Beyond Our Scope

“Reality,” says Haruki Murakami in a novel, “is just the accumulation of ominous prophecies come to life.”

Indeed, you don’t have to be a total pessimist to agree with that judgment. The world is presently so full of ominous prophecies that we’re simply incapable of taking action in critical areas. The greatest conundrums and quandaries of our time—Artificial Intelligence and how to handle it, climate change, politics, governance—offer us no widely acceptable or adaptable solutions.

Our quandaries grow out of the “ominous prophecies” from scientists, politicians, nut cases and media gurus, none of whom have viable answers, or even good partial answers. Humanity is stuck with qualified, fractional or crazed proposals that get us nowhere. Evaluating such stuff, much less acting on it, seems beyond our power. Our biggest predicaments are paralyzing us.

Geoffrey Hinton, so-called godfather to AI, recently quit Google to announce to the world the prodigious dangers of the new technology. He thinks these may be more urgent even than climate change, which is “a huge risk too.” Hinton believes “that the race between Google and Microsoft and others will escalate into a global race that will not stop without some sort of global regulation.”

The Biden administration just convened a meeting about AI’s risks. Given how the GOP works, who can be sanguine about the outcome? My friend Bill Davidow, a digital pioneer who has written much about AI, is also very worried about what he calls the rising dominance of virtual homo sapiens, “automatons that cannot put down their smart devices and spend endless hours perusing social networks and watching YouTube videos.”

He recently wrote me: “In general, I feel that the new technologies are in the process of creating purposeless unhappy people with severe mental problems. AI is a new tool for powering the process. We are maladapted to the virtual world.” Two Google scientists recently committed suicide in New York. What does that mean?

We all must hope that the AI horse is not out of the barn, but I fear that it is. Hinton worries that failure to control AI may even displace our failure to deal with climate change. Three years ago I wrote here about how unlikely it was that the world could achieve its 1.5-C degree warming limit. That is even less likely now.

Scientists and the United Nations keep issuing powerful warnings. China and other states keep relying on coal, and generate other pollutants. We keep reading headlines like thisEleven Chemical Plants in China and One in the U.S. Emit a Climate Super-Pollutant Called Nitrous Oxide That’s 273 Times More Potent Than Carbon Dioxide—and wonder why nothing is being done.

Globally, a few countries are beginning to take action on climate, among them Denmark, Sweden and Chile. The big polluters face immense problems, of course. But, as MIT reported, “The US is by far the largest historical emitter, responsible for over 20% of all emissions, and the EU is close behind.” Right now, China is far outpacing the US.

How to deal with climate change is the messiest, most convoluted and critical problem that human civilization has ever had to confront. With political cooperation within and between countries at a new low, the outlook remains grim. I was just blessed with a new grandchild and fear for the world he and his brothers are going to inhabit.

Good Places Gone Bad

Condos next door, Puerto Escondido

In my life I’ve been very lucky to spend time and live in some desirable places: venues like Greenwich Village, Martha’s Vineyard, Little Compton Rhode Island, Chesapeake Bay, the coast of Maine. I took vacations to rare places like Tortola, the Leeward Islands and, years ago, Cozumel.

Now we learn that Cozumel, home to great scuba diving and laid-back Mexican charm, has been totally taken over by giant cruise ships. They disgorged some “1.2 million cruise ship passengers aboard 390 ocean liners in the first three months of 2023.” The place is now like St. Thomas and much of the Caribbean, host to hordes of vacationers seeking a charm that has vanished.

New York, the Vineyard—where we owned a small house—and even the fisherman’s backwater of Little Compton have been taken over by the rich and infamous who have transformed what was charming and unique into vacation spots for the masses with condos, hotels, Airbnbs, and freaks on mopeds.

You’re probably aware of how the process works. The word gets out from savvy travelers who tell their friends and cohorts about their wonderful discoveries. As in politics, word of mouth is a powerful change agent. Then come the speculators, sensing big profits, and the developers who build on models of what they know will sell.

