Concurrently, I had been telling people that in listening to some of Mozart’s more sublime passages (try Ave Verum Corpus), I had a distinct impression that he had gone to heaven and brought them back.  Then I read Walter Isaacson’s Einstein, in which the great physicist is quoted as saying, “Beethoven created his music, but Mozart’s music is so pure it seems to have been ever-present in the universe” (p.38).  On another occasion, Einstein remarked that while Beethoven had to compose his music, Mozart snatched his from the universe, “the way I snatch my ideas from the universe.”

Tricks of the mind?  Humility?  Silly metaphors?  Or is Jung’s “collective unconscious” at play again, informed by the very crypto-structures of reality itself?  I’m sometimes bemused in watching programs on savants on the more serious television channels.  The narrator will suddenly blurt out, “Savants have knowledge they have never learned,” and then quickly change the subject, knowing what has been stated is is taboo in the context of reductionist science.

My stepdaughter Marla was born deaf, and deafness is a condition that tends to cause certain neural connections to be made differently than they are in “normal” people.  She has now had cochlear implants in both ears and has 96% hearing.  (That loud applause you hear in the background is for Dr. Thomas J. Balkany and the Audiology Clinic at the University of Miami.)  The first inkling I had of her possessing stunningly different abilities came when, as a seven-year-old with only a couple of piano lessons under her belt, she began pounding away at the piano as children do.  Suddenly she came up with about four measures of perfect, professional-sounding jazz.  I dropped the pot I was washing and looked over at her in a state of shock as the name of Oscar Peterson flashed through my mind.  She looked at me, smiled and asked, “You like it?”

On another occasion she jumped up on my lap at the computer and took control of the mouse.  (People born deaf are nothing if not aggressive, but she was so charming that I didn’t mind postponing what I was doing.)  She found a word game consisting of a string of letters out of which one was to make quite a number of words of different lengths.  Between us we managed to get all but one seven-letter word.  I couldn’t come up with one and suggested that we give up.  She said, “No, I have it!”  She typed in what looked like gibberish to me, and I remarked that it didn’t mean anything.  Then she hit “Enter” and the game took the word.

I asked her where she had got it, and she said, “I heard it once on TV.”  Well, words that a person who has probably done a million pages of reading in multiple languages has never encountered tend not to be used on Spongebob.  I looked it up in Webster’s Unabridged, and it was there.  And no, I was too stunned to write it down, so I don’t know what it was.  Maybe she does.

The name Marla means “high tower” in Greek.  Maybe there’s an antenna on there somewhere.

Science is hard-pressed, to say the least, to come up with a plausible—and I stress the word “plausible”—explanation of such phenomena.  She was not surprised at her ability to play jazz at that level, at least on that one occasion.  Furthermore, she was completely confident that she knew an appropriate word to finish the game.

Is there, indeed, a ghost in the machine?  Is science being hypocritical in proclaiming that it operates objectively, examining all the facts and coming to reasonable conclusions, when it also sweeps anything not matching its preconceived notions under the carpet?  I am referring, of course, to anything that smacks of a reality beyond the purely reductionistic.

Carl Jung wrote a good deal about “meaningful coincidences,” such as the one that took place when he was counseling a lady who spoke of a dream she had had the previous night about an Egyptian scarab.  Just then there was a banging at the window.  Jung opened it, and in flew a beetle of the European species that most resembles the scarab.

I used to teach a graduate seminar in the works of Miguel de Cervantes, back when such a monumental volume as Don Quixote could be assigned and the better students would actually read it.  At the same time I was devouring popular books on modern physics, and eventually it occurred to me that, while the two parts of Don Quixote appeared in 1605 and 1615, Albert Einstein’s special and general theories of relativity were produced by him in 1905 and 1915, respectively, 300 years later in the two cases.  Was that a mere coincidence or a meaningful coincidence?, I wondered.

Let’s look at what each of them was saying.  Just for one example, as he is about to charge a flock of sheep and kill a number of them, Don Quixote says, “I tell you, Sancho, and it is therefore true,” that the sheep in question are the two armies involved in a great battle he has read about in one of his chivalric novels.  For his part, Einstein denied us the delusion that time is an absolute thing, so that we can imagine that all entities in the universe are acting at the same moment.  So maybe Don Quixote isn’t so far off in projecting into the present a battle he presumes took place in an earlier age.

