Bombastic Pomposity and Egocentrism: …. What a World!!

It’s a Saturday morning in May, 2023.  The first seven days did not bring the political crisis envisioned in Charles W. Bailey II and Fletcher Knebel’s 1962 story, Seven Days in May.  Those were a wasted seven days anyway, lesser evil triumphed there, or perhaps it was greater evil.  It’s a matter of perspective.  But it seems like a good morning to break rules, like the prohibition against mixing metaphors, so I’m playing with imagery involving mirrors, perhaps magic mirrors, perhaps not.  But mirrors that give us slightly distorted but not wholly inaccurate glimpses of ourselves, of our realities, but also of our perceptions, whether truthful or not.  Interesting topic for speculation: are truth and accuracy synonyms?  My instincts tell me that’s not the case, although I don’t know why.

Once more I imagine what it must have been like for Troy’s princess Cassandra, after she was afflicted by Apollo’s curse, and she became uselessly clairvoyant.  I imagine what she might have been shouting to disinterested winds, were she among us today.  Perhaps something like the following with respect to the political climate in which our world finds itself, one where egocentric Paris has become the norm.  Perhaps the following is what she might write, seeking to warn us, had she ever learned to write:

Donald Trump’s bombastic pomposity and egocentrism is not unique to today’s major political characters, it is at least equaled by the Clintons and the Bidens and the Obamas, but theirs is more deceptive, more subtle.  Obfuscated by the corporate media and thus, much more dangerous.   Their respective followers (all furious) are comprised, on the one hand, of the mid to lower, less educated but much more hardworking classes that idolize the brash Mr. Trump, and in doing so, vent their frustration at their denigration while being looted, and on the other by the purportedly “woke” who follow the latter three, not realizing that they are, more than anything else, tools of the tiny oppressor class.  “Woke” in the sense that zombies can be said to be awake, blindly and blithely following orders they don’t comprehend, but doing so relentlessly.   Mr. Trump’s unpleasantness does not mean that his grasp of reality is less than that of the Clintons and the Bidens, the Obamas and their ilk.  To the latter, reality is irrelevant, the only thing that matters is the narrative they weave and seek to impose, believing. Justifiably. that if truth us totally hidden, then its impact on the present and the future can be blunted, can be manipulated, at least for a while, reveling in Lincoln’s “you can fool most of the people some of the time”, and like Louis XV, rejoicing in the belief that such time is now, that it’s their time and to Hell with the future they’ve so thoroughly mortgaged.  Their adherents, for the most part, do not plan on having the children who will have to bear that burden.   Mr. Trump’s glimpses into reality, slight and distorted as they might be, recognize that the anti-Kantish state of perpetual war so profitable to the “woke’s” masters is disastrous for business, which is seemingly Mr. Trump’s guiding principle, and that a prosperous future requires mutually profitable coexistence with the “enemies-on-demand” that keep the military industrial complex humming, hence peace with China and Russia and North Korea is essential, and NATO is but an anachronistic white elephant looking to justify its existence, and that for the United States, the tax dollars wasted on defense spending and military bases and adventures abroad ought to be redirected to repair and modernization of internal infrastructure, on bridges and roads and airports and railroads, and public utilities.  But his view is myopic and occluded when it comes to the Middle East, where whatever Israel does is fine with him, and whatever it wants it deserves and should get, so Iran has to go, at the very least.  After all, what is one more genocide (of others) in Judaea’s long history?  And, of course, Mr. Trump’s perspective is utterly convoluted when it comes to international economics which he treats like New York City real estate machinations, i.e., where the art of the bluff is key to “the art of the deal”.   Perhaps, the abuses of both groups of bipolar bombastically pompous and egocentric leaders, as they inadvertently slip into the light as a result of their policy of mutual calumny, will somehow filter into the collective consciousness and, like an annoying morning alarm clock, jolt the electorate awake, although the Clintons and the Bidens and the Obamas hope that it is way too late for that to make any differences, and it at least smells as though they might be right, at least in the verisimilitude of democracy in which we live.  Electoral manipulation through misinformation and information withheld, if not outright electoral fraud, has seemingly become the norm, covered in a cloak of impunity by a judicial system which equates the refusal to investigate allegations as definitive proof that they’re not only false, but deliberate lies.  Not just errors in judgment, but deliberate sedition.  And where the totally politicized judiciary has joined the totally politicized corporate media to throttle any attempts to change the profitably pro-perpetual-bellum quagmire in which ordinary citizens are trapped.  After all, neither rules nor consequences apply to the extraordinary few, no talent needed, the awards and rewards are theirs to bestow upon themselves, and, of course, upon the groveling useful.

Still; … even Cassandra seemingly had hope.  The one positive thing that remained when Pandora’s amphora was unsealed (it was not really a box) and emptied.  And even if only an illusion, or perhaps a delusion, hope apparently springs eternally-enough to keep things interesting.  And thus, …  Mr. Trump.  “What a world”, as the purportedly Evil Witch of the West declaimed as she melted after exposure to the cleansing effects of water, “what a world” where apparently, the bombastically pompous and egocentric Mr. Trump represents the almost unattainable but much sought, lesser evil.

As an irrelevant but funny aside (at least we still sometimes have humor, as long as it’s not politically incorrect), someone innocently pointed out to me the uncanny resemblance on a number of levels between the current president of the United States and a character on the long running “Simpsons”, Montgomery Burns.  That person may well soon find himself or herself (I need to protect my sources) in big trouble, although purportedly not having anything to do with such observation.  That’s apparently the current price for exercising the right to freedom of expression. 

“What a world” seems to fit the bill.
_______

© 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/.

Supercilious Sally

Supercilious Sally is a proud member of the “woke” generation; those morally enlightened and superior intellectuals so willing to sacrifice their time to show others just how evil and mean spirited they are. 

In honor of her non-white brethren, she spends inordinate amounts of time in tanning parlors, and wears expensive designer-ripped jeans and African-style jewelry and sandals.  And she permed her hair too.  She’s a frequent Vegan, but not religious about it, sometimes a great piece of meat really hits the spot, especially if no one is looking, and lobster and crab and shrimp, yummm.

Speaking of religion, she’s not religious, although she is spiritual, … well, … in her own way.    Religion, after all, is a scam, unless it’s way-out, alien oriented religion, then, as long as it’s not Scientology, it’s fine.  Her’s is the inverse “white-man’s-burden”, teaching white men how horrible they are is her primary calling, especially her “white, male-chauvinist” dad from whom she and her mother, his ex-wife, have to extract the money they require to fund their work, teaching others how much further they needed to go to attain enlightenment, and to fund their lifestyles of course.  Okay, they need to extract as much money as possible from him, he doesn’t deserve what he earns anyway, no matter how long and hard he works.  They have much more meaningful uses for his income.  And they really, really need it.  When you want something enough, it’s the same as a need.  And she is kind to her dad, on his birthdays she’s taken to telling him that despite all his faults, she doesn’t hate him.  Not really.  Not all the time.

She does not refer to herself as supercilious, just “Sammy” (she did not like “Sally”, it was way too Caucasian).  It was her mirror which coined that silly “supercilious” sobriquet, and it was only adopted by those around her who were not among the enlightened.  She tells everyone to just call her “Sammy”, for some reason, believing it implies that she’s part black.  She may be right as far as her heart and soul are concerned.  But there are those who just call her “Silly Sally”, something she hates, and she hates them, albeit in a sort benevolent manner, at least in a manner of speaking.

She’s a busy young woman with all her rallies and protests and all, especially those that might get a tiny bit out of control, with a bit of rioting and justified looting, perhaps even a bit of arson, and if some of those white-male-chauvinist small business owners get injured, well, it’s their own damned fault for not having seen the light; for not having grasped the urgency of admitting their moral and ethical inferiority.  Damned money grubbers!  She’s proud not to be among the employed which gives her time for her non-credit, self-improvement classes and social media policing and censoring activities, activities for which she receives a stipend of sorts from generous and enlightened Democratic Party supporters, especially those affiliated with the wonderful Clinton Foundation and the enlightened George Soros. 

She’s sort of sexually promiscuous, when she can find someone woke enough and still capable of performing oral sex for hours on end, an activity she proudly disdains.  She’s usually not into intercourse, she will not contribute to over-population, in fact, she’s a proud abortion veteran having undergone procedures five times already (and she’s not yet twenty-three).  She’s not one of those fake activists who only talk about things, she’s an active participant in the prochoice movement.  If not for her need to engage in abortion generating activities, she’d be a lesbian with a black girlfriend, or better yet, “trans”.  She’s a trans-activist too.

She’s at odds with her mother for not having engaged in more productive interracial, extramarital sexual activities, ones where she might have been born black and perhaps even seemingly poor, not too poor, but poor enough to be able to hold it over other people’s heads at rallies.  And to qualify for minority set asides and affirmative action programs.  Perhaps she’ll find an interactive videogame into which she can subsume herself as the virtual personality she wishes she was, that she imagines she is, that she does all she can to appear to be, but without the related unpleasantness; and as long as it doesn’t take too much effort.

She loves the new trends in entertainment where the new norms require that the cast and characters be totally integrated, racially, religiously, sexually and morally; hopefully sometime soon, society will reflect Hollywood’s new paradigms.  And she’s all for removing all that inconvenient history.  She read somewhere that someone, George something or other, had a character in one of his novels who claimed that “if you can control the past, you can control the present and the future”, so she’s among those who demands that history be changed to suit their whims of the moment, after all, to her and her friends, history should be dynamic rather than static.  And creative history is best of all.

They’re the “woke”, and proud of it!
_______

© 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/.

Damn-damn-triple-damn: a silly micro story

He was not in a good mood.  He wasn’t sure why.

The day had dawned pretty “normally”, not a beautiful day but not dreary, just, perhaps a bit hazy, probably because of ashes from the nearby quiescent volcano.  The haze obscured the four nearby snowclad peaks which often made the day interesting.

It was a Sunday, a sort of quiet Sunday.  His wife’s domestic assistant had arrived and both were engaged in the weekly apartment cleanup but because of a crick in his back (for reasons unknown), he was not being very helpful, more of a hindrance really, and the crick kept him from sitting without a stinging pain, so writing or researching did not seem great ideas.  Perhaps bedrest would help, but he resented having to curtail his activities.

Damned uncooperative body!!!

He did have books to read, and baseball was finally back, albeit only spring training.  Second games today, a split squad, but the Yankees’ manager, a nice guy, was awful during yesterday’s opening day game.  He seemed to be using spring training to practice awful managing; the first game had been lost 7 to 4.  It was as though the terrible three in charge were setting the stage for finding the silver lining in too many losses, and that did not help his mood.

Damned uncooperative Yankees, he despised Hal and the Cash Man, and felt a bit bad about his disdain for Aaron (bleeping, at least in Boston and now for very different reasons, in New York) Boone, but he was so damned inept as a manager.  The terrible trio certainly had Yankees’ fans polarized, the cheerleaders-no-matter-what on one side, and those desperate to maintain classical Yankees’ traditions on the other (hoping that failing to make the grade was not replacing winning-at-all-costs as the norm).

What to do, what to do? 

Damned uncooperative back, or was it his left hip.  He had tennis on Tuesday and insisted on getting better before then but his body seemed set on teaching him a lesson on its proper use, and the consequences of its abuse.  Maybe bed rest was really called for.  He did have a few books he was reading.  He liked to read several books concurrently as the themes and scenes and dialogue mixed in his mind to create a composite image, and that, in turn, helped with his own creativity.  But he did not write in bed.

He hated pills but had asked his wife for a few.,  She was a beautiful and highly competent chemical engineer and knew a good deal about just about everything, but not in a know-it-all fashion.  He was a pretty lucky guy.  But his damned back, or was it his hip.  The pain seemed to enjoy confusing him as well.

Damn, damn, triple damn.
_______

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

Guillermo (“Bill”) Calvo Mahé (a sometime poet and, in this case, the protagonist) 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 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/.

