The Proliferation of Glasses

I've been pondering the many different kinds of glasses that are deemed necessary by some for drinking different kinds of beverages. How did this happen? Why does one simple, functional glass or mug not suffice? The same question applies to the absurd variety of types of flatware.

Then I realized what must be the answer.

Some time ago — two hundred years, perhaps — glass manufacturers met in secret somewhere, probably London or Paris, to discuss a big problem. Families, even the wealthiest ones, owned just enough glasses, mugs, knives, etc. to supply one of each to each person. Even the wealthy saw no need for more. So the vitrine industrialists’ sales could only grow as fast as the population grew. That wasn't enough to satisfy their greed.

Some genius came up with the answer. Let us, he said, persuade people that they need different types of glasses for different types of wine, different types of beer, different spirits, etc. We will make the upper classes think that their knowledge of these differences and their possession of the many types of glasses set them even further apart from and above the hoi polloi, and that moreover they can demonstrate their superiority to their fellow aristocrats by out-glassing them. Our earnings will be multiplied many times!The sky’s the limit!

And so it was done. Cutlery manufacturers of course saw the virtue in this approach and followed suit. (Or possibly it was the other way around. I’m not sure.)

Very soon, a cottage industry developed of self-proclaimed experts who made good money teaching people which glasses, knives, forks, spoons, etc. to use for different beverages and foods — and even the right way to set the table with this new hodge podge of items.

Perhaps if I were to look up the history of glassware and flatware, I’d find a completely different explanation, but I’m not going to do that because I much prefer mine.

Artemis Thoughts

Our grandson, Jack, asked me how I felt about Artemis II, given my NASA Apollo background. The more I thought about my answer, the more I realized how mixed my feelings are. I wrote him a longish, rambling letter, part of which I decided to post here to my blog. Maybe I can make it a bit less rambling in this format.

Most of all, there's an odd mixture of detachment and nostalgia. That's also how I felt about the last few Apollo missions after I had already left NASA. I left right after Apollo 15 and hadn't contributed anything directly to 16 and 17, but I still felt connected to them. At the same time, they were something I watched on television from the outside, just like all the other Muggles. Of course, that lack of connection applies completely to Artemis, and yet much of Artemis II looked so much like Apollo that I still felt a tug. Not that I'd want to be back working those long hours (literally round the clock in the case of Apollo 8), doggedly crunching numbers while wishing I was home with my wife and son. It got even worse when I was in graduate school at the University of Houston (where I got my MS in math) while working at NASA. I was a zombie for a couple of years or so. It was only doable because I was in my twenties. I don't miss any of that, of course, and yet at the same time, I miss knowing that I was contributing to something so grand and amazing, something that was also my boyhood obsession. At the same time as all of that, it all seems very long ago and far away — which it is.

I feel a lot of sadness and bitterness about the murder of Apollo by feckless politicians and anger at the American public for their fickleness and lack of imagination and for being so easily manipulated. I feel the same way about the death of the Shuttle program, on some of the early planning for which I also worked. If China beats us to the moon, which they well could, it wouldn't surprise me at all if Artemis gets canceled.

After Apollo, I worked at Martin Marietta on the Viking Mars lander missions. My contribution there was more significant than it was for Apollo, and the missions were great successes, but it wasn't emotionally fulfilling the way Apollo was. Yes, those were landings on Mars (Mars!), and the very first ones. But the landings were unmanned. There was no photograph of a suited astronaut stepping out onto the Martian soil. Still, it kept me connected to the magic of space exploration. At least, it did until the major part of the work was over and Martin M. told a whole bunch of us, "Thanks so much, guys. There's the door. Good luck." Nowadays, Denver is one of the centers of the aerospace industry, but not so in those days, so good luck was scarce unless one was willing to relocate, which I was not. In the end, I saw reports about the two Vikings landing Mars (landing exactly where they were supposed to! thanks partly to me!) and the results of their digging in the Martian soil on TV with the rest of the, as before, Muggles.

