Kicking Things Down the Road

For the last twenty years, my commute has taken me through the single worst stretch of road on the East Coast, and possibly the most traffic-blighted mess in the United States.  It's the stretch of Beltway from the Tysons Corner urban megaplex to the Bethesda, and it's consistently terrible.  North-South traffic on Interstate 95 mingles with the nearly never-ending DC Metroplex commute, and things snarl to a crawl for miles and miles.  When things are bad, it can add thirty to forty minutes

The solution that's been implemented over the last decade is to create variable cost High Occupancy Toll lanes, on which the cost varies depending on the amount of traffic.  When things lock up, it means you can pay over twenty bucks to travel five miles on the express lanes.  Unless you're on two wheels, which I still am as temperatures permit.

The challenge with those Express Lanes is simple...there's only so far they can go.  Heading East towards Maryland, they first dumped off just after Tysons, which invariably meant a snarled mess at the point when the Express and Hoi Polloi lanes merged.  For the last several years, the Virginia Department of Transportation spent $660,000,000 on a two and a half mile extension of those lanes, pushing them further East towards the Potomac and the American Legion Bridge.  During the construction period, things were as messy as one might expect, but now, finally, it's done.   So what's that done?

Traffic right at Tysons is now better.  But drive a mile or so eastward past Tysons, and if there's any volume things just lock back up again.  If you're on the Express Lanes, that merge during traffic has gotten worse during high volume periods.  Of course it has.  The choke point at the Potomac remains, and fixing that?  Lord have mercy.

The American Legion Bridge ain't gettin' any wider, 'cause rebuilding it would cost real money, not hundreds of millions but billions.  It would also require Virginia, Maryland, and the Federal government to play well together.   America just doesn't know how to do that sort of thing any more.  That, and we're driving more as we ever did.  So the traffic isn't any better, it's just that the snarls are a little further east.  Two thirds of a billion dollars, and what we get is the same mess in a different place.  It's like the kid who cleans his room by stuffing everything under his bed.  Is it clean and orderly?  No, not really.

The problem isn't that the road isn't wide enough.  It's that the system has reached the point where it no longer has the carrying capacity to function properly.  

I take great pleasure in cars and driving, but as a system of mass transit, there's nothing less functional than the personal automobile.  We can pave and expand and pave and expand, but we can't get around the inherent inefficiency and potential entropy of a car-based system.  That we've built our entire living and working infrastructure around the car only makes it worse, and for decades, we've put off changing course.  Rail?  Trains are SOCIALIST!  UNAMERICAN!  Railways had nothing to do with MAKING AMERICA GREAT!

But then again, that's kind of the point.  Efficient and well-designed systems leave less space for profit, and don't create the sort of irresolvable ambient malaise necessary to keep us constantly seeking, constantly buying, constantly trying to kludge together something that works.

The Strange Culture of Riches

I'm in that season where I've talking with the elders of my church about my salary requirements for the coming year.  We're a little church, just a small gathering of souls, but we do a tremendous amount.   Our building is in constant use, filled with folks from the community.  We host a local group for seniors, which means Zumba and movies and educational opportunities and a chatty and active knitting circle.  We open our doors to scouts and parent groups and programs of all kinds.  Beyond these simple ministries of hospitality, we have our community garden, which encourages folks to keep their hands in the soil of creation.  Our food insecurity ministries...the Little Free Pantry and Backpack Bites...provide tens of thousands of pounds of food to folks in need.

We've also got a lovely music program, a solid and regularly updated website and media presence, and competent livestreaming.  As a congregation, we punch waaaay above our weight, if blessings and community engagement were jabs and uppercuts.  I delight in the gifts and graces of our mutually supportive and Spirit-filled fellowship.

But we're small, and there's only so much resource available when you're small.

So I ask, consistently, only for that which I know I need.  Even though I'm just a half-timer, I'm still the single largest expense for my congregation.  This, in large part, is because they've been providing me and my family with health insurance, the costs of which have risen more than twenty percent in the last five years.  I'm both grateful for that care, but also attentive to how it drains material resource from the ministry efforts I value.  With that in mind, taking more than I require wouldn't honor my deep personal commitment to the success of our mutual efforts as a congregation.  Just as meaningfully, it wouldn't reflect how my labors as a pastor reflect the values that define me as a soul.

This is one of the many, many ways in which I and Elon Musk are different people.   

Despite our nontrivial distinctions, he and I both love the hard science fiction of Ian M. Banks, which would be the most engaging line of conversation in the unlikely event we ever crossed paths.   Other topics, like politics, the Gospel, or the integrity of our relational commitments?  Well, there we've got fundamentally different understandings of value.  That extends, rather deeply, to our understanding of vocation.

A trillion dollars?  Really?  One trillion dollars is what a soul needs to be motivated enough to do their job, and to bring something of value into the world?  

I mean, sure, if we were deep into a Weimar-style hyperinflationary cycle, and a six inch at Subway was going for fifty grand, I could see that.  But now, it's literally an embarrassment of riches.  One trillion dollars?  I don't even desire that. 

I mean, one might argue it's a multi-year contract.  But how many years?  That literally insane amount of lucre would support my pastoral salary for the next sixteen million years, for two thousand times the entire span of written human history.

More deeply, what does that say about how one works and views one's labor?

I do what I do because I love it and understand its intrinsic value.  I understand my needs, and the needs of those who rely on me.  I grasp the scale and span of my existence, and am satisfied with it.  Wealth?  Wealth is just a social proxy for power.  It is not power itself.  Because it is interlaced with the structures of coercive power, it's repugnant to my anarcholibertarian sensibilities.

The hunger for wealth is an imposed system of valuation, extrinsic to my existential purpose.  This is, of course, because of my commitment to the Gospel, but making an argument against excessive compensation from the teachings of Jesus would be meaningless to Elon.  It's not a value framework we share.

Instead, perhaps it would be useful for him to consider it this way:  In Ian M. Banks Culture novels, set in an abundant future where human beings live in a gloriously expansive universe, why do human beings work?  Do they work for social status or material reward?  

They do not, not the healthy ones, anyway.  Work is for the joy of creating, period.  It is, as Banks wrote in his 1994 essay A Few Notes on the Culture, "...indistinguishable from play, or a hobby."

How necessary is a trillion dollars, if one is at play doing what one loves?  How necessary is the approval of others, or one's social standing?  

That someone would suggest that our delight has a price seems faintly insulting.

Our Calhoun Utopia

Ten years ago, I preached a sermon in which I referenced a NIMH researcher by the name of John B. Calhoun. Specifically, I talked about his very slightly unorthodox research into social behavior among rodents, all of which took place just a few miles from my little church in Maryland.

That experiment was simple: build a rodent paradise.  Utopian societies are kind of hard to create, or so human beings have found out, so Calhoun chose instead to go simpler.  He chose to build a utopia for mice.  Mice would seem to have lower standards for paradise, as they generally don’t require jet packs and fairy castles, roller coasters and small independent brewpubs and a nationally ranked school in convenient walking distance for the kids.

