True Ancestor

The Revolution Will Not Be Turbo-charged

I was watching my rampaging White Sox on TV a couple of nights ago and noticed something that any disciplined TV-watcher has probably noticed for awhile now: automobile adds are using phrases redolent of American patriotism and independence in their ad campaigns. Cadillac's tag line is "Life. Liberty. And the Pursuit." Chevrolet promises "An American Revolution." A shade less derivative but no less mock-inspirational, Chrysler says, "Let's Refuel America."

The irony is beyond belief. It seems Cadillac is after a younger demographic with this campaign: a young, George Michael-ish bachelor zooms through the deserted neon canyons of an anonymous cityscape, his internal monologue full of self-congratulation for the wisdom of his purchase of a Cadillac. This ad campaign must be a decade behind the times (ergo the George Michael reference). Younger drivers don't give a turd about these enormous, sclerotic gas-guzzlers driven by Bubbies and Zadies all over the land: they want cars that manage to perform reasonably well while using less gas. That would make them feel pretty cool.

Chevrolet, like Ford, is really all about its trucks, and so this ad campaign at least launches a cluster-bomb toward what it perceives as the patriotic heartland: Hillary-voting, Andrea Mitchell-hating redneck country. Meanwhile, you have to really be an auto-geek (or have a son that's turning into one) to learn that Chevy is going to move ahead with its production of the plug-in hybrid Chevy Volt in 2010. Talk about an American revolution: a car company actually doing something about mobility, economy and environmental stewardship! I must be dreaming.

As for Chrysler: you'll be shocked to learn that it's not really refueling America; it's offering a fixed price for unleaded and diesel to go along with its vehicles. Thanks for the diesel deal, guys. Now what about all the health problems attributed to it?

As scary as he can sometimes be, I think Charles Krauthammer was right on this issue: create a U.S. energy tax that keeps gasoline above the panic "price point" (which appears to be about $4 a gallon) so that we incentivize conservation and alternative fuel technology, rather than subsidizing oil companies and emirates.  

Now that's life, liberty and the pursuit.

--T.A.

Fade to Black(berry)

Ah, one could hear the cries of anguish and withdrawal all over North America today, as service on the ubiquitous Blackberry suffered a massive outage.

I didn't even notice. Not til I saw this article. By then I was safely ensconced in the family room, trolling restlessly for news while Gabe watched an episode of Family Guy that he must already have seen five times.

I feel somewhat reclusive, even misanthropic lately. I let loose a muffled hurrah when networks go down or airports grind to a halt in abysmal weather. I'm cheered by empty big-box stores and feel strangely vindicated by abandoned, unfinished condo developments. I confess that, when in this frame of mind, I even find plunges in the stock market reassuring: after all, I think to myself, if everything's going to go to hell in a handbasket, why shouldn't it be obvious?

And speaking of where everything's going -- get a load of all the alarming (alarmist?) medical news: the long decline in heart disease rates is over, it appears; and those of us who lost our virginity either quite early or quite late are going to suffer more health problems and greater sexual dysfunction.

Take your pick: the moral of the story is --

• Too much information is bad for the soul
• Too much information distorts the truth and makes every finding sound like an ominous trend
• Nothing matters as much as everything seems to matter
• Get yer head outta yer butt
• Explicit movies and lyrics are a plot by Big Pharma to sell us Viagra
• It's all one, big Oliver-Stone like conspiracy
• I'm not getting enough sleep

--T.A.

Facebook and Family

I seem to have crossed some invisible, digital line with my daughters by creating a Facebook page.

Oldest Daughter, whom we'll soon be visiting in London, has not responded to my request for Facebook friendship (extended several days ago). Middle Daughter was absolutely horrified to peek over my shoulder at home the other evening and find me navigating around Facebook.

"What are you doing?! You're on Facebook?! Why?!!"

Her tone indicated that there'd be no good answer to that question, but I did my best: I explained that friends of mine were on facebook, far-flung relatives stay in touch with it, authors are on it (some are in several of those categories at once); in short, in some ways it's far more efficient for staying in touch than e-mail, especially if you want to communicate with a group of people (family, people with similar interests, etc.).

"Oh, and by the way," I said, "when I search for you on Facebook, you're nowhere to be found."

"Ah-hah!," she crowed. "That's because I don't want you to find me!" Middle Daughter has disguised her identity. And she explained why: friends can find her, but employers -- or teachers, or parents, or perverts (which are all really one and the same, as far as she's concerned) -- cannot.

Then Middle Daughter told me how to find her page. I find that I don't want to look at it. There are some things about your kids that you really are better off not knowing, some circles you're better off not peeping into. Especially when those kids are over 18 and generally solid citizens, as The Daughters are.

It's funny how sites like Facebook start for exclusive communities and then cannot resist the breach of exclusivity. The Web is either horribly perverted, relentlessly democratic or neurotically secretive. I work under the assumption that my every keystroke will someday be discoverable, and I have to both be careful and inure myself to that concern.

So piss off.

No, just kidding! Really!

--T.A.

"Our universe might be somebody else's hobby."

