When Ridicule Isn't Enough

Over twenty years ago a friend did me a huge favor. In response to some random comment of mine, he said, "Good God, you certainly do have a keen sense of the absurd!"

Well, sure. After all, I'd been a research mathematician. Research mathematicians do not generally do their research using beakers, bunsen burners, oscilloscopes, or tweezers. They do it using proofs, half the time by the kind called Reduction To Absurdity, and it's really an advantage when trying to reduce a thing to absurdity to be gifted at knowing when you've done it.

[Above right: Euclid at the moment he discovers a contradiction to "equals to equals are equals." Minutes later he invented the first shredder.]

Still, it was quite a help to me to know that my friend could see the gift even in ordinary conversation. No wonder people leave when I enter rooms! That and my galling habitual resort to irony. And the garlic breath. And the intermittent rants, sulks, and giggles.

Knowing of a serious failing, such as oversensitivity to the absurd, you can deal with it. You can seek professional help. Also, drugs such as Paxil, Zyprexa, and Ethanol, are known to blunt the sensitivity. Studies have shown that drunks without partners suffer 50% less sharp awareness of the absurd, on average, compared to sober people in long-term relationships.

Sometimes the cures are worse than the disease. For example, Paxil undid 95% of my puberty, leaving only the beard. An alternative is to exploit your failing creatively. You may make mock, for instance.

[Left: Ferdinand Von Lindemann proved Pi is worse than irrational, it's even transcendental. Is that absurd or what?]

It turns out that there is a never ending stream of the absurd that I can use to make mock. I shall illustrate with one sweet example.

It is HR 1955/ S 1959, also known as the "Violent Radicalization and Homegrown Terrorism Prevention Act of 2007." This passed in the US House in October, after a suspension of the rules prevented debate, by a 405-6 vote, with 23 abstentions. It is likely to be considered by the Senate any day now, as soon as it gets out of committee. The law would create a commission of 10 paid Executive and Congressional appointees, each of which would have, for 18 months, independent power of subpoena to gather evidence in separate hearings throughout the country and compel testimonies under oath, in order to define "homegrown terrorism." The law itself doesn't define terrorism but says it includes planning or threatening to use "force" (not violence!) and what it calls "violent radicalization," consisting of the promotion of any "extremist belief system." (Promotions aren't violence!)

After subjecting the country to as many as ten simultaneous legal processes designed to root out all evidence of Americans promoting beliefs that any bozo on these fake courts deems extremist, such as Scientology, abortion rights, the belief that only Allah is God and Muhammed is His Prophet, or that fluoridation is a Communist plot, then the law would establish a "Center of Excellence for the Study of Violent Radicalization and Homegrown Terrorism in the United States" which would be a kind of government-run think-tank for coming up with cool new ways to battle all these evil promoters and forcifiers.

Force without violence is another name for political pressure. Force without violence includes the ballot box, initiatives and referenda, rallies, demonstrations, and boycotts. The law invites a commission to find out who, outside the government, is pushing political agendas by nonviolent means and class them as terrorists. The law as passed by the House explicitly mentions the use of the internet by political groups as a "weapon" for domestic radicalization.

The internet, of course, is purely a tool of communication. So, if the internet can be classed as a weapon, so can writing, talking, and the use of sign language. Gestures can be weapons of domestic radicalization. Planning to use a gesture as a weapon of domestic radicalization, as I am doing right now, in my head, would be subject to investigation by the commission.

Sometime in the next 18 months I may be compelled to admit under oath that I thought to raise a finger against my government.

[Below: Dangerous domestic radicals have been among us for too long.]

OJ And Me in the Lonely Crowd

Ever try to imagine the internal conversations of people who turn up in the news?

Did Michael “Kramer” Richards think to himself, “I’m a great comedic actor, but I’m having trouble getting roles these days. Hey, why don’t I try stand-up for a while? That’s got to be easy.”

Maybe the Pope thought, “I know what will show Muslims I’m cool. I’ll go to a predominantly Muslim country and let my people drive me around in the Pope-mobile and show them all how cute and harmless I am. They’ll love me for sure!”

I’m not going to try to guess exactly what OJ was thinking when he came up with that book idea of his. I’m afraid that if I ever got myself to think that way my brain would get stuck in that state and I’d never be able to fake normal again. But I’ll guess part of what he was thinking was “Hmm, money.”

Let me risk seeming to change the subject entirely. I’ve been noticing a pattern in the news lately. A lot is coming down to conflicts, real and imagined, between individual and group rights.

Example: Why should we have hate-crime legislation? Doesn’t that give rights to groups that individuals can’t share in? Why should it be worse to beat up someone because you don’t like the group they belong to, than to beat the same person up because you just don’t like their looks?

Come on, people, that one’s simple. The hate-crime beating is worse to the extent that, in addition to the immediate harm done to the immediate victim, other people are also threatened with future violence. Such threats amount to terrorism.

