussion about it.  “Follow the science,” but science isn’t on a single path.  At times, we have to rely on common sense, a resource that’s been sorely lacking this past year.

Now let’s take Afghanistan.  Oh, wait, it’s already been taken by the Taliban.  They’re now in possession of billions of dollars worth of abandoned high-tech weapons developed by western nations such as Britain, the US and Israel.  The Taliban aren’t our friends, and we can be sure that this technology will soon be in the hands of our enemies, such as Iran and China.

Choose Life

It’s an accepted principle in Judaism that our fate for the coming year is written in a book on Rosh Hashanah, the New Year.  But just before the holiday, we have a Bible reading that says “I have put before you life and death, blessing and curse.  Choose life.”  Rabbi Ronnie Hasson cites the medieval sage Maimonides that the verse teaches that “anything that a person wants to do, he has the ability to do…” and God will not interfere.  We must take responsibility for all that happens to us.  God rewards and punishes precisely because we have free will… Our success is due to many factors including the effort we put in, the decisions we make, the opportunities we capture, etc. We can’t blame God for our failures if we haven’t made the appropriate choices.

The Canadian government chose to allow Chinese scientists (later expelled) to work at the virology lab in Winnipeg.  The Americans chose to fund the Wuhan lab.  Should we say the pandemic is God’s will, or the result of horrible human choices?  When our own weaponry is used against us, whether in acts of terrorism or acts of war, is it God’s will, or people’s (leaders’) stupidity that’s the cause?

5781 is over.  What will we choose in the year 5782?

I wish you a healthy year, I wish you a happy year.  I wish that you make the appropriate decisions, and choose life.

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Though answers may change, many questions stand.  Dr. Anthony Fauci made an important statement about the fluid responses to the Wuhan virus.

“So when you hear someone say something at one point and then two or three months later, if you stick with what you said at the original time when you had one-fifth of the data that you have now, I think that would be inappropriate.”

COVID is something new.  People panicked as it mutated into a global pandemic, not knowing what it is or how to respond.

Difficult questions

• Did COVID come from the lab or wet market in Wuhan?

  

• Was it deliberately enhanced by the Chinese government to make it more deadly?
• Did Xi Jinping (Chinese leader) deliberately spread the virus throughout the world?
• Is it Satan’s, Tam’s, Trump’s, Trudeau’s, Fauci’s, or the World Health Organization’s fault?
• Does closing borders help prevent the spread?
• Are lockdowns effective?
• Do medical grade masks help?
• Do dollar store grade masks help?
• Are the vaccines deadly, effective, or somewhere in between?
• Do ventilators help or harm patients?
• Is hydroxychloroquine a helpful treatment or a placebo?

So many questions.  So many deaths, so much suffering.  Not just from the illness, but from the disruption it caused.  So many people lost their livelihoods, so many other diseases went undiagnosed, untreated.

There are answers to all these questions.  The virus originated somewhere.  The ventilators had an effect.  Masks do something, but we don’t know where or how much.  We may never know.  The questions stand.

The Talmud, a book of Jewish law and tradition consists mostly of records of discussions between rabbis.  Sometimes they agree with each other, sometimes not.  The rabbis challenge each other with difficult questions.  There are many they cannot resolve, so they declare “Taiku.”  It’s an Aramaic word saying the questions stand unanswered.   It’s also popularly explained as an acronym for a declaration that Elijah the Prophet will answer all questions with the advent of the Messiah.  A declaration of “Taiku” is not an admission of failure.

The man Taiku

Taiku is also the name of a character in Quantum Cannibals.  As the chief of a thriving Bronze-Age village Taiku has to build roads, stop bandits,

calm ethnic hostility, and protect refugees, all the while facing an unfathomable foe that threatens to destroy his world.  He has many decisions, many questions, but his best source of answers has been murdered.

