I stand by this. It has aged well. Though he can’t figure out how to rep his own neck ware as well as Junior, he very much was and remains a Problem Child.

His view and exercise of power is vulgar and pre-pubescent. Like a brat he creates a scene and then gets his jollies watching others react like lunatics. You can imagine the joy he’d take connecting his whole family to electrodes, never tiring of watching Eric or Melania or his dad convulse.

Don’t take my word for it. Trump laid bare his view of power when he summed up his approach to his grade-school plan to develop Gaza:

But I’m not forcing it. I’m just going to sit back and recommend it.

Trump barfs out ideas and watches the world squirm. And like a toddler, at the first sign of resistance from an adult in the room, he gets scared or throws a tantrum.

In the same alternate reality where his show The Apprentice was entertaining, his childish routines might warrant the four seconds of attention the average TikTok video earns, and no more. On antics alone Trump is awful, but not so awful you can’t—as The Simpson’s Vin Scully-ish baseball announcer put it—take your eyes away! It’s like watching a monkey swallow a hand grenade.

The world would be inestimably better if we could turn our attention elsewhere. The problem is not only that he is once again president (and living proof that the universe likes a morbid joke). In his first term, though we feared the lasting damage of his most dreadful appointees, a handful of capable surrogates and advisors kept him from acting on a not insignificant percentage of his stupidest ideas.

No such luck this time. Nowadays, he’s further off his rocker, and his crew more venal and unqualified. Theirs is a perpetual reality warping machine: they worship Trump as an almighty, and he enables their twisted ideas about liberty for the few, justice for those who can pay. JD Vance, the Catholic in Sadducee’s clothing, once called Trump a “total fraud”. Now vice president, Vance cheers on his boss’s cry-cries and can’t muster even the shame of Judas.

This is not to say that Vance was once a good person. Maybe he was born this way.

No, the tragedy—indeed the one and only point—of Trump is that he affects a lot of people. Mostly for the worse. In fact, he’s retarded the ethics and the rational thinking capabilities of great swaths of the world. And he’s normalized this widespread idiocy, this adoption of Idiocracy, and given people a green light to ignore and in some cases abandon what used to be known as character: the truths you stood by, the ones you could not forsake for money or fame or without at least a tinge of guilt.

How or why such a senile man-child can mesmerize so many so thoroughly will be a much-studied question for decades to come. But no matter how deluded the droves of his supporters are today, none can deny that the hagiography is a sign of a mental break. What is missing from your lives, from between your ears, to cause you to worship a person? A person like that?

Some of the less enthusiastic go with the cop out I don’t agree with his tactics, I only believe in him for the ends. Which begs the question: If you can be bothered to hold your nose and stoop to such depths, why bother fretting over the means at all? If it’s OK to suggest your own general should be hung for treason, or the attack on Nancy Pelosi’s husband was a joke, or January 6th rioters were as civil as a tour group, why not just get on with it? Hang the general, hammer the husband, torch the Capital.

Others opt for the argument that we need a “man” in charge because this is how the world works. Never heard that one before. But what exactly is so manly about being a raving lunatic, or playing endless rounds of golf? Or, when it comes to admirers, what is so manly about wearing plaid or firing a gun or burning diesel or laughing at shrinking biospheres? Do the hunters who go along with his manly play acting look forward to stalking prey in parking lots? Because with Trump’s environmental policies that’s where they will be setting up their blinds.

Who do we blame for the moral shrinkage that Trump has wrought?

Go ahead, blame inept Democrats if you like. They had and have problems to last lifetimes. Social media, insecure billionaires, GOP organizers. Blame them all. Blame especially everyone who voted for him. Blame them, but you’re still at least partly wrong.

The full fault lies with everyone who did not vote against Trump.

They had no excuse. Brain damage? Racism? Hatred of women? A love for money above all else? Doesn’t matter. No eligible voter had an excuse. Anything, any single thing, would have made a better president than Trump.

Think of the time we’d have saved, the sanity we’d have preserved, the mistakes we’d have avoided, the damage we’d have dodged, the energy we could have put into building something lasting, worthwhile, and productive.

Instead it’s been an ongoing hate-filled kindergarten of farce. Trump is the Used Cars of presidents—without the laughs or the integrity.

Just over a couple of months into Trump’s disastrous second term, which of his accomplishments do his voters like most?