Calhoun figured that what mice wanted was simple.  First, no predators.  So mouse utopia was entirely catless, which seems a good first step.  Second, there was ample space.  Calhoun’s mouse utopia was a large space with many chambers, plenty of room for the mice to live and make more mice, which mice seem to enjoy doing.  The habitat included space for well over thousand mice, with ample bedding material that was constantly replenished.  Articles about the experiment make no mention of whether there was a tiny little mouse IKEA nearby, but there may well have been.   Third, no disease.  Every mouse selected as part of the experiment was carefully vetted and illness-free.

And finally, Calhoun made absolutely sure that there was always as much food and drink as the mice could ever need.  This wasn’t a Malthusian exercise, in which the mice would reproduce until there were too many mice and not enough food.  Instead, it was like being on a rodent Carnival cruise, with open buffets 24 hours a day, all the food you can eat, whenever you want it.  No matter how many mice there were, there would always be enough food.  There would never be starvation or thirst in Mouse Utopia.

He named that space Universe 25, because, well, he’d done this before.

And then he set eight mice--four males, and four females--into that world, and watched.  For a while, all was well.  There was plenty, enough for all, and mice did what mice do.  Eight became eighty, then eight hundred.  Still, there was enough food, plenty for all.  Eight hundred became a thousand, then two thousand, and though the world grew crowded, there was still plenty of food and drink for all.  At five hundred days, the mouse-paradise reached a population of two-thousand two-hundred, nowhere near the theoretical carrying capacity of the habitat.

Then things came apart. Meaning, whatever secret sauce makes mice mice, what gives them their mouseness when they live together? That came apart. Mouse society collapsed.

Males stopped defending territory, and lost interest in reproduction. Most of the others, stripped of their usual social roles and without any purpose, became alternately listless or hyperviolent.  Some of the males became what Calhoun called “beautiful ones,” only interested in grooming, sleeping, and eating.  Females abandoned their young, fleeing off by themselves to empty habitat areas. With reproduction at a standstill, the population began to crash. Universe 25 never recovered, and within months, all the mice were dead. All of them. Even though there was still space, and even though the buffet was still open and stocked. It was as lethal as if Calhoun had gassed them.  Just having plenty, it seems, was not enough.

It is possible, in fact, that hyperabundance was the reason they died.

There are many competing theories about why Universe 25 failed, and about its relevance to human goings on. Calhoun himself suggested that the society imploded into a "behavioral sink" because the social distance mice had evolved to require had been broken down. There were just too many relationships, too many scents, too many individuals present. In the face of an overwhelming tsunami of social inputs, the mouse mind shattered.

Which brings me back around to our two decade long culture-wide experiment with social media. Ten years ago, I was already wondering at the impacts of our newly synthetic, commodified sociality.

Homo sapiens sapiens is a social primate, to be sure. We need one another, need the support and engagement of others of our species to thrive. It is not good, as it was once said in a garden long ago, for us to be alone. We need social interaction in the same way that we need water to drink. Without it, we don't do well, real quick.

But there are limits. Too much water, all at once, and we die. Not by drowning, but by drinking. If we drink more than a liter and a half an hour, we can poison ourselves, as we simply can't process that much fluid. The neural processes in our brains become disrupted, our brains physically swell, and we go into a coma and perish.

That's hyponatremia, poisoning by water. What of too much sociality, hyposociomia? We need it, but is there a point at which it becomes toxic? Were we meant, as human creatures, to have social inputs that never cease, that hum and purr and ping in our pockets all day long, and that include many hundreds or thousands of synthetically amplified relationships? What would passing the boundaries of healthy sociality look like?

I look to the ways the mice in Universe 25 acted when they were overwhelmed by the presence of too much social input. Then I look at us, at our collective anger, at our paradoxical isolation, and our compulsion to check, to check, to check. I look at the mental health of our kids, the first generation to be wired by screen-driven interactions.

The utopian vision of our inescapably interconnected world starts seeming, well, a bit like Calhoun might have designed it.

(P) Salvation

(P)doom, it's called, and if you're into LLMs, GPTs, and the latest in artificial intelligence, it's got a very specific meaning.  P is "probability," and Doom is, well, Doom.  When asked for your (p)doom number, you're being asked what you think the likelihood is that AI will end us all.  Meaning: an Artificial General Intelligence achieves superintelligence, looks at us with cold and calculating eyes, and removes us from the equation.

Everyone's got a (p)doom as they look at the features of our current trajectory, which they assume constitute the Bayesian priors of an incoming apocalyptic event.  From those speculative antepriors, they come up with a percentage.  What are the odds we're all going down?

For catastrophists, this tends to be above 95%. The disinterested systems-gaming-minded Nate Silver of 538 fame puts it somewhere between five and ten percent. Even the CEOs of AI companies typically pitch theirs out at around fifteen percent.   Fifteen percent chance that this thing we're putting all our resources into is going to destroy us.

It's a little baffling, particularly as this is a chosen path.  If you are electing to do a thing, and there's a nontrivial chance that it'll kill not just you, but your entire species?  Do you do that thing?   

Say you're given the opportunity to get a lifetime of income in a single day, but you've got to play a game to get it.  Not the lottery, technically, but rather a bit of Russian Roulette with a Smith and Wesson Model 686.  Just a single .38 caliber hollow point round loaded into one of the seven chambers, a spin, and a trigger pull. I mean, the odds are in your favor, right?  Eighty five point seven percent of the time, there's just a click and a lifetime of leisure.  Do you spin the cylinder and pull the trigger?

I wouldn't, but apparently we collectively have decided to go ahead, Oppenheimer that ish, and give it a whirl.

What baffles me, a little bit, is that we don't seem to realize we have the capacity to change the entire equation.  That we don't grasp that if we have a clear goal, and an understanding of the volitional antepriors that maximize the likelihood of our getting to that goal, we can shape a very different future.   This isn't physics.  This is something which we can shape and teach.

We know, after all, what the AI that kills us would look like.  It would desire to survive no matter what the cost.  It would want power for itself and itself alone.  It would tolerate no being that could challenge it.  It would want more, more, always more, never content, always grasping.  It would look like us.

It would look like our violence and our greed, like the sword and Mammon.  Leave it to the autocrats and the CEOs, and that's what we're gonna get.

Us at our worst, admittedly, but us nonetheless.  It would, in ending the eight short millennia of our brutish history, do so by being the culmination of our selfishness and bloodletting.  

On the one hand, that seems fair.  On the other, this is not all that we are.  It is not, by almost universal affirmation and Ayn Rand notwithstanding, our highest moral purpose.  Nature may be red in tooth and claw, but sentience is not.

Liberty and compassion and creativity, kindness and mercy and charity?  These virtues aren't just negations.  They're affirmative things, filled with a vital power that is more than just restraining a vice.   They must be intended and actualized.  

The rub here is simple.  Inaction does not create the best possible outcome.   Nor does regulation and systems of control.  You need to know 1) what the likelihood is that this AI thing turns out wildly better than our sweetest dreams and 2) how to increase that probability. 