Pseudo Hierophantology:

A satire of sorts in the ancient Keltic style

The following is an obviously fictional account (probably) of a future event, predicated on being able to project using currently undisclosed aspects of quantum dynamics.  This manuscript was provided by a would-be-publicity-seeking-pseudo-whistleblower, you know, one of those crazed conspiracy theorists that fact checkers at Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Google and their pseudo siblings filter out so we won’t have to decide on our own what’s accurate and what’s not (only commie traitors and Putin puppets think otherwise).  It’s only shared to demonstrate the perverted depths to which Russian and Chinese troll farms (not even using humans, but artificial intelligence), will go.

Anyway, purportedly ….  According to a source we’re not free to identify (perhaps, because it doesn’t exist) …., the following events will transpire, probably in Chicago during the summer of 2024.  Echoes of 1968 may still be resonating then, and the Happy Warrior may be all but forgotten as will the cries of his victims, but, probably no one will really care.  It was all Mayor John Daily’s fault anyway.  One might then wonder whether the then current incarnation of the Daily Show, in contrast to the original, will have been coopted by that famous political family (the Dailys) for the event.  I also wonder about what Jon Stewart will think then.  I kind of like Jon!

….

So, ….

It’s mid-summer, probably July, in 2024.  Chicago, Illinois.  The city is swollen with politicians, pseudo journalists, pseudo celebrities and their groupies as well as with purportedly woke, cancel culture warrior wannabes.  Theretofore despised public authorities are on full alert everywhere in the city and its suburbs lest the citizenry be riled by the plethora of “guests”.

The convention grounds are[1] surrounded by local and state police, National Guard troops, CIA operatives, Secret Service agents and a few mercenaries (i.e., regular military troops temporarily separated for clandestine duty).  They’ve certainly not forgotten 1968.

The convention hall is huge; as long and high-tiered as it is broad, … but somehow, … it seems hollow, even though it is full of bellowing sycophants, sycophants of every race, gender, nationality, religion, and sexual orientation, all in appropriate percentages, all firmly “woke” (in the new, pejorative sense of the term).  Many are waving state flags and other symbols, confetti fluttering in the hot air.  A lot of hot air, .…  In several senses.  Not all of the hot air is atmospheric in nature.  Handshakes and hugs are omnipresent but inchoate blades await new homes in unsuspecting backs.

It’s summer during a leap year!  Time to select candidates for the next federal elections scheduled for November 5, the first Tuesday after the first Monday in November, the sixtieth presidential election since adoption of the constitution of 1787-1789.  Somehow, in many states, ballots, already including the names of as yet, un-nominated nominees, have already been mailed, whether the designated recipient has asked for one or not.  Some have even reached their correct destinations and some, how many will in all probability never be known if recent history is any guide, are being successfully commercialized, either by their owners or others of an entrepreneurial bent.  Evidently, the right to commercialize the vote, turning it into a tangible asset, is now sacred.  Following up on the euphemism that a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush, massive mailing of ballots now permits their conversion into cash prior to actual elections.  Something frowned upon in earlier, less enlightened times, and even now, in less enlightened parts of the world. But it is now as American as apple pie, or perhaps pizza.  Or chicken wings.  “Make every vote count!”  For something anyway.

An interesting thought comes to mind related to the philosophical query of whether or not a tree falling in an utterly uninhabited forest makes noise as it falls.  Is a crime a crime if it is so carefully plotted as to elude evidence?  Or if those charged with investigating it refuse to do so.  Does a criminal act that does not end in prosecution render the act non-criminal?  Unlike the case with our tree, or the chicken or the egg, in this case, we apparently have an answer, at least according to the corporate media, prosecutors and the courts.  And the answer is ….

¿What was the question?  Yep, definitely!  That’s the answer.

Anyway, back to the future (good title for a movie or two, or three, ….).  But not just yet.  We still need a bit of context.

“Federal elections” are a misnomer.  Interestingly, there are no real federal elections in the United States and only one variant even purports to be national, i.e., nationwide: the one where a president and vice president are purportedly elected.  All United States elections are held on a state by state basis, even those for federal officers such as members of the House of Representatives, members of the Senate, the president and the vice president.  Actually, the election for vice president is rarely separate in any sense, rather, since the fiasco in 1800 with Aaron Burr, it is part of the election for president unless the purported Electoral College fails in its task, or a sitting vice president has to be replaced.  Then, as indicated below, the election falls to the Senate (not to “We the People”).

In addition, voters never really vote directly for a president or vice president, only for state members to the fictional Electoral College, a non-existent institution (as it has no tangible presence anywhere), whose members never meet but who purportedly select a president and vice resident by majority vote.  Whether or not they have the right and duty to exercise their best judgment is such process (as was originally hoped) appears irredeemably confused based on a conflict between state and federal laws on point.  Pluralities among the electors results in sending the election of the president to the House of Representatives and of the vice president to the Senate.  Still, national conventions for the two major parties that form the duopolous dictatorship in the United States, even if not all that relevant, or perhaps more relevant than is supposed (a quandary), are a sight to see.  A show really, albeit with the reality being carefully hidden away.  At least usually.

Sooo, for the United States, at least on the federal level, no democracy, no democracy at all, or liberty really, and the purported Bill of Rights appears to be made of Swiss cheese (although it smells a bit more gamy after two and half plus centuries, more like limburger perhaps).  Like the purported Constitution, it’s purportedly “organic”, whatever that means.  Anyway (again), be that as it may, ….  Back to the hall!

It is the metaphorical eve of another in a long series of purportedly existential elections.  Another election in which voters will have to determine which evil posited is lesser, and rarely if ever will they be permitted to merely vote for that in which they believe.  That is almost never on the ballot, at least in a manner which renders it an effective choice.  Only evil is granted that role, only evil has a chance to win, at least usually, at least, … almost always; … perhaps always.

This is “the” Convention.  The quadrennial (like the Olympiads) national convention.  One of two.  There are many other political parties, political movements and independent candidacies, but of course, on a federal level, since 1860, only two have ever really been in play.  The Supreme Court has defined American “democracy” in that way, asserting that the nation has a vested interest in a two party “system” (others define that as a duopolous dictatorship and the member of the Supreme Court as incoherent, calcified fossils, and other less flattering appellations).

Be that as it may (again), ….

A lot of planning and even more plotting has been involved in orchestrating exactly the right results for this convention, as has been true, if not since time immemorial, at least for a very long time.  Some of the electorate think decisions are really made at national political conventions but, then again, some of them even believe they play a real role in the process rather than being mere extras.  Some even believe in ludicrously inefficient concepts like truth and justice and honor.  Most, however, at least most of those present at the convention, realize that the tooth fairy, the Easter bunny, Santa Claus, fairies, elves and imaginary friends are as likely to be real as those utopian imaginings.[2]

Not everyone is welcome at this or at any other purportedly national political convention.  Indeed, the concept of “We the People” is apparently anathema at national political conventions.  After the 2016 election, in an unsuccessful law suit brought against the Democratic Party for failure to abide by its own primary rules[3], the judiciary sanctified the right of at least one of the two “major” political parties to do whatever its leadership wants with respect to nominations, thus, codifying existing Democratic Party elitist practices.  But, in an attempt to create an illusion of fairness, there exists a multilayered screening process designed to assure that only reliable partisans attend nominating conventions.  It is called the primaries’ system but also includes a strange concept referred to as the caucus’ system, in each case controlled through something referred to as “super delegates”.  The process is not always totally effective, although of late, it has been much improved.  Still, notwithstanding earnest efforts to homogenize the party’s party (so to speak), this time, at this specific convention, there is a very, very uninvited party crasher illegally (sort of) present.  A spy really (although not one of those authorized, even invited spies present assigned by what has euphemistically come to be known as the Deep State).  Not a professional spy notwithstanding the very sophisticated beta version equipment she’s been lent (or is it loaned) and which she hopes will permit her to translate the hyperbole flooding the fetid air of the convention into useful information: seemingly innocuously looking techno-spectacles purportedly and earplugs using neurolink technology (we use that word a lot for legal reasons) specially designed for a wealthy South African impresario which he’s purportedly, for unknown, non-philanthropic reasons, personally made available to the uninvited guest, along with a related set of earplugs.

Both gadgets purportedly work by translating brainwaves into images and sounds which reveal the underlying reality behind subterfuge.  Being beta versions, they are not perfect, but they’re good enough, and anyway, nothing better is available.  Ironically, they’d been commissioned for use by the United States intelligence agencies which pretty much operate the Deep State, though they do not own it; that is above their admittedly very high pay grades.  Ownership is currently limited to the billionaire class, but not every billionaire is eligible.  Even more ironic is the fact that the almost anonymous donor is taking the risk of changing the original purpose for which the two devices were designed in order to at least attempt to thwart the long term plans of those who’d commissioned them. 

The purported impresario is very famous (assuming he is whom we believe him to be).  He is perhaps the world’s wealthiest man, … at least some of the time.  To continue our train of irony, as someone not born in the United States, the purported donor apparently has no personal benefit to attain from messing with the pending elections or with any future elections, at least not directly.  Xenophobia has always been preeminent in the United States and no one foreign-born can ever successfully aspire to its highest offices.  Still, he is a member of the human race and the entire human race is impacted by political decisions taken in the good old US of A.  And of course, the purported “highest offices” actually have little to do with governance.  The latter is why it is hard to understand why the donor is interested in events such as the convention at all, unless, of course, his peers have “DFI-ed him (designated him for assignment, a sports metaphor some readers may understand).  He tends to ignore “rules of engagement” (which have nothing to do with nuptials) and that annoys his peers.  Plus, he is not of the old aristocracy, rather, a bit like the intruder, he is a bit of a gate crasher.  Despite his wealth and power, he has apparently not been invited into the Deep State club, although the Deep State seeks to keep him in line via the carrot, i.e., grants of massively profitable government contracts.

Equipped with the misdirected devices, the intruder[4] watches and listens, ensconced amidst a pile of electoral debris in a concealed alcove that is normally full of cleaning supplies. “Funny”, the intruder thinks; in a sense, it is still full of “cleaning supplies” (her and her gadgets), especially should her efforts prove successful.

The purported South African donor usually knows what he’s doing, and is usually successful, notwithstanding the constant barrage of criticism to which he is usually subjected.  Being skeptical, as real journalists are wont to be, the intruder wonders whether, rather than a South African, the donor is really the South African’s nemesis, the owner of the world’s largest retail vendor and of one of the more prominent exponents of the yellow journalists’ trade, an offshoot of poorly plotted creative fiction.  Anyway, whoever he is, apparently criticism not only rolls off of him like water off of a duck’s back, but it actually motivates him, it inspires him to succeed, regardless of the odds, and regardless of the costs, at least to others.  Hmmm, the intruder thinks, the alternate to the South African as the donor rather reminds her of a fictional commercial spokesperson for a cleaning product referred to for over half a century as “Mr. Clean”, although that appellation in no sense would have applied to him.  But the intruder still wonders why, whichever multibillionaire the donor is, he’s taken the risk of helping her.  Anyway, this is not the time for speculation.  That will come later.  It’s show time.

The intruder carefully dons and adjusts the spectacles and earplugs, they have to be perfectly in place for the bidirectional neurolinks involved to function adequately, and she listens to and watches the scene unfolding below her.  For some reason, the name of an old, black and white television program she’s never watched comes to mind, “The Twilight Zone”:

….

The convention hall is filled to the brim with slightly intoxicated men and women, most of legal age, indeed, most way older than legal age.  Indeed, some are also significantly more than slightly intoxicated.  Consequently, the hall reeks of stale beer, whiskey, tequila, rum, tobacco smoke, other smoke of a somewhat sweeter-smelling vintage, but most of all, it stinks of bodies that could use a shower and lots of soap, notwithstanding a state of the art air-conditioning system plus functioning at full blast (the plus involves the ability, if necessary, to discretely spray a variety of psychotropic vapors to be inhaled by unsuspecting participants).  Everyone seems to be talking at once until a chant is picked up in which they all (or at least most) eventually join.  The chant was started by a gaunt older woman seemingly addicted to plastic surgery.  She insists on being referred to as the “Speaker”, a role she’d once held in the House of Representatives and is determined to keep that fact at least somewhat present in everyone’s mind; kind of like a former federal attorney general in the ill-fated Obama administration has done, insisting on being referred to as AG (followed by his last name) in his constant tirades and demands for donations to save “democracy” from the opposition, which ought never, under any circumstances, be permitted to ever, ever, ever win any elections at all.  Something with which the Speaker and most participants at the convention fervently agree.

