Bob Barker

News this week of Bob Barker's passing at the age of 99. The Big Wheel has spun and almost landed on $1.00. He has now made it to the great showcase in the sky. In his honour, I link to my poem Consolation. It's one of my bittersweet favourites. I grew up watching The Price Is Right. I had Bob Barker in mind when I wrote the poem. And the Johnny referred to in the poem is of course, the inimitable Johnny Olson.   

Watch The Children

 CLICK HERE TO HEAR THE SONG

Watch the children

Play their games,

Watch the adults

Do the same.

Watch the players

Rise and fall,

Watch the broadcast

Of it all.

Watch the followers

Play their roles,

Watch the leaders 

Dig the holes.

Watch them talking

Watch them spin,

As they push 

The bodies in.

Watch the crowds

Cheer them on,

Watch the show

Before it’s gone.

Watch the children

Play their games,

Watch the adults

Do the same.

Neckties

CLICK HERE TO HEAR AUTHOR READ

I used to yearn 

for the days

of hats and neckties,

but especially neckties.

Toppers are a bit too obvious, 

cowboy and baseball,

beanie, boater and beret,

clichéd identifiers

of a job, a team,

a dream.

A necktie is oblique

and suggestive,

beveled, flaccidly

pointing down to

below the waist.

For the banker, 

the hedge fund manager,

the salesman,

it's shiny sleek 

and reptilian

always be closing,

and by the end of the day

hangs under the chin 

long and languid 

like a dog-tired tongue

thirsty for a stiff drink

straight.

I once heard a history buff 

say neckties were a symbol

of slavery,

Colonial,

think of a choke chain,

or a lynching noose.

But I don't see it.

I think of my dad 

teaching me how to make

a Windsor knot,

over, under and around,

over, under and around,

the feel of his soft silk cravat

tightening around my throat,

his thick hands

correcting my small ones

until I got it right.

The Singer Sang His Song

CLICK HERE TO HEAR THE SONG

They took him from his mother 

The singer sang his song

They took him from his land

The singer sang his song

They beat him with a stick

The singer sang his song

They made him beg for coins

The singer sang his song

The singer sang his song

He sang it all day long

Until the sun was gone

With others and alone 

They made him pick the fruit

The singer sang his song

They sent him to the mines

The singer sang his song

They made him work machines

The singer sang his song

They gave him scraps to eat

The singer sang his song

The singer sang his song

He sang it all day long

Until the sun was gone

With others and alone 

They put him in the street

The singer sang his song

They told him he was hired

The singer sang his song

They gave him guns to fire

The singer sang his song

They told him when to fire

The singer sang his song

The singer sang his song

He sang it all day long

Until the sun was gone

With others and alone.

Summer Camp

CLICK HERE TO HEAR AUTHOR READ

We were feral 

We were young

We slept in bags

We had some fun

I pissed the bed

and cried for home

that first summer,

didn't write.

Next summer

I kissed a 'kitchen girl'

and smoked my first cigarette

with tent mates in a tunnel

we dug in the woods.

On a canoe trip

our unstable counsellor

paisley red bandanna'd

paddling stern

kicked me hard in the spine

with his unlaced steel-toed 

Kodiak boot,

called me a 'fucking kike'

for laughing at something

he didn't like,

the gunnels shook

I didn't understand

what he said,

but I shut up.

My last summer

I carried a pocket-knife,

and a wooden matchstick hung

from my lower lip

ready to set whatever

on fire

I can still taste the sulfur.

Watch the Children

CLICK HERE TO HEAR AUTHOR READ

Watch the children

Play their games,

Watch the adults

Do the same.

Watch the players

Rise and fall,

Watch the broadcast

Of it all.

Watch the followers

Play their roles,

Watch the leaders 

Dig the holes.

Watch them talking

Watch them spin,

As they push 

The bodies in.

Watch the crowds

Cheer them on,

Watch the show

Before it’s gone.

Watch the children

Play their games,

Watch the adults

Do the same.

Prognosis

CLICK HERE TO HEAR AUTHOR READ

If only there was 

an MRI for love

an X-ray for trust

a CT scan for fear

to diagnose 

my loneliness

I could show you

where it hurts

send you the results

and anxiously await

the prognosis. 