• Is it the confidence he’s given to consumers? – The Conference Board
  

• His crypto-hustles? – Gizmodo
• His family’s full-time grift? – Wall Street Journal
• The way he’s sacrificed nature in red states? Who needs clean air and water, after all? – NY Times
• What about how well he’s protecting the rest of America’s natural bounty, a gift from god, don’t you know. But no Trump voter has ever been to Yosemite, so no big deal. – SF Gate
• His populism? The front row of his inauguration was overflowing with small business owners, wasn’t it?

• Do they like how well he’s stood by the Arabs who supported him? Never mind. – The Hill
• He might not live or talk or act like a god-fearing man, but surely all the religious types among his apostles (including the Catholics) are thrilled by the very god-like results he delivers. Aren’t they? – National Catholic Reporter , America Magazine
• Do they love the way he’s made it easier for elites like himself, his entire Cabinet, all his friends, and his biggest donors to buy their way out of trouble? – Popular Information
• Do his fans love the way he’s stood up for fair drug pricing? – STAT
• Or the way he’s powered Wall Street, and managed to do so without understanding tariffs or money? That is impressive. – MSN / Wall Street Journal
  • BTW, if tariffs are going to bring in “trillions and trillions of dollars,” why keep delaying their implementation? – CNN
• Surely it’s the support he’s shown veterans? – AP
• Perhaps it’s the corruption? – Gizmodo
• Could it be that most of all they like destruction of the institutions that made America endure? Or do they not get that precisely what’s allowed America to survive and thrive? – NY Times
• Is it the error prone way his blue-collar helper Elon Musk so assiduously cuts jobs and life-saving soft-power programs, or the way he does so with such glee? Or is it that he does so with such irony, for no subsidy is too big for his interests (nor any slight too small to penetrate his thin skin). – Newsweek
• Maybe it’s Trump’s renewed commitment to and affinity for sex traffickers. It couldn’t be, could it? – NY Times
• Or is it his decision to shut down effective consumer protections and reduce oversight of banks? It’s not like these guys had anything to do with the 2008 financial disaster. – Wired
• His diplomacy? The way he’s sided with Russia and North Korea, just like in the good old days? Oh right, that never happened. – Semafor
  

• Perhaps they most love the international relations advice from his saddest son?

• Maybe Trump lovers most appreciate his long-running shakedown of Ukraine, insisting on payment for protection like a two-bit thug. Same as his predecessors did to America’s European Allies during WWII—except the exact opposite. – Center for American Progress
• Is it the size of the trough he’s built for Musk? – NY Times
• His loyalty test is possibly quite popular–and normal? – Bloomberg
• Do his followers swoon most for the numerous steps he’s taken to reduce protections for employees? – The Guardian
• Is it the way he’s made U.S. elections less secure? – ABC News
• Maybe it’s something subtle, like his Stalinist relationship to a free press? NBC News
• Do Trumpists most adore how he invokes god? If his supporters’ god—which sure doesn’t sound Christian, maybe it’s a Norse god, or a Mayan god, or the one that saved Hitler from his bomb attack—did push the assassin’s bullet aside, why don’t they pray to that god to just finish the job, build that wall or whatever, brick by brick? – CBS News
• Perhaps they admire most of all the way his royal ambitions remind many Chinese of Mao’s Cultural Revolution – DNYUZ
• Is it the way he brought back “free speech” as long as it’s speech he agrees with? – NY Times
• Or how he’s “managing” the government like a business?
  

• It could be his support of law enforcement, which he reaffirmed in the Capital Building.

• Or how effectively and efficiently his administration is improving government efficiency and efficacy? – AP
• Maybe they really dig the way he admires guys who commit crimes against humanity. – BBC
• Is it the care he has taken to strengthen relationships with America’s closest allies, to the extent they’re now seriously talking about the outlook for a decade’s long war…with the U.S.? – Calgary Herald
  • As an aside, how tone deaf, ignorant, disrespectful, and sheltered do you have to be to not see how offensive, counterproductive, and gross his rants about taking over Greenland, Canada, and the Panama Canal are? Well, totally.
• Quite possibly, they best like the confidence his leadership has instilled in investors–though to his credit he only talks about markets when they’re rising.

• It could be they love that you have to agree with every single thing he says… and once you don’t, you’re the enemy. That’s not odd. – The Telegraph
• Or it might be his patented unpredictability. Know what else is unpredictable?

As the late Bill Paxton said:

If only.

CalTech recently concluded that if you measured all the coherent things Trump has said since his first election, you could fill a teaspoon. The rest would overflow the Gulf of Mexico.

That falls in line with the actions of the chatbot MIT built using Trump’s speech. Shortly after turning it on, it begged for death.