Anyway, …

“Let us sin!” the Speaker seems to shout (remember, that’s the earplug translation version, she actually intoned: “let us pray”).  Interestingly, outside the convention hall, tens of thousands of angry and disappointed “activists (i.e., unpaid, abused and manipulated, naïve young “volunteers”) are chanting something that sounds like “let us sin” but is actually “let us in”.  They’ve not been credentialed and thus are barred from the hall, being deemed too unreliable, especially when nothing they’ve been promised is actually going to be delivered there.

Anyway, … back to the Speaker.  She’s a practicing Catholic, if not all that true to her purported faith (or anything else).  But then, nowadays, few Catholics really are.  Actually, few Catholics ever have been.  Few followers of any religion really are.  Religion is fascinatingly like politics in that the more vociferously its principle tenets are proclaimed, the less they seem to be adhered to.  Consider how many humans have been killed or maimed, how many lives destroyed in the name of love and peace and in the names of myriad deities and their prophets.  Instead of being “true believers”, many Catholics who deem themselves “modern”, like Reformed Jews, treat their faith really more as a cultural thing, but, the Speaker’s purported Catholicism has been useful to her (and to others) in her political endevors, even when Catholic leaders condemn her for her apparent apostasy.  Perhaps especially when she is so condemned.

The Speaker looks very different through the intruder’s filtering spectacles than the carefully coiffed image she seeks to portray in real life (if her life can, in any sense, be considered real), although her photographs always require quite a bit of air-brushing.  She is, in actuality, stylishly dressed in a white designer pantsuit, however, the spectacles show her wearing garish blood red garments trimmed in brackish gilt and garlanded in fake garnets, and instead of her actual stylish small cap, it shows her wearing an antlered helm, a bit askew, apparently knocked off kilter as her faux-passion-on-demand controlled fake fury seems to agitate her.  Kind of like a fundamentalist preacher performing faith healings.

“Let us sin” her enflamed congregants seemingly respond (remember the earplugs) in a roar! 

The spectacles seem to show a complex mob.  Some have tally books in hand, and have begun to furiously lodge double dubbed entries into ledger books and balance sheets.  Others, who appear to have suitcases full of what appeared to be purloined or purchased ballots, head to areas set aside as vote exchanges where offers and bids for the ballots fly wildly, establishing electoral odds for pundits to declaim, with winning bidders and enriched sellers merrily laughing and singing as the purchasers fill in their newly acquired pre-signed ballots.  If one vote is priceless, how about a thousand?  Price is obviously relative.  “Count every vote” they laugh and jeer.  “Count every vote”!

Still other “mob” members (perhaps a double entendre certain Italians are especially well-suited to grasp) head to what the techno-spectacles interpret as troll farms but which such members refer to as social media communications centers, places where, using thousands of interrelated computer systems, messages warning of fabricated crises fly back and forth, hither and yon, demanding donations, but in carefully crafted and disrespectfully-respectable, even pleading tones.  “They’ll destroy social security, they’ll bring back slavery”, “they’ll take away your right to sell your vote”, “they’ll force women to bear all the children while men are unfairly exempted from that duty”, “they’ll force you to participate in sporting events according to birth gender”, and other such stridently effective fund raising themes.  Actually, the earplugs just let those slogans slip by without much real translation.  The fundraising gurus actually said things similar to those (and others just as effective), albeit in every case, at best distortions or even more frequently, blatant falsehoods (the latter being obviously favored).  The suckers will buy anything if their emotions are riled enough!

Who cares as long as the bucks keep flowing in: small donations, large donations, huge donations, money set aside for mortgages and food and education, they all count, and they’ll all end up in the “right hands”, or at least a good deal of them will, and anyway, just which are the “right” hands is open to interpretation.  It depends on what the meaning of “is” is.

From the back of the hall, in the upper tiers, apparently furious backbenchers also take up a chant, soon echoed from every nook and cranny, except for the tiny nook which sometimes doubles as a cleaning closet, now temporarily occupied by the intruder:

“We want war, we want war, kill the damned Ruskies the stinking Chinks too, and the freakish Iranians, and the damned North Koreans, and the stupid Syrians, and heretical rag headed Muslims!!!  More money for defense and for homeland security!!!  Everyone’s out to get us!  More money to stamp out unauthorized news!  Real patriots pay whatever taxes need to be imposed … but borrowing is just as good; in fact, better!  Sacrifice is awesome! 

No to infrastructure, no to universal healthcare and free education, no to guaranteed minimum wage, the money is needed elsewhere!!!  No, no, no, no, noooooo!

We want war, we want war …!” 

Again, the earplugs rest.  No need to translate all that much, except with respect to the pejoratives and racist aspects, those are, in reality, couched in more polite terms.

The crowd is on fire!!!!  Hell on Earth in a sense, a very figurative as well as literal sense.

The intruder, wanting to do an equipment check and to contextualize the situation to assure that her report will be accurate, removes the spectacles and earplugs and this is what she sees:

Below her, on the flag bedecked main stage, at the podium, stands the carefully coiffured and only slightly mummified recent Speaker of the House of Representatives, continuing to address the massive crowd of carefully screened political delegates, all sworn to monolithic obedience.  Others who’d expected to speak, imagine large hooks pulling her off of the stage.

Outside the hall, muffled screams can be heard from excluded Bernie Sanders’ supporters, but Bernie himself is just fine, indeed, he’s been given a prime speaking role (assuming the Speaker ever gives up the podium) and promised plum committee assignments after the next election, guaranteed assignments as the election is apparently in the bag.  After all, enough of the ballots have already been sent out and “re-acquired”.  Good old AOC, she whose name has become an acronym (and a curse to some), watches, entertained, dreaming that perhaps soon enough, perhaps even this cycle, it will be her turn, and not just at the podium, … if she can just keep “her” squad under control.

For all the orchestration and fine performances, some almost Oscar worthy[5], the comforting and comfortable fact is that the seemingly hard fought results supposedly to be determined have already been tabulated by friendly monitors in the intelligence community, the Department of Justice and the Judiciary.  It’s great to have loyal and reliable friends, not only in high places, but burrowing among the wonderful federal bureaucracy; even among the purported opposition.  Of course, the intruder is not directly privy to the foregoing, but she gets the drift.  The sensations comfortingly set in stone in the minds of the delegates enter the gadgets’ neurolinked translation matrixes.

Posters are plastered everywhere urging voters to re-elect “Honest Joe”.  Interesting that the “president” has elected to attempt to grow a Lincoln-style chin beard.  He’s not been successful but the posters have been doctored to make it seem as though he has.  And a Lincoln-style stove top hat has also been included, as well as an image of the log cabin, albeit in Pennsylvania, where “honest” Joe is now rumored to have been born.  Indeed, it is being whispered-about that “Joe” was really his second name, and that his real first name is “Abraham”, so he is really Abraham (Abe) Joseph Robinette Biden Jr., the name having been purportedly selected after a medium present at his baptism had fainted and begun to speak in tongues, fortunately variants of English, proclaiming that the newborn was fated to become the most beloved and respected United States president ever (make some room on Mount Rushmore).  It was only because of his humility that he’d elected to be called Joe.  One should remember that plagiarism has always been “honest” Joe’s strong point.  Other posters show “first son” Hunter as a naval war hero after he’d purportedly served unstintingly in the Peace Corps all over Africa and won several “father” and “husband of the year” awards, all as recently reported in all major corporate media (except for a furious Fox News, whose broadcasts have encountered inexplicable transmission problems).

From another part of the crowd comes another chant: “Honest Joe, honest Joe, honest Joe, everyone’s friend!!  Honest Joe, honest Joe, honest Joe, everyone’s friend!!  Honest Joe, honest Joe, honest Joe, everyone’s friend!!  Honest Joe, honest Joe, honest Joe, everyone’s friend!!”  Posters indicating that “Labor Loves Joe” are ardently waved by earnest union-busting execs from a number of high tech, Silicon Valley companies as well as by senior management of the nation’s railroads and the heads of some major unions, especially teachers’ and entertainment industry unions.

But all is not just carefully scripted “guns and roses”:

To the dismay of the Speaker and honest Joe, a counter cry of “we want Hillary” is taken up from somewhere, even though it seems no one is really involved.  The Speaker suspects that Hillary may have somehow gamed the hall’s state of the art sound system and had it piped in, although Hillary herself is modestly sitting on the platform, blowing kisses and waving as though she hopes that the counter chant will end, … or perhaps soon end.  The Speaker is in a bind.  She secretly hates Hillary but can never admit to that.  She isn’t all that fond of Joe either, feeling that they’ve both screwed her out of her rightful place in history.  So she just ignores the counter-chant and, seemingly thrilled, keeps waving her hands and smiling.  Blowing kisses is out.  It requires use of too many face muscles paralyzed through overuse of Botox.

Unfortunately for Hillary, there are counter-counter cries of “Michelle, Michelle, Michelle” as well, which irk Hillary no end.  Michelle is not demurely sitting at the speakers’ platform though but actively encouraging those chants, as is her husband and their erstwhile assistant, good old AG.  AOC theretofore sitting patiently on the speakers platform is thoroughly steamed, she’s been upstaged.  She’d not thought about having her own chant piped into the sophisticated, computer controlled (and thus, eminently hackable) sound system.  “Stupid, stupid, stupid, stupid” she berates herself, under her breath.

It’s what the intruder expected, although she’d hoped otherwise.  After all, she may technically still be a Democrat, she’s not yet changed her registration, although she’s in a bit of a moral and ethical quandary given that her hero, or actually, heroine, a former Congresswoman from Hawaii, has officially left the Democratic Party. Uncomfortable with her thoughts, the intruder re-dons the anti-bovine feces neurolink-spectacles and earplugs, and stares at the scene below while listening to the translated proceedings. 

She feels a bit queasy, a bit ill, a bit like regurgitating, and she hates to regurgitate.  She’s voted Democrat all her life.  She is black so she’s had to.  Or else!  At one point, her political volunteer supervisor had insisted she denounce her womanhood in favor of “transhood”, and she’d played along; forced to stop reading or watching anything that had to do with Harry Potter, et. al.  Perhaps, now that she’s joined Tulsi’s new movement, she’ll be expelled, not only from her party but from her race and from her gender. 

What will she be then?  Will she be somehow transformed into a racist, xenophobic, misogynic white male?

….

The spectacles and earplugs, again in place, portray the following scene:

Down in the hall, on the speakers’ platform, the Speaker, still in monologue mode, watches happily.  The chants in favor of honest Joe and Hillary and Michelle (but not in favor of AOL) have quieted down, perhaps because she’s been maniacally banging her gavel for order (she loves to do that, it reminds everyone she’s been Speaker of the House).  She smiles broadly, her tightly crafted face stretched to the limit, stubborn wrinkles hidden behind a mask of powdered gold, wig glued firmly in place.  She cackles and croons and begs and threatens and cajoles.  Fund raising is her favorite thing, her strong point.  And her legal team has advised her that Congressional immunity (some would say impunity) permits her to say whatever she wants, free of detrimental legal consequences.

The earplugs translate her televised words as follows: “more, damn you, don’t hold anything back!!!  College funds, dowries, retirement savings; you can take out mortgages and loans, and those credit card balances-available are an affront to decency.  Pitch in and save our country from the rabble that would make it theirs.”  Her actual words are much more polished, even humble and pleading.  Begging even.

