Phantom and Admission Review

Phantom and Admission, Movie Review

Every Monday is two for one DVD night at our local video store. Sometimes I pick my movie based on the number of tomatoes it earns on rottentomatoes.com's "tomato meter". Other times, I do not. Either the movie did not turn up on my tomato meter radar (I only read the reviews of movies that make more than 90 percent at rotten tomatoes), or, at the store, I cannot remember how well it did.

At such times, I have to rely only on the blurb on the back of the box -- our video store prints it out in large, senior friendly letters on the back of their boxes. The letters are so large that sometimes, when I forget my glasses, I can still, with effort, make out what the blurb has to say about the movie.

Last night, my double feature consisted of Phantom, a submarine drama, and Admission, which is billed as a light, romcom. Phantom I could not recall seeing at tomatoes. So I had only this:

"A submarine captain suffering from mind-altering seizures (Which are identified in the movie as epilepsy. Why not use the word?) is forced to leave his family when he is rushed into a classified mission. (As opposed to all the submarine crew who do not leave their families?) Haunted by his past and challenged by a rogue KGB group bent on seizing control of the ship's nuclear missile, the fate of humanity rests in the captain's hands when he discovers he was chosen for the mission in the belief he would fail."

I picked this film because I do not like to be bored at my double feature; it looked exiting, an action movie. It worked quite well, the male lead was impressive and carried it well. It seemed realistic, considering that the movie, while based on real events, is utter speculation from start to finish. All we really know is that a Soviet submarine sank in the late 1960's. That is all historians really can be sure of, so top secret was the mission, then and now. If everything in the sub happened as in the movie, we would all owe our lives to this submarine captain who saved civilization from nuclear annihilation.

It was not hard to lose yourself in the film, so realistic are the sets and sounds, but you have to get used to hearing supposedly Russian crewmen speaking American accented English. I thought that they could at least have pronounced the names in the Russian way. It is jarring to hear the name "Vladimir" mangled in the American way, instead of the guttural expletive that Russian mouths spit out. The crew, using an old-even-then diesel submarine, seem impressively competent. The ending is strange, they seem to dredge the sub home to Russia, though the ending titles explain that the sub, or at least its top secret "phantom" cloaking device, remains in American hands.

Admission is a Tina Fay vehicle that, I recalled, did fairly well on the Tomato meter. Still, the story of a university admissions officer, named Portia, no less? How romantic or even interesting can that be? Indeed, one adolescent character, who is forced to travel the world with his adoptive father, romanticizes Portia's boring existence.

Not so much boring, actually, as superfluous.

Admissions officers should not even exist. Universities get to cherry-pick who their students are going to be? Is not that like letting doctors pick only healthy people to cure? Or hiring cops only for places where no crime takes place?

Actually, one character, Portia's romantic rival, picks up on that feeling. She says to Portia something like, "In England our universities do not use the broad criteria of American colleges. We pick students only based on marks. For us, it is the gray cells that matter." Here am I thinking, is that better, or worse? If you have students so smart that you do not really have to teach them, will that not tempt the school not to bother about teaching at all?

Imagine a police department that has few criminals to deal with, and which also is tasked with criminology research. Which is likely to be emphasized, crime fighting or research? Which enhances the reputation of a school like Portia's Stanford, teaching or research? If she does her job well they will not have to worry much about teaching; all the students will teach themselves. They will enter the elite and give full credit to the brand's degree.

There should be a name for this sort of movie, ones that bill themselves as romantic comedies but which are really something else. In this case, Admission is too humorless to be a comedy, and not serious enough to be a drama. Call it an "anomie" flick.

In spite of the lead actor's proven amiability and skill, it is very hard to sympathize with Tina Fey's Portia. She lives with a man for I forget how many years, then when he leaves her for another woman, she can only pretend to care about it. She is depressed, but not primarily because of her relationships. She sees the futility of her work, but does not seek for more. She does find it useful, though, to pretend she is living a tragedy, to play on the pity that her breakup arouses in rivals and colleagues, and turn it to her own ends. She is no motherly type, but the only passion that she shows is for a boy that she thinks is her son. When it turns out that he is not, really, by then the viewer is past caring.

