It doesn’t matter what you believe in. This time of year is special. People are generally in a good mood, upward turns at the corners of the lips, singing out loud, or even singing in the heart alone. The magic we all believe in comes from the people we love and turning our attention to them.
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After about seventy years’ worth of research and one positive result that proved to be unreproducible, scientists have now officially discovered a process for creating nuclear fusion energy. This may be the ultimate rescue of the human race and life on Earth. Of course, it takes ninety-two high-energy lasers to do it, and it produces only a couple dozen boiling kettles worth of energy beyond what was input into the process. It will probably take thirty years to implement the energy solution. And fossil-fuel industries will probably double pollution output to celebrate the achievement. There is still suffering ahead of us. But things are better than they were overall from a mere two years ago.
I have been a bit pessimistic in this blog of late, feeling my own personal impending mortality, and feeling at the same time that the whole planet Earth was coming to an end.
This long-looked-for nuclear solution finally being proven and possible through reproducible results has given the science fiction writer in me the hope of irrepressible imagination again.
Evil robber barons like Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Bill Gates are still hoarding wealth and letting the rest of us starve. And evil despots like Donald Trump, Ron DeSantis, and Ted Cruz are still planning to rule and exploit everyone who is not them. But the villain classes have run into roadblocks and bad fortune for a change. And since Elon Musk has not yet finished demolishing Twitter, I can still use it for now to promote this blog and my books.
My writing endeavors through blog posts and book publishing have been growing year after year. But this year has seen my flights of fiction drawn back down to earth. I am getting less interaction and response this year than last year. And it is only natural for such things to go up and down. But, probably because of readers’ reactions to nudes in my artwork and gobs of pessimism in my basic messages, only the nudists and the nihilists that read me are more enthusiastic than they were before.
And that is okay too. If the world gives my work more time to be discovered, then those who need to see it will. Life finds a way. The future is fascinating, even to those of us who probably won’t get to see it.
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Adagio 25 – Pirates and the Importance of Words
Now you finally get to sample a bit of my genius at historical analysis. I will lay on you one of the theories of history that I created, and which has had a profound effect on the whole debate over whether History is a Science, or merely a gathering of talking idiots and puppets of the governments who won the wars.
The theory is this; History is always about pirates. I know that statement probably alarms you, or makes you simply dismiss me as a loony, bald-headed goofball who just likes to talk and is meant to be ignored by you. Don’t be alarmed, and I am NOT a goofball.
History is never really written about the builders and creators who craft a society or a civilization. The occasional Albert Einstein, Thomas Edison, Gragg of Mars, or Googol Marou gets mentioned in a history book, but it is always the man, men, or peoples who see the civilization, want the civilization, and then either take the civilization for themselves or totally destroy the civilization who ultimately get the notice and the credit for making History happen. History is not about making something, but about taking something that is already there.
Consider how this played out in the history of the Orion Spur of the Milky Way Galaxy. It truly began with the Ancients who colonized the entire galaxy and then, for reasons unknown, totally disappeared from it, leaving only powerful and dangerous artifacts behind. They were creators and makers, so the story could never really be about them.
The story then would have to proceed to the gentle alien folk called the Sylvani. Now, they may actually be the Ancients, we have no way of knowing, but they don’t actually make History happen either. They created jump drives and interstellar travel, particle readers and material synthesizers (as well as the Skortch beams and disintegrators that can be derived from them), and anti-gravity technology. They did not colonize the stars. They had the bad sense to leave everything as they found it and live their lives in relative peace. The fools!
The amphibianoid people known as the Tellerons were the first to colonize and make an empire in the Orion Spur. These prolific frog-men of Telleri spread their form of civilization to eleven worlds. They wouldn’t have been able to do this, however, if they had never made contact with the Sylvani people while the latter were peacefully exploring the world of Telleri. The frog-men imprisoned the Sylvani explorers and forced them to yield up the all-important space travel technologies they had created. It was an act of space piracy. They basically stole all the knowledge and equipment needed to make a star empire.
Now, the Tellerons were basically fools themselves. They were ruthless explorers and conquerors but were a bit shallow in the thinking end of their gene pool. They were not adaptable and had to carefully recreate their swampy home-world environment everywhere they went. Thus, they were easily conquered themselves when they met far more adaptable races like the Galtorrians from the Delta Pavonis star system and the Earthers from the Sol system.
Words are what basically conquered the Telleron Star Empire. When they reached the Galtorrian homeworld of Galtorr Prime, they got themselves hooked on an alien cultural anomaly caused by TV broadcasts from Earth. The Galtorrians had been receiving and decoding the television signals of Earth for twenty years. A virulent black market existed there for pirated episodes of a TV show called “I Love Lucy”. Reruns of that TV show became a model for both the Galtorrians and the Tellerons who tried to conquer them.