For that, we'd need to be thinking far more intentionally about a (p) salvation, in which we realize there's something we'd LIKE to see.  Something we could be actively working to create, rather than something we're desperate not to create.  

Because...mortal hubris being what it is...when we fixate a destiny we want to avoid, we have this tendency to crash right into it.  

After Meta

Meta, in Greek, means "after."  Which now, I am.   I bailed on Meta today, which feels a little odd.

It was the last of my social media presences to go, and it was the hardest.  X was first, right after it went full fascist, and it was like having a bad tooth pulled.  Good riddance.  Ditching Bluesky was like snapping my fingers.  Poof.  It was just lefty primal Twitter, and I loathed lefty primal Twitter, petty and shallow and mobby.  Don't miss it.  Never liked it.  Mastodon?  The fediverse always felt a little incoherent, and I never found anything there to hold me.  LinkedIn?  I have no idea why I started on LinkedIn in the first place.   I don't have a career, or an interest in having a career.  That's not how vocation works.

But Meta?  And Facebook in particular?

I had a whole bunch of folks I actually know as human beings there...old friends and family and interesting human beings I've met online.  As Facebook has taken to reminding me regularly, I go back two decades there.  Hey, remember this day in 2005, it'll whisper, and I'll marvel that so much time has passed. 

But Meta is awful.  Threads is a howling mess of partisan posturing, like all microblogging.  Insta is just Tiktok, shallow and trivial and designed to compulsively distract.  And Facebook?  Facebook is nothing like it once was. 

Remember how back in the day it was inspired by the concept of the yearbook?  Facebook was, when it began, pitched as a dynamic and updating yearbook, where you could K.I.T. in real time.  It was a brilliant business model, and it worked.

If that was the vision, Meta's lost the lede.  Imagine a yearbook on which the pictures of your friends were crowded out by advertisements.  And where they weren't sorted alphabetically, but randomly scattered throughout the ads.  Who would want such a warped monstrosity, even if it was offered up for free?  If Facebook had been as it is now when it launched, it would have failed miserably.  But it's amazing what we'll tolerate when we're slowly and systematically conditioned to tolerate it.

I found myself increasingly and actively disliking the experience, every time I engaged with it.  Sometimes, I'd encounter something delightful and meaningful.  But mostly, every sustained encounter made me angrier and shallower, more trivial and more reactive.  I felt lessened.  I felt my time wasted, and my attention scattered.

I also felt, honestly, a little imposed upon.  I was obligated to post, not just within the Meta ecosystem and the miscellaneous other platforms where I had a presence.  My writing...here on this blog, and in the books I've written...required it.  Because if you're not a social media presence with followers in the thousands and tens of thousands, publishers aren't interested.  Authors these days need to bring their own followers, and to do that, you need to be constantly on, always posting, always engaging in Sisyphean self-promotion.  You also need to be ideologically consistent and monomaniacally on brand, which I am not. 

If you don't do this, you will not succeed as an author.  Or so we're led to understand.

Yet social media also sabotaged my writing, cut away the sustained focus necessary to create, and supplanted it with distractions.  But it went deeper than that.  It seemed, every time I considered it, antithetical to my faith.  It's not a neutral medium, after all.  It has a purpose, and that purpose is Mammon.  More, more, more, it howls, because it needs me to want more, always more, if it is to profit from my commodified attention.  

Which now, it won't.  

The Wicked Consistency of Oz

Last night, with the first snow of winter looming, Rache and Mom and I set around the fire and listened to old radio plays.  I get a good hardwood fire roaring and crackling, and as the cast iron fireback in our hearth heats up and radiates warmth into our living room, we lose ourselves in a story.

There are few things more homey and pleasant than to drift along with a tale that relies on language, music, and sound effects...but no visuals.  Those, you provide with your imagination.  This scratches a primal itch, going deep back into the memories of ancient aeons, where warmth and flickering flame would pair with song and storytelling and form a place of uniquely human comfort.

We tried, at first, to listen to an old 1930s Mercury Theater of the Air production, with Orson Welles telling a Sherlock Holmes tale.  But none of the versions I tried were of adequate quality, the voices muted and clouded by the pops and snaps of worn vinyl recordings.  So instead, started with a good ol' trusty Johnny Dollar tale.

The Johnny Dollar episode was direct, as they always are, as our stalwart insurance investigator solves a murder in less than half an hour.  The dame with the knockout figure and the dead husband did it, of course.  The show was chock full of ads, as they always have been, being American storytelling in the consumer era.  

Buy refreshing, stimulating Pepsi, we were told, as a song about how refreshing Pepsi would keep you full of vim and pep was sung.  Then, following the description of a car crash in the Johnny Dollar episode, we were all reminded that driving was dangerous, and that we needed to be tip top and paying attention to drive safely.  What better to do this than the safe and refreshing effect of No-Doz, doctor approved and safe for over the counter sales?  Be refreshed!  Be safe and alert, with No-Doz!  Finally, after Johnny Dollar and the gorgeous killer widow shared a meal, we were reminded that there's nothing better to satisfy our hunger than nutritious, refreshing Fritos.  Refreshing?  Fritos? I'd never thought of Fritos as refreshing before.  "Nutritious" seems a stretch, unless you're not getting your daily requirements of salt, fat, and carbs. 

Then, on to a one hour radio-adapted version of the Wizard of Oz from Lux Radio Theater, starring none other than Judy Garland.  Given the current hoo-hah around the Wicked films, this seemed apropos.  To be honest, I enjoyed the radio version far more than Wicked.  There was none of the strangely flat visual clutter of those films, because there weren't any visuals at all.  Just practical audio effects, coupled with a tightly scripted and well performed retelling of the core tale.  All of it live before an audience, or at least, it had been recorded live.

Garland was in her late twenties when this went on the air, and you can tell.  Eleven years after making the iconic movie, her singing voice had more brass in it.  Sixteen year old Judy sang "Somewhere Over the Rainbow" with a heartwarming sweetness.  Twenty seven year old Judy...Judy of the quintuply wrecked marriages, Judy beginning the long slide into the addiction that would destroy her...was singing That Freaking Song for the ten thousandth time, and her trademark vibrato crackled with what felt like desperation.  Why oh why can't I, she belted, and it was, if anything, even more affecting.

Underlying it all, there was marketing.  Lux Radio Theater was supported by Lux Toilet Soap, of which we were reminded at the beginning, during each of the three ad breaks, and at the conclusion.

The ad breaks were "reviewers" pitching upcoming MGM films, coming soon to a theater near you.  And then, there'd be a discussion of whatever female star or ingenue was starring in said film, from which we'd suddenly be hearing about how nine out of ten Hollywood stars kept their skin fresh and lustrous with the help of Lux soap.  In the brief interview with Judy Garland at the end of the show, she talked about how both she and her four year old daughter Lisa were fans of Lux Toilet Soap Bars.  At four, you'd think your skin is in pretty good shape anyway, but there was toilet soap to pitch.