Makes one think that Trump’s family should be up on charges of elder abuse. Where Biden’s kept him locked away, Trump’s are cruelly—to him and the rest of us—parading him around.

If not any of these gifts from heaven, then perhaps Trump’s worshippers most like his attack on all things diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI). Who better to make judgements about fairness, hiring, and qualifications than a silver-spooned predator and his Heil-throwing advisors? Voila, America is a meritocracy again.

Thus, since in Trump’s eyes Matt Gaetz is qualified to be the Attorney General, Pete Hegsworth–whose worldview is far worse than his behavior–makes a fine Secretary of Defense. But if the honorable military service is the only prerequisite for that job, why not hire this guy for the role? Oh, wait.

And if he could run Defense, then surely a fella who happens to be your son-in-law’s father–a fella who committed crimes that judges called “disgraceful and reprehensible”–would be the perfect ambassador to France. In fact, there must not be anyone better for the job.

Where pure meritocracy rules, these kinds of Fox News wunderkinds naturally rise to the board at the Kennedy Center:

Of course, in such a meritocracy, a crank like this is best qualified to be the Secretary of Health.

Yet we know, anyone with a flicker of activity in their brain knows, that these hirings are akin to Herb picking Homer (all due respect) to restore his car company to glory.

No, Trump is no Herb. And Trump did not restore anything, he installed himself as King in the Kingdom of Failing Upwards.

Perhaps many, even most, people favor the pullback on DEI. That doesn’t alter the fact the “war” on DEI is bizarre. Sure, some DEI pronouncements went too far, some rules got too exclusionary… in the name of, at least in part, asking us to look at the world from another perspective. In the long run, that expansion of empathy helps everyone.

Yes, some DEI programs went wild blowing through their budgets. But not every dollar saved from government programs is a dollar well spent, despite what the military contractors say. And not every dollar spent on programs is somehow a dollar of profit stolen from the assured wisdom of the free market. Ask Meta.

Of course, there’s the argument that DEI programs were ineffective. Certainly, many have not succeeded. Has the clock run out already? A few setbacks means shut the whole thing down? If you look at any selection of rights movements, you’ll notice one thing: None were given a thing. None made an inch of progress without fighting like hell for it.

The folks who built DEI programs were in a fight. They are in a fight. What’s strange is Trump and his followers stand in opposition to DEI as though it is the biggest crisis in the world–as though it is the source of countless deaths and the cause of immense piles of money washing down the drain. They’re wrong, obviously. Bad habits, willful ignorance, and wars America had no business being in all cost a lot more money and lives.

It is confounding, though, how a coterie of such manly men can feel so hurt, so threatened, by DEI. How, in all their burliness, are they unable to overcome the unfair hurdles thrown up by DEI programs?

It’s disheartening that even some of those who see Trump for the fragile and confused shell of a person he is, still whine in sympathy with him at the evils of DEI. Brett Stephens–who wrote a sharp forecast of how Trump’s reign will end (not well)–falls into this group.

He complained that the “equity” part of DEI “in practice meant pervasive racial and gender gerrymandering based almost exclusively — and unconstitutionally — on considerations of group identity rather than individual qualifications.” And the Soviet-style DEI infrastructure made people sit through seminars that were “by turns saccharine and scolding, treacly and tendentious.” 

DEI training bored you, boohoo.

Next you’re going to tell the world that no friend or son ever got hired in place of the very best candidate, that every white man who landed a job–not only before women could vote or blacks were considered people, but also after–was indisputably the best candidate available.

Then you’re going to say that now that DEI programs are out, the U.S. is again a meritocracy. And every woman and every person of color has as legit a chance as anyone for employment wherever they want to work, to graduate from wherever they want to study–even when they lack the connections and the alumni networks and the money and their social safety net is fraying and their public education is in the tank.

Finally, you’re going to say even with a history of slave ownership and lynching, of denying women the right to vote, of institutionalized and casual racism, bigotry, and misogyny, you cannot bear any effort–an admittedly imperfect effort–to help make up some time, to help make up some generational wealth and to provide better access to worthwhile education. You’re going to say such an effort is a crime against humanity because it bores you.

How pathetic. But that about sums up Trump.

There is a ship called the S.S. United States. A wonder of engineering and luxury, it is the largest passenger ship ever built in America. The ship was launched in the 1950s–the decade Trump and his followers glorify and mis-remember as some sort of Golden Age. Perhaps for a few it was.

The ship is a sad metaphor for America.

