Years Of Being – A blog of my cosmic (and less than cosmic) observations and ruminations.

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To those whom consider Years Of Being worth reading (yes, both of you), this is to let you know that, for a variety of reasons, I have decided to restrict access to any political posts. If you would like to read these, please email me and request the password. Sorry for the inconvenience, but these are indeed times that try men and women’s souls.

charlesgpuckett@gmail.com

“Why Joe?” Is More Than Merely “Why Not?”

There are not a few voices out there who find deep faults with Joe Biden, and his accomplishments. Or his (perceived) lack of accomplishments. And I do not refer to the insane and anti-logical cacophony of the MAGA crowd. History will eventually bury their empty noise, and rightfully so. No, I am talking about the “friendly fire” on the Left, those impatient souls who demand and insist that Biden “do more”, or worse, that he has “done bad”.

History may seem dull to those who are focused on the future. Yes, working on the future is absolutely the prime responsibility of the leaders in the present. And God knows, the Climate and the Threat to Democracy loom over us all. But let’s be clear. Joe Biden has managed, via legislation and executive action, to get a rather incredible amount of things in place to deal with these and other issues, including the largest federal allocation ever made to combat climate change. But also repairing a badly crumbling infrastructure, canceling student loan debt, and measures to increase voting rights. And all this while working with one of the most antagonistic Congresses imaginable. That’s astonishing. But apparently not enough.

Admittedly, Joe has not reversed Dobbs and restored Rowe. He has not halted all fossil fuel usage and shut down all drilling and mining. He has not reinstated the Voting Rights Act. There are many things still needing to be done that Joe hasn’t done.

But then, History (and the Constitution) reveal that Joe Biden has no unilateral power to do those things.

In America, government actions require laws, and laws require consensus. Only autocrats will bypass those mechanisms. Now we all rightfully oppose the obscenity that is Donald Trump, and his lust to be a strongman tyrant, the equal of Putin or Kim Jong Un. If Joe Biden had such power, he could singlehandedly fix all these wrongs, no sweat. But surely we can see that an autocratic Biden (or any progressive), though he or she would undoubtedly “use the power for good”, is not an acceptable or desirable state of affairs. It would be as if Gandalf had decided to wield the One Ring “for good”. The outcome would be inevitable and disastrous.

So, perhaps it would be best to temper those rash denouncements of “Old Joe”. Joe Biden is 80 years of age. He is old, yes. But it is very important to remember that above all, he has a big heart and an old-fashioned love for America not still seen in many places. He most assuredly continues to act for the good of the country and its people, and not out of personal greed and aggrandizement. That aspect of his character cannot be overemphasized. And especially when contrasted against the sociopathic, narcissistic shitstorm that is Donald Trump.

Just as in 2016, and again in 2020, elections have consequences. Consider well how you vote in 2024.

A Lament For Fictional Heroes

For many, many years I eagerly awaited the new season of Doctor Who. Back in the day, I watch the “Golden Age” Doctors several times, and was at first a bit skeptical of the reboot of the show this century, but of course, that reboot has provided me (and so many others) some of the most memorable Doctor Who moments ever, as well as some of the finest writing and acting, not to mention special effects finally commensurate with the state of the art. The Golden Age special effects were, well, to be honest, nobody watched for the special effects.

And when I learned that the latest Doctor was to be regenerated into a woman, I was very keen on the idea. About time, I thought (see what I did there? 🙂). Unfortunately, the show also got a new show-runner (the person responsible for the arc of the series), and a new team of writers. And it was apparent to me, from the very first episode, that the writing and story arcs, such as they were, were simply not very good. I really liked the new Doctor, and I hated that she did not enjoy the same level of creative teamwork that had been the show’s backbone for so many years. The new show runner, a man named Chris Chibnall, apparently decided to basically ignore the decades that had preceded him. Continuity has always been a challenge in a show that spans five decades (and deals with time travel!), but it still deserves at least a modicum of effort. I haven’t watched any of the latest season, and feel no strong need to. And apparently the most recent holiday episode (used to be Christmas, now it’s New Years for some reason) completely destroyed the basic assumptions and origins of the show. Why would I care to see that?