The glowing reviews in respected travel publications just fan the flames and bring more vacationers who want a piece of the action. I wrote a blog last year about how some of us in Oaxaca respond to this.

Every new Travel+Leisure piece or New York Times article just brings in more of these vagrant deadbeats. They descend on us like the locusts. So we, or some of us, find a perverse joy in taking their money and making fun of them.

In smaller communities like Puerto Escondido, where I spend a good deal of time, demand can outrun supply, so prices go up and services go down. The infrastructure (water, health services, electric, internet, etc.) cannot keep pace. When my partner built a house here twelve years ago on a quiet street away from downtown there now loom five-story condos that are often in violation of the building codes. Trucks and construction noise abound. Real estate values skyrocket. Some old-timers want to move out.

One likely reason people are constantly searching for the perfect getaway is to escape from American culture. This is part of what drove me to Mexico some fourteen years ago. Today it’s the advent of Trump, the continuing tolerance of gun violence, the collapse of a working polity, the coarseness of American life, climate change—any or all can drive one to search for a better land.

And yet we know the transformation of good places into tourist havens has been going on for many years. It might be that laissez-faire economics also has something to do with this. People are encouraged to do whatever they want in the name of freedom, and desirable communities enforce few regulations. And many such places seem happy to sell out charm and uniqueness for the tourist dollar.

Laughing All the Way to the Bench

Kudos to ProPublica, which finally pursued and broke open the story about Harlan Crow’s longstanding gifts to Clarence the Logroller. I wonder, is this just another tale of MAGA mania to be ignored or suppressed by a burnt-out public? Since it’s so difficult to impose any kind of ethics test (even though there is one) on the Supremes, will anything come of this? Will the story have any legs?

It just might if John Roberts has balls—or if the Democrats can keep some pressure on. Impeaching Thomas is just not possible since the Dems don’t have the votes. The whole Dark Money thing, with billions in unacknowledged contributions, owes its life to Citizens United (“money is speech”), one of the worst-ever decisions by the Court.

There is a federal law against these sorts of contributions but does it, will it, have any teeth? Thomas and his wife have enjoyed Harlan’s “opulent getaways” for decades—from a guy who is in bed with Leonard Leo and the whole crew of Dark Money funders. Harlan Crow also seems to be an equal-opportunity giver: he has contributed lesser funds to Manchin and Sinema, Gottheimer and Cuellar, who have frustrated the Biden administration forever.

The case against Thomas was well put by Dahlia Lithwick and Mark Joseph Stern of Slate:

For years we have been hearing from the justices that it’s not their fault so many parties with business before the court are also their best friends. We’ve heard that it’s not on them to stop generous pals from lavishing gifts upon them. We have been given to understand—as Justice Antonin Scalia explained in justifying his own travels with parties litigating before him—that justices need to hang out with fabulous and wealthy movers and shakers because who else is there to hang out with. Oh, and for years we have swallowed the pablum that these trips are so intrinsically fun and interesting that Clarence Thomas, Leonard Leo, Mark Paoletta, and a megadonor can sit around for hours chatting about sports, and not talking about any past, present, or future matter that may come before the court.

And, according to Michael Tomasky, whose reporting I respect, Ginny Thomas’s “hard-right activism” is every bit as worrisome as her husband’s. “She’s a hard-right zealot who is active on just about every hot-button cultural issue in American politics.” You can’t fail to have noticed this, including her husband’s default failure to recuse himself from cases in which she would have an interest.

One must ask again why gross derelictions like the Thomas’s are so continually ignored or swept under the rug. One reason, as I suggested earlier, is that the public is burnt out or simply turned off by constantly hearing about such stuff. Or maybe they realize that given our broken polity there’s no apparent way to bring justice to the justices.

A Surfeit of Excess

You must have noticed that so many public figures are guilty of excesses of the grossest kind. Moderation is out, self-indulgence is in. Hate and acrimony have become the coin of the realm. No wonder antisemitism is on the rise.

