The Thomas Chronicles

For those wanting a political pseudo-messiah to solve all their problems, all I’ve got to say is…

This happened in my hometown of Houston, Texas. Apparently, some Islamic group called the Book of Signs Foundation is distributing Islamic Korans on the doormats and doorknobs of people’s homes.

So far, the group claims to have disseminated 30,000 Korans throughout Houston and some Houstonians are none to happy about it.

One resident said, “If we went into a Muslim country and left a Bible, we would be in prison and then decapitated a few years later.”

The Foxnews reported that these Korans were “targeting neighborhoods believed to be most receptive of the Quran or in need of a better understanding of Islam.”

“In need of better understanding“?

Perhaps the Muslim group, Book of Signs Foundation, has a somewhat limited understanding of Texans.

I know many Houstonians take an indifferent or a dim view of Mormons riding around their bikes with black slacks and black ties while distributing their Book of Mormons.

With this in mind, I don’t think they would take well to the distribution of a book that calls on every Muslim to kill infidels, Jews or else make them submit to Islam.

Maybe I’m off here but I think that was a tremendous waste of paper.

I’d rather not see the latest in the Batman movies. I’ve been a fan of the Batman movies ever since the first Tim Burton movie back in 1989. I’ve even checked into the comicbooks from time to time despite (or because of) Frank Miller’s psychotic rendition.

But this is one Batman movie is not what I had in mind as a good time for one overwhelming reason. The death of Heath Ledger.

I believe this role ultimately killed him and I don’t see how anyone can rationalize it. He said the role got under his skin. The sociopathic madman in the Joker got inside him when he played that role, haunted him, refused to let him sleep, as though the evil he portrayed latched onto him.

Heath Ledger described his sleepless nights and mental exhaustion as he wrestled with his role as the “psychopathic, mass-murdering, schizophrenic” Joker in the new Batman film.

He died overdosing on sleeping pills.

I know there are some who say they’re going to see this movie in honor of Ledger, but I think it’s darn close to morbid.

… to be entertained by the movie that killed Heath Ledger— kind of like laughing over a man’s grave, there’s just something not right about it…

Part 1 of 2

There was a memorable scene in Dead Poet’s Society when Robin William’s character asked his impressionable young students to walk around an open cobblestone courtyard in whatever manner suited them. After one or two brief roundabouts, he exclaimed, “There it is!” Naturally, without thinking, a group of his students started walking together, and then almost immediately thereafter, they began taking steps in unison. Arms, legs and feet swung and thudded against the cobblestones in lock step.

What was Robin William’s character, Mr. Keating, point in this quirky exercise? Conformity. It’s an old, well-trodden topic, but it’s one not many people are talking about lately.

What sparked this topic was a conversation I had the other day. In that conversation, a friend of mine said that the reason for all the tantrums at and around us since the dawn of the millennium is for the simple reason that we don’t conform. We don’t fit into pre-defined categories and modes of behavior and beliefs that are acceptable to the “collective”.

In my social and work environment, there is a certain amount of pressure to move along with the flow. Go along to get along, as the saying goes. One can be different as long as that difference is only topical, only surface deep. You can be “different” with the application or insertion of adventurous piercings, tattoos and have metal stainless-steel spikes coming out of your earlobes. But believe the wrong thing, state the obvious, or refuse to engage in the belittling slam dance that passes for conversation nowadays and you can find yourself in a puddle of kim-chi.

If modern social interaction were as simple as identifying concrete “do’s” and “don’ts” in any given setting, much like what was once known as social etiquette, it would be a rather simple matter of memorizing these lists of rules and adjust yourself accordingly. Then contemporary social interplay would be cake, right?

… ah, no. Not cake. Unfortunately, it ain’t even frosting.

The dynamic of many groups– social, business or otherwise– is that it is a free-floating consensus. Not quite like a beehive mentality, but darn close. It’s kind of like having a schizophrenic parent with an imperial ego asking you to push peas around the living room with the tip of your nose. Not satisfied with that approach, the schizoid parent then asks you to push walnuts, and then maybe apricots, and then– wait a minute, why push things at all? Pulling a tether with the apricot attached at one end and you on the other and with a piece of thread between your clenched teeth is much more appealing… Anyway, you get the idea.

In all these machinations, the wit and wisdom of the group must never be questioned. Unfortunately for me and others of my ilk, I like to go left when others want to go right. Part of it, I suppose, is me being a contrarian (i.e. doing it out of sheer bloodymindedness), but the larger part of it, I think (and I hope), is that I couldn’t conform even if I wanted to. And when I was younger, boy howdy, did I want to. A natural born orange in a basket full of apples, you might say, is not very pleasant at times.