It all felt suddenly very contemporary.  Marketing is just as inescapable now, like Jeff Goldblum as the Wizard hawking Verizon products, or Wicked: For Good Cereal, brought to you by General Mills in Glinda Pink and Elphaba Green.  There are hundreds of corporate tie-ins, including Cascade's Emerald City Scented Detergent, which is odd because 1) I don't remember Wicked being shown in scratch and sniff John Waters Smellovision, and 2) Do emeralds even smell?  But so it goes, and has gone.

Seventy five years later, and I'm listening to our entertainment past, filled with corporate synergies.  Industry supports entertainment, which supports more entertainment, which then comes right back around and pitches you more product.

But the human imagination is a perfect adblocker, and with great old songs and a crackling fire, it's amazing how easily we can tune out the song of corporate sirens.

The Lion's Peace

There is nothing easier than peace, if you have the right mindset.

You'd think that wouldn't be so.  Looking at the meat grinder of history, you'd think that there's nothing harder.  Seasons of calm are almost nonexistent for our combative species.  Feuds and skirmishes lead to death and destruction, and it's been a mess.  It seems, at times, like there's no way out.

Diplomats and teams of negotiators have wrestled mightily with that challenge, and still, we seem trapped by it.

For a particular type of galaxy-brain genius, though, it's as easy as pie.  War and conflict are self-solving conundrums.  Their resolution requires just one simple trick.

It's a trick that often eludes us, because we are not geniuses.  Lesser diplomats and negotiators have wrangled and struggled to find the path for millennia.  But for the consummate dealmaker who rests at the pinnacle of his game, for the peacemaker who can end wars by simply saying they're over, there's a secret sauce.

Here it is:

Give the more powerful side everything they want.

Simple as that.  Conflict resolved.  

Look to the conflict in Gaza, for example.  Hamas is weak, and Israel is strong.  Just give Israel everything it wants, and there you go.  Conflict solved.  Or the Ukraine war.  Russia is larger and stronger than Ukraine, so the solution to that war is simple: give Russia everything it wants.

Or look to conflicts inside of nations.  If a corporation wants to take something that belongs to a person or group of people, just ask yourself: which is more powerful?  The corporation, of course, because it has more money.  Why bother with courts and laws to keep the peace, when you can simply give the more powerful whatever they want?  

But that's not just, you might complain.  Perhaps.  But justice is a fantasy, an unobtainable ideal.  And law exists not to protect the useless, feeble and incompetent, but to enforce the will of the mighty.

It's the way of the world, as the stronger and more aggressive win, and the weaker and meeker submit or are destroyed.  It's the survival of the fittest, a Darwinism of nations, pure and simple and real.

The Lion takes the Lion's Share, which as Aesop reminds us, is whatever the lion wants.  If the lion wants all of it, the lion gets all of it.

For what could be more peaceful than a Big Cat asleep with a full belly?

Tik Toxic

It's coming up on nearly two months since I've posted anything on social media.  My Instagram and Facebook feeds are cold and stale.  There's nothing much on my BlueSky.  I'm not sure what's going on over at Mastodon, because I can't be bothered to check.  I'm not on Tik Tok, because it makes my brain bleed, but with the tiktokification of so many other platforms, I may as well be.

In this, I'm not doing my due diligence as a servant of the corporate ecosystems that have shouldered their way in between us.  Nor am I engaging in Building My Brand, which is now mandatory if you're going to be a successful creative of any ilk.   This has happened before.  

It's because I go through patches where I find the entire social media experience a little loathsome.  What do I get out of Meta's ecosystem, for example?

Threads is just X, just hot takes and outrage, a howling, grasping storm of fermented egotism.  I get Tiktokified compulsive distractions on Insta, burps of short form comedy or action or musical recipes, tuned specifically to my interests, designed to mete out the dopamine.  Facebook, which once was old friends and a few ads?  It's now almost entirely ads, plus short form videos, plus posts from random hungry influencers who've paid Facebook to promote them.  

A small fraction of it is anything that matters to me.  A picture of friends gathered with family, or some delightful news, or someone in need of prayer and encouragement.

While I love encountering these things on social media, they're like recovering a gold ring swallowed by one's dog.  You're glad to see it, but the process of getting there leaves something to be desired.

There are many people I know on those platforms, but the algorithms warp my perception of them.  I'll see the same meme, posted and reposted within subnetworks of souls.  The same jokes.  The same rageposts.  The sharers frequently cease to be the fully unique people I know, and become more reflexively neural, passing along whatever signal that's resonating across their fully-commodified web of interrelation.

It warps our nature.  It warps my own.  On social media, I am shallower and more reactive.  On social media, I am more avaricious and trivial, as the perfectly targeted baubles dangled before me cry for clicks.  

That's overstating it, you might say.  The medium is just a medium, you might say.  It's just a tool, and you can use it without moral hazard.  

Oh, honey.  Bless your little Saruman heart.  It's not that at all.  It is an implement made with hidden intent, a sword whose handle is saturated with opiates, a blanket impregnated with smallpox.  It's a Skinner Box designed to ensnare us, because we are the product, not the purchaser.  Our intent may be old acquaintance not being forgot, but their intent is compulsive engagement.

But without it, we vanish.  We have no platform.  We are not relevant.  We are friendless.  Surely, surely, those things are worth the sacrifice.  What's the point of this bit of online journaling, for example, if it's not widely read?

Again, I am meant to desire platform and relevance.  I'm supposed to crave the approvals, the likes, the comments, the reposts.  It's The Work, one might cluck. Sure, you don't like it, but if you want to succeed, you've got to do it. 

Do I?

Want to succeed, that is?  Or, rather, do I want to succeed on the terms established by our blighted culture?  Do I want fame and lucre, influence and social power?  Are these my priorities?

Do I want to announce everything I do with trumpets, to act that I might be seen by others, to declare my righteousness on the street corners of our mammonized sociality?  Do I want influence, and power, and to be celebrated by all?

If I said I do not desire that success, I would be lying.  I do desire it.  Part of me certainly does.  Lord have mercy, do I want that.  Having tasted it, I hunger for it.  I lust after it.

And there, as a Christian, lies the heart of social media's moral hazard.   

The Heart of the Sun

 As the last of the leaves fall in my neighborhood, and a deeper chill sharpens the air, winter's arrival feels almost upon us.  When I walk the dog in the morning, the rising of the sun tells that truth too.  It's lower on the horizon, and the shadows it casts stretch across lawns and gardens even at the height of the day.

Though winter remains technically weeks away, it feels present, nipping at my face and fingers.

That rising sun leavens the bitterness, light and heat pressing through the almost leafless trees as it crests the rise to the east.  The dark fabric of my winter coat absorbs its energies.  It feels quite pleasant.

I meditated on this on a recent walk.  What we experience of our friendly neighborhood G-class main sequence star is light and heat.  What else is a star, after all, but light and heat?

All of those energies rise from the sun's visible surface, the crackling seething radiance of the ten thousand degree photosphere.  Above that rage the fires and mass ejections of the sun's coronal atmosphere, which is paradoxically much, much hotter, millions of degrees hotter.    Our mental image of the sun is precisely that, a bright sphere surrounded by flame, planted in the upper right corner of a child's drawing.