Then, what about his statement that something is true because he declares it to be true?  (Sounds like a lot of today’s politicians, doesn’t it?)  Einstein also set in motion something the quantum mechanics people have had a deuce of a time wrestling with, namely the question of when and where a potential event becomes “real.”  The Copenhagen interpretation insisted that it only becomes real when a conscious being actually observes it.  Einstein and others fought that idea with claw and fang, but without much success.

I had the great privilege of holding a brief conversation with John Wheeler, who worked with Einstein at Princeton and later gave a name to the black hole phenomenon.  Wheeler had to leave for an appointment, but handed me offprints of a couple of his recent articles.  One was entitled, “Delayed Choice Experiments in Physics.”  He took off from the strange experience of some astronomers who found themselves viewing what appeared to be two identical galaxies in the same region of space.  The odds against this are so overpowering (notice that I didn’t say “astronomical”?) that they knew it could hardly be true.  As it turned out, they were viewing a single galaxy whose light was being bent by the sheer mass of an intervening galaxy and going around both sides of it.

The mind-boggling part is what came out of this.  They realized that they could set up their instruments so that the light from the far galaxy would come around the left side, the right side, or both sides, and that whichever one they chose was the way it had happened billions of years ago.  In other words, they were able to choose in their day what they wanted to have happened in the distant past, and that was the way it happened.  Wheeler eventually concluded that physicists were stuck with the idea that reality only takes place in the mind of a conscious observer.

The even weirder things now going on in membrane theory with its “multiverse” are grist for someone else’s post.

Now, back to Don Quixote.  How far off is he in declaring that he decides what is real?  The fact is that he has concluded before Wheeler & Co. that reality takes place in the mind of the observer.  Unfortunately, he still has to pay for the skewered sheep.

My point, though, is that the appearance of the two parts of Cervantes’s novel and Einstein’s theories of relativity 300 years apart may in fact be a meaningful coincidence.

However, don’t try to declare your checkbook balanced when the bank’s perception of your account balance differs from yours.  For some reason, the Copenhagen interpretation doesn’t work at that level, more’s the pity.  There may be hope, though, in M theory, in which there are millions of universes in which that checkbook is balanced.

All sorts of hysteria has resulted from this.  There are predictions out there that all the coastal cities of the world will be flooded by water melted from the polar ice caps.  Desertification will be a worldwide phenomenon.  The polar bears are already in danger of extinction.  Well, the people up in polar bear territory report that if anything there are too many of them, and furthermore, that that tear-jerking video of one of them floundering around as the ice around it melts was staged.

That sort of thing, in fact, is what set off all sorts of flashing lights and warning bells for many of us.  When supposedly serious, objective scientists begin making threats against those who refuse to get on the bandwagon, something here smells worse than fish rotting in those newly-formed deserts.  Science is supposed to be done dispassionately and objectively, following the information wherever it may lead, even to the dashing of one’s pet hypotheses.  There have been far too many cases, though, of human nature taking over so that pseudo-scientists search for data to confirm beliefs held for unworthy reasons.

So much for belaboring the obvious.

It seems, says the Green Watch America article, that “Steve McIntyre, along with Ross McKitrick, a professor of environmental economics at the University of Guelph, has mathematically discredited the graph, arguing that the bristlecone data was flawed.  Expert panels agreed, and the Mann graph, or at least the science behind it, has been discredited.”  One panel, though, pointed out that other studies have found similar trends.  The problem is that those studies were based on the same faulty data.

Still, a British scientist working in Siberia (voluntarily, or in a gulag?) has used tree ring data to demonstrate the same twentieth-century spike.  As it turns out, this study was based on a sample of “10 living trees alive as of 1990, and five living trees alive as of 1995.”  This is simply too small a sample.  The author of the article concludes, “Once again a dramatic hockey stick shape turns out to depend on the least reliable portion of a dataset.”  McIntyre “found a large set of 34 up-to-date core samples, taken from living trees in Yamal by none other than Schweingruber himself!  Had these been added to Briffa’s small group the 20th century would simply be flat.”  Try playing a hockey match with THAT stick!