The top newsmakers are all masters of excess, as they parade their unique versions of cultural debauchery: Putin’s historically induced fantasies of conquest verge on madness; Musk raises egotism to new heights; Greene glories in her own idiocy; Santos gives new meaning to the concept of truth; Bankman-Fried tries to outdo Bernie Madoff. Trump, to be sure, is godfather to them all.

For sheer cultural excess, the scourge of guns in America outdoes them all.

About a year ago in a sort of whimsical piece I took to praising Oscar Wilde and his notion that “nothing succeeds like excess.” Maybe I should have thought twice about endorsing this idea. The common American culture has become excessively debauched in so many ways, and not only by the far right.

Liberal identity politics has sometimes assumed that people from red states are culturally and politically backward—and so it offers a kind of “cultural imperialism” to help these benighted souls. This is a sort of culture shock, often just another form of chauvinism like American exceptionalism. American life is full of such examples, as in the half-century it took to finally give women the right to vote. Racism is an extreme form of cultural chauvinism.

In my Oscar Wilde piece, I took on the truism that nothing succeeds like success, the notion that Oscar parodied. Another way of saying this is that “North Americans commonly believe that anyone who works hard enough will be successful and wealthy. Underlying this belief is the value that wealth is good and important.” Mm-hmm, and do we really believe that the wealthy deserve all their privileges?

The values of our society, which used to represent ideal conditions or accepted truths, seem to have lost their power. The norms that enforce them, like expecting fairness in a transaction, are consistently breached. How are we supposed to judge the controversy over Hunter Biden’s laptop? Or the immigration debate, which has been clouded over with years of ranting on both sides?

My rant here is not going to change anything. To expect us to return to Aristotle’s golden mean—avoiding extremes, the measure of virtue—is a fool’s errand. Most people don’t know who Aristotle is.

Bad Signage and Other Linguistic Lapses

The New York Times has always irritated me with its insistence on using what are called “courtesy titles” (such as Dr., Mr., Ms., or Mrs.) to the point of producing fussy schoolmarm English. Here’s a ridiculous recent instance:

There’s no need to speculate about whether Mr. DeSantis is the “next” Reagan or Obama. Not even Mr. Obama and Mr. Reagan were clearly Obama or Reagan at this stage. And Mr. Reagan and Mr. Obama differ from Mr. DeSantis in the very same way that he’s purportedly similar to Mr. Walker, as both Mr. Obama and Mr. Reagan rose to prominence by commanding the national stage in famous speeches during their party’s campaigns in 1964 and 2004.

For years The Times has had its own Manual of Style and Usage, which also states that “since about 2015, courtesy titles have not been used in sports pages, pop culture, and fine arts.” This is snobbish usage, is it not? Politicians get status, and sports or arts figures do not? Think about that for a minute.

Punctuation and style can convey not only an editorial attitude but inadvertent humor. The internet offers lots of examples.

With the advent of online communication and its predominance, casual writers often get sloppy with their punctuation. There’s a lot of advice on the net about how to punctuate properly. But this is something that most people learn by reading and observing how good writers write. It’s (not “Its”) how we learn basic language skills.

The other day, a friend wrote me this in an email: “The new takeout place on Porfirio sounds convenient and inviting, too. Would Strunk & White say I still need that comma?” Good question, so I responded this way:

Re the comma before “too”: Strunk and White (I looked it up) has nothing on this but my personal choice would be never to use a comma there though I’ve read that this is preferred, at least in more formal English. So I Googled the problem and found this:

“When should I put a comma before too? When using the word too, you only need to use a comma before it for emphasis. According to The Chicago Manual of Style, a comma before too should be used only to note an abrupt shift in thought.”

The Manual of Style is my bible in such matters of editorial style, and so be it. Commas and their usage have always been feisty things.