The invader follows its own version of the real 1999 People’s Liberation Army (China) military treatise “Unrestricted Warfare.” The authors of this

frightening work stress that there is no distinction between war and peace, and that all means should be used to defeat the enemy.

Taiku knows how to deal with most of the issues he faces, but on too many there is no clear answer.  The questions stand.

There are few clear answers regarding COVID, its origins or how to deal with it.  So much of what was assumed to be true at its outset has been proven false, and vice versa.  Politicians have to make informed guesses, relying on experts who for the most part, are also making informed guesses.  One says “left,” the other says “right.”  The questions stand, but the leaders cannot stand still; they are obliged to act.  In hindsight we know who to call brilliant, who to condemn for his foolishness.

We’re hopefully approaching the end of the COVID pandemic.  Would it have come quicker if our leaders had acted differently?  That’s another question that will stand.

Does Taiku get the answers he needs to save his world?  Read Quantum Cannibals to find out.

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The novel Quantum Cannibals has a large cast of characters, some evil, some saintly.  Most are complex, neither black nor white.  A person can be a good character, but simply confused when facing an impossible situation.  All of the characters in the book are intended to reflect back on our non-fictional world, to say something about how we can respond to both the impossible and the ordinary.

Many of the characters were inspired by real-world people or other fictional characters.  Nonetheless, Quantum Cannibals is a work of fiction.  Names and characters are products of my imagination and are not to be construed as real.

I will write a series of “Good Character” posts, introducing people from the novel: who was their inspiration, and what is their relevance today.  Some of the people (and their inspiration) you will meet are:

• Eric (Eric Cartman, from TV show South Park)
• Alex (poet Allen Ginsberg)
• Simon (the Rabbinic sage and mystic Simon bar Yochai)
• Lillith (Lillith)
• Asenath (Asenath Barzani, a 16^th century religious academy leader in Kurdistan)
• Mustafa (Ottoman general, Siege of Famagusta (Cyprus), 1570-71)

  

• Aua (early 20^th Inuk (Eskimo) shaman)
• Taiku (the Talmudic concept of a question that cannot yet be answered)

Some people say I’m too didactic, always finding a lesson in something.  Others say I’m always making jokes out of everything.  I hope when you read the “Good Character” posts that follow, they inspire you to reflect, and inspire you to laugh.

Oh, yeah, and inspire you to buy and read the novel.

Click here to read the post about Alex/Ginsberg/Cuties, and romanticizing kiddie porn

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I’ve been victimized by sexual violence.  Lucky me; it’s happened twice, and I was horrified.

Let me clarify.  I wasn’t horrified when it happened.  I thought it was funny back then, and laughed.  Rather, I was horrified when told that what happened to me was sexual violence.  An educational program I’m taking recently obliged all students to take an online course on that subject.  Catcalls, they said, was sexual violence. A quick grope also fit the category. The course to prevent sexual violence trivialized it instead, and I think that’s horrible.

I don’t remember exactly what those gay guys yelled at me as I passed, but it was lewd.  I don’t even remember where it happened, just that it did. My response was to wave back at the guys, blow them a kiss and continue on my way.  I didn’t think much of it till recently, when the sexual violence classification upgraded my experience.

Even more violent was the grope.  I had been hitch-hiking to my newspaper route at four in the morning.  When the driver stopped at my destination he reached over and grabbed my crotch, making a lascivious remark.  I smiled, got out of the car, and delivered my papers. I decided not to be upset, and promptly put the grope out of my mind till it was horribly brought back by this online course.  Now I wonder if I have PTSD or need years of therapy to help me recover.

Intense Anger

Nope.  Except for intense anger, I’m good.  I’m not mad at the guy who groped me or the fellows that made lewd remarks as I sashayed past them.  I’m furious with the people who put together that online course, the people who equated catcalls and a quick grope with physical violence, with forced sexual contact.  I’ve talked with women who have been raped, or beaten for resisting rape. It wasn’t something they could laugh about afterwards. It’s a qualitatively different experience.