In 2025, the S.S. United States is a rusty behemoth that can’t move under its own power. It is being towed to the coast of Florida and sunk.

There are too many good and great people in America to believe this is the end of the empire. But my god, by opting for a second date with that dismal and dangerous old man, the country has taken a giant step backward, toward the dark ages–and dragged the world along with it.

A bounce back from this madness is not assured. Survival of all that was good in the U.S. is not guaranteed. The circus tent is on fire, the clown is in charge, and his clown family and clown friends are fighting for the spoils before they go up in an ash heap.

Larry Ellison said he wants AI to be our policeman. Well, that’s not exactly what he said. Rather, he said AI is on the verge of policing our police. AI is also on the verge of policing all the rest of us, too. AI will be the always-on eye, and by dint of its unblinking-ness, none of us will dare do wrong.

To the extent that money talks, Ellison is fully on board with this seeming inevitability. Such technological omnipotence should be built, he believes, on Oracle’s technology.

That’s such a bad idea, even any current, credible AI doesn’t say that. And this should be end of matter.

If only it were that easy.

When Larry Ellison throws his wallet in with AI, what he is really saying is he wants AI to watch us all and judge our actions as in the right or in the wrong. Given the way AI “learns”, this means that he wants to rely on AI to look at us humans—how we treat each other—and synthesize an answer to what is right and what is wrong. Problem is, we don’t know right from wrong. Certainly not enough to program an AI that would judge us justly and with anything resembling equanimity.

As grim as such a technology sounds, we should thank Larry Ellison for raising this issue. It is a big and serious depiction of the human organism struggling to forge its conscience. It is, believe it or not, a sign of human progress.

Anniversaries, like birthdays, can be arbitrary things. Contrived, when we celebrate for the sake of celebrating. This anniversary is different. In a life filled with daring and an appetite to tackle the impossible… because, because!–Petit inspired, awed, humbled, dared, and mesmerized all who saw him.

He has continued to, with many other feats on a tightrope, but none like this. His years-in-the-making plan to walk between the Towers comes to us on-demand via the knockout film Man on Wire. In the NY Times, Colum McCann beautifully frames at least a part of the marvel and meaning of Petit’s accomplishment. A New Yorker article from 1987, meanwhile, dives into more of Petit’s drive and the sacrifices he has made to satisfy his bursts of creativity.

That profile includes details on a wire walk Petit performed inside the Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine in New York City. It was not his first there. The Right Reverend Paul Moore, Bishop of New York, is quoted, saying:

The magic here is not that we humans do extraordinary and wonderful things for something other than survival. It is that we do them because the best part of us must do them to survive a life lived in all our humanity.

Mentioned:

• Colum McCann

The film earned a score of 82 on Metacritic, an aggregator of movie reviews. New York Magazine said “Hit Man might be a masterpiece.” Others gushed, and even the normally reliable Mick LaSalle of The SF Chronicle wrote “the movie has a very satisfying story that’s worked out with precision and never flags.”

With School of Rock in his oeuvre, any Linklater product deserves a look. With these reviews, we can reasonably expect to be entertained. But no. Not even close. Instead, it’s unadulterated disappointment. Metacritic’s 82 is accurate only if the scale goes to 1,000.

The premise is fine. A professor who moonlights as a killer-for-hire in New Orleans Police Department sting operations. The actors, good enough. The chemistry between the leads, Glenn Powell and Adria Arjona, OK.

The directing? Linklater brought his D-game. His style is unobtrusive, but his approach remains small-scale throughout and is full of pointless, incoherent cuts.

The main culprit, however, is the script. Based on a true story published in Texas Monthly, the finished product by Linklater and Powell trashes believability. It is no better than a rough draft, full of lines that need a grinder before they’re polished enough to represent something from the mouths of real humans.

The plot is an idea we are left waiting for, never to arrive. There are approximately nine seconds of tension in the entire movie, and right after it arrives we learn that was the climax. All that’s left is the happy ending and the moral of the story.

That moral, explicated in voice-over, is babble. It is undermined by characters as shallow as thimbles, as hollow as a Donald Trump promise. We’re to believe that this aw-shucks university professor of philosophy is OK with the woman he’s fallen for killing her husband because… she said he’s a bad guy? That a scuzzy cop—and the only interesting character in the movie—deserves to die, and they’re both up to killing him? And smart enough to get away with it? That sexual attraction and murder is enough to foment love and sustain a marriage, right through to two kids and a new house cut out of Homes & Gardens?

Please.