He continues:  “Thus the key ingredient in most of the studies that have been invoked to support the Hockey Stick, namely the Briffa Yamal series, depends on the influence of a woefully thin subsample of trees and the exclusion of readily-available data for the same area.  Whatever is going on here, it is not science.”

Ross McKintrick writes, “I have consistently found that when the layers get peeled back, what lies at the core is either flawed, misleading or simply non-existent . . . .  The IPCC fabricated evidence in its 2007 report to cover up the problem . . . .  The often-hyped claim that the modern climate has departed from natural variability depended on flawed statistical methods and low-quality data . . . .  Conflicts of interest are [pandemic], critical evidence is systematically ignored and there are no effective checks and balances against bias or distortion.”

“Bias and distortion” on the part of the scientists whose conclusions we depend on?  That comes across not only as hypocrisy, but as dangerous hypocrisy.  President Obama has called for billions of dollars that we simply don’t have available to fight global warming, and some of the measures proposed to fight it are going to hurt enormous numbers of human beings in developing countries.

For that matter, even some scientists convinced that global warming is real are saying that when the polar ice caps melt, the water will cool off the gulf stream and produce a new ice age, so the new watchword is “climate change.”  Whatever.

With a nod of appreciation to Don Rickles, I think what we’re dealing with here is not hockey sticks, but a bunch of hockey pucks.

In the present climate of our country, however, it seems one dare not even use the word “shoot” in certain contexts, not even if the word clearly relates to photography.  In Western New York there is a quiet little woodsy town full of Wesleyans named Houghton.  Some years ago two excruciatingly Middle-America ladies had the job of sending news from that area to the nearest newspaper, in Olean.  They were asked to take a few shots of—not at—Governor Cuomo when he visited there.  The evening before his arrival they were discussing his schedule by phone.  One said, “Oh, there’s a five-minute break between two events.  Maybe we could shoot the governor then.”

It didn’t take long for the FBI to descend upon ultra-peaceful little Houghton, where they mercilessly grilled the two women over several days about their plans to assassinate Governor Cuomo.  The agents knew every detail of their lives, right down to the brand of dishwasher detergent they used, but the fact that they were utterly boring housewives without even a traffic ticket to their names made no difference.  The agents were determined to find all those who might be involved in the conspiracy.

All this over the one word, “shoot,” clearly in the context of photojournalism.

Now the same mentality prevails with regard to what has been described as “a very competent, credible, funny and concise” film entitled Shooting Michael Moore, which was made by a friend of Moore’s named Kevin Leffler.  The latter’s comment is as follows:  “Everyone I talked to or observed at both the Miami and Detroit showings of the movie thoroughly enjoyed the movie, including many who identify with Michael Moore [emphasis mine].  Anger was never an observed result, so concern about any type of violence directed at Mike seems to be mistaken.  The use of the word ‘shooting’ was . . . in the context of shooting with a camera, which I believe is appropriate given that Mike is a movie type guy.”

But in Traverse City, Michigan, a certain Jeff Gibbs warns citizens that the film promotes violence towards Michael Moore.  This is patently absurd.  He goes on to associate Leffler and the owner of the movie with the murderers of John F. Kennedy, Robert F. Kennedy and John Lennon.  Draw your own conclusions about the exacerbated hysteria involved in an accusation of that kind, especially in view of the fact that even friends and supporters of Moore laughed at the humor in the film and liked it as a spoof.

Presumably those T-shirts one used to see showing the face of George W. Bush against the backdrop of a target were perfectly all right, though.  It all depends on whom one is attacking, correct?

The film was essentially killed in Traverse City by this campaign, and it remains to be seen whether it will be banned in the rest of the country.  The attacker says, essentially, that the right to free speech is suspended in this case because Leffler is advocating the assassination of someone.  Am I allowed to think that just possibly there is some hypocrisy here, and that Leffler’s real crime is that of lampooning a liberal icon?  Some pretty hairy stuff is being used to steamroll over our right to free speech, while, incidentally, pornography is not only permissible but, as one writer put it, held in a reverence formerly associated only with religion.

In the meantime, the reputations of two very good men have been damaged in a thoroughly nasty way, and a serious apology is in order on the part of Mr. Gibbs.

We’d better start thinking about what free speech is really all about before some things that need to be said are repressed under one preposterous pretext or another.

