There's this Outer Limits episode called "The Architects of Fear" in which a scientist played by Robert Culp agrees to go on what's essentially a one-way mission: he's allows himself to be surgically altered by his fellow scientists and placed in an experimental spacecraft to pull of a tremendous ruse on the whole planet: he'll fake being a "scout" for an alien invasion--probably dying in the process as the armed forces destroy his "spaceship"--and thus uniting the world against this extraterrestrial threat. The scientific group of which he's a part have come to the conclusion that only some external threat, some existential crisis, can possibly shake the world out of its tribal conflicts and unite everyone together.

Alan Moore's Watchmen series used the same trope, and indeed, the idea of a (fake) alien invasion uniting the planet has been used in science-fiction for decades. In some cases, the plot fails: in the Outer Limits episode, it fails because Culp's spaceship goes off course and is discovered by three hunters, whom no one believes. In Moore's Watchmen comic, the plot succeeds until another character's journal detailing the whole ruse  is discovered at the end of the story, with the implication that this will reveal the deception and thus end its usefulness.

The idea seems to be that while unity and an end to tribal conflict is a good thing, it can't be accomplished by trickery. If we want to end our petty squabbles between nations and between ourselves, we're going to have to decide to do it on its own merits. Any attempt to foist a false external threat onto humanity and thus make us unified will eventually fail because the ruse will be discovered.

But, as they say, the truth is stranger than fiction.

I won't say the Coronavirus is a species-ending threat to the human race. It is serious, and we need to take relatively drastic steps to contain the threat, but no one is predicting that the virus threatens the survival of humanity itself. Still, it does represent an external threat, one which in no way respects borders nor ideology. And it is a serious threat.

I would have hoped that in light of this threat, we would have found a way as Americans to stop the tribalism. I would have hoped that there'd be an end to partisan sniping from members of government. I would have hoped that there weren't accusations from the leader of the free world that the news media is hyping the pandemic to hurt him personally. I would have hoped that, finally, with this external threat, we would have put away the childish words and deeds of the past and focused on the threat itself.

That, I now see, was too much to ask.

If I were coaching against some opponent--let's say one that for some reason my school had a rivalry with--and a fire broke out on the field, I wouldn't be looking to see how I could turn the situation into my advantage. The two teams, who had been opponents when the game started, would turn into allies as we fought the fire with our water buckets and squeeze bottles. We'd recognize that the fire is much more serious than the game we had been playing.

What if tomorrow, we detect a fleet of interstellar spacecraft approaching the planet, sending an alien but unmistakable message of warning to us? The Day the Earth Stood Still played on this idea, too. Would our president claim that the aliens were sent by the fake news media to tear him down? Would he tweet in all capital letters, "SAD!"? 

What if Jesus Christ came back--or came for the first time, depending on your beliefs-- tomorrow? Or Mohammed? Or any of the many messiahs claimed by the world's religions? What if they ALL appeared? Would some people criticize the Lamb because he wasn't wearing a MAGA hat? 

In short, what I'm asking in an increasingly desperate fashion is--what would it take to unify us? What would it take for us to finally, finally agree that there is such a thing as scientific truth, and such a thing as universal human ethics, and that despite our ideological differences, we still are one species, and that your fellow human has dignity and value? Is there ANYTHING that could do it? 

Can we humans transcend our tribal beginnings and stop looking at one another as the enemy? Can we look across the ocean, or the mountain, or the plains, and see not a competitor but a friend?

Now we are engaged in a great pandemic, testing whether this nation--and this world--can endure. Not endure as Lincoln meant, but endure as one people. Maybe we never were. Maybe the talk of how it was better in the old times is just that--talk. Maybe tribalism can't be bred out of us, not even in the face of a global pandemic. Maybe we're not better than this, and maybe we're still just animals in fancy clothes. 

But I have to believe we can see what's important. We should always have been able to see it, but if it takes a drastic and horrible spread of disease, then maybe that's what we gain at the end of all this. Please, if you're reading--realize that there is so much more that unites us than that which divides us. Realize that the human race can accomplish wonders as soon as it decides to stop fighting itself. And that our nation can pause the bickering and lies and jockeying for political and social advantage just while we deal with this threat. And maybe when it's over we'll realize we never needed to bicker in the first place.

Come on, humanity. We can do this. 

​Be seeing you!

I will never complain about not having time to write ever again.

See, it never was about that, though I do admit I tend to overschedule myself professionally. This Distance Learning thing--I don't know if it's more work, or less, or the same amount, but I do know that the nine-to-five (or in the case of most teachers, something closer to eight-to-four) work schedule has been completely obliterated. Not only that, but even the concept of "weekdays" and "weekends" is beginning to dissolve. I am still prepping for a Monday lesson and have been so doing for four hours now on a Sunday. The lesson will take ninety minutes. From an efficiency standpoint, that's pretty bad--something like three times as much prep work as actual execution. But it's what's required if I want to do a good job.

