For some time now I’ve been trying to think of what I can say that
would pay appropriate tribute to Kurt Vonnegut who recently passed
away. I had virtually forgotten how big of an influence he had been on
my thinking during my early education. I haven’t read a book he wrote
in years and I didn’t follow him or listen to his speeches or public
appearances.  He kind of fell off my radar until it was unannounced
that he had died. I deeply regret the missed opportunities to have
listened to him and learned from him these past years.

Back when I was in High School, I read all of his books that were out
at the time. I can’t honestly say that I loved every word, but I did
enjoy them on the balance. But more importantly they forced me to think
more deeply about things I’d only mused about in the past.  And they
made me feel more comfortable with the idea of expressing complex
thoughts in allegory and symbolism. I wonder if I hadn’t read Kurt
Vonnegut back then would I even be writing at all today? Would I ever
have found a voice or ever have thought that writing could matter? Or
would I have simply found some other pursuit and repressed the abstract
thoughts bumping around in my head as unacceptable for “civilized”
conversation.

There’s no adequate manner in which I can express my gratitude to him
for taking the time to write. There’s no mechanism I could use to
really explain to people how deeply I wish to honor his memory.

So instead I will simply give to you some of his own words. Not quotes
from his books as anyone can find and read those, but from the
interviews and appearances I have been listening to since his death was
announced. These I feel shed some insight into the mind of an
extraordinary being.

“I make posters suitable for frames you hang on the wall. And one of
them is  ‘Dearest Iraq, Do like us. After 100 years let your slaves go.
After 150 let your women work. Love you madly, Uncle Sam.’ Only within
the previous century did we start to become just.”

Interviewer: “What do you think of a community like Second Life… Do
you think it’s possible to get actually something done in such a place?”

“It’s actually possible to get a better life for individuals. And you
know I am frequently an enemy of new technologies, but I love cell
phones. Because I see people so happy and proud walking around
gesturing you know? I’m like Karl Marx I’m up for anything that makes
people happy.”

“Technology has ruined us. You know with “A Man Without a Country” a
title I considered was “The Fifty-First State” and that would be the
State Of Denial  which we’re all living in now because the game is all
over. We are in the process of irreversibly ruining the planet as a
life support system and nothing’s going to be done about it. I think
the motto now is “Don’t spoil the party.”"

Interviewer: “IF you were to build a country that you would consider
yourself a proud citizen of what would be three of its attributes?”

“Just one. Great public schools with classes of 12 or smaller.”

Interviewer: “That’s it? It’s sort of important what’s taught there right.”

“No. Just do this and the students will teach each other.”

Interviewer: “What advice would you give to a scientist who wants to
drop out of the system and start writing, or anyone who feels
creatively trapped.”

“I think everybody should practice at heart. And one thing I hate about
our criticism is that what you do has to be original. Just do it for
god’s sake! And it’ll make your soul grow. People should be painting
pictures or drawing pictures or singing or dancing. And it doesn’t
matter if you’re lousy at it. It’ll still make your soul grow. And also
you’ll find out more about what’s inside you. Writing? Yes. Look there
are all these books that are no longer read. It doesn’t matter. It’s
the thrill. The big pay off is when the author wrote it. The act of
creativity. So please experience that. It doesn’t have to be justified
afterwards by fame or money. The big pay off is doing it. And I have
asked different sorts of real artists, professional artists, when,
excuse the term, when they get their rocks off. A sculptor is happy
when he finds out when his piece is going to live.”

Interviewer: “Where do you think the self consciousness over art comes from?”

“From the critics. It say’s that if you can’t do something original don’t do it.”

Interviewer: “How would you describe Second Life?”

“I can’t see anything wrong with it. I think it’s human resourcefulness at it’s best.”

“I have a message for future generations. And that is, please accept
our apologies. We were roaring drunk on petroleum and we in fact still
are. And everything that distinguishes our era from the dark ages since
we still have slaves and torture chambers is what we’ve been able to do
with petroleum. And that is going to end very soon. Of course no one
will say how soon it’s going to end. I think the next couple of years
is going to see the price of fossil fuels go through the roof. And
there will be no substitutes for gasoline and I think that my reading
of history is that the only fun most human beings have ever had, any
feeling of power, respect has been driving automobiles. And so they’re
not about to give that up. And you know you get in a car and everybody
really respects you. So people are not going to give that up easily so
eventually we will run out of fossil fuels. And uh I think the world is
ending.”

“This was my Uncle Olux. I had a good uncle and a bad uncle. The bad
uncle was dan but the good uncle was Olux. And what he found
objectionable about human beings was that they never noticed when they
were really happy. So whenever he was really happy, you know we could
be sitting around in the shade in the summertime in the shade of an
apple tree, drinking lemonade and talking. Just sort of back and forth
buzzing like humming bees. And Uncle Olux would all of a sudden say “If
this isn’t nice what is!” And then we realized how happy we were and we
might have missed it. And the bad uncle Dan was when I came back from
the war which was quite painful, he clapped me on the back and said
“You’re a man now.” I wanted to kill him.”

Interviewer: “You were a POW during the firebombing of Dresdan… You
must have great empathy for the troops oversees… Everybody agrees
that it must be hell for those guys.”

“Well not only that but they’re being sent on fools errands. I’ve read
about they go on patrols. And they’re in awful danger and the patrols
accomplish almost nothing. Sure that strikes me as a nonsensical war.
That isn’t how you fight.”

Interviewer: “It strikes me that maybe you are not the biggest fan of the president of the united states at this juncture.”

“Well… he is what in my grade school we would have a called a twit
and what in High School we would have a called a twit and so I’m sorry
that we have such a person as a president.”

“Of course we have only a one party government. It’s the winners.
Everybody else is the losers. The winners are divided into two parties
the Republicans and the Democrats.”

“No cabinet has ever had a secretary of the future. And there are no
plans at all for my grandchildren and great grand children.”

“Look we’re awful animals. We can start with that. You know it’s the whole human experiment that’s what we are.”

Interviewer: “At heart we’re awful?”

