Abandon Mythology

I used to be a regular runner, but as I’ve grown older (and heavier) over the years, running has gradually, but steadily, become more of a chore than the source of enjoyment it once was.

Still, as part of an ongoing program to slow the ravages of middle age on my body, or at least repair some of the damage caused by a genetic predisposition toward European beer, I occasionally drag my lazy ass off the disc golf course for some more vigorous exercise. Like a ten mile drive to the park for a two mile run.

These days, though, my running is more of a slow, sad shuffle. I’m out there among the physically fit, but I’m no longer one of them. No, I’m the sweaty, red-faced guy making peculiar whuffing noises like a steam locomotive, passing only the walkers, hearing “On your left” repeatedly as a steady stream of cyclists and roller bladers and six-year-olds on Big Wheels overtake me.

Then, of course, there are the real runners. I’m humiliated as they glide by in their expensive running suits that look remarkably like long underwear, while I shamble along in my ’90′s-era running shorts, showing a lot more leg than is currently fashionable.

It’s been years since I experienced a runner’s high, so I was caught completely by surprise when it happened to me yesterday. Everything came together, I found my pace, my breathing was right, my brain settled into that near-meditative state, and I just ran, effortlessly, feeling as if I could run forever. It was wonderful. And short-lived.

Reality settled back in when my legs began to tighten up and I found myself almost four miles from my truck. The return trip was a brutal slog, alternating increasingly shorter bouts of running with only slightly less painful walking, the pain getting worse seemingly with every step, spreading to my feet. I was even beginning to cramp a little when, at last, I hobbled up to my truck and drove hastily away.

So it’s a somewhat sheepish return to the disc golf course for me this morning, a little gimpy, but not as sore as I expected to be. Early Sunday is the best time to play here. I break the dew on a quiet course, empty but for the elderly couple salvaging aluminum cans. The parking lot at the DUI school next door fills with cars and a bunch of tired-looking men start lining up at the door.

One of the few people who read this blog sent me this.

There’s not really much I can add to that, other than to say this particular reader has also seen me naked and was equally impressed with that experience.

Two days into a 5 week stay in Oklahoma City and I’m already hating it. Even the bumper stickers are pissing me off today. Honestly, isn’t still sporting a Ron Paul for preznit sticker this long after the voters figured out he’s a kook like saying “I’m the dumbest redneck in the county”? Seriously. Then I saw another one that read “Liberalism Breeds Terrorism.” Now, that’s a whole lot of stupid packed into three words. I wanted to chase that guy down and smack him with some Anaïs Nin:

Truth is something which can’t be told in a few words. Those who simplify the universe only reduce the expansion of its meaning.

Or just ask him if he actually believes religious fanaticism is now a product of the left. But, you know, he probably really does believe it. It’s amazing how unhinged some of these right-wingers are now. The same people who have despised liberals for decades for creating Social Security and Medicare to take care of the elderly in the first place, will now look you in the eye and claim that liberals want to pull the plug on grandma. They aren’t even trying to sound rational any more, just venting a lot of frustration and rage. I’ve got some Anaïs Nin for them too:

We do not see things as they are, we see them as we are.

So true. Then I saw a sign that cheered me up. It read “Take Jesus Back To School With You.” The funny thing was, the sign was not in front of one of Oklahoma City’s approximately half-bazillion churches. It was in front of a barbecue joint. And why would that cheer me up? ‘Cause now I’m tooling down the road thinking, “Barbecued jeebus? I can’t imagine what it would taste like, but I bet it’s stringy.”

Today was the first half of yet another journey into Banjostan, and as usual, I listened to NPR as I traveled. I’m generally not a big fan of the second half of the Diane Rehm show. It’s usually an in-depth interview with the author of a book I’ll never read, however today was an exception. I’m definitely going to pick up a copy of What Else But Home by Michael Rosen. The blurb on NPR’s website:

How a sandlot baseball game led a middle-class family to take in five boys from the projects. It’s a story of discovery, the true meaning of family, and bridging the racial and socio-economic divide.

Doesn’t really do it justice. The author and his wife, both white, and already with two adopted (white) sons, gradually became the parents of five fatherless black kids right out of New York public housing. Listening to Rosen’s account, it sounded like a fascinating tale, so I’m gonna put a few bucks in his pocket and read it for blogworthiness.

I’ve heard various nitwits on the right say we live in a post-racial America now, what with our new preznit Blackie Hussein Marx and all, but the uniqueness of Rosen’s story reveals a vast cultural dichotomy. His sons label all things as being either “ghetto” or “white,” as they move back and forth between two distinctly different worlds. From my vantage point here in the white world, the rarity of stories like this one is striking. I don’t know a single white person, myself included, who would do what Michael Rosen and his wife did.

When Sarah Palin unexpectedly resigned midway through her term as governor of Alaska, there was a lot of speculation about her reason(s) for doing so. Some said she was bailing ahead of impending corruption indictments; some said she was beginning her campaign for preznit; some even blamed David Letterman for calling her daughter a bimbo. Literally everyone knew it wasn’t the ridiculous tripe she was spouting about being able to do more for Alaskans as a private citizen than as their governor.

But it’s looking like the real reason was simple mathematics. The darling of the religious right, with millions of devoted followers just dying to throw money at her, was stuck in a $125,000 a year government job, with a year and a half left on her contract. In Sunday’s St. Louis Post-Dispatch, columnist Kevin Horrigan looks at the numbers:

Palin reportedly is working on a book for which she received a huge advance. Because she’s no longer governor, she doesn’t have to disclose how huge, but estimates range from $7 million to $11 million.