Can you imagine the uproar in the media if that had happened somewhere in Middle America around that time?  All right, now replace “George W. Bush” with “Barack Hussein Obama” and you have what actually happened recently in an elementary school.  No uproar in the media, incidentally.  Big surprise, mega-hypocrisy.  By the way, as Glenn Beck has asked, when did it become fashionable to parade the president’s middle name, Hussein?

I don’t recall any time in US history when quasi-worship services were held in honor of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson or Abraham Lincoln.  For that matter, Dwight D. Eisenhower pulled off the miracle of directing the Allies into victory over an extremely tough foe despite having to deal with the megalomaniacs Montgomery and Patton, and we school kids weren’t made to memorize hymns in praise of him in the late forties.

Just how far is this Obama cult going to go?  And just how long is the mainline press going to ignore unamerican activities of this sort?

It seems to me that we’d do well to pay attention to the terminology used in our Constitution.  The word president comes from the verb to preside.  The word legislature has reference to the making of laws, and the executive branch of the government—that’s the president—presides over the execution of those laws.  The judicial branch is supposed to make judgments on whether those processes are working properly.  It’s ludicrous even to suggest that this is what is happening today.

We knew things were getting dangerous when Richard Nixon was accused of setting up “the imperial presidency,” and we got rid of him, much to the admiring surprise of much of the rest of the world.  Perhaps it is time for all of us to consider returning the presidency to the service-oriented humility of, say, a Harry S. Truman.  Remember him?  He and Bess paid much of their own way when they entertained at the White House.  He drove her back to Missouri when his term was up, and the Congress had to give him a livable pension some time after he left, because he had almost nothing.

Or maybe we should remember Cincinnatus, the archetypal example of how power doesn’t always corrupt.  He performed his heroic deeds and was offered a powerful position but said, essentially, “Naw, my work is done and my place is back on the farm.”  That’s in contrast to King Saul, who heard the ladies around him singing, “Saul has slain his thousands, but David his tens of thousands,” and set out to kill his rival.

In 1937, Lord Raglan wrote in his book on the hero that the concept of deity is a power concept.  In other words, that which is perceived as powerful tends to be worshiped.  We need to watch out for that if we’re interested in maintaining a republic.  When the Roman republic began having to worship its emperors it was done for.

In a Sunday school class I was teaching recently, the Christian virtue of humility came up, and I remarked, “You’ll all have to read one of my best books.  It’s entitled “Humility and How I Attained It.”  Later someone informed me that almost no one had caught the joke.  Did they honestly think I meant it?  It occurred to me that the problem might have been that in our age it is considered normal, if not normative, to promote oneself, even one’s attainment of humility.  After all, an editor had urged me to engage in “shameless self-promotion” in the cause of a book I really did write.

Some of this has come about in the schools, where a major concern appears to be the installation of self-esteem in every student.  The problem is that self-esteem often becomes self-aggrandizement.  I recall a golf tournament at Willie Nelson’s rough little nine-hole course in the Hill Country near Austin.  Willie, in the opposite mode of the one we’re discussing, calls it, tongue in cheek, “the Pedernales Country Club.”  A prize was offered for the drive hit the closest to a rope laid down the center of the first fairway.  It was won by a man who had strutted around with his nose in the air all day.  A friend of his asked him how close he had come to the rope, and, in surprise, the winner answered, “Well, right up against it, of course.”

A few seasons back it was common for NFL players who made big plays to swagger around the field repeatedly pointing at their chests, as if to say, “Hey, look at me!  I’m God!”  My thought was that the league office would eventually put an end to that unsportmanlike conduct, and apparently it did.  What a difference from the attitude of the great Vince Lombardi’s players, who would often make great plays and then quietly return to the huddle.  They figured they had only done what they were paid to do (paid rather poorly, too, in comparison with today’s players).  Casey Stengel was once asked why he didn’t engage in a lot of back-slapping enthusiasm for his players who hit game-winning home runs.  He too made it clear that this was what they were paid to do.

David Brooks, in an article entitled “High-Five Nation” (The New York Times, Sept. 15, 2009), deplores the incredible self-promotion we have come to expect in this country, pointing back to the end of World War II, when the mood of “the Greatest Generation” was subdued and humble.  We had just done the impossible, we had done what Hitler could not bring off, namely winning a war on two incredibly difficult fronts.  But Brooks points out that “fascism had stood for grandiosity, pomposity, boasting and zeal,” and among the victorious Allies “there was a mass hunger for a public style that was understated, self-abnegating, modest and spare.”