When people see that I, and others like myself, don’t conform and have no intention of conforming to the beliefs of the group, there are tantrums. I’ve had it happen on the whole Global Warming shtick. I’ve had it happen on my position favoring gay marriage and gay rights. These tantrums take on many forms, but one of the more frequent reactions I receive is where they would accuse me of being a) arrogant and unwilling to listen b) uncompassionate and c) plain stupid. All this tend to be delivered in acerbic sarcasm and mockery.

I am, of course, not suggesting that people huff and puff whenever they interact with me all the time. I’m simply illustrating a pattern of behavior toward those who do not conform to the shifting beliefs of the collective group. One can be a “Winner” one minute, and a “Loser” in the next. In favor one day, out of favor the next, and there is no seeming rhyme or reason for it. The group just somehow decides it will forevermore have tea rather than coffee in the morning, and all the lemmings run out to have an English Breakfast tea with a dash of honey.

For those still having coffee, well, they just can’t quite keep up, can they? Didn’t you know that today Oceania is the enemy?

Read further in Part II

see Part I

If being chastised for not slavishly follow one particular ideology isn’t enough– liberalism, conservativism, feminism, environmentalism, whatever-ism– you can also find yourself ostracized from the group collective. At work, sometimes when someone falls out of favor with the collective, suddenly they find themselves isolated. Co-workers suddenly don’t feel like socializing with you. Your job might even be in jeopardy.

I’ve observed this time and again. So, when I ran across this article on Foxnews yesterday, I could only nod my head.

These days everyone is so enthusiastic about the evolution of the Web, with its free content, interesting blogs, citizen journalism and the rest of it.

Not me. The big problem, as I see it, is the decline in general perspective, which is due to the decline in the popularity of newspapers and magazines.

By perspective, I mean generalized or common knowledge.

When you pick up The New York Times and look at the front page, you get a general perspective on world events. As you page through the newspaper, you see all sorts of interesting articles that you might not have read if you were merely surfing the Net for news.

Over time, this sort of happenstance approach to information gives a reader perspective on things. You have a sense as to what the economy is doing. You know if some international disaster has occurred. You are more tuned in.

This is going away.

…

… Kids under 21 don’t read newspapers. Many adults have stopped subscribing. The newspapers themselves are cheapening their product.

The New York Times recently laid off a bunch of reporters, who were replaced by bloggers and kids who just got out of journalism school. Probably all functionally good writers, they bring no life experience perspective to the table, and they probably lack world view perspective, too. And they are the ones doling out information to the masses.

…

Meanwhile, the public continues to read about what they already know. And they hang out only with like-minded people. There are huge cadres of people who are practically duplicates of each other. They all think alike, dress alike, and go to the same group-approved places.

With the slow death of newspapers, this beehive-like behavior is only going to get worse. And schools are not helping; they tend to have a political agenda and seem to limit, not enhance, world perspective. This is worsened by a de-emphasis on actual learning and an over-emphasis on personal self-esteem.

The self-esteem movement in education has fostered underachievers who are now out in the world of business, taking on jobs as clerks and cashiers. They can’t add. They can’t spell. They have no idea where Chicago is located on a map. They can’t read a map, in fact. They are seemingly stupid and mostly incompetent.

But hey, they think they are winners just because they’ve been told they are winners. It was drummed into them.

These people eat up information from the Internet and they believe everything they read. They pass along gossip as fact. They fall for every hoax under the sun (especially the very old ones).

[Emphasis is mine.]

There is a no more partisan place, no more contentious and ideologically polarizing place on planet earth than in cyberspace. Cloned ideas for like-minded people, who often congratulate each other for the rightness of their opinions.

If you’re looking for a place where there is a basic uniformity of opinion, various internet sites and pit stops inside the blogosphere should provide you with what you’re looking for. There are a very few notable exceptions, but in most blogs and other opinion sites, absolute conformity of ideas is darn near absolute. And should one stray from the particular ideology of the blog in the “Comments” sections, other commenters would be quick to berate, belittle and even curse the errant individual into either submission or silence.

On both the liberal and conservative end, there is this peculiar litany of characteristics and position, which, according to each respective political group, one must believe in order to be liberal or conservative. To be a “liberal”, you must believe in such and such, and to be a “conservative”, you must believe in this laundry list of convictions. If you’re a liberal, you have to hate Bush, believe in environmentalism, hate the war, and hand American foreign policy over to international organizations (i.e. lose our sovereignty). If you’re a conservative, you have to hate or agree to dispossess gays, support the war, and let market forces determine everything.