So lacking in commitment is Portia that nothing works out for her, and ultimately, she does not much care. So, why should we?

The feeling you get at the end is a mild sort of fleeting melancholy. Mild because her anomie is just what she has sown and reaped. In the same way, failure to even address its job as an institution of learning is what Stanford seeks and finds. Finally, Portia stands up for a student who seems actually to need to be taught. She pulls a fast one and gets him accepted, even at the price of being fired. Ironically, though, this boy is an autodidact, someone who educated himself. Even more than other applicants, he does not need to go to school in order to learn. He says that he saw early on that he had lousy teachers and role models, so he decided to teach himself. The ideal candidate, actually, for a lousy but high status school. Just what the elite schools seek, someone who requires as little teaching and guidance as possible. Clearly, Portia should not have been fired for picking him, because she was hired to do just this. Anyone who needs good teaching in order to progress, that is the student that needs to be weeded out.

In a sane world, institutions of learning would never get to pick the students they teach, any more than police departments can pick the neighbourhood they patrol, or doctors can weed out sick patients. There would be a separate admissions body that would assign applicants to a school based on sortition (that is, a completely random choice of individuals by lottery). First of all, it would eliminate students who are not capable of higher education. How long does it take for a computer to sort that out, a split second?

Then, everyone would be a candidate.

That is, Stanford would be assigned kids that are rich, middle class and poor, youths with high, middling and low marks, all based on clear statistical criteria. It would be forced to do its job, teaching. Education is a long term thing, but it would only take a generation or two using sortitioning to find out which schools really are elite schools, and which really do deserve to be at the bottom of the heap. The result would be a less elitist, a more democratic society.

 ----

Postscript: Not many movie reviews have a postscript, but this one does. I just read Leo Tolstoy’s assessment of the novels of Guy de Maupassant, and here he lays out three “conditions of a true artistic production,” it needs,

1. the correct, that is, the moral, relation of the author to the subject,

2. the beauty of form, and

3. sincerity, that is, love for what the author describes.

He goes on to point out that when approaching such a work of art, once it has passed these three tests, is to ask, what does the artist have to say that is new?

This movie was clearly written by someone very familiar with the subject matter, that is, the life of an admissions officer. That was new, for me. But beyond that, the artistic value of this film is its statement that it is unlikely that correctness, beauty and sincerity are even possible in today’s moral climate. There is no tragedy in a relationship breaking up that neither party committed to in the first place. Personal anguish, perhaps, but no tragedy. Tragedy and drama require more of the individual than the characters in this film are willing to give. All we can hope for is an ungainly, unpretty, unfunny comedy.

Pilots Need Love Too

My daughter Silvie’s latest artwork.

August 07, 2012

Man of Stele

By John Taylor; 2010 Oct 04, Mashiyyat 08, 167 BE

Hammurabi (d. 1750 BCE) was a king of Babylon best known today for a code of laws that he promulgated in Akkadian (the language of the common people) throughout his dominion on clay tablets. Because these tablets were accessible only to a literate elite, he also had steles, stone monuments or pillars about as tall as a person, placed in the center of public places in every town. On the surface of these pillars were written, in cuneiform script, some 281 concise laws, each laying out a specific transgression followed by its punishment, which was usually severe by today's standards. Hammurabi proclaimed that anyone complaining of an injustice need only go and consult the writing on the stele in order to find out what recourse there was in his law.

In 1901, a "diorite stele in the shape of a huge index finger, 2.25 m or 7.4 ft tall" with nearly the complete code written on it was uncovered near the ancient capital of Susa, and it is now on display in the Louvre Museum. (see <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hammurabi>, and, <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code_of_Hammurabi>) The idea of using a stele to publicize the content of laws had been around for centuries when Hammurabi came along. Nonetheless, because of the perfect condition of this "finger stele," we now associate this technique with him. The "fingernail" of the stele's finger contains bas relief images as well as text. That means that the citizens of 1700 BCE had a more immediate multimedia experience in reading their laws than we do with our far more complex modern legal systems.