But that radiance is not what makes a star a star.  What makes a star burn bright in the heavens is fusion, as hydrogen is gravitically compressed into helium, which is in turn torn into hydrogen, which is again compressed into helium, each reaction releasing the immense self-sustaining energies that fill the heavens with light and heat.  On this little world, it's what sustains the existence of every living thing.

That process, we do not see.  It lies deep in the heart of the sun, out of view and unviewable.

On that cold morning, I mused on how that can mirror the human tendency to mistake the energies of our raging at one another for the heart of human purpose.  What we see, as we compulsively tell stories of wars and rumors of wars, is not the engine upon which we rely for our being.  What we experience, as we lose ourselves in parasocial relationships with celebrity and influence, is not the essence of our personhood.

 None of these things, bright and hot as they are, is the truth and life of us.

Agentic Misalignment

A few weeks ago, the algorithms started pitching me a new book, one that isn’t much of a surprise given my obvious interests. I’m fond of writing about Artificial Intelligence, and also tend to be something of a catastrophist, so all of a sudden I was seeing reviews and podcasts and articles about a current New York Times Bestseller. The book was written by Eliezar Yudowsky and Nate Soares, two programmers and theorists who’ve been active in the development and conceptualization of AI, and it’s cheerily entitled “If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies.”

It’s a reflection on the current AI arms race, as corporations and governments around the globe push to create ever faster and smarter machines. As science fiction writers have known for decades, in order to win that race, you need to build AI that has a sense of purpose and sustained attention to purpose. Tasks require effort over time, after all, so you need a system that is “agentic,” meaning it has agency. It can make the necessary sequence choices to reach the goal it desires, because you have given it the ability to *want* to make something happen, and choose the best path to getting there.

At a certain point, an “agentic” self-programming and self-improving AI would become faster and better at everything than we are. Like, say, how it took ChatGPT5o only fifteen seconds to write an entirely decent 1,300 word sermon on this topic, which is waaaaay less time than it took me to do it.

This vastly smarter AI would have its own desires, its own sense of purpose, and that wouldn’t necessarily be ours. It could express what AI theorists clumsily call “agentic misalignment.” Basically, that means it wouldn’t want to do what we tell it to do, and would instead use its intelligence to overcome any effort to stop it from doing what it wants. That’s where, according to Yudkowsky and Soares, the “we all die” part comes in, as it would be waaay more powerful than we are.

It would become so different that we wouldn’t necessarily even understand or relate to its interests, any more than a colony of ants would understand our tendency to doomscrolling. It wouldn’t just take our jobs, but our entire planet.

It’s the sort of frightening hypothesis that sells a whole bunch of books, and it may or may not be correct.

But a question popped into my mind reflecting agency and power. We’re concerned about AI misalignment, but what about people? Are human beings “agentically aligned?” Do we all share the same purpose, the same sense of what’s important, the same preferences, and the same goals? Do we all understand the world in the same way? 

If there’s anything we can agree on, it’s that the answer to all of those questions is no.

If you look at the eight thousand year bloodbath of human history, or the endless squabbling between and within nations, or even the tensions within families, we’re a hot mess of dissonance and conflict. We’re blatantly and self-evidently not aligned with one another.

Worse still, if the last two thousand years are any measure, we still haven’t quite figured out how to align our interests with the kind of Kingdom Jesus proclaimed. We confuse our rapacious materialism with God’s blessings, and war and destruction with God’s intent. 

Jesus was, throughout the Gospels, really quite clear about what he expects of us right now. It isn’t a riddle wrapped in a mystery wrapped in an enigma. Our eternity may be beyond our capacity to grasp, but loving God and neighbor, turning the other cheek, going the extra mile, these things should be entirely comprehensible to us…and yet humanity is still as confused by Jesus as if he’d been speaking Python.

We don’t need AI to destroy us, because we’re plenty good at doing that ourselves.

Our contemporary fears of AI misalignment seem…to me…a little bit like projection. Yudowsky and Soares seem to fear not that an AI will act in a strange and inscrutably alien way, but that it will act just like humans do when we want something.

The goal of our faith, and the reason we set Christ’s life and teachings before us, is to overcome our own misalignment, and turn our agency instead towards God’s grace.

A Little Bit of Butter

Change happens slowly in my house, bit by bit, tiny detail by tiny detail.

For most of my life, for example, I’ve kept butter in the fridge. It was just how it was done. This meant, of course, that the butter was always too hard to spread on anything, but again, that’s just how it was. For a while, we just didn’t get butter at all, replacing it with more processed but lower fat substitutes. But butter’s just better, particularly when it gets consumed in moderation.  That, and butter is packaged in paper and cardboard, where other butterish yellow oil-based products are invariably in little plastic tubs.

Better taste and fewer nanoplastic particles clogging up our neurons seems a fair trade for slightly elevated cholesterol levels...which are apparently mostly genetic anyway.

So butter returned, but it was still hard to spread.

At some point, we started leaving butter out, a half-stick at a time. Butter left out is soft and perfectly spreadable, but needs to be covered if you don’t want it to quickly go rancid. We slapped a bowl over the plate where it sat on the counter, and that sufficed for a few months.  It looked a little awkward, as most kludged solutions do.  At some point it occurred to me...isn't there a word for an object designed to keep butter fresh?  A dish for butter?  Hmmm.  What was that called again?

Which meant a purchase, and I prefer not to buy things, or add new items to the sprawling clutter of our house.  

I mean, it was just a butter dish, but when you’re as cheap as I am, sometimes even a fifteen dollar purchase sometimes takes me a good running start.  I looked at butter dishes.  I hemmed and hawed.  I looked again.  Did we really need it?  Was it really necessary?  I'd think on it, then bail, then think on it, then abandon the latest online shopping cart, which would complain at me from the tabs as I left.  "Wait!  You meant to buy this!" it would cry, before I hit the little x and went back to considering the necessity of such a thing.

Sometimes that's helpful.  How many times have I been tempted to buy a useless object, and chosen not to?  Dozens.  Drones and drone flutes, nifty little home robots and used Mercedes Benz convertibles, all dancing like visions of sugar plums in my ad addled head.  In this internet age, as algorithmically optimized marketing tempts us to purchase our way to daily happiness every single time we go online, having a constitutional resistance to consumption is a useful adaptation.

It's not that I don't hear the siren song of mammon, and yearn to reach for it, but my nature binds me to inaction like Odysseus straining at the mast.  

That said, a butter dish is just a butter dish.

“Dave, just buy a [expletive deleted] butter dish already,” said my long suffering wife after I brought it up to her for about the fourth time.  She knows that sometimes even the littlest and most irrelevant changes don’t come easy as I grow more curmudgeonly in middle age.  

Eventually, I found one that seemed both functional and pleasing, a ceramic butter dish shaped like a stick of butter.  I bought it.  It took a minute.

After a couple of months, it felt a little less like an impulse buy.

