"[...] All these questions about crime, environment, children, recall to my mind an article or yours which interested me at the time. 'On Crime' . . . or something of the sort, I forget the title, I read it with pleasure two months ago in the Periodical Review. “
“My article? In the Periodic Review?” Raskolnikov asked in astonishment. “ certainly did write an article upon a book six months ago when I left the university, but I sent it to the Weekly Review.”
“But it came out in the Periodical.”
“That's true; but when it ceased to exist, the Weekly Review was amalgamated with the Periodical, and so your article appeared two months ago in the latter. Didn't you know?”
Raskolnikov had not known.
“Why, you might get some money out of the for the article! What a strange person you are! You lead such a solitary life that you know nothing of matters that concern you directly. It's a fact, I assure you.”
“Bravo, Rodya! I knew nothing about it either!” cried, Razumihin. “I'll run to the reading -room and ask for the number. Two months ago? What was the date? It doesn't matter though, I will find it. Think of not telling us!”
“How did you find out that the article was min? It's only signed with an initial.”
“I only learnt it by chance, the other day. Through the editor; I know him. . . . I was very much interested.”
“I analyzed, if I remember, the psychology of a criminal before and after the crime.”
“Yes, and you maintained that the perpetration of a crime is always accompanied by illness. Very, very original, but . . . it was not that part of your article that interested me so much, but the idea at the end of the article which I regret to say you merely suggested without working it out clearly. There is, if you recollect, a suggestion that there are certain persons who can. . . . that is, not precisely are able to, but have a perfect right to commit breaches of morality and crimes, and that the law is not for them.”
“Raskolnikov smiled at the exaggerated and intentional distortion of his idea.
“What? What do you mean? A right to crime? But not because of the influence of environment?” Razumihin inquired with some alarm even.
“No, not exactly because of it,” answered Porfiry. “In his article all en are divided into 'ordinary' and 'extraordinary'. Ordinary men have to live in submission, have no right to transgress the law, because, don't you see, they are ordinary. But extraordinary men have a right to commit any crime and to transgress the law in any way, just because they are extraordinary. That was your idea, if I am not mistaken?”
“What do you mean? That can't be right?” Razumihin muttered in bewilderment. Raskolnikov smiled again. He saw the point at once, and knew where they wanted to drive him. He decided to take up the challenge.
“That wasn't quite my contention,” he began simple and modestly. “Yet I admit that you have stated it almost correctly, perhaps, if you like, perfectly so.” (It almost gave him pleasure to admit this.) “The only difference is that I don't contend that extraordinary people are always bound to commit breaches of morals, as you call it. In fact, I doubt whether such an argument could be published. I simply hinted that an extraordinary man has the right . . . that is not an official right, but an inner right to decide in his own conscience to overstep . . . certain obstacles, and only in case it is essential for the practical fulfillment of his idea (sometimes, perhaps, of benefit to the whole of humanity). You say that my article isn't definite, I am ready to make it as clear as I can. Perhaps I am right in thinking you want me to; very well. I maintain that if the discoveries of Kepler and Newton could not have been made known except by sacrificing the lives of one, a dozen, a hundred, or more men, Newton would have had the right, would indeed have been in duty bound . . . to eliminate the dozen or the hundred men for the sake of making his discoveries known to the whole of humanity. But it does not follow from that that Newton had a right to murder people right and left and to steal every day in the market. Then, I remember, I maintain in my article that all . . . well, legislators and leaders of men, such as Lycurgus, Solon, Mohamed, Napoleon, and so on, were all without exception criminals, from the very fact that, making a new law, they transgressed the ancient one, handed down from their ancestors and held sacred by the people, and they did not stop short at bloodshed either, if that bloodshed – often of innocent persons fighting bravely in defense of ancient law – were of use to their cause. It's remarkable in fact, that the majority, indeed, of these bnefactors and leaders of humanity were guilty of terrible carnage. In short, I maintain that all great men or even men a little out of the common, that is to say capable of giving some new word, must from their very nature be criminals – more or less, of course. Otherwise it's hard for them to get out of the common rut; and to remain in the common rut is what they can't submit to, from their very nature again, and to my mind they ought not, indeed, to submit to it. You see that there is nothing particularly new in all that. The same thing has been printed a thousand times before. As for my division of people into ordinary and extraordinary, I acknowledge that it's somewhat arbitrary, but I don't insist upon exact numbers. I only believe in my leading idea that men are in general divided by a law of nature into two categories, inferior (ordinary), that is, so to say, material that serves only to reproduce its kind and men who have the gift or the talent to utter a new word. There are, of course, innumerable sub-divisions, but the distinguishing features or both categories are fairly well marked. The first category, generally speaking, are men conservative in temperament and law-abiding; they live under control and love to be controlled. To my thinking it is their duty to be controlled, because that's their vocation, and there is nothing humiliating in it for them. The second category all transgress the law; they are destroyers or disposed to destruction according to their capacities. The crimes of these men are of course relative and varied; for the most part the seek in very varied ways the destruction of the present for the sake of the better. But if such a one is forced for the sake of his idea to step over a corpse or wade through blood, he can, I maintain, find himself, in his conscience, a sanction for wading through blood – that depends on the idea and its dimensions, not that. It's only in that sense I speak of their right to crime in my article (you remember it began with a legal question). There's no need for much anxiety, however; the masses will scarcely ever admit this right, they punish them or hang them (more or less), and in doing so fulfill quite justly their conservative vocation. But the same masses set these criminals on a pedestal in the next generation and worship them (more or less). The first category is always the man of the present, the second the man of the future. The first preserve the world and people, the second move the world and led .. to its coal. Each class has an equal right to exist.”