The man who ran the show all through the David Tennant, Matt Jones and Peter Capaldi years, a man named Steven Moffat, left the show (so I hear) to concentrate on the most excellent Benedict Cumberbatch Sherlock Holmes show. The irony is that that show seems to have disappeared. Cumberbatch is off doing a million other things now, including becoming a part of the Marvel Character Universe (MCU) as Doctor Strange. So we lost Sherlock Holmes, too.

And speaking of the MCU, look what happened there: Iron Man & Captain America are both gone, not to mention the others who perished in the fight against Thanos. Iron Man & Captain America pretty much formed the central core of the whole MCU, by virtue of movie seniority (Iron Man) and historical credentials (Captain America). Not to mention the iconic and magnetic personality of Robert Downey, Jr., whose constant wit was like a perpetual motion machine in the Avengers movies. There will be more MCU movies, but that’s a HUGE loss.

On television, the extremely excellent (IMO) Agents of Shield has dissolved. Yes, the stories had ranged further and further out, convoluted and Ouroborean in their complexity. But they still held together, and the characters had become real (not always true in science fiction) and we cared about them, and their conflicts and their hidden facets. I also really liked the Agent Carter series, and hated to see it pulled, though Agents of Shield managed to even wrap up that story line in their last few episodes.

I wish I could like the DC super hero movies, but let’s face it: they never had the mojo that the Stan Lee movies did. I suspect that’s because, even in the deeps of comic book time, DC heroes were never complicated. It was always super goodness vs super evil, end of story. Sure, in “modern” comic novel times, they’ve tried to add internal character conflict, but it’s really sort of painted on, not inherent. I believe I foresaw this, even as a kid, when Batman kept adding Bat-things to his arsenal, and Superman had a new superpower seemingly every issue. I think the writing was on the wall when Superman started using his super-ventriloquism. Across interplanetary space. Yeah. Super-ventriloquism. Sure, Aquaman and Wonder Woman are cool, but I think that’s more due to the actors, not the stories. And I understand WW84 is kind of a bust, which I hate.

Contrast to the MCU heroes who were ALWAYS conflicted, from the gitgo. Spider-man was an actual teenager, with teenage problems, and living with his aunt, a widow. His boss was a jerk, he had girl friend problems. Ironman was a spoiled rich guy. Hell, the Hulk was a rampaging, mindless monster. Captain America was about as close to one-dimensional as they portrayed, but don’t forget he started out as a 98 pound weakling. So there’s stuff there, too. Thor was an actual GOD, so that added a whole new dimension (literally). And that naturally leads to Doctor Strange, and the unreality HE represents. Like I said, a pantheon of characters with deep character wells from which to draw.

As for the X-Men, who apparently live in a completely separate MCU, they’ve pretty much played that story out into ultimate entropy and the heat death of the (MC) Universe (2). There’s nothing left to do now.

Star Wars? God we can only hope there’s no more there to come. The Mandolorean has obvious promise, but the most common thread I’ve seen in Season 1 and the first few episodes of Season 2 (like Jethro Tull, I’m “Living In the Past” 🎶 ) is: Mandolorean goes to a planet, some person or group there enlists his help on some local problem, he helps, he and Baby Yoda leave. I understand there’s some big plot Reveal at the end of Season 2. I hope it’s not just a contrivance.

Star Trek? They were forced to not only reboot the franchise, they went so far as to shift it into an alternate universe with alternate basis and history. Entertaining as far as it has gone, I hope it can go further. That remains to be seen.

Peter Jackson has squeezed every drop of cinematic juice out of Middle Earth there was to squeeze, more actually. Three full length movies for the Hobbit? Everybody KNEW that was not right. I guess he might assail the Silmarillion, but that is NOT a cinematically oriented tale. And the characters are impossible to bring down to human stature.

So, the cinematic (and small screen) hero world is not as much fun anymore. I guess it could just be me, and the result of “getting on” as I am so obviously doing. But these playful bits of heroic story-telling have been with me for so long, I find it a bit sad to see the more iconic and central parts departing. Like Samwise Gamgee said, they are going into the West, they are leaving us.

Why Does Tolkien Resonate So Profoundly?