As I said, China might beat us to the moon. Perhaps Artemis II will touch down on the moon before the Chinese land there, but at this point, we’re only planning one Artemis launch per year. In other words, we'll keep doing grand-gesture missions, whereas China is moving steadily ahead with solid commitment to establish a permanent base and then keep expanding it. They'll beat us in the long term.

However, I think the results will be bad for any humans who stay there long term because of the effects of low gravity on the human body. Add to that being confined to small quarters surrounded by instant death. Even researchers in Antarctica go bonkers fairly quickly, and that's with normal gravity and the ability to go outside occasionally with lots of warm clothes and no spacesuits required. Emotionally, I thrill to the idea of humans in space. It was my boyhood dream to be one of them. But the more we learn about the effects of zero and micro gravity on the human body, among the other dangers, the more I think that we need to focus on robotics and AI for space exploration. Advances in medicine could change that in the future, but that's much longer term than advances in robotics and AI. In the end, the moon, Mars, and all the rest of space might not belong to us but to our robot servants.

Musical Notes: A Brief History

For countless generations, musical notes were laboriously constructed by hand. This limited the quantity of music humans could produce, but there were few humans, so it wasn't a problem.

Over time, as human population and therefore human music production increased, so did the construction of new notes, and the two growth rates roughly kept pace. However, in the 18th Century, music production exploded, and by the end of that century, the supply of the shorter notes, especially eighth and sixteenth notes, was almost exhausted. As a result, in the following century, music was typified by longer, slower sounds, or what we call the Romantic Movement.

Thanks to the Industrial Age, machine production of musical notes replaced manual craftmanship, resulting in a plentiful supply of notes by the beginning of the 20th Century. Sadly, the new machine-produced notes were of inferior quality. This resulted in Modern or Contemporary Music.

The huge growth of popular music in the 20th Century once again threatened to create an imbalance between the rates of production and consumption of notes. Fortunately, much 21st Century popular music doesn't seem to use musical notes at all.

Spare Me Your Secular Solstice Celebration

Celebration of the winter solstice has been growing in popularity for quite a few years. That’s not just the case among those who style themselves pagans. It’s also true among secularists, large numbers of whom engage in organized celebrations of the winter solstice involving gatherings, music, speeches, food, drink, lighting ceremonies, and sometimes gift giving. In short, Christmas, just not by that name.

It’s clear to me that such celebrations are a sop to leftover religious feelings. They serve an emotional purpose for people who miss the Christmas celebrations of their childhood but no longer believe in the religious drivel undergirding Christmas. If only they could recreate those happy childhood days without hypocritically embracing all that Jesus silliness again! Enter the secular solstice celebration. As I said above: Christmas by another name.

Some of them like to say that “axial tilt is the reason for the season.” Clever. Which season is that? Oh, right: the Christmas season. Or as people say nowadays, the holiday season. (Hanukkah! You Jews are included! See? It’s not Christian at all! So shut up while the radio stations all blare out an endless stream of Christmas carols and hymns.)

In some cases, they’ll repeat the same excuse that non-religious Christians use for celebrating Christmas: It’s not religious anymore. Nowadays, it’s just a time for family gathering. In that case, why not instead have your family gathering at a time of year much more suitable for traveling? Why do it at the time of year set aside by Christianity to celebrate its founding myth?

I’ve occasionally expressed these opinions online. I expected disagreement from the secular solstice celebrants, but I’ve been surprised by the anger in some of the replies. I shouldn’t have been. That agner proves my point.

I’m reminded of the angry reactions I encountered in the past when objecting to Christmas displays on public property. My first such experience was during my first Christmas on the campus of Indiana University, in 1962. I said—calmly and reasonably, I’m pretty sure—to the other young men in my dorm that it violated the separation of church and state for a public university to be putting Christmas decorations on its buildings. Outrage! Fury! “What if they added that Jewish candle thing?” “Menorah,” I said. “Yeah, that. Would that take care of the problem?” “No,” I said. “That’s also a religious symbol. That would be compounding the problem. There shouldn’t be anything at all on the buildings.” “All those Jewish merchants don’t mind making money by selling Christmas presents to Christians, do they?” That was said with a meaningful glare. I laughed and said, “If Christians want to foolishly spend lots of money on buying gifts at this time of year, then the merchants would also be fools if they didn’t make money from that nonsense, wouldn’t they?” (That didn’t improve the atmosphere.)