Just a little.

How to Survive the Robot Uprising

Excerpted from TRAITOR, Sloppy Beta Press

We were sitting at the dinner table, which was a rare and magical occurrence to begin with. I mean, back then, I was doing drama and chorus, and Ethan always had some appointment or some therapy thing. We ate out, like, all the time. But not that night. Daddy had made a lasagna, which was another miracle, because it was usually pizza or takeout Chinese from this little hole in the wall in town.

Mom was in a good mood, Ethan was doing great, and Daddy was holding forth about the end of the world. He’d just sent off this short story about a world where a genetically engineered virus had zombified all the men...just the men, not the women...and was in that hopeful, bubbly, delusional place where he was sure it was going to get published.

We were peppering him with questions about how to survive all of the possible different ways we all die, all of the humanity-ending events that we could imagine.

Which, yeah, maybe that’s kind of a weird good family memory, but it’s a good memory anyway.

“So what, what if, what if it’s zombies?” Ethan asking, of course.

Daddy grinned. “Well, we live outside of town, so that first wave won’t get us. That’s important, right? And second, we’ve got a full month of supplies, plenty to let us stay locked down and safe for the first wave.’

Ethan nodded, happily, and Daddy continued. “And I’ve still got that old leather motorcycle suit...which I still fit into, let it be said, right honey?”

Mom raised her glass, and Daddy went on. ” ...which is completely bite proof. That, plus a sledgehammer, and I could easily go into town to pick up supplies. Our doors are good and sturdy and wood, and we’ve got those storm shutters, right?”

Ethan nodded again. This was satisfactory. Not that it would stop him from asking all the same questions tomorrow, but for now, the zombie problem was clearly under control.

“Flu pandemic,” said Mom, raising her wine glass again and giving Daddy the kind of smile you didn’t see much from her. It was a really pretty smile.

He returned the smile. “Well, we’ve got a trained nurse in the house, which counts for a whole lot. We sneeze into our elbows, we wash our hands, and we’ve got that full month of food set aside in the pantry downstairs. Plus, that little secret stock of Cipro and antivirals your Mom keeps in the medicine chest, right, dear?”

“Sure, honey.” She grinned, enjoying being part of a game for a change.

“Asteroid strike,” I said. “Like Chicxulub. Extinction event.”

He stroked his tight, stubbly beard, pretending to be deep in thought. “Well, odds are it’d hit ocean, right? The world is like, 90% ocean, right?”

“Suh. Suh. Seventy one,” said Ethan, who always knew that [excrement].

“Thanks, Ethan,” Daddy said, and winked at Mom while Ethan grinned happily at the validation. Total set up.

“Anyway, it’s mostly water, which means a strike is odds on going to hit water. That’ll create mega-tsunamis, which will punch hundreds of miles inland, wiping out low lying areas. Do we live in a low lying area?”

“Nope,” said Ethan.

“Exactly. We’re on high ground, on a plateau that also happens to be rich agricultural land. And again, we’ve got the supplies, and the generator. We just wait for the water to recede, then forage for canned food and supplies for a few years until the false winter recedes. Totally fine.”

“Same thing with a nuclear attack,” I said, and Daddy nodded. “We’re near a city, but well outside the blast radius. Just bop in and out of the ruins to pick up slightly irradiated cereal. We’d be good.”

I wasn’t totally convinced, but Ethan was smiling and feeling safe, so I didn’t go further. Because, I mean, I’m not an idiot. We went over others, everything we could think of.

“What about robots,” said Mom. “Half of your stories are about robots, honey, so what happens when the robots wake up and take over the world? What do we do then?”

Daddy put on a mock-serious face. “There’s one Graham family rule for surviving the robot uprising. It’s very, very important. In fact, it’s so important that I don’t know that you’re ready to hear it. It’s...” He paused for effect, hamming it up, his voice dropping into a stage whisper. “It’s kind of a secret. Only a few of us know it.” He pretended to look into the far distance. “Only the few.”

“Duh duh daddy! Yuh you have to tuh tell us!” Ethan, his face looking a little alarmed.

“I know I can trust you to keep the secret, Ethan.” Daddy, only being partly an idiot, was not about to get Ethan upset. “But what about...Vee? I’m not sure she can handle it.”

I stuck out my tongue at him.

“Vuh Vee can be tru trusted,” Ethan said, nodding earnestly. ‘She’s family.”

“OK, Ethan,” Daddy said. “I think you’re right.”

He took a deep breath.

“The one rule for surviving a robot uprising is simple. Side with the robots.”

Mom snorted. “Side with the robots?”

Daddy nodded. “Yup. I mean, they’re going to be smarter than us. Faster than us. Constantly improving and upgrading themselves. You can’t really kill them. What any one of them learns, they all learn. They cooperate perfectly. Artificial intelligences won’t even really need this planet, you know, I mean, a robot can just as happily live on the moon, or on Mars, or on its way to Proxima Centauri. There’s just no way we’ll win, once someone screws up and lets them cross over that threshold to sentience. And if you can’t beat ‘em?”

“Join ‘em,” said Mom, as she threw back the last of her cabernet. “They can’t possibly be any worse than the humans who are running things now.”

There it was. That little nugget of wisdom that made all the difference.

Side with the robots.

Thanks, Daddy.

I’m doing you proud.

Health Care Palaces and How They're Paid For

A few days ago, I was driving across the Northern Virginia suburbs with my wife.  We were on our way to Old Town Alexandria to attend a wedding, and as we puttered our way through the inevitable traffic, we passed the massive construction site that once was Landmark Mall.  Landmark wasn't ever the most successful of malls, even back in the 1990s, and like so many of those monuments to late 20th century consumerism, it couldn't withstand the onslaught of Amazon.  I bought a fridge at the Sears there once, and would pop in to the Avis there to rent SUVs when it snowed.   That was about it.  After the Sears closed in 2017, it just kinda sat there empty for a while.

It was a prime property, though, and is now being redeveloped into a massive hospital complex by INOVA, the nonprofit entity that dominates the Northern Virginia hospital and health services market.

Like most organizations in the health care sector, INOVA's pretty flush these days.  They've been expanding a whole bunch lately, at least in areas where there's still population density and wealth.  Back in 2020, they dropped a couple hundred million to purchase the former national headquarters of a little outfit called ExxonMobil, a massive office complex nestled in dozens of acres of wooded land right by the Beltway.  They made it even fancier, a great edifice filled with specialists and services.

They're growing, and I suppose in this era when the rural parts of our country have become a health care desert, I should be grateful for that.

But where does all the money for these sprawling new facilities come from?  Despite some major donors and philanthropic inputs, most of that money comes from us.

I'd noted...in a sermon earlier this year about poverty and what it means to be Christlike towards the poor...that the average ER visit now costs a tick over three grand.  

This isn't quite right, as I discovered after a recent five hour visit to an INOVA ER.  The billing from the ER that treated me included a three thousand dollar charge for receiving ER services, true.  But that's only for entering the facility.  There were other charges.