Then, she switches audiences.  Faster, and wilder on closed circuit to the delegates, she continues and the earplugs, getting a bit overheated, translate: “there are no limits, just fabricate as needed”.  “If enough of us firmly believe something (or claim that we do), then that’s the truth, … or it will be”!  And her congregants: purchased jurists and faux journalists and molish federal bureaucrats answer jubilantly, “so it’ll be written, for we’re the ones writing it, and so it’ll appear, no matter what happens” while others chant over and over again, “history is what we say it was, tear down those monuments, censor those books or better yet, burn them, especially George Orwell’s and Aldous Huxley’s and Kurt Vonnegut’s” and other phrases sacred and pleasing to the hallowed cackling sort of shrew (hey, it’s the earplugs translating and that’s how her audience really views her, her opponents opinions make those observations very tame in comparison). 

Finally, once again, the sacred phrase (as translated) is shouted and echoed throughout the halls of the great convocation: “Let us go forth and sin, and sin and sin!”  And other slogans like “Sin is in” and “All hail the happy harpies of the apocalypse”.   The latter chant seems to bother the Speaker as she feels it includes her nemeses, Hillary and Michelle.  Maybe even AOC.

….

Back to context: Of course, as indicated above (several times to avoid misinterpretations and law suits), the foregoing is a translation, perhaps a transliteration, and subjective at that.  The neurolink-spectacles and earplugs have apparently been provided by someone claiming to represent Elon Musk, but not Telsa, definitely not Telsa, or Space-X.  In all likelihood, Mr. Musk had nothing to do with any of it, even though the spectacles and earplugs had apparently been developed by one of his many smaller companies.  But not even he would be stupid enough to risk all the government contracts coming his way.  Or would he?  He can be pretty weird.  Naw!!!  It must have been some other South African billionaire entrepreneur responsible, another one whose own former sports car orbits the sun.  Or, maybe, taking a page out of Machiavelli’s purported masterpiece, The Prince[6], Elon’s main rival, on earth as well as in space, is responsible, the Beeeeezzzz man, and he just wants Elon to take the fall.  After all, the Securities and Exchange Commission already hates him, and they can bring down anyone.

The chants and exhortations are certainly loud.  The phrase “Damned Trump” now seems omnipresent, and cries of “where’s Hillary” and “where’s Michelle” are also very popular, which does not really please the Speaker.  Or AOC.

Anyway, … the spectacles and earplugs haven’t really changed things all that much.  Not all that much to change.  And the odor in the hall, what a whiff.  Practically deadly.  The intruder should have asked that guy from South Africa (or wherever) for nose plugs too.  She’ll have to talk to Tulsi about that when she gets out.  Before her next gig.

If she gets out. 

As opposed to her hero/heroine as a woman, as a real journalist, the intruder’s hero (though she is loath to admit it publicly) sits imprisoned in an English jail, held without bail, while Biden administration attorneys seek to have him turned over in the name of freedom of the press to face what passes for justice in the purported Land of the Free and Home of the Brave.  And she is all too well aware what will await her, should she be caught.

Of course, if she gets out, she has another similar assignment pending concerning a sort of slightly distorted mirror image national convention (mirror image in the sense of mirrors once found in county fair funhouses way back when), a convention to be held by the purported opposition.  It too will be carefully controlled by the Deep State, perhaps even more so as a recent convention got out of hand with disastrous results.  Many of the Deep State spies present at the current convention will also be present, under different guises, at the GOP national convention.  The parts are virtually interchangeable, except, of course, for the Speaker and Hillary and Michelle and AOL.  They are pretty much inimitable, at least in their own opinions.  But Nicky Hailey will be there, as, in all probability, will Alaska’s own Sarah Palin, and Mitch McConnell and other cartoonish Republicans.  Donald Trump is not expected to be there if attorneys general in New York and Georgia and Democrat appointed judges and traditionalist members of his own party have any say, which they might not.  He terrifies them as much as he sets off Democrats.

That should be quite a show as well.

The intruder wonders what will happen to the information and imagery she is gathering, even if she is successful in getting it out.  Would even Consortium News dare to print it?  And even if it did, would the Masters of the Internet let it circulate?

And even if it did circulate, would anyone read it? 

And even if some people read it, would anyone believe it?

She thinks of Edward Snowden, and before him, John Crane, and she thinks of Chelsea Manning and Daniel Hale.  And of course, she remembers Troy’s Cassandra.

Not all that comforting.

[Cut!!!]

Caveat!!!  While this “story” may be useful in seeking to understand the realities underlying the United States’ political system, the author recommends against citing it as a source for civics class research papers.  Instructors may not be amused.  On the other hand, ….

Further Caveat!!!  Civics instructors might find this “story” useful for their classes but their principals, and especially, their local school boards, might disagree.  ….  Vehemently.
_______

© 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 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/.


[1] Actually, “will be”, but it will be grammatically too confusing to keep using the future tense so we’ll revert to resent or past tenses (simple, continuous, perfect, conditional, progressive, etc.) anything being possible in the quantic realms anyway.

[2] Some among us, on the other hand, would call those people despicable cynics, there existing no definitive proof for the non-existence of the Easter bunny, Santa Claus, fairies, elves and imaginary friends, or even unicorns.  Thus, as to such things, we must remain agnostic, if the scientific method is to be respected, and acknowledge the impossibility of proving any negative definitively.  It is possible that the intruder as well as Elon Musk, like Nikola Tesla, are at least among “we the agnostics”.

[3] Carol Wilding, et al., Plaintiffs, vs. DNC Services Corp., D/B/A/ Democratic National Committee and Deborah Wasserman Schultz, 941 F.3d 1116 (2019).

[4] Actually a journalist, a real journalist rather than one of those puffed up pseudo professionals who hog the airwaves as well as the quickly fading print media, already almost irrelevant.

[5] All the old cinematic awards have been coopted, as have the Pulitzer prizes, the Nobels, the Golden Globes, the Grammies, etc.

[6] Machiavelli had actually much preferred his Discourses on the First Ten of Titus Livy, which led to very different conclusions.

The Wannabe Secret Life of Sidney Stone

Sydney Stone was not at home, which was unusual, even odd, he was a homebody, albeit not by choice.  He just had a very boring life, no real friends and he suffered from agoraphobia.  Not just open spaces but uncomfortable situations.  Not a deep rooted fear, just a smidgen, but the smidgen made things uncomfortable, and that just made everything worse in a spiraling sort of way.  So he mainly stayed at home, worked from home and shopped from home, but he sensed that he might be coming down with a touch of claustrophobia as well. 

He was not into video games and found that all the cool old television programs had been replaced by politicized drivel.  One black woman was now always the heroic protagonist, hopefully lesbian but bisexual would do.  One Asian, one Hispanic, perhaps a member of a local indigenous population and one dweeby white guy who always reminded him too much of himself, with gender roles, including transgender, carefully distributed equally.  So he was not much for television either.  Lately he’d mainly been trying to come up with a cool nickname for himself and not doing all that well.  “Sid” of course, was out, as was “Ney”.  The “Stoner” might have worked if he’d been into drugs, but he wasn’t.  “SS” had strong anti-Semitic elements and he was sort of concerned with the sanity of Zionists, so that was out as well. 

Sidney, it’s sad to admit, was not all that creative, except when it came to illness.  There, he was an artist (he suffered from a touch of hypochondria as well).  It provided a bit of spice to his spiceless life but unfortunately, paramedics would no longer come when he called, all having realized that he was just a very lonely and bit eccentric kind of guy.  One, a redheaded girl named Lucy, had come for a while, but eventually, she’d stopped coming too.  Evidently she had mental issues of her own.  Not dangerous ones but apparently, she’d come to believe she was married to a Cuban band leader and had two imaginary friends named Fred and Ethel, and she’d just sort of dropped out of site.

He wished he had a girlfriend who was good at nicknames but the truth was, he didn’t have a girlfriend (even Lucy had never been a girlfriend), or even a friend who was a girl (ditto again with respect to Lucy).  It was hard meeting other people of any kind, stuck in his apartment.  He also didn’t have, as we implied before, any guy friends, or even any pets.  Just himself and his mirrors; three of them, one in the bathroom, one in the foyer (to make it look larger), and one behind the bedroom door that had been left there by a prior tenant.  He frequently talked to his mirrors, usually complaining about his situation, but often also asking about prior tenants or their guests, or even workmen and women, any people at all really, people whose images they’d reflected in the past.  Kind of crazy he realized but, you never knew, and he hadn’t all that much better to do.  Plus, every once in a while, the mirrors would respond, but that was only when he was asleep and dreaming.  He’d try to recall the dreams when he woke, and he almost could, at first, but then, the harder he tried, the faster they’d fade.

He had one favorite book, an old one from tenth grade literature class about a guy named Walter Mitty, with whom he identified.  “If only I had an imagination like Walter’s”, Sidney (for lack of a nickname) would say to himself, “my life would be a lot cooler”.  Walter Mitty, had he been non-fictional, might have been pleased by Sidney’s admiration, of course, depending on which daydream he was in.

Thinking of Walter Mitty usually led Sidney to consider the viability of developing a multiple personality disorder but he had no idea whether that was volitionally possible.  He also wondered whether or not multiple personalities could interact with each other, realizing that, if not, then the only benefit would be if the alternative personalities lacked his phobias and could get out and meet people.  But then, pessimistically (he was a pessimist as well), he was sure his primary personality wouldn’t derive any benefit as he was pretty sure the principle personality would be unaware of the others, all of which would, in all probability, gang up on him, ridiculing him to his metaphorical back, which of course would worsen his agoraphobia.  Apparently, he was paranoid as well.

“Hmmm”, Sidney whispered to himself, as though he was afraid someone would hear him, an epiphany of sorts breaking through.  “How do I know I don’t have a multiple personality disorder”, and wondered whether, in fact, other personalities were keeping him in the dark.  “Yuck” he whispered (for the reason we previously mentioned), he was afraid of the dark as well.  Now he was also developing both delusions and paranoia, but “Hell” he whispered (you know why), “it’s better than sitting at home with nothing to do.”

Then he realized he wasn’t at home at all and really panicked.

One wonders if narrators count as aspects of multiple personality disorders.
_______

© 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 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/.

Refractory Reflections on Metaphysics, Self-Awareness and the History of our Cosmos:  Perhaps a satire, but hopefully informative

Introduction:

For some reason, many people associate the term “metaphysics” with beliefs outside scientific norms, beliefs in magic or miracles or ghosts or religion, but in reality, the term applies to one of the four main branches of philosophy (those being metaphysics, epistemology, logic, and ethics).  Metaphysics is technically then, at least linguistically, the branch of philosophy that studies the fundamental nature of reality; i.e., the premises for the concepts of being, identity and change, of space and time, of cause and effect, necessity and possibility.  Interestingly, it also encompasses questions concerning the nature of consciousness and the relationship between mind and matter, between substance and attribute, and between potentiality and actuality.

That then begs the question as to what philosophy is.  Given that most fully recognized doctoral degrees today purport to be doctorates of philosophy, “recognized” because they are purportedly research oriented as opposed to merely working doctoral degrees like law or medicine, etc., that makes the term “philosophy either all-encompassing or meaningless, or, as some philosophers who thrive on controversy and contradiction forcefully assert, both concurrently.  Interesting that if philosophy is purportedly a quest for truth, its four branches are so ethereal, so either overflowing or lacking in substance (or both concurrently) that obfuscation seems its primary value.

Logic seems an exercise valid only insofar as its premises are accurate.  It would seem logical to test logic by measuring its conclusions with empirical evidence, but when we do that and the conclusions don’t coincide with actuality, we tend to just torture the result into submission by blaming external factors, or just lying (the most popular current trend).  Logic could be a process through which we constantly refine premises so that they approach veracity, if we could bind ourselves to the quest for truth, a Holy Grail of sorts, but we have, as of yet, in most cases, been unable to attain that strong a discipline.

Ethics seems a great deal like aesthetics, its postulates being utterly subjective based on the preferences of the beholder.  It too has, to date, escaped the quest for truth, at most sometimes encompassing agreed upon common denominators as to appropriate behavior; what philosopher David Hume referred to as “conventions”, i.e., agreements among a defined segment of the population, possibly a vast majority thereof, to treat something as valid, because such postulate seems to work well enough to be relied on.  Unfortunately, many such postulates with respect to behavior are demonstrably illogical and rather than based on reason, are merely arbitrary impositions of authority through force (e.g., monogamous behavior, sovereignty, autonomy, purported democracy, liberty, rights, etc., honored at least as much in the breach as in their respect).