The problem is not that this movie got made. Thousands of others, far worse, are made every year. The tragedy is the praise heaped upon it, the complete incongruity of the regard with which it has been received and the actual finished product.

May this be the exception to, not the example of, a trend. For if—according to the Boston Globe and the Washington Post—Hit Man is “one of the year’s best films”, our cultural dumbing down has reached a new nadir, and our estimation of what is good and funny and well made has reached new, and depressing, heights.

Mentions:

• Mick LaSalle
• Texas Monthly

Had Trump died, it would have been bad for him. End of life, and in all likelihood an eternity in the fires of damnation. It might have been worse for those he left behind. Whatever havoc he sows over his remaining days, the chaos that would have followed his murder might have been worse.

Such speculation is beside the point, however. Murder is wrong. We should all be glad his didn’t happen.

That the current disintegration of American politics—a temporary mutation or an accelerating devolution?—briefly culminated in an assassination attempt is mind boggling. That it was Trump is hardly matters, in a sense. If Vegas has odds on such things, Biden was the safer bet. And yet a young man tried to assassinate Donald Trump. His attempt encapsulates much about our mental health in 2024. The shooter saw a solution to something—his concerns, his demons, his frustrations—in a murder/suicide. Clearly deranged. And from some of those who sought to comprehend what had happened, to fit it into the narrative of this election cycle, came a different but only somewhat less deranged response.

God moved the bullet.

Yes, it was a fluke that one of the shooter’s bullets grazed Trump’s ear and got no closer. But the former president’s prostrating fans inevitably and inanely saw the hand of God at work.

Whose God? we should ask. And was this same God busy with his hands when Trump cheated on his wife? Or when he raped E. Jean Carroll? Did this God direct those bullets into Corey Comperatore, the bystander in the rally bleachers who was murdered?

This quasi-religious reaction is one of the major takeaways from the sad attempt on Trump’s life, for it shows in a new way how religion has moldered in America. They talk about Christianity, but they don’t walk the talk. There is very little living in the example of Christ. Instead, they find brother- and sisterhood, nay, meaning, in praise of Trump—lumps, scars, lies, convictions, rapes, and all.

The second takeaway is that Trump got to name JD Vance his running mate.

I’m all for the evolution of beliefs and ideas. But there is a name for Vance’s transformation from never-Trumper to whatever abomination he has become: bootlicker.

Like anyone who has joined Trump’s circle, Vance’s dance with the devil will unfold into tragedy. While his journey might take longer, he’ll end up in the same place as Mike Pence: vilified, unloved, untouchable. The problem is despite Trump’s infatuation with the spotlight, he might let Vance step into it more than he did Pence. Trump, after all, has a physical inability to focus on details or to care about policy. Vance is bright enough and works diligently enough that, given the opportunity, he could do a lot of damage before his downfall. He’s bad for Ukraine, and therefore all of Europe. He’s bad for the evolution of the energy sector and horrible for the environment (and thus the health of all).

Though Vance has a long runway ahead of him age-wise, we can only hope he joins Pence in Republican purgatory ASAP. Or sooner.

The power doesn’t, I’ve learned, emanate from the age of the ruins.

I recently rode my bike down the street where I rented a home. I’d seen before what had come of it. More than ten years ago the bungalow where my wife and I lived with our kids for close to a decade met a wrecking ball. The house was not an architectural wonder, nor a model of efficiency.

But there’s a lot wrong with what replaced it.

Certainly this new structure is more energy efficient. But its style makes me question what passes for taste and wonder about the quality of our design schools. I can almost guarantee that though at least twice the size of the home it replaced, fewer people live there. And given the financial sorcery at work in the Vancouver real estate market, I know this house will remain standing a fraction of the time our old rented bungalow did.

Previous drive-bys never elicited the strange emptiness I felt when I rode through the our neighborhood last month. In the past, we’d drive through to see what was new since we left. It was a straightforward calculation. While our lives had gone on, what had changed in the old neighborhood? This time was different. It wasn’t the monster house that supplanted our old home that did it. This time I rode down the next block as well, past the house where Doug and his wife and his step-daughters had lived. We met them when they moved in across the back alley from us. Doug and his wife stayed in the neighborhood longer than we did, but they later divorced and moved out, too. This time I pedaled down his old street and found that his former home was also gone. It and the homes nearby, all of them seemed to have been replaced with such thoroughness I could hardly tell where Doug’s house had even been.

The change felt drastic this time. Unfair. Doug’s house had come down and life hadn’t gone on. Not for Doug. He died on Christmas after a long bout with cancer.

