All Your Base Are Belong To Us
Eighteen hundred years ago in a city of Rome, an influential Christian heretic named Marcion took a look at the world around him and drew a conclusion: The god who created our cosmos couldn't possibly be good.
- Howard Bloom, "The Lucifer Principle: A Scientific Expedition into the Forces of History"
For the most part disease memes, like diseases, are self-limiting: depressed or defeatist people tend to eschew social interactions, and the healthier parts of the organization reject them and their beliefs. It is not uncommon during periods of societal financial stress to see corporations succumb to defeatism and collapse. Various disease memes have more adapted life-cycles; for instance they make the carriers more effective when carriers are sparse. A simple example is a "yes man," who rises rapidly in a corporation until he is an executive. But a "yes man" cannot function as CEO, and a leader cannot function surrounded by "yes men".
- from the Wikipedia entry "disease meme"
This sword here at my side don't act the way it should
Keeps calling me its master, but I feel like its slave
- Blue Oyster Cult, "Black Blade"
How are you gentlemen !!
Some lowlights from the "news" first, I think. Sure, why not. In response to the utterly fucking horrific death toll from the tsunamis in the Indian Ocean, President Bush announced that in addition to the $35 million in aid already pledged by the United States, he had "established a regional core group with India, Japan and Australia to help coordinate relief efforts. I'm confident more nations will join this core group in short order." Which is great. Finally, my president steps up and does something admirable. And I really ought to just shut up there, oughtn't I? Except then I go and read that India has refused any foreign disaster aid, saying it's doing quite nicely on its own, thanks anyway. Well that doesn't make any sense, Bush just said India was a part of the plan. Why do the Indians hate America? We're trying to be Christ-like and their self-reliance is making us look bad. That makes New Delhi objectively pro-Saddam, really, to use the Ann Coulter approach. And then I just had to go and find some article about the upcoming inaugural festivities, and it says that Bush is having not one, not two, not three...keep going...not five...almost there...but seven, SEVEN simultaneous inaugural balls this January...to the tune of $40 MILLION...paid for BY US...for a guy who IS ALREADY PRESIDENT. Oh, and then he ordered a renewed offensive in Iraq. [this sounds like a snide remark but this is actually true. more below.]
81,000 are dead, the corpses keep coming in with no end in sight, and half as many again may die from disease and malnutrition owing to the utter collapse of civil authority and basic administration in the areas affected, most notably in the Indonesian province of Aceh. This province covers the northern part of the island of Sumatra which was the closest major landmass to the epicenter of the quake and whose capital city of Banda Aceh was all but flattened by the 15-meter-high tsunami generated by the quake. I mention this because Aceh is home to the most active separatist, borderline fundamentalist Muslim movement in the world's largest Muslim nation. The chance for America to throw its vast resources into relieving this devastated region and earn us immeasurable goodwill from the Muslim world is manna from Heaven. Forget $35 million. We spend that in a few hours in Iraq. How about a few hundred million. Now. I know, I know, the new meme is "fiscal restraint," which means "pinching pennies except on the things we like." But think back to the good will we had after September 11. That right-wing kleptocrat Jacques Chirac, openly weeping at a press conference over the lives lost. Fucking Muammar Qadhafi (!) personally donating blood as part of a Libyan blood drive to help International Red Cross and Red Crescent. Everything we've managed to piss away with Iraq, regained with this one sweepingly dramatic gesture. To prove the cynics and the critics false, to demonstrate beyond a shadow of a fucking doubt that America steps up to the plate and bears the greater share of the burden when the chips are down, because that's what Great Nations do.
Well, not so much. See, the caterer's deposit is non-refundable, so. Sorry Indonesia. But seriously though, stop being anti-American. We're the good guys. If you promise to thank us for the neglible effort we're making here with your whole disaster of epic proportions thing, maybe we'll send you some of the leftover hors d'oeurves come January 21. Deal?
Also, the Iraqi insurgency has made a major tactical evolution. The ever-reliable Car Bomb seems poised to yield to the House Bomb. Insurgents in west Baghdad made an anonymous tip to Iraqi police claiming to be informing on themselves, telling the police about a safehouse stockpiled with weapons being used by the insurgents. The Iraqi police launched a raid, and found out that the tip was good, solid information - a "slam dunk," even, to quote Tenet - with the niggling omission that the explosives were actually armed, and subsequently detonated by remote, killing about 30 people. The Baghdad neighborhood where this occurred has been described as being "staunchly Baathist," which seems not to mean much these days with the bulk of the hardcore Baathist resistance - scattered clusters of Fedayeen Saddam and Special Republican Guard soldiers organized by former Baath Party apparatchiks and local Baathist mini-warlords - having allied themselves, and to a certain extent assimilated with, the thriving Sunni multi-ethnic religious resistance, the so-called "foreign fighters" led by Jordanian al-Zarqawi. But it's embarrassing and indelicate to criticize Sunni Islam, which is A Great and Noble Religion and We Respect It's Rich Traditions and Please Vote and blah blah blah. Better to link this to Saddam, nobody likes that guy. Adrian Zmed has better prospects for a comeback. So anyway. In we chuck the intrepid U.S. First Cav to the charmingly bemonikered "Triangle of Death," the cluster of Sunni strongholds south of Baghdad. The Triangle is where a large number of insurgents relocated following the debacle of the Second Falluja Offensive in November, where we marched in with great pomp and circumstance and found lots of ricebowls left smoldering on cooking fires and precious few actual terrorists. So good luck with that one, boys. Happy New Year.