-- Dostoevsky, Fyodor, Crime and Punishment. Bantam Books, New York NY, 1987.
Monday, November 23, 2009
Saturday, September 19, 2009
Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth - R.Buckminster Fuller
It is easy to demonstrate to those who will take the time and the trouble to unbias their thoughts that automation swiftly can multiply the physical energy part of wealth much more rapidly and profusely than can man's muscle and brian-reflexed, manually-controlled production. On the other hand humans alone can foresee, integrate, and anticipate the new tasks to be done by progressively automated wealth-producing machinery. To take advantage of the fabulous magnitudes of real wealth waiting to be employed intelligently by humans and unblock automation's postponement by organized labor we must give each human who is or becomes unemployed a life fellowship in research and development or in just simple thinking. Man must be able to dare to think truthfully and to act accordingly without fear of losing his franchise to live. The use of mind fellowships will permit humans comprehensively to expand and accelerate scientific exploration and experimental prototype development. For every 100m000 employed in research and development, or just plain thinking, one probably will make a breakthrough that will more than pay for the other 99,999 fellowships. Thus, production will no longer be impeded by humans trying to do what machines can do better. Contrariwise, omni-automated and inanimately powered production will unleash humanity's unique capability - its metaphysical capability. Historically speaking, these steps will be taken within the next decade. There is no doubt about it. But not without much social crisis and consequent educational experience and discovery concerning the nature of our unlimited wealth.
Through the universal research and development fellowships, we're going to start emancipating humanity from being muscle and reflex machines. We're going to give everybody a chance to develop their most powerful mental and intuitive faculties. [...] What we want everybody to do is to think clearly.
We soon will begin to generate wealth so rapidly that we can do very great things. [...] We have learned that only and exclusively through use of his mind can man inventively employ the generalized principles further to conserve the locally available physical energy of the only universally unlimited supply. Only thus can man put to orderly advantage the various, local, and otherwise disorderly behaviors of the entropic, physical universe. Man can and may metaphysically comprehend, anticipate, shunt, and meteringly introduce the evolutionarily organized environment events in the magnitudes and frequencies that best synchronize with the patterns of his successful and metaphysical metabolic regeneration while ever increasing the degrees of humanity's space and time freedoms from yesterday's ignorance sustaining survival procedure chores and their personal time capital wasting.
Now we have comprehended and peeled off the layers of petals which disclosed not only that physical energy is conserved but also that it is ever increasingly deposited as a fossil-fuel savings account aboard our Spaceship Earth through photosynthesis and progressive, complex, topsoil fossilization buried ever deeper within Earth's crust by frost, wind, flood, volcanoes, and earthquake upheavals. We have thus discovered also that we can make all of humanity successful through science's world-engulfing industrial evolution provided that we are not so foolish as to continue to exhaust in a split second of astronomical history the orderly energy savings of billions of years' energy conservation aboard Spaceship Earth. These energy savings have been put into our Spaceship's life-regeneratintion-guaranteeing bank account for use only in self-starter functions.