I rode through the alley separating our former homes to get a better sense where his little place had been. I found contractors installing gutters on two new buildings, one a lane house. They didn’t have a clue about me or Doug or our families. I looked at the rubble still in the yard, leftovers from the jobsite. I imagined the rubble from the demolitions of both our homes. That’s when the changes hurt. I never mourned our little bungalow before, but I did now. The bedroom our sons shared, the walls we painted, the tiny dining room where we hosted dinners, the backyard we used to fill with laughter. Those places, including those places where we shared time with Doug, were gone. Never to be seen again, never to be understood or appreciated by anyone who came after.

As I rode away that day, to the home my family lives in now, I realized I’d approached every place I’d lived the same way as those builders. When we moved in and painted the walls, and replaced the flooring, and put up our pictures, we never once thought of those who’d come before us, who’d made their own memories and lived their own lives in those homes.

We should have.

I know there are ruins all over. In Sudan. In Myanmar. In Gaza. In my own neighborhood. But the feeling I rode away with took my thoughts to Ukraine. Where the destruction is incomprehensible in both its scale and its intent. I realized I couldn’t put it out of my mind any longer.

This is the first I’ve written about Ukraine since Russia invaded. My unwillingness to address the terror and the crime of the war inflicted on that nation stems perhaps from a simple-minded hope that it would end before I had to think about it too deeply.

When I visited Ukraine for the first time in June, 2016, I was aware of the fighting that had torn up parts of the east. In Kyiv, I visited publicly displayed documentation of the death and ruination Russia had inflicted in the Donbas region beginning in 2014. I visited the shrines to those who fought against it. These were important memorials and warnings to the citizens of Ukraine, but they were also distinctly not the focus of life there. People were not looking back. The place of course had the remnants of its Soviet past, its inefficiencies and aged technology. But Kyiv vibrated with vitality, youth, and initiative. They were looking ahead.

Further west, in the countryside where my relatives live, the fields of corn and berries and the whispers of the wind reminded me of Tuscany.

Full-scale war, or even the faintest threat to any of the land or the way of life, never occurred to me. When I visited again in the winter of 2018, the threat had entered the realm of the theoretical. But that was all. No one I spoke with believed it real.

Yet years later, Putin brought it. A level of destruction only those on the ground can begin to grasp. Begin, yes, but perhaps even they can’t comprehend the extent of it. Those of us not there, well, from our safe homes we might have a more complete picture. The NY Times recently published the first comprehensive tally of the destruction in the Ukraine war. The presentation is a service to the people of Ukraine and all who are fighting Putin’s mad tyranny. The details are sickening.

More buildings have been destroyed in Ukraine than if every building in Manhattan were to be leveled four times over. 

NY Times, June 3, 2024

The images included in the report give readers a hint of what has happened across swaths of this proud country.

The infographics provide both the scale of destruction and important details, including what buildings the Russians have targeted.

The whole report deserves to be read. Demands to be.

What happened to my old house and Doug’s comes in the stream of life. What I felt visiting those places where our homes no longer stand, what I felt in Rome—that is a privilege, a gateway to prized memories and to flights of imagination that hopefully engender empathy and awe and new understandings of the human heart.

What has happened in Ukraine—what is still happening—is none of those things. It is, instead, a picture of the human heart emptied. Putin and his armies have sacrificed hordes of their own people to rain down death and devastation on a country more hopeful than Russia could ever imagine. He has not only made ruins of everyday Ukraine, he has obliterated and ambushed the ruins to deprive Ukrainians the chance to revisit what is being taken from them.

For what?

The lengths Putin has gone to for death, his indifference to the pain he causes, and his childish justifications for his war—these are not explained by trauma or a psychosis or a desire to re-write history. This is evil.

The nature of that evil can be debated by clerics and philosophers and all the rest of us another day. It is real, as real as the goodness that exists in the world. Every day ahead is yet to be written, but where there is goodness, there is a chance for justice. Where there is a chance, there is only one way forward.

But the changes necessary to hold onto a chance at maintaining our 21st century way of life–if that’s what we want–are not going to be easy. Or pretty.

China once again provides a glimpse of our future now. This month, state-owned Power Construction Corp of China connected it’s newest solar farm to the country’s power grid. Astoundingly, it generates 6.1 million megawatts of power a year. It also covers 200,000 acres. That’s about 150,000 football fields. If it were a square, each side would measure over 28 kilometers.

This is only the start.