I think that it is highly significant that Hammurabi, or whatever leader it was that originally came up with this idea, chose his index finger as a symbolic display for his codex. Actually, I do not think that this is even a symbol or metaphor -- it is exactly, literally what we do with our index fingers. We use them to give instructions, to indicate direction, to assert authority, threaten punishment or even to express puzzlement, saying "Wait a second here." We wag our index finger when a right is violated, and we curl it when we want someone to come hither. This is our first and main pointer.

So natural does such use of the index finger seem that when I had small children I remember being surprised that I had to teach it to them. When they asked where something was, I sometimes had to literally take their face in my hand and turn it so that they would look at my finger. When performing a search they seemed to expect verbal directions as a matter of course while I, being lazy, prefer non-verbal indicators. Even now that they are 11 and 16 years old I sometimes have to say to them, "Look at my finger," before they will look in the right direction. So, evidently, did Hammurabi.

The index finger also seems to be tied into written language. It would be very clumsy to write with a pen without using the index finger, though perhaps less so to wield a hammer and chisel to inscribe the ancient cuneiform script into a clay tablet. It is interesting that in some of the pre-literate languages of the oldest culture in the world, the Aboriginals of Australia, the need for relative pointers like the index finger was largely eliminated. Instead of learning concepts like "left" or "right," it is expected that everyone will constantly maintain a mental compass in their head. For example, instead of warning someone that there is a bee approaching their left foot, they will say, "Look out, there is a bee approaching the northwest of your foot." Since the first thing most people do when they hear such urgent news is to spin around in panic, the Aboriginal way seems more practical in such situations. Only when agriculture helps a population grow large and the people trade with and mix with foreigners, as they did in Mesopotamia, is there a clear necessity to throw out implicit assumptions about what others know and lay down the law by combining written symbols with non-verbal indicators, as does the finger-shaped stile.

I think that we need to revive the stele, and not only in promulgating laws but for just about every serious, directed purpose. Now that computers and the Internet are ubiquitous, we can use stiles not only as displays but also as interfaces, as points of interaction with every center of power and authority.

Three Directions of the Stele

The electronic stele would be indispensible in a Comenian inspired cosmopolis. The finger can point in three dimensions, upwards towards Platonic, eternal forms and ideals (art and religion), sideways towards other people (politics and peace studies) and inwards or outwards, to the depth dimensions of enlightenment, science and education. Just as the stele indicated for the ancient Babylonians what the law was on any given issue, an electronic stile interface, with a computer monitor where the "fingernail" is placed, can indicate which modality of governance is involved, the consistory, the college or the Dicastery. Hence, to repeat,

The stele's finger pointed upwards is religion, the interfaith consistory of holiness, which deals with whatever extends beyond the time scale of this particular generation. The classic images are Michelangelo’s (1475-1574) portrait of Plato, pointing heavenwards, or of the creation, with God pointing an index finger directly at the drooping hand of Adam.

The stele pointing sideways is practical politics, the Dicastery of Peace, dealing with our worldly relations with other human beings. This dimension is concerned with practical end results, which conduce to wisdom, harmony, reciprocity and, in a word, peace. Michelangelo’s image is of Aristotle, extending an outstretched hand palm down, indicating the broadness and moderation that is the foundation of this entire dimension.

Finally, there is the stele pointing in the inward or outward dimension, towards enlightenment, philosophy, education and science, which are the jobs of the College of Light. The concern of this stele is to deepen our understanding and to express that in our service. An example in the same artist's work may be the recently discovered self-portrait of Michelangelo in "The Crucifixion of Saint Peter." (1550) Here he looks along the arm and pointed finger of another horseman, pointing in the direction of the feet of the saint being crucified upside-down.

Another image that springs to mind is the war recruitment poster of a stern man pointing his index finger directly at the viewer, captioned, "Uncle Sam needs you."

As our technology becomes more sophisticated it will become wholly interactive. One day I see children raised and educated in regular dialogue with robot stiles -- situated in their own room, in the family household, in the community and everywhere they go. These stiles will be designed to explicate rules and laws of world governance, pointing in the three directions and dimensions that were laid out by John Amos Comenius, and others.

Review of "The Road"

The Flesh of Others

By John Taylor; 2010 June 04, Azamat 17, 167 BE

The Road, A Movie Review

The Road is part of the genre known as post-apocalyptic fiction. These normally are stories of rebuilding after an unimaginably huge disaster; ultimately, they are stories of hope. Not in this case.

