Category Archives: Writing

On the Psycho-social Aspects of Sports

Posted on by
Reply

The concept of “sport” involves two principal roles, one is participatory: a physical activity to develop and improve physical skills, sometimes in a competitive fashion, often with health benefits related to attaining physical optimization.  But it also has a non-participatory entertainment aspect, one geared to spectators in general but more frequently to spectators who develop an affinity for a particular person or corporate entity, “corporate” in the sense of entity-continuity notwithstanding changes in its composition.  For example, despite the fact that Babe Ruth died long ago, the Yankees are still the Yankees.  Well, … almost.

The latter variant has interesting psychosocial dynamics with cultural implications that reflect social trends in the interrelationships between the spectators; between the spectators and the participants; between the spectators, the participants and those in charge of training and managing the participants; and, finally, between all of the foregoing and ownership.

Spectators tend to assume two very different roles: passive spectators who cheer on “their” team in a non-critical manner, no matter its performance; and, active, more-involved and more critical spectators, usually much more knowledgeable and frequently having formerly, at one level or another, been active participants.  The two groups have become increasingly polarized as our society has become less cohesive, with the cheer-leading spectators becoming bitterly critical of what they deem to be fair-weather fans, and the more active, critical fans, those who demand quality performance from the teams or players they support, deeming the cheer-leader types idiotic know-nothings.  Sports managers and owners at every level prefer the cheer-leading fan variant, especially those willing to spend on viewing sporting events in person or by subscription, but, in addition, purchasing related branded merchandise.  Some teams apparently go so far as to pay individuals and business involved in the new phenomenon of social media, to use fictional cheer-leader fans (trolls) to purportedly criticize the critical fans as traitors, something, to some extent, also done in the past through less honest sports journalists.

The issue of sports polarization is especially problematic with sports involving children where the “competitive” factor is bitterly debated among parents, some of whom (the “woke”) believe that sports should be fun for all, without winners, or even scores; and, fanatical parents who intervene, at times physically, frequently embarrassing their own children, living out their own frustrated sports fantasies, in quest for victory at any price.  Balance involving competition and development of life and social skills, those once revered concepts of good sportsmanship, seem all too frequently unattainable today.  That, unfortunately, merely reflects trends throughout our diverse social institutions, trends all too often manipulated as a means of maintaining control through polarization and involving issues such as abortion, gun control, political correctness, censorship, etc.

Sports have become a business with massive profits to both teams and players at its highest levels, as well as to broadcast media; ludicrous profits and ludicrous salaries when judged on the basis of comparative social contributions and on the basis of the growing disparity between the wealthiest among us and the rest, especially those who receive the lowest compensation for the most difficult and tedious jobs. The foregoing is true of professional sports, but unfortunately, has also afflicted amateur sports in academic institutions where college football coaches sometimes earn up to ten times what the college president or any academic professor or researcher is paid.

Sports have also become a useful tool for political control, deflecting dissatisfaction with poor political and economic performance, broken promises and inequity, into strong emotional responses to sporting events and activities, redirecting justifiable social anger towards competing sports spectators, whether those who support other teams or those who criticize the performance of teams and players they themselves support.  It is how we “blow off steam”; psychic energy needed to power necessary societal change, leaving us either satiated, exhausted or both, and bitter towards umpires, referees, coaches, players and other fans, instead of against those we most need to replace: our political, media and economic “leaders”.

Sports have evolved from their earliest roles, when they involved non-partisan appreciation of excellence, dexterity and physical abilities (such as in the ancient Olympics), into a social phenomenon much more like the violent partisan events that existed during the Roman imperial period, events centered on chariot racing, where almost the entirety of the population was divided among violent supporters of Greens and Blues, such division flowing into political groupings as well.

International sports can be a unifying force domestically while a divisive force internationally.  For example soccer’s world cup and the modern variant of the Olympic games, international spectacles where international political rivalries now regularly intervene to exclude more capable athletes and teams from competing based on factors totally unrelated to sports, factors such as economic and political rivalries among groups of allied nations.

Notwithstanding the foregoing I am an avid sports enthusiast, perhaps an addict of sorts.  I love sports as an active participant (when possible), but as a spectator as well (admittedly of the more critical variant).  And that’s the case notwithstanding all of the deficiencies, abuses and dangers associated with modern sports that I acknowledge exist.  That’s the case with most of us, although the majority have no idea concerning many of the issues raised in this introspective article.

In short, it seems that as humans, there is nothing we cannot pervert into a polarizing factor, into something to divide us and set us off against each other, into something that can be used to manipulate and control us.  Even something as magnificent as the sports we purport to love.
_______

© Guillermo Calvo Mahé; Manizales, 2023; all rights reserved.  Please feel free to share with appropriate attribution.