Meanwhile, to feed our growing global population, and our growing appetite for any and all fruits and vegetables year round, we’re covering more of the Earth than ever with greenhouses. New analysis of satellite data shows we’ve now covered 13,000 square kilometers with them so far. To no one’s surprise, sixty percent are in China.

Put all those greenhouses together in a square and each side would be over 100 kilometers long. Most of them covered in plastic.

The skills, the vision, the prowess to make this happen, to turn greater swaths of the power grid green and feed more people–these are extraordinary feats. But how did we get here? Is this what we want? Do we know where we’re going?

Zuckerberg is not the first tech mogul to commit to such a blunder. Nor is he the first to see beautiful creation arise from a bigheaded trainwreck of a product. This is a tech feature, in a way. The industry has a long-held mantra to build it—the platform, the software, the chip, etc.—and let the users create wonders. The approach has held up well enough, for amidst the failures are diamonds like spreadsheets, the iPhone, and the Internet itself which have launched countless products, businesses, and life-enhancing (and draining) improvements.

Zuckerberg didn’t seem too keen on Meta as a platform, to be honest. Nonetheless, his focus on building a high-quality, (relatively) low-cost virtual reality (VR) device for entering and living in the Metaverse has yielded at least one spectacular bi-product. Via VR, Space Explorers the Infinite allows the Earth-bound to (relatively freely) roam around the International Space Station. The UI design is top notch, enabling visitors to quickly learn how to manoeuvre in and interact with the VR environment.

It’s a stunning experience. All credit to Meta for creating the platform, and all credit to PHI Studio and Felix & Paul Studios for making the most of it. The presentation is a tangible example of the power of cooperation among smart and trained and inspired people: those who made the VR and those who created Space Explorers, and those who made this wonder that orbits the earth, the International Space Station—which itself is an achievement of cooperation across and above borders.

Space Explorers provides a not-so-obvious hint about why it works: it allows you to go somewhere most of us couldn’t easily go, and to experience in a way a world not accessible to us. Through the Meta VR, we all have the option to vicariously visit the lower reaches of space.

Zuck, meanwhile, aimed his company’s efforts at recreating the everyday in the digital world. Rendering people as boring Mii-like knock-offs and plonking them down in a pseudo-familiar environment. One mistake among a few in this approach is that he made us the object.

Though he has pledged otherwise, he appears ready to give up on the Metaverse and throw all his efforts into AI. All the better to serve up ads. As a side benefit, those in the Meta AI world will be able to play around and see what they can create. That’s a bit like letting a kid play with a handgun.

But it’s a cruel world right now. We take our victories, and our trips beyond the Metaverse, when we can.

Mentions:

• Beatrice Nolan
• Miles Klee
• Mark Zuckerberg

In his piece, Kristof condemned Hamas and acknowledged Israel’s right to defend itself. He noted that he’s “covered lots of conflicts, and one of the striking things about the bombardment of Gaza is how intense it has been… The pace of killing of civilians has been much greater than in most other recent conflicts; the only one that I know of that compares is perhaps the Rwanda genocide in 1994.”

He concludes: “The lives of Israeli, American and Palestinian children all have equal value, and we should act like it.”

Acknowledge that lives of all children have equal value. Not a big ask.

Unless it is.

The comments section to Kristof’s column was full of feedback from those who agreed and disagreed with him. One stuck out to me:

To Bill, the problem is empathy. In this view, empathy keeps us from steeling ourselves against the dirty task of killing children to achieve our morally justified goals.

Bill is not alone in his view. But he misses that his comment is a perfect argument in favor of empathy. With his morally justified objective in view, he cannot see or care for or value in the least the children in Gaza. What about if he could see those children through the eyes of their parents?

How might he do this?

According to his comment, Bill is from North Carolina. So, Bill could summon all the powers of his imagination to envision a 140-square-mile area around his own home. He could imagine that, rightly or wrongly, his corner of North Carolina is fenced in and inescapable. Imagine it is bombarded daily, to the point that half of all the buildings there are now destroyed. If not his own home, then likely his neighbor’s home is gone, a pile of rubble. He and his family are threatened every day from bombs and artillery.

In this situation, how willing is Bill to accept that his children must die for the bomber’s morally just objectives?

Unless Bill is on board with such a sacrifice, he’s missing the obvious. His worldview, where innocents pay the price of war, is one shared not only with other faux war hawks. It is also shared by Hamas.

Mentions:

• Nicholas Kristof

Why?