But here’s the point. The anger in that long-ago incident is the same as the anger I’ve encountered more recently when criticizing secular solstice celebrations. That tells me that I’m pushing the same buttons. In both cases, the unpleasant outsider is pointing out hypocrisy and illogic and explaining why the people involved should be willing to discard the cherished things of childhood and grow up.

If you really want freedom from religion, and every thinking person should want that, then free yourself from religious substitutes as well.

I Remember Self–Censorship in Apartheid South Africa

I remember being told not to repeat to other kids what I heard my parents say about the government. I remember my parents ordering me to rewrite my letters to relatives and to remove anything that wasn’t purely personal because they were sure, probably with justification, that our letters were being read by the government. I was a child and I was parroting my parents’ political opinions, but I had yet to learn what they already knew: that in a police state, one can speak one’s mind inside the home but not outside it and not to strangers, nor write it in letters.

In Nazi Germany, the Heil Hitler salute was officially termed “the German greeting.” The bitter joke among Germans was the real German greeting was the cautious swiveling of the head to side to side to make sure no one was listening before speaking frankly to a friend. I remember listening to my father and a neighbor he didn’t yet know as they engaged in a verbal dance, a careful sounding out, moving from neutral subjects to ever more political ones, gauging each other’s true politics before they both began criticizing the government. That was the South African greeting.

And now I’m seeing the same thing here in America. It’s not new, of course. There was plenty of violent retribution for unpopular speech/behavior/political positions during Colonial times. During the Revolution, Loyalists were harassed, chased from their homes, even murdered. Abolitionists were murdered in the antebellum South, and the same has happened to civil rights proponents into modern times. Then there were the Red Scare, the McMartin Preschool/Satanic ritual abuse hysteria, and so on.

Perhaps the current evil will die out, as most of the above did. But look at the destruction that those evils caused before they vanished. Surely Trump can’t last much longer, and I hope that he won’t be followed by another figure with the same insane appeal to the worst among us. But we can’t be sure of that, can we? Such “leaders” keep popping up. Even if Trumpism ends with Trump, the damage he has done will take a long time to repair, if it can be repaired.

In the meantime, our media and social platforms, increasingly owned by plutocrats who deem it in their interest to support Trump, are shifting rapidly to the right. The result isn’t censorship in the strict sense because it’s not being done by the government. Instead, it’s a pervasive and powerful form of self–censorship.

The end result is what I saw as a boy in Apartheid South Africa: a silence born of fear.

The Writer and His Novel—a Troubled Marriage

Forty or more years ago, I tried to write a short autobiographical novel stemming from what was then a fairly recent episode in my life. I didn't get far with the book, partly because I didn't have the hang of writing mainstream fiction and partly because writing about something that was still raw turned out to be far more emotionally difficult than I had expected. (I had thought that writing the story would be therapeutic. It wasn't.) It also didn't feel like a novel—more like a fictionalized diary entry.

I put it aside and went back to genre fiction. Plot–driven fiction was much easier. But I kept coming back to that autobiographical novel, and also fiddling with some other autobiographical fiction. At some point, I merged all the autobiographical stuff together, and the result was something very novel like but also very incomplete and uneven—different parts that didn't go together well. Dropped it again. Came back to it later. Rinse and repeat.

With each cycle, the novel got bigger and better but still very emotionally stressful to work on. Also with each cycle, the plot extended more into the past and the future, and the book spread sideways in the sense of adding more secondary characters and subplots. The calendar had caught up with the book’s timeline, so that the parts that had originally been set in the near future were now set in the recent past. Oops. The near future I had envisioned hadn’t happened, requiring plot revisions. On and on it went.

I kept putting the novel, now called Chains, aside in favor of plot-driven novels I could actually finish in a reasonable amount of time. But I always felt guilty, and increasingly silly and annoyed with myself. Chains kept poking at me.