Guillermo (“Bill”) Calvo Mahé (a sometime poet) is a writer, political commentator and academic currently residing in the Republic of Colombia (although he has primarily lived in the United States of America of which he is also a citizen).  Until 2017 he chaired the political science, government and international relations programs at the Universidad Autónoma de Manizales.  He is currently the publisher of the Inannite Review, available at Substack.com.  He has academic degrees in political science (the Citadel), law (St. John’s University), international legal studies (New York University) and translation and linguistic studies (the University of Florida’s Center for Latin American Studies).  However, he is also fascinated by mythology, religion, physics, astronomy and mathematics, especially with matters related to quanta and cosmogony.  He can be contacted at guillermo.calvo.mahe@gmail.com and much of his writing is available through his blog at https://guillermocalvo.com/.

Black Listed Gifts

Posted on by
Reply

I was watching the “Black List” last night, “binging” on the latest season available on Netflix, an obvious US propaganda piece as is most of what comes out of Hollywood and its clones (the reality as far back as Woodrow Wilson’s epoch).  But amazingly, in that episode something resonated in a humanistically positive manner. 

Imagine that. 

For some unfathomable reason, I enjoy the program.  Perhaps it’s the acting, especially by James Spader.  And it provides insights into the manner in which US propaganda has culturally conquered much of the world with brazen distortions.  But I rarely find the really useful human element that permits us to better understand ourselves, and improve who we are.  The element essential in great works of art.

I did last night, and it involved a gift, the gift being a very used old portable radio.

Economically, today, I am not well off.  But like most among my current peers, I am living well enough, largely because I became an expatriate of sorts, living in a beautiful albeit affordable place, a beautiful city high in the central range of the Colombian Andes.  Beautiful mountains, snowcapped peaks, thermal springs, perpetual spring, but no oceans or beaches.  A place where social security is a bit more than enough to get by.  But where friends and family are a long way off.

I’ve been much better off, wealthy even, in a past where limousines were not an occasional luxury but a normal tool, where the making of an expensive gift was “no big deal”.  But I’ve also been much less well off than I am now, and it’s that time in my life that resonated with the “Black List” episode I viewed last night.  And it dealt with the character I find least interesting, least credible, most boring: Diego Klattenhoff as agent Donald Ressler.

The resonance involved the realization that the most important gifts I ever made where those that involved something I already owned, something I had to sacrifice under the circumstances of the moment because I lacked the wherewithal to merely “buy something appropriate”.  Usually it was a book, but sometimes a keepsake I’d picked up somewhere or other.  It involved a sacrifice of something for which I really cared, something I’d miss, but which to me, at the time, seemed important to pass on.  I’ve also received gifts like that and last night I realized that I’d not appreciated their worth at the time.  I do now.

In this materialistic and polarized world, one where empathy is hard to generate and harder to find, where a touch of humanity seems a rare thing but is actually omnipresent, hidden in the quotidian, especially in the lives of the least well-off.  Hidden in plain sight amidst the most vulnerable among us.  Hidden among that silent majority where almost everything involves a sacrifice, but where such sacrifices are joyfully made and never regretted, but also, perhaps, as in my case, where such sacrifices are not quite fully appreciated by the recipients.  At least not until it’s much too late to express our gratitude.

It made me think, especially of my mother.  Eventually a single mom who made the best of what I’ve become and accomplished possible without ever stressing the many sacrifices she and the rest of my family had to make, things I just took for granted until she was gone. 

Her case and mine, unfortunately, are not unusual.  Especially today when the generational shift is so bitter, and where too many of the young consider themselves ethically and morally superior, while concurrently entitled, and view their parents and their parent’s generation as out of touch bigots.  A generation that has no idea what the adage “it’s better to give than to receive” means, or worse, that it even exists.  Where giving is something that’s done with the taxes other people pay, and mainly given to industries dedicated to legalized murder on a massive scale, in the name of liberty and peace and equality.

Amazingly, the episode made me think, rather than just react and enjoy the action and the acting.

Talk about finding pearls in a dung heap!
_______

© Guillermo Calvo Mahé; Manizales, 2023; all rights reserved.  Please feel free to share with appropriate attribution.

Guillermo (“Bill”) Calvo Mahé (a sometime poet) is a writer, political commentator and academic currently residing in the Republic of Colombia (although he has primarily lived in the United States of America of which he is also a citizen).  Until 2017 he chaired the political science, government and international relations programs at the Universidad Autónoma de Manizales.  He is currently the publisher of the Inannite Review, available at Substack.com.  He has academic degrees in political science (the Citadel), law (St. John’s University), international legal studies (New York University) and translation and linguistic studies (the University of Florida’s Center for Latin American Studies).  However, he is also fascinated by mythology, religion, physics, astronomy and mathematics, especially with matters related to quanta and cosmogony.  He can be contacted at guillermo.calvo.mahe@gmail.com and much of his writing is available through his blog at https://guillermocalvo.com/.