Think of Harry Truman’s driving himself and Beth back to Missouri when he left office.

Perhaps the epitome of the new trend was found in Kanye West’s grabbing the microphone from Taylor Swift at the MTV Music Awards to declare that the wrong person had won.  Eventually he made a half-hearted apology to some of the people he offended, but not to journalist Chris Willman, whom he had instructed to kill himself.  Apparently he and Chris have profound theological differences.  Kanye thinks he’s God and Chris disagrees.

There was a tent revival meeting in Connecticut some decades ago in which, during the time set aside for testimonies, a man stood up and announced that, following many years of hard spiritual discipline, he could declare before that congregation that he had finally attained perfection.  The evangelist told him, “Sit down and shut up.  I want to hear from your wife.”

Ultimately it may be a matter of such low self-esteem on the part of a lot of us that we have to try to convince ourselves and the world that we’re great.  But one time a nephew of mine, playing defense at the end of a championship Pop Warner football game, charged through the line and plastered the quarterback to  seal his team’s victory and the championship.  Everyone else on his side was ecstatic, wanting to carry him off the field on their shoulders.  But he slunk off the field, explaining later that he felt sorry for the quarterback he had embarrassed.

Could we be a little more like that, please?

Not long ago I was in a Catholic Church and remarked to the liturgist (a descendant of Martin Luther, incidentally; first you beat them, then you join them) that I liked the crucifix, which showed the risen Christ in front of the cross with outstretched arms.  She said that style was called “Christ Triumphant,” and that the bishop hated it, but that he couldn’t force the church to exchange it for the old style crucifix unless the current one was replaced.

The philosophical background of this assault on authority in all its manifestations was called deconstruction.  Since every text is written according to the prejudices of the author (note the connection with “authority”), and no text can be conclusively proven to refer truly to anything behind it, all we have before us is “the free play of signifiers upon the page.”  From the outset another brilliant former professor of mine, Raymond D. Souza, declared that deconstruction wouldn’t last very long because “if it were true we’d stop reading papers at each other.”  In other words, it was a self-canceling ideology, since the texts in which it was declared to be true were suspect themselves.

Ho hum.

So one day in San Antonio I found myself opening a paper with “Now that deconstruction has predictably swallowed its own tail and disappeared . . . .”  The editor who published the paper thought that line was too outrageous and suppressed it.

Maybe he was a hard-core deconstructionist, but then that is an oxymoron.

The dissolution of authority within the church has had miserable results.  Any kook with a King James Bible has been able to pull out a few emotionally-charged verses and start his/her own church association, and of course on the true lunatic fringe are the dangerous cults.  What is happening is that anyone’s authority is as good as anyone else’s in this atmosphere, so you choose your own poison.  Clearly there was going to be a reaction, and it has taken some interesting forms.  The first thing I noticed was that when I returned to that bastion of traditional evangelicalism, Wheaton College, I found that the great old Wheaton Bible Church was now meeting in what looked like an aircraft hangar with a boxing ring in the middle.  The congregation was talking loudly, laughing and engaging in horseplay.  When that continued into the time of prayer and Scripture reading, I left.

Then I read that quite a number of members of the Wheaton faculty, staff and administration were attending and joining an Episcopal church in Oak Park, Illinois (Ernest Hemingway’s old stomping grounds, but I doubt that this is significant), and that urge to liturge seemed very foreign to the atmosphere when I had been a student at Wheaton.  Some evangelicals were even becoming Roman Catholics, explaining that they were tired of having to make up their own minds about theology when so many ideas were vying for their attention, and they wanted Catholic tradition to do it for them.

Now it seems that there is a significant move by Protestants back to Calvinism.  (See Christianity Today, Sept. 2009.)  Not the hyper-Calvinism of the later colonial period, but the doctrinal ideas of Calvin himself, who has existed in recent times almost exclusively as a very false caricature of himself.  Calvin was the Reformation theologian who took off from the ideas of Augustine and systematized Christian doctrine in his Institutes of the Christian Religion, and he was hardly the cold, impersonal tyrant that his enemies have made him out to be.