In my novel Quantum Cannibals the main character is gang-raped.  A friend of hers is gang-raped. Revenge is the only therapy available to them.  Read the novel to find out how they dealt with it.

In the #MeToo era, every act, every word can be spun into being a form of aggression.  True sexual violence, brutal sexual violence gets buried under the detritus of hurt feelings and trumped-up sensitivities.  When everyone’s a victim the authentic victims don’t get the attention, certainly not the revenge or catharsis they deserve.  The online course that I took was in itself a form of sexual violence.

What Is Suffering?

Half a century ago suffering was looked upon as a moral, religious or even philosophical issue. What did it mean, and did that meaning provide any comfort to those who were suffering?  With the intense secularization of western industrial societies in the latter part of the twentieth century, suffering became rationalized: an issue to be treated either through drugs, psychiatry, or the wide range of happiness industries.  With #MeToo the ordeal of sexual victim-hood regained a moral flavor, but without any chance for meaning. The only treatment is to widen the definition, name more culprits, identify more people as victims.

That’s the spirit in which my two experiences were labelled as violence.  It’s not a comforting spirit. How much worse it must be for the people who have suffered real, physical sexual violence.

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A beautiful demon rapes a human, who enjoys it.  The demon then accuses the human of raping her.

When I composed this scene for my novel Quantum Cannibals (publication date Nov. 2018), I thought it fictional.  In the contemporary non-fictional world (such as it is), the #MeToo movement has brought the demons out from their hiding places.

Personally, I’m glad I’m an old fart, happily married to a beautiful woman.  I’d hate to be on the make today, looking for ladies to sle*p with.  It’s way too complicated.  Despite the long-ago success of the sexual revolution, things today are more testy than they were when Ed Sullivan was afraid to show Elvis’

gyrating hips on Sunday TV.

An approved style of life

Today there’s no stigma attached to pre-marital sex, and adultery is considered by many as an approved style of life.  A girl who sleeps around is no longer considered bad; just as guys are supposed to sleep around, so are women.  In literature, in film, all kinds of sexual behavior is tolerated, even praised.

A problem now is that every consent for nookie carries with it the implied right for the woman to withdraw or deny consent subsequent to the act.  Even if the woman sends you love notes after you’ve been together, it doesn’t mean that she still consents to the sex you already had.  And even if you have done nothing together, you can still be convicted or your reputation ruined, just on the basis of a woman’s accusation.  It can be vague, it can be inconsistent, but the accusation is accepted (unless of course she has the wrong political affiliation).

Go away before I call the police

In olden times it was simple.  “Yes” meant “yes,” “no” meant “try harder” or “get lost.” “Go away before I call the police” meant “no.”  “Maybe some other time” meant “up your game.”  I had some difficulty with the jargon.  When a woman told me “no,” or “go f*ck yourself,” I took it as a definitive rejection.  I can’t tell you how many times women got upset with me because I stopped trying when they said “no.”  I would have had many more notches on my Winchester

if I had relied on the simple jargon of those times.  Then again, if I had always interpreted “no” as “try harder,” I might have ended acting like Bill Cosby.  Better to do without than turn into a sex demon.  Some behavior, whether or not it’s part of the approved style of life, should be rejected.

These days who knows what yes, no, and go f*ck yourself mean.  It’s even worse.  A man might see a gorgeous blonde with a nice rack and want to get to know her.  Then he finds out she identifies as a guy.  Then he finds out she’s gay.  Is she a gay man, or a gay woman?  If the former, it means she wants to be with a guy, so maybe it’s good.  If the latter, it means… well, who the hell knows what it means?  Perhaps she/he/it identifies as a Catholic priest and is celibate or looking for someone way younger than you.

