Mouse in Firelight

When is crime no longer crime?

I watched a film last evening, Firelight by name, a love story, and a tale of two crimes. A young woman, for pay, allowed herself to be made pregnant by a scion of an English peer whose lawful wife (the son’s, not the licentious Lord’s) was in a coma and, consequently, could bear him no heir. Hence, the first crime, a bargain forbidden by law, by custom, and – as it turned out – by the instincts of mother-love.

The girl-child is taken from the mother immediately after birth. The mother-for-hire accepts her fee, and leaves … for seven years. Somehow the comatose wife is still alive, but absolutely “dead to the world.” (This is in the 1830s, so we are asked to suspend a ton of disbelief that a totally comatose person, unable even to blink, could have been kept alive that long.) The child's mother, seeking somehow to find her way into her child’s life, hires on as her little girl’s governess. The rest – including the second crime – you can imagine, though some of the dialogue between the mother and child, and the father and governess goes far beyond the merely imaginable. If there is a flaw in the script, I did not hear it.

The miracle of the film – and it was miraculous – emerged for me as much out of what was seen as from the words and action. Sophie Marceau, the governess, is beauty personified. The child’s father, played by Stephen Dillane, looks to me like the sort of man who would take center stage in the pleasant dreams of women. Marceau and Dillane are a beautiful couple. Still, their charms might have been wasted by a director intent on titillation, but in the carefully restrained hands and mind of writer/director William Nicholson (“The Gladiator,” “Shadowlands”) their beauty is made to seem almost to emanate from the whole of the story and its pictures. The colors Nicholson caused to appear on the screen, and the way he has asked them to move – like “firelight” – upon the actors’ faces and against the sometimes frigid – but always liquid – scenery, creates a world unlike any world we might encounter simply “out there.” The film is art in its highest form: dramatic action unfolding as on a living canvas, poetry spoken as by the heart itself, music that reaches the ear, not so much as sound as barely sensed tension. Silence becomes dialogue, expressing thoughts that perhaps might have been spoken but never so eloquently as when left unsaid….

There had been at least one moment in the week or so when Dillane and Marceau were making the child, when the pure commercialism of their actions gave way to true passion ... to love, if you will to call it that. And they both knew it. Seven years later, when it has been almost invisibly made clear that the passion never died, Dillane asks the governess, in a room lit by the firelight of their yet unspoken love…

“Do you remember that moment when …” [fade to silence.

She replies: [silence] (When any other answer would have said it less clearly.)

Then, after a moment has passed, perhaps to let the audience “hear” what Marceau has heard…

Dillane: “Please tell me that moment can never come again.”

Marceau: [silence] (…and when, even the dullest must know that the deep and genuine love they had discovered in themselves seven years before has become objectively real, we begin to see, and not merely to feel, the “firelight.”)

The film also uses a few truly radical devices. It violates one of the stage world’s most honored clichés, Chekhov’s famous advice: “If you call attention to a gun on the wall in act one, be sure you fire it in act three.” But in a scene immediately after Marceau is hired as governess, the camera follows her as she walks toward a staircase. Just as she reaches the landing, her eyes, for the briefest instant, move to the left where she notices something outside the camera’s view. What was that something she has obviously called our attention to in act one? If we expect she has seen an object of some sort that will take on a meaning in act three, we have misled ourselves. She has “seen” nothing that relates to the plot. She has merely created a suspenseful tension that would otherwise have been much less had she merely ascended the stairs and “noticed” nothing. We have been caused to sense mystery without the usual trappings of relevance. Our emotions have been appealed to so subtly we hardly knew what was happening. We have been brought into the play at its most meaningful level.

In the end, after the story has turned itself on its head, after crime and circumstance have had their way with the characters, after two extremely moving climactic scenes – one between the lovers, another between the governess/mother and her child – the story folds together in a way that could never have been made so right had its every message been spoken. This story has no moral. If anything, it has an immoral, a denouement so perfectly in violation of what ought to be, we come away wondering why we are so happy that it ended just that way. Perhaps life occasionally presents us with instances when crime is no longer crime.

Mouse on Education

A few years ago, when the Mouse was a senior in high school, a teacher of his, a lady (of the genuine sort) named Miss Ruth Lipscomb, taught him and his peers American History. The text and the course outline seems upon reflection to have been designed to make good citizens of the lot of us. Columbus discovered America and that was a good thing, no mention being made of the genocidal effects of that discovery on the Arawak people of the Bahamas. The Triangle Trade was presented as a more-or-less benign affair. The guns and ammunition the Europeans sold to the slave traders of West Africa might just as well have been sold as collectibles for all we learned of the uses to which they were put. And the slaves and rum that closed the triangle?… mere commodities, things of value people were willing to take in trade for other things. The Revolution had no purpose but “freedom,” and had nothing to do with the debts of southern planters held by English banks, and certainly nothing to do with the desire of New England manufactories to be protected from their competitors abroad. We southern brattlings were supposed to swallow all this without a whimper, and for the most part we did.

That is, we did until we were brought face-to-face with the Civil War. There, things got a bit hairy.

You see, Miss Lipscomb was a renegade teacher. Oh, she gave us the usual run of the thing – the firing on Fort Sumter, Bull Run I & II, Shiloh, Gettysburg, and Appomattox, but of course, no Andersonville. We heard, about Dred Scott, but did not appreciate that, by declaring slaves to be property as protected in the Constitution, Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation – a Presidential decree – was made an unconstitutional act. We heard about John Brown’s final battle at Harper's Ferry, but nothing of Virginia Governor Pierpont’s order to the Virginia Militia, immediately after secession, telling it to raid the Federal Armory at Harper’s Ferry to take by force the munitions stored there, an act of war before Virginia was even at war. We heard lots of neat stuff about good old Marse Bobby Lee, and were really, really impressed by the fact that he showed up at Appomattox with shined boots, whereas Grant’s were muddy. (A few of us did sense that the mud bespoke of Grant’s hard-nosed victory.) We got the Civil War just about the way it is perhaps still being taught. But as I have implied, we also got more than we might have expected. We got Miss Lipscomb’s curriculum, too, the one she had fairly well kept to herself before the Monday morning after our “understanding” of the Civil War was formally completed. Miss Lipscomb – the renegade – decided to teach us how to think.

Without so much as a preamble to warn us of what was to come, our history teacher asked us two questions:

Why did some people think slavery was a good thing?

... And ...

Why did some other people think it was a bad thing?

Those of you who wish to comment can answer those questions as you wish. But that’s not what I’m up to here. I’m remembering the next five days of Miss Lipscomb’s class, how it was that a bunch of ordinary southern kids were caused to think about thinking. Oh, we started out trying to make the point, anachronistically, that everyone “knows” slavery is bad, but our teacher would have none of it. She quickly put that notion to rest simply by asking us to consider that many thousands of soldiers on the southern side had died to defend the right to keep slaves. “Were they consciously fighting to defend something they thought was wrong?”

That follow-on question left us squarely in our minds. From its consideration to a deeper “epistemological” question was only a short hop. (We didn’t know that long word, but we didn’t need to; the problem was apparent even if we had no name for it.) How is it that people come to believe what they believe?

We struggled – or better, muddled – our way through that problem for the better part of the first day. Maybe we never settled the question, but we did for sure confront it, and recognize it, as a more fundamental question than “how many died in this or that battle?” We were learning to think.

I will not claim that the five days of that discussion produced solutions to any of the world’s day-to-day problems. After all, we were dealing with questions that underlie all problems, and we were being taught – whether we knew it or not – that perhaps wrong answers to those fundamental questions underlie many of the world’s “real” problems. We were being taught that unless citizens know how to think, the phrase “good citizen” is an oxymoron. (We didn’t know that big word either, and again, didn’t need to.)

I have mentioned this educational experience to several of my friends, and have heard the same reply on almost every occasion: “Miss Lipscomb would never get away with that today.” And maybe that’s true. I hear about the schools being forced to achieve their objectives within what is called Standards of Learning, SOLs, and that suggests to me that children are being taught to develop proficiencies that can be measured. Now I realize that it sort of sounds like it makes good sense to administer the school system in such a way as to let the taxpayers know they’re getting their money’s worth, but it also makes a sort of good sense to realize that that objective is not necessarily the same as producing good citizens in the non-oxymoronic sense. Kids can pass tests, and thus make their schools look good, without having mastered the ability to think.

That much is common knowledge. I don’t expect any of you to argue with it. (Even mice can dream.) What’s not so obvious is that it may be the case that in mastering the skills needed to pass tests the students are learning to think. To decide that issue, one way or the other, requires thought. Is it possible that the mental skills involved in learning the sorts of facts needed to pass tests are no different from the mental skills needed to engage in critical thinking? Is it possible that even the most indicative of tests – those that measure reading comprehension – measure something other than the ability to reason? It may be the case that in trying to decide what this or that complex paragraph “means,” the student may actually be unconsciously weighing one interpretation against another, and finally choosing the one that “feels good”? And isn’t it possible that that’s what goes on in critical thinking?

May be. But if the epistemological process turns upon something like unconscious emotional responses – and let’s say that it might – it does not follow that reading comprehension tests, or any other form of skills measurement, prepares the pupil for conflicted situations where the alternative that looks legitimately reasonable is the one that feels the worst. Such circumstances might never arise if all learning took place within the box of formal education. Kids would (presumably) learn nothing that would contradict the reasonable case. But it is probably provable that just as many of our “facts” are taught to us outside the box of formal education (and here I treat such things as moral and ethical principles as facts). As a consequence of that fact, the tests that determine whether the SOLs are being met, do not measure the extent to which students are capable of dealing with uncomfortable facts … and need I say it, the world is full of those.