Here’s an example where the conflict appears genuine: Recently in Montreal the police had a brief internal discussion over whether it might not be good, when engaging with certain extremely patriarchal ethnic communities within that diverse city, to leave the police women in the back seat of the police car, so to speak. Apparently the discussion lasted just long enough for someone to write a memo about it, and then the decision was: no way that’s going to happen. I learned about this from an editorial I found that framed it as a case of women’s individual rights vs a minority group’s rights. But is it?

Wasn’t the decision really to go with offending the tiny minority groups rather than offending the one huge majority group of women? I’m betting the Montreal police department wasn’t looking out for any one woman’s individual rights.

If I’m wrong about that, then what do we make of the veil controversy in France? Veils are losing out there. Why? Because the majority of French women don’t care if they wear veils, that’s why.

Getting back to the questions that started this, the news says that the hecklers that Richards spewed racist language toward are interested in receiving monetary compensation. That puts the whole Michael Richards’ career-in-flames story in a whole different light, one that swings the focus radically from group to individuals.

Suddenly it becomes an issue not of how racist Richards is, or how offended African-Americans everywhere are by the man’s language, but how hurt were these two guys in the audience, and how much would it take to make it better. What we have here is a triumph of the individual-right perspective over the group-right perspective. The hecklers are individualizing the common demand for reparations.

I’m warming to the idea slowly. I’m seeing possibilities, as my individual sensibilities are pummeled wherever I go.

Just the other day, a motorist gave me the finger for delaying him while I used a crosswalk. I’m thinking, that could be $5, right there.

If Benedict XVI sets off World War III by stirring up trouble in Istanbul, I am personally holding him responsible, and I will sue him and the Vatican $100 for each day I am made miserable by the consequent global conflagration. After all, I can’t leave for another planet.

Hmm, money.

Yo Military Tribunal Is A Finger

Being a member of the editorial board of this august rag, I periodically meet with other editorial board members to do editorial board stuff. For example the other day we all sat around a table eating pizza. But right now I'm thinking of a time when we were not only eating pizza, we were thinking. We were thinking about stuff that we could put in the paper.

Usually I'm not any good at that kind of thing, because I don't know anything. So I keep quiet while other people talk. But this time I had a cool idea. I said we should write about this military tribunal business.

Then one of our editors, Michele "Process! Process! Process!" Marchand, said something positive and encouraging about my idea. I think she said, "Why don't you write about that in your column, Wes?"

Unfortunately, now that I sit down to write I am high on Nyquil and my brain is telling me that what Michele said was "Why don't you stick your finger in a lamp socket, Wes?" This has triggered the following flashback.

It was just about forty years ago, 1961. I was 12 years old. My parents had hauled my ass to Guadalajara to live in an apartment building in the suburbs next door on one side to an escaped Nazi, and on the other side to some self-exiled former American commie. We were just there to take advantage of the inexpensive low standard of living. Eggs rancheros! Two cent bus rides! A free nacho with every martini!

But I digress. On this particular day, I was home alone, reading, when the light in the lamp burned out. So I unscrewed the bulb and got a new one. Then I thought, "Hey, I wonder what it would feel like if I stuck my finger in the socket?"

I probably wouldn't have even considered it for more than a second if I was in the US. I mean, we've got REAL electricity here in the US of A. But I was in Mexico where the electricity was probably made by rubbing a thousand balloons on poor people's heads or something like that. So I did it.

Don't try this in your own homes, kids. I stuck my finger all the way into that lamp socket. It immediately felt like a big whomping firecracker went off in my arm, concentrated in my elbow. My whole arm jerked violently, which was probably really good because it pulled my finger out so my finger wasn't fried. It just burned a little.

But the cool thing was that now all the lights were out in the whole apartment. So I went out to find the building manager, to get the fuse replaced. Then I found out that all the lights were out everywhere in our building. By the time I found the manager, he had replaced the burned out fuse, but it didn't get the lights on, BECAUSE ALL THE ELECTRICITY WAS OUT IN OUR WHOLE END OF GUADALAJARA.

The grid was down, and it stayed down for two hours! It was so awesome! And I did it all by myself with my own little index finger!

Of course I had to tell everybody how it had happened. And then after I told everybody about my adventure with the light socket, I realized I could be in big trouble. What if the Mexican police found out an American 12 year old was sabotaging the city electrical system? I could have experienced puberty in a Mexican prison, learning a Spanish vocabulary of a sort that would be of absolutely no use to me in a career as a botanist.

It occurs to me now, with the hindsight of forty years, that sticking my finger in that lamp socket was a mistake. Sure, it looked good at the time, and there were some thrills associated with it, but all in all it wasn't worth the risk, now that I look back on it.

And that's what I think we'll all feel about military tribunals, in a few decades down the road.