jameswharris

Is Cynicism a Side-Effect of Aging? – The Mark Twain Syndrome

Samuel Clemens, known famously as Mark Twain, became extremely bitter and pessimistic about the human race as he got older. I’m 60 and I’m starting to feel I’ve caught a touch of pessimism myself, so I’m wondering if I’m developing the Mark Twain Syndrome? And will I get more negative as the years pile up?

Is cynicism a side-effect of aging?

Now Twain had a lot of reasons to feel depressed and bitter. His wife, and two of his three daughters, died before he did. He made fortunes and lost them. He ran up staggering debt. In his old age he had to constantly tour the world giving talks so he could honorably pay off his creditors. Plus he saw a lot of the world that he just didn’t like, and he felt he had good reasons to think humans were a nasty species. Twain died in 1910, so he never knew the horrors of the 20th century, but the vicious satirical stories he wrote in his later years feel spot on to modern readers.

I would think anyone following the highly polarized politics of the 2012 presidential election would feel depressed about our political system. I would think anyone studying how humans treat the environment and our fellow creatures would feel gloomy about the Earth. I would think anyone comparing the growing greed of the rich versus the expanding misery of the poor would feel doomed over the fate of mankind. It’s hard not to believe that homo sapiens aren’t going to use up every last resource on this planet and never feel guilty.

How can you have faith in Congress when the national debt grows and all they can talk about is tax cuts? How can feel good about America when one party stonewalls the other for four years in hopes of winning the next election? When did serving the party become more important than serving the country?

Our current economic calamity is due to a man-made economic catastrophe. Billions were stolen but no one was ever put on trial. And the rich are spending billions to get a President in office so they can go back to business as usual.

I can’t help but believe that a perfect storm of national collapse is brewing. Is the U.S. in decline like the Roman and British empires were long ago?

Here some of the factors:

Growing economic chaos
World-wide shift to fundamental religious thinking
Global warming
Diseases becoming immune to our medicines
Population growth
Dwindling resources
Relentless pollution
Accelerating species extinctions
Uncontrolled debt
Political polarization
Aging population
Growing segment of population that’s not in labor force
Escalating crime and corruption around the world
Rising healthcare costs
Rising food costs

Now, do I dwell on all of that because I’m getting older? If I was young would I feel that all of those issues were just problems to be easily solved? I don’t know. It’s not like I want to walk around with a sandwich sign proclaiming “The End is Near” but I feel like I’m on a fast train and the brakes just went out. Is that feeling caused by getting older?

How do you know when things are bad or when you’re just feeling bad and think civilization is in decline?

Conversely, when I read about developments in science, technology, medicine, I feel positive and my thoughts about the future are uplifted. Science is the one constant positive – but most people reject science. What makes me feel good makes other people feel bad.

When I was young and read about Mark Twain I hoped I’d never become bitter and negative like he did. Even now I try to stay positive. But its not easy. Oh, if I keep busy and ignore the problems I’m as happy as a two-year-old with a box of cookies. And I tend to think that’s how most folks handles the problem–they eat more cookies.

When I was young, growing up with the Mercury, Gemini and Apollo space programs, I assumed we’d have permanent bases on the Moon and Mars by now, and men and women would have explored the entire solar system. In my teens, I felt before I died engineers would be drawing up plans interstellar spacecraft. Maybe not manned ones, but at least for interstellar robotic explorers. I think part of my disappointed about getting old is none of this has happened.

I’ve read enough history to know that the present has always been on the tipping point of chaos. I should feel confident that we’ll continue to bumble though. But I’ve also read enough history to know that nations rise and fall, and that all over the globe there are sites where people live who think about their country’s former glory. We revel is the decline of communism, but who is to say capitalism will last? Personally, I think free market capitalism will fail under overpopulation. We have over 12 million people defined as unemployed, but we have over 87 million people not employed, or considered unemployable. This population is over 16, not in jail or in military service that doesn’t work. They are retired, mentally or physically can’t work, gave up trying to find work, or won’t work. Less than half the U.S. population has jobs and they must fund the living expenses for the entire population. Capitalism isn’t creating enough jobs. It’s worse in other countries.

And the people who are working and paying taxes want to pay less. This is at a time when our economy depends on socialism. The reality is the U.S. has been a socialistic country since the 1930s. To reject socialism now means condemning tens of millions of poverty. The growing nostalgia for fundamental religious beliefs and conservative values is no solution at all. It’s just a plea, “Stop the world I want to get off—why can’t things be the way they used to be?”