And yet, you’ve got to be totally unconscious to write something like “Let’s eat Grandma!” or “Students get first hand job experience.” The written word reflects our informal speech, now more than ever. Punctuation now guides meaning, more than ever.

Aging Is Not a Disease

The NY Times recently published a piece in which a 41-year-old doctor in Boston muses about advances in the science of anti-aging. She is pregnant with her first child and wonders whether aging is really inevitable. Her dad does pull-ups at age 70 and pursues studies on “how he might slow the ticking clock.” Aging for folks like this is clearly something to be conquered, not accommodated.

“Longevity researchers,” she says, “would tell you that aging itself is a disease that we can understand and treat, cancer and heart disease and dementia only its symptoms.” Hmm, if aging is a disease, I must be pretty sick at 88. I do have age spots but no cancer or heart disease—yet—and no crippling ailments or obvious mental disorders, though some might contest that. So I got lucky in the old age sweepstakes.

I’ve been blessed with good health (with some minor problems) in the last few years, and I look at getting older as something perfectly normal. If I can get another year or so, that would be fine. I don’t fear death, though I might if things change. For now, I look and feel younger than my chronology would predict. Except in the morning.

Getting older, I’ve been drawn to feel that so much of what we do as a society works against nature. We humans can’t even manage ourselves, and all our false notions of progress are usually at the expense of the natural world and those less fortunate. How we respond to climate change will be the ultimate test.

So I find that anti-aging and extending human life are like so many other new tools for fighting off or plundering nature and advancing bogus notions of progress. Work proceeds apace on gene modification, CRISPR, AI, and other high-minded efforts to alter our humanity and improve on what nature gives us. I never thought I’d say this, but why is science always the answer?

A good friend in her mid-70s recently had major surgery for an intestinal blockage. She was quite healthy, and this came as a big shock. So did the resulting colostomy. She’s been depressed, won’t eat, and talks about wanting to just give up. The vicissitudes of our health can change everything.

If good health is everything, why are we so cavalier about it? Could someone in poor health rely on an anti-aging program? Will these programs be just for the rich? Of course they will.

To her credit, Dr. Lamas, the writer, is not wholly convinced that anti-aging science will provide a better life: “it is not entirely clear that having a younger genetic than chronological age confers a longer or better life.” If I continue to be blessed with good genetics and health, old age remains something to treasured—until it’s not.

What Really Happened at The Dinner

Trump: Ye, my friend, so glad to see you again. Your view of things is so unusual.

Ye: Well, I like Hitler. You know, every human being has something of value that they brought to the table, especially Hitler. I just said that on an interview with Alex Jones, one of our good guys. Why isn’t he here? He knows the Holocaust was fake news. That’s why I brought my dear friend with me, Nick Fuentes. I think you know him.

Trump: Never saw him before in my life. Oh, wait a minute . . . Charlottesville.

Ye: He’s been a good Jew hater from the early days. Now y’all need to get into my campaign to run for president. Don, I want you to be my vice president.

Trump, screaming: You out of your fucking mind? You got no chance at the presidency, bro, not while I’m running. . . .

Of course, what they really said at the dinner is largely beyond imagining and beyond satire. One could just as well try to imagine what Xi Jinping said when he was informed of the recent massive protests. Axios made an attempt to render what the fawning Fuentes said by talking with “sources” present—but never succeeded in finding a smoking gun, just a bunch of servile compliments to Trump.

 I do have to give credit to Andy Borowitz, who wrote that white nationalists gave “scathing Tripadvisor reviews” of the service and food at Mar-a-Lago: “too many ethnic dishes,” they said.

A Slight Loss of Control

Some fans have urged me to write more about aging. It is a rich topic, especially for one at my age (88). I offered my general thoughts on the matter a couple of weeks ago, but that was the tip of the iceberg, so to say.