Now, I am not suggesting that schools ought to be teaching ethical and moral facts. God forbid. I am suggesting that the schools might be doing the world a favor if they taught in such a way that the graduates of their system matriculate as good citizens, able to reason the whys and wherefores of their beliefs. I suggest that that objective cannot be reached if all we teach are those facts that tend to make our children “good citizens.” Children who have been properly educated ought (though I dislike that word, here it is), they ought to know how to defend their principles when they can think of no reason why those principles are false, and to know why they are surrendering to superior principles when their reason demands.

But unless they know how to deal with the difference between reasoned facts and believed "facts,” they will have been set loose in a world they are practically – but perhaps not wholly – unable to deal with. We muddled through Miss Lipscomb’s challenge. We were not by that experience made into philosophers, but we did realize we had encountered a different sort of learning. We had learned a little of what’s involved in dealing with contradictory “facts.” We had learned that the truth is not always the first thing that comes to mind, that in fact, it is the tension created between what we think we know and what we suspect we do not know, that drives the ineluctable desire to know. Armed with the lesson Miss Lipscomb had taught us, we finally came to understand that we come into the world equipped with the ability to think, yet knowing nothing. That fact – and countless others – had been opened up to us as possibilities by a teacher who desired to produce good citizens and not mere jingoistic robots.

[No brag, Thierry, just fact.]

Once Upon a Mouse ...

Back when I was working as the supposed leader of a bunch of computer programmer animals, I had occasion to take an official action that -- had it turned out one of the ways it might have -- would have put an end to my career as a computer weenie. Seems there was a new Army Colonel -- a lady Colonel, no less -- put in charge of one of the organizations my bunch did work for. As is the habit of all new Colonels, this lady decided she had to do something right off to let the world know she was all business. (I think it's in the Army manual that they must do this.)

A work order initiated by the lady Colonel appeared on my desk the very next week after she took Command of her group, which had something to do with administration, you know, like, maybe running a tight ship. Seems the lady wanted us to do a little program that would produce a printout of all the civil servants who had on more than one occasion within the past year "abused" their sick leave by taking a Monday off. Well, okay. Not a big deal, and not a difficult program either ... about a half-hour job.

BUT ... one of the gals who worked on my team had recently submitted a formal suggestion that those people who had taken no sick leave in the past year be recognized by some sort of certificate or other form of recognition for their great performance. The suggestion came back unapproved, and it was the lady Colonel herself who had written the reason for the rejection: "Good health is its own reward."

Fine. Who could disagree with such logic? Well ... no one maybe, no one but your humble Mouse, the guy who's sitting there staring at the two pieces of paper, the "illogical" suggestion, and the work order.

In what must have been a moment of temporary insanity, I stapled a copy of the rejected suggestion to the work order and scrawled in very large letters across the face of it, the following equally logical response.

And bad health is it's own punishment.

Of course I knew, and the lady Colonel knew that people do abuse sick leave, some more than others, and that perhaps if the work force learned that their names would appear on a shit list if they made a habit of it, they might refrain. But if taking Monday sick leave is potentially an abusive act, it is also a temptation many must be exposed to. It follows then that those not taking Monday sick leave could be understood to have made conscious choices not to abuse the sick leave privilege. If the offenders were to be punished, why not reward those who "did the right thing?"

Well, all logic aside. My venture into "bravesville" did not turn out badly. As chance would have it, before the lady Colonel received my contemptious reply, she and I had occasion to meet on another matter. And seeings as how I was in those days almost as handsome and congenial as I am now, the lady Colonel was swept off her feet. I never heard a word from her about the work order. She did not even bother to resubmit it. I guess she saw the illogic of her ways. Not all Army Colonels are stupid.

I was inspired to write this by a comment made to my previous blog by a blogster who uses the name of the minor French actor, "Thierry Beauchamp," or who may be that actor. Old Thierry struck a sensitive spot in the Mouse's thick skin ... counted almost to 20 before gathering myself for my usual polite and deeply meaningful response.

The Maturation of the Mouse

Until I was about 42 years old I wondered how it had come about that I had come to feel nothing like the prejudices I should have been feeling. Reared in the deep south of share-cropper lineage, I had ought to have grown up not only saying things like “had ought to have” but also looking down on black people as inferior beings with whom white people should have no truck. But I didn’t. For some reason – or reasons – I grew up trusting that the differences among the peoples of the earth had more to do with the way they were raised than with the accidents of their birth. It seemed I had just always believed that racial differences didn’t much matter.

But I guess when I reached 42 something must have happened that led me to wonder how I had gotten that way. It just didn’t seem “right” – although it was certainly right – for a southern boy to believe as I did. So I began to wonder.

Well, my wondering turned up a lot of reasons. I wrote of one of them in my blog of May 22. I ‘lowed as how the incident described in that piece explained how I became color blind. Maybe I misspoke myself there. The change may very well have taken place long before, and nowhere near Crawford Park. I finally came to understand that it had a lot to do with my father, a railroad engineer who never learned to drive an automobile. His best friends were railroad firemen, and the firemen were all black men. You see, the railroad had an unwritten policy that no negro would ever be promoted to engineer, and when that fact was coupled to the company’s seniority rules, it was bound to happen that the vast majority of the firemen would be black.

One of those firemen, Jerry Shepherd, who could drive a car, always came by to pick up my dad when they were scheduled for the same run, and it had become the custom that dad would invite Jerry – who we were brought up to call Mr. Shepherd – for a cup of coffee or even breakfast, if it was that time of day. That certainly must have had a liberating effect on the child that I was. But then, why didn’t it also affect my brother who remained a “good southern boy” all his life? I really don’t know the answer, not even now.

Later, when I was 19 years old, another incident occurred that I am convinced finally sealed the matter. I was then a railroad employee myself, working in the clerk’s “extra board,” which meant that I would work the vacation time or other off-time for the regular employees. This particular day – a Sunday morning – I was working as the “call boy,” a job with no duties other than to go to the rooming houses where the away-from-home railroaders slept and wake them up for their run. During the daylight hours the job was almost a no-job, since most of the men would be awake and not need the services of the call boy. So, I was sitting around the depot, earning my wages the hard way – doing nothing. But that turned out OK on this particular day, because it happened that the U.S. Congressman from our district, Mr. Frank Boykin, wandered down to the depot that morning himself and sat down on the bench beside me and told the true story I’m about to tell you. As I say, that story closed the jar lid on my growing up to be what I am as regards the “race issue.”

These were Mr. Boykin’s words:

An old black man came in one day to the court house up in Jackson, in Washington County. Said he wanted to register to vote. That would have been a first, you understand. No n_____ had ever voted in Washington County.

The registrar knew what to do. He proceeded to ask the old man a series of questions that had been put together just for the purpose of disqualifying n_____s from voting. “Have you ever had trouble with the law?” The old man answered, “Yessuh, once I happened to park the boss man’s horse an’ wagon two minutes longer than I wuz s’posed to … over at the feed store.” The registrar asked: “And that’s all? You never had any real trouble with the law?” “Yessuh,” the old man answered. “I’se purty much stayed to myself all these years.”

The registrar, even though a product of his times, was a decent man, so he realized that question had failed in its mission. He proceeded to ask four or five more questions, all of which the old black man answered to the satisfaction of the registrar. Finally came the question that had never failed. “Here’s your last question. What is a writ of certiorari” The old man, knowing he had met his match, slowly rose from the chair, put on his hat an started shuffling toward the door. But then, sadly shaking his head, he made this answer: “I guess, cap’n, tha’s a writ they done made up to stop a pore ole n___ah from votin’ in Washington County.”

At that point Mr. Boykin paused, like a good story teller, shook his head in admiration, and then, in a voice filled with pride, finished the story: “And that, young feller, is how they came to register the first black who ever voted in Washington County.

On that Sunday morning the story had certainly come across as a form of southern humor, but years later, when I came to reflect on the problem of how I came to be an “abolitionist” in Alabama, I remembered something else that had happened to me, or in me, as the story ended. I remembered that I had not only laughed but had also felt something like prideful hope, a feeling that seemed to be telling me more about the mindset of the registrar than of the old black man. Oh, for sure, the old man had his wits about him, and maybe he was permitted to vote only because he had entertained the registrar. But … well, maybe it was Mr. Boykin’s way of telling the story. I’m sure he told it as a way to make me laugh, but there was a look in his eye that spoke of a deeper, more enduring purpose. Mr. Boykin knew that he was telling me a story of how the injustices of the south began to unravel. He knew he was talking about a past that had to change, and even though he could never have been reelected if he had spoken aloud the words I saw in his eyes, his message was clear. “It’s wrong, boy. The way we have treated negroes has always been wrong.”

I cannot be sure of the role Frank Boykin’s story played in the stage play that has been my life, but I like to think it contributed a moral to the plot. Otherwise, it would be just another funny story. As it has turned out, now that I am closer to the curtain than I was when the “plot began to thicken,” it seems to me that … well, let me put it this way … I may not be all that I ought to be, but I like the part of me that I learned from the likes of my dad, and Jerry Shepherd, and Frank Boykin, and … yes … from that old man, the first negro who was registered to vote in Washington County Alabama. Yes, I like that part of me.

An Afterthought

When three decades ago I first considered the order of "be, do, have," it seemed to me that once we "have" something it becomes a part of our being. That was a wrong idea. It's not the "things" that become part of us, but our attitude toward them. If we regard “things” as Faust did – as a relief from certain kinds of boredom – our beingness in relation to things will have us situated as victims who are caused to be what we are by things that are not us. We will be “objects” produced by other “objects.”

