In Steam Engine Time, People Build Steam Engines

Pluralitas non est ponenda sine necessitate.
- William of Ockham

There is no me. I do not exist. There used to be a me but I had it surgically removed.
- Peter Sellers

The real distinction is between those who adapt their purposes to reality and those who seek to mold reality in light of their purposes.
- Henry Kissinger

It's amazing that brain can generate enough power to keep those legs moving.
- Gene Hackman in "Superman"


For those of you wondering, if any of my loyal audience remains after YET ANOTHER extended hiatus due to writer's block and a surfeit of indifference (yawn), the title of to-day's entry is YET ANOTHER obscure quote of sorts, from a fella name of Charles Fort. I couldn't track down the exact quote so I didn't want to cheat and pass off some garbled paraphrasing as the man's actual words. I felt I owed to you. The Readers. Aren't you grateful? Yeah, whatever. Don't pretend to care, because I know you're faking it. Anywho. Arbitrary self-inflicted rules for quotations don't apply to entry titles, so I found a way to sneak it in, heh heh. [I guess the idea of outwitting myself isn't really sinister-chuckle-worthy, now that I stop and mull it over. But what the hell, I'll treat myself.] ANYWAY. The point being, the "quote." Well, first a little background bio.

[cue up old-timey newsreel music]

CHARLES FORT: A Life

Charles Hoy [?] Fort was not born in a log cabin in Albany, New York on August 6, 1874. Come to think of it I'm fairly certain that by 1874 there were few or no log cabins in Albany. [This was of course long before the great Albany Log Cabin Renaissance of the 1950s. A short-lived and highly inflammable architectural fad.] When he failed to make a living as a short story writer, he decided to broaden his ambitions and soon was a failure as a novelist as well. He managed to see one of ten novels he wrote make it to publication, but it sold poorly. He then began simultaneous work on two books, cleverly titled X and Y, which were about the sinister machinations of Martians and a hidden South Polar empire, respectively, but grew discouraged when he forgot which book was which and abandoned the project. This proved to be a blessing in disguise, for his next work, The Book of the Damned, was an uncharacteristic success for him. This work was Fort's collection of "damned" facts, that is to say, damned by the scientific and learned authorities of the day, anyway. Anecdotes about crop circles [which reminds me, that movie Signs was a total piece of shit; but I digress], spontaneous combustion, the Loch Ness Monster, how the Mayans invented television, that sort of thing. Perhaps his most famous quote, which usually makes the rounds of various and sundry UFO conspiracy circles, is, "The Earth is a farm. We are someone else's property." I guess he was sort of like Robert L. Ripley without the cartooning part. Anyway, Fort had found his calling, and wrote many other volumes of strange facts and factoids, sort of founded a quasi-serious group to further explore the limits of the possible and impossible called the Fortean Society, and basically milked the gimmick onto which he'd stumbled for all it was worth. Many charge Fort with being credulous and trusting to the verge of imbecility, but Fort himself was quoted as saying, "I believe nothing of my own that I have ever written." Some would say this reveals the man's naked charlatanism. Others counter that he was trying to topple the scientific orthodoxy of his day, averring that a more flexible, open-minded heterodoxical system of inquiry might be more beneficial to the Scientific Method. Some would then remark that Others had a point, but still, they hated that fucking Fort. Others then called Some losers who were just jealous, and then sometimes a fistfight would break out.

[end old-timey newsreel music]

I know that I had a point to make when I began that...

Oh. Right. The not-quote. It's supposed to be Fort's rather Fortean explanation for why things can be invented at roughly the same time by disparate and far-flung societies with no way to influence one another. To me it sounded like Fort was suggesting that history, or biology, which, if you think about it, is the most basic and primal historical epic of all, flows through and is guided and directed by a series of invisible and almost incomprehensible series of predetermined contours, barriers, and gullies. A broad valley, if not an actual riverbed. I suppose the idea is rapidly approaching obsolescence in the 21st century, when Kikiyu shamans, Ainu whalers, Tibetan lamas and emperor penguins all seem to have cell phones and websites, but still. It might serve to explain the preponderance of certain ideas and ideologies at various points in history, up until and including this very picosecond [now] as I sit here typing [no, now] this sentence [now!].