Now I’m dwelling on the bad again. Are my worries just from getting old? Or do we all have something to be depressed about?

JWH – 7/15/12

Have the Climate Deniers Won the War–Or Just Built the 21st Century Maginot Line?

How often do you see a big documentary on Global Warming on TV now-a-days? Sure, the nightly news often mentions global warming when it runs stories on hurricanes, tornadoes, floods, fires and other extreme weather events, or when it does stories on habitat changes for animals, plants and insects, but you seldom see big documentaries about climate warming anymore. Nor is climate change a hot political issue for the presidential elections. Obama hasn’t made it an issue, and when climate change does come up in Congress or State Capitols it’s often by politicians suppressing climate change data or bills, or even writing laws against collecting climate data.

Read these articles to see what I mean:

Are the climate change deniers and skeptical scientists right? Do we have nothing to fear from global warming? Or are they complete deniers of reality and have built a political Maginot Line to convince the American public we’re all safe from the global warming threat?

Many of the reports above are from writers attacking the idea of global warming and climate change. They consider themselves fighting fear mongers.

Now you can read for yourself the reports about the climate from NOAA – State of the Climate. This ain’t light reading and you have to concentrate on the data, charts and graphs. If you search the web you can find reports from other agencies and countries. On one hand you have the scientists studying the data, and on the other hand people, including some scientists, but mostly right-wing activists who say the data is all wrong, deceptive or incomplete.

Who do you believe? The folks you want to believe? Doesn’t that make us all reality deniers?

We spend untold billions on defense because we fear attacks on the United States. If global warming is the threat scientists say it is, it’s more of a security threat than we’ve ever faced by any war. We have a long history of going all paranoia over reds, but why greens? Some people even believe the greens are the new reds. But the greens are trying to protect America, but the public doesn’t want to believe that.

There is something deeply psychological going on here and I don’t know what it is.

If everyone is sticking their heads in the sand, what do you do? If the collective says, “Let’s pretend nothing is happening, and it will all go away,” what do you do?

If you look at the climate history charts, the scientists appear to be right, so how long do we keep looking at the data and seeing it relate to reality before everyone with their heads in the sand and their butts in the air start thinking, “Hey, my ass is on fire!”

To tell the truth, I’m starting to wonder if there’s a huge scientific reality to denying. That’s it’s part of human nature. That no matter how bad things get, the deniers will keep denying global warming, and finding reasons to think things are okay. That denying reality is MUCH bigger than science. That if I read enough history I’d find that the deniers have always won the war on denying.

Or is it simply, to conservatives liberals always have to be wrong, no matter what, and on every subject.

JWH – 7/11/12

Survivors (BBC 1975-1977)

Ever since I gave up cable TV years ago I’ve discovered I really love finding a TV series and watching it from the first to last episode. Preferably from Netflix streaming, but DVDs are an okay second choice. Watching a complete TV series is like enjoying a very long novel. I listen to novels all the time, so I’m used to their length in hours. Average novels are 10-20 hours. Recently I listened to Anna Karenina and it was 42 hours. I’ve just finished 38 episodes of Survivors which ran on the BBC for three seasons (series as they say) from 1975 till 1977. Each episode was slightly less than an hour, so the entire run was equal to one long novel. It’s a shame actual novels aren’t filmed this way.

Survivors is a post-apocalyptic story set in England about a handful of people who survive a world-wide plague. In the course of the story we hear that only 1 person in 5,000 survived, another time they guessed 1 in 10,000. This plague is far more virulent than the famous Black Plague of the middle ages. Viewers assume the plague was engineered as a bio-weapon from the opening credits.

In the first season Greg, Jenny and Abby each find themselves alone among the dead. They strike out on their own with very different plans but they eventually meet up and work to survive together. Most of the episodes deal with finding food, encountering other bands of survivors with different agendas for surviving, wild dogs and rats, and much talk about how to start civilization all over again. The driving plot of the first season is Abby’s desperate need to find her son who was away at boarding school when the death came. Greg and Jenny agree to help her enthusiastically at first, but as the season progresses and chances dim, become reluctant to keep traveling.

In the second season, Jenny and Greg have settled with others on a farm and the season is about rebuilding civilization at the rural level. Charles, a new main character replaces Abby. Each episode deals with various post-apocalyptic issues, like having babies, finding medicine, fighting roving bands of thugs, producing methane for tractor fuel, handling dysfunctional people, how to decide who does what jobs, making alliances with other settlements, developing trade, and so on. Many fans didn’t like this season because the action slows. Stories are about raising sheep and cabbages. I actually like the second season quite a lot. Each episode dealt with true post-apocalyptic problems.