I first heard about "The Road" a few years ago from the environmentalist columnist George Monbiot. For him, it was a story about where we are going to end up with global warming and the destruction of nature. That may be the case, since he reviewed the novel, The Road. The movie version I just saw may have a difference of emphasis from the book. In any case, the film version of The Road in my opinion has nothing to do with environmental policy.

It is true that the apocalyptic event that starts off the forlorn adventures of this father and son does destroy all life, just like our greedy old environmental policies are doing, although this event does so far more selectively. It seems to be some kind of nuclear war that kills all insects, birds and animals, but not plants. Maybe a neutron bomb. The only ones commonly left alive are the people who happened to be sheltered inside their houses. And surely no conflict or meteor impact, not even a nuclear winter, would obliterate living beings in that selective way.

I kept thinking through the first part of the film, "This is just how a nuclear war would play out." If there were a conflict between, say, India and Pakistan, simulations have found that it would trigger a nuclear winter around the world. Once the media and government fell apart nobody would know or care how it happened, who pushed the button, or why. It would be just what you see in The Road. No explanations, just the brute struggle to survive. Except that in The Road there is not even an attempt to gossip about it. No speculation, nothing. People are totally incurious and only see others as things to fear.

The situation in The Road is a very artificial one. Only humans inside buildings survive, meaning that there is only one way to survive, by eating your fellow man. A world where nothing lives, just people, and there is nothing to eat, just people. One group, one of only three large groups encountered in the whole movie, figures out a way to survive on cannibalism a little longer than otherwise, by keeping a bunch of victims alive and locked away like chattel in a basement. Other than that, there are no groups, no community at all in The Road. The thought of doing so does not enter anybody's head, it seems.

This and a few other puzzling aspects of the movie kept me thinking for several days. For example, the first reaction of most people to the destruction of all life except a few sheltered humans is to commit suicide. Is that the best they can think of? What happened to the will to survive. Even if it is not reasonable, I would think that there would be some attempt to band together. However, all these poor souls can think of is to use what bullets remain to kill themselves. Better that than be eaten by what the boy calls "the bad guys."

My experience with this genre has been that in spite of the great doom that destroys most humans, the story is usually hopeful in the end. People do band together and find some kind of community. This happens in a way even in the Mad Max series. They may be robbers and killers, but people do come together.

Not in The Road.

Fear dominates the lives of these poor victims. They would be victims even if there had been no apocalypse. The only innocent, the only character with a sense of decency and fellow feeling in the whole world is the son, who was born after the apocalypse had taken place. In other words, the old order was corruptive poison. At one point the father says to him,

"I come from a different world from you."

It is true. At one point a black man steals their possessions from them and the father chases him down, strips the fellow naked and leaves him to die. The son objects but the father's answer is that he will die sooner or later anyway. Why not sooner rather than later? The boy, legitimately, wonders where the line lies between good guy and bad guy. Fear so dominates the thoughts of the characters that at the end of the film, the happiest ending we can expect, it turns out that a family had been following the father and son but were afraid to talk to them until after the father had died. Fear, fear, fear.

The real bleakness started long before the bomb, or whatever it was, exploded. An underlying dreariness lurked in the hearts even of the good guys.

 

How can that be?

Finally, this morning I understood what this film is all about. It is about what would happen if this consumer culture ever lost its god, commercialism, consumerism, Mammon. We are brainwashed so thoroughly by thousands of advertisements we hear daily that we live to buy. If ever there came a time when there was nothing to buy, we would cave. The only thing we could think of is suicide. We would have to make our future, not buy it. In that case none of us would have the slightest reason to go on with our lives.

The mother of the boy, the wife of the father is proof of this. All through the movie you think she must have died in childbirth or died of disease. But no. She simply does not want to live. She can see no reason to try to continue in these conditions. Cut off from Mammon, fear and self-immolation are the only instincts she responds to. She reluctantly gives birth to the baby, and goes on nurturing him for a while, then she just gives up. She decides to walk off and kill herself, alone, where it will not upset her son. Alone is, according to the commercialist view of human nature, where we naturally want to be.