When I started Chains, I was in early middle age or late whatever comes right before middle age. Now I'm into old age, and I feel really silly that I haven't finished the book. Each year, I've told myself that I'd have it done by my birthday, or at least by the end of the year. Each year, I failed to do that.

On the bright side, Chains has become not only much bigger than I originally intended but also much more serious, deeper, and layered than it was at the start. Or so it seems to me, anyway.

My birthday was last week, and Chains wasn’t done by then. It probably won't be done by the end of this year, either, but after working at the book more steadily this year than I have in a long time, I'm finally hopeful that it will at least be a real first draft by the end of the year. It has reached the point that it reads like a novel, albeit with gaps and inconsistencies, instead of like of a collection of stuff that doesn't fit together.

That was anticlimactic, wasn't it? Perhaps I shouldn't have posted anything until I had a finalish first draft. But I didn't want to wait.

At this point, the ms. is over 230,000 words. It could end up around 250-260,000 words. That's more than twice as long as anything I've written before. It will quite literally be my magnum opus.

I used the phrase “troubled marriage” in the title of this piece because it occurred to me today that my relationship with Chains has some similarity to a troubled marriage. Sometimes I’ve felt that the book is unrewarding drudgery, and at those times I’ve thought about giving up on it and starting anew, looking for that magical new book/relationship that I imagine would fulfill all my needs. Sometimes, two spouses/partners can’t stand to look at each other, to hear each other’s voices, or even to be in the same house. The arguments can be awful. Their eyes may wander, noticing others. They wonder if those others would be better matches, or at least more exciting ones. But then there are the deliriously wonderful reconciliations! They tell themselves that all is well after all. We can do this! We can make it! Until the next falling out, and the cycle repeats. That’s me and Chains.

All right, old book/girl. Give me a hug and a kiss, and let’s try again, eh? Of course, once you’re finally published, then you’re old news and my eye will be wandering again.

Law and Order, Waste and Fraud, Close the Border, and Lose Your Rights

For quite a long time, we heard “Law and Order” as the GOP/right wing/plutocratic war cry. My memory is that it started with Nixon, or at least was first repeated loudly and often by him and his lackeys. Whenever it started, it was code for “Those people are getting uppity. We’ll terrorize them into submission while at the same time ensuring that anyone who might otherwise sympathize with those people will instead acquiesce because of fear of the uppitiness.”

Nowadays, the war cry is “Waste and Fraud.” That’s a dog whistle for “The non-rich are getting too big a slice of the pie, which rightfully belongs entirely to us, so we’ll destroy programs that help them and suck up the resulting extra revenue for ourselves, but we’ll pretend that we’re just eliminating fraud and waste because we have successfully brainwashed the rubes into thinking that all government programs are full of fraud and waste, so they’ll support us.”

Meanwhile, “Close the Border” has been around forever in one form or another. Of course it’s just a flavor of xenophobia. “Those strange people are destroying our beautiful, sacred, pure culture with their weird music/food/religion/customs and seducing our young from the straight path and polluting our perfect bloodstream.” It’s a handy way to whip up fear and get votes, and it’s popular among politicians all over the world.

But I see something more happening in America. In the longer term, the “Close the Border” cry habituates the population to the existence of a police state. Americans have passively accepted the shocking establishment of a 100-mile wide Constitution-free zone along the border—which means around the edges of the 48 contiguous states and Alaska. Under the grotesque Trump administration, that Constitution-free zone now in effect includes anywhere that the government’s masked brownshirt thugs, a.k.a. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, happen to be. The zone won’t long be limited to wherever ICE is present; other agencies will soon be included.

The recent quick and violent expansion of the Constitution-free zone beyond the border sparked protests, which in turn sparked talk of harsh countermeasures. The protests will subside with time or be violently quashed. Perhaps the thugocracy will realize it went too far, too fast and will back off for a short time. Then it will expand the Constitution-free zone again, but a bit more slowly and less conspicuously. The end goal remains the same, though: a Constitution-free America.