For the last season, Jenny, Greg and Charles travel most of the season seeing other settlements, promoting trade, and hoping to get electricity going again. Our characters do a lot of horseback riding around rural England and Scotland. Fans felt the action picked up in the third season.

It’s too bad this show is 1970s television technology because the bucolic scenery, old manor houses, and rustic farms would have been beautiful in modern high definition. There was a 2008 remake of Survivors that only ran for two short seasons that gives us a taste of what could have been. The original series never had big production values but that never bothered me because after-the-collapse stories are among my favorite fictional themes, and living is inherently low tech in such a scenario.

Overall, I really enjoyed Survivors, which is only available on DVD through Netflix, so I had to wait patiently for each new disc. Sadly, the discs are old and scratched so I don’t know how much longer they will be available. There is a 6-disc set of the entire three seasons at Amazon that came out in 2010, but I wonder how long they will stay in print. Plus the set is on 5 double-sided “flippy” DVDs and 1 single sided DVD. In England and Australia the set was on 11 single sided discs. I consider it bad form, lack of respect and cheapness to put shows on double-sided DVDs, which keeps me from buying it. I enjoyed the series enough that I know I’ll want to watch them again in the future, but I don’t want to buy it with flippy discs.

Evidently this show still has lots of fans in England, but it’s little known in America. That’s too bad because it’s a intriguing show. It’s not fantastic, but it is thought provoking and I liked the characters. I was sad they fired Carolyn Seymour who played Abby at the end of the first season. And many appealing secondary characters get killed – but hey, that’s what life would be like after the collapse. Survivors introduced many secondary characters over the course of the three seasons, several of which I really got to like before they disappeared or were killed off.

The show had lots of room to grow because of all these additional characters, and I’m sorry the producers and writers didn’t explore their lives more. Instead of 13 episode seasons the concept could easily have supported 26 episode per year, and the entire show could have run five or six years without running out of interesting topics to pursue. But then I like technical stuff. I’d gladly would have watched several episodes about getting the steam trains running again, or getting tractors to run off of methane. The 1970s was a big back to nature era and this show would have been perfect for the Mother Earth News crowd.

To me, the Gold Standard of post-apocalyptic novels is Earth Abides by George R. Stewart. In England I assume it’s The Day of the Triffids. Only Earth Abides takes its story into the third generation after the collapse. When they remade Survivors in 2008, they should have started with the second or third generation after the original 1975-1977 series. The actors who play Abby, Jenny and Greg are still alive, so it would be interesting to see them reprise their roles as grandparents. Instead they modernize the original series and brought in a ridiculous secret government program.

Since Mary Shelley’s The Last Man, every generation has imagined what life would be like if civilization collapsed. The list of novels is long, and there have been many movies dealing with the theme, but there have been few television shows covering the topic. Survivors, both 1975 and 2008, are the standouts, along with Jericho from 2006-2008.

JWH – 7/8/12

Global Warming On Trial–A New Type of Reality Show

Although global warming is well accepted in the scientific world, the concept has been strongly rejected by much of the American public. Since CSI type television shows are very popular, as well as court and crime dramas, I’ve wondered if this conflict on global warming doesn’t present us with a potentially new type of reality TV show.

Put global warming on public trial. Let both sides of the argument present witnesses and testimony. Let the TV viewers be the jury. It will be hard to develop the show without bias, but if it’s designed right, we might get close to impartiality in the structure of the trial. The prosecution will be the scientists with the crime being that humanity is causing global warming. The defense will be all the people who believe humanity is innocent.

To make the show more interesting, it would be appealing to have real trial lawyers working each side of the case, and maybe even a real judge, or judges to preside over procedures. This would be an expensive show to produce, and it could take months to play out. To make it more appealing, we should allow the public to vote on the progress in each episode, and to vote on aspects of how the trail is being conducted.

I know the public will vote the way they feel now about the subject – how impartial is Dancing with the Stars? It will be interesting to see if the numbers change though. Can people be persuaded by facts?

This could be the trial of the century, and people love those. Certainly, global warming could be the crime of the century.

If such a show was developed, it could be very popular. I’m tired of the old reality shows. Having a more realistic reality show is appealing. And once this case is over, pick another.

JWH – 7/7/12

The Age of Miracles by Karen Thompson Walker–A Powerful Literary Science Fiction Novel

The Age of Miracles by Karen Thompson Walker came out June 26th and it’s already getting tremendous press.

