Beer thumping with Heisenberg’s ocelot

Gosh all hemlock, three months since my last post! Kind of ran out of steam there. To begin with, scratch Time flies like an arrow; it aborted after only two chapters. No great loss. But how to explain the long silence? No explanation; no excuse. Blame it on entropy. It has nothing to do with entropy, of course, but I used to be obsessed with the idea that entropy was the explanation for almost all shit that happened. Second Law and all that.

I have several times referred to Joe Bageant, the passionately articulate socialist-redneck blogger whose social criticism I find so invigoratingly depressing. For quite a while his blog has consisted mostly of reader responses to his magnum opus, Deer hunting with Jesus (2007), and his counter-responses; in fact, the title of the book is also the name of the blog (although its address is simply www.joebageant.com). Most of the responses rave about how his book states with impassioned eloquence all the ideas the reader has had for years, and many readers from other countries (particularly Australia, for some reason) relate how the social decay which he describes in the Divided States also applies to their countries as well. But during all this time, well over a year, while I was reading what everyone else was saying after having read the book, I hadn’t read it myself. So a couple of months ago I corrected that deficiency and bought it (from Amazon; forgive me, for I have sinned).

Subtitled “Dispatches from America’s class war,” it is basically about life in what is usually called the working class, more or less synonymous with the lower class. Bageant himself grew up in Winchester, Virginia, which he uses as the paradigmatic example of lower-working-class America, and he frankly admits to having been raised a redneck. Somewhere along his journey, however, he picked up socialism as a political philosophy, thus making him that seeming oxymoron, a socialist redneck. (The journey incidentally included some time in Boulder with the likes of Timothy Leary.) Having achieved a modest degree of fame and fortune as an author, he came back to Winchester (which, like anyone’s home town, was no longer the town he grew up in), and the book consists mostly of the lives and experiences of his neighbors and fellow citizens, which are used to illustrate what he calls America’s class war. The various chapters are devoted to all the vulnerable and tempting targets of attack in American culture: shitty employment at the mercy (ha ha) of heartless corporations, corrupt mortgage rackets ripping off home-owners, the health-non-care racket designed to make the corporations rich at the sacrifice of the little guy. But there are also some scarily fascinating glimpses into cultural aspects slightly more indigenous to the redneck South, such as the gun culture which is such an important part of their social identity (hence the title), and the truly terrifying intersection of fundamentalist Christianity with fascist-theocratic “dominionist” politics. There’s also a chapter on Lynndie England, the soldier whose claim to fifteen minutes of fame was the picture of her leading Abu Ghraib prisoners around on a leash—just another innocent little lass raised in the white-trash culture of West Virginia just over the hill from Winchester, simply doing what any other good old red-blooded redneck would be glad to do.

More or less incidentally, he mentions here and there some of the many reasons working-poor rednecks have to hate yuppie liberals, and some of them are even reasons I hate yuppie liberals—and I’m closer to being a yuppie liberal than to being a working-poor redneck—an odd mixture which I believe some intellectuals call status-inconsistency. The main reason working-poor rednecks hate yuppie liberals is that the liberals not only don’t listen to the rednecks’ concerns or take them seriously, they try insofar as possible to ignore their existence. One of Bageant’s more amusing comments on the gulf between them is the observation that the supermarkets rednecks shop in don’t even have avocados or leeks.

A fundamental idea running through all this, without being the focus of any particular chapter, is the disadvantages the working poor suffer from shitty or no education. There are times when Bageant almost seems to imply that a lot of the problems would disappear, or at least be greatly ameliorated, by better education. But of course it has to be the right kind of education; the corrupt racket that public schooling has become, and its disastrous effects on kids (and the adults they grow into), are just more easy targets for attack. (How many people have pointed out the irony of the fact that the catastrophically moronic “No Child Left Behind” act was the brain-[sic?]-child of a president who was conspicuously left behind?) So all this is basically a rehash, from a refreshingly new and sometimes grimly humorous point of view, of all the social problems we’ve all been dismally aware of for years. Perhaps Bageant’s one truly original idea is what he calls the “American hologram.” As he himself describes it in one of his on-line essays: “Like a holographic simulation, each part [of American culture] refers exclusively back to the whole, and the whole refers exclusively back to the parts.” This may be a rather loose application of holography to social criticism, but it’s a novel statement of the way in which we are so enmeshed in the various aspects of the culture that it becomes very difficult to stand back from it or “outside” it and view it critically.