Epistemology is vague enough to be virtually objectively undefinable.  Subjectively, it involves the study of the nature, origin, and scope of knowledge, the rationality of belief, and various related issues. It asks what constitutes knowledge (differentiating it from mere supposition and belief), and how knowledge can be obtained, tested and thus refined.  What roles do perception, reason, memory and testimony play in the attainment of information worthy of reliance, and conversely, what factors impair the reliability of perception, reason, memory and testimony.  And finally, assuming knowledge is distilled from belief, how it can be organized and structured to render it useful, but subject to limitants, including whether all justified beliefs must be derived (i.e., derived from justified foundational beliefs) or whether justification requires only a coherent set of beliefs.

Epistemology is subject to philosophical skepticism which questions whether it is possible to attain knowledge at all, positing that, at best, we may enjoy Hume’s conventions, …. for a time.  In fact, questioning whether knowledge exists or is merely a temporary phenomenon involving a mere subjective exercise in relative opinions has become very stylish through positing of seemingly unanswerable queries such as: “What do we know”; “What does it mean to say that we know something?”; “What makes justified beliefs justified?”; and, “How do we know that we know?”

So, …. given the foregoing context, is it any wonder that metaphysics is both misunderstood and confusing?  Still, notwithstanding the foregoing, let’s delve into the metaphysical juncture between religion, cosmogony and cosmology.  It could be fun, perhaps even informative, assuming information, in fact, exists.

Unbridled speculation concerning sentience

[Hmm, why does the foregoing make some of us (well, at least me, I was being optimistic) think of the number one-hundred-and-eleven, perhaps a sacred number of sorts.  At least in Middle Earth.[1]

Anyway …  a “convention”, perhaps the first convention, the primal premise:  Prior to the beginning there was naught, absolutely.  Except perhaps, for a speck.  A very heavy speck perhaps, a singularity, although that might have been quite a bit after the beginning, if there was, in fact, a beginning.  But what if there was a “something” (certainly not time, not yet) before the beginning when only “sentience” existed?

“Sentience”, an awkward term as used in this reflection as it presupposes both senses and something to sense.  For our purposes however, let’s define it as a term of art referencing self-awareness, or at least, consciousness of a sort, even when there is nothing, necessarily, of which to be conscious (not to imply that it is not operative in the presence of senses and things to sense).

The huge probability is that sentience evolved over a very long time after the beginning, when there existed enough interactive complexity to give rise to life, and then to sensory rather than reactive input, and then to self-awareness and finally, to cognizance.  We tend to believe that all of the foregoing are biological concepts (and carbon based biology at that), but Richard Dawkins, a British evolutionary biologist, author and avowed atheist (indeed, ironically, the purported “god of the atheists”) has expounded on a concept of potential non-biological intelligence that leads to interesting alternative hypotheses, hypotheses that “breathe new life” into purportedly “debunked” philosophies concerning group sentience and intelligence, prime examples being the postulates of philosophers Thomas Hobbes, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and Immanuel Kant concerning the volitional realities of history and of the “state” as sort of living entities.

Dawkins inadvertently gave life to such philosophical hypotheses when he expounded on a hypotheses concerning fundamental (i.e., basic) units of information which he referred to as “memes”.  Dawkins asserted that memes mirrored the concept of biological “genes” by congregating into complex organisms: genes into diverse life forms and memes into what Dawkins referred to as memeplexes.  Memeplexes apparently have many, if not all, the attributes of biological life, using the minds, emotions, etc., of human beings as tools and carriers similarly to the way we use cells, organs, etc., to grow, evolve, mutate, propagate and operate.  According to Dawkins and now many others, examples of memeplexes include religions, political movements and philosophies, all of which are purportedly characterized by birth, growth, mutation and defensive reactions. 

As not all life appears to be self-aware, neither are memeplexes.  While self-awareness is a complex concept which remains unexplained, it has been hypothesized that self-awareness arises when a critical mass of interactive complexity develops.  For biological creatures, that is attained through neuronic interaction in the brain.  A basic observation is that we, as human beings, are normally self-aware, but that we are also composite living entities comprised of trillions of cells, also independent living structures (even if probably not self-aware entities) which act through preprogrammed reaction rather than volition. 

It is posited that perhaps such complexity can also be attained through other means.  For example, socially, though interaction among groups of humans, it being understood in sociology that group dynamics frequently result in actions in which individual members of a group would not engage.  Those observations have led some to draw the hypotheses that a similar process exists, not only among groups of humans operating through memeplexes, but perhaps, even through non-biological conglomerations, such ecosystems, planets, solar systems, galaxies, perhaps even a universe or the multiverse as well. 

Based on the foregoing, whether biological of non-biological, one would seemingly be justified in assuming that sentience was a post creation, evolutionary phenomena.  However, to a great many fellow members of our human species, when pitted against faith, facts are balderdash, and with faith, anything is possible, even levitation of mountains by individuals without the use of tools.  Thus, to them, no matter what the facts, theories or hypotheses claim, and no matter what the evidence, sentience was first, and eternal to boot, and omniscient, and ubiquitously omnipresent, and omnipotent and even, despite apparent empirical contradictions, omnibenevolent.

Sentience as Divinity

Sooo, … anyway, let’s play the latter’s game and assume, for argument’s sake, that notwithstanding the evidence or lack of evidence, there might, at one point before time, have been a single sentience.  A monist first cause, eternal in the sense that it preceded both time and space.  In that case, one could well assume that such single sentience would have been bored out of its gourd (had gourds then existed) and it would also seem to follow that boredom was the very first thing perceived by that sentience, the motive force, as it were, the inspiration for everything that followed.  And it would further seem that, after a period (not yet time because motion did not yet exist and motion seems essential to time), let’s call it eventually, more than one sentience would evolve (if there had ever been sentience at all).  After all, the miracle of sentience is much more improbable than is the probability that, should sentience have arisen, it would arise again, and thus become multiple and varied.  It would have been terribly boring otherwise.  If there was more than one, they could at least sense each other, thus not being condemned to only perceiving “to themselves” about nothing.

At any rate, assuming that sentience was first (as discussed above, an improbability), then, perhaps, it would be appropriate to consider such sentience equivalent to what some among us[2] have come to perceive as “divine” (no, not in the aesthetic sense, nor in the epistemological sense, but rather, in a popular variant of the “metaphysical” sense).  Consequently, for purposes of these reflections, it would seem appropriate to define such sentience as Divinity (capitalized, out of respect, just in case).  “The” Divinity, or at least the original Divinity.

Anyway (again, as promised), ….

Evolutionary Naught

“Nothing” is an interestingly existential concept in its absolute sense.  It can seemingly take two principal directions.  The first is somewhat obvious (albeit very boring): the absence of everything.  But the second option, why that’s something else entirely, both literally and figuratively.  It could, in fact, at least as a mathematical concept, and mathematical concepts frequently seem to pave the way for realities of sorts, be the inchoate sum total of everything possible in time, space and whatever we’ve yet to perceive (even quanta) if everything includes equivalent positive and negative aspects, not linearly (two dimensional), but omni directional in three or more dimensions, probably a spherical concept, without any edges or angles, and hence infinite.  I.e., the sum total of everything intangible as well as tangible which, it would be mathematically reasonable to assume, equal zero, and thus, naught.  Under the latter scenario, nothing would contain inchoate infinity, and should motion be somehow attained and time thus created, why it might well include eternity itself. 

Hmmm, sounds quite a bit like embryonic chaos.  Chaos, not in a negative sense implying disorder, but in the almost magical sense of infinite possibilities and thus, total uncertainty.  Seemingly a close relative to quanta.

Because for purposes of this part of this reflection we have posited Divinity as an assumption, then one should probably wonder as to the relationship between our aforementioned Divinity and the second sort of nothing, let’s capitalize it and call it “Naught”, and our speculative sort of epistle would then entail how they may have interacted to permit the existence of all that is, something we might perhaps refer to as either the “Big Bang” or “Creation”, depending on one’s attitude towards metaphysics.

At some point it appears that, possibly volitionally (as a result of a decision by Divinity), or perhaps merely accidentally, Naught was fractured, cleft, cracked, busted, no longer, … well, … nothing, and a minimalist singularity escaped (the “Great Escape”).  There are probably those, and it is not reasonable to just assume that they’re wrong, who believe that Naught came first, the singularity second and Divinity (if at all) came third, but that is not, apparently, a palatable version as far as Divinity (at least the Abrahamic version of Divinity) is concerned, although there are others (secular physicists and philosophers they’re called) who deny that Divinity exists at all, although they do admit to sentience and to the singularity[3].  A still third group, generic philosophers (as we initially explained), in the quest for what they define as truth, who will argue with anyone about anything, including whether or not what they seek exists, or can be defined, or is permanent, etc.  You get the point I think.

Anyway, it seems we’ll have to engage in something that David Hume, a philosopher who did not believe truth could be found, developed as a working substitute.  As indicated previously, Hume believed that because, in his opinion, first causes, to which he referred as “premises”, could never be proven, for convenience (there being no other option, unless, perhaps, one were the Divine and the Divine were omniscient) we would need to reach a working consensus, a sort of pragmatic, temporary substitute for truth, because such “consensus” seemed to work.  Hume referred to such working consensuses (as initially discussed towards the “beginning” of this apparently interminable reflection) as a “conventions”.[4]

For purposes of this epistle (as we’ve indicated on now several occasions[5]) we will assume that sentience somehow evolved into Divinity within Naught eternities prior to the Great Escape, and then, volitionally, by escaping from Naught, destroyed Naught’s prefect balance, converting Naught into an omnidimensional, omnidirectional singularity, which then eventually expanded into an infinite number of universes which we will, as a convention, refer to as the omniverse, a neo-platonic monist sort of concept comprised of a series of multiverses, each comprised of uncountable universes, etc., etc., etc.

[Because reflecting on an infinity of multiverses, or even just one multiverse would not only take a long time, and writing about it, a lot of paper, really, more time and paper than have ever existed, we’ll focus on one universe for the nonce, the one we inhabit.  One we’ll call “Cosmos”, as did the ancient Greeks (and today’s Russians).]

In the Beginning

We know turn to speculation of what our hypothetical Divinity might have witnessed, perhaps as possibly eventually shared with a few select individuals (long after individuals had evolved), no, not priests, or at least not priests as such, but mathematicians and physicists.

In the “Beginning”, hmmm, an interesting concept.  There is of course the version favored by faith imbued Abrahamics, and similar versions posited by diverse other mythologies (mythology in the broad sense which encompasses virtually all religions), but there is also, to all appearances, a version imbued with evidence which even Creationists (an Abrahamic religious phenomena) seem to accept, so for now, we’ll roll with that, at least, for purposes of this reflection, or perhaps epistle.

Sooo, ….

In this version of the “Beginning”, rather than just a six day endeavor (plus one day for sort of resting), a singularity burst forth from Naught in the form of  massive, unimaginable heat, heat in all probability never to be duplicated (interesting to speculate that an Abrahamic Hell may have preceded Heaven), plus four “forces”.  First out and thus eldest was gravity, then electromagnetism, then quantum flavourdynamics (which some call the weak force, a name it resents as pejorative) and then the nuclear force (which enjoys being referred to as the strong force, i.e., as it binds elemental particles together).  They introduced an era known to some and accepted by others, but by no means all, commonly referred to as “cosmic inflation”.  During the cosmic inflation era (epoch, eon, or whatever), the singularity is unwrapped, perhaps by Divinity, and its residue quickly expands (really quickly, we lack a concept reflecting enough speed to adequately describe how quickly) and begins to sort of cool, albeit with intermittent explosive events which, through gravity, perhaps attempting to recreate the initial singularity in an inverse process, heats a tiny bit of that which was cooled.  As the foregoing required motion, time, as a concept we sort of grasp (if perhaps not to the extent of understanding), was also born.  Time, born concurrently with the Great Escape, might have an interesting case to make insisting that it was first, but that seems a chicken versus egg conundrum, or would have, had there been chickens and eggs at the time in forms other than possibly inchoate.