I am by far not the first to note this: It is almost impossible to overstate the magnitude of the accomplishment that JRR Tolkien achieved in a lifetime of effort.

Almost everyone comes to the world of Middle Earth via The Hobbit and the LOTR trilogy, easily some of the finest examples of pure story-telling in the English language. Taken together, The Red Book of the Westmarch will undoubtedly take its place among the true and lasting classics of literature, revered for many, many years into the future.

But the Red Book was, after all, only the most visible culmination of a work of breath-taking scope. I re-opened the Silmarillion last night, and was once again reminded of just how wide and deep was the task Tolkien took on. Though likely somewhat organic and even accidental in its genesis, the construction of this mythology, this history, was a thing so complete and far-ranging, that it almost defies categorization.

Whole cultural mythologies that form the fabric upon which our shared Jungian subconscious floats, these required centuries of tale-telling and evolution by 100’s and even 1000’s of bards and scops. Tolkien, by nature and by education, lived and breathed those examples. As a philologist of the first rank, he also understood how the structure of a language colored and constrained the stories that are told in that language.

And then he, in one lifetime, as an individual, built an entire mythology, disguised, as he liked to say, as a history. True, there are still gaps, and some inevitable inconsistency (though it feels remarkably consistent to my eyes). And the language of his recounting of that vast tale changes as he tells it. The components of The Silmarillion read and sound like the myths we all learned as children: the style is elevated, the characters and beings are impossibly larger than life, sometimes hard to relate to, standing as they do for themes that are archetypal and not necessarily breathing and bleeding.

But then, with that framework largely a fait accompli (though he continued to expand and refine it his whole life), he chose to “try his hand” at writing a really long tale, one that would hold a reader’s attention in a way that the myths, as fascinating and necessary as they were, might never do.

And thus we have The Lord Of the Rings. A story painted against a massive backdrop of history and myth, a backdrop often hinted at, although never detailed. But it is primarily a story of people whom we know. And especially if the people we know happen to live in the English countryside, though really, they are from Everywhere. They are brave when they need to be, but they are also afraid. They make jokes, they get angry, they have plans. The landscape through which they journey is full of fantastic beings and events, but it is also one we can see, see plainly in our mind’s eye. It is full of detailed images that remain indelibly etched in us.

It begins in that least fantastic place imaginable, the Shire, then walks into the Old Forest and meets Bombadil, then encounters the Barrows. Then it’s into Bree and a sort of normalcy, but it’s hobbits and Men now, and some bumble, and some sneer, and one is mysterious. And so it continues, on to larger and larger vistas and a view of an increasingly wider world, a world in which so much more is at stake than hobbits from the Shire ever imagined possible. The style in which Tolkien tells this epic focuses our attention on these individuals, their foibles and their simple nobility. All the while revealing the larger history against which everything plays out.

“Fantasy” writing has been with us for a long time. But LOTR is not fantasy, though it is found in that section of the bookstore. Tolkien single-handedly created the genre which so many have attempted to imitate. And though there have been many very good, and even excellent, works produced that try to match his achievement, we know, or at least sense, that they all lack some essential element. And of course, when you think about it, it is Tolkien’s decades of deep consideration and creation of the material that comprises the Silmarillion that separates LOTR from all that came after. The construction of whole languages, with their rules and grammar*, of whole continents, with their landmarks and geography, and of a history and Creation myth, that formed a panorama against which the events in LOTR played out, these all made the world of Middle Earth ring “true” in a way that could never be so without the concomitant years of immersion and dedication.

Everyone who reads the works of JRR Tolkien benefits from his lifetime of work, even if they are not consciously aware of it.

* Just for example, consider how Elvish names are so consistent, and then compare that to (as a REALLY bad example) how sci-fi writers used to come up with the personal names of the aliens they introduced us to. Names which often were simply nonsensical syllables and letters, meant to convey “weirdness”. Fantasy writing is replete with such examples.

Perceptual Ontology

I recently read “Beyond Biocentrism”, by noted physician Robert Lanza and Bob Berman. It’s not particularly well-written, employing a style that is decidedly “populist science”, and making those kinds of deductive leaps that sort of waves the hands and implies the authors either don’t have hard evidence, or don’t want to lose readers trying to explain it. Still, the whole premise is one that has always appealed to me, so it was easy to look past that.