Still, I'm working from home, so I don't lose any time in transit to and from school. I can take a break pretty much any time I want for as long as I want. I can do my planning while watching TV (I'm watching St. Elsewhere, of all things, nowadays). And I can pet my dogs whenever they look at me with that longing only a dog can muster.

All of that, I submit, is a nightmare. We need the mild tyranny of the workspace, I contend. My poor students, most of whom are highly disciplined and skilled youngsters, are struggling with the idea of stay-at-home school. All of the convenience of distance learning is conspiring to make the experience far less convenient.

And that's where my personal writing comes in. 

My usual routine, before the Coronavirus changed all of our routines, was to finish school and school-related work and then to go to the gym for a bit, then retreat to the local coffee shop to write for an hour. I'd usually be able to make it home at or around 6:00, in time to make dinner for the family (sometimes my daughter will have made dinner already. My wife, blessed though she is in many ways including a goddess-like body that refuses to age, has not found the culinary endeavors to her liking nor has she developed particularly strong skills in food preparation). Yes, it's true that on many days, I had a school meeting of one form or another, necessitating a change in my routine, but by and large, that's what I did.

One would think, therefore, being released from the inflexibility of a strict schedule, I would have increased my writing output. But I find myself lacking in the self-discipline to maintain a writing routine in the absence of outside factors.

In short, I'm lazy. 

So I am going to finish this blog, take my laptop outside where I will not be distracted (though Rocky and Eddie often believe it is Play Ball! time when I go outside) and continue to write. 

I hope if you are yourself quarantined by the Coronavirus pandemic, you can find your own way to fulfillment despite the lure of laziness.

Be seeing you!

Hello, all!

You'd think that with all this sequestering and changes to school and whatnot, I'd be more active as a blogger. Strangely enough, the disruption in ordinary life has been such that I've felt less productive as opposed to more. I'm hoping to reverse that trend, as it sure seems like we're going to be doing this for a while. So here are some random thoughts as we enter this new world.

I've been thinking about Orwell a lot lately, partially because I've been assembling readings for my AP students and he pops up a lot on AP lists, but mainly because I'm remembering what happened in his most famous piece of writing, 1984.  (He was originally going to title it The Last Man in Europe, but he changed his mind. Why that year? Not because he was making any kind of prediction--as we know, he was really commenting on his world as it was. He simply exaggerated. So why that year? Well, though the novel was published in 1949, he did the writing of it in 1948. He merely switched the last two digits of the year. Neat, huh?) In that novel, the protagonist Winston Smith is a minor functionary at the Ministry of Truth, which is in charge of disseminating propaganda to the public of Oceania. His job is to alter newspaper records so that the past utterances of the leader, a figure known only as Big Brother, line up with the reality of the present. For example, if Big Brother predicted on Monday that there would be an increase in the chocolate ration, and then on Tuesday there was a reduction, Smith would have to change the facts of the past so that Big Brother is and was never wrong. He'd go back and change what Big Brother was recorded as saying on Monday so that Tuesday's reality lined up with Monday's prediction. 

Why does this resonate?

Well, we've been living in the world of 1984 for some time now, having duplicated many of the novel's plot points and ideas. This is a new level of deception--not just lying about the way things are or what's happening in the present, but lying about what the past even was. What strikes me, though--and this is the terrifying part--is that in the world of 1984,  Winston Smith knows that what he is doing is deception. He resists it (not particularly well or particularly heroically, since he's just some dude who has been ground down by the Man) and has to be tortured with drugs and strange devices and eventually a face-cage full of hungry rats before he breaks and accepts Big Brother. (Spoiler alert: "he loved Big Brother" are the final four words). It's the complete and utter domination of a person by a totalitarian government, and it is awful and tragic in a way few books can ever hope to be. 

But...and this is the point...Winston Smith resists. Oh, sure--he can't fight the State torturer (whose name, incidentally, is O'Brien) nor the combined power of the State for that matter, and he loses everything. He loses his humanity, his love for Julia, everything. He loses in every way possible. But he had to be broken. And that's what terrifies me about what's happening today.

Our leader, Donald Trump, is attempting even now to rewrite history and his own remarks about the beginning of the pandemic. Aided by his own Ministry of Truth (Fox News and other affiliated outlets) he is blithely changing what he once said and believed so that he was never wrong. He always saw the Coronavirus was serious. He called it a pandemic before anyone else did. Oceania has always been at war with Eurasia. So in that, we're duplicating the storyline of Orwell's classic.

But we're going along with it! The number of people who are simply accepting these claims, these falsehoods, these lies is staggering. Orwell predicted the power of a totalitarian government could and would be able to break anyone, given enough time and enough brutality. But even Orwell, as bleak as he was, did not predict that we would go along with our own brainwashing. Winston Smith was destroyed, but he went down fighting. We are willingly screaming "do it to Julia!" before O'Brien has even begun his work. 

That is what scares me. Not losing the fight to a totalitarian regime ("who controls the past controls the present") but not even fighting at all. The State doesn't need Room 101 if we're going to surrender before the fight has even been joined. 

Truth matters. Reality matters. 

Fight for them.

Be seeing you!