blah. Anyway.
I wanted to embark on another of my patented flights of fancy and childlike awe with this article, but it seems the times are grimly insistent. Sometimes history is jealous of our attentions. I'll just talk a little about the concept of Internet memes, about which I spent today reading. The title of today's entry is a particularly persistent meme that raced around the Internet way in the way-back of 2001 but lingers still. Apparently, it's a line of dialogue, ineptly translated from Japanese, from a none-too-memorable video game from 10-15 years ago called "Zero Wing." Something about an alien cyborg menace coolly informing the approaching Earth spacefleet of treachery in its own ranks. It came out, somehow, as "All your base are belong to us." Then the cyborg taunts the incredulous human heroes with the imminence of their demise with the immortal turn of phrase, "You have no chance to survive make your time." More mangled Engrish follows. So...why are we talking about this? Apparently, the phrase bounced from person to person, as memes do by definition. Memes, for those who don't know, are self-perpetuating pieces of information. A catchy song you can't get out of your head and start humming, inflicting it on others. A conspiracy theory that starts getting whispered around. An email telling you how to make lots of money fast, and it's totally legal. Jokes. Religions. These are all memes.
Okay. But. All your base are belong to us?
There's nothing really noteworthy about it, which is why it became so noteworthy, perversely. Some DJ made a techno song sampling this line, some other people made an Internet video for it showing the eponymous line photoshopped into every conceivable context, and there you go. It bounced around the planet. On April Fools Day in some town in Michigan, a group of guys put a few dozen signs bearing this cryptic slogan all over their town one night. The local chief of police thought it was a warning from al-Qaeda. The weird part is that this game was never even sold in America. To these seven guys who spent the whole night pulling off this elaborate prank that maybe a hundred people in the world would get, the joke is so obscure at this point that it's not even a joke anymore, it's just something you know about, from some guy who heard it from some other guy. And yet perversely, as I said, the very distance from the original joke has made it oddly amusing, but in a totally different way. Imagine a tape recording of a Richard Pryor concert, duped about twenty generations, until you can't hear intelligble English. But what you do hear is rather silly-sounding. So you laugh. And you're not sure why you laugh, but you do. And you dupe it again, and distort it further. And the translation and the distortion, depending on the circumstances, sort of generates its own inertia, and keeps something moving that should never have started moving in the first place.
The idea of translation fascinates me, because no two languages are ever one hundred percent compatible. There are always exceptions, contexts, accents, shadings that elude true translation. Ever hear of Omar Khayyam? It's okay if you haven't, it's not as if I'm an expect either. But Omar lived in 11th and 12th century Persia and was an eminent philosopher, astronomer, and mathematician. Today we mainly know him for his poetry, however. Except, we don't really know him for HIS poetry. The "Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam" was most famously translated by an English poet and literary scholar named Edward FitzGerald. FitzGerald, a contemporary of Tennyson and Thackeray, had had little success in his own right. But his translations of Khayyam's many quatrains of poetry, which took many liberties and often little resemble their alleged source material, are strikingly beautiful and mystical. Two men separated by centuries of history, whose works separately are little remembered if at all, but the intermingling of their minds and imaginations produced something unique and sublime. The idea of that simply fascinates me. The germination of ideas, from one mind to the next, so that at a certain point one can no longer discern the original seed from the tree which has sprung up.
I don't really having anything illuminating to offer on this, sorry. Just wanted to muse on it for a bit. But maybe someone will read this tomorrow, or five years from now, and the cogs in her head will turn and click and something that seemed previously remote and inexplicable will now make sense, and she'll write that song or finish that painting or solder that robot together or something. Who knows. When fishing in the ocean of ideas, make sure to use a wide net. You'll catch a lot more boots, but you might haul a mermaid in too.
[What was that? WAY too maudlin, that last bit. Future readers, take note: skip that last metaphor, it was lame. But the rest of the entry's not bad. Also, Soylent Green is made from people.]