The fossil fuel deposits of our Spaceship Earth correspond to our automobile's storage battery which must be conserved to turn over our main engine's self-starter. Thereafter, our "main engine," the life regenerating processes, must operate exclusively on our vast daily energy income from the powers of wind, tide, water, and the direct Sun radiation energy. The fossil-fuel savings account has been put aboard Spaceship Earth for the exclusive function of getting the new machinery built with which to support life and humanity at every more effective standards of vital physical energy and reinspiring metaphysical sustenance to be sustained exclusively on our Sun radiation's and Moon pull gravity's tidal, wind, and rainfall generated pulsating and therefore harnessable energies. The daily income energies are excessively adequate for the operation of our main industrial engines and their automated productions. The energy expended in one minute of a tropical hurricane equals the combined energy of all the U.S.A and U.S.S.R. nuclear weapons. Only by understanding this scheme may we continue for all time ahead to enjoy and explore universe as we progressively harness evermore of the celestially generated tidal and storm generated wind, water, and electrical power concentrations. We cannot afford to expend our fossil fuels faster than we are "recharging our batter," which means precisely the rate at which the fossil fuels are being continually deposited within Earth's spherical crust.
We have discovered that it is highly feasible for all the human passengers aboard Spaceship Earth to enjoy the whole ship without any individual being advanced at the expense of another, provided that we are not so foolish as to burn up our ship and its operating equipment by powering our prime operations exclusively on atomic reactor generated energy. The too-shortsighted and debilitating exploitation of fossil fuels and atomic energy are similar to running our automobiles only on the self-starters and batteries and as the latter become exhausted replenishing the batteries only by starting the chain reaction consumption of the atoms with which the automobiles are constituted.
We have discovered also why we were given our intellectual faculties and physical extension facilities. We have discovered that we have the inherent capability and inferentially the responsibility of making humanity comprehensively and sustainably successful. We have learned the difference between brain and mind capabilities. We have learned of the superstitions and inferiority complexes built into all humanity through all of history's yesterdays of slavish survival under conditions of abysmal illiteracy and ignorance wherein only the most ruthless, shrewd, and eventually brutish could sustain existence, and then for no more than a third of its known potential life span.
This all brings us to a realization of the enormous educational task which must be successfully accomplished right now in a hurry in order to convert man's spin-dive toward oblivion into an intellectually mastered power pullout into safe and level flight of physical and metaphysical success, whereafter he may turn his Spaceship Earth's occupancy into a universe exploring advantage. It if comprehends and reacts effectively, humanity will open an entirely new chapter of the experiences and the thoughts and drives thereby stimulated.
Most importantly we have learned that from here on it is success for all or for none, for it is experimentally proven by physics that "unity is plural and at minimum two" - the complementary but not mirror-imaged proton and neutron. You and I are inherently different and complementary. Together we average as zero - that is, as eternity.
- - Fuller, Buckminster R, Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth. Southern Illinois University Press, Carbondale, Ill, 1969.
Through the universal research and development fellowships, we're going to start emancipating humanity from being muscle and reflex machines. We're going to give everybody a chance to develop their most powerful mental and intuitive faculties. [...] What we want everybody to do is to think clearly.
We soon will begin to generate wealth so rapidly that we can do very great things. [...] We have learned that only and exclusively through use of his mind can man inventively employ the generalized principles further to conserve the locally available physical energy of the only universally unlimited supply. Only thus can man put to orderly advantage the various, local, and otherwise disorderly behaviors of the entropic, physical universe. Man can and may metaphysically comprehend, anticipate, shunt, and meteringly introduce the evolutionarily organized environment events in the magnitudes and frequencies that best synchronize with the patterns of his successful and metaphysical metabolic regeneration while ever increasing the degrees of humanity's space and time freedoms from yesterday's ignorance sustaining survival procedure chores and their personal time capital wasting.
Now we have comprehended and peeled off the layers of petals which disclosed not only that physical energy is conserved but also that it is ever increasingly deposited as a fossil-fuel savings account aboard our Spaceship Earth through photosynthesis and progressive, complex, topsoil fossilization buried ever deeper within Earth's crust by frost, wind, flood, volcanoes, and earthquake upheavals. We have thus discovered also that we can make all of humanity successful through science's world-engulfing industrial evolution provided that we are not so foolish as to continue to exhaust in a split second of astronomical history the orderly energy savings of billions of years' energy conservation aboard Spaceship Earth. These energy savings have been put into our Spaceship's life-regeneratintion-guaranteeing bank account for use only in self-starter functions.
The fossil fuel deposits of our Spaceship Earth correspond to our automobile's storage battery which must be conserved to turn over our main engine's self-starter. Thereafter, our "main engine," the life regenerating processes, must operate exclusively on our vast daily energy income from the powers of wind, tide, water, and the direct Sun radiation energy. The fossil-fuel savings account has been put aboard Spaceship Earth for the exclusive function of getting the new machinery built with which to support life and humanity at every more effective standards of vital physical energy and reinspiring metaphysical sustenance to be sustained exclusively on our Sun radiation's and Moon pull gravity's tidal, wind, and rainfall generated pulsating and therefore harnessable energies. The daily income energies are excessively adequate for the operation of our main industrial engines and their automated productions. The energy expended in one minute of a tropical hurricane equals the combined energy of all the U.S.A and U.S.S.R. nuclear weapons. Only by understanding this scheme may we continue for all time ahead to enjoy and explore universe as we progressively harness evermore of the celestially generated tidal and storm generated wind, water, and electrical power concentrations. We cannot afford to expend our fossil fuels faster than we are "recharging our batter," which means precisely the rate at which the fossil fuels are being continually deposited within Earth's spherical crust.