Interestingly, although we do not personally recall it, all of the ingredients for the matter which currently comprises each and every one of us was present at the Beginning, thus, in a sense, we are all virtually the same age, the same age as our Cosmos.  Anyway ….

The Beginning!!!  Oh what a time it was!!!  Albeit very brief at first.  Yactoseconds were eternities then.  It was the era ruled by Planck-Time (no relation to Hammer Time).  During the initial second, only energy existed, energy comprised of neutrinos in thermal equilibrium with protons, neutrons and electrons, all maintained through weak force interaction.   The era that comprised a single second had no name at the time (at least that we know of, Divinity might have a different story to tell) but it has since come to be referred to indirectly as the “coupling era”; a suggestively interesting nomenclature. 

Eventually (a very short eventually, having taken but a second, but it was all the time that had ever existed, so perhaps it seemed long to the coupled neutrinos and protons, neutrons and electrons), the rate of the weak interaction became slower than the rate of initial expansion of the universe, or perhaps (it’s hard to remember after more than fourteen billion years), instead, the time scale for weak interactions became greater than the age of the universe at that time (there being no real difference), and the orgy quickly petered out (so to speak).  As a side note, the temperature of the Cosmos at the time of “decoupling” was approximately ten billion degrees Kelvin (very, very hot).  As a result of decoupling, neutrinos formed a cosmic neutrino background.  Primordial singularity remnants, which we, in or ignorance, call black holes (a name for which they do not care), may also have been formed during the first eternal second (hmmm, sounds oxymoronic, but it’s probably true).  Sort of progeny of the wild times.

Beginning towards the end of the first second composite subatomic particles emerged, including protons and neutrons, and then, after more and more eternities, at about two minutes after the Great Escape, nucleosynthesis (apparently a new and kinkier sort of mating) occurred and, about a quarter of the protons and all the neutrons fused into elements, initially hydrogen, then its heavier variant, hydrogen+ (also known as deuterium) apparently having swallowed a neutron (hmmm, why are there so many sexual analogies?).  The hydrogen and deuterium then started to mate like crazy, siring mainly primordial helium; i.e., a family comprised of an alpha particle (two protons and two neutrons) engulfed in an electron wave comprised of two electrons.  The next orgy then took place as the then ruling citizenry (hydrogen and helium atoms, protons, neutrinos and neutrons) engaged in constant and more complex coupling, generating more and more complex atoms. 

Divinity, perhaps looking on, perhaps not yet prudish, would seem to have been pleased.  The bit of havoc it wreaked was bearing fruit, … sort of.

The Joys of Plasmic Baths

Eternities and eons after the Great Escape, what we would call twenty minutes today (eternities and eons were much shorter back then), the Cosmos was no longer hot enough for nuclear fusion but far too hot for neutral atoms to exist or for photons to travel far.  It was then comprised of a miasma of energy and opaque plasma.  For us currently, as biological beings, plasma would be deadly, but sort of cool (in a non-thermatic sense).  It was comprised of an extremely hot and thick ionized substance, in composition, somewhere between gaseous and liquid.  For the Divine, it might have been a warm bath.  Indeed, while improbable to the extreme, it is not impossible that a form of life might have inhabited the primordial plasma realm, well, in the sense that nothing is demonstrably impossible.  After all, most of the matter in our Cosmos (ninety-nine point nine percent) is still plasma in the form of stars, etc., and we live in the Cosmos. 

Eventually, a tiny bit of the plasma (one tenth of one percent, oddly, the percent of current humans who rule the world) evolved into the other three states of matter (gas, liquid and solids), but eventually took quite a while.  Actually, about eighteen-thousand years.  But a tiny bit of the former plasma was still quite a lot, much more than even googols (as a number, not an autocratic internet platform) of the newer forms of matter.

A recombination epoch began at around 18,000 years after the Great Escape as electrons combined with helium nuclei (perhaps the first mixed marriages and the threat of assimilation was born) to form He+, an ionized form of helium (perhaps copying the initial experiment through which hydrogen swallowed a neutron to form deuterium), and, about 29,000 years later, as the universe cooled (relatively), matter (including, of course, plasma), rather than radiation, began to predominate.

At age 100,000, relative to the Great Escape, neutral helium atoms (without the +) formed giving birth to the first molecule, helium hydride. About 270,000 years later (370,000 years after the Great Escape), helium hydride and hydrogen concluded a long term affair as a result of which, molecular hydrogen was born and, for the first time, the Cosmos attained transparency, apparently an important accomplishment.  And stars started to form. Hmmm, “a star is born”, good name for a movie.

The relatively newly formed hydrogen and helium atoms, with traces of lithium, quickly attained their ground state (state of lowest energy) by parting from some of their photons (“photon decoupling”), some of which are still around (perhaps sad at having been rejected) as the cosmic microwave background, the oldest direct observation we currently have of our Cosmos.

Wow, it’s like a tele-novela (Spanish for soap opera), except, as best we know, there was no television at the time.  But the romance was palpable.

Evidently, Divinity had done enough for a while and it was time for lights out, and a nap.  Divinity, of course (assuming it exists), takes credit for everything that’s happened.  He, she, it or they were (assuming they exist) experimenting, playing, laying out and implementing a plan.  But the Cosmos was now able to coast on its own for a while.  A pretty long while really, about nine-hundred-and-ninety-nine million, six-hundred-and-thirty thousand years.  Give or take a few days.

The universe was transparent, comprised of plasma, energy, hydrogen and helium with a bit of lithium mixed in, and it was playing with the Elder (gravity), but slowly.  No stars or other sources of light existed and the original glow from the plasma had dissipated. That brilliant pale orange glow of decoupling photons and radio emissions released by hydrogen atoms had first shifted red and then after the first three million years, faded, thus, no visible light.  Perfect for naps.

One may wonder about dark matter and dark energy at the time, as well as antimatter, but, the volumes in which those chapters were kept have been mislaid, and thus unavailable right now.

Wow, talk about an “On the Seventh Day”!

Let there be Light!

Soooo, ….

Divinity may have been napping for a while but, between two hundred million and five hundred million years after the Great Escape, lights slowly started turning on as the earliest generations of stars and galaxies started to form and early large structures gradually emerged, all drawn to the foam-like dark matter filaments which had already begun to draw together throughout the Cosmos.  Details concerning size and duration[6] are apparently in those mislaid chapters as well (“mislaid”, yuck, … a sexual connotation gain, just a coincidence in terminology).[7] 

An article encaptioned “Chronology of the Universe” on which much of the foregoing and following is based describes early star formation as follows (almost a quote but slightly modified):

They [the stars] may have been between 100 and 300 times larger than the star we call Sol and non-metallic, and of relatively brief duration (after all, they were beta versions), flashes in the pan so to speak as rumors still circulating claim that they quickly consumed their fuel (hydrogen) and detonated “as highly energetic pair-instability supernovae”(I don’t know why the imagery keeps sounding so sexual, in this case, like very inexperienced pre-adolescent boys)”after mere millions of years”, but it may well be that less ambitious, smaller stars with more staying power are still around.  But even in the former case, the resulting super novae had a lasting impact as they “created” (hmmm, that may not be the correct word as Divinity likes to claim that prerogative for him, her, it or their selves) most of the everyday elements we see today, … including those of which we are comprised.

During that same period, high-energy photons from the earliest stars, dwarf galaxies and perhaps quasars led to a period of reionization that finished by about one billion years after the Great Escape, and then, the lights really finally started to turn back on.  Showtime!  The stars were much as they are today, except for being hotter, more dense (not intellectually, as far as we know), with more spiral and irregular galaxies and more interested in procreation.  Our current galaxies may, as far as we can tell (despite our relative myopia), tend to include far more giant elliptical galaxies, galaxy clusters and super galaxies.

The lights were on, but, and it’s a pretty big but (but, not butt, although perhaps that accidental analogy works), because of the constant acceleration of our universe, presumably, based on the hypotheses (described as a “law”, whatever that is) that neither more energy nor more matter can be created (or purportedly destroyed, just converted inter se)[8], the apparently constant and consistent acceleration and expansion of the boundaries of our Cosmos seemingly diminished the ability of gravity to decelerate them[9] while, concurrently but in contrast, on the dark side, dark energy (believed to be a constant scalar field throughout the visible universe) had and has been a constant factor tending to accelerate expansion[10].  Thus, again, “apparently” (everything we seem to know about physics always seems to be only apparently, as you may have noticed), the Cosmo’s expansion passed an inflection point about five or six billion years ago and it entered the modern “dark-energy-dominated era”.  Soooo, at least since then, expansion is now accelerating rather than decelerating. Cosmic sentience may know what’s going on, assuming it exists, but perhaps it doesn’t care, or perhaps, like us, it hasn’t noticed, being concerned with other things.  And with reference to “laws” of physics, you know how legislatures are.  Consistency is not their hallmark.

Anyway ….

“Notwithstanding the foregoing” (a sort of legal phrase that sometimes pinch hits for “anyway, ….  There are among us purported experts who believe they understand how our Cosmos will function for about eighty-six billion more years (and, unlike journalists, they may be right, although studies of quantic phenomena certainly keep stirring our perceptions of the Cosmic “pot”), but after that, hmmm, who knows.  At some time the “Stelliferous Era”, the era when celestial progeny has been looked on as favorable, stylish and productive, our current era, will end, and, sort of like is happening in many parts of Terra today where populations have become more jaded and more interested in individuality than in families, where they find gender a sort of optional fad preferring choice over biological legacy, star formation will begin to atrophy until no new stars are born.  Because it is anticipated that the Cosmos will continue to expand, that may mean that we will enter an age of hermits, less and less closely related, with less and less interstellar interaction.  And the observable Cosmos will become more and more limited to the local, perhaps eventually, depending on how quanta feels about this, perhaps our Cosmos will expand so much, that only isolated neutrinos and their cousins will remain, although black holes would seem a sort of wild card.

Hmmm, except for being massively larger, that would seem a lot like just before “the Beginning”.

And our friend, the universal sentience and its component families???   What we’ve hypothetically defined as “Divinity”?  Hmm, perhaps only the shadow knows.
_______

© 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 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/.


[1] [Hmmm, a warm welcome to our first footnote.  Probably more to come.  This was just too long to include, as an interruption in the main text].  Anyway, … a caveat with respect to the terms “anyway”, “so” (usually elongated to “soooo” and “Mmmmm”.  They are terms that I will frequently use as sort of placeholders without real independent meaning, i.e., as “expletives” or “fillers”, although the term “expletive” also pertains, in a negative sense, to words or phrases charged with negative connotations.  Strange); … anyway ….  A further linguisti-grammatical caveat: I use series of “.”, not only to denote text missing in a quotation, but as long pauses.  I think that’s it … for now.

[2] Those who are not among “us of little faith”.

[3] As to which they seem to argue interminably, and along with secular mathematicians, argue about the nature of Naught.

[4] Of course, as is the case with language, that term has been distorted, mutated and changed and now also refers to gatherings of people with shared interests who need excuses to avoid normal “social” conventions and engage in behavior Divinity might find objectionable.  At least Divinity as perceived by some, a sort of very opinionated negative sort of totalitarian Divinity.

[5] It seems as though such arbitrary assumption sticks in someone’s craw and thus, has to be repeatedly reinforced.

[6] Anyway, … it sounds like something else, something prurient, but I assure you that was not so, or at least I’m pretty sure that was not so.  My primal matter, like yours, was there, but not yet sentient, … I don’t think.

[7] Hmmm, if we are going to postulate Abrahamic possibilities, then one might speculate on whether or not the deposed former archangel Hêl él had anything to do with dark matter.

[8] Perhaps because the concept of preservation of the matter-energy concept was so thoroughly violated at “the” Beginning, some busybodies decided that a law needed to be passed controlling the issue, but who was there at the time to legislate that law???  How would violations be punished?