For behind every outwardly consumerist message to indulge yourself is an even more insidious implication: be an extreme individualist. The only reason others band together with other human beings is to put you down. Do not trust groups. They just want to do what the groups ultimately end up doing in this movie, eat human flesh. The original cannibals, the real exploiters were eating our hearts and minds out long before the apocalypse. Groups are all inherently evil. Fear the other.

That subliminal message we hear from advertisements every minute of the day. Have it your way. You deserve it. Forget other people, the world exists to serve you. No wonder the last thing these survivors want to do is join together for survival. We individuals are a baby sucking at the tit of business. Take away the tit, and the baby does not even cry. It just dies. For business is no mother, it is just a big tit, feeding our minds and souls, without love. The only reaction we learn from it is fear, suicide, or to join in feeding off the flesh of other individuals.

::

Wisdom as Soul Beauty

The Beauty of Seeking Knowledge

Wisdom as Social Purity

By John Taylor; 2010 April 30, Jamal 02, 167 BE

You can talk about most divine virtues without having to drag God into it, but that is impossible for wisdom. At least, that is my experience. Maybe that is why I am having such a hard time writing about wisdom, when I, fool that I am, thought it would be easy at first. For one thing, you have to tread through some very thorny, politically not-so-correct ground right at the start.

The Bible throws down the gauntlet early on, saying not only that those who do not believe in God are fools, but that all folly can be traced to one's relationship to the Godhead in the first place. Both the 14th and the 53rd Psalms are nothing less than declarations of war against atheists. Did I say atheists? Is that right? Consider what the first passage says,

"The fool has said in his heart, "There is no God." They are corrupt, they have done abominable works. There is none who does good. Yahweh looked down from heaven on the children of men, to see if there were any who did understand, who did seek after God. (Psalm 14:1-2, WEB)

This does not actually mention atheists, it equates folly with corruption and doing wrong, which is not controversial, right? We can all agree that every injustice and atrocity that takes place ultimately boils down to somebody's foolishness and lack of wisdom. That is what Socrates taught, that all wrongdoing is an expression of ignorance. Here it says that all corruption is an expression of folly. Folly, then, is an aesthetic value judgment about what goes on in the heart. Conversely, wisdom is the beauty of what happens in the invisible realm of the heart. Alexandrian philosopher Plotinus put this well,

"One Soul is wise and lovely, another foolish and ugly. Soul-beauty is constituted by wisdom." (Plotinus, qi Wisdom, Mortimer Adler, the Great Ideas, p. 939)

If wisdom is a sort of beauty of the soul and folly is its ugliness then, like physical poise and bodily frumpiness, they are difficult to perceive, and futile to point out. As effective as the nerd's lame pickup line, "Hnuk, Hnuk, you are beautiful!" This, I can tell you, does not generally glean good results, unless you yourself are very, very attractive. The ugliness of folly and the beauty of wisdom, then, are probably best discerned in collective behaviour.

 

The Psalm then turns its condemnation not to any individual's private belief, believer or atheist, but to the nature of the society that comes out many individuals agreeing to a single social contract.

"They have all gone aside; they have together become corrupt. There is none who does good, no, not one. Have all the workers of iniquity no knowledge, who eat up my people as they eat bread, and do not call on Yahweh? There were they in great fear, for God is in the generation of the righteous." (14:3-5)

The 53rd Psalm is identical to the 14th, except that it adds here, "They have become filthy together." In other words, lack of belief is a kind of group impurity. It is a condition where a group fails to question -- recall the 2nd verse, which describes God looking down at the heart from above and asking one crucial question: does anybody seek after Him? Those who do so thereby show, if not wisdom, then at least understanding. Wisdom, then, is defined as search for God. This investigation of the divine may or may not result in social conformity, depending on the cleanliness or purity of the covenant that holds the group together.

A fool, then, says in his heart that there is no God, and thereby gives up the search before it starts. This abrupt abortion of the soul begins an inner rot, "They are corrupt...," for we were created by nature to know and love God. Something inside has died, and started to putrefy. The result is a "filthy" group consent.