“…between the approved style of life and the assumed structure of reality, there is conceived to be a simple and fundamental congruence such that they complete one another and lend one another meaning.” –Clifford Geertz, anthropologist

Life gets more complicated all the time.  It’s not just advanced technology or an opaque economic system.  The fact is that Western culture is being dismantled and reconstructed, taking a principle from here, a value from there, and duct-taping them into some kind of bizarre structure.  The pieces, beliefs, and doctrines no longer fit each other, and Western society is teetering.  The “approved style of life” and “the assumed structure of reality” are no longer congruent.  Perhaps that’s why so many people look favorably at Islam, with its unequivocal social and sexual roles, where the primary value is to “submit.”  Freedom, which most westerners view as essential to their approved style of life, will vanish into the midden heap of the tolerated structure of reality.

Do we want to lose our freedom? If the answer is no, try harder.

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I’m grateful it’s so cold outside.  Not just bitterly cold, but skin-numbing cold.  Frostbite cold.  Not to mention windy, making the weather even more unpleasant, maybe dangerous.  (Much warmer though, than what the exiles face in the novel Quantum Cannibals)

I’m Grateful for Wood

Maybe I should go chop some firewood.  On a cold day like this you can go through a stack of wood pretty damned quick.  It’s supposed to cool down later this week, so even a full cord might not be enough.  Need to split a lot of pine to keep warm in this weather.

I’m getting old for that, though.  The usual ailments of age prevent me from swinging an axe like I used to, carrying armfuls of logs over to the fire.  Besides which, it’s cold out there.  Chopping wood warms you up, but it’s still damned cold.  Not only that, my city has banned fireplaces and wood stoves, unless they are some damned high-tech device that burn clean, that don’t emit carbon.  Hell, wood is carbon.  I’m carbon, everything alive is carbon.

I’m Grateful For Oil

Yes, keeping the wood fire burning is going to be a problem.  Maybe instead I’ll just phone the oil company to come fill up my tank.  But it’s not really necessary.  They have a formula that tells them when I need oil, and then they come on their own.  It’s real convenient, and I’m grateful for it.  I don’t have to pay the driver; the company just puts it on my credit card, and emails me about it.

Sure is a lot easier than sharpening my axe, standing outside and splitting pine, then carrying the whole damned thing inside.  My neighbors would be pissed at me anyways if I cut down the trees around my backyard.  Would also be in violation of municipal bylaws. Be a hell of a chore to have a sweet-smelling

fire, to keep warm naturally.  I sure am grateful to the oil company that makes the delivery.  I’m grateful for the rail companies, the shipping lines that bring the oil from the refineries.  Would be grateful to the pipeline companies that transported the oil, but the damned environmentalists blocked them.  So the heating oil in my tank comes from places like Saudi Arabia and Venezuela.  Those self-righteous “progressives” are forcing me to send money to some of the meanest places on earth.

I’m grateful, but those railways aren’t safe.  Ask the people of Lac Megantic, where an oil train that was parked for the night killed forty-seven people.  My town

is surrounded by railroad tracks, and I got to tell you, I don’t feel that comfortable when those oil cars go rumbling by.

I’m grateful for my electricity.  If it wasn’t so cold, my heat pump would be warming my house, wringing heat out of the cold outside air and stashing it inside.  I’m grateful for the dependable power that runs it, and for the ingenious people who thought of using winter cold to heat a home.

I’m Grateful I’m Not Progressive

Got to tell you, when I was younger I was one of those self-righteous “progressives” trying to get in the way of energy.  The government wanted to build a bunch of dams up north; the Indians and Eskimos didn’t want them to.  I was part of the team collecting proof that the natives could use in court.  To make a long story short, the dams got built, but the Cree Indians and the Inuit got really good deals that made their lives a lot better.  Hey, a community of four hundred people has its own five-million dollar airstrip, long enough to handle jets.

When I was living in a tipi with a Cree family, I didn’t get too bothered when the temperature hit forty below at night.  The head of the family, not me, was the one who got up before sunrise to bring in wood and get the  fire started, as I stayed snug in my sleeping bag.  I was grateful not to get up till the place warmed up.