Now, it's obvious that we cannot escape being surrounded by things that would – if we remained passive in our understanding of them – cause the innermost sense we have of ourselves to be determined by outside causes. But digging a bit deeper into the distinction Miss Robin made between objects with and without souls may shed some light on the difference between being an active human being and being a mere passive piece of breathing meat.

Take for instance this business we call "loving" that commands so much of the attention of women and men. In its simplest form – disregarding the fact that loving men and loving women both have souls – lovers might regard the object of their affection as just another "thing" that happened to come along in their lives just in time to relieve certain natural cravings, relief from boredom being the one less talked about. If that’s essentially the sum of the effect our beloved has on our being, then we might well admit that a soulless rubber ducky could have served us just as well.

But the man or woman who loves just happens to be an object with a soul, and even more certainly, just happens to be the object of his or her own most enduring love. We love ourselves. And, of course, we must if we are to remain concerned for our own well being.

With that fact in mind, think once again of that question and answer Karl Jaspers saw as fundamental to an understanding of Spinoza. The question: “On what do happiness and unhappiness depend?” The answer: “On the nature of the objects we love.” We are compelled by existential forces to love ourselves, but nothing in nature – the world’s or our own – compels us to value ourselves. We may in fact hate what we are while continuing to behave in the world as if nothing in it were more important than ourselves.

One possible source of self hatred lies in our relating to other people as if they were soulless objects. We are intuitively aware that all people are essentially like ourselves in the sense that we all possess souls. [This cannot be proven, and that’s precisely why that knowledge remains intuitive, i.e., not provable and not needing proof.] An ethical intuition also suggests to us – without compulsion – that it is wrong to treat other people as if they were not like us in that respect. To the extent we violate that moral imperative, we devalue ourselves, and to the extent we lack value, the love we bestow upon ourselves is directed toward an object that does not deserve to be loved. Hence, unhappiness.

The loving relationships between men and women have taken on so many different patterns it would be virtually impossible to catalog, much less analyze, them all. But there do seem to be certain general forms in those relationships that can be put into the mill of self analysis. Spinoza spoke of the desire the lover feels toward his beloved, said that the lover desires to “possess” his beloved. But he then went on to say that the desire to possess another flies in the face of the existensial fact that it is impossible actually to possess another. We may be able to possess soulless objects, because they have no desire to be not possessed. But every thing with a soul loves itself, and that self love cannot be taken away by another’s love, no matter how sincere or enduring. Lovers may make themselves “one,” but they remain two. They may give each other pleasure, but the pleasure happens in two different souls. We may wish to possess our beloved, but in order to do so we would have to make of them objects unlike ourselves. We would be compelled to deny them a soul.

But loving also has positive characteristics. We desire happiness for our beloved, and the more happiness the beloved enjoys the more joy we also experience. But this one has a cutting edge. Our beloved may find joy in someone other than ourselves. It is not altogether certain that our joy would thus increase as hers did. But if we have truly loved, and if we have transcended the traps of possessiveness, I suppose it may be possible to experience joy in our beloved's enjoyment of another's love. This may be more likely to occur in cases where a person loves from afar, or where the strictures of society prohibit the mutual sharing of joy. The lover, in those cases, may in fact take pleasure in knowing that his beloved is living a joyful life. It should not pass notice that when the lover does in fact experience that sort of joy, it is likely that he will find a value in himself that would not otherwise be there. It should, however, also be noted that society’s strictures often compel a person to endure less joy than he or she might find with another. Cases of that sort multiply sorrow, both in the soul of the lover and the beloved.

If we now analogously extend these understandings to objects other than individual lovers, if we think of families, cities, and nations – perhaps even the earth – as loving and beloved objects, we find ourselves able to make sense of much of the world’s unhappiness. Families feel compelled to love black sheep sons and daughters, cities and nations to care for their lost sheep, the world itself, if it were sentient, to mourn the losses imposed upon the unfortunate by nature’s vagaries. If we think of the so-called “consumer generation” as a lover who has centered its affection on objects of fleeting value, we may begin to understand at least one of humanity’s central afflictions: we can only truly possess things that rot and decay, and we intuitively understand that there is something wrong with us for that compulsion. The world is the object of star-crossed lovers.

Well, enough for one passing morning – which has already made its way into an afternoon. Perhaps another day will find a more joyful way to speak of the earth. We are still, when we are operating as authentic humans, a community of I’s and Thou’s. We are objects with souls, lovers and beloveds, seekers of the perfect way to love and be loved.

The Faustians and the Mouse

The story of Professor Faust has been likened by "Miss Robin" -- in a comment on this blog -- to children of our time, those we've come to call "the Baby Boomers." I vowed when I read her comment that I would try to say something "brilliant" about all that, not altogether sure that I could, you understand, but a bit taken aback that a young lady less than 1/3 the Mouse's age had put a slant on our recent history that -- I confess -- had never so much as crossed the Mouse's mind -- not even as a shadow. And today's blog is it ... the Mouse's "brilliant" expansion on Miss Robin's truly brilliant insight. (Hmm. I first spelled it "incite," and perhaps would never have noticed my "error" had I not heard Herr Doctor Freud laughing his head off in Prichard, Alabama ... the place where the souls of the righteous but unwashed dead were transferred after the Pope abolished Limbo.)

Faust's story has been written a thousand times, but most notably by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, a German writer, some would say, the German writer . We've had Benet's "The Devil & Daniel Webster," an opera "Faust" by Gounod, a modern novel by Thomas Mann, and at least one dramatization by the lady we know on this blog as "Finding Fairhope." [She named the devil, Nick. Thought I'd forgotten, did you?]

The story's actually quite simple. A man with a problem strikes a bargain with an all-powerful being -- makes a contract, as it were -- and enjoys for a time all the benefits he had traded his soul for. Miss Robin understood that "the Baby Boomers didn't sign any such contract." She claimed they just happened to come along at a time in history when the world was primed to render the benefits. The contract was unconsciously negotiated. They were carried along into the sin of "consumerism" by the favoring gales of fortune. They didn't realize they had sold their souls.

Miss Robin's Faustian allegory is thus, in a profound way, far more devastating than Goethe's. At least Professor Faust had the benefit of an arm's length deal, as they say; he bargained with his eyes wide open. But the Boomers hardly realized that by falling in love with "things" they were sacrificing the only thing that, finally, would make life worth living. They had lost sight of the value of life itself. Having confused life with the all-too-fleeting sensations produced by having this or that object, they imagined -- in their wildest dreams -- that "things" would put an end to boredom. "If I only had a rubber ducky, the girl of my dreams would love me, and I would forget about the Mercedes" ... until tomorrow they should have added.

If Goethe had leapt ahead a century or so and read his Sartre and Camus, he could have had his man Faust moaning about the bassackwardness of the way the Boomers -- and most of us -- consider that the world works. He could have had Faust arguing with his angelic self about the order of the verbs, be, do, and have. Instead, he threw the good Doctor Faust onto the ass end of the triad, had him believing that if Mephistopheles would just let him have great knowledge, then he would do great works, and be the man he had always sensed that he could be. Of course, Goethe knew what he was doing, even if Faust didn't. Goethe was, after all, a good Spinozist! Goethe arranged it, you see, that when the Devil came for his due, Faust's beloved Margarete, so in love with Faust's kisses while the contract terms were in his favor, would now be led to cry:

Are you no longer able to return a kiss?
So short a time away from me. my love,
and you've forgotten how to kiss.

Faust has had his fling with knowledge and sensuous living, he has done all that the wealthiest Prince's of the world might have done, and now he is left where he began, with his own being. He has had his rubber ducky, and has found it wanting.

The world as we know it emerges out of our being, here and now. To the extent that our being drives us to do things out of our being, rather than out of our having, (X) we are become as better beings, able to do mightier works with greater perfection, able to have the power to move on to the higher levels of being to which we are now empowered. It is out of our being that we see and judge goodness and beauty. It is out of our acting as more enlightened and appreciative beings that we are able to do -- with natural ease -- things we might before have judged impossible.

Faust had not seen it that way, though Goethe had. Faust was already a learned man, a powerful man, but somehow came to believe he was being deprived. He thought because he lacked a knowledge of everything, he knew nothing. His rubber ducky -- the power he wished he could wheedle from Mephistopheles -- he already had ... or else there was no such. He had been deluded by visions of a Heaven that he knew, from his learning, was a fiction, but which he nonetheless imagined as something real. Perhaps he suspected, or merely wished, that all allegories had a counterpart in Being, that if he could imagine Heaven it must in some sense be obtainable. If he had simply compared the power he knew he possessed in his own soul to that possessed by, say, a frog, he would have seen the only Heaven there is ... the divine force Dylan Thomas saw, "the power that through the green fuse drives the flower," the elan that drives the human soul.

So, Faust had a problem. But his was not a problem brought about by ignorance. His emptiness became apparent to him only in his fullness. But the Boomers were different. They never sensed fullness, only emptiness. They set about with a frenzy to fill it with whatever seemed to momentarily relieve the dullness created by the safety and sameness of the world as it seemed to be in the sitcoms of the 50s and 60s. But that emptiness is like the hole in the barn roof Twain's jaybird kept putting acorns in, the one he never filled, and never could. If the jay had been capable of reflecting on life's rewards , as Spinoza was, and as Goethe parodied in Faust, he may have reflected as the philosopher did in the first paragraph of his Treatise on the Emendation of the Intellect, probably the most poetic, and certainly one the most fundamental passages in his prose:

After experience had taught me that all the usual surroundings of social life are vain and futile; seeing that none of the objects of my fears contained in themselves anything either good or bad, except in so far as the mind is affected by them, I finally resolved to inquire whether there might be some real good having power to communicate itself, which would affect the mind singly, to the exclusion of all else: whether, in fact, there might be anything of which the discovery and attainment would enable me to enjoy continuous, supreme, and unending happiness.