Even with the best of wills, we are pretty helpless in this search. We are by nature incapable to conduct our search for Truth on our own -- which is why God is looking down from above, searching those who seek Him. We need God in order to find God. As Heraclitus put it,

"Human character has not the means of knowing, but the divine one has." (fr. 78).

Worldly wisdom is by nature oppressive. It gives birth to cruelty and violence. Divine wisdom is peaceful. It has the ability to forge a pure social agreement. It starts a just society and a compassionate civilization going.

"But the wisdom that is from above is first pure, then peaceable, gentle, [and] easy to be intreated, full of mercy and good fruits, without partiality, and without hypocrisy." (James 3:17)

God loves a loving group, and He sees to it that they succeed. That is why the major religions have lived on, while so many philosophies and faiths have gone by the wayside. As the Qur'an and Abdu'l-Baha both advised, take a trip across Asia and you will see very frequently the ruins of cities that once were prosperous, but which did not last. Their folly sunk them into oblivion, and only ruins remain standing -- or, now, archaeological digs.

God and His divine wisdom are at the heart of evolution. God works His creative energy through natural selection in nature, but among groups of intelligent beings He guides through what might be called "divine selection." In the words of the Psalm, He looks down from heaven at the hearts, seeking out the seekers and loving the lovers. Only corrupt science and corrupt religion imagine that there is a contradiction between evolutionary theory and progressive revelation. I leave the last word to the One Who opened the ancient scriptures with the key of a Revelation that openly explains progress in faith.

"O ye wise men of the City and philosophers of the world! Beware lest human learning and wisdom cause you to wax proud before God, the Help in Peril, the Self-Subsisting. Know ye that true wisdom is to fear God, to know Him, and to recognize His Manifestations. This wisdom, however, can be attained only by those who detach themselves from the world, and who walk in the ways of the good pleasure of their Lord." (Summons, 5.113, p. 233)

::

Timelapse of Alps with Moonlight

What liberals lose when they ignore religion

Controversial academic and author, Camille Paglia, author of Sexual Personae, was part of the ROM's Director's Signature Series, entitled The Three New Commandments, coinciding with the Dead Sea Scrolls exhibit. Paglia describes herself as an "atheist who defends religion", explaining that an understanding of world religions and their symbols and motifs is essential to fully understanding human civilization and our place in the universe.

Found Kid

This poster by Silvie shows her black humor. Drawn during last night's home study class, it shows what it might look like if a kidnapper made up a poster pretending that he had found a kid, depicted as still inside a bag.


"I am practicing drawing men in v-neck sweatshirts with chest hair," was her comment today.

From Badi Blog

Silvie Satirizes Her Plugged In Generation

From The Badi Blog

From The Badi Blog

From The Badi Blog

From The Badi Blog

Treehouse of Horror fan comic by Silvie

Silvie's Comic, II

Silvie's Comic, III

Same Scream in Many Movies

Drawing by Ed de Jong

This is called Medisance, or Backbiting

The artist is Ed de Jong, a faithful reader of this blog.

One of the better Downfall scene parodies

Hitler finds out his subtitles are wrong



::

Of Fires and Freeloaders

Spongers and the Fire Tablet

By John Taylor; 2008 Oct 17, 1 'Ilm 165 BE

 

Lazistry Spongers

 

A Nobel prizewinning chemist and prescient climatologist, Svante Arrhenius, is arguing that we are well beyond the tipping point with carbon dioxide levels. Reporting on this, Michael D. Lemonick reports on Scientific American's environmental blog a paper by Arrhenius stating that,

 

"If humanity wishes to preserve a planet similar to that on which civilization developed and to which life on Earth is adapted CO2 will need to be reduced from its current 385 ppm [parts per million] to at most 350 ppm. The situation is much more sensitive than we had implicitly been assuming."

 

That means net carbon reduction, which means eliminating carbon emissions completely as soon as possible, followed by some sort of megaproject to scrub carbon from the air. Which means -- you never hear this mentioned, though it is obvious -- that we will have to form a strong, resolute world government, and soon. Nothing but a democratically elected body on a planetary level can exert the sort of universal authority that such a strong measure as decarbonization and electrification of the world economy would require. Nothing smaller than that dare stand up to the wealthy and their trans-national corporations, whose interests do not conduce to survival of the human race.