The premise? A sort of mashup of the strong anthropic principle together with the idea that we actually create reality, that the universe exists due to our conscious and unconscious participation in the process. The anthropic principle, for those unfamiliar with it, suggests that the universe has a set of independent constants with values that, if they were only very slightly different, would make life impossible. These are constants as disparate as the speed of light, the gravitational constant, the fine-structure nuclear constant, the strength of weak and strong force, and the like. As the book’s title suggests, the authors believe that the universe depends on life to exist, and not the other way around. That existence and consciousness are necessarily interdependent and intertwined.

As interesting as that is, it is set of notions that I have long considered and been interested in, and in fact think highly likely. The reason I am writing this essay is to present a new idea that I had not thought about before reading it in Beyond Biocentrism. Let me explain.

Imagine walking through a city park, or hiking in the woods. Unless it’s late autumn or winter, what is the main color that you experience? Green of course, in a wide range of shades and hues, but basically green. And why do we see all this green? Because all those leaves are green, you answer. And why are they green? Anyone who took high school biology knows that it is due to the chlorophyll present in these leaves, a substance quietly and continuously converting sunlight into stored energy, the sugars and starches that form the bedrock of the entire food chain on this planet. So, it’s the green chlorophyll that creates this green panorama.

But wait, what does it mean to say chlorophyll is somehow “green”? Here’s a funny thing: chlorophyll is everything but green. In fact, chlorophyll absorbs every color of the spectrum other than green. Green is rejected, it’s the color chlorophyll doesn’t use, and so it is the color that is reflected back to our eye, and so we see green. That is what all color perception is: seeing the wavelengths that are reflected rather than absorbed from all the substances in our view.

But wait further. What exactly is “green”? And I’m not talking about the old conundrum of “is the color I perceive as green is the same color someone else sees?” No, the question here is much deeper than whether we all perceive the same colors. Because, green is something more fundamental than a “color”. It is a set of wavelengths, a set of frequencies associated with electromagnetic waves. What arrives on the rods and cones of our eyeballs is not a color, but electromagnetic waves that produce chemical and electrical responses in those rods and cones.

But an electromagnetic wave has no color per se. It is a continuously varying electric field propagated perpendicular to a continuously varying magnetic wave, traveling at the speed of light. In a very real sense, it is not anything at all. Certainly it has no inherent color. To say it another way, there is no color at all “out there” in the world. Whatever color (and shape and texture, etc.) we experience is all constructed within us, within our brain and our consciousness.

This is a deeply profound realization, once you understand the full implication. Look out the window or around the room. Everything you see is not ”there”, at least not in the way you see it. This is not to say there is nothing out there; you walk into a wall, you will experience the solid wall (but more about that later). But what it means is that everything you experience is experienced internally, within the confines of your brain and consciousness. There is a complete representation of the world inside your brain, and that is the ONLY representation you can experience.

There are no colors “out there”, only invisible electromagnetic waves. There are no “smells” out there, only odorless molecules that generate an chemical and electrical response in olfactory neurons. There are no “sounds” out there, only compression waves traveling through the air that create chemical and electrical responses in auditory nerves, which are translated into the sounds and speech we experience. Even touch, which would seem to involve those solid objects that are out there, ends up being a set of nerve impulses that our brains and consciousness translate into “cloth” or “skin” or “smooth” or “rough” or even “a punch” or “a bump”. Everything that we experience is a complicated translation of sense perceptions into images and other constructs, that only exist within our brains.

(This seems a good place to point out that, even those solid objects we all admit are definitely “out there” are entities that we never actually come in contact with. No finger ever actually pressed a keyboard. In the nanoscopic world at the boundaries of physical objects, it is ultimately electric fields that repulse each other. No molecules in your finger ever actually touched molecules in the keyboard. Though that is admittedly splitting a very fine hair :).