Palin could knock down half a million bucks in speaker’s fees in a well-planned weekend.

Four times your annual salary in a weekend would be tough for anybody to pass up. Sadly, for most modern American politicians — Republican or Democrat — it is an impossibility. For them, cashing in is what politics is about. Sarah Palin did what 99% of her peers would have done in the same situation; she kicked principles to the curb and took the money.

Now she has to earn it. And to do that, she has to get way down in the weeds with the crazies on the far right. Here’s Horrigan quoting somebody quoting somebody else (yeah, yeah, I know):

Bernstein quoted Julian Zelizer, a professor at Princeton University who studies the conservative movement: “If you want to do well in that market, they expect red meat. They don’t want moderates — that’s not what sells.”

She’s off to an excellent start with this Facebook post seemingly pulled right out of her ass. A sample:

The America I know and love is not one in which my parents or my baby with Down Syndrome will have to stand in front of Obama’s “death panel” so his bureaucrats can decide, based on a subjective judgment of their “level of productivity in society,” whether they are worthy of health care. Such a system is downright evil.

OMG!! If health care reform passes, liberals will kill my retarded baby!!! That’s top-shelf crazy, right there, but Sarah knows her audience. The far right thrives on fear and anger and false victimization, and contemptible as it is, she’s just delivering the red meat. I’m betting it will get much worse.

Sarah Palin seems destined to become the second female on my list of people I want to kick in the nuts, joining the repugnant Ann Coulter. At first, I almost wished she could somehow wind up with the Republican nomination for preznit in 2012, just to witness the beat-down she would take in a debate with Michelle’s husband. But now I just hope she doesn’t get too many people killed making her millions.

My last post was supposed to be about ignorance and somehow I wandered off into a story about my youthful skirmishes with the invisible cloud-daddy, but hey, at least I wrote something. I’ll try to stay on point this time. No guarantees, though.

I just finished reading a collection of essays on ignorance, edited by Robert N. Proctor and Linda Schiebinger. It’s titled Agnotology [The Making and Unmaking of Ignorance]. It details some of the many and varied forms that ignorance takes, under three very broad distinctions: ignorance as native state, ignorance as lost realm, and ignorance as strategic ploy.

The first category, ignorance as native state, is simply the “place where knowledge has not yet penetrated.” We all begin life as an empty vessel. This is an innocent ignorance from which we spend our lives escaping. (Most of us anyway.) Individual recognition of this lack of knowledge is the Socratic ignorance I mentioned in my last post. It would seem that this type of ignorance could be easily remedied, given our access to the intertoobz, but maybe not:

Technologies can cause the proliferation of ignorance: the public seems to be awakening to the fact that in the midst of the “information” explosion, there has been an “ignorance” explosion as well … The internet has certainly fostered the spread of fictions along with facts.

Don’t I know it. If the billionaires over at Google ever come up with a bullshit filter, they’ll make some serious money.

Ignorance as lost realm is also often innocent in nature, as when knowledge once gained is abandoned for more modern or more useful information, or when it takes the form of specialization. There is simply too much information available for us to absorb it all. We routinely, and necessarily, sacrifice breadth of learning for depth of understanding in order to produce expertise. But ignorance as lost realm can be far from innocent, as when knowledge already gained is deliberately withheld, or the pursuit of knowledge in certain areas is discouraged for reasons of ideology or secrecy. Military secrecy for instance:

Contemplate these numbers: about five times as many pages are being added to the classified universe than are being brought to the storehouses of human learning, including all the books and journals on any subject in any language collected in the largest repositories on the planet.

That’s downright scary, isn’t it? Then there’s the systematic suppression of knowledge and study of the clitoris and the female orgasm as detailed in one of these essays. I always thought it was just me, but apparently nobody knows anything about that damn thing. I didn’t even know how much I didn’t know. I definitely need to study this subject more closely.

But the worst, the absolute worst is the third category: ignorance as strategic ploy, agnogenesis. Two of my most despised adversaries — mythologists and global warming deniers — employ these methods as a primary line of defense. The religious embrace ignorance in order to deny reality and resist the advance of science:

Here a religious agnotology is advocated in which we are urged to recognize our ignorance as a fundamental limitation on human experience, and we are urged not to intervene in matters where only God has knowledge.

In summary, religious agnotology expresses the view that life is too complex for humans to understand and that science and technology will lead to disaster because of the hubris involved in attempting to improve on God’s creation.

At least they are predictable. When facts get in the way of their ideology, they simply dismiss the facts using any means available to deny the truth. They’ve been doing it for centuries. Nothing new there.

The more insidious users of this methodology, though, are our modern capitalists. An entire industry has grown and flourished around the manufacture of uncertainty, the intentional creation of ignorance by attacking science and scientists solely for the purpose of protecting corporate profits. The book does a good job of chronicling how the purveyors of misinformation got their start in the tobacco industry’s decades-long campaign to deny smoking causes cancer. They lost that battle, but they perfected their craft and carried it over into every aspect of modern “product defense.”

They are at their most contemptible in their assault on global warming science. The strategy mostly involves paying their own “scientists” to contradict the global scientific consensus, and then demanding equal time for this tiny minority viewpoint from a complacent media. The media, naively seeking balance, helps create a controversy where none truly exists. Truth becomes malleable, and ignorance reigns, all in the name of the “free market.”

The great economist John Maynard Keynes famously noted that there is no free lunch. The western world has experienced 150 years of unprecedented prosperity built by tapping the energy stored in fossil fuels. That was our lunch. Global warming is the bill.

Overall, Agnotology is a very interesting read, though much of it reads like a textbook. And rightly so. It should be required reading for all current and future journalists and science writers.