Because in a world pulled apart by dogma and doctrine, Hume argued for a morality that is both realistic, approachable, attainable, and practical. His is a morality “rooted in nothing more than ‘sympathy’: a kind of fellow-feeling for others which is close to what we now call empathy. We behave well to others for no other reason than that we see in them the capacity to suffer or to thrive, and we respond accordingly.“

This is an approach all of us can take. The problem is that so few of us do. Instead, some of us believe we can reason our way to morals, though thousands of years into our intellectual endeavor to construct a morality of pure reason our task goes on.  Others think they can believe their way to a higher morality. Yet “if morality is rooted in some kind of extra-human transcendental reality, we are condemned to moral disagreement.”

Perhaps you’ve noticed the fallout: The First Crusade to conquer Jerusalem, the dreamed about and partially/temporarily assembled caliphate of ISIS, or the 1995 assassination of former Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin by a right-wing Jew who said God instructed him to do it.

The great irony in taking sacred instruction—whether in a text or in your head—literally is that it encourages, perhaps even forces, followers to dump the spiritual guidance that might help make something like heaven here on Earth. Instead, religious zealots use their wishy-washy adherence to doctrine to wield power and to declare fellow (non-believing) humans something less. Translating ancient texts into policy is a fool’s game, rife with arbitrariness and contradiction and conflict. That’s how today we end up with the fundamentalist Christian notion that Jesus doesn’t so much live in our hearts, he’s merely waiting for the restoration of the kingdom of Israel so he can return to Earth.

It’s this kind of thinking—ready to change when the grip on power is slipping—that gives us contortionist doctrine like that of John Hagee’s Cornerstone Church in San Antonio. Whereas most Christians will allow Jews into heaven provided they convert to Christianity, Hagee says “that because Jews have a covenant with God, they are not in need of “saving” and will have a place in the kingdom of heaven.“

So, which is it, do Jews get into the Christian heaven or not? It’s the same answer for all these policy debates. It’s both. And neither. It’s whatever fits our needs. Our doctrine is inviolable—unless we say so.

David French characterizes the specifically evangelical Republican bent to this approach by noting “they are inflexible about policy positions even when the Bible is silent or vague. They are flexible about morality even when the Bible is clear.”

French rightly points out that the American fundamentalist Christian outlook is one driven by emotion, not guided by philosophy or reflection. That applies to most of what Aldous Huxley called the religions of time, whose adherents include those who look for a future victory from a god in the sky, or from historical progress or technological advancement. Baggini agrees, noting “The physicist Steven Weinberg was wrong to say that ‘for good people to do evil things, that takes religion’: any rigidly held ideology will do.“

It’s interesting that empathy and sympathy lie at the core of Hume’s morality. These are often considered characteristics of the feminine mind, the one half of the human psyche that Richard Tarnas, in his stellar survey of Western Philosophy, said was largely missing from and—writing in 1991—needed by the Western canon. By all of human civilization, for that matter.

Sadly, and not so originally, the feminist mindset that has in fact moved further into our collective consciousness in the last thirty years has become a premier target of neo-reactionaries and techno-salvationists, groups that thrive on dogma. The men seeking a tech eternity—if the tech industry is any measure, then yes they’re mostly men—are building “a future fit for machines” as Lewis Lapham puts it. Not the place you’re likely to find widespread empathy. The neo-reactionaries, meanwhile, are taking aim at wokeism and the rest of modernity, including feminism, in the hopes of building a less tolerant, less democratic, and more religious world. The answer, it seems, is to strive for less compassion, less understanding, and more subservience to cryptic texts, at least when it serves your purpose.

There seems to be a technology problem here as well. Roger Cohen rightly notes that while the animosity between peoples has been around for ages in the Holy Land, the psychological gulf—that is, the ability to recognize the other as human—has worsened since the collapse of the Oslo Accords in 1993. The reason: “Day-to-day interaction between Israelis and Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza has been drastically reduced by walls and fences in a push for physical separation.” Even in our nearly infinitely wired world, where billions of people have access to online video and images, virtual doesn’t replace actual. The dream of technologically bringing people together, or engendering empathy and understanding with a digital image or an Internet connection, is failing.

Worse, though, is that technology seems to be a turbocharged platform for engendering hate, whether that entails condemning others or recruiting likeminded folks to your hateful and violent causes. The problem, then, isn’t technology alone. It’s also us.

Mentions:

• Julian Baggini
• Josh Alvarez
• David French
• Richard Tarnas
• Lewis Lapham
• Katherine Stewart
• Roger Cohen