The takeaway from all of this is kind of mind-blowing, at least for me. It is that there is nothing in my experience that has an intrinsic quality: there is no color, nor shape, nor sound, nor smell nor tactile essence in the world I experience. All of those attributes are supplied by my brain, and realized in my consciousness. The external world supplies only physical modulations in a variety of mediums: EM waves, sound waves, molecules, field interactions. This is not to say that those modulations are non-existent and can somehow be ignored. Radiation can kill, sound waves can deafen, molecules can poison, field interactions can pierce and maim. The brain and body can, and will, die and decompose.

Consciousness? Well, that’s another thing altogether. And the subject of another essay at another time.

Support Trump? Hie Thee Away From Me

Consider this blog post as a stone marker on the ground, an adamant declaration of “here and no further”. It comes down to this:

If you support Donald Trump, you and I will no longer have any association. If you are voting for Trump in November, you and I can no longer share any sort of friendship or even casual interaction.

By supporting Trump, you have revealed yourself as a person morally bankrupt, or intellectually damaged, or both. And the most damning thing you have revealed is that you hold absolutely no regard for the fundamentals of American democracy, nor freedom, nor justice, nor decency, nor the rule of law, nor the Constitution, nor any of the norms upon which the greatest country in history was built.

Instead, you have surrendered your independent thought and liberty to a sociopathic, narcissistic, lying, corrupt authoritarian, a man who cares not a whit for you or your well-being, or any goddam thing in the world other than Donald Trump. That being the case, and since I maintain a set of standards that determine whom I consider a friend, or even with whom I will exchange words, be advised that you no longer rise to any level I will accept.

Furthermore, I have no use for any attempt at explanation for your support of Trump, no willingness to listen to your “reasoning” or “rationale”. If you support Trump, that is demonstrated proof that you have no capacity for reason. Like everyone else in the country, you’ve had the same four years to experience his complete lack of human decency, his endless lying, his imbecilic pronouncements, his idiotic and embarrassing lack of even the basics of how our government works, his sadistic cruelty and bullying, his willingness to not just ignore, but to trample the precepts set out in the Constitution, his greed, his stonewalling and coverups, his corruption that continues to line his pockets in direct violation of the emoluments clause, and on and on and on. So there is no possible reason that you could provide for supporting this monster.

But if you do support him, either you are hopelessly blind, or else you agree with his words and actions. If you are indeed that blind, then you must be willfully so; the sheer extent of Trump’s abominations make it impossible to ignore or deny them without actively working hard to do so. And be advised: if the gods strive in vain against stupidity, they rage in righteous anger against willful ignorance.

If you agree with what he has said and done, then you are, like him, a worthless excuse of an American, much less a human being. To agree with Trump is to have forsaken every basic building block upon which this great American Experiment rests. You are denying the critical principles of justice for all, individual liberty, and equal treatment under the law. You are forsaking the basic humanity which all our better angels forever compel us to promote: work for the common good, care for the least among us, feed the hungry, protect the children. Not put them in cages.

So, again: if you support Trump, if you plan to vote for him, put us in the category of “No Longer Connected”. Unfriend me on FB, or send me a message, and I’ll unfriend you. As Henry told Eleanor in “The Lion In Winter”, “We do not touch at any point.”

And we never will.

Television News: A Brief History

Here is one of those factoids that historians may find pivotal when they look back on this era (assuming there are historians: if Trump wins 2020, one fears for the very existence of such people, not to mention what unimpeded climate change may do to fate of civilization. But I digress). At one point in the late 70’s and early 80’s, two fundamental changes occurred in news reportage, and they were not unconnected. One of course was the advent of 24/7 cable news (CNN being the original). The other was the fact that network news came under the same umbrella as network entertainment. Prior to that, news departments in the Big 3 networks actually existed as independent corporate entities. ABC led the charge when Roone Arledge was promoted from managing sports to being the network head. He decided news should make money just like sports did, and the other major networks followed suit.

The main impact of that separation had been that news was NOT part of the ratings/commercial aspect of the networks. Before these mergings, network news organizations generally operated at a loss, which the networks felt was a reasonable expense. Given this freedom, they were not accountable to ratings and sponsors. And this allowed them to simply report the news. Period. They did not have to justify their existence by a ratings competition.