On the Possibility of Divine Contrition

Posted on by
Reply

What if some of what objective alien academics might, on reflection, consider Terran religious myths, turned out to be true.  Consider the two most visible this week: the divine massacre of Egypt’s first born male children at the request of at least one Hebrew leader; and then, a bit over a millennia later, the execution of the purported son of the Hebrew god, again, at the demand of at least some Hebrew leaders.

What if the execution of the Nazarene, Yeshua ben Miriam, or ben Deux, or ben Yosef, depending on his paternity, involved an act of contrition by the Hebrew divinity for the execution, at his command, of so many innocents, and that does not relate solely to the Egyptian firstborn, but to almost all of the human race in the purported Great Flood, and to numerous Canaanites whose land, property and women were apparently gifts from the Hebrew God to the followers of a man from Ur Kaśdim who married his own sister and did not hesitate to generously share her with others (if it was to his benefit), and perhaps, even to the imposition of mortality not only on Eve, purportedly for her sins, and Adam, but on all humanity.

What if, having had over a millennia to reflect, the Hebrew divinity discovered a conscience and decided that his own sins (he was obviously male) required a supreme sacrifice, that of a version of himself? 

That certainly makes more ethical and moral sense than a sacrifice by mankind of a divinity’s son, to expunge the sin by one ancestress of having taken a bite from an apple (or a fruit of some kind, anyway).

Something to consider during the celebration of this week which so reeks of irony.

_______

© Guillermo Calvo Mahé; Manizales, 2023; all rights reserved.  Please feel free to share with appropriate attribution.

Guillermo (“Bill”) Calvo Mahé (a sometime poet) is a writer, political commentator and academic currently residing in the Republic of Colombia (although he has primarily lived in the United States of America of which he is also a citizen).  Until 2017 he chaired the political science, government and international relations programs at the Universidad Autónoma de Manizales.  He is currently the publisher of the Inannite Review, available at Substack.com.  He has academic degrees in political science (the Citadel), law (St. John’s University), international legal studies (New York University) and translation and linguistic studies (the University of Florida’s Center for Latin American Studies).  However, he is also fascinated by mythology, religion, physics, astronomy and mathematics, especially with matters related to quanta and cosmogony.  He can be contacted at guillermo.calvo.mahe@gmail.com and much of his writing is available through his blog at https://guillermocalvo.com/.

Context on the Current Criminal Case against Former US President Donald John Trump, a Perspective from the Republic of Colombia

Posted on by
Reply

The following is based on an article written by the author for use in the Republic of Colombia trying to contextualize for a Colombian audience the nature of the actions recently brought against former president Donald Trump by Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg.  It contrasts Mr. Trump’s current situation with the similar experiences of Colombia’s current president, a left wing progressive, when he was the mayor of Bogota and a probable contender for the Colombian presidency (which he obviously won, but only after intervention by the Interamerican Human Rights Court, an institution to which the United States does not subscribe).

The recent indictment of former President Donald John Trump by a grand jury convened and controlled by Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg seems very confusing to foreigners, primarily because reports in the traditional United States lack both context and objectivity, and, further, admittedly, because the former president’s personality is so abrasive, self-centered and unpleasant, that it is difficult to feel compassion for him.  However, as indicated in the introduction, for Colombians, some analogies involving their own recent experiences are useful. 

One, involves a political leader who shares Mr. Trump’s aggressive personality, Carlos Felipe Mejía Mejía, a former senator from former president Alvaro Uribe Velez’s ultra-right wing political party, the Centro Democratico (a favorite of the United States’ Deep State), and the other (again as mentioned in the introduction), involves the experiences of current Colombian president Gustavo Petro’s in the face of abuse of the Colombian legal system by his opponents, to prevent him from participating in electoral politics.  Mr. Petro’s struggles were successful only because, unlike the United States, Colombia respects international law and human rights and accepts the decisions of the Interamerican Court of Human Rights, an institution established through the Interamerican Convention on Human Rights, which the United States has refused to ratify (that tribunal found the abuse of the legal system to bar Mr. Petro from political activity illegal).  Mr. Petro had been removed from office as mayor of Bogota and barred from future political by the national procurator, a political opponent, pretty much in the manner Democratic prosecutors in Georgia and New York, as well as in the Department of Justice, are seeking to convict Mr. Trump of crimes in order to render him ineligible to engage in political activity, especially with respect to the presidential elections scheduled for 2024.

The following is pretty much how I explained the current situation in the United States to a Colombian audience:

Former president Donald Trump has just been indicted by a grand jury organized by a county attorney within New York City on 34 felony counts. They all have to do with a payment pursuant to a legal settlement and non-disclosure agreement seeking to put an end to accusations by Mrs. Stephanie Gregory Clifford, a former porn star using the name “Stormy Daniels”, to the effect that Mr. Trump had spent a night with her when, although married, he was a private citizen.