“Look after two world wars and the holocaust and the nuclear bombing of
hiroshima and nagisaki and after the roman games and after the spanish
inquisition and after burning witches in public. Shouldn’t we call it
off? I mean we are a disease and should be ashamed of ourselves.”

“I think our planet’s immune system is trying to get rid of and should.”

“You know everybody’s been so mean to the president lately as though he
caused the hurricane, and he didn’t. He didn’t cause that hurricane.
And I’d like to say something good about him. He is not the dumbest man
at the top of our government. The dumbest man at the top of our
government is the secretary of defense. He is so dumb he thought he
could take over a country and its oil,  population 27 million I
believe, muslims. He thought he could take it over and the oil which
was after with a whole bunch of big bangs you know? And then 200,000
American soldiers who didn’t even know how to say ‘hello’ in arabic.”

“I have wanted to give Iraq a lesson in democracy because you know
we’re experienced in it. In democracy, after 100 years you have to
let your slaves go and after 150 you have to let your women vote, and at the beginning of democracy quite a bit of genocide and
ethnic cleansing is quite ok. And that’s what’s going on right now.”

“I have hear a list of liberal crap I don’t want to hear any more. It
say’s for instance “Forgive us our tresspasses as we forgive those that
tresspass against us.” Nobody better tresspass against me you know I’ll
cut him a new you know what.”

Kurt Vonnegut said he saw the publication of Slaughterhouse five as a
kind of liberation: “I think it not only freed me, I think it freed
writers. Because the vietnam war made our motives so scruffy and
essentially stupid that we could finally talk about something bad that
we did to the worst people imaginable, the nazis. What I saw, what I
had to report made war look so ugly. You know the truth can be pretty
powerful stuff if you’re not expecting it.”

“You know Karl Marx got a bumb wrap as all he was trying to do was take
care of a whole lot of people. Of course socialism is just evil now.
It’s completely discredited supposedly by the collapse of the soviet
union. But I can’t help noticing that my grandchildren are heavily in
hock to communist china now which is evidently a whole lot better at
business than we are. You know we talk about the collapse of communism
and the soviet union. My Goodness this country collapsed in 1929. I
mean it crashed big time and capitalism looked like a very poor idea.”

“When I worked for General Electric again this was soon after the
second world war. You know I was keeping up with new developments and
they showed me a milling machine. And this thing worked by punch cards.
That’s where computers were at that time. And everybody was sort of
sheapish about how well this thing worked. Because in those days
machinest were treated as though they were great musicians as they were
virtuousos on these machines. And after that demonstration everyone was
thinking what’s going to happen to these wonderful men who have been so
useful to us. We have to give people something to do with life.”

“It’s obvious through the human experience that extended families and
tribes are terribly important. We can do without extended  family as
human beings about as easily as we can do without vitamins or essential
minerals.”

“Well that’s exactly what I am. The trouble with being a secular
humanist is that we don’t have a congregation we don’t meet. So it’s a
very flimsy tribe. Well there’s a wonderful quotation from nature.
Nature said “Only a person of deep faith can afford the luxury of
skepticism.” It’s something perfectly wonderful is going on I do not
doubt it, but the explanations I hear do not satisfy me.”

“Ink on paper doesn’t matter any more. Television is the whole story.
It is ‘the’ way to communicate now. There was a time when ink on paper
really mattered but it doesn’t any more.”

Interviewer: “Can humour be found you think in the devastation of New
Orleans and all the those other communities along the gulf coast after
the hurricane?”

“My faith in the American people is deep. And I imagine there have been
wonderful jokes made down there. The darkest jokes possible. But again
there are many people who were absolutely helpless. And it would be
very human if one of them made a joke.”

Interviewer: “How important has art been to your work?”

“Well it’s a perfectly agreeable innocent thing to do and it’s a way of
being human. What I hate about public school systems that cut out the
arts because they’re not a way to make a living. It is such a human
thing to do and it is the experience of becoming. If you make something
that wasn’t in the universe before. And that feels so good to human
beings and to cheat kids out of that is criminal. Everybody should be
painting now or drawing or whatever just as they should be singing or
taking walks or falling in love or whatever. It’s so human. And not to
teach kids how to do this is to cheat them terribly.”

“What music is I don’t know. But it helps me so. And I mean it’s just
noise but it’s such magical noise and enchanting to me. Why it works so
well I don’t know but I know that I can find relief listening to music.”

“You can’t remember pure nonsense. It was pure nonsense the pointless
destruction of that city.  And I kept writing crap as they say.”

Interviewer: “Did the bombing and the stench of the bodies you were
digging up afterwards haunt you? Do those memories haunt you?”

“No. If you were imagining it yes of course you would. And so the
person would be colored for the rest of his life by this stench in his
nostrils and all that. This was a wonderful teenage adventure in my
life. I wouldn’t have missed a moment of it. It did not wound me at
all. It was things that happened when I was six years old would go a
whole lot… will explain far more thoroughly what I am then dresdan.
No, it was a great adventure. I loved the whole thing.”

Interviewer: “You really did?”

“Oh yeah, and I liked being in the infantry and I wouldn’t have missed it.”

Interviewer: “Umm… I’m just so surprised to hear that.”

“Well it’s wrong for a pacifist to like war that much. I found nothing to object to.”

“For one thing, one of the filters I had seen it through was war movies
about world war 2 and war books. And of course they featured Frank
Sinatra and Duke Wayne and all that. And it took me a long time to
realize that this war was in fact fought by children. And not these
middle aged 4f movie actors.”

“Absolutely nothing was gained by it. And I’ll issue the challenge
again here. Nobody in this whole world benefited from that air raid but
me. That not one person got out of auschwitz a microsecond earlier. Not
one german soldier fell back from his fox hole on the russian front or
the american front. Nothing was changed at all. And I’m the only person
that benefited and I got three dollars or maybe four dollars for every
person killed there.”

Interviewer: “So you think because of the economics of writing that
it’s very difficult for writers to be full time novelists any more?”

“Right and one consequence is that you are going to, your novelists as
you will have them are people who are rich or what have married rich.
And so you are going to get more and more stories about Andover and
Brown and Harvard and so forth. And these lives certainly deserve to be
reported on, but I think you’re going to have an upper class literature
because only the upper classes will be able to afford the time it takes
to write a novel.”

