Farewell, Mr. Vonnegut

One of my fondest memories of being a first year teacher last year was when one of my seniors in study hall told he found a book on another teachers shelf called Breakfast of Champions. He read it in a few days and then told me he didn't understand it. Being just a little familiar with the works of Vonnegut I wanted to read it too. Two days later I was done with it to. We spent the next two weeks talking about it and what it meant to each of us. I've spent the past year searching Asian bookstores for more Vonnegut, after giving Cat's Cradle to a Chinese English teacher. I still base a good chunk of my theology on what I remember an old roommate sharing with me after reading a Vonnegut book. That was after I encouraged him to read Slaughterhouse Five and he began reading other books on his own.

And now the good old man is dead. I'll leave it, again, to MetaFilter to someone else to sum up my own thoughts:

Kurt Vonnegut *was* an idiot.

You'd have to be to tell the truth. Sometimes there exists a person who is unafraid to look life if in the eye and accept it for what it is. Has this world ever rewarded these people with anything but sadness and a sense of isolation?

It's the sweet little lies about this world and our lives in it that make living bearable for so many of us, you'd have to be an idiot to give up that comfort, even if you never spoke about it to another soul. You'd have to be an even bigger idiot to open your mouth and speak the truth, or in his case sing it out for all to hear, when everything history has ever taught us is that people will only despise you for it.

He wasn't a particularly happy man, his vision didn't seem to bring him comfort, he struggled with suicide his whole life, and perhaps he could have dulled that pain with some comforting illusions. But he was an idiot, and chose the harder path, and made the world an indelibly better place because he lived here, and chose to live in his manner.

... and from his own imagination, the Book of Bokonon:

The Last Rites of the Bokononism [ 99 ]
(Each line is said once by the person giving the rites and then repeated by the dying person.)

God made mud.
God got lonesome.
So God said to some of the mud, "Sit up!"
"See all I've made," said God, "the hills, the sea, the sky, the stars."
And I was some of the mud that got to sit up and look around.
Lucky me, lucky mud.
I, mud, sat up and saw what a nice job God had done.
Nice going, God.
Nobody but you could have done it, God! I certainly couldn't have.
I feel very unimportant compared to You.
The only way I can feel the least bit important is to think of all the mud that didn't even get to sit up and look around.
I got so much, and most mud got so little.
Thank you for the honor!
Now mud lies down again and goes to sleep.
What memories for mud to have!
What interesting other kinds of sitting-up mud I met!
I loved everything I saw!
Good night.
I will go to heaven now.
I can hardly wait...
To find out for certain what my wampeter was...
And who was in my karass...
And all the good things our karass did for you.
Amen.

*

Global Climate Change

I had a rocket scientist once correct my Colonization of Space class in college. "It's not global warming," he said, "it's global climate change."

I believe something is happening. I believe humans are linked to it. Despite the data, I don't think we have any idea what's really fueling it or what's going to happen. In that vein, I wrote this [way too long] comment on Metafilter in a thread tying sunspot cycles and Global Warming:

I remember growing up in the 80's seeing TV commercials telling my childhood super-ego that the oceans would be dead seven years ago. Granted, they're in horrible shape, but they're not dead and I still had shrimp I didn't ask for in my fried rice for dinner tonight. I also remember a great deal of the available data saying something serious would happen in January 1, 2000. Nothing happened besides fireworks and a few DUI's. I also remember hearing about a veritable army of Cat 5 hurricanes that were supposed to bear down on my beloved Florida last summer. They never came.

Correlation is not causation and I know we have a mountain of relatively reliable data saying one thing, but it's kinda hard to turn the Gut-O-Meter off when I hear anyone say that when there were no sunspots, things cooled down. When there were a whole lot of sunspots, things started heating up. And wait... doesn't the sun have something to do with temperature? I've heard of this for years and it's stuck on a deep level.

I want to believe in Global Warming©. I really, really do. And I really think we should be cutting down on emissions no matter what... but, that said, it's really hard to turn my Gut-O-Meter off and buy into the new and improved secularized version Judgment Day.

I think inside of everyone is this eschatological voice screaming that everything will, and should, come to a screeching halt in the very near future because of our sins against each other and our planet. It's inside all of us. It fuels most religious faith. I think there's a very real chance this thanatos seeps into interpreting results. Add in group-think bias and extremely strong pressure to arrive at certain conclusions and I think we're building ourselves up for a widespread loss of faith in the scientific community at the time when we need it most.

I don't want to be a part of the same group that also chooses the simpler, and wrong, claim there's also no massive stockpile of aged and long-sense useless chemical and bio munitions buried somewhere in the Iraqi desert. It sounds easier to say there never were WMD and that's that, just like it's easier to say emissions cause GW and that's that.

In fact, I don't want to be a part of any prediction that's anything but mediocre. We're dealing with desertification, water shortages, and beach erosion now... they're all very serious, but it's not the end of the world. In fact most peoples lots in life keep getting better. There's no reason not to assume that even quite a bit worse isn't manageable.

Book Review: The New Emperors

Pete Salisbury's The New Emperors is one of the best history books I've ever read. In reads like a Bill Bryson take down of one of the most complicated subjects in contemporary history: the rise and evolution of the Chinese Communist Party through the lives of it's two paramount leaders, Mao Zedong and Deng Xiaoping. It tracks the Party's rise against the odds - even the Soviets were backing the Kuomintang - to eventually take over and completely remold Chinese society. The remolding might be one of the most brutal yet intriguing social science experiments of all time: the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution. This is where the books shines.

Instead of just telling you that the peasants were melting their farm tools in backyard steel mills during the Great Leap Forward while the crops rotted, it describes through firsthand account and interviews how these things happened, what Mao was thinking, and how his lieutenants fueled it. It shows the beginnings, starting with Peng Dehuai, of the purging that would define the Cultural Revolution. Like a soap opera it sets up the characters just to watch them fall. Perhaps venturing a bit too far into speculation, but supported with Mao's own words, Salisbury claims what was really going through Mao's head were literal pipe dreams. The opiate-laced sleeping medication that the old warhorses were dependent on fueled the imaginative perceptions of what flipping an entire society on its head would bring.

The book changes direction to chronicle the less interesting but more relevant story that brought Deng Xiaoping out of small tractor repair shop where he was sent during the Cultural Revolution and into Beijing to topple the Gang of Four. Like Mao, the book starts soft on the imminently flexible and results-oriented leader and ends with the rigidity and tragedy of his latter days, culminating in the Tiananmen tragedy where the author was an observer.

This is a must read for anyone interested in the roots of today’s China. Though I didn’t think so at the time, it was worth the Beat Reader I traded it for at Friendly’s Guest House in Manila. Get it.

New Directions

I've been promising for awhile that Treyopia was going to be taking a new direction. Here it is. I'm really just not that inspired to write about daily life here. I think I've covered almost everything already. Furthermore, as an officer now in the company and not just a teacher anymore [that promotion came through], I don't feel inclined to write much about my actual work. Too many people who I work with and whom I want to recruit read this for me to be brutally honest.

Besides, I'm a politics junkie and this is stuff I love. I'm using Hong Kong as a supply base to get new books so that when I write I know what I'm talking about. Chinese politics is something I currently know little about and it's a subject that I'm sure many people want information on. As I learn, I'll share. Here's my chance to act as an on-the-ground observer immersing myself in the literature that's out there. Besides, this might help decide if this is something I want to get serious about studying.

With that said, I invite regular readers to make a decision about whether they want to stay with me or not. I'll post up older-style materials when I can, but I think from now on it's going to look more like the past week than anything else. In any case, thanks for reading. It means a lot.