For example, why Islam? The West, meaning the North Americans and Europeans who like to think they run the planet and aren't often wrong, have fucked with virtually every alien culture they've ever encountered on this entire planet, and the minute we discover intelligent life on Mars will be building spaceships to go and fuck with them. We've conquered, colonized, exploited, harassed, murdered, "sivilized" [that's a quote from Huckleberry Finn, not a rare typo, calm down], emancipated/manumitted, and continued to exploit every brown and black culture the Southern Hemisphere has to offer, and a few Northern ones as well. We're still doing it. Central and South Americans are our modern-day Okies. We let them stream through our deliberately porous borders so they can scrub our toilets and pick our fruit [hopefully not on the same day], and then we evict them and lock them up when they have the audacity to not make the effort to more effectively evade our feeble but politically necessary efforts to stop illegal immigration. [Lazy Mexicans. Can't they take the time to get better forged documents?] Yet it wasn't a ragtag team of Hondurans, Venezuelans and Mexicans who flew jumbo jets into our financial and military capitals 4 years ago, even though I'm sure they could make a case arguing for the justification of it. We don't face a shadowy, stateless, ill-defined coterie of pan-Latino bombers and assassins who lobby for the creation of a Native American absolutist regime stretching from the Arctic Ocean to the Strait of Magellan. [And NO, the Zapatistas of the southern Mexican state of Chiapas do not count. They're not blowing up 747s at LAX and La Guardia, they just would like it if their people could afford food and housing most of the time, that's all. They're not exactly the Cobra Crimson Guard.] Nor are we "threatened" [let's face it, al-Qaeda itself is not a threat to America. Americans, yes. But they're just a symptom, not the problem itself] by hostile cadres of Zulus, samurai, or Magyars. It's the Arabs. More precisely, the Islamists, whose primary fuel seems to be Arab nationalism [again, footnote: not that al-Qaeda is nationalist, it's not, it wants to create a multiethnic Sunni caliphate, but if it weren't for the jangled nerves and wounded pride of Arabs who feel exploited and emasculated, there would be no al-Qaeda, in my opinion], but fuck it, let's just say the Arabs. Why is it that they're rebelling against us when the other conquered peoples of Earth have just about gotten used to the chafing of their yokes?

Maybe Fort, in his own oddball way, had a point. In the time of Intifadah, or "Uprising"...well...people start uprisings. Maybe the historical pendulum is starting to swing back. Maybe this is the second real "threat" to American hegemony [the first being North Vietnam, which managed to distort and to an extent impede our imperial designs considerably in its day] or maybe this is a momentary pothole on the road to American annexation of most of the planet. It's hard to say. Just remember: it took centuries for the "barbarian" [meaning "non-American"...ha, sorry, I meant "non-Roman"] peoples to bring down Rome. I'm sure whole generations of Roman citizens weren't even conscious that their entire society was falling all around them. But when it finally crashed, it did so with such finality and impact that it set society back at least five hundred years. Maybe a thousand.

Is it healthy for the human race to have to tolerate the existence of hyperpowers like Rome? And America? When we fall, how long will it take civilization to recover? Or will we try and take them all with us when we go? Look at what we've done in Iraq. The rational, sane, humanist opposition to our presence there has been either marginalized, co-opted, or assassinated. The sadists and the faithful, who are one and the same in my book, are running the Loyal Opposition Show now. And make no mistake about it, the relationship between the Bush White House and the Iraqi insurrectionists is every bit as symbiotic as it is parasitic and cancerous. [Human relations often parallel biological processes, but they just as often invert and defy them.] We want to stamp out the rebels but we need them just as badly, to justify our presence there, to be the butchers and barbarians so that we can be the legionaries of order and law. We need the terrorists to kill our soldiers because the blood of soldiers makes excellent whitewash...it washes away the sins of commanders and commanded alike. We Must Never Forget. Support Our Troops. My Country, Right Or Wrong. Blood is the glue that plasters these mantras to the walls of the decent and civilized world, blood, some of ours but mostly yours, blood, blood, blood. I risk repeating myself, but what I say three times is true: in every war, in every war, there are two sides, and they're not the opposing armies on the battlefield. They are the ones who want the war, and the ones who try to stop it, and each faction has adherents that cross the dotted lines of a map. Bush wanted this war, and so did bin Laden, and Zarqawi and al-Sadr and all the rest. They entered into a silent conspiracy, a compact to which all warmongers swear fealty - to keep the killing going, so that We Can Do Whatever We Want. Societies, in the end, are organized around their ability to make war. Maybe societies themselves, as we understand the term to-day, are the problem. But what is the solution then? An endless string of independent Platonic city-states? Anarchy, which is just a maternity ward for mob rule? I don't know. I truly don't. I don't think anyone has the answer yet.

The problem is that we've all seemed to stop asking the question.

[On a final note, this apparently marks the two-year anniversary of my starting a weblog. I have to be candid and admit that I've written perhaps a tenth the amount of output I'd hoped to produce, and a lot of it is embarrassing and self-absorbed, but some of it isn't so bad as it could have been. Hopefully, in terms of passion, prolificacy, and profundity, the next two years will put the first two to shame. Probably not. But it's a journey, not a destination, right?...]