“Well that’s all they want to publish now in many cases. That’s all
their interested in. It’s these people in business schools have come up
with this wonderful idea is “Hey why don’t you publish nothing but
bestsellers.” You know, it’s why waste money on anything else? And so
some extremely good writers in this country are having trouble finding
publishers now because they only sell 25, 30 thousand copies which is
nothing any more.”

“Reading was a lot more fun too. I’ve always read for pleasure. I never
had to explain afterwards what the author had done to prove that I had
understood the book at all. And when I enter into literary
conversations now I don’t have the vocabulary, I don’t have the
critical approach that most people have who have come through seminars
and all that. So I really can’t speak literature very well.”

“Writers will come out of almost any department but the English
department. This is not to insult english departments when I say this
in a lecture everybody says “oh yeah ho ho what a bunch of jerks in the
English department”. Well that’s not the purpose of an English
department to turn out creative writers. It’s to turn out literary
historians, cultivated people and people who will in turn teach people
the wonders of their language and their literature. But one thing an
English department will do is teach you good taste too soon. And so
when you can’t write very well but are starting out, you’ll be
horrified when you compare yourself with James Joyce at the peak of his
powers or Proust or Mark Twain or whatever. And so when I was in the
chemistry department at Cornell writing for the Cornell Sun I thought
everything was wonderful that I was doing, you know, I didn’t know any
better so I dared to begin.”

“The newspaper style has always seemed to me wonderfully honest. It’s you tell as much as you know as quickly as you can.”

“I think people are really influenced by novels between the age of 12
and 24 say. And whatever I am today, whatever my literary tastes are,
whatever authors I admire, whatever my politics are, is largely
determined by books I read back then. That was a long time ago.”

***

That last has the most poignant meaning for me. For if there was ever a
writer whose novels I read “between the age of 12 and 24″ that
determined to a great extent my literary tastes and my politics and my
beliefs it is certainly Kurt Vonnegut. I will miss him.

These quotes come from the interviews with Kurt Vonnegut on NPR, FreshAir,  the SecondLife interview through The Infinite Mind, PBS, and the Daily Show with Jon Stewart. Most of these can be listened to on youtube or through the npr web site.

In the aftermath of a violent shooting tragedy, what happens to gun shops around the country? There seem to me to be three possible and probably impacts.

1. Gun shops sell more guns and ammunition. People are scared and think that they need a gun to protect themselves and their families so they go out and buy a gun.

2. Gun shops face persecution and violence against them or at least significant picketing and protest. People are scared and looking for someone to lay blame upon.

3. Gun shops face increased regulation through laws that they have to comply with. Politicians are scared (or sense opportunity) and want to show that they are doing something.

Now, I don’t have any data to say to what extent of any of these things are happening and have happened, but intuitively they seem like the likely results.

I’m not a particular fan of any of any of these three outcomes. I’m not against regulation on the surface, but I am a little leery of knee-jerk regulation in the response to tragedy. They are rarely well thought out and often just need to be revised a few months or years later. Also, I don’t think it’s particularly fair to have businesses have to react to a chaotically changing regulation environment where every publicly visible event could change the rules of the game for them.

On the other hand I certainly don’t think gun salesmen should profit from the tragedy that has befallen others and
I am just as appalled by the thought of these people being persecuted.  I am even not fond of the idea of people strongly protesting in a peaceful way in front of or around the places where guns are sold, though I do think they have a right to if they please.

Rather, I think we need a situation where those who sell and manufacture guns are not at odds with either the government that regulates their sale or the people who are effected negatively by the existence and proliferation of those guns. I would prefer it if, the very act of being responsible for the distribution of powerful weaponry to the citizenry would carry with it a certain amount of public trust. Such a trust should not be given lightly. It would have to be earned and reaffirmed on a regular basis. That means that owners of gun shops would have to be concerned for the safety of the populace as much as for their own profit. Then, hopefully, no one would lay the blame at their feet when tragedy strikes.

One way to try and reverse these trends is to instead of implementing hard and fast rules that prevent certain gun sales (at least not beyond a certain reasonable minimum),  implement laws that tie the profits of the makers of weaponry directly to the social consequences of the distribution of that weaponry. One step in this direction might be to make it so that a gun owner is responsible for covering minimally the cost of the guns and ammunition used in a violent unlawful incident and also any property damage caused by the weaponry. Another might be to make them responsible for paying reparations to the victims of the incidents. Another possibility might be to simply levy a fine against them each time a weapon from a particular shop or created by a particular manufacturer is used to commit criminal acts. Alternatively one could simply tax the sale of guns and ammunition significantly and offer substantive discounts to the salesmen who demonstrate a track record of selling guns to responsible citizenry. The money taxed could then be used for funds that go to the victims of violent crimes and to pay for the extra costs incurred by the State for cleanup and investigation, with any left over funding just going toward paying for policing and attorneys. Also, any such rule that ties profits to criminal incidents could be implemented in such a way that it takes into account the probability of the salesman of knowing that the weapon in question was going to be used for criminal activity based upon the buyer’s background. Sell a gun to an upstanding citizen who one day snaps and you won’t owe very much, but sell a gun to a person who has a criminal record as the cost could be great indeed.

The consequences of any of these proposals might well be to create a situation where businesses that sell guns, have as great or greater an incentive to compete on safety and control of the sales of their guns than they do upon the cost and deadly effectiveness of those same arms.  Companies could well fight with one another to become increasingly restrictive on who they sell their guns to. They may well use credit checks if they don’t already and they may look hard for ways in which to acquire more information about the psychiatric history of their potential customers. Some other businesses might arise to fill the growing need of gun companies to be more aware of to whom they are selling their weapons. These companies could provide expertise in obtaining and providing a profile of any potential customer that adequately gauges the likelihood of that customer being involved in violence, much like insurance companies obtain similar information about their potential customers. The gun shops would also be likely to favor guns that are less lethal so that not as many dead arise from any particular shooting,  so that would in turn put pressure upon the manufacturers to create guns that fit that profile.