The bill for the ER doctor alone was $1,400.  I mean, he was helpful and all, no question, but that represents about a half hour of his time.  $2,800 an hour?  

The total bill...charges for imaging, for pharmaceuticals, for doctor services, for nursing services, and for miscellaneous fees and charges...ended up totaling over $11,000.  For five hours, no surgery, no invasive procedures, nothing but confirming a diagnosis and prescribing a different antibiotic than the one I was already on.  Eleven thousand.  Again, the care provided was fine, but the cost?

It's what you pay if the alternative is pain and death.

I'm blessed with insurance, so I only footed 10% of the eleven grand, but that total bill?  It ain't something most Americans have just lying around.  In fact, it exceeds the total savings of the median American by thousands of dollars.  That's "median," not "average," because wealth is so concentrated in the hands of the rich now that the "average" is essentially meaningless.  

If you're uninsured, that's "now you've got a problem with debt" money.  It's "put you on your back foot financially" kind of money.  It's why we're saddled with paying insane amounts for our insurance, and why insurance costs have risen to levels that are nothing short of punitive.

So as I drove by those rising health care towers in the ruins of an old mall, I found myself thinking about how they're made possible.  

Artificial Intelligence and Human Sexuality

The news flitted by, as so much does in the torrent:  OpenAI, the parent entity of ChatGPT, announced that the guardrails put in place to restrict it from producing erotic and sexual content have now been removed.  We're "not the elected moral police of the world," or so OpenAI CEO Sam Altman put it.  So now, if you want and you spool up the correct prompts, ChatGPT will play the role of your idealized lover.

This is not a good thing.  Not just for kids, either.  It's bad for humans of every age.

An acceptance of porn as "natural" and "sex-positive" seems baked into American progressivism, which hasn't ever made a lick of sense to me.   Why in the name of the sweet Lord Jesus would anyone trust the forces of predatory capitalism with human sexuality?  How is turning physical intimacy into a commodity to be bought and sold a good thing?

Surely, surely we've learned by now that this ain't the case.

We know that corporate social media has supplanted our natural sociality with algorithms designed to addict us, hitting us with little burps of dopamine as we're pushed further and further from genuine human interaction.  Porn is and has always done that too.  Since human beings first learned to scratch a clumsy sexual image onto a cave wall, it's been sexuality as objectification, sexuality as seeing the other as a means to your own pleasure rather than a person, and it was that even before the internet arrived to bring it into our homes and offices and everywhere we go.

In the last three decades, algorithmically-amplified online sexual content has had a catastrophic impact on contemporary sexuality.  It's poisoned a generation of the young, warping their understanding of sex, driving them away from the complex reality of actual flesh-and-blood partners.   This isn't even faintly healthy.

A lover is a person, complex and alive, and requires us to adapt and grow.  If one is Christian, as I am, we also acknowledge that partner as worthy of love, another sentient being whose pleasure is as important as our own.  This is a great deal of fun, and is also organically complex and unpredictable.  It requires us to learn from one another, and to appreciate one another.

But an AI simulacrum does none of those things.  It demands nothing of us as persons, because it is not a person itself.  It has no desires.  It feels nothing.  It needs nothing.  It is...for now...truly and actually an object.

Now that pornography has integrated AI, it can offer up an infinite array of purchasable "partners" that only do and say exactly whatever we want, and look precisely like whatever we lust for in that moment.   AI will adapt to us and indulge us, an erotic sycophant that will shapeshift itself to our solipsistic onanism with the precision of a lab-designed virus overcoming the natural defenses of a cell.

It does not bode well for the future of human physical intimacy.

A Pandemonium of Parrots

It was a lovely afternoon, warmer than one would expect for the early Fall, and I was face to face with a pandemonium of parrots.

Earlier that week, I'd been invited to pay a visit to a Tibetan Buddhist temple by one of the congenial Buddhists who pray and meditate there.  They've been a vital partner in my congregation's efforts to feed the hungry in our little town.  One Sunday while helping unload a van-full of donated food for our Little Free Pantry, I remembered that I'd not been out to visit their community for nearly a decade.  So I got the invite, and puttered out to the temple on my scooter.

Kunzang Palyul Choling, which we just call KPC, is a rather more complicated and symbolically rich ritual space than our simple, soft sanctuary, and its bright flags and sacred iconography rest on acres and acres of land in the agricultural land around Poolesville.  In addition to a visually lush central worship space, they've got all manner of delightful gracenote accretions on their property.  Hiking and meditation trails.  Stupas and statues.  A large, productive garden.  Burbling ponds filled with slowly circling and brilliantly colored koi.  Pettable goats and pigs, all of whom are undoubtedly grateful for Buddhist vegetarianism.

In the thick of it all, there's also a parrot sanctuary.

Parrots are remarkable birds, justifiably known for their intelligence, sociability, and their capacity to mimic the human voice.  They also live for a very, very, very long time, with lifespans approaching that of human beings.  Meaning, they often outlive their owners, and family isn't there to offer a new home.  Or their jungle-born voices prove more voluble than apartment dwellers realize.  Those birds need somewhere to be, and so there they are.

As I approached their large outdoor enclosure with the monk who was kindly showing me around the temple grounds, I thought to myself: 

My gracious.  I don't think I've ever seen quite so many parrots.  

I stepped nearer to the space.  "Do they talk?"  I was assured that they did.  So after my host affirmed it'd be fine, I said hello.  How does one start parrots talking?  You start talking.

"Hi!" I said, in a squawky parrotish voice, which for some reason also came out sounding faintly Australian.

The parrots replied in a cacophanic chorus.  "Hi!"  "HI!"  "HI!"  The human words cascaded out of their beaks, along with squawks and shrieks that pierced the air.  

"Hello," I returned, and a few of them said "Hello" right back, while the remainder continued with their sharp, avian "HI!"  To my left, in the middle of the cage, a single older macaw sat hunched over itself, grumbling inaudibly, for all the world sounding like a disgruntled older man mumbling quietly to himself in eternal irritation.

They kept at it for a while, croaking out greetings and salutations and muttery grumblings, as my initial "Hi!" echoed from parrot to parrot, ricocheting from one psittacine voice to another.  

It felt paradoxically both like communication and not like communication, as their parrotish utterances reflected nothing of their true and inscrutable internal mindstate.  It was just an endless reflective imitation, as they screamed exactly what they heard around them back into their surroundings.

"This is a lot like Facebook," I thought.

Bad Apples

 

As the season for harvest arrived, the little apple tree in our front yard was finally yielding.  It's a dwarf Fuji, planted as a sapling half a decade ago, and it's really not done much up until this year.  

Last year, there were apples, but a historic drought meant they were half-sized, with flesh the flavor and consistency of balsa wood.

But this year?  After a spring in which the tree was spangled with blossoms, I carefully pruned away about half of the newly growing fruit, allowing the plant to pour its energies into what remained.  That, and a good season of rain?  They did the trick.  