Truth be told, the Tellerons began worshipping the character of Fred Mertz being played by an actor named William Frawley. Frawley’s frog-like mouth and toad-like wit made the fin-headed frog-men think Fred Mertz was a god. The Galtorrians had already adapted the English Language from the show because it was similar in sound patterns to Galtorr-speak. It had become the language of, not only entertainment, but of commerce and diplomacy. Now, English is a twisted and demented sort of language, capable of double meanings, puns, and irony. There are no sacred rules of grammar, word-formation, or spelling, and so the language can be shaped to suit the nefarious purposes of those sinister professionals known as “writers”. Galtorrians were able to trick Tellerons with the so-called “Word of Fred Mertz” into giving them the secrets of space travel, Skortch rays, and material synthesis.
So, space travel and the Telleron Empire fell into the hands of the Galtorrians by piracy. They stole the empire from the rival alien race. They then ruthlessly expanded their new empire. Being a pirate was the thing that created the History.
Now, a very similar process also happened on Earth. Tellerons, easily tricked by Earthers, also lost control of their stolen technology when they tried to invade Earth in about the year 1990 A.D. They tried to invade using invisibility technology acquired by showing their Sylvani slaves old episodes of Star Trek with Romulans in them. The Sylvani succeeded beyond the wildest dreams of Gene Roddenberry. Of course, this backfired, because it is hard to intimidate someone you are trying to conquer with armies and weapons that cannot be seen. The Tellerons managed to lose their devices and Skortch themselves during an invasion that almost no one knew was happening. Again, the technology was pirated from them. I firmly believe that it was one of my own ancestors, a genius named Orben Wallace who reverse-engineered all the alien devices and brought the technology to Earth.
The empire of all humanoid and intelligent life forms in the Orion Spur would be taken and retaken using the stolen technologies and the stolen words of what would become known as “Galanglic,” Galactic English. So, you can see, I have brilliantly proven my theory. All History is about pirates.
Filed under aliens, humor, novel, NOVEL WRITING, Paffooney, satire, science fiction
There was a time when you could turn on the TV news and listen to what you were fairly confident was actually news. Walter Cronkite on CBS always seemed to really “Tell it like it is.” He never seemed to put a spin on anything. No one doubted anything he said when he reported space missions from NASA or the assassination of JFK. You never had to wonder, “What is Cronkite’s real agenda?” His agenda was always to tell me the news of the day.
The question of politics and ideas was always one of, “Which flavor tastes best in my own personal opinion?” Because I was weirdly and excessively smart as a kid, I often listened to some of the smartest people accessible to a black-and-white RCA television set.
William F. Buckley Jr. and Gore Vidal were both identifiably smarter than me. I loved to listen to them argue. They were equally matched. They respected each other’s intellect, but they hated each other with a passion. Buckley was a Fascist-leaning conservative ball of hatred with a giant ego. Vidal was a self-contradictory Commie-pinko bastard child of liberal chaos with an equally giant ego. I never agreed with either of them on anything, but their debates taught me so much about life and politics that I became a dyed-in-the-wool moderate because of them. They were the key evidence backing up the theory that you needed two sides in the political argument to hammer out good ideas of solid worth. And, though I didn’t trust either side of the argument fully, I always trusted that both were basing their ideas on facts.
When I was young I identified as a Republican like my father, and thought George Will was a reasonable opinion-leader. After all, a man who loves baseball can’t be a bad guy.
Then along came Richard Nixon and the faith-shaking lies of Watergate. The media began to be cast as the villain as they continued to show the violence and horrors of Vietnam on TV and tell us about campus unrest and the terrible outcomes of things like the Kent State Massacre. The President suggested routinely that the media was not using facts as much as it was using opinions to turn people away from the Nixon administration’s answer to the problems of life in the USA. I tried to continue believing in the Republican president right up until he resigned and flew away in that helicopter with his metaphorical tail between his legs (I am trying to suggest he was a cowardly dog, not that I want to make a lewd joke about poor Dick Nixon… or is that Little Dick Nixon, the man who let me down?)
And then along comes Ronald Reagan, the man acting as a “Great President” because he was a veteran actor and knew how to play the part. And with him came Fox News.
Roger Ailes, a former adviser to Nixon, got together with media mogul Rupert Murdoch, a man who would commit any crime necessary to sell more newspapers, and created a news channel that would pump out conservative-leaning propaganda that would leave Joseph Goebbels envious. I make it a rule to only listen to them and their views on anything when I feel the need to get one-foot-hopping, fire-spitting mad about something. So, since, I am a relatively happy person in spite of a long, hard life, you can understand why I almost never watch Fox News. They are truly skilled at making me mad and unhappy. And I suspect they do the same for everyone. They deal in outrage more than well-thought-out ideas.