Spinoza found his happiness in exactly the place where Faust had found his sorrow, in a true knowledge of the world and, thus, of God. The Boomers, though, became bogged down in the "vain and futile" trappings of the "usual surroundings of social life." They never made it out of their senses into a discovery of their mind. Small wonder that their pleasures have not delivered "continuous, supreme, and unending happiness." They were -- and remain -- in love with the wrong sorts of objects.

Perhaps in time, after the vanities have run their course, a critical mass of humankind will awaken to the greatness and glory of simply being human, learning to revel in what they are instead of in what they might someday have. That'll be Heaven

Two Loves for a Mouse

Writing a daily (almost) blog gets easier as the blog becomes more popular and more and more people comment. My blog just before this one, for example, was inspired by an observation made by a commenter, and today’s blog is to be no different.

Last evening a young lady who calls herself “Robin” asked a telling question, “Do WE have integrity?” and added a punch line: “I'm talking about you and me.” The Mouse assumed – for comforts sake – that the “we” she had in mind were the people of the United States of America. If I read her intent correctly, she was putting the blame for the sins committed by our nation squarely on the shoulders of the American people themselves, those who in a republic are ultimately responsible for their own government.

As you might imagine, an indictment of that breadth has caused the Mouse a few sleepless hours. Nothing gets to him quite so effectively as the well-aimed thrust of a verbal spear. And nothing disturbs him quite so deeply as a sense of personal guilt. If I, as one of the people, am guilty of the atrocities that have been committed in my name, what exactly is the nature of my guilt? And what must I do about it?

Because I am more a man of words than of deeds I suspected that the first question would be the easy one, and perhaps it was. But the answer that came up for me to that question caught me completely off guard and elevated “what must I do” from a mere civil action – “get involved” – to something that more resembles a religious penance than a rational response.

I have been rereading Karl Jaspers’ commentary on Spinoza, keeping the thin little volume beside my keyboard here, to read whenever the harpies of hyperspace temporarily cease their torture. This morning the book fell open to what Jaspers referred to as the first question we must address when setting out to understand Spinoza. His question did not at first seem related to the one I had posed as my first, but after he answered, I saw that his question not only related but provided, in effect, an answer to both of mine. Jaspers asked: “On what do happiness and unhappiness depend?” And quickly answered: “On the nature of the objects that we love.”

If we as a people – and I as an individual – have permitted our nation to create conditions of unhappiness, it must be that we have fallen in love with the wrong objects.

In yesterdays’ closing paragraphs I referred to the idea that so long as the ideals of this nation remain alive hope endures. But maintaining a stock of ideals in the mind’s storehouse is not the same as loving them. While we may on occasion trot out references to “the Founding Fathers” and to “the American experiment” to add volume to empty phrases, if those ideals were in fact our “true loves,” I seriously doubt that we would have permitted the series of misadventures I summarized in yesterday’s blog. We would not have been mesmerized by “manifest destiny,” puffed up by dreams of empire, nor (finally) incapacitated by the pathological delusions of grandeur that naturally afflict those who imagine themselves “masters of the universe.” We would not murder innocents in the name of “freedom.”

If we are not in love with our ideals, then what do we love? What is the object that occupies the foremost place in our hearts? Perhaps it is, as many have suggested, simply the emotional comforts and stimulations provided by “things.” Perhaps we have become so distracted by the consumerist calling that we have lost sight of the ethical ideals embodied in The American Dream. It has been, after all, those ideals that have produced the wealth that makes consumerism possible.

I observed yesterday that, “This nation was not established to change men’s nature, but rather to establish a framework of order and justice within which men might seek their own sense of righteousness, and see to their own happiness.” It did not occur to me when I wrote those words that a strong possibility exists that when the nation succeeds in establishing “a framework of order” the people, in seeking their own happiness, might easily lose sight of the selfless ideals that undergird and actually create the nation’s strength. By focusing on themselves and on their immediate happiness, the people may have fallen in love with the wrong object.

But as I have implied, the escape from consumerism may more resemble a penance than a practical solution. If we were at this late date to follow Thoreau’s advice to “simplify, simplify, simplify,” odds are we would bankrupt the nation and send the world into an endless depression. But surely there must be a middleground. Surely we can stop consuming some of the objects we are consuming without creating economic panic. Surely our government can exercise restraint in some of its spending without endangering the wealth and health of the nation. How many billions are we spending each day for no reason other than to sustain our armies in foreign fields?

But the economic demands placed upon us by our love all go by the boards when we finally catch on to it that we can love the ideals of liberty and justice – love them and commit to them without reservation – while at the same time seeking and finding our individual happiness. We are, after all, not robots programmed to perform simple tasks. It is entirely possible, within the context of a nation built upon a love of liberty and justice, to seek and to find safety and stimulation for our individual selves. It is possible to love the abstract ideals of our dream and, at the same time, to desire and have the concrete objects the implentation of those ideals have made possible.

But it ain’t easy. To love what we have in our hands demands first that we love those things that exist – and can only exist – in our hearts, and it is painfully apparent that we are more prone to love what we can see and hold in our hands than those things that exist only as ideas. It takes an act of reason to grasp the connection between the perceptible and the unseen, an act of wakeful recognition to sense the intertwining and interdependence of our loves.

And yet, if we take the easy path, the one that permits us to have our “things” while remaining ignorant of their source in the ethical infrastructure of our ideals, we are bound to be forced to answer Robin’s question in the negative. “No, my dear, we are not ethical. We are in love with objects that have no soul."

Pray, dear child, take us by the shoulders and shake us into wakefulness, lest we die – as a nation and as a people – in possession only of things destined to end in dust and decay.

If the dream is to survive, it must be lived.

Manifest Mendacity

A man I know as “John (Sweden)” last evening posted a rather meaningful comment to one of the Mouse’s blogs. He wrote, in part: “America is one of civilization’s greatest tragedies, a failed democracy, and the number one threat and obstacle to peace and stability in the world.” John (S)’s statement was made in the context of a discussion of the Iraq war, in which the Mouse had opined – not exactly in these hackneyed words – that, while the invasion of that oil-rich country was ill-advised (to put it mildly), the U.S. now finds itself holding a tiger by the tail. To let go, and leave the tiger to its own designs could very well have disastrous effects.

John (S), after swapping remarks with another commenter, most of which could be dismissed as the sort of persiflage too often encountered in Internet “rooms,” finally broadened the discussion to a topic that could not so easily be set aside. When viewed within the context of that broader concern, the war in Iraq can be seen as merely a symptom of a deadly disease. America may indeed be “the number one threat and obstacle to peace and stability in the world.”

Once the notion struck me that John (S) might be right, I began to wonder how it could have come about that a nation founded on the ideals of human equality and “liberty and justice for all” could have become a monster to at least one reasonably intelligent man. Answering that question would be easy if it could be settled by solving the riddles of the current U.S. administration. There can be no question but that the nation’s ideals have been severely betrayed by George W. Bush and his accomplices. In even a modest expression of those ideals, no justification can be found for preemptive war, for misleading the American people with lies and distortions of fact, for eroding civil liberties, for, in effect, fomenting violence – all of which have become business as usual for our leadership. Yes, if it were that simple the problem could be solved very simply, by voting the miscreants out of office. But I suspect – no, I am convinced – the roots of the problem go much further back than the current occupant’s residency in the White House.

John (S) indirectly referred to the Vietnam War, and in retrospect I suppose most people would agree that war was a terrible mistake. And yet, it was justified at the time by honest civil servants as a continuation of a policy developed during the Eisenhower administration by John Foster Dulles. Designed to bankrupt the Soviet Union, Dulles’s “brinksmanship” strategy sought to keep the world on the brink of war, with the U.S. developing weapons of greater and greater technical capability, not intending necessarily to use them, but requiring the USSR to spend more than their fledgling economy could afford merely to keep up. Dulles was playing on Russian paranoia, an illness it acquired as a direct effect of the Stalinist purges and the tragic losses inflicted upon the Soviet people during WW II. The USSR countered by promoting a series of cheap guerilla type wars, the most significant for the U.S. being the war waged by Ho Chi Minh against the pseudo-American government of South Vietnam.

But even the so-called Cold War does not seem to have been the beginning of the malaise John (S) pointed to. America’s dealings with Mexico and the tribal nations of Native Americans reflected a small scale contagion of the Superpower mindset, a “childhood” disease as it were that has metastasized into an epidemic. We characterized those early violations of human rights as expressions of the nation’s “manifest destiny,” as if we, like the Joshua of the Old Testament, were empowered from on high to go forth and conquer. It seems never to have occurred to us to question those essentially empty words, accepting the evidence of our undeniable successes as proof of our divine authority.

The Spanish-American War finally brought into the open our belief that America was the “anointed of God.” Our quest for empire could no longer be glossed over as a territorial necessity. The islands of the Philippines were half-way around the world. We justified our murder of tens of thousands of native Filipinos in words that might have been spoken by an itinerant tent-show preacher: we were bringing Christianity to the heathens. That motive played well among the fundamentalist population of the late 1890s, with only a few voices being raised, notable among them one of my heroes, Samuel Langhorne Clemens, Mark Twain. But despite Clemens’ popularity, he was not heard. His was merely a voice of reason, with no chance at all against the jingoistic bellowing of the Hearst newspapers and, yes, the Old Rough Rider himself. The die was cast, and America was launched as a world super power.