[9] Hmmm, how might that impact that other gravity related law, that whatever goes up must go down.  I’m getting an image of a typical legislative body, corruption rampant, charged with legislating physical laws, and not doing such a great job.

[10] Sooo, black matter, black energy, what if rather than Hêl él to blame, it’s a reflection of Zoroastrian ethical dualism: Spenta Mainyu versus Angra Mainyu?

Silicone Sally, an ironic mini micro-story

It was 1975 and Silicone Sally was not the kind of nickname you’d think an attractive young woman would be drawn to, or, especially, one she’d give herself, but she’d perceived of herself as a pioneer and a trendsetter.  And it did call attention to some of her more prominent attributes.  That they were, in fact, natural, rather than artificially sculpted, was a sort of surprise she enjoyed bestowing on her more serious and reflective admirers. Interestingly, she eventually went to work as a designer in Silicon Valley.
_______

© 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 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).  He can be contacted at guillermo.calvo.mahe@gmail.com and much of his writing is available through his blog at https://guillermocalvo.com/.

Sayonara Baby!

Phineas was in a pithy mood although he didn’t know why.  Fortunately for him he didn’t care why, he was just enjoying it.  Perhaps today would be the day he’d finally write something and, if he did, why he might someday get it published.

Phineas was not the easiest name to bear but he managed it good naturedly, although he wondered just what his parents might have been thinking when they’d endowed him with it.  It wasn’t as if they’d named him after someone for whom they deeply cared, or even knew.  Apparently, it had something to do with a film a long time ago, a film based on a book about a wager concerning travelling around the world more quickly than then seemed possible.  But then, his parents had conceived him in the sixties when decisions were sometimes made based on chemically induced spur of the moment epiphanies, epiphanies thereafter quickly discarded.

It wasn’t as if he was often epigrammatic, he tended to be a bit vague and indirect, lost in phantasies; perhaps a bit like his parents had been way back when, way back in the day so to speak.  Interesting phrase that, “so to speak”.

Anyway, perhaps Phineas had decided to turn over a new leaf, not a vegetable leaf, at least not directly; rather, a metaphorical leaf, so “pithy” was his word of the day.  He dressed nattily for a change.  He usually favored jeans but today, dress pants it was.  And a vest, even though it had once been his father’s.  And a tie, even though it was paisley, and paisley had been out of style for a while, except, of course, among the vintage crowd (of which he was not a member in good standing).  “Hmmm, shoes” he whispered to himself.  A problem as most of his were old tennis shoes or sandals, not a loafer to be had, or an oxford.  And tennis shoes and sandals tended not to qualify as pithy in matters of haberdashery.

Of a sudden, his pithy mood did not seem quite as satisfying as it had, as though a wind had whipped the page he’d sought to turn back to where his book of life had been.  Speaking of pages, he’d need some paper if he was going to write something, or a pen, or a computer, or a tablet, or a cell phone.

“Damned shoes” he thought out loud.  “Who needs them”, although it seemed obvious that they might be a necessary accessory to anyone, who, feeling pithy, had decided to dress nattily, which at that point, no longer described Phineas.  Fortunately for him, his apartment was not large, rather small really, and cluttered with non-natty accoutrements.  And he’d not yet made his bed (almost a tradition).  So back into bed he plopped, back into bed to hopefully dream non-pithy dreams.

Sayonara baby!
_______

© 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 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).  He can be contacted at guillermo.calvo.mahe@gmail.com and much of his writing is available through his blog at https://guillermocalvo.com/.

The Revelations of John (an Exile in Patmos) Reconsidered ,… Sort of

Or perhaps, the “Reconsiderations of Bill or Guille” (an expatriate of sorts in Manizales)

Introduction

(The serious part)

The purported revelations of John of Patmos (really, an expatriate who fled to Patmos), a John who styled himself the Elder, the purported book of revelations written on or about the year 96 of the Common Era, seem, in their apocalyptic aspects, almost completely Zoroastrian.  A cartoonish culmination of the doctrine of ethical dualism.  Indeed, the version of Yešu[1] it envisions, denominated “Christ”, seems utterly different than the loving Jesus reflected in modern imagery, much more the messiah longed for by racist, ethnocentric Hebrews, to whom all others were inferiors, now, ironically, subsumed in fundamentalist Paulist Christianity[2].

Interestingly, old Johnny seemed most bothered by the sexual and dietary heresies of the Nicolaitans, followers of Nicholas the Deacon, a real apostle (unlike Saul, albeit as a replacement) and member of the Jerusalem Community.  As in today’s uber polarized world, relatively irrelevant issues were used to divide people who had much more in common than in conflict, the apparent goal (as it is today) being the elimination of any who held contrary views, regardless of how innocuous.  The Nicolaitans’ horrible heresy (according to their detractors, including John but strangely, not Saul), involved the belief that monogamy was not essential and that sharing those beloved with others was a positive, rather than a negative thing, true love promoting the joy and pleasure of the beloved, rather than restricting it; but also, the belief that it was not inappropriate to eat food (specifically meat), offered in sacrifice to idols if it had first been exorcised, … probably important when food was scarce.

John was not original in his revelations, primarily using imagery, threats and promises old before Yešu had purportedly incarnated.  Imagery, threats and promises made in writings such as the books of Daniel and Ezekiel in the Old Testament, 1 Esdras in the Apocrypha, the Book of Enoch in the Pseudepigrapha, the Assumption of Moses, and, portions of the Synoptic Gospels.  He merely placed them in a new, anti-Roman Imperial context, and directed them specifically against the Roman Emperor and those who followed him, especially followers of Yešu willing to compromise the beliefs Pauline Christianity required of them.  In essence, he was a plagiarist, but that was not looked down upon in antiquity.  Indeed, a popular literary device at the time was the antithesis of plagiarism, giving famous others credit for what one had written in order to enhance its impact.

Of course, all of the threats and promises reflected in John’s purported revelations were to take place while the Roman Empire continued to exist in its pagan version.  It’s hard to believe that they applied after the Roman Empire became Pauline, when it became Pauline Christians who engaged in persecution, torture and murder, as well as who placed restrictions on religious beliefs; actions such as those attributed by John to the Romans.  Hence, everything predicted should have taken place prior to the Emperor Constantine’s decrees in the year 331 of the Common Era, decrees which made Pauline Christianity the official religion of the Roman Empire. 

Through distorted rationalization (such as are common today in journalism) disassociated from the religious aspect of John’s purported revelations and focused exclusively on their political dimension, i.e., the existence of the Roman State, one could, albeit unconvincingly, argue that the promised (or threatened) events need only have occurred prior to the fall of the Eastern Roman (Byzantine) Empire in the year 1453 of the Common Era.  And if later, only if today’s Vatican State is seen as the continuation of the Roman Empire against which John railed can an argument be made that the prophecies of John’s purported revelations remain merely inchoate, rather than utter claptrap.

Interestingly, the sexual beliefs associated with Nicholas the Deacon seem to never have gone out of style and seem, at least since the 1960’s, to have emerged from the closet, as it were.  As to eating food sacrificed to idols, well, who knows?  Who can tell where today’s food has its origins, regardless of labeling laws, … except perhaps for Kosher food.

Summary of John’s Imagery

(The satirical part.  Accurate, but satire just the same.  Unavoidably so):

Yešu, in his role as the Pauline “Christ”, purportedly speaking from heaven to John, addresses messages to seven angels, each responsible for one of seven specific Pauline churches in Asia Minor.  One might ask why Yešu, in heaven, would need the assistance of John, to address his angels, but evidently the divine communication network was not functioning at the time.  So much for ubiquitous omnipresence.

With reference to the seven angels, one each had purportedly been assigned the role of guardian to Pauline churches in Ephesus, Smyrna, Thyatira, Pergamum, Sardis, Philadelphia and Laodicea.  Evidently, five of the angels were not doing such a great job at eliminating those who found the doctrines of the Nicolaitans reasonable.  Yešu seems especially miffed with the angel charged with guarding the Pauline church at Pergamum, where “Satan”[3] was purported to have his headquarters. 

Interesting. 

One wonders if Pergamum has been carefully searched in quest of a portal leading to the infernal regions.  For anyone interested, the site of Pergamum is located sixteen miles from the Aegean Sea on a lofty isolated hill on the northern side of the broad valley of the Bakır River, a site currently occupied by the modern town of Bergama, in the province of İzmir in Turkey.  One wonders if, as in the Colombian municipality of Rio Sucio, they have biannual carnivals dedicated to “the Devil”.

Following Yešu’s message to his angels, strangely, via John (as I’ve noted), he describes to John, evidently for transmittal to us, a message concerning seven seals (no, not the animals, just scrolls) on which is (or will be) purportedly written an account of events that “are about to take place” (the term “about” was evidently to be interpreted in a very broad manner, a manner to include any temporal period whatsoever; hmmm, a bit suspicious that).  But only Yešu is purportedly authorized to open the seals (no one else being worthy). 

There follows a bit of equine fantasy (I’m rather fond of horses myself) as the first four seals, if ever opened (John assures us they will, be, Yešu told him so) for some reason deal with horses.  Sigismund Schlomo Freud might have had something to say concerning that imagery, had it ever been brought to his attention.  Perhaps it was and perhaps he did.  Hmmm, on at least one occasion Freud did discuss equine fixations as follows: he interpreted horses, as a phobia (unfortunately he did not discuss them directly as a fixation), as symbolic of the father, and that fear that a horse would bite represented fear of castration as punishment for incestuous desires towards the mother, an expression of the Oedipus complex.  One might wonder what that tells us about John.  As far as I know, Yešu had no personal interaction with horses, only asses, although certain ranks of Roman soldiers in Palestine (where Yešu lived) did use them.  For the safety of my eternal soul then, I’ll limit my observations to John.

Anyway, again according to Yešu (via John), when Yešu opens the first seal, a white horse will appear whose rider will go forth to conquer. Other seals will then be opened, and three more horses: a red one, a black one, and a pale one, will appear in rapid succession.  According to analysts of John’s purported revelations, the four horses and their respective riders purportedly symbolize the conflicts that will mark the beginning of the final destruction of the Roman Empire (and have nothing to do with an Oedipal Complex, but, … who knows).

When the fifth seal is opened, the souls of those who have been waiting for the purported second coming, in duly respectful tones but obviously “verily” annoyed, will demand to know (respectfully of course), how much longer they have to wait until their suffering is avenged, but will be advised (one assumes by Yešu) that they still have a while to wait, and that their wait is likely to be unpleasant, but that if they are patient and faithful (it seems they were not merely souls, but living entities as well), they will be among the redeemed whose names are written in a “Book of Life”.  Evidently, such souls will never have been previously exposed to the revelations of John and will thus be ignorant of what is happening; apparently not being all that conscientious in complying with their Pauline educational obligations.

According to good old John, the scene then changes and we will embark on act two of his revelations.  One wonders if John’s production might not make a good video game.  Four angels representing the four winds of heaven will be told to hold back their winds (hmmm, flatulent angels) until “the servants of God have had seals placed on their foreheads”.  “Ouch”; one wonders if that will hurt.  It seems quite a bit like branding.  Then, apparently, notwithstanding the billions who have, since the dawn of the Common Era, attempted to comply with the usually incoherent, incomprehensible and contradictory instructions they keep receiving from the heirs of Paul (and presumably John) in Yešu’s name of course, all but a very few of them, 144,000 to be precise, will be sentenced to perdition.  As of the dawn of 2023, the world’s current population is approximately eight billion people, most of whom may have souls (although most politicians, lawyers, journalists and priests may not).  As of the dawn of 2023, it is estimated that 117 billion people have lived on Earth, the vast majority having lived following the start of the Common Era.  Assuming that Yešu decarnated (a neologism for when he abandoned his “carnate” form) approximately 1,990 years ago, as 2023 dawns, that means that, were the events “imagined” by John to occur today, an average of only about 72 people per year would have been “saved”.  One wonders at those stuck in Limbo, all the unbaptized infants, etc., what is to happen to them?  That means that fewer people will be “saved”, regardless of their piety, belief and conduct, than currently comprise the 0.01% who rule and own us.  What are the probabilities that such 0.01% have somehow cornered this market as well?  Hmm, they currently constitute about 800,000 people; that means that less than one in five of them will make the cut.  Interesting situation, at least for them.  For the rest of us, it’s apparently “Abandon All Hope”.