For great justice. I'm out. If I don't update before then, happy New Year wishes to all my loyal readers. Both of them.
- Howard Bloom, "The Lucifer Principle: A Scientific Expedition into the Forces of History"
For the most part disease memes, like diseases, are self-limiting: depressed or defeatist people tend to eschew social interactions, and the healthier parts of the organization reject them and their beliefs. It is not uncommon during periods of societal financial stress to see corporations succumb to defeatism and collapse. Various disease memes have more adapted life-cycles; for instance they make the carriers more effective when carriers are sparse. A simple example is a "yes man," who rises rapidly in a corporation until he is an executive. But a "yes man" cannot function as CEO, and a leader cannot function surrounded by "yes men".
- from the Wikipedia entry "disease meme"
This sword here at my side don't act the way it should
Keeps calling me its master, but I feel like its slave
- Blue Oyster Cult, "Black Blade"
How are you gentlemen !!
Some lowlights from the "news" first, I think. Sure, why not. In response to the utterly fucking horrific death toll from the tsunamis in the Indian Ocean, President Bush announced that in addition to the $35 million in aid already pledged by the United States, he had "established a regional core group with India, Japan and Australia to help coordinate relief efforts. I'm confident more nations will join this core group in short order." Which is great. Finally, my president steps up and does something admirable. And I really ought to just shut up there, oughtn't I? Except then I go and read that India has refused any foreign disaster aid, saying it's doing quite nicely on its own, thanks anyway. Well that doesn't make any sense, Bush just said India was a part of the plan. Why do the Indians hate America? We're trying to be Christ-like and their self-reliance is making us look bad. That makes New Delhi objectively pro-Saddam, really, to use the Ann Coulter approach. And then I just had to go and find some article about the upcoming inaugural festivities, and it says that Bush is having not one, not two, not three...keep going...not five...almost there...but seven, SEVEN simultaneous inaugural balls this January...to the tune of $40 MILLION...paid for BY US...for a guy who IS ALREADY PRESIDENT. Oh, and then he ordered a renewed offensive in Iraq. [this sounds like a snide remark but this is actually true. more below.]
81,000 are dead, the corpses keep coming in with no end in sight, and half as many again may die from disease and malnutrition owing to the utter collapse of civil authority and basic administration in the areas affected, most notably in the Indonesian province of Aceh. This province covers the northern part of the island of Sumatra which was the closest major landmass to the epicenter of the quake and whose capital city of Banda Aceh was all but flattened by the 15-meter-high tsunami generated by the quake. I mention this because Aceh is home to the most active separatist, borderline fundamentalist Muslim movement in the world's largest Muslim nation. The chance for America to throw its vast resources into relieving this devastated region and earn us immeasurable goodwill from the Muslim world is manna from Heaven. Forget $35 million. We spend that in a few hours in Iraq. How about a few hundred million. Now. I know, I know, the new meme is "fiscal restraint," which means "pinching pennies except on the things we like." But think back to the good will we had after September 11. That right-wing kleptocrat Jacques Chirac, openly weeping at a press conference over the lives lost. Fucking Muammar Qadhafi (!) personally donating blood as part of a Libyan blood drive to help International Red Cross and Red Crescent. Everything we've managed to piss away with Iraq, regained with this one sweepingly dramatic gesture. To prove the cynics and the critics false, to demonstrate beyond a shadow of a fucking doubt that America steps up to the plate and bears the greater share of the burden when the chips are down, because that's what Great Nations do.
Well, not so much. See, the caterer's deposit is non-refundable, so. Sorry Indonesia. But seriously though, stop being anti-American. We're the good guys. If you promise to thank us for the neglible effort we're making here with your whole disaster of epic proportions thing, maybe we'll send you some of the leftover hors d'oeurves come January 21. Deal?
Also, the Iraqi insurgency has made a major tactical evolution. The ever-reliable Car Bomb seems poised to yield to the House Bomb. Insurgents in west Baghdad made an anonymous tip to Iraqi police claiming to be informing on themselves, telling the police about a safehouse stockpiled with weapons being used by the insurgents. The Iraqi police launched a raid, and found out that the tip was good, solid information - a "slam dunk," even, to quote Tenet - with the niggling omission that the explosives were actually armed, and subsequently detonated by remote, killing about 30 people. The Baghdad neighborhood where this occurred has been described as being "staunchly Baathist," which seems not to mean much these days with the bulk of the hardcore Baathist resistance - scattered clusters of Fedayeen Saddam and Special Republican Guard soldiers organized by former Baath Party apparatchiks and local Baathist mini-warlords - having allied themselves, and to a certain extent assimilated with, the thriving Sunni multi-ethnic religious resistance, the so-called "foreign fighters" led by Jordanian al-Zarqawi. But it's embarrassing and indelicate to criticize Sunni Islam, which is A Great and Noble Religion and We Respect It's Rich Traditions and Please Vote and blah blah blah. Better to link this to Saddam, nobody likes that guy. Adrian Zmed has better prospects for a comeback. So anyway. In we chuck the intrepid U.S. First Cav to the charmingly bemonikered "Triangle of Death," the cluster of Sunni strongholds south of Baghdad. The Triangle is where a large number of insurgents relocated following the debacle of the Second Falluja Offensive in November, where we marched in with great pomp and circumstance and found lots of ricebowls left smoldering on cooking fires and precious few actual terrorists. So good luck with that one, boys. Happy New Year.
blah. Anyway.