By combining them with the entertainment wing of their respective networks, news programs were suddenly in need of “ratings”. Meaning they needed audience share. News became entertainment. At the same time, CNN (and the subsequent cable news channels) had to justify a 24/7 coverage of news. You can imagine the challenge. Instead of audiences being content with the Today show and Good Morning America and then 30 minutes of the evening news shows, it was necessary to try and keep viewers watching ALL THE TIME. Only shocking, tittilating news would suffice.

So all the news outlets were, in one fell swoop, suddenly in the “business” of news. That, plus the daily deluge, and the immediacy provided by our global connectivity, has resulted in news being NEWS: it’s ALWAYS breaking, it’s ALWAYS on, and it’s ALWAYS trying to shout louder and to be more shrill. Naturally the end result is that we are now inured to horror, immune to shock, indifferent to disaster. And something like Fox “News” was able to worm its way into existence.

BTW: If you ever find yourself in Britain, watch the BBC news. The have what are called “news readers”. That’s what they do: they read the news. It’s amazingly refreshing. And purely informative.

“Where did you go, Walter Cronkite?
Our nation turns its bleary eyes to you, woo-woo-woo
What’s that you say Mrs. Robinson?
Cronkite’s dead and now we’ve gone astray, hey, hey hey.
Hey, hey hey.”

Just Want To Testify

Robert Mueller will testify before Jerry Nadler’s Judiciary Committee. The only real question left to determine is whether anything beyond his opening statement will be televised, open testimony. Mueller has reportedly expressed his desire to take the committee’s questions behind closed doors, with the transcript to be subsequently made available to the public.

The visceral impact of hearing and seeing Mueller cannot be overestimated. Common wisdom says that it was the televised testimony in Watergate (John Dean in particular) that was instrumental in shifting public opinion against Nixon. And no one is ever going to read the transcript (though Rachel Maddow will surely enact great swaths of it for you!). Having said that, it is also clear that the current format that permits limited time for questions by committee members is a TERRIBLE format, encouraging posturing on both sides. It is understandable that Mueller would want to avoid providing fodder for such political theatre. The Republicans would make no honest attempts to uncover the truth, and would use their time simply to attack his credibility (which, in normal times, would be a pointless endeavor. I mean, it’s Robert Mueller, for Christ’s sake).

If, on the other hand, Mueller were to make a comprehensive opening statement, one that covered all the important questions and pulled no punches, that might be the best of all worlds: no chance for Republicans to publicly attack, Democrats don’t come off as political hatchetmen. Use the opening statement to say it all. Why the money trail was not followed, or what happened if it was? What happened with the counter-intelligence investigation? Did Barr short-circuit the special counsel’s investigation? Or did he NOT? It’s important to know either way. What were his explicit reasons for not making a prosecutorial determination for obstruction? The DOJ memo or something else?. Clarify the decision for no conspiracy charge in face of the overwhelming prima facie evidence of Russian-Trump connections and communications. Just lay it all out in front of the cameras.

Then, fine, go behind close doors and let the Republicans do what they will.
But starting with an uninterrupted flood of information, and opinion, would likely be damning. And Mueller certainly needs to set the record straight w.r.t. how Barr behaved in all this.

After all, Bill Barr did not shy from repeatedly using the cameras to mischaracterize Mueller’s work, and with no questions interrupting him. Seems only fitting that Mueller be given the same platform.

The Truth Will Out

Truth will come to light; murder cannot be hid long.
A man’s son may, but at length the truth will out.

The Merchant of Venice, William Shakespeare

Bill Barr continues to sit on the Mueller report. One supposes he is trying to hide something contained in the 400+ pages, something damning to Donald Trump. Barr’s four page summary, released two weeks ago, was interpreted as “full exoneration” by Trump and the Trumpsters, even though the verbiage quotes Mueller as explicitly stating it was not an exoneration of the President, specifically in the area of obstruction of justice.

Barr and Trump can do what they will, but in the end, the report will become public. Even if Barr obfuscates and delays and redacts to his heart’s content, the Special Counsel and his team have the facts. They had even, according to leaked accounts, prepared “public-facing” summaries of the report’s main sections, summaries that were written specifically so as to not require any redaction. Barr ignored these summaries in favor of his own white-washed summary.