We have discovered that it is highly feasible for all the human passengers aboard Spaceship Earth to enjoy the whole ship without any individual being advanced at the expense of another, provided that we are not so foolish as to burn up our ship and its operating equipment by powering our prime operations exclusively on atomic reactor generated energy. The too-shortsighted and debilitating exploitation of fossil fuels and atomic energy are similar to running our automobiles only on the self-starters and batteries and as the latter become exhausted replenishing the batteries only by starting the chain reaction consumption of the atoms with which the automobiles are constituted.
We have discovered also why we were given our intellectual faculties and physical extension facilities. We have discovered that we have the inherent capability and inferentially the responsibility of making humanity comprehensively and sustainably successful. We have learned the difference between brain and mind capabilities. We have learned of the superstitions and inferiority complexes built into all humanity through all of history's yesterdays of slavish survival under conditions of abysmal illiteracy and ignorance wherein only the most ruthless, shrewd, and eventually brutish could sustain existence, and then for no more than a third of its known potential life span.
This all brings us to a realization of the enormous educational task which must be successfully accomplished right now in a hurry in order to convert man's spin-dive toward oblivion into an intellectually mastered power pullout into safe and level flight of physical and metaphysical success, whereafter he may turn his Spaceship Earth's occupancy into a universe exploring advantage. It if comprehends and reacts effectively, humanity will open an entirely new chapter of the experiences and the thoughts and drives thereby stimulated.
Most importantly we have learned that from here on it is success for all or for none, for it is experimentally proven by physics that "unity is plural and at minimum two" - the complementary but not mirror-imaged proton and neutron. You and I are inherently different and complementary. Together we average as zero - that is, as eternity.
- - Fuller, Buckminster R, Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth. Southern Illinois University Press, Carbondale, Ill, 1969.
Wednesday, August 19, 2009
The Parable of the Sower - Octavia E. Butler
As wind,
As water,
As fire,
As life,
God
Is both creative and destructive,
Demanding and yielding,
Sculptor and clay.
God is Infinite Potential:
God is Change.
- Earthseed: The Books of the Living
THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 9, 2027
We've had over a week of weary, frightening, nerve wracking walking. We've reached and passed through the city of Sacramento without real trouble. We've been able to buy enough food and water, been able to find plenty of empty places in the hills where we could make camp. Yet none of us have had any feelings of comfort or well-being along the stretch of Interstate-5 that we've just traveled. I-5 is much less traveled than U.S. 101, in spite of the earthquake chaos. There were times when the only people we could see were each other. Those times never lasted long, but they did happen.
On the other hand, there were more trucks on I-5. We had to be careful because trucks traveled during the day as well as at night. Also, there were more human bones on I-5. It was nothing to run across skulls, lower jaws, or bones of the pelvis and torso. Arm and leg bones were rarer, but now and then, we spotted them too.
[...] But we say other things. On Tuesday we camped in a little hollow back in the hills to the west of the road, and a big black and white dog came wandering down toward our camp with the fresh-looking, bloody hand and forearm of a child in its mouth.
The dog spotted us, froze, turned, and ran back the way it had come. But we all got a good look before it went, and we all saw the same thing. That night, we posted a double watch. Two watchers, two guns, no unnecessary conversation, no sex.
The next day we decided not to take another rest day until we had pasted through Sacramento. There was no guarantee that anything would be better on the other side of Sacramento, but we wanted to get away from this grim land.
That night, looking for a place to camp, we stumbled across four ragged, filthy kids huddled around a campfire. The picture of them is still clear in my mind. Kids the age of my brothers - twelve, thirteen, maybe fourteen years old, three boys and a girl. The girl was pregnant, and so huge it was obvious she would be giving birth any day. We rounded a bend in a dry stream bed, and there these kids were, roasting a severed human leg, maneuvering it where it lay in the middle of their fire atop the burning wood by twisting its foot. As we watched, the girl pulled a sliver of charred flesh from the thigh and stuffed it into her mouth.