Flip This Boat

CLICK HERE TO HEAR THE SONG

I've never been too good

At casual conversation

About the latest name brands

Or the state of the nation

I don't know cars

I don't follow the news

But sometimes I get interested

And I'm interested in you

Let's take it to the point

There's no coming back 

We won't get very far 

If you're holding back

I'm holding my breath 

Ready to take us there  

I know it ain't easy 

When you don't come up for air

Wading in the shallows

Has never been for me

Diving to the bottom 

Is where I need to be

I’ve never felt the curse

Of strangers saying I’m great

And if sometimes I’ve had success

It always comes late

Just tell me how you feel

Tell me what you're thinking

Let's flip this boat 

And get our bodies sinking

The deeper we go

The pressure starts to build 

Try not to worry

That someone might get killed

I know it ain't romantic 

To always question why 

Or to see your lover cry

Wading in the shallows

Has never been for me

Diving to the bottom 

Is where I need to be

On the Jan. 6 charges; trump and some legal, political, religious angles

I promised myself (and even more importantly my wife and kids) that I wouldn't talk any more about trump... but these are historic times, so indulge me. Brief observations (I almost wrote 'Grief observations'):

- My main take away from reading the indictment is actually all the people who did the 'right thing' at multiple layers of government, which is both comforting and discomfiting. Comforting in the sense that the indictment sketches out all the levels of government (state and federal) required to make the scheme of flipping or discounting electoral votes in a presidential election possible, and it's significant. It seems almost like an impossibility, especially if there is more than one or two states involved. What is made clear in the indictment was that trump's scheme was hamhanded and destined to fail. And yet... if Pence had caved to his demands not to count some electoral votes, it would have gotten very messy. I still don't think it would have worked, but it would have been very very ugly. So there is definitely at least one very critical point of weakness in the system. 

- The mainstream media coverage so far is driving me mad. Fox is predictably hysterical. CNN and MSNBC are predictably overly legal and lost in the weeds. I have yet to see anyone clearly articulate the basic scheme. So allow me to do it: There is a process for counting Electoral College votes in a presidential election. The votes are alotted in each state based on the winner of the popular vote. These votes are then required to be certified by state authorities by the 'safe harbour' date of December 8th (they are required to sign the certificates on December 14th). Once certified by the Secretary of State and Governor, these votes are then sent to Congress to be formally counted on January 6th by the Vice-President who presides. That's it. Certification means all legal avenues for inquiry, re-count, court challenge or objection have been exhausted (except 'objections' raised in Congress, but these are ultimately meaningless for reasons I won't go into here). There is no such thing as 'de-certification' - I wish people would stop using that term. Any effort to promote 'de-certification' is by definition illegal. Any effort to promote electoral votes other than the legally certified votes is illegal. This is the crux of the case. The other part of the case relates to the scheme to stop the lawful function of government on January 6th, namely the process of counting the certified votes by the Vice-President, which trump and his minions tried (and succeeded) in doing for a while. That's it. Focus people! It's not more complicated than that.

- The idea that it matters what trump believed or didn't believe about the election, is a distraction. His delusions, or willful blindness is not a defense. What matters in legal terms is 'criminal intent' not what he believed or didn't believe in his pea brain. What matters is what he intended to do, which was to stay in power in spite of the certified election results, which is by definition corrupt and criminal. A bank robber may believe that all the money in the bank belongs to him, it won't excuse him from pulling out a gun and threatening to kill the teller if she doesn't hand over the money. It's still armed robbery. Stealing money, stealing the election. You get the idea.

- On trump's continued popularity with his core followers, despite (or more likely because of) his legal indictments. Yes, it fits with the narrative of victimization they relate to, and the more trump is 'victimized' by the 'deep state', the more they will embrace their hero. That's certainly one part of it. But the other (related) part of it, I believe, is an anti-hero religious model that trump has played up by saying that he represents their salvation, their 'revenge' and that he is the only thing standing between them and the (evil, Marxist, godless etc.) forces that are 'coming after' them. Insofar as they see trump as their salvation, and I believe many of them do, they will continue to support him until the story reaches the only conclusion possible according to the model. His sacrifice. He will have to die politically and legally speaking. So for them, there is no turning back. Ever. Because at that point they believe he will be resurrected and they will do whatever they can to make that happen. He's got them forever and no amount of de-programming will work. 

Is Consciousness a Question of Belief?