In the end all of this would not impinge in any way upon your right to bear arms under the constitution. You would have the same right to buy and use a gun as anyone else, whether you are the most deranged or the most sane person in the country. You just need to find someone who is willing to sell it to you. Certainly we would not want to impinge upon the rights of the businesses to sell their property?

Anyway, my point is that control of weaponry is what society needs to accomplish. That need not be accomplished by a gun ban or even particularly strong regulations. There are a lot of possibilities, but I think one that has not gotten enough consideration is trying to get the many businesses involved in manufacture, distribution, and sales of guns and ammunition on the same side as the people advocating peaceful use of them. We should not rely simply on their good conscience to create the controls needed when we can also create economic incentives for them to do so.

That being said, I personally would be fine with stronger universal limitations on who can be sold guns to as well. That would just be another way to establish strong controls. I’m just not convinced it would be the most effective.

I’ve had big dreams. Who hasn’t? To be rich and famous or well known and respected. To be the head of your field or an artist renowned for your unique vision. Or to be a powerful player capable of changing the world for the better. Or even just to live a wealthy comfortable life in a big home having all the comforts deserving of someone who has “won” this great capitalist competitive game we spend our days playing.

I’ve dreamed these dreams, but I don’t think I’ve ever really wanted them. Rather they were more like dreams of the “wouldn’t it be neat if…” variety. They weren’t real. I couldn’t imagine actually working toward making them a reality. No doubt they are someone’s real dream and there is someone who will fight for these things and dedicate themselves with singular determination into putting themselves into such a vision of their own future. But not I. For me they have never been much of a dream, more like a wistful daydream.

Still, there are other dreams. Dreams that aren’t so big and grand or wondrous to desire. Dreams that are so tiny that most would not even recognize them as dreams. A single moment here, a word there, an experience there. Often I don’t have even a good picture of what they are, just kind of a recollection of a feeling that I would like to see come again in different day in a different way.

When I think of these dreams I find myself wanting them, needing them, and willing to fight for them. Just give me a second to reclaim a lost second of past joy or an instance of reality more real than flawed remembrance. Give me an moment of an experience beyond what I am capable of, a microscopic time frame where revelation begets understanding.  I would pay a high price for those things, if given the option. But the reality is they are far less likely to occur than even the big dreams are and there is far less you can do to cause them to come to pass. 

Still, these small dreams matter to me. They matter a lot more than the thoughts of big wonders and grand possibilities. These are the dreams I cherish. I would not be me without them.

http://ask.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/04/13/2018210

On slashdot today there is a comment where someone asks if it is ok for schools to ban wikipedia.  This is such a question that is so extraordinarily unexpected to me that I would not have believed that anyone would ask it had I not read it for myself.

Block wikipedia in schools? Who would think such a thing was rational? Why not just opt out of the future of human development while you are it?  This is insanity. Why? Would you be afraid that students might learn something that isn’t the strictly controlled knowledge that the schools teach? Afraid you can’t brain wash your students effectively? Afraid your students might have to deal with the discomfort of learning something that is not true and have to learn to verify and think for themselves? Afraid that the students might actually start to learn to contribute to the society and add to the free knowledge available to everyone? I just don’t get it. To know that there a schools out there that actually are doing this right now makes me feel very very bad about the world.

I am sure that if you were to stick a random observer in front of the internet in this day and age who has no experience or no outside knowledge of anything related to the internet and just asked him or her to browse through pages uses a standard search engine, one of the first and most useful sites he or she would come accross would be wikipedia. Not only that but I am sure that he or she would keep coming across it again and again and again while browsing the web and each time finding something useful or interesting in the process. Very soon I would expect such a person to rely on wikipedia as a baseline resource for information, a place to look first for data before looking onwards to more in depth sites. And often, wikipedia would prove sufficient in and of itself to satisfy the random reader’s bit of curiosity and he’d have no need to look onward.

There are many arguments against wikipedia. It is often under attack and often ridiculed both by people who have an agenda and by people who are wise and should know better. People complain about how quickly it changes, how people with an agenda might influence it or twist it, how the data is inherently unreliable, and sometimes they just argue that there are better resources to use and that it does not deserve its popularity.  These arguments are all more or less nonsense. Studies have never conclusively shown any significant level of unreliability in the data, wikipedia is designed with its mutability in mind and accounts for it, sources are carefully tracked and bias and vandalism both are kept in check through a rather complex system of controls and social norms. Since its sources are clearly delineated with plenty of external links wikipedia provides numerous alternative resources for the knowledge hungry to go beyond wikipedia to learn more. And if you still have an issue with anything on wikipedia, it provides an open forum for users to discuss and argue and find out what others are thinking and disagree with you about and ultimately you can change it to the more accurate statement you know to be right.  If you still have doubts about Wikipedia’s reliability, you can get a pretty balanced picture of it by reading wikipedia’s own article on the issue right here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reliability_of_Wikipedia

But even if Wikipedia were significantly more unreliable than all other encyclopedias out there, it would still be something utterly extraordinary and worthy of praise. It is simply a more democratic institution than many other sources of knowledge. Everyone can access it, (who has an internet connection) easily and without cost. They can all participate in the discussion and the growth of it too. And it grows in the direction that the people actually want it to grow, not in the direction any small independent group of people says it ought to grow in. Topics that might seem irrelevant to the makers of Encyclopedia Britannica can get full airing on Wikipedia, taking their place in the grand scheme of human history. The breathe of information on wikipedia is just unimaginable, 8 million pages and 1.7  million full fledged articles in the english language alone. Approximately 7 million articles in 251 languages.  And if you’ve spent any time reading wikipedia you know a lot of these articles are not small things at all. Some of them are simply huge.

We used to have an old set of Encyclopedias in my home. I remember, my parents got them because they thought they would be helpful for us in our education. They weren’t very. I was a very curious child and on occasion I would flip through an encyclopdia or look for something that I wanted to know in one. Inevitably I would not be able to find what I was looking for and I’d just get bored with it. The articles were uninteresting by and large and not particularly detailed. For projects I would have to go to the library to learn something meaningful about a subject matter, the encyclopedia might possibly just give me a few pictures to use or let me know something trivial like what a certain state’s flag looks like. I never got caught up in it. I never became fascinated with our encyclopedias. I never started to enjoy just reading articles in our encyclopedias just for the joy of reading them. They were more like ornamentation than a useful resource.