The First World War solidified the casting, and our refusal to join the League of Nations, as merely one of many focused on world peace, confirmed that we regarded ourselves as something other than just another member of the herd of nations. We were, after all, the power that had snatched England's and France’s chestnuts out of the fire of the stalemated war, and brought Germany to its knees. Even today, the jingo lives on in our dogged reluctance to surrender even a part of our sovereignty to the United Nations.

Now all of this might have been for the good if we had based our “foreign entanglements” on the ideals of liberty and justice. Instead of enacting policies fraught with superstitious beliefs in manifest destiny and divine revelation, we could have adopted a “Lighthouse Policy,” demonstrating our righteousness by our example. If our system of government was the best – and there has never been a better – that fact, by itself, would have made more converts to democracy than our armies ever could – or will. If our system of limited capitalism was seen to produce more wealth than any other ever had or could, that fact too would have led at least the reasoning people of the world to emulation rather than hatred. If we had fought wars only for noble reasons, if we had never permitted our ideals to be sacrificed to delusions of grandeur, if we had humbly walked in the way of the ideas that must have been held in the hearts of the Founders, perhaps the world might not now see us as John (S) sees us, as a nation the world has passed by.

I grant, the Lighthouse Policy has never in history been implemented by any nation that was powerful enough to believe it could follow the path of conquest. As Thucydides wrote of the Athenian negotiation with the Milesians (before slaughtering them), “Of men we know, and of the Gods we suspect, they will rule where they can, and serve only where they must.” The madman Hegel wrote – though it took him roughly 400,000 words of bad German to say it: men are either masters or slaves, and desire to be the former. No powerful nation has for very long pursued a path lit by reason. All have followed where their lust for power would take them.

And here we are.

We are tempted to believe the world might be different if men would only come to their senses. Unfortunately, we must deal with people as they are, and not as we wish they were. This nation was not established to change men’s nature, but rather to establish a framework of order and justice within which men might seek their own sense of righteousness, and see to their own happiness. The United States of America was never created to be a world power, nor a savior of humankind. That it has come to this must be seen as a gradual assault of our demons upon the nobler angels of our ideals. It was to be expected, that when men use words without knowing their meaning, when nations feel they are “called” to “liberate” the world by force of arms … it was to be expected that at least one, and maybe two, reasonably intelligent men would see America as “a failed democracy, and the number one threat and obstacle to peace and stability in the world.”

But fret not, John (S). So long as it remains possible for men to speak and write words describing the ideals of the American dream, so long as people like yourself continue to keep alive – if only flickeringly so – the principles upon which this nation was founded …then this too shall pass and we shall see a rebirth of freedom, not forced upon the world, but growing out of the pure vision kept in your heart.

But what a pity that so many innocents have been caused to die by the blindness and stone-heartedness of those who are led by a will to power.

The Word on Spinoza's Ring

Bento Baruch Benedictus de Espinoza wore a ring upon which he (personally) had engraved the image of a thorny rose and the Latin word "Caute." The flower represents a play on his name. Apparently, "spinoza" is the Spanish word for "thorn," and there can be little doubt that Benedict was aware that the powers-that-be regarded him as a thorn and his beliefs as thorny. In English the Latin word means "cautiously," so we can take it that Spinoza meant to remain a thorn, but to do so with caution. If we can judge by the way he lived his life -- especially, as regards the manner in which his works were published -- he was, to put it in the vernacular, "cautious to a fault."

Perhaps he adopted the life style of extreme caution after he was attacked at knife point in the year immediately preceding his banishment from the Jewish community of Amsterdam. His unorthodox views of the religion into which he was born were already well known, and it was for those views that he was attacked. In any case, during his lifetime he published only one book that bore his name on the title page, a geometric demonstration of Descartes' "Philosophy and Metaphysical Thoughts." But that book did not express Spinoza's own beliefs, a fact that was made clear in a brief preface to the book that Spinoza insisted someone other than himself should write. Later, his "Treatise on Theology and Politics" was anonymously published. It even bore a false publisher's name. None of his other work was published until after his death, at the tender age of 44. The "Ethics," a "Hebrew Grammar," and two unfinished pieces, the "Political Treatise" and a "Treatise on the Emendation of the Intellect," were safely locked away in a small desk. Immediately after his death -- the next day -- the contents of the desk (still locked away) were sent to Amsterdam where they were shortly published, in both Latin (the language in which he wrote them) and in Dutch. The circle of friends who saw to the printing, by publishing the works in the language common people could read, seemed to be throwing Spinoza's caution "to the wind," in effect saying to the authorities who had dogged their friend throughout his life, "up yours!".

His friends -- none of them Jewish, most of them men of substantial means, and none of them particularly religious in the usual sense -- had less to fear than Spinoza, so felt no particular need for caution. One might thus be led to attribute to Spinoza himself a streak of cowardice, an attribution that might stick were it not for one particular incident. It seems that after Louis 14th's invasion of the Netherlands had finally been foiled, the "common people" decided to avenge the wave of destruction the French had caused. They chose for their scapegoat Jan de Witt, a man who could rightfully be compared to George Washington as the Father of his Country, for it was certainly de Witt who had led his nation to become the most democratic nation in Europe. But Holland still had its religious zealotry, headed by William of Orange, a pretender to the "presidency" and a man who would break down the already crumbly wall separating church and state. The mob, incensed by William's propagandists, murdered Jan de Witt and his brother, tore them limb from limb and fed their entrails to the dogs. When word of the atrocity reached Spinoza, he had to be physically restrained from racing into the street to denouce the mob as "The Greatest of the Barbarians." He had prepared a sign bearing those words, and would have posted it had his landlord, perhaps fearing for his own safety as a harborer of the heretic, not restrained him. Spinoza would almost certainly have been killed had he not been double-locked in his room. (He lived as a boarder, owning nothing of value save his books, his bed, and the lathe he used to grind lenses, an occupation that provided him a living.)

Spinoza had also inherited cautious ways from the Jewish community. The Jews in Amsterdam were, almost to a man, first generation descendants of Marrano exiles from Portugal and Spain, people who had been driven from several homelands by their refusal to disavow their religion. They lived cautiously or not at all. But then Spinoza was doubly exiled, not only from the land of his ancestors on the Iberian peninsula, but from the tight-knit Jewish "nation" in Holland. "Caute" became his watchword because history had thrust it upon him. He lived as long as he did -- which was not long in any case -- because he lived cautiously.

You can read a much more eloquent and revealing portrait of Bento Baruch Benedictus de Espinoza in a beautifully written book, "Betraying Spinoza," by Rebecca Goldstein. The last chapter of the book -- how can I say this without seeming more of a sycophant than I already am -- I was in tears as the final moments of Spinoza's death unfolded in Ms Goldstein's remarkable prose. I seemed to be in that "upper room" with the dying Spinoza and the young doctor to whom Spinoza communicated his instructions regarding the small locked desk. If Ms Goldstein took a large measure of poetic license in her description of that scene, well, dear lady, you are forgiven. Your poetry worked. You have written a beautiful book.

A Mouse in the White House

First, I want to clear up the title. The mouse in the White House is a mouse, not the Mouse. The mouse currently occupying the White House
and -- I must add -- his political opponents do not see the double edged tragedy in the following statement (uttered by the mouse yesterday).

"Leaving before we complete our mission would create a terrorist state in the heart of the Middle East, a country with huge oil reserves that the terrorist network would be willing to use to extract economic pain from those of us who believe in freedom."

The current occupant of the White House hinges the future of his administration on the obvious fact that what he said is probably the truth. But he apparently is not willing to face the more compelling fact that he's the villain who created that uncomfortable situation. Moreover, the Democratic meatballs appear to be denying the terrible fact the mouse reported, crying for immediate withdrawal from Iraq when they ought to be forming their demands around simply getting rid of the current occupant of the White House and the much larger rats who put the crazy ideas in his head, Mr. Cheney and Mr. Rumsfeld.

The genuine, capital "M" Mouse reported the fact implied in the (little "m") mouse's speech over three years ago, before the troops were sent in. And the Mouse wasn't the only one telling his mousiness the truth. His Secretary of State told him that he was creating a "pottery shop" manifesto, "If you break it you own it." The current occupant disregarded that advice, and now complains that the mess he created is really a mess.

If the party that is now out wants to get in, they've got to stop this bullshit about getting out of Iraq now. They must be truthful about the status quo, admit that the nation is between the proverbial rock and a hard place, and brace the American people for a long, hard struggle. They must run their campaigns on the basis of the fact that the ("m") mouse is simply incompetent. It's not that he's merely stupid. It's that his particular brand of stupidity is the sort usually associated with evil people. Their brainless actions lead to tragedy and they take responsibility for none of it. The time has past when we can afford to keep brainless krill on the payroll.

Which raises an interesting question: do we have any intelligent politicians left in this country? The possibility truly exists that the election process itself has, by natural selection, produced politicians whose qualifications reside in the bone structure of their faces. To win office they must be photogenic. So, getting a politician elected who actually possesses the qualifications needed to lead the nation out of a quagmire is going to be difficult if not altogether impossible.

I would opt entirely for impossibility if I had not recently seen on CSPAN a young, good looking member of the House of Representatives who not only has the media-demanded qualification of being pleasantly photographable, but who seems also to have a brain that works. I'm referring to a fellow name of Jay Inslee, a Congressman from the state of Washington. If the one performance I saw is an idicator of the man's abilities, then I say let's promote him, make him the next current occupant (and maybe the Mouse can then actually say the President's name without gagging).