They never saw us. I was in the lead, and I stopped the others before they all rounded the bend. Harry and Zahra, who were just behind me, saw all that I saw. We turned the others back and away, not telling them why until we were far from those kids and their cannibal feast.
No one attacked us. No one bother us at all. The country we walked through was even beautiful in some places - green trees and rolling hills; golden dried grasses and tiny communities, farms, many overgrown and abandoned, and abandoned houses. Nice country, and compared to Souther California, rich country. More water, more food, more room...
So why were the people eating one another?
There were several burned out buildings. It was obvious that there had been trouble here too, but much less than on the coast. Yet we couldn't wait to get back to the coast.
Sacramento was all right to resupply in a hurry though. Water and food were cheap there compared to what you could buy along hte roadside, of course. Cities were alyways a relief as far as prices were. But cities were also dangerous. More gangs, more cops, more suspicious, nervous people with guns. You tiptoe through cities. You keep up a steady pace, keep your eyes open, and try to look both too intimidating to bother and invisible. Neat trick. Bankole says cities have been like that for a long time.
Your teachers
Are all around you.
All that you perceive,
All that you experience,
All that is given to you
or taken from you,
All that you love or hate,
need or fear
Will teach you -
If you will learn.
God is your first
and your last teacher,
God is your harshest teacher;
subtle,
demanding.
Learn or die.
- Earthseed: The Books of the Living
FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 10, 2027
We had another battle to try to sleep through before dawn this morning. It began to the south of us out on or near the highway, and worked its way first toward, then away from us.
We could hear people shooting, screaming, cursing, running. . . Same old stuff - tiresome, dangerous, and stupid. The shooting went on for over an hour, waxing, and waning. There was a final barrage that seemed to involve more guns than ever. Then the noise stopped.
I managed to sleep through some of it. I got over being afraid, even got over geing angry. In the end, I was only tired. I thought, if the bastards are going to kill me, I can't stop them by staying awake. If that wasn't altogether true, I didn't care. I slept.
[...] The two scared people turned out to be the most racially mixed that I had ever met. Her's their story, put together from the fragmnts they told us during the day and tonight. The woman had a Japanese father, a black mother, and a Mexican husband, all dead. Only she and her daughter are left. Her name is Emery Tankaka Solis. Her daughter is Tori Solis. Tori is ni ne years old, noot seven as I had guessed. I suspect she has rarely had enough to eat in her life. She's tiny, quick, quiet, and hungry-eyed. She hid bits of food in her filthy rags until we made her a new dress from one of Bankole's shirts. Then she hid food in that. Although Tori is nine, her mother is only 23. At 13, Emery married a much older man who promised to take care of her. Her father was already dead, killed in someone else's gunfight. Her mother was sick, and dying of tuberculosis. The mother pushed Emery into marriage to save her from ictimization and starvtation in the streets.
Up to that point, the situation was dreary, but normal. Emery had three children over the next three years -- a daughter and two sons. She and her husband did farm work in trade for food, shelter, and hand-me-downs. Then the farm was sold to a big agribusiness conglomerate, and the workers fell into new hands. Wages were paid, but in company scrip, not in cash. Rent was charged for the workers' shacks. Workers had to pay for food, for clothing -- new or used -- for everything they needed, and, of course they could only spend their company notes at the company store. Wages -- surprise! -- were never quite enough to pay the bills. According to new laws that might or might not exist, people were not permitted to leave an employer to whom they owed money. They were obligated to work off the debt either as quasi-indentured people or as convicts. That is, if they refused to work, they could be arrested, jailed, and in the end, handed over to their employers.
Either way, such debt slaves could be forced to work longer hours for less pay, could be "disciplined" if they failed to meet their quotas, could be traded and sold with or without their consent, with or without their families, to distant employers who had temporary or permanent need of them. Worse, children could be forced to work off the debt of their parents if the parents died, became disabled, or escaped.
Emery's husband sickened and died. There was no doctor, no medicine beyond a few expensive other-the-counter preparations and the herbs that the workers grew in their tiny gardens. Jorge Francisco Solis died in fever and pain on the earthen floor of his shack without ever seeing a doctor. Bankole said it sounded as though he died of peritonitis brought on by untreated appendicitis. Such a simple thing. But then, there's nothing more replaceable than unskilled labor.
Emory and her children became responsible for the Solis debt. Accepting this, Emery worked and endured until one day, without warning, her sons were taken away. They were one and two years younger than her daughter, and too young to be without bother their parents. Yet they were taken. Emery was not asked to part with them, nor was she told what would be done with them. She had terrible suspicions when she recovered from the drug she had been given to "quiet her down." She cried and demanded the return of her sons and would not work again until her masters threatened to take her daughter as well.