Movie franchises like The Matrix, Terminator and Back to the Future indicate our collective suspicion that time is a loop, not a line, and that somehow technology and String Theory will help us explode, not merely explore, our primitive theologies.

(For fans with long memories, perhaps the most touching example of this cinematic theorizing was the short 1993 made-for-TV movie The Whole Shebang, starring Mark Linn-Baker as a flustered graduate student whose doctoral thesis is -- the creation of the Universe.)

A philosopher at Oxford University has developed a compelling hypothesis which suggests not that we might someday be able to simulate ourselves, but that we ourselves are simulations.

Read this Times piece and let its message sink in: although we may, by mid-century, have a computer that simulates all of us, we may already be just one phylum in a genus of simulations stretching backwards and forwards throughout all of Time -- which may itself be a simulation.

Thanks to Colorado Charlie for destroying my workday. Of course, it only resembles a workday...

--T.A.

Wii!!!

Last night, Gabe's nieces brought over an early birthday present: the Nintendo Wii.

My verdict: What a ridiculous piece of crap. What an unncessary luxury. What a waste of time.

What a cool toy.

Probably my favorite thing about it -- aside from the fact that you might actually burn, say, a dozen calories during the course of a video game -- is that you can customize little individual players, and have them compete in a little universe of players with very distinctive facial features, but hands and feet that are mysteriously detached from the rest of their bodies.

Just as we're detached from our cartoon selves, our cartoon selves' extremities are detached from their bodies, making an entire shiny, scrubbed universe of tiny but crucial detachments from reality (just look at these people staring at their games and you can see how detached from reality we can become).

Much hilarity ensued last night, as the nieces worked with us to create players representing (and resembling) everyone in our family. My goateed, balding alter ego was trounced by Gabe's boyish, almond-eyed doppelganger in three out of four contests.

While the games were fun, it was the creation of alternative selves that was the highlight of the evening.

Now, if I could just get mine to hit a backhand...

--T.A.

Rav Dessler Takes Technology to Task

Thumbing through a volume of Rabbi Eliyahu Dessler's Strive for Truth! (first published as Michtav Me-Eliyahu), I was struck by how prescient this modern Mussar master was, writing about technological advances from the vantage point of London in 1944. Rabbi Dessler must have been aware of the destruction overwhelming European Jewry even as he wrote: the essay on The destructive philosophy of materialism draws frequent comparisons between contemporary materialism and the "Generation of the Deluge," and warns that the desire to use technology to achieve happiness in the end guarantees only heartache:

If people become 'givers,' the world will be a wonderful place to live in, irrespective of technology. So long as they remain 'takers,' their efforts inevitably will be directed toward selfishness, violence and war. Every advance in technology will be used for destruction and ruin. For instance, the vast improvement in transport which we have witnessed in our time, the ability to reach any place on the globe within hours or days rather than weeks or months -- what a benefit to those who are bent on doing mitzvot! But on the other hand, what a danger it poses to humanity! Previously wars were localized, but now any war is likely to become a world conflict.

Rav Dessler notes that in Hebrew, every sharp instrument is a herev -- a sword. The Hebrew language, unique in the way its words point to the essence of things, recognizes the potential for evil inherent in all mankind, and all the inventions that leap from the human mind. This is why hewn stone couldn't be used in the building of the Temple: Any stone so shaped was molded with the help of an implement rooted in an evil intention.

In the essay, Dessler then gives a shocking tale from the Targum Yonatan about how at the last moments before the Flood, water burst forth from the ground, and people tried to stuff the cracks with the bodies of their children to hold back the waters.

Such, notes Dessler, was the cruelty of the generation that merited destruction -- a destruction that awaits us in different form.

...[T]he more men pursue the goal of developing the world materialistically, the more their troubles increase. Instead of realizing that they are sinking further and further into the mire of materialism, they search for ever more sophisticated technological devices, hoping that by these means they will eventually reach their coveted goal -- a life of physical ease and happiness in this world, without having to bother about the demands and challenges of the spiritual world. And when they see no hope of this for themselves, they make desperate efforts to ensure that at least their children will be able to enjoy materials happiness in this world ... and, figuratively speaking, they try to forestall with their childrens' bodies the inevitable collapse of the materialistic civilization.

Does this foreshadow the collision of faith and materialism in the world today? Or the 9/11 attacks, in which terrorists used technology to strike at a materialist nerve center?

Interestingly, when you Google Rav Dessler, you get some pre-9/11 writings by Orthodox rabbis saying that the tide of secular materialism is about to overwhelm the world. Some would say it's really a tide of religion, using technology to increase destructive capacity.

Me, I see Yeats' vision of the center not holding: the predominant religious energies of the world separate and retreat to one extreme, the secular energies to another -- allowing something terrible to up from the vacated center.

Avoiding this fate requires us to recognize that we are designed to be both secular and spiritual. We are meant to harness dark energies for light enterprises. We are challenged to turn enormous energy away from enormous destruction -- and the heartbreak is, some part of us is always tempted to do otherwise.

--T.A.

Bill, Number One and Me: Kingpins of Philanthropy

Brother-In-Law Number One, the CEO of our for-profit company, runs with a pretty high-falutin crowd.