The CSPAN broadcast I watched was devoted to a subcommittee meeting in which the merits of the "hockey stick" analysis of global warming was being discussed. For the first hour or so the congresspeople on the committee were grilling six invited panel members, three of whom supported the analysis (which shows temperatures rising at an alarming rate) and three of whom were quibbling with the statistical methods that had been used. No one, not any of the members of the subcommittee who had spoken -- and certainly not the Mouse -- knew the first thing about statistics, so the words passing back and forth between the subcommittee and the panel might just as well have been grunts and growls for all they were contributing to an understanding of the problem. But then came Jay Inslee's turn to ask questions.

He first, in a matter of seconds, asked any of the six panel members who had any doubts about the human causes of global warming to raise their hand. None did. Then Inslee said, very simply, so the debate we're having is not about whether we have a problem, and added that the time has passed for defining the problem and it was now time to take action.

In short, Inslee had nailed the true problem and recommended a course different from the do-nothing process currently being pursued by the administration and the Congress. I was struck by his ability to see the truth through all the smoke and mirrors. He must be possessed of a logical, Spinozistic mind.

So, there is hope. Maybe Mr. Inslee is not the man the Democrats will put forth to do the job. He's not very well known. But the fact that people like him can still be found among the population suggests to me that all is not lost. The problem facing us in Iraq is difficult, but it can't be much worse than we have faced many times before. In my lifetime, the nation has risen from the poverty of a great depression, fought and won a major world war, lost an ill-advised war, rose above the criminal acts of at least two presidents and the sexual perversity of another, and yet is still breathing. But today we face major problems, perhaps as difficult as any we have faced since the Civil War. We must begin as a people to use our minds as active devices, questioning what we hear, rather than letting it soak into our already-made-up minds.

Yes, Mr. (little "m") mouse, tragedy might indeed result if we precipitously leave Iraq, but why in heaven's name should we trust you to solve the problem, the numbskull who put us there in the first place? You are the problem, and it's time for the American people to wake up to that fact. We've done it before, we'll do it again.

The Mendacious Mr. Lou Dobbs

I want to talk about the most disgusting pundit currently peddling his wares on cable TV (CNN). I refer to the silver-haired mouthpiece of the far right, Mr Lou Dobbs. Every evenng for at least the past year -- and I do mean every evening -- Dobbs has belched forth on the evils of illegal immigrant labor. As the faithful may recall, we went over this topic a month or so ago, and given that the collective opinion of the Mouse-world represents the "truth for our times," I was convinced Dobbs would get the message and get off his Hitlerian bandwagon.

I didn't realize two things. First, he was (literally) "getting off" on the subject. Now I confess that it wasn't me who noticed this, but one of the Mouse's dearest friends. She advised me to watch closely as Dobbs's rant reaches its apex (every evening), how his breathing becomes more rapid and his eyes begin to scrootch together as he tries to hide the effects of his gathering orgasm. I did watch, and it was true. His efforts to withhold his burst of pleasure actually caused beads of sweat to pop out on my TV screen. I noticed also something else my friend had failed to mention. As Dobbs nears "completion," the little flag pin he wears on his lapel begins to wave, and just as he passes through the rages of petitte morte (I'm guessing about the spelling, FF) the flag gradually folds its colors and sags into a state of reverential repose.

But the orgasmic effects upon old Lou are only his personal reward. Dobbs's bosses at CNN reap a far more tangible, though perhaps less satisfying, payoff -- money. Dobbs appeals to the prurient interests of the American far-right, and as we all know, there is no limit to the amount of horseshit those worthies will swallow if it is packaged as flag-waving jingo-talk or as the "word of God." So old Lou is -- make no mistake -- a commodity, and his palaver but sugar-sweet icing to the tongues of the rabid right.

Five years ago, old silver-hair made his first attempt to enter the Jingo Hall of Fame by vomitting -- again every night -- on the evils of "exporting America." That also sold well with those who love capitalism but hate its realities, but as the punditry of the party line began to line up against our hero on this issue, he gradually transitioned to his present packaging. Hot cakes never sold so well. The maggotry at CNN, seeing how well Lou's sales were going during his regular 6 -7 PM (eastern) weekdays slot, began scheduling him into other shows as an "invited expert" on immigration issues.

A word about Lou's "expertise." As a Harvard educated economist he ought by now to have said at least a word or two about the economic values presented by the use of illegal labor to harvest crops in sunny California and elsewhere. And he could have detailed the effect deportation of all that cheap labor might have on the price of lettuce, or for that matter, on the lettuce crop, which would probably rot in the fields for want of hands to gather it. But no, Lou Dobbs, a man who should be able to speak with some authority on the pros and cons of the issue has -- to my knowledge -- said virtually nothing about anything other than the evils of "our broken borders." He belongs over on Fox News where the viewers are more accustomed to (and apparently, hungry for ) "fair and balanced" bullshit.

Obviously, CNN views Dobbs as their answer to Bill O'Reilly, the top-rated cable "news" pundit over on Fox. To the Mouse, the difference between Dobbs and O'Reilly is that one of them ought to know better and pretends not to, while the other is just a poor l'il old backroom potboiler who's line is so obviously "off" we are inclined to shed tears of pity. Dobbs used to bill himself as Moneyline, but now his marquee is just plain, simple, and unpretentious Lou Dobbs Tonight, champion of the "little people," and vigilant guardian of the Mexican border.

If he had not in the process allied himself with several of the most hateful of America's hate groups, he might be considered as just another feather merchant, doing what comes naturally in the American scheme of things -- chasing the "almighty" dollar (which is, incidentally, getting less almighty day-by-day.) The Nation reports (August 28, 2006) that, in covering a protest against Home Depot for hiring illegal immigrants, "Dobbs aired a clip of California Coalition for Immigration Reform spokeswoman Barbara Coe" identifying her as merely a "protester" when in fact the group (CCC) has been identified as a "hate group." Miss Coe -- no simple spokeswoman -- "in a speech last year, called undocumented workers, 'illegal barbarians who are cutting off heads and appendages of blind, white, disabled gringos.'" And it wasn't as if Dobbs was unaware of the woman's connections and opinions. He had been warned of the "incipient" dangers of some of his guests two years before. So, Dobbs, and CNN also -- by their decision to keep him on -- have allied themselves with forces that, if they had their way, would build concentration camps, and God knows what else, for the illegals and, I suppose, those who employ them. Hence my choice of the word "Hitlerian" in the first substantive paragraph of this fact-filled dissertation.

But let me end up with this: the fault for the success of Dobbs and his likes rests not so much with them as with the public who continue to tune them in. If there were not a market for their hate mongering, it would not be there. As one of the Mouse's fictious characters, Joanna Thompson, once said, "If people are getting pleasure from doing what they do, they're gonna continue doing it, even if what they're doing is wiping their asses with broken beer bottles."

That lady knew whereof she spoke. Dobbs's evil may not be quite so obvious as the toilet habits of the people she referred to, but his, for being made so palatable to the tastes of the ignorant masses, is far more deadly.

The Return of the Mouse

Several catastrophic events have kept the Mouse imprisoned for the past two days. First a "massive" power failure here in Madison County and, next, a failure -- after the "precipitent" power drop -- of the Mouse's PC to function properly. To make matters worse, even in those rare moments when it became possible to send out emails to my adoring fan(s), the missives were invariably bumped back to me with a message from the "postmaster" informing that my letters were either "delayed" or worse. But thanks to the diligent work of the Allegheny Power Co, and my good friends at Crucial Computers (thanks Jonathan and Brian), the power and the PC are back, and the Mouse is ready to roar ... again.

I want to talk about the most disgusting pundit currently peddling his wares on cable TV (CNN). I refer to the silver-haired mouthpiece of the far right, Mr Lou Dobbs. Every evenng for at least the past year -- and I do mean every evening -- Dobbs has belched forth on the evils of illegal immigrant labor. As the faithful may recall, we went over this topic a month or so ago, and given that the collective opinion of the Mouse-world represents the "truth for our times," I was convinced Dobbs would get the message and get off his Hitlerian bandwagon.

I didn't realize two things. First, he was (literally) "getting off" on the subject. Now I confess that it wasn't me who noticed this, but one of the Mouse's dearest friends. She advised me to watch closely as Dobbs's rant reaches its apex (every evening), how his breathing becomes more rapid and his eyes begin to scrootch together as he tries to hide the effects of his gathering orgasm. I did watch, and it was true. His efforts to withhold his burst of pleasure actually caused beads of sweat to pop out on my TV screen. I noticed also something else my friend had failed to mention. As Dobbs nears "completion," the little flag pin he wears on his lapel begins to wave, and just as he passes through the rages of petitte morte (I'm guessing about the spelling, FF) the flag gradually folds its colors and sags into a state of reverential repose.

But the orgasmic effects upon old Lou are only his personal reward. Dobbs's bosses at CNN reap a far more tangible, though perhaps less satisfying, payoff -- money. Dobbs appeals to the prurient interests of the American far-right, and as we all know, there is no limit to the amount of horseshit those worthies will swallow if it is packaged as flag-waving jingo-talk or as the "word of God." So old Lou is -- make no mistake -- a commodity, and his palaver but sugar-sweet icing to the tongues of the rabid right.

Five years ago, old silver-hair made his first attempt to enter the Jingo Hall of Fame by vomitting -- again every night -- on the evils of "exporting America." That also sold well with those who love capitalism but hate its realities, but as the punditry of the party line began to line up against our hero on this issue, he gradually transitioned to his present packaging. Hot cakes never sold so well. The maggotry at CNN, seeing how well Lou's sales were going during his regular 6 -7 PM (eastern) weekdays slot, began scheduling him into other shows as an "invited expert" on immigration issues.