She decided then to run away, to take her daughter and brave the roads with heir thieves, rapists, and cannibals. They had nothing for anyone to steal, and rape wasn't something they could escape by remaining slaves.
A gang fight drove her to us. Gangs are always a special danger in cities. If you keep to the road while you're in individual gang territories you might escape their attentions. We have so far. But the overgrown park land where we camped last night was, according to Emery, in dispute. Two gangs shot at each other and called insults and accusations back and forth. Now and then they stopped to shoot at passing trucks. During one of these intervals, Emery and Tori who had camped close to the roadside had slipped away.
"One group was coming close to us," Emery said. "They would shoot and run. When they ran, they got closer. We had to get away. We couldn't let them hear us or see us. We found your clearing, but we didn't see you. You know how to hide."
That, I suppose was a compliment. We try to disappear into the scenery when that's possible. Most of the time it isn't. Tonight it isn't. And tonight we watch two at a time.
-- Octavia E. Butler, Parable of the Sower, Four Walls Eight Windows, New York, NY 1993.
As water,
As fire,
As life,
God
Is both creative and destructive,
Demanding and yielding,
Sculptor and clay.
God is Infinite Potential:
God is Change.
- Earthseed: The Books of the Living
THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 9, 2027
We've had over a week of weary, frightening, nerve wracking walking. We've reached and passed through the city of Sacramento without real trouble. We've been able to buy enough food and water, been able to find plenty of empty places in the hills where we could make camp. Yet none of us have had any feelings of comfort or well-being along the stretch of Interstate-5 that we've just traveled. I-5 is much less traveled than U.S. 101, in spite of the earthquake chaos. There were times when the only people we could see were each other. Those times never lasted long, but they did happen.
On the other hand, there were more trucks on I-5. We had to be careful because trucks traveled during the day as well as at night. Also, there were more human bones on I-5. It was nothing to run across skulls, lower jaws, or bones of the pelvis and torso. Arm and leg bones were rarer, but now and then, we spotted them too.
[...] But we say other things. On Tuesday we camped in a little hollow back in the hills to the west of the road, and a big black and white dog came wandering down toward our camp with the fresh-looking, bloody hand and forearm of a child in its mouth.
The dog spotted us, froze, turned, and ran back the way it had come. But we all got a good look before it went, and we all saw the same thing. That night, we posted a double watch. Two watchers, two guns, no unnecessary conversation, no sex.
The next day we decided not to take another rest day until we had pasted through Sacramento. There was no guarantee that anything would be better on the other side of Sacramento, but we wanted to get away from this grim land.
That night, looking for a place to camp, we stumbled across four ragged, filthy kids huddled around a campfire. The picture of them is still clear in my mind. Kids the age of my brothers - twelve, thirteen, maybe fourteen years old, three boys and a girl. The girl was pregnant, and so huge it was obvious she would be giving birth any day. We rounded a bend in a dry stream bed, and there these kids were, roasting a severed human leg, maneuvering it where it lay in the middle of their fire atop the burning wood by twisting its foot. As we watched, the girl pulled a sliver of charred flesh from the thigh and stuffed it into her mouth.
They never saw us. I was in the lead, and I stopped the others before they all rounded the bend. Harry and Zahra, who were just behind me, saw all that I saw. We turned the others back and away, not telling them why until we were far from those kids and their cannibal feast.
No one attacked us. No one bother us at all. The country we walked through was even beautiful in some places - green trees and rolling hills; golden dried grasses and tiny communities, farms, many overgrown and abandoned, and abandoned houses. Nice country, and compared to Souther California, rich country. More water, more food, more room...
So why were the people eating one another?
There were several burned out buildings. It was obvious that there had been trouble here too, but much less than on the coast. Yet we couldn't wait to get back to the coast.
Sacramento was all right to resupply in a hurry though. Water and food were cheap there compared to what you could buy along hte roadside, of course. Cities were alyways a relief as far as prices were. But cities were also dangerous. More gangs, more cops, more suspicious, nervous people with guns. You tiptoe through cities. You keep up a steady pace, keep your eyes open, and try to look both too intimidating to bother and invisible. Neat trick. Bankole says cities have been like that for a long time.
Your teachers
Are all around you.
All that you perceive,
All that you experience,
All that is given to you
or taken from you,
All that you love or hate,
need or fear
Will teach you -
If you will learn.
God is your first
and your last teacher,
God is your harshest teacher;
subtle,
demanding.
Learn or die.
- Earthseed: The Books of the Living
FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 10, 2027
We had another battle to try to sleep through before dawn this morning. It began to the south of us out on or near the highway, and worked its way first toward, then away from us.