So, what does this have to do with “Heisenberg’s ocelot”? Well, the book I started reading after Deer hunting is Robert Anton Wilson’s Schrödinger’s cat trilogy. I’m a very slow reader, so it will take me a while to finish and digest this rather large book, but I might make some beginning observations. Just to lay some groundwork for those of my thousands of readers who may be unfamiliar with quantum mechanics: “Schrödinger’s cat” refers to a thought-experiment devised by Erwin Schrödinger in 1935 which illustrates the quantum paradox of a cat which can be considered simultaneously dead and alive until a quantum event (the decay of a radioactive atom) takes place to “collapse” its state one way or the other. That’s an exceedingly oversimplified and perhaps even erroneous description for the two or three of my readers who may be familiar with quantum mechanics, but let it serve my purposes. A rather far-fetched application of the idea of “wave function collapse” or “state vector collapse” can be used to postulate the existence of “parallel universes,” in the sense that each such collapse creates two separate and parallel universes, one for each of the states that results from the collapse. (Forgive me; I really don’t know what I’m blathering about, and the Wikipedia articles on the subject are far too long and technical for me to wade through. If one of my readers knows better, he’s welcome to correct me. “She”? How many female quantum physicists are there around? Several hundred?)

As an aside, I might note that the classic Frank Capra/Jimmie Stewart film It’s a wonderful life has never, to my knowledge, been recognized as a story about parallel universes. That aspect is, of course, disguised by the fact that the idea is never mentioned in the movie, since “Clarence” the “angel” is one of the silliest nitwits in film history, and even “George Bailey” falls somewhat short of a rocket scientist. In addition, the whole idea of parallel universes was either new or nonexistent at the time the movie was made, and even if it existed in theory, it was almost certainly unknown to Capra. And the story involves characters going back and forth between universes, which is so rare, even in science-fiction, that it almost falls outside the genre. (Again, I may stand corrected, but note that I consider it very different from time-travel.) Far more common is the story where the universes exist parallel to each other but never communicate with each other.

Thus, the three books of Wilson’s trilogy (each of which is labeled “Book One”) involve parallel universes in which people and events are similar but different. As an example, “Justin Case” in Book One is “an embittered, fortyish man who wrote beautifully meaningless film criticism”; in Book One he is “a mild, fortyish man who wrote excruciatingly intelligent music criticism”; and in Book One he is “a balding, nervous man who was living in a sociological treatise”—that is, he over-intellectualized in order to distance himself from people. Another example: Benny “Eggs” Benedict is a popular columnist for a New York newspaper in two of the books (different newspapers, different columns), but becomes Bonny Benedict (still a newspaper columnist) in the third one. Such examples could be multiplied, not only of parallel characters but of pun names—Bertha Van Ation, Natalie Drest, Juan Tootrego, Polly Esther Doubleknit, Carol Christmas, Marvin Gardens (a place on the Monopoly game board)—and references parallel to real people like James Joyce, and multi-layered puns like George Washington Carver Bridge (a historical person crossed with a bridge—itself a pun on “crossed”). The father of Markoff Chaney (a pun on “Markov chain,” a mathematical term) is Indole Chaney (a pun on a chemical structure).

Okay, enough multiplication of examples; you get the idea: Wilson loves word games, and so do I. Another of his more endearing traits is that he consistently refers to humans as domesticated primates, and to insects as the six-legged majority population. Lots of good ideas in this twisted view of “reality.” Maybe I’ll devote more space to it when I finish it.

Let me close with something totally unrelated to the above, but something I’d just like to rant briefly about. (Making up for lost time in terms of space here, aren’t we?) I seem to be hearing and seeing a lot these days about nasty people in history, most recently something on PBS last night about the twentieth century’s big nasties, Joe and Adolph, and their role in World War II. Well, I’m hardly the first person to point this out (I haven’t had an original idea in years), but it has often been noted that almost all of the really evil people in world history—the ones who are powerful enough to get into world history—were convinced at the time they were perpetrating their evil that what they were doing was for the good of their people. This would include not only Hitler and Stalin but also lesser ones like Idi Amin, Pol Pot, Mao Tse Tung, Slobodan Milošević (or, going back a bit, Bloody Mary Tudor of England, or all the Spanish Inquisitors)—some of these (and others who might be added) maybe arguably evil but certainly nasty—to a man, they were convinced that they were doing good, and the reason their morality is arguable is that a lot of other people (different numbers for different leaders) also thought they did good. (Notice that I did not add the Mad Emperor to that list. That’s a little ambivalent, isn’t it? He is certainly responsible for the collapse of American democracy, but so far he has not been directly responsible for the deaths of millions of his citizens—disregarding the Iraq war, that is.)

Anyway, the upshot of all this is to reinforce further the oft-quoted maxim of advice: Be very wary of anybody who tells you that what they are doing or trying to do is for your own good. This wariness can start with your parents if you’re a natural-born skeptic, but is easily extended, with a little experience, to teachers, priests, doctors, politicians, etc. To begin with, there’s always the question of how they think they know what’s good for you. Good for lots of other people, maybe (and often not even that), but not necessarily for you. Almost always, their ideas of what’s good for people are dictated by some kind of doctrine or ideology which ignores or denies human diversity: the same things have to be equally good for all people. Be particularly wary of anyone who makes such claims on the basis of being an “expert.” Most “experts” are moronic assholes with trumped up credentials. Heed the popular bumper sticker: “Question authority.” Anything worthwhile I’ve learned has been gleaned from bumper stickers.