News media came under a cloud that obscured the border between facts and partisan opinions. And conservatives seemed to have a monopoly on the shouty-pouty angry news. So, I began to wonder where to turn for a well-reasoned and possibly more liberal discussion of what was politically and ethically real. I found it in the most surprising of places.
I turned to the “Excuse me, this is the news” crews on Comedy Central where Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert were busy remaking news reporting as a form of comedy entertainment. It is hard work to take real news and turn it into go-for-the-chuckles statements of fact that make you go, “Hmm, that’s right, isn’t it?” Stewart and Colbert consistently examine how other news organizations hurl, vomit forth, and spin the news, and by so doing, they help you examine the sources, get at the truth, and find the dissonance in the songs everyone else is singing. And these are very smart men. As I said, the intellectual work they do is very difficult, harder than merely telling it like it is. I know because I have tried to do the same myself. And is it really “fake news”? It seems to me like it is carefully filtered news, with the poisons of propaganda either surgically removed, or neutralized with antidotes of reason and understanding.
So, Mickey listens to comedians to get his news. Is that where you expected this article to end up? If not, where do you get your news?
We face bleak things in the near future. Climate change is out of control. And we are arguing whether or not the crisis is even real.
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The people and organizations that have to change the most to preserve life on Earth are still firmly committed to short-term profits and keeping everything the same.
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If things don’t change drastically, we are doomed. There will be no future without massive adaptations of behavior.
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Life on Earth is a good and worthy thing. We have gone from primitive natural systems of survival of the fittest to reaching for the heights of equality, fraternity, and freedom that the greatest social-theory thinkers could imagine. And utopia is not achievable, but falling short in our efforts to attain it should not be viewed as an ultimate failure. We are born. We grow. We both suffer and thrive. And finally we die. There is no shame in the journey we all must take.
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We enter this life with nothing but our naked bodies and a mind capable of learning and understanding.
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Everything we have, everything we think, and everything that connects us to life in this world is the result of the choices we make or are made for us by someone who cares or should care about us.
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We absolutely should be choosing to protect life on Earth to give our children and all future generations a chance to have at least what we ourselves had. But the choice is not in my hands… not individually. And the most powerful hands always seem to belong to the hardest hearts.
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So, if we have no choice except to accept that even entire planets eventually die, at least we can choose to hold our heads up and be glad for what we did get out of life. If it all must end, then let it end with beauty. Let the final notes of the song send a thrill up and down our spines.
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No, that is not a typo. I only meant “gifts” in pun form. Sometimes you don’t feel much like talking and, after all, the “picture can be worth a thousand words”, especially if the picture moves.
As you can see, I am spending the day with the Ghost of Christmases Past. Have a wonderful holiday, however you may celebrate it. I will offer more goofy stuff by Mickey after the Ghost of Christmases Future gets done with me.
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I bought a gingerbread house kit from Walmart once again, and we put it together on Sunday while my oldest son was home on leave from the Marine Corps. This little photo essay is inadequate for fully understanding the scope of the epic mess we made, the sugary sweetness of eating the thing as we built it, and the challenge it was to my diabetes and diet.
I did not realize when I bought this kit that the gingerbread house was already put together and glued in place with sugar paste. So the first step this time was chocolate frosting and candy decorations.
Last minute special touches only cost $1.95.
My son the Marine did the Christmas tree on the side in green frosting, not realizing that we had a package of green marshmallow stuff in the kit for that purpose.
I am told that the best part of the process was tearing it all apart and devouring it at the end. I even ate a tiny piece myself.
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I have been ill. I came down with Covid Omicron for the second time, a new variant, almost two weeks ago. And the fever, body aches, and loss of appetite, though it wasn’t enough to kill me, really tore up most of my opportunities to write meaningfully. I got downright depressed with my inability to put words together. Chocolate helped. Walks in the park sapped my energy, by also helped. But due to diabetes and, you know…. being sick with Covid, I couldn’t do enough of either of those things. So, I turned to YouTube and got hooked on philosophers all over again.
If you have seen any of my philosophy posts before, you know who my go-to wise guys are. Nietzsche, Marcus Aurelius, Soren Kierkegaard, Walt Whitman, and Danny Kaye can always give me philosophical bacon bits to chew on, even when I am suffering severe loss of appetite from having Covid again. (What do you mean Danny Kaye is not a philosopher? Have you seen the Court Jester? The Inspector General? You can live your life by the philosophies of the characters he plays… I mean, the mis-identified country bumpkins behind the puffed-up reputations of the popinjays the communities mistake him for.)
Being angry is easy. Being happy is hard.
While I was feeling sorry for myself and letting Crazy Freddy (Nietzsche) tell me, “What doesn’t kill me makes me stronger,” my blog fell off a log and into the bog in the fog. I try to get at least 50 views per day. But apparently too many reposted old blogs didn’t fill in for me when I was too ill to write. I haven’t gotten down to 0 since my first year of blogging. But I was down to 20 for the first time in four years. And I averaged in the 30s. I am therefore due to come back as strong as the Mighty Thor. Right?