We could hear people shooting, screaming, cursing, running. . . Same old stuff - tiresome, dangerous, and stupid. The shooting went on for over an hour, waxing, and waning. There was a final barrage that seemed to involve more guns than ever. Then the noise stopped.
I managed to sleep through some of it. I got over being afraid, even got over geing angry. In the end, I was only tired. I thought, if the bastards are going to kill me, I can't stop them by staying awake. If that wasn't altogether true, I didn't care. I slept.
[...] The two scared people turned out to be the most racially mixed that I had ever met. Her's their story, put together from the fragmnts they told us during the day and tonight. The woman had a Japanese father, a black mother, and a Mexican husband, all dead. Only she and her daughter are left. Her name is Emery Tankaka Solis. Her daughter is Tori Solis. Tori is ni ne years old, noot seven as I had guessed. I suspect she has rarely had enough to eat in her life. She's tiny, quick, quiet, and hungry-eyed. She hid bits of food in her filthy rags until we made her a new dress from one of Bankole's shirts. Then she hid food in that. Although Tori is nine, her mother is only 23. At 13, Emery married a much older man who promised to take care of her. Her father was already dead, killed in someone else's gunfight. Her mother was sick, and dying of tuberculosis. The mother pushed Emery into marriage to save her from ictimization and starvtation in the streets.
Up to that point, the situation was dreary, but normal. Emery had three children over the next three years -- a daughter and two sons. She and her husband did farm work in trade for food, shelter, and hand-me-downs. Then the farm was sold to a big agribusiness conglomerate, and the workers fell into new hands. Wages were paid, but in company scrip, not in cash. Rent was charged for the workers' shacks. Workers had to pay for food, for clothing -- new or used -- for everything they needed, and, of course they could only spend their company notes at the company store. Wages -- surprise! -- were never quite enough to pay the bills. According to new laws that might or might not exist, people were not permitted to leave an employer to whom they owed money. They were obligated to work off the debt either as quasi-indentured people or as convicts. That is, if they refused to work, they could be arrested, jailed, and in the end, handed over to their employers.
Either way, such debt slaves could be forced to work longer hours for less pay, could be "disciplined" if they failed to meet their quotas, could be traded and sold with or without their consent, with or without their families, to distant employers who had temporary or permanent need of them. Worse, children could be forced to work off the debt of their parents if the parents died, became disabled, or escaped.
Emery's husband sickened and died. There was no doctor, no medicine beyond a few expensive other-the-counter preparations and the herbs that the workers grew in their tiny gardens. Jorge Francisco Solis died in fever and pain on the earthen floor of his shack without ever seeing a doctor. Bankole said it sounded as though he died of peritonitis brought on by untreated appendicitis. Such a simple thing. But then, there's nothing more replaceable than unskilled labor.
Emory and her children became responsible for the Solis debt. Accepting this, Emery worked and endured until one day, without warning, her sons were taken away. They were one and two years younger than her daughter, and too young to be without bother their parents. Yet they were taken. Emery was not asked to part with them, nor was she told what would be done with them. She had terrible suspicions when she recovered from the drug she had been given to "quiet her down." She cried and demanded the return of her sons and would not work again until her masters threatened to take her daughter as well.
She decided then to run away, to take her daughter and brave the roads with heir thieves, rapists, and cannibals. They had nothing for anyone to steal, and rape wasn't something they could escape by remaining slaves.
A gang fight drove her to us. Gangs are always a special danger in cities. If you keep to the road while you're in individual gang territories you might escape their attentions. We have so far. But the overgrown park land where we camped last night was, according to Emery, in dispute. Two gangs shot at each other and called insults and accusations back and forth. Now and then they stopped to shoot at passing trucks. During one of these intervals, Emery and Tori who had camped close to the roadside had slipped away.
"One group was coming close to us," Emery said. "They would shoot and run. When they ran, they got closer. We had to get away. We couldn't let them hear us or see us. We found your clearing, but we didn't see you. You know how to hide."
That, I suppose was a compliment. We try to disappear into the scenery when that's possible. Most of the time it isn't. Tonight it isn't. And tonight we watch two at a time.
-- Octavia E. Butler, Parable of the Sower, Four Walls Eight Windows, New York, NY 1993.
Monday, June 15, 2009
Special Topics in Calamity Physics - Marisha Pessl
"[...] The clearest most palpable things in life, the elephants and white rhinos if you will, standing around quite plainly in their watering holes, chewing on leaves and twigs, they often go unnoticed. And why is that?"