In contrast, I read Wikipedia all the time. Sometimes I’m just searching for something on the web and the wikipedia article is one of the first and best resources I find about it. Other times I go to wikipedia first when I am curious about something and want to learn a little more about some subject matter or phrase I heard in passing during a conversation or on the news or read in the book.  Still other times in my spare time I just peruse wikipedia reading articles that meet my fancy and reading the discussions too and clicking on the sites linked to in the references and external links sections and learning more. More recently I’ve even started to peruse the many wiki spin off projects as well be it wikinews, wikiversity, or wikiquote and I find them all to be thoroughly enjoyable expenditures of my time.  I’ve always been a huge fan of wikipedia, in fact I was quite a fan a number of projects the preceded it that were similar in nature. But wikipedia has just been to me one of the most extraordinary resources I’ve ever encountered. Its explosive growth, huge breathe and extraordinary reliability has made it one of those resources that make me wonder how it is that I ever once got along without it.

In a very real way wikipedia has already become a kind of base line knowledge for net dwellers to have. I talk to people on line, on forums and chats and on any subject of any depth in order for us to be talking the same “language” in a real sense we have to base our discussions on certain background facts and suppositions that we can get most readily from wikipedia articles. We supplement that knowledge from other resources and we sometimes dispute the claims asserted but in a sense if we didn’t have the wikipedia articles we’d just be talking right past each other, or we wouldn’t have the requisite pre-knowledge to even be able to speak intelligibly on the matter. This is the capacity in which wikipedia and resources like it raises the level of discussion on the internet and keeps us all on the same page. I have more than once been referred to the wikipedia article on a subject in a discussion and more often than not reading that article is very helpful and enables me to add more to the discussion than I otherwise would have. I have often quoted and referenced wikipedia articles on discussions as well in order to provide detail or clarification on some point.

Wikipedia isn’t the end of our learning, nor do we base all of our discussions solely on the facts found within. The internet is filled with far more and more in depth knowledge than you can get just from wikipedia and is growing ever more saturated with useful knowledge by the day. But Wikipedia does provide the basics of understanding in areas where we may have only had total ignorance prior to unearthing the article. Wikipedia spreads basic knowledge to the masses efficiently and effectively. This is really just a component of the massive effect of democratization of basic information wrought from the internet itself, but in a very real way I think of Wikipedia as the crowning jewel, the pivotal symbol of the internet’s triumph in this area.

So why the huge criticism of this site? Why do so many people hate it so? Why do even many of the wise and rational still speak with caution about this astounding resources and try to warn people off of it? I think it is for a very simple reason. Because our intuition tells us it shouldn’t work so well. The idea of open access and reliable knowledge is counterintuitive to us. We think an encyclopedia edited by “anyone” just can’t possibly work, so we look for the flaws and we hesitate to put any stake in it. We keep expecting it to prove to be unreliable and biased because we think of our fellow human beings, especially those that are stranger to us as so inherently unreliable and biased.

But wikipedia and many other collaborative projects break those expectations. They show them to be false and based on false assumptions. We can working together make something greater than what we individually could accomplish and we can do it for no other reason than our desire to do so, our urge to help out our fellow human beings and contribute to the future of human knowledge.  Sometimes having the best and the greatest exclusive experts is less effective than having just large masses of people contributing whatever little bit of expertise and knowledge they can.

Still, do not think that I just flippantly dismiss all claims of both bias and inaccuracy in wikipedia. It does exist as it exists in virtually all other resources where you can find the same information in pretty much equal proportion. In fact I feel that it is the very fact that Wikipedia is so open and obvious about the likelihood of its having bias and and inaccuracies that is one of the things that makes it most useful as a vehicle for modern knowledge. It shouts at you “We are collaboratively edited!”, “Anyone can change this!”, “Don’t just take what you are reading at face value!”  But of course this is the attitude you should really have about everything you read. You always should have had that attitude, but perhaps now even more than ever. It’s just that wikipedia makes sure you can’t forget it.  Whereas other resources be it the New York Times or Encyclopedia Britannica claim to be in some fundamental way “the truth” making we readers every and again look the fool for trusting them when we find out that they are as flawed and unreliable as everything else, wikipedia puts on no such airs or pretensions. It is no more and no less than the truth as according to the many editors who happened to have chosen to write about it at the time. Don’t take their word for it. Read more and become certain. Wikipedia tells us hey these days you don’t trust your schools, your state, your police officers, your doctors, your lawyers, even your parents, but you rely on them all the same. So don’t trust wikipedia either, but feel free to rely on it if you choose.  In this way a resource like Wikipedia makes us all better thinkers and learners if we are wise enough to treat it reasonably.

So block wikipedia from the internet will you? Well you might as well just turn off the damn thing altogether. Any internet that does not allow for open collaborative free institutions like wikipedia is not an internet I want anything to do with.

“A thing without a name has no substance. If it existed, it would have a name. And, likewise, if you give a thing a name, somewhere, on some level, the thing named will exist, will come to be.”

“Give a thing a name and it will somehow come to be. All truth is in naming, and all lies as well, for noting distorts like a false name can, a false name that changes the reality as well as the seeming.”

Here, amongst the core principles of one of George RR Martin’s great masterpieces (does he write anything else?), I find this a fascinating message. Dying of the Light  it is called. Above the sad fate of pitiful wandering planet of Worlorn, circling past the ring of fire, after the festival was over back towards the frigid cold of outer space, filled with  the lives of ghosts  who don’t yet know  that their time has passed.

There is so much to Dying of the Light I could not begin to discuss it all, and yet this one thing I feel I must write of, this idea of the power of naming and the impact of it has on people’s lives.

I had a friend once long before college, before high school truly who used to speak on occasion of the power of names. It surprised me that I remember that now. He, like I was an avid reader of fantasy and science fiction back then and to be sure the idea of naming power is not unique to Martin.