I listened to the audio edition with pitch-perfect narration by Emily Janice Card. The Age of Miracles is a science fiction novel told in first person by eleven-year-old Julia, so it feels like another science fiction YA novel, but it’s not marketed as either as SF or YA, and it’s far from another hit young adult novel for adults. It’s a literary novel about a young girl witnessing the Earth undergoing a catastrophic change called “the slowing.” Earth begins to slow its spin. Before the novel is over the Earth’s day is over twice as long.

As soon as I saw the announcement for this book I knew I had to read it. If you loved The Lovely Bones or The Secret Life of Bees, there’s a good chance you’ll love The Age of Miracles. However, if you loved Earth Abides, The Day of the Triffids, Alas, Babylon, there’s also a good chance you’ll love this novel. If you ever wished Catcher in the Rye had been science fiction, then this book is for you. When The Age of Miracles is pitched to movie producers I’m sure they’ll summarize it like this: coming of age in the apocalypse.

The editorial reviews collected at Amazon.com rave about this book. The customer reviews are a bit mixed, with most people loving it, and a few people complaining, some rather bitterly. A few complainers weren’t expecting a YA novel. Other complainers object to the science. I too had trouble with some of the science, but I think Karen Thompson Walker is right in that we’d weigh more if the Earth’s spin slowed. For those people objecting to her science, just read “If the Earth Stood Still” and you’ll realize Thompson is up on the details.

But I’m not sure the details of the science are important to this story – science fiction has often been wrong about science. The Age of Miracles is an allegory about how nature turns against us and how we respond.

The Age of Miracles is more literary than YA – there are no teenagers fighting to the death on television. It’s more literary than science fiction, it’s not about heroic astronauts trying to save the world. The narrator is telling her story from years later, after the events, so we know she survives. The Age of Miracles is a very simple tale, a coming of age story set against our world falling apart.

The defining issue with any end-of-the-world novel is how people react. I can’t help believe that the slowing is a metaphor for global warming, but don’t let that stop you from reading The Age of Miracles if you’re on the wrong side of that political question. The Age of Miracles is science fiction at its best because it’s all about sense of wonder. I’ve always found tremendous sense of wonder in end of the world novels. These novels aren’t predicting gloom and doom, but exploring how people face the immensity of reality.

Julia is just an eleven-year-old kid that has a mother and father, a few friends, a music teacher, and a sheltered life where’s she shy and timid, but like most kids her age, wants to fit in. Half of The Age of Miracles is about Julie coping with normal life. The other half is about coping with a world going through a lot of scary changes. The people in this story decide to fight their fears by leading ordinary lives. This is not a post-apocalyptic novel with Mad Max type warriors. This is the end of the world coming to suburbia, soccer moms and mini-vans.

Most of the classic end of the world SF novels came from the cold war era. The Age of Miracles is maybe what J. G. Ballard would have written about the Internet Age facing the apocalypse if he was channeling Harper Lee.

End of the world novels usually draw the reader in by getting them to imagine what they would do in the same situation. The Age of Miracles is different. I’m 60, and I’m being asked to imagine how an 11 year-old would see things. It’s a powerful motif. I can’t help but wonder how young people feel today growing up and imagining what global warming will bring.

In the past decade there have been a number of literary novels that used science fictional plots and they have been very successful. In fact, they have generally kicked genre butt. Stories like The Road, The Time Traveler’s Wife, Cloud Atlas, Never Let Me Go, The Sparrow brought deep characterization and a sense of realism to very far out ideas. I can’t help but wonder if would-be literary writers haven’t noticed that pairing literary style with the fantastic sells, especially if it also appeals to both the YA and adult readers.

I can only speculate why Karen Thompson Walker wrote The Age of Miracles, but whether intentionally or by accident, she’s hit on a perfect combination of literary and science fiction styles. Is Ms. Walker a science fiction reader trained in a MFA program? Or is she a literary writer influenced by all the science fiction in our society. There’s a good chance that the science fiction genre played no part in influencing the writing of her story. Did George Orwell need to read SF before writing Nineteen Eighty-Four? We could assume Karen Thompson Walker is like Michael Chabon and attempts to live in both the literary and SF genre worlds.

Maybe Ms. Thompson is even more savvy than that. Maybe she wanted to write about global warming and knew the topic would turn off many readers, so she developed the slowing as a stand-in. If she did, it will be just as effective for making people think about our future.

I bet there will be a lot of literary and science fiction writers wishing they had written The Age of Miracles. I’m sure it’s going to spawn a lot of imitators.

JWH – 7/5/12