This, I believe, is childish; and what is more, this kind of thinking polarizes people and increases antagonism toward those with whom you would disagree. When both conservative and liberal blogs forcefully try to correct each other into the “pure” conservatism and “pure” liberalism, you end up with extremes. And just because lots of people force each other through the pressure of conformity to believe the same thing does not make it true.

An incredible instance of this is when the Republicans lost control of Congress in 2006. Talkshow hosts and bloggers blamed it on the Republicans not being “true” enough to their “conservative values”.

This is an incredible assertion when the party of “competence” bungled Katrina; when they were caught in scandals on the Hill; when they’ve dismissed the American people’s worries over the border; when they’ve treated the American people as their servants rather than the other way around; and they’ve done all this while waving the flag in America’s face and chanting their bigotry that gays don’t have a right to exist. Purity of ideology, I’m afraid, had little to do with it.

This is antithetical to a position arrived at through objectively reasoning the facts.

Society, communities and people are not neat tidy things that could be solved with a few tossed off platitudes. People are often contradictory in their beliefs and behaviors. People can do amazingly virtuous deeds on the one hand, like face down lynch mobs and tend to the sick in cancer wards, and then they can come home and do despicable things on the other hand, like beat their children and run down their spouse through constantly undermining and belittling.

We humans are NOT neat and tidy things– that’s just reality– and I am very skeptical of cure-all solutions or some idea that if we all get together and believe the same thing we can somehow transcend the seeds of corruption that is in us all.

No. We can’t.

What we need are working solutions that look to this reality, not utopias.

I think the liberal attitude of “Do as I say, when and how I want it done, because I know best” and the conservative attitude of “Take care of it yourself because I don’t want to spend the time and money on you” would both be calamities if they each get their way.

I suspect the solution is somewhere in between, and I also suspect it would be found in the least likely of places.

Read from the beginning in Part I

* Bookworm wrote a long-ish post on a related topic.

*Neo-neocon on the related subject of uniformity in academia.

Agree or disagree with Miss Noonan, her articles are almost always worth reading. She has her finger on the pulse of the nation and her observations are usual timely and insightful, even though I sometimes think she’s reading the gauge incorrectly (see her articles on Barack Obama).

But when she’s at the height of her observational powers, she has me nodding my head, not in a EUREKA! moment, but in the way she ties together her observational strands toward a conclusion. She points out what Christopher Hitchens pointed out, about the indignity of going through our airports.

It almost makes you wonder if freedom is slipping away from us; if it is being leeched from us piecemeal by some authoritarian figure in the guise of a screaming TSA fellow.

Bowed heads, shoeless shuffling feet, stripped down to the essentials (though thankfully not down to your skivvies… at any rate, not anymore) and identification cards and papers held in order– It makes you feel de-humanized, and as time goes by, this peculiar institution is having incipient shadows of Orwell.

You’re processed, prodded and hopefully not sterilized by the time you reach your flight, and no one whimpers a protest, not even a raised voice for fear of the state’s swift retribution. Which is perhaps being arrested, handcuffed and carted away? Placed on a no-fly list? Perhaps your luggage would be confiscated for an indefinite amount of time. Who knows?

Thus, we bow our heads, go through this indignity and go along to get get along.

I’ve gone through this ordeal many times, at least once or twice a year, and I’ve never liked the taste of it. I too go along to get along.

Have any of us asked the question: What rights do we have once we cross into the airport terminal?

Not only are we prodded and poked and magnetically scanned, when we finally board the plane we effectively become prisoners for the duration of the flight. Should the airlines and the friendly TSA fellows decide, you can be deprived of water, toiletries, food– all the basic human necessities– for hours and hours on end without any recourse.

I suppose you could protest and demand to be let off and cause a scene. You probably would be let off the plane, but it might be in handcuffs.

To add insult to injury, we, the American people, know that our congressmen and senators, our diplomats and ex-Presidents don’t have to suffer what the rest of America suffers. They have private jets, loaned jets, a friend of a friend of a friend’s jet they could borrow for a weekend in Tahiti. Neither the Dean’s, the Bush’s, the Pelosi’s, the Graham’s nor the Reid’s of the world has to suffer these indignities. Coincidentally, however, they are also the people refusing to do anything about it on our behalf.

Frankly, I’m surprised we endured this hand-handedness for so long. With the General Election approaching in November, perhaps, it’s high time we fire our so-called “Representatives”. With our congressmen and women having a lower turnover rate that the former Soviet Politburo, maybe it’s time they got a real job. Clearly, many of them aren’t doing the job Americans have hired them for…

Perhaps this is just cynical talk. I think it happens to be the truth of the matter, and if that’s just cynical talk, I know I’m not alone in it.