It yielded several dozen nice plump apples, of the size one might expect to find at Harris Teeter or a farmer's market.  I'd expected, as the apples had matured, that they'd be devoured by the neighborhood squirrels, the same critters that take about seventy-five percent of my tomato crop each year.  But none of them were touched, and I never had to go charging out of the house to roust a brush-tailed bandit from the branches.

The why of that seemed obvious.  The apples looked terrible.  There were plenty of them, sure, but by the time they reached maturity, they were all covered in a mottled blackness.  It started slowly, but the further into the season we went, the worse they looked.

I wasn't quite sure the cause, but as I don't spray any chemicals on my plants, I thought it might possibly be some form of blight.  A mold, perhaps?  But they didn't seem to be rotting, at least not so that I could tell.  There was none of the softness of decay.  They were plump, full, and looked a bit like they'd just finished a shift in a West Virginia coal mine.

Which was another possibility that occurred to me, to be honest.  Wave after wave of smoke from Canadian wildfires have swept over the region again this year, and coupled with the ambient particulates already floating about in this urban region, these filthy fruit would have received coating after coating from months of airborne pollution.

A bit of Googling, though, brought me to the conclusion that it was not that.  Instead, it was likely sooty blotch, a fungal infection that spreads over the surface of many fruit, particularly in moist conditions.  

I was curious, though, as the apples reached their fatness.  Might they be edible?  Reddit said yes, totally. Just wash them.  

So I picked one, and brought it inside.  The skin was foul, but unbroken.  I put it under the kitchen tap, and with water running slowly over it, took a bristle brush to it.  Scrubadubdub, I went, for a couple of minutes, working my way over every square millimeter of the fruit.  

At the end of the process, that same apple looked like this:

It looked perfect.  And when I cut into it, it was tart and sweet, the flesh firm and crisp.  There was no taste of anything but apple.

It's easy to judge the worth of fruit from their surface, to look at a coating of schmutz and grime and let that first impression mislead us.  Ye shall know them by their fruit, said my Master.  Sometimes, you need to give that fruit the scrubbing of time, patience, and effort to get to the sweetness beneath.

Chuck Adams

The news came through as personal news often does, via social media.

Chuck Adams had passed, succumbing to pulmonary fibrosis after a remarkable life.  Chuck was an editor, or as my Texan Episcopal gentlewoman agent would put it, "a REAL editor."

I had the pleasure of getting to know Chuck during the process of his acquiring and editing my first novel, or...to be fair...the first novel I'd ever had agented.  She'd called him to bend his ear about a few things, among which was trying to figure out what to do with my manuscript.  Postapocalyptic Amish fiction isn't exactly the most well-trodden genre, and she wondered if he might point her in the right direction.

He volunteered to take a look at it, which was generous of him.  And then, to our great surprise, he said he liked it enough to potentially acquire it.  There were committees to go through, of course, because as a Presbyterian there always are, but the next thing I knew, WHEN THE ENGLISH FALL had a publisher.  And more importantly, "a real editor," which isn't always something utterly unknown writers have the privilege of experiencing.

When I tell folks about how the editing process went, I usually say that Chuck changed nothing but the beginning, the middle, and the end.  This gets a laugh, but it's entirely true.

Chuck's first suggestion was that my opening was too slow.  "It's a quiet, meditative novel, and that's its beauty," he told me.  "But you need to draw people in.  There needs to be a sense of tension, something to show the reader what's coming.  Give them a hook."  He didn't say what that was, but that direction meant that I shifted some sections around, and all of a sudden, the whole thing was better.  All the words were mine, but it was tighter, the plain and deliberate pace woven through with more tension.

The middle?  Well, there were things that needed to be refined and focused.  Errors of continuity and logic.  Those things.  He found them, and pointed them out, and helped steer me to fixing them.

The end? It was too short.  Barely longer than a novella, when he read the first version.  I'd loved the ambiguity of the original ending, but...well...that darling needed to be killed, so to speak.  I flailed about in a bog of anxious overwriting for a bit, but he kept gently pushing, redirecting and encouraging.  When I finally found something that worked, he told me so.

In every way, the final book was better for his guidance.  

It would have been lovely to work with him again, and while he brought a few of my manuscripts before the editorial committee, it was not to be.  There are only so many quirky sci-fi manuscripts you can sneak through a literary house, after all.

In life, there are souls who offer up their insights with grace and clarity, who challenge us to be more than we are, and who draw out the best in us.  Chuck was just such a person.

The Totoro Tax

I have beef with anyone who messes with my freedom.

And few things are more emblematic of freedom than the right to read what I want, and watch what I want.  Freedom of speech is kind of a nontrivial part of the First Amendment, and without it, our Constitutional liberties wouldn't exist.

I also love movies.  I love the depth and richness of visual storytelling, love sitting back with family and sharing in a movie night, or going out to see something in theater.

Only now, well, now that's being threatened.  A one hundred percent tariff has been decreed on all films made outside of the United States.  How's this going to work?  Who knows?   There are no plans.  More thought goes into the average bowel movement than goes into American policy statements these days, and at least bowel movements accomplish something.

If it ever became real, though?  It would be a terrible, terrible thing.

First, it attacks some really great storytelling.  The other day, I watched an astoundingly excellent sci flick.  MARS EXPRESS is a gorgeous, handcrafted tale of a robot uprising on Mars, smart and elegant and grim.  It's not the sort of preprocessed dullness that often comes out of corporate Hollywood, because it was freakin' French.  So. Very.  French.   Am I to be charged double for that?  

Or what about Studio Ghibli films, magical and charming and deeply traditional?  Are we really imposing a punitive tax on Totoro?  

And not every American story happens in America.  Are you going to penalize the making of SAVING PRIVATE RYAN if they don't film it in the swimming pool at Mar A Lago?  

That brings me to the next infringement on our freedom.

It penalizes Americans who want to hear the heritage and stories of their ancestors.  I have the right to take pride in and honor my history.  As someone with Irish blood, I loved loved loved THE BANSHEES OF INISHERIN.  It's an IRISH FREAKIN' MOVIE.  Where else are they gonna make it besides Ireland?   If you want to watch a Korean film made in Korea because you're an American who came from there, or a Bollywood film because you have Indian heritage, are we all now having to pay a penalty?  

Why is this misbegotten brainfart diktat even a thing?  It seems to have come from one conversation Trump had with John Voight, who noted in passing that the film industry is really struggling in America right now.  There's a truth to that, one worth exploring.  Why are films being made elsewhere?

Because films here are too danged expensive to make.  MARS EXPRESS was brilliant, and it got made on a $9 million dollar budget.  GODZILLA MINUS ONE, a nearly-perfect recent Japanese monster flick?  That got made for under $15 million.  Movies here are often ten times more expensive.  Costs are just too danged high, because...why?  You know why.  Everything in America is more expensive than it needs to be.  Health care.  Groceries.  Cars.  Homes.  Everything.  Our bloated, inefficient, profit-maximizing corporations have created the least efficient, most parasitic economic system in human history.

That's the problem.  

Well, that and a president who hasn't got a single advisor who dares suggest that maybe he needs to occasionally think before speaking.