House of Eratosthenes

I’m coming to be aware lately of a recurring sequence of events within communities large & small. Said sequence begins with the plight of some smaller selection of the population within that community; people who…

1. Suffer a tragedy/setback
2. Become more acutely aware that they, by their existence & routine activities, are doing very little to fulfill others;

And as a result of that initiating event,

1. They want to have
2. Everybody else wants them to have

…one of the two following things, perhaps both of them…

1. Dictatorial control over the endeavors of the community as a whole
2. An unlimited share of the community resources

Read that last one not as “a larger share” or “an increased share”…but more of…an unlimited share. They, or others, want their concerns about exhausted supplies to just go away. Not to be addressed in a rational or sustainable way. Just make the concerns go away. Sort of like handing someone a blank check, except, when you really hand someone a blank check for whatever wants & needs they have in mind, they still have to do some math…this goes beyond that, it’s more like relieving the aggrieved party of the burdens of number theory itself, with all its attendant inconveniences. Think of Michelle Obama’s vacations, for example. Her living like royalty, for some reason, is a soothing tonic to others who do not get to live like that, only to watch her, and live vicariously through her — I guess.

Many years ago I compared the anti-war activist Cindy Sheehan to a character out of Atlas Shrugged who, like Sheehan, suffered or relished the status of bereaved mother (perhaps a little bit of both). The character from the novel, and the subplot that was defined around her, helps to illustrate the problem. See, this “Kip’s Ma” person lost her son, Kip, in the Taggart Tunnel disaster which is a game-changing event taking place about halfway through Part II of the three-part epic. The tunnel disaster is a halftime event meant to illustrate what happens when non-producing people tell producers how to produce, and the novel as a whole shows how we humans seem to be wired to make our own problems much worse than they were before, even as we toil away under the delusion that we’re trying to solve them.

The entire nation is sympathetic to the personal tragedy suffered by Kip’s Ma, who is never named, I think…she is given dictatorial control over agriculture, with a looming famine threatening. She decrees the problem is an over-reliance on wheat, and intones that the population should be fed by soybean instead, since that’s the way they do it in the Orient and they’re much smarter than we are, or something. Well, it ends up being a meaningless triviality whether or not the shift to soy would be a beneficial one, for you see, there are certain handling requirements that apply to soybeans that don’t apply to wheat. These are not accommodated, and as a result there are entire freight cars left to rot by the loading station while a population continues to starve.

So the problem we see with Kip’s Ma, as well as with these situations…there are three sets of two options apiece, two to the power of three is eight, so this is eight different strains of this tragedy that can come to pass — and have, within my memory — is that this person’s elevation to the position of power and/or privilege has nothing to do with competence. In fact, in many cases it has to do with the opposite. In the case of the “acutely aware that they are doing very little to fulfill others” it is an issue with lack of productivity, and consequently, lack of the hard-knocks, hands-on knowledge that would develop naturally if they’d spent more of their lives being productive people. And this would apply to President Obama, as well as to many of the public-sector bureaucratic-hack lifelong-lawyers-or-less…read that as unproductive people…in His cabinet.

I think these people have holes in their lives that they can’t fill. You might say they’ve been visited by Scrooge’s three spirits, and are more bothered than they’re willing to admit that, if they were to be abducted by aliens tonight, or die in their sleep, they wouldn’t be missed. Ah, maybe by family & friends. But for all the influence they hold, I think they understand there’s nobody anywhere saying “Thank goodness [blank] handled this problem, it could have gone so much worse.” Not unless they’re paid to say that. Nobody really means it.

Are You The One? It isn’t possible, because these people have been selected for their competence — at a great assortment of entirely empty and meaningless talents, like delivering speeches in front of teleprompters. Giving bullshit excuses to Congress why certain papers should not be produced, and making it sound convincing. Squinching up the eyebrows in just the right way. Wearing a suit well. Saying things like “make no mistake,” “let me be clear,” “uh,” and other such gems in such a thoughtful, sonorous way.

Not doing a Goddamn thing to make anything any better, anywhere. Just putting on good television drama for drooling idiots, that is their area of expertise, and in mid-life they have achieved a new level of self-awareness of it and it has left them unfulfilled. They’ll never admit it, but they have a festering jealousy against the Henry Reardens who came up with new metal alloys that can change the world for the better.

There are those people, and then there are the Kennedy Family people, the Cindy Sheehans, et cetera. Hillary Clinton, for example, is not famous for having any of her close relatives die, but she did have an unfaithful husband…I guess they’re still married, I dunno, don’t care, wouldn’t be surprised if they’re not. Nobody’s asking. The Clintons are to be granted complete privacy in this matter at all times, in all respects, save for one thing: The marriage betrayal is Hillary Clinton’s only qualification, on the entire planet, for anything. It is the only visible way in which she is even remotely exceptional. No really, stop it already with the “intelligent” schtick, she’s lauded because her husband went tomcattin’ around and no other reason, and everyone knows it.

There are many other such examples, since I’ve essentially defined this sequence of events eight times. In truth, I cannot claim authoritative knowledge about it, I’m still in a process of observing it, and mulling it over. The four strains that are under the categorization of “Everybody else wants them to” are all puzzles, to me…I do not understand the adrenaline that drives the third-party, which is everybody else who lives in the community. And that applies to Kip’s Ma, she did not become Soybean Dictator just because she thought it would be a great idea. The nation as a whole pushed for it; the other leaders, as well as the citizens toiling away under the yoke. I don’t completely understand how this works. It seems to have something to do with guilt. Guilt makes people say “aw, that person over there who isn’t qualified to do anything and everyone knows it…let’s put that person in charge of something that has a direct impact on us all, from which we cannot escape.” This must be something that just doesn’t apply to me, like I’m missing something. Must be part of some brain cortex I’m missing — again — like, this is why everyone else seems to think Top Gun and Star Trek IV are good movies. I’m just not picking up the signal. I’ve never shared in this sentiment so I don’t understand how it works, but work it does. Let’s make Teddy Kennedy President, it’s his turn…stuff like that.

But then the people who fall for that, will turn around at breakneck speed and start denouncing someone else as unqualfied — and, from all the evidence we will see made available in that turn of events, it seems they are adhering to my definition of that word, not theirs, as they so insist…

I suggest it be re-defined as “calling things what they really are.”

More specifically, “calling things what they are without a bunch of bullshit euphemisms.”

The danger and the known harm, here, too, are obvious…again, I’m feeling a certain pang of self-perceived foolishness stooping to the level where I type the words in that point it out. We start to systematically fill these high positions that demand “qualified” people…with known liars. We engage in and sustain a pattern of reserving meaningful influence, for the exclusive use of those who we know should not have any.

Do I need to type in what comes next? That this is a bad thing and we need to stop it? I have the impression I do not; this seems to be one of those situations where everyone & his dog consciously knows what is right & wrong, and for reasons unknown and unexplored, we have this definable, documented and familiar tendency to fail to follow through.

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Memo For File CLVSaturday, February 25th, 2012

Memo For File CLV
Saturday, February 25th, 2012