Normally, Ms. Clifford’s demands would have involved the crimes of blackmail and extortion and she would have been the person facing criminal prosecution, but the current case is, for purely political reasons, different. The truth is that the alleged crimes attributed to Mr. Trump have never existed in American jurisprudence and, rather, involve an “innovation” by the Manhattan District Attorney focused on the way in which the expenses were reported by Mr. Trump’s employees, i.e., not as donations from Mr. Trump to his own presidential campaign, but as business or personal legal expenses, paid to his attorney, who had paid them to Ms. Clifford.  Indeed, the agreement was between that attorney and Ms. Clifford, for the benefit of Mr. Trump.

If settlement and non-disclosure agreements were a crime, then many American politicians would (or should) be in jail, especially major Trump adversaries, but that doesn’t seem to matter. It also doesn’t matter whether he is eventually found innocent. The mere accusations (indictments are only accusations, after all) are expected to have the desired impact. An electoral victory in 2024 for someone more in accord with current neoconservative politics in the United States.

So, why the current situation? After all, Mr. Trump is clearly a neoliberal capitalist very much in the mold of many of his political opponents.  Well, because “very much” is apparently not enough, especially when it involves rejection of traditional neoconservative tactics.

Former President Trump currently leads presidential preference polls for the 2024 presidential elections in the United States, and that is intolerable to the Democratic Party and to traditional Republicans, not because of his alleged immoral personal conduct, that’s a matter between him and his wife, but because Mr. Trump disagrees with current policies concerning the conflict in the Ukraine, because he wants to end NATO, which he perceives as anachronistic, and also, because he believes that the huge expenditures on “defense” spending, on military bases in other countries and on interventions in foreign affairs should be reduced considerably, with the savings used to improve domestic infrastructure, lower taxes charged to US citizens and reduce the national debt to zero.

For the powers that actually control the American state (which President Dwight David Eisenhower warned against when he alluded to “the military/industrial complex”), that would be intolerable given that such industry “earns” billions of dollars in profits every year. Thus, as was the case for current the Colombian president (prior to intervention by the Interamerican Human Rights Court), Mr. Trump’s opponents are seeking to destroy him politically through constant and consistent abuse of the legal system, abuse orchestrated by Democratic prosecutors in several states, especially in New York and Georgia, as well as in the Department of Justice; prosecutors using all the resources available through the United States criminal justice system (an oxymoron) to convict Mr. Trump of offenses which would make him ineligible to run for or hold public office.

In the case of Colombian President Petro, the Inter-American Court of Human Rights prevented his political opponents from denying the Colombian people the right to elect the candidate of their choice as president, but nothing of that nature exists with respect to the United States, purportedly the land of the free, and Mr. Trump is at the mercy of judges and prosecutors appointed by his political enemies, and a press that hates him.  Not an enviable position for Mr. Trump, but also, not an enviable position for those Americans, perhaps a majority, who see him as their champion.  The United States is currently more polarized than it has been since 1859, and we know what happened then.  This situation is likely to make matters even worse, but then, that’s a future problem and as Louis XV is alleged to have proclaimed: “Let the flood come, as long as I’m no longer here”, which it did.  From this author’s perspective, the issue is not whether Mr. Trump is a good or decent person, he is not a Trump supporter nor does he intend to vote for him, but in a democracy, a real democracy, what is happening to Mr. Trump should not be tolerated.

It should be noted that the author tried to post a Spanish version of this article on Facebook, but it was immediately banned, allegedly for violating the community guidelines against nudity. Judge for yourself what this article has to do with that subject, and then ask yourself what is happening, and why.
_______

© Guillermo Calvo Mahé; Manizales, 2023; all rights reserved.  Please feel free to share with appropriate attribution.

Guillermo (“Bill”) Calvo Mahé (a sometime poet) is a writer, political commentator and academic currently residing in the Republic of Colombia (although he has primarily lived in the United States of America of which he is also a citizen).  Until 2017 he chaired the political science, government and international relations programs at the Universidad Autónoma de Manizales.  He is currently the publisher of the Inannite Review, available at Substack.com.  He has academic degrees in political science (the Citadel), law (St. John’s University), international legal studies (New York University) and translation and linguistic studies (the University of Florida’s Center for Latin American Studies).  However, he is also fascinated by mythology, religion, physics, astronomy and mathematics, especially with matters related to quanta and cosmogony.  He can be contacted at guillermo.calvo.mahe@gmail.com and much of his writing is available through his blog at https://guillermocalvo.com/.

Something to Mess with as Easter Week once again Makes an Appearance

Posted on by
Reply

Sooo, ….  Most of our quotidian numerical systems today are premised on Arabic numerals with10 as the base, hence we start at 0, go through 9 and then start over with zero preceded by one, etc. 