It is likely that he believed it, this idea of names and power and perhaps he believes it to this day I know not but for me? I never believed it. Not really. It is sort of one of those great ironies in the world, you can learn and understand so much when you cast it in the light of names and naming but in the end, and of this I am certain, they really and truly are… only words…

There’s no magic or mysticism beyond that of any other words, for truth, but that does not mean they don’t matter or the concepts we try to express when we speak of the power of naming are not real or lack substance. Martin shares with us powerful messages here in the guise of the mythos of naming. He speaks to us of the roles we play in our societies, the choices we make to fit into ideals, how we can fall into being something or someone we are not, and how we can rise and change to become something we would like to be. Throughout it all he calls it names and bonds and substance. Reality brought into being through the words we choose and how deep and profound the impact the labels we place upon one another can possibly be.

The heroine of the story Gwen cast aside the names her ex-lover gave her, Jenny, Guinevere, because they defined a role that was not herself, but then was later haunted by the name she took when she married another: bethyn. A word that defines a kind of a relationship like a spouse only not, having the force of cultural bias behind it that made it into a kind of repulsive slavery. It was a role that she  took because she told herself it was “only a word”, only later to find that it had deeper meaning and created a reality that was a trap for her that she needed to escape.

Her “husband” Jaan Vikory strives to take on the name of the hero, which is represented by his last name, struggles to change his people to make them give up their past ways and become better for it. Yet he is bound by the traditions of his culture too and forced to take on names that bind him to be and accept roles that he would not necessarily choose if free to his own devices. Does he live up to his name? In many ways yes, he is the heroic savior of many and yes effects great change amongst his people, only in the end the struggles he faces and the choices he make force him to break a bond so dear to him that it breaks him. In the end, I think, he is not the hero Vikory but just a man named Jaan.

There are other characters too wrapped up in this naming motif. The traitor who even in the last wants only that his name remain on his work as scientist, as an ecologist. The loyal servant who strives in the end to live up to his bond to Jaan that names him teyn which he calls the greatest of bonds.

But then there is the main character, Dirk T’Larien, who came chasing the name of a woman who did not exist, who never existed. Ever a shadow, a ghost seeming to move inexorably toward his own death step by step but at each moment taking on more and growing stronger and more substantial, more real in the process. He never has much in the way of names or bonds throughout the book. It seems he’d lost the only bond that ever mattered to him years past. And during all the years between hes never had any name to either live up to or struggle against. He was just an ordinary man living out a shell of an existance. As another character tells him “You are not a terribly bad man, t’Larien. You are weak, I know, but no one has ever called you strong.”

And Dirk grows stronger, throughout the book, the city of despair is burned down, he casts away the whisperjewel that spoke of forgotten realities that were never real to begin with and in the end he faces his obligations and does not run away. 

There is only one name that is often said of Dirk and I think in the end it defines him more than anything, influences his decisions when otherwise he might have fled or committed suicide long ago or simply stopped caring. It is a simple name but in the world of Worlorn, like all names, it seems to have great power.  A name he strives to be, risks his life in becoming and in the end lives up to better than anyone would have ever expected of him. What is that name? Simply Friend.

I don’t believe in the power of “names” but they are guide posts and signs that point to the deeper realities of roles and perspectives and expectations, the realities of what we do to one another with the way in which we regard one another.  It is certainly very real to feel yourself forced into playing a role that is not yourself. It is certainly very real to strive to fulfill a role that is bigger than anything you could ever be. It is just as real to look at someone and urge them to be more than they ever thought they were capable of being. I believe that all of that is all too real.

But what are roles, perspectives, expectations really? Just names. Names for something deeper that lies beneath the surface. Names that make that something into something that grows real in the naming.

They were my friends, the two of them who asked me to journey with them. And they needed my help, so I agreed. They spoke of the joy of adventure, the pleasure of discovery, and the possibility of treasure at the end with such enthusiasm that I felt my enthusiasm growing too. But I was cautious. Such journeys are not without their risks.

We entered the ruins together and slowly we traversed them. There were dangers a plenty, traps and pitfalls and strange powers barring our way.  My power was enough to disarm many, my presence could diffuse the risk of others. But for the rest, we helped each other, worked together to keep each other safe. It was harder than we expected even with my ability and several times we feared for our lives, but somehow we managed to make our way through the maze like caverns and find our way to their end.

A grand hall awaits us by there is no treasure to be seen. Only ahead at the back wall of the strange chamber there is a gaping square hole like a shoot just barely wide enough for a grown man to slide through, above it are strange runes and symbols of a bygone era.

My friends approach it eagerly I hold back but they can find nothing interesting about the wall. They wonder if they should try entering the shoot and seeing what is beyond.

“Wait.”  I say.

As I said, I was cautious. So I slowly walked up to the front of the room and my friends make way for me.  As I come up to the shoot the words above it start to glow reacting to my presence. I am not surprised, these sorts of things tends to happen when you command the power.

A moment passes and then we hear a mysterious disembodied voice and I know that it is stating the words inscribed in the runes. It states:

“For each, ask and receive a treasure of great desire or for one enter and experience a moment of perfect happiness.”

Trepidation strikes me. Something isn’t right. I look to my left and to my right at my companions and then I see it in their eyes.  There is guilt overwhelmed by desire. They want it. Badly.  They had known of this. This was why they really came, why they brought me to this place and asked for my help. They needed me but they knew that only one of us could claim the prize.

What would have happened next? Would they have begged me? Forced me to choose between one friend and another. Both had used me. Both had betrayed me in this. But even had they not I could never pick one over the other. 

Or would we fight for it? Would our friendship shatter here? I could not bare it.

I could ask, but for what? And would we not wonder always what we had missed? I knew it was the safer course to take the consolation prize and be happy and together, but I wondered if the insidiousness of uncertainty would undermine our alliance. Who was I to choose for them? And I could see in their eyes that neither would ever agree to anything less than perfection.

I had one advantage left and only one choice that I could be made.  I was closest. So I jumped in before they could react and stop me. If only one could take the risk let it be me. Or was it just that I was just as selfish and filled with greed and I wanted it as much or more than them?