 

Recent columns by my favourite justice campaigner, George Monbiot, focus on debt and corporate spongers. Monbiot points out that there is a direct link between environmental damage -- our "debt" to nature -- and the present financial meltdown.

 

"Ecology and economy are both derived from the Greek word oikos - a house or dwelling. Our survival depends upon the rational management of this home: the space in which life can be sustained. The rules are the same in both cases. If you extract resources at a rate beyond the level of replenishment, your stock will collapse." (http://www.monbiot.com/archives/2008/10/14/this-is-what-denial-does/)

 

We are prone to losing touch with reality, indulging in "magical thinking whose results have just come crashing home. The financial crisis shows what happens when we try to make the facts fit our desires. Now we must learn to live in the real world." Any crisis in one "household" will feed crisis in the other. Economy and ecology are in a constant dance with one another. Success or failure in one household feeds crisis in another. In good times leaders compete with one another in extravagant projects that degrade resources; in hard times, pressured by debt, they rush to exploit forests and fisheries before it is too late. But Monbiot is no blind pessimist.

 

"But one of the benefits of modernity is our ability to spot trends and predict results. If fish in a depleted ecosystem grow by 5% a year and the catch expands by 10% a year, the fishery will collapse. If the global economy keeps growing at 3% a year (or 1700% a century) it too will hit the wall."

 

Another column deals with the automobile industry, which is more than usually out of touch with reality. Rather than make better cars, these venal companies learned that it is easier just to pull the strings of government. These freeloading corporate welfare bums care nothing for really producing -- instead of industry the car industry should be called a "lazistry." He points out that,

 

"In the US, manufacturers have still not reached the standard (an average of 27.5 miles per gallon) that they were supposed to have met, under the Energy Policy Conservation Act, by 1985. The average car sold in the States today is less efficient than the 1908 Model T Ford."  ()

 

Amazing how far the automobile has come in a century. Instead of driving people around car companies drive the governments that rule over people. They not only get around rules and regulations, they actually wheedle governments into paying for innovations that they have no intention of implementing. Pretty neat trick.

 

"But subsidies are what governments pay when regulation does not happen. If you do not have the guts to force companies to do something, you must bribe them instead. It is a fair guess that European car makers will still fail to meet their environmental targets, even if they get the money they are demanding. The greenest thing governments could do is to allow these foot-dragging, planet-eating spongers to go under." ()

 

==========

 

Segue to the Fire Tablet

 

Here is what I did yesterday.

 

I spent the morning working over my notes without coming up with much until, at the last minute, a few words about the nature of the Baha'i Covenant. (This morning I worked out several errors in it; the latest draft is on the Badi' Blog) My body urgently wanted to nap all morning but I fought it off. After lunch I went for a walk to Sally Ann's, the library and then home, arriving about 4 PM with slight head pain. I could fight the nap no longer and slept an hour, waking with a worse headache, as well as poor cerebration. Words slurred and mixed up, silly errors, the usual. Marie had gone to work and I had to tear the kids away from the computer screens and get them into the car to go to our Feast in Caledonia.

 

The headache got worse and I was about to cancel. I know enough not to drive with a migraine. Then I took a whiff of the air outside. Coal smoke. During the nap the sooty air had settled in thicker than before. I realized that it had been there during my walk outside, just below the level where my nose could detect it. If I had known, I would have shut all the windows. As it was, I was exposed all during my nap.

 

That meant that I was not suffering from a grand mal attack, which progresses like a steamroller and is dangerous in every way. No, it was "just" a cluster headache caused by exposure to toxins. This slams shut higher regions of the brain, and in thicker doses causes intense, knife like stabs to the head. Painful but not progressive like a Grand Mal attack. It responded quickly to my big guns, my last resort of a cup of coffee and an ASA. That meant I could drive so we rushed off, picked up some pizza pieces on the way, and attended Feast. On the way back the countryside was dotted with thick clouds of coal smoke, thanks to the Nanticoke Generating Station, which is about forty clicks to the south of us. I ran from the car to the house, but that short exposure caused stabbing pain for half an hour.