The point would seem to be that there is a great thirst for some reasonable authority to turn to in order to rebuild a meaningful church.  I wonder what the sociopolitical equivalent will turn out to be.

As it turns out, it was such a good party at the outset that its momentum never flagged.  At the time of Arthur’s initially painful encounter with it, it makes regular raids on various planets to replenish supplies of drinks, guacamole and chips and incidental necessities.  It has now been going strong for several generations, and the younger partyers are showing signs of degeneracy (not that their forebears didn’t).

Douglas Adams came from the UK but settled in Santa Barbara, where he shared a love for a certain seafood restaurant with Jonathan Winters.  (Someone needs to investigate the possible connection between what that restaurant serves and the production of great humor.)  But it occurred to me that his story of the perpetual, free-floating party is quite a good parable about today’s United States.  In a recent post I quoted someone as calling this “the first entertainment culture since the fall of the Roman Empire” (“Cotton Candy and Circus”).

One of the symptoms, as I see it, is utterly inane advertising tricks such as the slogan of Monday Night Football:  “Is it Monday yet?”  Has anyone thought through the implications of that?  Does ESPN consider its viewers such a bunch of bleary-eyed couch potatoes that they’ve actually lost track of what day it is?  Well, maybe they do, and maybe they’re right in some cases.  Then there is Anheuser-Busch, which in the past put out some of the best commercials of all time.  Who wouldn’t love the one in which one of the older Clydesdales gets back at the young colts for kicking snow on him and the others by smacking a tree and covering the colts with snow?  Or the one in which a young Clydesdale slips into a harness and tries to pull the Budweiser wagon?  Finally he manages to get it moving, and the camera pans to the rear, where an older horse is pushing.

But Monday is my night off? Why am I working?

So what is the new Anheuser-Busch commercial tack?  “Drinkability.”  Brilliant.  Man, every time I see that I’m moved to go out and buy a case of Bud because I now know it’s drinkable and the other brands aren’t.  I had always wondered what was wrong with them.

Have our minds become so blitzed by our orbiting in Adams’s perpetual party that we’re moved to action by this stuff?  I don’t know of another generation anyplace in the world in which people actually paraded their ignorance.  (“Well, I studied French in high school, but I don’t remember a single word of it.”  Or “Oh, yeah, I studied geography in school, but you’ll have to tell me whether Miami is north or south of here.”  Laughter.)  Anyone who shows signs of having more of an intellect than, as Douglas Adams puts it, a demented bee, is passed off as an “elitist.” Do I detect just a smidgen of hypocrisy in that?

Everyone has seen the staggeringly frightening signs of ignorance, but the question that arises is whether people a majority of whom don’t know who fought in World War II or who won are capable of maintaining a representative government.  Non-intelligent, ignorant partyers are emphatically not intelligent voters.

One recalls Harry Truman’s declaration that in the United States a man can call the president an SOB, and all the president can do is call him an SOB back.  Richard Nixon was accused of running “the imperial presidency,” and some others of that tendency come to mind, but they never consolidated their power into true despotism.  I recall receiving the news of Nixon’s resignation in a taxi in Colombia.  The driver told me the world had been watching us, because they knew that in most countries a head of state accused of those same crimes would simply seize the armed forces and take control.  He said they admired us for actually following through on our stated principles.

So everyone is Caesar.  What are the implications?  There is vast power out there, economic, military and otherwise, and no one individual controls it.  The question that must be asked is whether humankind is presently capable of handling the increasingly dangerous power we’ve been handed.  Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein has been pointed out as a warning to a race whose scientific knowledge was increasing exponentially that they might well set things in motion that they would be unable to control.  Mr. Hyde, created out of his own self by Dr. Jekyll, proves to be an out-of-control destructive force.

For that matter, in one novel Fyodor Dostoyevsky placed in a character’s mouth, “The heavens are void.  All is permitted,” and in another he gave us his Raskolnikov, whose crime and punishment were set in a new register, anticipating André Gide’s Les Caves du Vatican (the Vatican wine cellars), which toys with the implications of “gratuitous evil.”  In it the protagonist, anticipating postmodernity’s values, wonders what it would be like to commit a major crime with no motive whatsoever.  Suddenly, as the train he is riding crosses a bridge, he takes a man seated opposite him and throws him out the door.  The authorities never make any progress in finding the killer because they can identify no motive.