I find myself lying on my back in an idyllic landscape.  Above me, I watch beautiful clouds float by, the sky is a perfect blue. I feel the warmth of the sun heating my face while the cool ground cools my back and a gentle wind floats over me.  I am younger here. Just a kid again. All the burdens that had plagued me daily of doubt and fear and an underlying anger were all gone as were the memories of hurt and fear and pain. I never knew how heavy a burden they had been for me until they were lifted.

Beside me lying on his back as well is a person that I know instantly to be my closest friend. There are no names in this place, none that can be vocalized but I know his and he knows mine. We lie looking up in companionable silence, lost in our own thoughts but they don’t feel to be separate thoughts. I feel as if we are two sides of the same coin and  that all that we do is linked.

After a moment there is a rustle in the trees and we hear soft laughter coming from beyond. We both sit up at the same time and stare off to see our friends emerge from the tree. There are four of them, two girls and two guys and they look at us with their happy smiling familiar faces. I know them all, trust them all, and I know that they are amongst the only people in the world that I would want to spend time with.

“What’s so funny?”  my friend asks, with pretend hurt.

They don’t respond directly,  but one of the guys says “You two weren’t going to keep this place all to yourselves were you?”

We laugh and talk companionably and soon we have an impromptu picnic in the glade. We eat and talk and play and chatter about pointless things. But never a word causes me discomfort and I never feel at a loss of what to say or never feel a sense of fear of what they might think.  It was perfect. Almost.

As its get’s later, I ask the question.  I know her name and we all do, the seventh and last member of our group who is absent from our revelry. Someone snickers. A girl tells me that she went to sit by the lake. I twirl a blade of grass in my hand and stare at it as everyone grows quiet around me.  My closest friend looks at me with concern. My other friends look at me with curiosity.

I give some pointless excuse that all can see through and stand up and walk off away from our pleasant companionship to find her. Through the trees I travel and to the lake where I see her sitting on a peer that stretches out into the water. The sunset shines behind her.

I walk over and sit beside her, our legs are dangling out over the water. She turns at my presence and smiles at me. I smile back and ask her the obvious question.

“What are you doing out here by yourself.”

She turns away from me still smiling and answers me with a question.

“Have you ever seen a more beautiful sight?”

I cannot deny it. Eventually I turn my eyes from her and stare out to see what she sees. The beauty of a perfect sunset over the twinkling water, a sight alone that seems to make life worth living. We sit in silence staring at the light, she rests her hand lightly upon mine.

This was it, a group of perfect friends, a perfect moment of companionship. No fears, no doubts, only the comfort of knowing your place in the world and experiencing the joy of the perfect beauty that surrounds us. I thought that I was happy truly. Perfectly happy.

As I have this thought, she turns to me suddenly. The light from the sun is more than three quarters gone. Soon it will have faded.  In her eyes is a seriousness and a certainty that I had never seen before. She looks me right in the eyes and says the words that haunt me still. There is a deep sadness tinging her voice as she says them

“Not even perfect happiness lasts forever.”

With that her face contorts into a kind of anger and rage I’ve never imagined. She grips me harshly and throws me into the lake leaping in after me. There she hold my head under the water while her eyes glare at me with unfathomable depths of raging hatred. I’ve never seen such fiery despite in the eyes of another. I’ve never felt anyone look upon me as if I was the lowest of the low, worthy of nothing more than total elimination.

I look up through the clear water through which my head is submerged. I look beyond her to the side of the lake and I see them. My four friends standing there and pointing at us in the water. But none make a move to save me. No. Instead, though my ears are filled with water I  can hear their laughter floating up toward me. They are shaking with laughter pointing and mocking me. To them my drowning is a joke. I am not worthy to be saved, but I am worthy of giving them a moment’s amusement as I suffer.

I shudder but one thing keeps me sane, and keeps me struggling to force my way up for air and breathe and life. My closest friend is not amongst them. He is not there laughing at me. He wouldn’t I think. 

But where is he? I look around desperately while I struggle, always trying to keep my eyes away from seeing the fiery hatred in her eyes or the sparkling laughter of those on the shore.  Eventually I look up to the pier from which we had jumped and I see first his shoes at the edge of the pier and I feel a sense of deep relief. He has come all the way out here to save me! Surely he won’t abandon me.  I reach out my hand towards him thinking and hoping that he is reaching down to grasp mine. My eyes travel up and up his body as I stretch further and more desperately. Until I finally see him.

He is not reaching toward me. His eyes are clasped firmly in front of him. And his eyes, his terrible eyes. The sight cursed me to a lifetime of nightmares of those eyes. In them there was not laughter nor fierceness only a coldness deeper than the frigid waters beneath a thousand miles of ice. Everything about them screamed out a kind of cold disregard and disgust that I knew was devoted solely ant totally toward me. His eyes spoke condemnation at me. They screamed at me. Though he never said a word I knew exactly what he was saying with those eyes and the message rent my soul.  “How could you,” they said,  ” How can you be so weak?”

I gasped in the anger and sorrow and fear and embarrassment I felt. And with it, I finally let the water into my lungs and with a moment of perfect despair I collapsed into emptiness.

I awoke screaming at the top of my lungs with tears flying down my face. I struggled fiercely at hands that gripped me my mind fully lost to me for that moment still thinking I was drowning in the water.

It took a long moment before I gained control of myself and I heard my name being spoken over and over again  by them who were with me still my two friends who had journeyed here with me who had fought with me to reach this place, to get this so called “treasure”. 

I see in their eyes their deep concern for me. I wonder how long they had been there with me holding me, striving to bring me back to sanity. I gasp and choke an tears and I grip their hands tightly as the images of my experiences float back through my mind replaying through the clouds. I see the clouds, the sunset. I see their facing happy and smiling then filled with hatred, and scorn and overwhelming disappointment. 

It seemed like I sat there on the stones for an eternity but eventually I got up and they my friends ever present stood with me. I wiped my eyes and found my center. I shook off their grasp and walked slowly on my own around the small room that must have been at the bottom of the shoot where we all now stood. I walked slowly two circuits around the room taking deep breathes the entire time until I knew for certain that I was in complete control of my faculties.

Finally I came back to my friends and I looked at them and it was as if I saw seeing them for the first time.