 

On the way, as the kids tore apart the back seat, I heard on CBC details about the situation in Peace River Country where I lived as a child. Two gas lines were sabotaged by, the RCMP believe, eco-terrorists. It was pristine wilderness when I was there but now there are gas wells going up everywhere. An expert explained that the gas there is "sour," filled with chemicals that reduce visual acuity and cause other forms of brain damage to anybody living downwind of a gas well. Locals who suffer harm protest the environmental damage, but in vain. Cash-strapped governments concede to companies paying them hundreds of thousands of dollars a month in taxes. It seems that at least one victim has decided to lash out at the filthy Plutocrats.

 

The CBC interview said, "Of course, nothing justifies violence." The expert responded, "You are absolutely right, nothing can justify retaliation of that nature." Hmm. Here am I, kept by air pollution a prisoner in my own house, and there are the Peace River Dwellers, their brains addled and eyes dimmed by gas wells, but nothing justifies lashing back. No. In my case, it is a government agency, Ontario Hydro, that is sticking knives into my aching brain. This morning I came across these words of Baha'u'llah addressed to the persecuted Baha'is in Iran,

 

"... Ye should not, however, by reason of the tyrannical acts of some heedless souls, transgress the limits of God's commandments by contending with anyone." (Fire and Light, p. 10)

 

No, a Baha'i is not even allowed to contend, much less retaliate, against a malevolent foe. For the real enemy is retaliation itself. The only thing we have to contend against is contention itself...

 

No, a believer in God is concerned to end the underlying cause of the pollution, and that cause is above all spiritual. And besides, if I did not have this pain to fight, I would not feel the need to turn as often to the Beloved of the world for consolation. I owe the polluters that. Without them I would feel the need to be reading words of wisdom like this:

 

"If, however, for a few days, in compliance with God's all-encompassing wisdom, outward affairs should run their course contrary to one's cherished desire, this is of no consequence and should not matter. Our intent is that all the friends should fix their gaze on the Supreme Horizon, and cling to that which hath been revealed in the Tablets. They should strictly avoid sedition, and refrain from treading the path of dissension and strife. They should champion their One True God, exalted be He, through the hosts of forbearance, of submission, of an upright character, of goodly deeds, and of the choicest and most refined words." (Fire and Light, p. 10)

 

Having been so grievously impaired during the day, I could not do my obligatory prayer. In fact, I longed for the dark and silence of midnight. I took an hour and went through the long oblig and several other of the most powerful prayers of Baha'u'llah, including the Fire Tablet. In this case, like cures like. Coal plumes, the effluent of coal fires, effectively consume my outward existence but the spiritual fires of this prayer stoke the flames of my soul. The words of Baha'u'llah, this Tablet promises at the end, will set the world on fire. The Word of God become the Most Great Renewable.

 

What set me on to the Fire Tablet was an anecdote I heard from a Baha'i psychotherapist lately. She had a client, the most drop dead gorgeous woman she had ever met; the woman is dead now, so she was free to tell some of her story. The client's beauty, instead of a blessing, was a terrible affliction. Her father committed incest on her when she was young, then when her first boyfriend began to suspect, he committed suicide. Her car broke down and a truck driver stopped and raped her. She went into a bar near a military base and ended up getting gang raped. On and on, raped, abused, endlessly. The woman came to the Baha'i shrink and asked:

 

"Why have I had to go through this? Why did God give me this awful gift?"

 

The Baha'i could think of nothing to tell her other than:

 

"I feel moved to say this prayer with you."

 

Not the standard therapy recommend by the medical licensing organization. They read the Fire Tablet together and the woman was visibly moved. She said to her,

 

"The person who wrote this prayer, he was the One, wasn't he?"

 

"The One?"

 

"You know, the One. The promised One."

 

No Baha'i could deny it when the question is put so directly, no matter how professional a face she needs to put on. So long story short the client soon became a believer. Watch your movie listings because somebody is going to make a film about that woman someday. Anyway, I feel her afflictions, and those of Baha'u'llah, when I read that prayer. A great comfort to share it, misery loves company and all that. Take advantage of the Fire Tablet and slowly burn away, burn like a phoenix in the suffering of the One...

--
John Taylor

email: badijet@gmail.com
blog: http://badiblog.blogspot.com/

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