The base 60 system used by the Babylonians, the one we use to tell time, and for angles and circles, etc., was much more sophisticated because, while ten is divisible by 1, 2, 5 and 10 (and perhaps 0), 60 is divisible by each of those, plus, 3, 4, 6 and all of their multiples. 

Most computer language is premised on an “on” and “off” binary concept using symbols of “0”s and “1”s. 

Is monotheistic religion, religion based on platonic models, premised on base “infinity”, with only one, all-encompassing number, making it equivalent to monist panentheism? 

Something to mess with, mentally, as Easter week once again makes an appearance.
_______

© Guillermo Calvo Mahé; Manizales, 2023; all rights reserved.  Please feel free to share with appropriate attribution.

Guillermo (“Bill”) Calvo Mahé (a sometime poet) is a writer, political commentator and academic currently residing in the Republic of Colombia (although he has primarily lived in the United States of America of which he is also a citizen).  Until 2017 he chaired the political science, government and international relations programs at the Universidad Autónoma de Manizales.  He is currently the publisher of the Inannite Review, available at Substack.com.  He has academic degrees in political science (the Citadel), law (St. John’s University), international legal studies (New York University) and translation and linguistic studies (the University of Florida’s Center for Latin American Studies).  However, he is also fascinated by mythology, religion, physics, astronomy and mathematics, especially with matters related to quanta and cosmogony.  He can be contacted at guillermo.calvo.mahe@gmail.com and much of his writing is available through his blog at https://guillermocalvo.com/.

Introspections on an Early Spring Evening in April during 2023

Posted on by
Reply

Pipes, a variety of pipes, large ones, long ones, meerschaum pipes, water pipes, he’d had many, and brandies too, although mainly fruit brandies, peach and apricot especially, but sometimes cherry, and of course, the good ones, Cardenal Mendoza in the corked box, and once in a very long while, two or three times perhaps, Gran Duque de Alba. He’d preferred the Spanish brandies but the best one had probably been an Armagnac, 25 year old Cles Des Ducs. It came in a beautiful crystal decanter in a wooden cigar box, both of which he still had. He also loved Grand Marnier, although somehow, it seemed to get sweeter as he aged, and then, too sweet. But his current wife still enjoyed it. And of course, wines, especially those red wines from the Bordeaux region he’d loved when he lived in New York, but could now rarely obtain.

He’d enjoyed symphonic music, classical, especially Beethoven, but Mozart as well, and Tchaikovsky, and Brahms, and Vivaldi, and Shubert. And all of the foregoing because his mother had led him to believe that his long-vanished father, whom he’d eventually located, late in life for them both, had favored them. Perhaps he had but it was just as likely that his mother had invented the specifics as part of a virtual profile, one she’d created to guide him into becoming the man she’d hoped he’d be. And for the most part, perhaps she’d succeeded. But not totally; he was pretty deeply flawed in too many ways. His sons had told him so, … eventually. His mother had been an amazing woman in every positive sense. Not perfect, her insecurities made that impossible, but then again, she’d somehow overcome every obstacle life had thrown her way, and there were many of them, among which, were his father, and his step father, and who knew who else. Perhaps him as well.

The pipes were all gone. His lately returned father had appropriated a few, his favorites, and his second son’s friends had stolen the last ones during a party of sorts at his apartment, they used them for pot and hashish and who knows what. And the alcohol came and went, but it was not all that important to him, thank goodness. And the music, … well that stuck, but supplemented by classical guitar and flamenco works which created another virtual world for him, an Arab sort of world fading into Iberian imagery set in Granada, and Valencia, and the Alhambra, and even Johnny-come-lately Aranjuez.

Cigars had been a stage all their own, one he sometimes used to market his law firm, and when that was gone, his strategic consultancy, and when that was a memory as well, his writing, but never his university academic endeavors, smoking had become anachronistic by then, and although he tended to love anachronisms, that was not one.

It was a sort of strange day in early spring high in the central range of the Colombian Andes where he now lived, as usual, in a home reminiscent of a museum, a large apartment full of old books already read, many several times, but some, not at all. The Quimbayas Cumanday, a snow-clad volcano that overlooked his tenth floor apartment was no longer quiescent, but not altogether active. It seethed and spumed ash and shook the surrounding mountainsides several thousand times a day, but the tremors were slight, at least for the most part, and neither he nor his wife were very troubled by them, at least not any more. If it were to erupt, the magma would slither down the other side of the glacier, although streams of mud might prove troublesome to nearby towns. It was over fifteen thousand feet high, and the city in the sky where he lived was above the seven thousand foot mark, leaving a great deal of space to be filled before magma ever became a problem, or before beaches were created through global warming, which to him would be a blessing; he missed the ocean.