But now, member of the Mueller team, after 22 months of the most disciplined leak control imaginable, have, in the wake of being disbanded, begun to let important tidbits out. The reason seems to be that they are extremely dissatisfied with Barr’s characterization of their work. The obstruction charges were in particular “very serious”, and the evidence strong. We do not know the whole reasoning, but Mueller’s decision not to present a case for indictment may well have been a decision based on DOJ’s long standing rule (not a law!) against indicting a sitting President. Why recommend indictment if the Attorney General would summarily refuse to prosecute? Likewise, even though Mueller did recommend against a criminal case for conspiracy with the Russians, we do not know the breadth and depth of whatever evidence does exist for conspiracy, regardless of whether it was sufficient for an airtight criminal case, the only kind Mueller and company have yet established.

We don’t know… but we will know. As I said, even if Barr sits on the report until hell freezes over, the people who know what’s in the report still know what they know.

And they can testify to that knowledge.

Neal Katyal was the DOJ lawyer who drew up the Special Counsel regulations after the Special Prosecutor law was allowed to lapse. KenStarr, the man who investigated Bill Clinton, was a Special Prosecutor. After that fiasco, Congress chose to sunset the Special Prosecutor idea, and DOJ replaced the office with that of a Special Counsel. In an interview, Katyal made the point that a Special Counsel is completely independent. Yes, he is required to submit his report to the Attorney General, who then has complete discretion as to what to release, to Congress and to the public. Barr is showing us what his intentions are.

But Katyal said that it was a specific decision to make the Special Counsel completely independent of DOJ, just for the situation when an AG might act politically w.r.t. disseminating the results. Which Barr is obviously doing. That independence means that the entire team is not subject to any DOJ control as to what they can or cannot say after the Special Counsel has been disbanded. Mueller and his team can say whatever they wish, and specifically can speak freely to House Oversight, Judicial and Intelligence committees. One can only imagine that, if team members are disgruntled with Barr’s handling of the report, and how he is ignoring their findings, they will be eager to set the record straight. And especially in the public forum of committee hearings.

Then there’s the matter of Trump’s tax returns. Richard Neal, an extremely taciturn man, is the chairman of the House Ways & Means Committee. In accordance with a law in effect since the early 20th century, he has requested Trump’s tax returns for the last six years. These are the same returns Trump pledged, during the campaign, that he would release after being elected, but has subsequently reversed himself, telling everyone to go screw themselves: he will not release.

The law mentioned is very specific. If the Ways & Means chair (or even the Ways & Means chief of staff) makes such a request, for any American, the IRS “shall supply” the requested returns. There is no gray area, no ambiguous language, no requirement for providing any justification. They simply “shall supply” the requested returns, and any supporting documentation. Cut and dried.

Trump has appointed lackeys as the number one and number two men at the IRS (he even had Mitch McConnell fast track their confirmations, even ahead of the Secretary of Defense nomination!) Naturally, they are not complying with the law and the returns have not been given to Mr. Neal. The whole thing will go to court, and one can expect it to be fast-tracked, almost certainly to the Supreme Court. It is important to note that there has never been a single case since the law was enacted where the IRS failed to comply. The language is as unambiguous as it gets. Even with five conservatives on the SCOTUS, it would seem impossible to see them rule in Trump’s favor.

So, yes. At the present moment, the facts lie at least partially hidden from scrutiny. But even with the depth and width of corruption and outright criminality displayed daily by this administration, even with their blatant and brazen stonewalling, those facts will come to light. And likely sooner than later.

At length the truth will indeed out.

The Way We Were Who We Were

My high School class (Cullman High, Cullman, Alabama: 1969) will be having our 50th reunion this summer. That fact starkly stands before me as an ultimately sobering thought. Life has its “odometer” moments: turning 21, 30, 50, 60. And one’s 50th high school reunion jumps right up there like a giant neon sign on life’s highway. Just doing the math gives one pause to consider all the water that’s passed under all those bridges, including the ones I burned behind me.