I’m the head of the family now (okay, my wife is).  It’s my job to warm up the house in the morning.  So I trudge down to the thermostat, press a button a couple of times, and let the furnace do its job.  I could program the thermostat, but I like doing things manually.  It’s how I ‘rough it’ these days.

I don’t want to be an ingrate, so I ‘like’ and ‘share’ Facebook posts promoting rational oil development.  Yeah, I’m a real activist.  I write letters to my Member of Parliament, to my newspaper (digital edition).  I talk to people about oil, about electricity.  I listen too, when my Indian friends tell me of the risks of a pipeline, the treaties that were ignored, the people who were harmed.

Everything has its dangers, everything has its risks.  I’d be grateful if everybody bitching about oil thought about how much better it’s made our lives, about the dangers of having to live without it.  I don’t want to go outside now to split wood.  I’m too old, it’s too damned cold, and anyways I got rid of my axe a long time ago.

The post I’m Grateful It’s Cold appeared first on Quantum Cannibals.

They did not foresee…  the development of a vast mass communications industry, concerned in the main neither with the true nor the false, but with the unreal, the more or less totally irrelevant

Aldous Huxley

We all like good Theater.  Something terrible happens to an innocent victim (or victims), the good guys scurry around trying to find out how and why the tragedy occurred, use all their resources to make sure the evildoers get punished, and it doesn’t happen again.  The audience comes away feeling that despite mishaps, the world is on the right trajectory, a safe place to be.

Take the theatrical aftermath of the recent bike path terror attack in New York City.  Or the van driving down a pedestrian mall in Barcelona.  Or the bomb outside the Ariana Grande concert in England.  Or any of the countless attacks in recent years, some resulting in some minor injuries, other killing dozens.

In the Theater of Fear, a regular script is followed.  First, thoughts and prayers to the victims.  Then outrage, saying that the victims’ city/nation/civilization won’t be intimidated. Then the investigations, where government and police vow to get to the bottom of things.  The authorities take some action to make sure the same attack can’t be replicated.  Like closing the barn doors after the cows have died.

 In “Brave New World” non-stop distractions of the most fascinating nature are deliberately used as instruments of policy, for the purpose of preventing people from paying too much attention to the realities of the social and political situation.

Aldous Huxley

Soon there’s a football game, or a celebrity does something scandalous and everything is under control (or at least forgotten) till the next act of the Theater of Fear.  Hopefully it will take place far away.  And the whole cycle is repeated.

What do the thoughts and prayers accomplish? They comfort the spectators, those not touched by the tragedy.  The outrage?  It masks people’s feeling of vulnerability.  Investigation?  It gives the population a sense that the terrorists are being dealt with.

Given enough time and resources, the investigators will be able to determine whether the terrorist yelling a fourteen hundred year battle cry was acting on behalf of some religious ideology.  They will probably decide that he was acting on his own, not part of some nefarious plot to take over the world.

It’s all Theater of fear, a diversion.  It doesn’t matter whether a terrorist is part of a tightly controlled organization, or acting on his own.  Sowing havoc doesn’t require great coordination, complex weapons or financing.  We know what the terrorists’ motives are.  We know what population they come from.  We know how to stop them.

But that requires abandoning the theatrics, the grand pronouncements of prayer, outrage and inquiry.  It means doing what we already know has to be done, even though it goes against the grain of what our advanced society is supposed to stand for.  The alternative is to succumb to the forces of evil, that have placed this drama, this horror upon us.  The Theater of Fear is for real.

Only the vigilant can maintain their liberties, and only those who are constantly and intelligently on the spot can hope to govern themselves effectively by democratic procedures. A society, most of whose members spend a great part of their time… somewhere else, in the irrelevant other worlds of sport and soap opera, of mythology and metaphysical fantasy, will find it hard to resist the encroachments of those would manipulate and control it.

Aldous Huxley

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