A word about Lou's "expertise." As a Harvard educated economist he ought by now to have said at least a word or two about the economic values presented by the use of illegal labor to harvest crops in sunny California and elsewhere. And he could have detailed the effect deportation of all that cheap labor might have on the price of lettuce, or for that matter, on the lettuce crop, which would probably rot in the fields for want of hands to gather it. But no, Lou Dobbs, a man who should be able to speak with some authority on the pros and cons of the issue has -- to my knowledge -- said virtually nothing about anything other than the evils of "our broken borders." He belongs over on Fox News where the viewers are more accustomed to (and apparently, hungry for ) "fair and balanced" bullshit.

Obviously, CNN views Dobbs as their answer to Bill O'Reilly, the top-rated cable "news" pundit over on Fox. To the Mouse, the difference between Dobbs and O'Reilly is that one of them ought to know better and pretends not to, while the other is just a poor l'il old backroom potboiler who's line is so obviously "off" we are inclined to shed tears of pity. Dobbs used to bill himself as Moneyline, but now his marquee is just plain, simple, and unpretentious Lou Dobbs Tonight, champion of the "little people," and vigilant guardian of the Mexican border.

If he had not in the process allied himself with several of the most hateful of America's hate groups, he might be considered as just another feather merchant, doing what comes naturally in the American scheme of things -- chasing the "almighty" dollar (which is, incidentally, getting less almighty day-by-day.) The Nation reports (August 28, 2006) that, in covering a protest against Home Depot for hiring illegal immigrants, "Dobbs aired a clip of California Coalition for Immigration Reform spokeswoman Barbara Coe" identifying her as merely a "protester" when in fact the group (CCC) has been identified as a "hate group." Miss Coe -- no simple spokeswoman -- "in a speech last year, called undocumented workers, 'illegal barbarians who are cutting off heads and appendages of blind, white, disabled gringos.'" And it wasn't as if Dobbs was unaware of the woman's connections and opinions. He had been warned of the "incipient" dangers of some of his guests two years before. So, Dobbs, and CNN also -- by their decision to keep him on -- have allied themselves with forces that, if they had their way, would build concentration camps, and God knows what else, for the illegals and, I suppose, those who employ them. Hence my choice of the word "Hitlerian" in the first substantive paragraph of this fact-filled dissertation.

But let me end up with this: the fault for the success of Dobbs and his likes rests not so much with them as with the public who continue to tune them in. If there were not a market for their hate mongering, it would not be there. As one of the Mouse's fictious characters, Joanna Thompson, once said, "If people are getting pleasure from doing what they do, they're gonna continue doing it, even if what they're doing is wiping their asses with broken beer bottles."

That lady knew whereof she spoke. Dobbs's evil may not be quite so obvious as the toilet habits of the people she referred to, but his, for being made so palatable to the tastes of the ignorant masses, is far more deadly.

A Mendacious Turn of Events

Briefly, we should never have gone to Iraq. Having done so, the so-called "war on terrorism" has been made essentially unwinnable. It has been remarked by mice of every breed how it was that, after the events of 9/11, the world was almost unanimously on our side. With allies in every corner of the world, we may have been able quickly to ferret out the main terrorists, put dirt over their heads, and then go on with life as it has been for at least six millenia -- fighting open wars for hidden reasons, rounding up the occasional mad bomber, and watching Lucy & Ricky insult each other every Tuesday night (or whenever). As it is, we have bungled into a world in which Lucy and Ricky are living on Capitol Hill, mad bombers are multiplying like condomless fleas, and the rumors and reasons for war have become, not merely hidden, but labelled "State Secret."

Adding injury to insult, those who engineered the descent into Hell's inner circles are now screaming that those of us (the great majority) who see the world as the mess it has become are "soft on terrorism." Our leaders, who by their incompetence have escalated a matter for the police into a Holy War that's bordering on holy-caust, are implying that because they have managed to contain the "war on terrorism" so that only foreigners are being slaughtered, they should be trusted to continue in office. This has been made completely disheartening by the fact that there are still a few souls who agree with them. Where are you now that we need you, boy with eyes for the emperor's new clothes?

Hmmm. I almost left out the word "new." I had forgotten that it was a shyster tailor who convinced the stupid ruler that he needed a new suit, a Tartuffe whose ability to conjure illusions produced a king and a people unable to see the truth when it was staring them in the face. We certainly have our near-sighted emperor, and our smooth-talking Cheney-type devil whispering golden clothes in his ear. But our case is a shade different from the one that played out when the open-eyed boy pointed to the king's nakedness. We've got a coterie of suit makers, and gold merchants who profit from the illusion. We've also got a flock of people who remain so in thrall to the emperor's divine right to rule they remain unable to see the naked man as anything other than God's gift to humanity. We have a few here in Madison County who regularly have their picture taken as they stand by a lifesize cardboard cutout of His Nakedness, smiling as if they thought it just fine and dandy that on a good day only 35 Iraqi innocents die from the indirect effects of their hero's doings. (The deaths are direct effects by some views of the matter, those that see all Islamic people as terrorists.)

In about 90 days the American people will get another chance to express their opinion of those who led us into Iraq. Many seem to think that expression will result in the turning out of the emperor's sidekicks, but I have a less sanguine view of the matter. One of my unnamed mentors once said that no one ever went broke by over-estimating the gullibility of the American people. As for whether the emperor's invisible clothes will be "seen" remains a matter for the gulls to decide ... and I, a lowly mouse, trust them not at all to see.

But then, we shall see.

Mouse Rules

Three rules, and how to apply them when you're not the second mouse.

These rules were presented to me by an old flame. (Well, she wasn't old when she offered me the rules, and you can take that fact as an explanation of why the rules seem a bit fuzzy in places.)

1. Never look in a woman's purse ('cause you might find something you wish wasn't there).

2. When looking for the iodine, look first in the medicine cabinet.

3. In a fog always dim your lights.

I have never understood the first rule, at least, not fully. I get it that what's in a woman's purse -- or anyone's purse -- is their business, and unless you're invited in, you should, like the rule says, never intrude. It's the parenthetical part that bothers me. I can think of a lot of things I'd like as not find in a woman's purse ... if I looked in, which I wouldn't be doing, don't you see, if I obeyed the rule in the first place. If the woman were someone I loved I certainly wouldn't want to find a draft of a suicide note, or a recently postmarked love letter from someone who ain't me. And I wouldn't want to find a pregnancy test kit -- I mean, if she were young enough for the thing to be of personal value to her, and if I knew her well enough for such things to have emotional relevance for me. I'm sure there are many other things I wouldn't want to find in a woman's purse, but as you see, that's not the reason I would take the rule seriously. Some rules ought to be obeyed without regard for the effect -- good or bad -- they might have on you if you broke them. (I think that makes sense, but I'm not sure.)

By one way of thinking, I understand the second rule as the sort of advice Mr. Spock might give to Captain Kirk. Think and act logically. When I heard the rule I was nowhere near creative enough to see it any other way, but now that I am a fully grown Mouse, old and wise, it occurs to me that people who are "looking for the iodine" have some sort of wound that needs treatment, and given the rule's commonsensible simplicity, it may imply that the "first" place to look, while logical, is not necessarily going to heal the wound. It's not "iodine" per se that the stricken man is looking for; it's healing. But then, as I said earlier, the person who gave me the rules was no older or wiser than I was when she gavce them to me, so maybe she meant it the easy way. "Think about it, Frankie. This makes no sense." And right she was. Still ... there's the wound to deal with.

And that's where the third rule comes in handy. Odds are, the iodine is in the medicine cabinet, and even though the chances are not quite so certain that iodine will do the trick, it's almost a certainty that if you run around in a fog with your head full of glaring lights, you're not only not going to heal your old wounds, you're going to add to them. But there's still a niggling of doubt here. Looking at these rules, or any rules as guides to living life, it's fairly clear that the person who follows rules is going to go around never taking chances and, consequently, never finding anything that's not there in plain sight that any self-respecting robot couldn't find.

At about the same time these rules were being laid on me, I was also learning a different sort of lesson from a different sort of person, a dead woman, old and wise. She was an educator, and one of the "rules" she had embraced -- she may even have invented it -- was that "education is not about getting ready for life; education is life." Those are probably not her exact words, but I don't think they've lost much in the paraphrase. We live best when we live as learning people. We live best if, when looking for the iodine, we look in a woman's purse, even though we may find there something we wish had not been there. And because we're always being educated, and thus are never quite educated, we're constantly in something of a fog. But then, so is everyone else, and when the bright lights go on, and more than one of us begins to see the truth of the fog and the frightfulness of the things we might run into by taking a look where we're not supposed to look, maybe, just maybe, if we exchange a few knowing glances, recognizing each other's wounds, maybe, just maybe we'll all open our purses to the world, empty them onto the floor and let the stuff fall where it will. Then maybe, sorting it all out in the fog, we'll find the real iodine.

But even if we don't, who cares a rat's ass? Life's for living and living's for learning. All that stuff to rummage through ... boy! bound to be a lot of learnin' goin' on in that foggy, foggy medicine cabinet.

Indirection as "Mendacity"

A commenter -- or better, "commenteress" -- has suggested that I write about the Blacksox scandal of 1919 and do so without mendacity. I have no intention of adding my uninformed three-bits worth to the tons that have been written about "Shoeless" Joe's innocence -- except to say, I believe in it. I intend instead to explain the commenteress's cryptic two words, "without mendacity."