I’ve been designated as the “technical guru” for a group of people who, by and large, preceded by about 10 years that cohort that became comfortable with computers, either by growing up with them, or being forced to adapt to them. My classmates generally missed that bus. I am the outlier: for a variety of reasons, many accidental, my career path lead me right out on the bleeding edge of technology. I spent 35 years at Intergraph, a company that has been pushing technical boundaries in computer graphics since 1969 (it was a coincidence they started when I graduated from high school. Or was it? Gibbs (NCIS) Rule 39. Look it up).

Anyway, as almost the sole person in my class who actually knows how all this stuff works, I took it upon myself to build a fairly involved web site for our 40th reunion. That magic was highly appreciated by my less computer literate classmates (“any sufficiently advanced tehnology is indistinguishable from magic to the uninitiated” – Arthur C. Clarke, more or less). So much so that I was prevailed upon to update the effort for our 50th (“No good deed goes unpunished.” – Wicked). In so doing, I decided to make better quality images from my senior annual. Which brings me at long last to the crux of my essay.

As I went through the process of scanning each page from the Senior section, then cutting and adjusting the individual photos, I could not help but reflect on those faces, faces from 50 years ago, many of which I never saw again after leaving those “hallowed halls.” Oh, there were several who were good friends, and not as many who remained good friends: life sends us down whatever paths it will, and divergence is almost guaranteed to some degree. But there were many faces I never really knew, names that had never been imprinted on my mind, people whose lives had never really even crossed mine, not then, nor in the intervening years.

I am keenly aware that high school is in many ways no longer remotely comparable to the way it was in 1969. Beyond the bedrock of how and what things are taught, the norms and mores of teenage life cannot be more drastically different when today’s youth go to high school than when the Ancient Ones (ie, me and my cohorts) attended school. Music, language, pasttimes… there is likely no aspect of modern teenage life that I would understand. And likely be astonished by. Hell, the cell phone alone has forever redefined not only teenage life, but even what it means to be a social entity on this planet.

Nevertheless, I would be willing to wager a considerable sum that one aspect of high school life is still in effect. Groups still form, cliques coalesce, exclusion exists. That is basic human nature. As is the concomitant cruelty that teenagers so easily and carelessly inflict on each other.

My point is that this eternal social dynamic was obviously also in effect in 1969. We all gravitated into our social circles, orbiting around each other, obeying an implicit hierarchy of “coolness” and awareness, and all trying hard to present a worldly knowledge that we were all stumbling around trying to learn. But the hard rules of cliqueishness too often raised impenetrable walls between “Us” and “Them”, however us and them were defined.

And so, in the three years I attended Cullman High, I only partially knew so many of my fellow stumblers. I may have never shunned people (I pray to God I did not), but then I never went out of my way to engage them either. The Comfort Zone of the Clique is a powerful insulation, and nothing ever happened to push me out of that zone.

Now, I am looking at all those pictures, closely. Age may not bring wisdom, but I do believe it has given me an awareness of Intelligence and Awareness when I see it someone’s face. The eyes, really. But all those decades ago, like everyone else, I only saw superficial exteriors. And I missed so much. I can see in so many of those faces in my annual the Light that I have learned to recognize and treasure. The glimmer of clarity and awareness that signal real curiosity and awareness.

Now it is five decades further down everyone’s world line. The people in those pictures have all gone on to become whatever life lead them to be. I know, without knowing the specifics, that for far too many, their path lead to some form of extinguishing that Light. Life is long. Life is hard. It is not fair, and circumstances too often simply beat down the human spirit until it can do nothing but wake up every day and go to sleep every night. On automatic.

Some will have gone on to do great things, creative things. They are the ones in whom that Light I see in those photographs never died, but instead blossomed and burned brightly. There will be some who have made a life of giving care and comfort and solace. There will be many (most?) who will have turned in the end to a deep form of religion, thinking themselves in personal communion with God and Jesus (this is Alabama, and therefore satori is much less likely). By the same calculus, it is likely many (most?) will even be Trump supporters. My own bias leads me to believe that those individuals will have been the ones whom life beat down the most. But who can say? The human animal is nothing if not a walking mass of contradictions.

The lesson, learned too late for almost everyone but the saintly and truly spiritual, is to somehow overcome the willful stupidity that we adopt so early and so easily. To recognize the Potential and Inner Mounting Flame that burns in people and places where we do not believe it can. And to not ignore it when we feel it.