There has never been a smidgen or a scintilla or iota of evidence that human beings are made of anything other than material (mostly carbon), flesh and bone and biochemistry. Or that our thoughts and feelings are the product of anything other than material interactions. And yet many of us (possibly the majority?) persist in believing that there's something else to life. We used to call that something else, or tellingly that something more (ie. enduring, transcendent, eternal etc.) a soul, a spirit, an essence. One time I was talking about the soul and afterlife with an orthodox Jewish friend. When I told him I didn't see any evidence of it, his answer to me (in the form of a question, he was Jewish after all) was: So you think we live 75 or 80 years if we're lucky, most it with difficulty and suffering, and then die, and that's it? That's all there is to it? It felt weird to say yes, exactly - even though that pretty much sums up what I think - because the way he said that's all there is made it seem like it's nothing, which is not how I feel at all about the wonders and mystery of life. Life is indeed significant and meaningful, not in spite of its finiteness, but because of it. Seems to me that the notion that there needs to be something more to it,  actually comes down to one thing, and it's not belief (in God, the soul, the afterlife etc.), but rather it's disbelief that life might actually boil down to what is knowable.

This question of what is 'knowable' has intrigued us since the beginning of time. Scientists essentially have 'faith' that we can 'know' things about the world and it's their job to find it. Others, like philosophers and clergy, doubt that anything is knowable. For clergy it's presumptuous to think that we can know things about the world, because that would infringe on God's territory (and worse make us like God). It's summed up in the story of Job, namely, that we are meant to suffer in ignorance about God's plan, and it's the height of arrogance to think that we would deign to understand His reasoning. As God rebukes Job, “Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth? Tell me, if you have understanding. Who determined its measurements – surely you know!" Of course, God intends this "surely you know" to put Job back in his place and shut him up.  

While the theologians tremble in fear that too much knowledge is a kind of sacrilege, the philosophers have made an intellectual game of it, pecking like crows over roadkill at the very question of whether anything is knowable, until nothing is left but the bones. Descartes famously posited dualism, the so-called mind-body 'problem' ie. that there's a gap between inner experience and outer reality that cannot be bridged. He came to the conclusion that there is only one thing we can know for sure and it's that each of us exists, because we think (read: we are conscious). As a result of the advancements in neuroscience, the same question has been reformatted into something philosophers have called the 'hard problem' of consciousness (Chalmers), a variation on the epistemological question of whether anything is knowable for certain. They say, even if we could map out the entire brain and correlate thoughts and emotions to our perceptions of the world, it doesn't get us any closer to understanding 'what it's like to be a bat' as one philosopher put it in the early 1970s (Nagel). In other words, ones individual experiences can't be explained by science (ie. they cannot be universalized). A lot of recent thinking takes Descartes' principle to an extreme in the opposite way. They argue that not only is individual existence the one sure thing, it's the only thing. They posit, with straight faces, that there is no external reality at all. What we are perceiving every day as reality is only a figment of our imagination, or put another way, a construct of our perceptions (Hoffman), which may only have a passing correspondence to reality. Others have similarly postulated that consciousness is so fundamental that it does not belong to us alone, but rather it's a fundamental principle of the universe, something that animates us, as oppposed to us animating it. This seems to me to be another kind of theology, God (universal consciousness) is 'ultimate' reality, an idea is as old as Plato.

Seems to me, as some great thinker might have said, the proof of the pudding is in the eating (read: experience = reality). In other words, the survival of each living organism depends on a capacity to perceive and experience the physical world with some degree of accuracy. If I am alive today (and it's not a big if) it is testament to the fact that all those creatures who came before me in the great chain of life, both human and subhuman species, that made my unlikely existence possible, had to reconcile their perception with external reality to the extent that it would ensure a lineage of survival. There's nothing too mysterious about consciousness in this sense if we understand it as a necessary mechanism for survival in animal species, and one that is the product of adaptation that has proven to be supremely suited for survival (thus far). It's a mechanism that has been continually finetuned over time, in exactly the same way all biological adaptations get finetuned. Since adaptation is such a critical part of the process, this idea that we are a product of our environment has always been literally true. Nowadays, the environment is literally becoming a product of us, which is a paradigmatic shift in reality. In this sense it's a reflection of our current state of consciousness that our world is ailing. Some of us seem to take some sort of comfort in thinking that reality is really just a hologram, a figment of imagination, or a question of belief. In other words, it's only a function of us. And in some respects I suppose it may be, to our peril.