It was a Van Meer Rhetorical Question followed by the Van Meer Pregnant Pause, so I simply waited, pressing the receiver against the bottom of my chin. I'd heard him use such oratorical devices before, the few times I'd gone to watch him lecture in one of the big amphitheaters with carpeted walls and buzzing light. The last time I'd heard him speak, on Civil Warfare at Cheswick College, I remember, quite distinctly, I was horrified. Without a doubt, I thought to myself, as Dad went on frowning center stage (occasionally breaking into a variety of showy gestures, as if he were a deranged Mark Antony or manic King Henry VIII), everyone could see, plain as day, Dad's embarrassing truth: he wanted to be Richard Burton. Butt then I really looked around, and noticed every student (even the one on the third row who'd shaved an anarchy symbol into the back of his head) was behaving like a feeble white moth spiraling through Dad's light.
"America is asleep," Dad boomed. "you've heard it before -- perhaps by a homeless man you passed on the street and he smelled like a Porta-John so you held your breath and pretended he was a mailbox. Well, is it true? Is America hibernating? Getting forty winks, a bit of shut-eye? We're a country of boundless opportunity. Aren't we? Well, I know the answer's yes if you happen to be a CEO. Last year, the average compensation for chief Executive Officer soared 26 percent, compared to blue-collara salaries inching up a pitiable 3 percent. And the fattest paycheck of all? Mr. Stuart Burnes, CEO of Remco Integrated Technologies. Tell him what he's won, Bob! One-hundred-sixteen-point-four million dollars for a year's labor."
Here Dad crossed his arms and looked fascinated.
"What's Stu doing to warrent such a windfall, a salaray that would feed all of Sudan? Sadly, not much. Integrated missed fourth-wuarter earnings. Stock prices fell 19 percent. Yet board members picked up the tab for the crew on Stu's hundred-foot yacht, also paid the Christie's curator fees for his fourteen-hundred-piece Impressionist art collection."
Here Dad inclined his head as if hearing faint, far-off music.
"So this is greed. And is it good? Should we listen to a man wearing suspenders? With many of you, when you come and chat with me during office hours, I sense an air of inevitability, not of defeat, but resignation, that such iniquities are simply the way it is and they can't be changed. This is America and what we do is grab as much cash as we can before we all die of heart disease. But do we want our lives to be a bonus round, a Money Grab? Call me an optimist, but I don't think so. I think we hope for something more meaningful. But what do we do? Start a revolution?"
Dad asked this of a small brown-haired girl wearing a pink T-shirt in the front row. She nodded apprehensively.
"Are you out of your mind?"
Instantly, she turned six shades pinker than the T-shirt.
"You might have heard of various imbeciles who waged war on the U.S. government in the sixties and seventies. The New Communist Left. The Weather Underground. The Students for the Blah-Blah-No-One-Takes-You-Seriously. In fact, I think they were worse than Stu, because they smashed, not monogamy, but hope for productive protest and objection in this country. With their delusional self-importance, ad hoc violence, it became easy to dismiss anyone voicing dissatisfaction with the way things are as freaky flower chiles.
"No, I contend we should take a cue from one of the greatest American movements of our time -- a revolution in itself really, nobly warring as it does against time and gravity, also accountable for the most widespread perpetuation of alien-looking life forms on Earth. Cosmetic surgery. That's right ladies and gentlemen. America is in dire need of a nip-tuck. No mass uprising, no widespread revolution. Rather, an eye lift here. A boob job there. Some well-placed liposuction. A minuscule cut behind the ears, tug it up, staple it into place -- confidentiality is key -- and viola, everyone will be saying we look mahvelous. Greater elasticity. No sags. For those of you who are laughing, you'll see precisely what I mean when you do the reading for Tuesday, the treatise in Littleton's Anatomy of Materialism, 'The Nightwatchmen and Mythical Principles of Practical Change.' And Eidelstein's 'Repressions of Imperialist Powers.' And my own meager pice, 'Blind Dates: Advantages of Silent Civil War.' Do not forget. You will be pop-quizzed."
Only when Dad, with a small self -satisfied smile, closed his worn leather folder full of chicken-scratch notes (placed on the lectern for effect, because he never looked at them), removed the linen handkerchief from his jacket pocket, and delicately touched it to his forehead (we'd driven through Nevada's Andamo Desert in the middle of July and he hadn't needed to blot his forehead like that a single time), only then did anyone mover. Some of the kids grinned in disbelief, others walked out of the lecture hall with surprised faces. A few were starting to page through the Littleton book.
Now, Dad answered his own question, his voice low and scratchy in the receiver.
"We are under an invincible blindness as to the true and real nature of things," he said.
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