Every aspect of aging seems to have three components—physical, psychological and social—and they’re all interlinked. There’s a very thorough and intimidating treatment of this on Wikipedia. Read it while you have your late afternoon cocktail. (Why do all discussions of aging always recommend easing off the booze? They totally ignore the psychological and social benefits.)

So today I want to talk not about dementia but about mental deficiency as it creeps up on you. This is normal yet disturbing. Myself and many friends have experienced loss of short-term memory. You know, forgetting your keys, the last name of a friend, where you put something. This is so common that it’s unremarkable. Yet it upsets a lot of us.

Often when you’re trying to recover a forgotten name it will come back to you a few moments later while you are thinking of something else. So your memory is still functional; it’s just taking its time to sift through all those long-unused cells in the mental library.

And sometimes the name or the word doesn’t come back. Well, calm down and search out related aspects of the word on Google. This will often trigger an association that can make the connection and turn your light bulb on. The usual fear and distrust of technology in elders is well-placed. But you have to learn to make tech work for you. I talked about some of the problems here in “Computer-Assisted Headaches.” We elders have to stop being intimidated by technology and learn simply to ignore what we can’t understand.

Keeping your mental alertness is key to solving many problems of aging. I have IBS, a too-common bowel disorder. So I complain again to my doc, who says that after all these years “you know more about this than I do.” I’m skeptical but as I experiment with treatments, nostrums, remedies natural and unnatural, I find some success in dealing with it. And I use the internet a lot.

Bottom line: your apparent loss of mental (even physical) control can often be compensated by using what’s left of your brain.

What we all worry about is keeping our mental acuity. Well, you’re never going to keep the edge you had at age 20 or 30. After 70, we all decline, so what can help? The usual advice is to exercise more, learn a new skill, play games and solve puzzles, dance, meditate, eat a good diet, and so on.

I think the most important way to keep sharp is to involve yourself regularly in a mentally challenging activity you love. For me it’s writing; for someone else it’s hiking or volunteer work or cooking. When you feel depressed, anxious, irritated with someone, or too isolated, don’t give way to it. Get back to something you really treasure doing.

That’s not just a bromide, folks. Example: when the blues take over, I turn to the music I love and I can regain an equilibrium from that. We need to remember to engage with the things we love.

Retreat of the Elders

This is for those of you who have reached your advanced years and are now flirting with the attractions of solitude. Sometimes, it seems, this can be more than a flirtation.

Here are the symptoms: a penchant for eating at home; fewer visits with friends; a preference for books over TV; souring on politics and current affairs; pique with the common culture; suffering fools gladly; and so on. Covid, of course, made things worse.

You go to a party where most of the folks there are your friends. The conversation is the usual chit-chat about local happenings, friends who are ill, movies you’ve never seen, restaurants you never visited, travel plans you’re not concerned about, political opinions you don’t agree with. You drink too much and leave early.

It’s about feeling “out of tune,” as Wordsworth said in his poem “The world is too much with us.” When the vibes are bad it’s like you’ve come from a different world, captive to “a creed outworn.” You are out of tune with the common culture (or so it feels), with its emphasis on escape, schlock or shock in pop art, films, and more. To confirm this, take a jaundiced look at New York Magazine’s stories in The Cut and Vulture.

The urge to withdraw from it all, I think, is not just limited to us elders. People everywhere seem to be getting a bellyful of all the institutions of state, the customs and the verities we grew up with and trusted. Why else would so many swallow Trump’s patent medicines and hokum? What is MAGA if not an escape into a surreal fantasy? How did the craziness of Brexit take hold of so many Brits? All of this represents a kind of withdrawal.

We oldsters turn sour on so many things because we’ve lived long enough to lose most of our innocence. Yeats said it best in “The Second Coming.” You seniors may remember these lines.

The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

So many sages have told us that aging is simply a loss of innocence. I don’t entirely buy that. I still remain innocent to many things, open to ideas, good books and conversation, thoughtful people, art and music. There’s just a whole lot less to be open to now. And that, my friends, requires regret but no apology.