I wanted to embark on another of my patented flights of fancy and childlike awe with this article, but it seems the times are grimly insistent. Sometimes history is jealous of our attentions. I'll just talk a little about the concept of Internet memes, about which I spent today reading. The title of today's entry is a particularly persistent meme that raced around the Internet way in the way-back of 2001 but lingers still. Apparently, it's a line of dialogue, ineptly translated from Japanese, from a none-too-memorable video game from 10-15 years ago called "Zero Wing." Something about an alien cyborg menace coolly informing the approaching Earth spacefleet of treachery in its own ranks. It came out, somehow, as "All your base are belong to us." Then the cyborg taunts the incredulous human heroes with the imminence of their demise with the immortal turn of phrase, "You have no chance to survive make your time." More mangled Engrish follows. So...why are we talking about this? Apparently, the phrase bounced from person to person, as memes do by definition. Memes, for those who don't know, are self-perpetuating pieces of information. A catchy song you can't get out of your head and start humming, inflicting it on others. A conspiracy theory that starts getting whispered around. An email telling you how to make lots of money fast, and it's totally legal. Jokes. Religions. These are all memes.
Okay. But. All your base are belong to us?
There's nothing really noteworthy about it, which is why it became so noteworthy, perversely. Some DJ made a techno song sampling this line, some other people made an Internet video for it showing the eponymous line photoshopped into every conceivable context, and there you go. It bounced around the planet. On April Fools Day in some town in Michigan, a group of guys put a few dozen signs bearing this cryptic slogan all over their town one night. The local chief of police thought it was a warning from al-Qaeda. The weird part is that this game was never even sold in America. To these seven guys who spent the whole night pulling off this elaborate prank that maybe a hundred people in the world would get, the joke is so obscure at this point that it's not even a joke anymore, it's just something you know about, from some guy who heard it from some other guy. And yet perversely, as I said, the very distance from the original joke has made it oddly amusing, but in a totally different way. Imagine a tape recording of a Richard Pryor concert, duped about twenty generations, until you can't hear intelligble English. But what you do hear is rather silly-sounding. So you laugh. And you're not sure why you laugh, but you do. And you dupe it again, and distort it further. And the translation and the distortion, depending on the circumstances, sort of generates its own inertia, and keeps something moving that should never have started moving in the first place.
The idea of translation fascinates me, because no two languages are ever one hundred percent compatible. There are always exceptions, contexts, accents, shadings that elude true translation. Ever hear of Omar Khayyam? It's okay if you haven't, it's not as if I'm an expect either. But Omar lived in 11th and 12th century Persia and was an eminent philosopher, astronomer, and mathematician. Today we mainly know him for his poetry, however. Except, we don't really know him for HIS poetry. The "Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam" was most famously translated by an English poet and literary scholar named Edward FitzGerald. FitzGerald, a contemporary of Tennyson and Thackeray, had had little success in his own right. But his translations of Khayyam's many quatrains of poetry, which took many liberties and often little resemble their alleged source material, are strikingly beautiful and mystical. Two men separated by centuries of history, whose works separately are little remembered if at all, but the intermingling of their minds and imaginations produced something unique and sublime. The idea of that simply fascinates me. The germination of ideas, from one mind to the next, so that at a certain point one can no longer discern the original seed from the tree which has sprung up.
I don't really having anything illuminating to offer on this, sorry. Just wanted to muse on it for a bit. But maybe someone will read this tomorrow, or five years from now, and the cogs in her head will turn and click and something that seemed previously remote and inexplicable will now make sense, and she'll write that song or finish that painting or solder that robot together or something. Who knows. When fishing in the ocean of ideas, make sure to use a wide net. You'll catch a lot more boots, but you might haul a mermaid in too.
[What was that? WAY too maudlin, that last bit. Future readers, take note: skip that last metaphor, it was lame. But the rest of the entry's not bad. Also, Soylent Green is made from people.]
For great justice. I'm out. If I don't update before then, happy New Year wishes to all my loyal readers. Both of them.
posted by Patrick at 10:43 PM
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