This past weekend, he was taken by a friend, via private jet, to a members-only resort in Big Sky, Montana. The place currently has 300 members, and any one of these people probably has greater net worth than most African nations.

Number One was skiing with his 9-year-old daughter on Saturday, when a fellow skiied up and joined them on the lift. Number One introduced himself to the stranger.

"Hi," the stranger said. "I'm Bill."

Bill, Number One thought. Why does this "Bill" guy look familiar?

Oh, he said to himself. It's Bill. As in Gates.

And then Number One did a really cool thing. He could've told his daughter that she was riding the lift with the richest man on the planet, or the greatest businessman alive, or the guy who made her computer games possible.

But instead, Number One turned to his daughter and said: "Claire, you should be very honored to be in this man's presence. He's done more to save and improve the lives of children in Africa than anybody in the world."

Claire smiled up at Bill Gates and said, cheerily: "Thank you!"

On their ride up the mountain, Bill and Number One talked some about business, but mostly about philanthropy. Number One allowed as how he's involved in philanthropy, too.

And what philanthropy did he tell Bill Gates about?

Why, my Little Non-Profit That Could!

It's kind of cool that Bill Gates knows about Full Circle Communities, Inc. I wonder if Bill's people will be calling...?

--T.A.

In Which the One True Wife Succumbs to the Tyranny of Voice Mail

It had to happen eventually.

Last week, the One True Wife's noble experiment in doing without home voice mail ended with her surrender to the phone company.

Upon her surrender, the Wife discovered that, upon ordering the basic voice mail package, our monthly phone bill actually will go down by two dollars a month. This struck me as a perverse and insidious message from the phone company, the message being: We've got you now. We'll make so much friggin' money off you, we'll even give you some of it back each month. After all, they now have a dedicated, proprietary, low- to no-cost advertising pipeline dumping directly into our home. They can leave us a little sale-mail anytime they want.

Of course, moms of Gabe's friends can now reach the elusive Wife either at home or on the road. Deliverers of goods, doctors' offices confirming appointments, Middle Daughter's school -- all those people and institutions that have our home number as the preferred point of contact -- can now leave the little opal-blue light on top of our cordless phones blinking madly, begging for attention.

This seems especially ironic in light of this comment, over at me True Ann-Sister's post on a very different but really fascinating topic; and this article revealing, among other things, how much time we spend consuming (or being consumed by) media; and this excerpt from an NPR story last week on "Blackberry Orphans".

I am building toward a book, or at least an extended rant, on the subject of the emptying of our souls (and particularly Jewish souls) by technology. But in the meantime I refer you to the book Amba speaks about here, and to this one, too, which contains this ominous passage:

[O]ur stone-age biology and our information-age lives grow ever more mismatched. . . As societal roles become yet more complex, specialized, and far removed from our inborn predispositions, they require increasing years of rehearsal to master, while providing fewer visceral rewards . . . Even the most successful individuals often find their work boring, difficult, unnatural, and unsatisfying, more like a sustained circus performance than a real life. Caffeine substitutes for natural adrenaline. Those original activities that do remain--eating and child raising, for instance--are often squeezed by the strange new tasks. The mismatch between instinct and necessity induces alienation in the midst of unprecedented physical plenty.

By the standards of our inherited tribal psychology, we are sick and crazy. Physically, however, we are healthier and live longer than ever, and we have vastly more options in every sphere of activity. Few city-dwellers would be prepared to adopt the circumscribed life in a stone-age forest village, despite uneasiness with their own. . . The world is rushing away from our ancestral roots ever faster, stretching the limits of both our biological and institutional adaptability.

Please leave a message. I mean, stay tuned.

--T.A.

I have a crush on Ms. Dewey

She's the perfect woman: exotic, mysterious, multi-ethnic, dramatic, comedic, impatient. Dressed in black, with copper-colored hair and a plunging neckline, she stands in front of a screen showing digital-age office buildings and freeway on-ramps. She's always in the middle of something else when I bring up her page, but she drops everything for me. She's witty, offbeat, a little wild.

And smart as hell.

Yes: I think I have a crush...on Ms. Dewey.

As her program is loading, she'll coax that loading bar along, cracking a hint of an erotic smile as it reaches its full length. Then I'll just sit there, watching her watch me. 

She'll wait forever, by turns sultry and imperious, winsome and weird. I'll look stuff up, just to hear her commentary. When I do a search on Quantum Theory: "Ah, yes, the Arts: the last refuge of the mathematically challenged." Jay -Z: "Of all the seaches in the Universe, that was definitely -- one of 'em." Teleology: "You know, I don't think people spend enough time thinking about that topic."

As she waits, she'll flick rubberbands at me, knock on the "screen" and say, "Anyone there?" Write in a journal; she gets irritable if I pull up another page and ignore her. "Hello," she'll say, pointing the text bar underneath her, "write something here!!"

And yet she doesn't know I exist.

Ah, the perfect mate for the digital age.

--T.A.

How Not to Be Present While On the Road:

Drive a car that's not about driving.

After all, who wouldn't want a car that sucks you into the Matrix?