“Are you ok?”   One of them asked with trepidation.

I didn’t answer. But I looked at them closely. They were truly concerned for my well being. I knew that this that had happened to me weighed heavily on them. They felt the guilt for it even not knowing what it was that had happened.  But just below the surface I could see it in them too the burning question that next to knowing that I was ok was the one thing they most desired to know, needed to know, would not be satisfied without knowing. It was why they came. It was why we are all here now.

They must have seen it in my eyes. The certainty of the demand that they ask and ask now. I would not volunteer it unless they asked.

“What was it like…” one of them started his eyes turned away unable to face me.

“… that… moment of perfect happiness?” the other finished, her face filled with shame and uncertainty as she tried to look anywhere but into my eyes.

And I thought about it then and I knew the answer. There in that place I had experienced ‘perfect’ friends and ‘perfect’ experiences but they had been unreal, illusions. Those friends would commit no wrongs feel no doubts, fear no evils. But these friends before me know. They felt shame and uncertainty. They had their own wants and needs independent of me that could drive them to great evil or great good. And yet they had a concern for me, had come after me when they heard me screaming alone in the darkness, had tried to save me. Those people in the other world, they had been been the perfect friends. But these friends here in this world. They were real.

I gripped both of their hands in mine fiercely.

“Perfect happiness…” I started.

I waited until they both looked up and met my gaze squarely. Then I spoke with more seriousness and conviction than I had ever spoken before.

“There is no such thing!”

And then I smiled at them, softening my grip but still holding their hands and they smiled back cautiously at me. These were my friends. My real friends. Hopeless real and hopelessly flawed just as I was. I needed them as they are and what they are. I didn’t want perfect happiness. Just a chance to find even a little was good enough for me.

“Let’s go home.”

Occasionally I hear or read words that seem as if the writer somehow tore a hole in  time and stuffed the words through them just so they could come unto me at a specific time when I needed to hear them. Often they are seemingly innocuous words, utterly irrelevant to the overarching plot of the story. Nevertheless they speak to me in a manner that makes me think that I would be a different person had I not heard or read them at that exact moment. Here are two such instances:  (To avoid spoilers I’ll remove references of names so it will not be known from where they come)

“Captain, aren’t you tired?”
“Not particularly.”
“If anything happens, I can call you. So why don’t you get some rest?”
“It won’t make any difference if I’m sitting in my room or sitting up here. It’s physically the same.”
“Well, I suppose you’re right.”
“Does it bothr you that I’m sitting here?”
“No, not at all. I just remember something from the past.”
“The past?”
“Yes. When I first went out on trading I could have started out as a second navigator on a large ship. But instead, I borrowed money from my father and used that money to lease a ship of my own. Of course, it was only a small one. But I was so worried that I couldn’t leave the bridge.”
“Even when you slept?”
“Yes. The crew tried to warn me that it wasn’t good for me. But I stubbornly refused to pay any attention. When we reached our destination, and began business negotiations I couldn’t concentrate anymore.  We lost quite a bit because of that.”
“But I sleep well in my room.”
“That’s better than I used to be.”
“It’s been five years since I was first appointed and it’s been over a year since I’ve been in actual battle.”
“If that’s the case you should take it easy on yourself.”
“So you also treat me like a child.”
“Certainly not! I just can’t stand to watch such a youngster.”
“You can’t stand to watch?”
“To be more precise. I think you are being overly enthusiastic.”
“Overly enthusiastic? You think so?”
“That’s how I see it.”
“I don’t do it intentionally. When I’m given a job to do, I want everything to go right. But I never really want to be a territorial ambassador.”
….
Captain: “So what do you do with yourself when you’re on your own?”
“That’s an awfully personal question.”
“Should I not have asked? Forgive me.”
“That’s okay. I have nothing to hide.
 Let’s see…. I send a lot of letters.”
“Every day?”
“Yes. Every day. I write to everyone I’ve ever met and known. Plus I still have some business matters to attend to even though I’m out here in the service. So I have to spend some time on administrative work.”
“Do you get bored?”
“I enjoy receiving the replies more than writing. I only write letters to see the replies. It’s a godo way to keep a relationship from dying.”
“Relationship from dying?”
“Even though you’re close… without spending time together the friendship will eventually fade. Writing is a way of keeping connections when you can’t meet.
“You know, when I die… I want my funeral to be bright and cheerful. Even though I spend my time with all of you on board. I doubt you and many of the crew would make it there.”
“You could be right. If you die in battle… that’s when the ship is destroyed.”
“By the way aren’t you going to rest?”
“Talking to you like this seems to be a better way to relax.”

*********************

“I actually don’t understand very much, but I’m sure they’re different.
At least, different from me and you. They’re not the ‘normal’ friends.”
“Why?”
<<laughter>>
“Me, I will become very happy just watching someone being very happy. I
like people who eat meals they cooked themselves with very big
mouthfuls. I don’t care if it’s someone I’ve never seen before. Un, so
when I see …’-nyan I feel very lucky. Even though I don’t know why
she’s like that, but she’s always especially happy!”
“Do you want to join them or something? Aren’t you lonely just watching from the side?”
“U–n, me, I feel that many movies I see have a deep meaning, but I
don’t ever want to film my own movie. Seeing’s enough for me. Whether
it’s the World Baseball Championship or the Pro Bowlers Association
World Championship, I always warmly cheer them on. But I never think
‘Uwah~ I want to play that too!’ and join them. Just watching those
people do their best makes me have a good mood already. Anyway, that
doesn’t interest me! So, I should just do what I can do!
“Like that, when I see [you five], I think it’s lots of fun. I like the appearance that
everybody’s busy! Apart from that, I also like the me standing off to
the side watching you!
“So I like where I am right now. I think …’-nyan knows as well, so
she hasn’t tried to drag me in. There’s five people, it must be crowded
already.
“It’s impossible to find out every secret for every thing on this planet. I’m busy enough with my own devices as it is.”
“…’-kun, you have to work hard. The future of mankind rests on you!”
<laughter>

*************************************

Wanting everything to go right…
Keeping relationships from dying…
Becoming happy by watching others be happy…

I am constantly awed and terrified by the power of language.