First, I have to confess that I received an email from her, adding an authoritative punch to her lack of respect for Joe Lieberman. I replied that I had neither much knowledge nor any concern for Senator Lieberman, but had rather used his plight as a way to set forth my own pet theory about why we are in Iraq without being accused of being anti-semitic. I had already warned another commenter -- before writing the piece -- that he should be on the lookout for its "indirection." By attributing my position to Joe Lieberman, and then excusing him for taking that position, I mendaciously managed to make it seem OK to believe that George Bush had sent Americans to die in Iraq -- and sentenced tens of thousands of innocent Iraqis to death -- simply to provide a backdoor defense for Israel. Had I taken that position more directly ... well, you see ... no one would be likely to accuse Joe Lieberman of anti-semitism.

To add another layer to that mendacious use of Senator Lieberman's difficulties, I now must confess that the theory I put into his head does not rank very highly in my full list of "reasons" (to use the word loosely) we are in Iraq. I say this even though the main architect of the neocon strategy, Paul Wolfowitz, is also Jewish. One can be a Jew and still be a damn fool. My top reason -- taken on the basis of powerful circumstantial evidence -- involves oil. I have said it here before, that even if in Iraq we had only succeeded in muddling up the politics in the middle east, the oil maggots would reap untold rewards of the money sort. Sending the Marines to Iraq would thus be a win-win strategy for big oil, since even if the weaponry of the US armed forces had succeeded, the new "democratic" government in Baghdad would be more or less obliged to create an economic (oil) system favoring western interests (rather than, say, China's).

With such a strong fit of the "data" to one theory, my others -- including the program for world domination proposed by Wolfowitz and his neocon accomplices associated with the "Project for the New American Century" -- gradually faded. Oil's the game and is quite likely to remain the game into the next two decades (unless a Democratic regime takes over in Washington less sold-out than its predecessors to the same big oil interests that own the current US government -- all three branches).

So, now with a full confession of my mendacity in the open -- at no one's expense (Lieberman has never heard of me) -- and the truth of the matter laid out for all my campaign workers to see, I can proceed with a relatively clean conscience to frame my agenda for my own version of "the new American century." And of that unfolding program I promise you will read more in the coming months.

MOUSE FOR PRESIDENT ... AMERICANS FOR THE MOUSE ... THE BEST LAID PLANS OF MICE AND MEN SOMETIMES WORK.

Lets all put all four of our feet to the treadmill and work for a better, safer world, where mice and men can dwell together in peace ... and cats and dogs "will fight no more forever." (Hmmm. Another "Joe" heard from.)

Mendacity as "Hidden Truth"

Some subjects have become so completely surrounded by emotional clouds they cannot be discussed without arousing suspicions of mendacity (in one of its forms). Just take a look at poor Joe Lieberman, the senator from Connecticut. He faces almost certain defeat in the Democratic Party's primary next week, and the man who will win that election is -- in my opinion -- not quite half the man Joe Lieberman is.

Now you might think Joe's losing has something to do with a broad disregard on his part of liberal principles, but that's not so. He's voted the party line 90% of the time, opposing the president's programs right down the line. He voted against the current occupant's tax cuts for the wealthy, against the CO's attempts to "privatize" Social Security, and against . . . well, against everything the CO has tried to foist on the American people as "good" policy . . . everything, that is, except the war in Iraq. Joe Lieberman has stood shoulder to shoulder with the CO and his flock of neocon henchmen on that debacle. And that's why Joe's gonna lose.

I haven't listened as carefully as I might have to the way Joe explains his stand on this issue that is so unpopular with Democrats, but from what I have heard he has been just as uncommunicative as the administration. He has mentioned the "war on terrorism," the virtue of "staying the course," and "stabilizing the middle east," the same drivel we've heard from Rumsfeld, Cheney, and the various press secretaries hired by the CO. Joe could have done it differently. He could have admitted that a victory in Iraq would go a long way toward shoring up the backside of Israel's defenses. A strong American presence in Iraq would severely disrupt the lines of communication and supply between Iran and its allies, the Hezbollah in Lebanon and Syria. Joe could have explained himself on the war by simply taking a pro-Israel position.

This stand would have taken the high ground away from his opponent. He could have made the case that for him, a Jew, to turn his back on a strategy that might save Israel as a nation would have been to betray his faith in God. With clever phrasing, he could have shown how he could understand other people's feelings about the war, but that the stand he has taken was the only one possible for him as a Jew and as a man.

But you see, Joe could not take that position without running a two-fold risk, one, that the inbred anti-semitism of the fundamentalist American people would be brought out into the open, and the war then would be opposed for a more-or-less ignoble (and thus more effective) reason; and two, that he, like the CO, would be labelled -- perhaps justifiably -- as a man parading his religious persuasions as a political ploy. But more importantly, he couldn't take this approach because it just ain't done. We do not do or say anything that might call into question our commitment to Israel.

Forget it that the reason Israel exists as "Israel" and not "Palestine" traces to an old book in which the "God" of a nomadic tribe granted them a piece of already-occupied real estate. Forget it that Israel exists because a guilt-ridden bunch of delegates to the UN, having "permitted" Germany to slaughter 6,000,000 Jews decided to follow through on "God's" orders and, once again, give the persecuted Jews a land occupied by others. Forget it that Israel is stolen land. Weren't the crusades designed to steal the same land from the Muslims and give it to Christians? Theft is not unjust when it can be justified as "the will of God" or "manifest destiny." (I saw that last one trudged out last week in the local paper as justification for the Tex-Mex war and other land grabs perpetrated on the Mexican people who are now illegal immigrants on the land grabbed from them.)

We can forget anything we choose to forget when the fogetting fits neatly into our idea of "the world as it ought to be." We've burnt witches, chopped the toes off runaway slaves, shot labor organizers and their wives and children, and"relocated" whole nations of Native Americans. No big deal. We even put up for three years or so with the lies and distortions of Joe McCarthy, not doubting him for a minute until he stepped over the line and questioned the patriotism of the US Army itself. We can abide horror so long as we call it by a more palatable name.

Joe can't be a Jew and an American at the same time. That's not necessarily a fact fact, but it is a political fact. The people of Connecticut -- good Americans all -- will never let Joe's allegiance to his "foreign" religion work as a justification for his unpopular stand on the war. Hey, I think the war's a shitbag, too. I also understand exactly why Joe Lieberman disagrees. It just doesn't seem fair to judge a loyal and experienced Democrat on this one issue, when his atand can be understood as a religious affair. For the life of me, I cannot see how the people of any liberal state cannot see it the same way. But maybe that's just me, and "they" won't let me vote in Connecticut anyhow.

The Mouse’s Five Smooth Theories

First, about why “five?” why “smooth?” Two questions, one answer: First Samuel, 17:40: “And he [David] took his staff in his hand, and chose him five smooth stones out of the brook . . . and he drew near to the Philistine.”

Now a word about why theories instead of stones. The Philistines are two numerous, “David’s” aim too unsure, and the use of slings and stones is against the law, even if you miss.

About 40 years ago the Mouse saw that the world was in need of amusement. So he laid aside his staff – for a moment – and chose five smooth theories out of his fervid mind. The five were all of a scientific nature, since only by solving the Sphinx’s riddles could the Mouse find amusement for himself, and ultimately for the world.

The Mouse first lifted his eyes toward the heavens, meaning to count the stars. But it came to him in the starlight – here is theory #1 – that the number of stars is less than what it appears to be. Sir Arthur Eddington’s proof of Einstein’s theory of general relativity had revealed to the Mouse that light rays are themselves subject to gravitational effects. They are bent. So the Mouse reasoned that the light from stars far more distant than the planet Mercury – whose rising Eddington had observed – is bent so severely that the same star appears to us from more than one direction. A recent picture in Scientific American has confirmed the Mouse’s theory. The same quasar-like body appears more than once in a narrow range of view. Score one for the Mouse.

Next, the Mouse read somewhere that if a cancer were supplied with nutrients it would never die. From other sources he learned that the distinctive thing about the growth of cancers, and what gives them their deadly nature, is that they obey no morphological law. They grow in all directions, more or less randomly. From those two observations it was simple for the Mouse to conclude that (#2) when we finally learn the true nature of cancers, we will find a direct connection between their lack of morphological direction and their immortality. This means, in short, that when living things took on form, they lost their individual immortality. Candice Pert, in her book Molecules of Emotion, reports that she and her colleagues at the NIH discovered that cancer cells lacked a small appendage which had previously been associated with the cell’s morphological “knowledge.” Normal cells know what to be – fingernail or kidney – partly because of this appendage and cancer cells did not have it. Mouse two, Philistines zero.

A further word about those immortal cancer cells: I quickly passed over the words, “if a cancer were supplied with nutrients.” But given an adequate supply of food, the cancer would continue to grow. Consequently, in order to survive it would require more and more food. Miss Pert also entertains the notion that cancers are macrophages. This characteristic usually refers to cells that consume foreign particles, but if we assume that to the body in which cancers reside, and upon which they feed, the cancer itself might be taken as a foreign particle, then as their food supply becomes more difficult to obtain they might begin to consume themselves. I have no illusions that this view of the matter has not been seen by cancer researchers, and I assume they are working on the possibility that a cure might lie in that direction. But the analogy between the cancer’s dilemma and the problems facing all living beings has not passed the Mouse’s notice. Because sexual reproduction theoretically can lead to species immortality and to unlimited growth, we and the lemmings face the certainty that we shall either control our growth in numbers, or we shall become macrophages consuming “foreign particles.” The rest I leave to the imagination.

Well, this has gotten a bit longer than I thought it might. There are three more theories, one of which I have (as of this moment) forgotten. Of the other two, a proof of one was suggested by the return of rocks from the moon. The second had to do with explaining déjà vu, a theory that cannot be proven at the current state of neural science. I’ll just stop here, and if I am lucky, I shall recall the fifth theory. If so, I will detail all three at a later date.