Of course, we have progressed—if that is the word—far beyond that in today’s “thrill kills.”  A gang member my daughter counseled still laughed as he told of torturing a woman to death in Fresno, California.  “You should have heard her scream,” he said.

Caesar makes the rules, and if everyone is Caesar, everyone makes the rules.  Some of us think that’s called spiritual and moral bankruptcy.  This becomes corrosive in many areas, but perhaps worst of all in the courts.  This morning I read of a judge in New Hampshire who decreed that a ten-year-old girl who has been home schooled must now attend public school because she has developed some religious views that are “too rigid.”

Would one of you Caesars out there please ask that judge why the girl’s religious views are too rigid while his opinion of her views is not too rigid?  But then, the Caesars have always been hypocritical.

When I turned the television on this morning the first thing I saw was “Officer Killed.”  My system boots up to a news channel where, aside from the weather, sports and the occasional public interest story, there is no news that does not have to do with crime and violence.  Apparently surveys have shown that the viewing public simply can’t get enough of it.  It’s perhaps unlikely that nothing else of interest happens in Tampa.

Of course, we’ve all heard of the old principle that a local newscast had to open with the story of a fire, and sometimes crews had to go far afield to find one.  Now the opening scene has yellow police tape in it.

Then there are the entertainment shows.  The National Geographic Channel has an absolute fixation on crime and prisons, especially Locked Up Abroad, and the History Channel loves to put on Gangland.  I mean, what could be more entertaining than wallowing in the filth of drug-crazed street gangs?  Other channels as well offer us exposés of prison life—Secrets of Alcatraz or whatever.  (Put “secret” in a show’s title and people flock to turn it on.)  In a related phenomenon, not long ago I read that the most-watched show was WWF Wrestling, and now we have World Extreme Cage Fighting.

All this isn’t new, of course.  In the past, before it was realized that far too many race drivers were being killed and some serious progress was made to protect them, I heard drivers matter-of-factly say they knew the majority of fans in the stands were there to see them get killed.  I don’t know how many times I have wondered why freeway traffic was backed up for miles, until I saw that on the other side of the median was a serious accident, and people were slowing down in the hope of seeing people who were dead or dying.

Both of my fields have me attempting to analyze texts to find out what is going on in them, but I confess that I’m at a loss on this one.

The great psychologist Carl Jung took a great deal of abuse in his time for going outside the limits of reductionist science and dealing with what his critics chose to call “mysticism.”  Among his alleged heresies was his insistence that there was such a thing as a collective unconscious, a pool of knowledge, wisdom and imagery that all human beings share.  Since his time, however, those who are not committed to a knee-jerk reductionism have paid attention to scientific studies tending to show that Jung was essentially right.

In such matters the real test often comes when big business puts its money on a theory.  I was startled recently as I watched a two-hour program on network theory, when a businessman described a program he and others had written that scans the internet for key words and concepts in an attempt to gauge trends in that collective unconscious of Jung’s.  The result is a set of predictions about what is going to happen in certain areas of interest in the future.  The most intriguing part to me was that the program has a stunningly accurate track record.  (The fact that it is predicting cataclysmic events early in this century is beyond the scope of this post.)

My point is that I wonder whether that program is also tuned in to our hundreds of television channels, and if so, what predictions it is making on the basis of its observations of them.  Beyond those programs centered on violence and imprisonment that I’ve mentioned, what about the myriad of features on mega-disasters that could put an end to life as we know it?  There is no end to the programs on mega-tornadoes, mega-hurricanes (again, sorry), mega-tsunamis, mega-earthquakes, mega-volcanoes, nuclear war, pandemic plagues, comet and asteroid impacts, out-of-control robots, and the Lord knows what they’ll come up with next.  What does that say about how the collective unconscious is functioning right now?

Maybe people are focused on violence and its aftermath because they are so frustrated by their lives that they need to objectify their own violent impulses.  It might be analogous to the explanation I’ve heard from some lovers of that kind of popular music that makes me think it must be the sound track from one of Saddam Hussein’s torture chambers, that “I’m glad they’re getting it out of my system so I don’t have to.”