America is in line at the airport. America has its shoes off, is carrying a rubberized bin, is going through a magnetometer. America is worried there is fungus on the floor after a million stockinged feet have walked on it. But America knows not to ask. America is guilty until proved innocent, and no one wants to draw undue attention. America left its ticket and passport in the jacket in the bin in the X-ray machine, and is admonished. America is embarrassed to have put one one-ounce moisturizer too many in the see-through bag. America is irritated that the TSA agent removed its mascara, opened it, put it to her nose, and smelled it. Why don’t you put it up your nose and see if it explodes? America thinks.

And, as always: Why do we do this when you know I am not a terrorist, and you know I know you know I am not a terrorist? Why this costly and harassing kabuki when we both know the facts, and would agree that all this harassment is the government’s way of showing “fairness,” of showing that it will equally humiliate anyone in order to show its high-mindedness and sense of justice? Our politicians congratulate themselves on this as we stand in line.

All the frisking, beeping and patting down is demoralizing to our society. It breeds resentment, encourages a sense that the normal are not in control, that common sense is yesterday. Another thing: It reduces the status of that ancestral arbiter and leader of society, the middle-aged woman. In the new fairness, she is treated like everyone, without respect, like the loud ruffian and the vulgar girl on the phone. The middle-aged woman is the one spread-eagled over there in the delicate shell beneath the removed jacket, praying nothing on her body goes beep and makes people look.

America makes it through security, gets to the gate, waits. The TV monitor is on. It is Wolf Blitzer. He is telling us with a voice of urgency of the Pennsylvania returns. But no one looks up. We are a nation of Willie Lomans, dragging our rollies through acres of airport, going through life with a suitcase and a slack jaw, trying to get home after a long day of meetings, of moving product.

No one in crowded gate 14 looks up to see what happened in Pennsylvania. No one. Wolf talks to the air. Gate 14 is small-town America, a mix, a group of people of all classes and races brought together and living in close proximity until the plane is called, and America knows what Samuel Johnson knew. “How small of all that human hearts endure / That part which laws or kings can cause or cure.”

Gate 14 doesn’t think any one of the candidates is going to make their lives better. Gate 14 will vote anyway, because they know they are the grownups of America and must play the role and do the job.

You can read the rest here.

We’ve been having a peculiar spasm of bizarre natural events lately, and I thought it would be interesting to recount just a few of them.

– We have the ongoing problem of the Mississippi River swelling to uncomfortable levels due to the rain and snowfall earlier this month.

– There was an unprecedented swarm of earthquakes off the coast of Oregon. The strange location of the earthquakes prompted one geologist, Robert Dziak, to note:

“In the 17 years we’ve been monitoring the ocean through hydrophone recordings, we’ve never seen a swarm of earthquakes in an area such as this,” Dziak said. “We’re not certain what it means. But we hope to have a ship divert to the site and take some water samples that may help us learn more.”

– Last week, Illinois was treated to a wake up call. A 5.2 earthquake rocked St. Louis and southern Illinois.

– Wild fires are raging in New Mexico around Mountainaire earlier this week. It’s still going on last I checked.

– Today, a 4.4 earthquake struck Reno.

With the exception of the ongoing flood and potential flood situation along the Mississippi, all these other events have happened around 10 days of each other. This is pretty astonishing when you stop and think about it. The sheer density of events is incredible.

In very short order, I wonder if the human psyche can cope with the pace of events. I’m willing to venture a guess that a sizable portion of the people in the United States and the world have already gone mad from the rate of change in our world.

And if you have doubts on this, imagine yourself as a Chinese peasant around thirty-five years old. Roughly twenty-five years ago, when you were ten, your nation was a predominately agrarian society. Now, it’s become a high-tech industrial society. Everything you’ve known in your whole life keeps changing every few years.

To bring the point on home, there are certain towns out in Arizona that only just five or six years ago only housed five hundred to one thousand people. Now, many of those small towns are suddenly called cities as the thousands poured in from outside the state from California and the Northeast. I know of one such town that was strangely dubbed the fastest growing city in America. From 500 to the expected 350,000 by 2025.

Even my hometown, Houston, Texas, has changed radically in the five years since I left. Roughly 800,000 people have poured into the city from California and New Orleans and the Northeast (Ain’t it funny how people are doing a mass exodus from California? The problem is, the newcomers usually maintain their adherence to the same mentality that created the dysfunctions of California.) On my visits home, I almost feel alien there.

I know this was a total segue from my initial topic of natural phenomenon but it felt relevant at the time.