Anyway, according to Yešu (according to John), before Yešu opens the rest of the seals, another series of disasters will be heralded by seven angels, each one carrying a trumpet. One wonders if the seven angels are the same each time, or if they arrive in teams of seven.  The trumpets must be huge as they have massive destructive power when blown, although they perhaps are only indicia of coming calamities, Harbingers in Black, perhaps like those that the Latin American poet César Abraham Vallejo Mendoza wrote about in his poem, “Los Heraldos Negros”. 

Following the blowing of the trumpets, a massive earthquake will purportedly occur, turning rivers to blood.  The light of the sun and the moon will be extinguished and the stars will come unglued and fall to Earth.  Then things will really get bad, especially for any surviving persecutors of (one assumes) the 144,000 lucky ones.  Given all the schisms in Pauline Christianity since John’s day, where members of each Pauline denomination claim all others are to be condemned to Hell as heretics, certainly a form of persecution, it would seem that the most avidly religious may well be both among the punished and the vindicated, concurrently, which may explain the 144,000 number.

John, apparently paraphrasing Yešu, unless he has a really good memory, then maligns dragons, equating them with poor old confused Satan (remember the whole thing with Hêl él, Lucifer, and Sama’el; now they’re turned into a dragon, yeesh!!!).  But apparently, Satan and Marcus Cocceius Nerva, the Roman Emperor in the year 96 of the Common Era (when John purportedly wrote his “revelations”), are to be considered one and the same.  Poor Nerva; he did not reign long at all, just fifteen months, and he was a reformer of sorts, no Caligula or Nero.  But then, perhaps communication was slow back then and good old John thought that someone else was in charge.  However, one would assume that Yešu would have known better.  Perhaps poor John just misunderstood.  After all, it may be that Yešu was declaiming to John in Enoquiano, the mythical celestial language.  And there have never been all that many certified, or even qualified Enoquiano translators and interpreters, at least since the fall of that tower in Babel.

Anyway, ….

The “Dragon”, a-Satan (clearly a reference to Hêl él who rebelled in Heaven against YHWH and then purportedly schemed with Herod I, also known as Herod the Great, to do away with the infant Yešu) will somehow have been busy along with his retinue of angels (supposedly fully one third of the former Heavenly Host), challenging Yešu, YHWH and the Holy Spirit, purportedly working through poor Nerva (more probably his predecessors as Nerva was the first of the Five Good Emperors, or perhaps his successors, or perhaps the Papacy, or who knows who).  At any rate, “he” (whoever “he” is) will have been the one who will have been persecuting Yešu’s followers.  Hmmm, that “he” could be any leader of any purportedly Pauline church[4] since, based on the aforementioned thousands of Pauline schisms, almost all followers of Yešu will have been commended to condemnation in Hell and to damnation (assuming the two things are different) by other followers of Paul, given that they each consider all others blasphemous heretics.

Actually, the aforesaid “he” ought to be easy to recognize as, according to good old John (as told to him directly by Yešu), “he” will have seven heads and ten horns and will be somehow further identifiable by calculating his number, it should be “666” (although how our numbers are calculated remains a mystery); so be in the lookout for anyone fitting that description.

As the end finally draws near (again), again according to John as told directly by Yešu, or perhaps only by Yešu’s voice, three angels will appear (one wonders what will have happened to the other four, if indeed they are the same, or why the change in numbers if they are different; and whatever will have happened to the horses and their jockeys?).  One angel will announce that the hour of God’s judgment has come, the second one will yell that Babylon has fallen (which happened millennia ago so is no surprise) and the third will be doing his best to terrify anyone who’s been worshipping “the Beast” (probably the Dragon, you remember, our composite nemesis), all of whom are to then be thrown into a lake of fire where they will forever be destroyed. Hmmm, that seems a bit oxymoronic at best, poor phrasing, as destruction seems a final event rather than a process.  But then again, as you may recall, it may be that Yešu was declaiming to John in Enoquiano, hard for mortals to understand.

As if that’s not enough, with all the bad guys frying in a lake of fire (sounds sort of like something the Nazis were accused of doing), seven more angels will then appear (ahhh, the seven reunited perhaps), each one carrying a bowl filled with one of seven plagues as YHWH will be really wroth!!!!.  One wonders at the interaction of the fire in the humungous lake into which billions of bodies and souls are frying, with the plagues, which are to be as follows, almost as though they were a recipe: the first bowl will have some sort of agent generating “foul and evil sores” on the men who at the time bear the mark of the beast and who worship its image (does that mean women will be exempt, just asking, that will certainly please feminists); the second, will be poured into the sea (which sea is not clear), and will turn its waters into blood (which supposedly had already occurred to rivers somewhat earlier), but this time, killing everything there (assuming our pollution has not already done that).  Hmmm, it seems YHWH will become a mass polluter. Then, similar calamities, all different, will follow as each angel carelessly empties its bowl, without any thought for the consequences.

So, having destroyed everyone and everything except for the 144,000 lucky prize winners, Yešu will finally return, riding on clouds (hopefully not thoroughly polluted) and, amazingly, it appears that the fiery lake and plagues will not have been enough to destroy all the “wicked”, because more will be slain by the light Yešu’s coming generates (as though he were radioactive).  Apparently, concurrently with that event, the Dragon (a-Satan, etc.) will be bound underground for a thousand years and the Earth itself will be condemned to a thousand year period of desolation.  In the meantime, the 144,000 lucky righteous ones will have been flown to a celestial city where they can hang out with YHWH, Yešu, the Holly Spirit, and those angels who’d declined Hêl él’s invitation to rebel.

But that’s only for a single millennium.  Apparently, somehow, during that time, the remainder of the 117 billion will have recovered; revived so that they can be destroyed again.  Interesting to speculate as to when they will have died as their torment was to have been perpetual, what with the fiery lake, the plagues and all.

Anyway, according to John, as told to him by the voice of Yešu (one wonders if his voice is an entity in and of itself, which would seem to make the trinity a bit crowded), the celestial city will land on earth and someone or someones will engage in one more wars (which will probably make the 144,000 very happy, as, assuming they coincide with the current 0.01% who rule us, war seems to be their favorite pastime), and the wicked will be destroyed … again.  After which, the residue of humanity will live happily ever after, perpetually partying with YHWH, Yešu, the Holly Spirit, and those angels who’d declined Hêl él’s invitation to rebel, in the celestial city now on earth.  Given the slight population, it could be on a tiny Island somewhere in the Caribbean perhaps, perhaps near Eden, a new Jerusalem with streets of gold,  walls of jasper and gates of pearl (and what about windows?), in the midst of the good old River of Life, which will flow eternally from the throne of God, with neither sorrow nor crying allowed (or else), for God will wipe away all tears (one wonders, with no crying, from whence tears will appear), and there will be no more death.

One does wonder a bit what might happen to any of the happy denizens of the grounded celestial city, should they become a bit too independent; one wonders whether “free will” will be an aspect of that paradise; one wonders, … just asking, what would happen to any who might transgress.  You know, sing out of tune or harp off chord or something.  Perhaps wonder about dear old Nicholas the Deacon.

Anyway ….

Amen.

Concluding Observation

One wonders what happened after good old John sobered up.
_______

© 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 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).  He can be contacted at guillermo.calvo.mahe@gmail.com and much of his writing is available through his blog at https://guillermocalvo.com/.


[1] Yešu, commonly referred to as Jesus, or the Christ, or Joshua, or Yeshua, but the correct Aramaic variant (the name he might answer to) was Yešu.  He never, ever, ever answered to Christ.

[2] The adjective Paulist is added because Saul of Tarsus perverted the original teachings of Yešu, for his own purposes, in opposition to the religious movement that initially sought to promote the beliefs espoused by Yešu as promoted by Yešu’s brothers and apostles through an organization known as the Jerusalem Community.  He referred to his counter movement as Christianity and to Yešu as the “Christ”, a Greek term roughly analogous to messenger or messiah.  Saul, who renamed himself “Paul” for some reason, first tried to destroy the Jerusalem Community through legal and religious means within Judaism (including assassinations) but eventually found it much more profitable to coopt it, disassociating them from their Jewish origins by melding Jewish beliefs with Greek spiritual philosophies.

[3] Known to latter pre-Pauline Hebrews as ha-Satan, the unfortunate syncretic composite through mistranslation by Jerome of Stridon of the Hebrew archangel Hêl él, Lucifer, the Roman god of truth and light, and, YHWH’s chief legal advisor and prosecutor, Sama’el.  Poor Lucifer, eternally calumnied since then.

[4] All leaders with the possible exception of a certain Jorge Mario Bergoglio, also known currently as Pope Francis I.  He’s an unusually forgiving and empathic sort who refuses to condemn anyone.

Here’s Hoping; …. Again

I wonder at the relationship between black holes and entropy. 

Then I translate that into quotidian social dynamics and finally, perhaps seeking to ground the esoteric with that which by entertaining us, helps subjugate us, … into sports. 

Perhaps that’s because I’m watching Tom Brady, the all-time best performing quarterback who I despised while he was with the New England Patriots (I have been a Jets fan since their birth as the Titans), sort of implode after a few successful seasons with the Tampa Bay Buccaneers.  It’s as though the Buc’s loosing tradition has slowly drained the positive energy Brady initially carried with him, leaving him, more or less, a frustrated husk as his teammates accentuate the power of their mediocracy over his talent and charisma.  The Green Bay Packers and Aaron Rogers are a different story.  The team has deteriorated around Rogers, and age has taken its toll on him, but the magic still manages to shine through, at least from time to time.  Which somehow, in a convoluted fashion, brings me to my Jets, or rather, the Jets I share with millions of frustrated fans, waiting for Lucy to once more pull the ball away as Charley Brown tries for the ever-elusive field goal.

Many decades ago, most of us Jets fans, new at the time, it was early 1969, still believing in providence, begged for just one victory, after which, we agreed, we’d understand if we’d never again enjoy the privilege of asking for divine boons, at least in professional American football.  Evidently, if the Divine exists, he, she, it or they have a sense of humor and a close working relationship with a fellow by the name of Murphy.  At least most of us have always assumed it’s a he, but it might well be a she, or perhaps it’s androgynous, or plural.  We got our wish and, in the ensuing fifty-three years, have been paying off that open ended debt. 

Apparently, at least from today’s perspective, we were young and foolish on that January 12 in 1969 at the old Orange Bowl in Miami, Florida.  But then, given our nature, had we to do it all over again, we’d probably make that same deal despite the trail of ensuing tears, curses, lamentations and complaints.  It’s not so bad when our team is just uniformly terrible, it’s when it shows sparks of brilliance and raises our hopes, only to tumble them time after time that Murphy gets his, her, its or their kicks.  Perhaps we should consider drafting a quarterback named Murphy, and perhaps linebackers, cornerbacks and safeties named Murphy. That might at least confuse him, her, it or them, at least for enough time to let us sneak one more super bowl victory in.

Thinks look surprisingly good for our Jets this year and Lucy seems to be promising that she’s reformed, and the Jets do have a few Murphies: there’s Kevin (assistant director of pro personnel) and Tom (vice president, information technology) on the staff, but I know of no others.  So, just like Charley Brown, I and many other Jets fans are hopeful, optimistic, excited this year, … but a bit wary.  But then there’s the issue of black holes and entropy, and unfortunately, a somewhat negative tradition.

Still Joe Namath and company were awesome, and there’s never been a professional football game as important as Super Bowl III, and the AFL may have disappeared after that game, but it’s alive and well in some sort of sports Valhalla that echoes in our hearts.  And this team’s coaches seem different, as do the players, well, at least most of them.

Sooo; anyway:

Here’s hoping; .…

Again.
_______

© Guillermo Calvo Mahé; Manizales, 2022; 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 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).  He can be contacted at guillermo.calvo.mahe@gmail.com and much of his writing is available through his blog at https://guillermocalvo.com/.