He loved seeing the Quimbayas Cumanday, now called something else, the name of some bureaucrat or other, and the other three chains of snowclad ranges visible from the windows in his bedroom and his library and his guest room, and he wondered what it might look like, should it erupt, and what it would sound like, and whether it would be during the day or would waken him and his wife in mid-night, or whether it would really ever erupt at all. The small constant tremors made that less likely as they constantly released pressures that would otherwise build up. Quimbayas Cumanday seemed to know just what it was doing. He wondered whether referring to Quimbayas Cumanday as an “it” was insulting, but then again, how to know if it was a “he” or a “she”. Divinities are sort of strange that way.

The day was drawing to a close and soon the sun would set, pretty much behind the tall gothic cathedral that graced the city, the second tallest in the hemisphere, as he understood it. The sun set there during the periods closest to the equinoxes, then moved in a range, left and right for a while, and beyond the sunset he knew lay the Pacific Ocean, lightning and thunder there making the view of the west visible from his apartment’s long corridor, decorated as an art gallery of sorts, a periodically entertaining spectacle. Not that he could see the Ocean, it was too far away, but he knew that was where the sun set, and that it was from there that the thunder and lightning played.

Soon it would be dusk and the moon and the very few constellations and stars and planets visible, Venus and Jupiter among them, would come to visit. He loved the view of the night sky as seen from distant oceans or from desserts where billions of lights and stellar clouds created insuperable cyclical works of art and prompted speculation on the natures of divinity and time, and of eternity and infinity, and of mathematics and physics, and perhaps, of other distant species. But little of that was visible amidst the light-pollution generated by the city.

He loved the instant of transition that twilight turned dusk represented, as purples and oranges and lavenders and greens darkened and slowly became indigo. To him that was a magical instant repeated twice each day, a cycle reminiscent of the only two times during each day when broken clocks and timepieces were perfectly balanced.

He often thought of his three sons at dusk, now grown and estranged, living far, far away, and wondered at might have beens, and of all the people he’d known and somehow wronged, and of how he’d change things, if he only could. And of his father, gone for good now, and of those family members he’d treasured now gone as well. And of his many former classmates and students now scattered around the world, and of those curious people who read the articles and stories and poems he published, and wondered whether they took them seriously, or, like his sons, took him for a fool.

And he wondered what was to become of a world that in so many ways seemed to be headed headlong towards perdition, but also, gratefully, of the southern hemisphere which seemed to be finding its own way, learning from the many, many mistakes of its northern brethren, the self-proclaimed elder brothers and bearers of the “white man’s burden”.

And finally, he knew, his wife would soon call him to bed and that he’d lie pleasantly at her side, trying to fall asleep, fitfully at first, and that he’d eventually dream strange and entertaining dreams of far-off places and strange things, and of people and places he’d known, and then, as he woke, he’d wonder which realm was real.

© Guillermo Calvo Mahé; Manizales, 2023; all rights reserved.  Please feel free to share with appropriate attribution.

Guillermo (“Bill”) Calvo Mahé (a sometime poet) is a writer, political commentator and academic currently residing in the Republic of Colombia (although he has primarily lived in the United States of America of which he is also a citizen).  Until 2017 he chaired the political science, government and international relations programs at the Universidad Autónoma de Manizales.  He is currently the publisher of the Inannite Review, available at Substack.com.  He has academic degrees in political science (the Citadel), law (St. John’s University), international legal studies (New York University) and translation and linguistic studies (the University of Florida’s Center for Latin American Studies).  However, he is also fascinated by mythology, religion, physics, astronomy and mathematics, especially with matters related to quanta and cosmogony.  He can be contacted at guillermo.calvo.mahe@gmail.com and much of his writing is available through his blog at https://guillermocalvo.com/.

Now What?

Posted on by
Reply

As I write this, I wonder if it will ever be permitted to see the light of day.  I’m certain that access to this article will be subjected to the de facto censorship limiting its spread and access through algorithms designed to limit postures frowned upon by our Internet censors.  But perhaps some brave souls will share it.  Every once in a while we somehow manage to get our messages heard, after which, of course, they’re distorted.

As usual when I write about abuse of the political, electoral and legal systems by the Deep State and its primary tools, the Democratic Party, traditionalist Republicans and the corporate media to impact the electoral options of Donald John Trump, I precede by asserting that I do not care for him and do not intend to vote for him, even as a protest.  But Mr. Trump has been indicted through the machinations of a Deep State tool, one of several local attorneys general and federal prosecutors tasked with preventing him for again running for and again possibly winning the United States presidency. 

The action is unprecedented, not only because it involves a former United States president, but because the purported “crime” involves having been the victim of blackmail and extortion.  But the real reason seems obvious to me.  It seems obvious to many who love peace, to the many who really strive for equity and equality, and for a system of governance based on justice and legality.