The Stoics remind us that we really can’t control things like the blog’s readership and their enthusiasm or lack thereof. I have to learn to accept certain things about myself as a writer. Franz Kafka and H. P. Lovecraft during their lifetimes were writing in obscurity, never living to see their work catch on and be recognized. And both of them were talented writers. Both of them were better writers than I am. So, I should not fret about living in obscurity and being ignored by the reading public. Life and writing are not about wealth and fame. My books exist, at least for now, and that has to be enough.
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I have already written and published 21 books. I have to accept the fact that I won’t be able to create many more. But that is a good number to leave behind.
Philosophers eventually get around to telling me that life is meaningless unless you bother to make your own meaning. And, it turns out, I have already done that. I could die tomorrow fully fulfilled in life. What I have accomplished as a teacher and a cartoonist, and a writer, is enough.
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I was recently asked how I can live surrounded by conservatives when I am obviously liberal-minded. I hardly have to think about it to give an answer.
You have to realize that conservatives are people too. To begin with, I hope you didn’t look at the picture I started with and think, “He must think all conservatives are stupid and look like that.” The picture of Doofy Fuddbugg I used here is not about them. It is about me. This is the comedy face I wear when I am talking politics. You live a life filled with economic, physical, and emotional pain like I have, you have a tendency to wear a mask that makes you, at the very least, happy on the outside. People talk to me all the time, but not because I seek them out. In social situations, I am not a bee, I’m a flower. And because of my sense of humor, people feel comfortable seeking me out and telling me about their pain and anger and hurt to the point that they eventually reach the totally mistaken conclusion that I have wisdom to share.
I do think that corporate bank CEO’s look like this, and I am not sure they count as people.
I hear lots of detailed complaints from my conservative friends in both Iowa and Texas. I know what they fear and what makes them angry. Here are a few of the key things;
I have always understood these feelings because I began hearing them repeatedly since the 1980’s. They are like a fire-cracker with a very short fuse, these ideas conservatives live with. And certain words you say to them are like matches. They will set off, not just one, but all of the fireworks.
So, here is how I talk to conservatives.
Filed under commentary, compassion, education, empathy, goofy thoughts, humor, politics, self portrait
Catch a Falling Star 
I Hope You Dance…
When you walk to the front of the classroom and take up the big pencil in front of a group of young teens and twelve-year-olds, there is a strong pressure to learn how to sing and dance. That, of course, is a metaphor. I was always too arthritic and clunky in my movements to literally dance. But I looked out over a sea of bored and malevolence-filled eyes, slack and sometimes drooling mouths attached to hormone-fueled and creatively evil minds. And I was being paid to put ideas in their heads. Specifically boring and difficult ideas that none of them really wanted in their own personal heads. So I felt the need to learn to dance, to teach in ways that were engaging like good dance tunes, and entertaining in ways that made them want to take action, to metaphorically get up and dance along with me.
I wanted them to enjoy learning the way I did.
But the music of the teacher is not always compatible with the dance style of the individual learner. The secret behind that is, there is absolutely no way to prompt them to dance along with you until you learn about the music already playing in their stupid little heads. (And you can’t, of course ever use the word “stupid” out loud, no matter how funny or true the word is,) You have to get to know a kid before you can teach them anything.
The discordant melodies and bizarre tunes you encounter when you talk to them is like dancing in a minefield blindfolded. Some don’t have enough to eat at home and have to survive off of the nutrition-less food they get in the school cafeteria’s free-and-reduced lunch program. Some of them have never heard a single positive thing from the adults at home, enduring only endless criticism, insults, and sometimes fists. Some of them fall in love you. Some due to hormones. Some due to the fact that you treat them like a real human being. Some because they just stupidly assume that everyone dances to the same tunes they hear in their own personal head.
Some of them automatically hate you because they know that if you hear their own secret music in their own self-loathing heads, you will never accept it. They hate you because you are a teacher and teachers always hate them. Some of them, deep down, are as loathsome as they think they are.
But, if you find the right music, you can get any of them, even all of them, to dance. It might be hard to find. It might be a nearly impossible task to learn to play that music once you find it. But it can be done.
And if you get them to dance to your music, to dance along with you, I can’t think of anything more rewarding, anything more life-fulfilling. Have you ever tried it for yourself? If you are not a teacher, how about with your own children or the children related to you? Everybody should learn to dance this dance I am talking about in metaphors. At least once in your life. It is addictive. You will want to dance more. So the next time the music starts and you get the chance… I hope you’ll dance!
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Filed under commentary, education, kids, metaphor, Paffooney, teaching
Tagged as being a teacher