Mr. Trump has many negative characteristics but also a few saving graces, and it is the latter which have led the Deep State to take this unprecedented action, an action so polarizing that it once again promotes the prospect that American citizens will feel it is their duty to act in an uncivil, possibly violent manner.  The saving graces all involve repudiation of neoconservative military activities abroad, for example, in the Ukraine and in Taiwan; they involve repudiation of the dangerously anachronistic North Atlantic Treaty Organization and the similar web of offensive military alliances and bases around the world designed to promote and preserve political, economic and military hegemony, even at the risk of nuclear war.  They involve a desire to redirect spending on defense towards improved infrastructure.

Mr. Trump’s posture with respect to the foregoing is neither consistent nor coherent given his dedication to Israeli objectives and his intent to do to the Islamic Republic of Iran what his predecessors did to Iraq, nor given his methodology of governance through arrogance and aggressive posturing on economic issues, but it is deeply threatening to those who rule us through proxies, those who rule us through moles scattered throughout the bureaucracy and the judiciary, throughout what used to be a purportedly free press, throughout international institutions.  That is why a minor league functionary has taken the unprecedented, illegal action that confronts the United States today.  The action which will exacerbate the polarization which led to the events of January 6, 2020, and which, step by step, is bringing Americans closer and closer to another disastrous civil conflict.

Some among the American people seem to be waking up to the reality that democracy in the United States is an illusion, too many perhaps.  And the Deep State will not tolerate such independence, not again.  It is hell bent on preventing the miscalculations that led to the disastrous 2016 presidential and Congressional elections, disastrous at least from their perspective.  And no price is too high to pay to avoid them, especially when it is We the People who pay the price, not those who rule us.  Who rule us as though they were the proud owners of Tolkien’s one ring.

Julian Assange sits rotting in a British prison, thanks to the Deep State, in that case including Mr. Trump.  The real criminals, the Clintons, the Obamas, the Bush’s and the Bidens (and I don’t mean just Hunter and Jimmy), are free to loot, plunder and cast the world into chaos; a world suffering from the blights of inflation and recession everywhere, and from the violence of the antithesis of Kant’s perpetual peace.  And I’m not at all certain that We the People can do anything about it.  It may already be too late. 

It is certainly way too late to stop the madness through the prophylactic means the Constitution was adopted to provide, means such as limiting the war powers to Congress, an institution which, for more than a century, has abdicated its most important responsibilities, both with respect to peace, and to foreign affairs, and to the wise use of our tax dollars.  And I’m not certain that there are any other constitutional options still open. 

Many of us seriously question the legitimacy of the electoral process, some, because of recent events, but others because the United States has always been a duopoly, a faux democracy with the electoral system rigged in favor of two principal players, both ultimately controlled by the same people.  That leaves us no options that most of us find acceptable, certainly not those options brewing under the surface among left and right wing armed thugs who consider themselves patriots.

So, … “now what”, as Troy’s Cassandra might ask, after having warned us of what was happening for so long?  As Julian Assange might ask, or Edward Snowden, or Chelsea Manning, or as the small group of independent journalists exiled from the major media constantly remind us.  Or as George Orwell and Aldous Huxley and myriad other authors of dystopian novels illustrated for us.

Now what?
_______

© Guillermo Calvo Mahé; Manizales, 2023; all rights reserved.  Please feel free to share with appropriate attribution.

Guillermo (“Bill”) Calvo Mahé (a sometime poet) is a writer, political commentator and academic currently residing in the Republic of Colombia (although he has primarily lived in the United States of America of which he is also a citizen).  Until 2017 he chaired the political science, government and international relations programs at the Universidad Autónoma de Manizales.  He is currently the publisher of the Inannite Review, available at Substack.com.  He has academic degrees in political science (the Citadel), law (St. John’s University), international legal studies (New York University) and translation and linguistic studies (the University of Florida’s Center for Latin American Studies).  However, he is also fascinated by mythology, religion, physics, astronomy and mathematics, especially with matters related to quanta and cosmogony.  He can be contacted at guillermo.calvo.mahe@gmail.com and much of his writing is available through his blog at https://guillermocalvo.com/.

Chaotic Symmetry and Me

Posted on by
Reply

Is boredom the mother of speculation and hence, the harbinger of discovery?

Take this morning. 

A nice enough morning in the beautiful central range of the Colombian Andes, over seven thousand feet high, surrounded by snow-clad peaks, but spring reigning, seemingly eternal, the chill softened by nearby volcanically heated thermal springs.  Still, that enchanted backdrop being the norm, a jaded sense seems to permeate my dawning day and, seeking to alleviate incipient boredom, I begin to speculate on the relationship between chaos and entropy. 

Chaos is a concept that fascinates me, but in its theoretical aspect where everything is still possible and entropy is yet pre-nascent, rather than in the sense where nothing makes sense, like politics today, or journalism, or television series on which more and more of us tend to unthinkingly and unquestioningly binge, thereby rendering ourselves absolutely malleable to those who, like Sauron, seek to rule us all.

Nope, no binging for me today, at least not on the refuse marketed to “entertain” and indoctrinate us by the so-called entertainment industry.  This morning, I’ll speculate, hypothesize and fantasize all on my own.  I’ll speculate on the nature of chaos and order, anarchism and symmetry.

Here goes nothing, or perhaps, … a very fascinating something:

It seems as if perhaps eternity, in a closed sense (somewhat of an oxymoron, I know), is the journey from chaos through entropy, perhaps, back into a single singularity and thus, back into inchoate chaos, the only perfect state of chaos where everything is still a possibility and nothing is more probable than anything else.

As much as I admire, perhaps even love the concept of chaos for its almost infinite possibilities, I am, in my personal life drawn to its opposites, order and symmetry.  Hard to reconcile but we humans tend towards the complicated, albeit in a simplistic manner.  Go figure.

Symmetry, at least to me, is a ritual where, by aligning things as close to perfectly as I can, I give free reign to quantic phenomena, to quantic possibilities, but not over the smallest spaces possible, but rather, without regard to time or space, which become mere illusions.  Order, on the other hand, in its absolute sense, implies the total loss of freedom, perhaps as close to the concept of hell to which a libertarian can come (I perceive of myself as a socialist-libertarian, which to traditional chaos-loving anarchists is an irresolvable contradiction).

Is it possible that “sense” is the ultimate product of “nonsense”, the way matter and energy were at some point the product of a parentless singularity?

You know, … the human mind is a fascinating place in which to spend an otherwise boring day.
_______

© Guillermo Calvo Mahé; Manizales, 2023; all rights reserved.  Please feel free to share with appropriate attribution.

Guillermo (“Bill”) Calvo Mahé (a sometime poet) is a writer, political commentator and academic currently residing in the Republic of Colombia (although he has primarily lived in the United States of America of which he is also a citizen).  Until 2017 he chaired the political science, government and international relations programs at the Universidad Autónoma de Manizales.  He is currently the publisher of the Inannite Review, available at https://guillermocalvomah.substack.com/.  He has academic degrees in political science (the Citadel), law (St. John’s University), international legal studies (New York University) and translation and linguistic studies (the University of Florida’s Center for Latin American Studies).  However, he is also fascinated by mythology, religion, physics, astronomy and mathematics, especially with matters related to quanta and cosmogony.  He can be contacted at guillermo.calvo.mahe@gmail.com and much of his writing is available through his blog at https://guillermocalvo.com/.

An Early Spring Morning in the Colombian Andes

Posted on by
Reply

Apparently a world away
it’s cloudy and damp in the Central Range of the Colombian Andes,
an eerily beautiful morning in a city in the sky. 

Fluvial clouds cover mountains and hide glaciers
in fleecy mist blankets, as though it were too early to rise,
the sun apparently still resting. 

Oddly reminiscent of the patterns on screens
of early televisions
preceding the day’s programming.
_______

© Guillermo Calvo Mahé; Manizales, 2023; all rights reserved.  Please feel free to share with appropriate attribution.

Guillermo (“Bill”) Calvo Mahé (a sometime poet) is a writer, political commentator and academic currently residing in the Republic of Colombia (although he has primarily lived in the United States of America of which he is also a citizen).  Until 2017 he chaired the political science, government and international relations programs at the Universidad Autónoma de Manizales.  He is currently the publisher of the Inannite Review, available at https://guillermocalvomah.substack.com/.  He has academic degrees in political science (the Citadel), law (St. John’s University), international legal studies (New York University) and translation and linguistic studies (the University of Florida’s Center for Latin American Studies).  However, he is also fascinated by mythology, religion, physics, astronomy and mathematics, especially with matters related to quanta and cosmogony.  He can be contacted at guillermo.calvo.mahe@gmail.com and much of his writing is available through his blog at https://guillermocalvo.com/.

Introspection: a senryū of sorts in e minor flat

Posted on by
Reply

Fidelity was not his strong point, … well, … in affairs of the heart.
Aesthetics mattered too much, although it was far from the only consideration.

But temerity usually kept him faithful, at least for a while.

© Guillermo Calvo Mahé; Manizales, 2023; all rights reserved. Please feel free to share with appropriate attribution.

Guillermo (“Bill”) Calvo Mahé (a sometime poet) is a writer, political commentator and academic currently residing in the Republic of Colombia (although he has primarily lived in the United States of America of which he is also a citizen). Until 2017 he chaired the political science, government and international relations programs at the Universidad Autónoma de Manizales. He is currently the publisher of the Inannite Review, available at https://guillermocalvomah.substack.com/. He has academic degrees in political science (the Citadel), law (St. John’s University), international legal studies (New York University) and translation and linguistic studies (the University of Florida’s Center for Latin American Studies). However, he is also fascinated by mythology, religion, physics, astronomy and mathematics, especially with matters related to quanta and cosmogony. He can be contacted at guillermo.calvo.mahe@gmail.com and much of his writing is available through his blog at https://guillermocalvo.com/.