About My Last . . .

Several people seem - a couple say so - to be philosophy majors. Great. Then you know the rules, and unless you intend to wander into pseudo-intellectual device, that means there are things upon which we have to agree. Gravity, for instance, is a fact. Any opinion that says the pull of gravity is directed in any direction other than toward the center of the earth is special, and requires repair to another domain of discourse.

Someone - Schopenhauer, I think - once pointed out that there's a difference between logic and dialectic processes. Logic, he noted, is the science of pure reason, and is capable of a priori construction. Dialectic, on the other hand, must be a posteriori - it must wait for experience. The trouble with that is that experience may vary from individual to individual or group to group.

Worse (and I think Schopenhauer discussed it), human beings argue "eristically" (I read Schopenhauer in German a long time ago, and that was my translation then), for the pure sake of arguing, in other words - just the competition. They aren't interested in determining fact, only in winning the argument. I'm not one of the latter, incidentally, which means I "flip-flop" sometimes - because logic and reason say I'm wrong.

History, of course, is experience, subject to honest and dishonest - eristic, for instance - error. Among the honest forms of error are those something like what we used to call Type One and Type Two Errors.

Now I've done it. Parenthetically, I need to explain that a Type I Error occurs when one rejects the Null Hypothesis when it is true. An example of the Null Hypothesis is the assumption that a coin will come up heads half the time. A Type II Error happens when one doesn't reject the Null Hypothesis (and, of course, the hypothesis alternative to the Hull is true).

Phew! Anyway, let's say for instance I make an argument that my opposition refutes on the basis of information too limited - there's more proof he (and I, maybe) hasn't considered, in other words. I concede that he's right, making us both wrong. Honest error. Experience will show us how wrong we are. Iraq, in other words (when you're dead, everyone is pretty sure something went wrong).

But logic remains effective even when the subject is being decided dialectically or eristically. Logic, for instance, is the basis for the theory of Type One and Type Two Errors. It's the basis for my observation concerning what death of combatants in war means. More, pure (mathematical) logic is the basis for all rational tactics. In game theory, for instance, it has been shown that in any finite, non-cooperative game (warfare included), there must - HAS to be - a situation where no player has anything to gain by changing his strategy while the other players do not change theirs. The theory is called the Nash-Cournot Equilibrium, and it is based in its entirety on pure logic. It is a fact, something even experience can't change (a coin may come up heads - for instance - fifty, even a hundred or more times in a row; that doesn't change the logic - accepting the Null Hypothesis - of the matter).

Oops again. Now I'm "hoist on my own petard" - again. We're into probability theory - Bayesian, to be exact - and Kip, Tom, and others - will say we're back to experience. Yes and no. Bayes' Theorem and all the rules of probability are derived from pure logic. To reject the answer or answers probability suggests is illogical, in other words.

Months - at least six - before the invasion of Iraq, I said and wrote that it would be a colossal blunder. I said that on the basis of both logic and experience. I did not, as it seems the administration did, expect on the basis of good intentions and god's blessing a miracle. I could, indeed, have been wrong, too; but my error - logically - would have to have been that of erring on the side of caution.

German Field Marshal Erwin Rommel once observed that a risk is a chance you take knowing that failure means you can still recover. A gamble is a chance taken knowing that failure means recovery will be impossible. The decisive factor is whether risk or gamble is worth failure. Was "Iraqi Freedom" worth the risk or gamble? For the United States government? For the military-industrial complex? For the U.S. public? For the dead?

Rommel also said, "Sweat saves blood, blood saves lives, and brains saves both." Rommel was a tactician; George W. Bush and his administration aren't. There's no arguing that - dialectically OR eristically.

P.S. Rommel was a brilliant tactician -arguably the greatest of all time. Here are some more things he said - something to consider where our discussion here today is concerned:

"Mortal danger is an effective antidote for fixed ideas." (Explains the change in Mr. Bush's approval ratings, maybe?)

"Don't fight a battle if you don't gain anything by winning." (I guess we've been discussing that - "on the side of caution . . .")

"Courage which goes against military expediency is stupidity, or, if it is insisted upon by a commander, irresponsibility." (I've sent this one to the White House and my "representatives" in the U.S. Congress.)

"The best plan is the one made when the battle is over." (Just remember that I'm on record months before.)

"Men are basically smart or dumb and lazy or ambitious. The dumb and ambitious ones are dangerous and I get rid of them. The dumb and lazy ones I give mundane duties. The smart ambitious ones I put on my staff. The smart and lazy ones I make my commanders." (Would that the U.S. public actually had those options; and to imagine we do is illogical in light of experience.)

"One must not judge everyone in the world by his qualities as a soldier: otherwise we should have no civilization." (Not so apropos here - or is it?)

"What was really amazing was the speed with which the Americans adapted themselves to modern warfare. Starting from scratch an army has been crafted in the very minimum of time, which, in equipment, armament and organization of all arms, surpasses anything the world has yet seen." (We're all wondering what happened, aren't we?)

Shades of Marshall McLuhan

However it may seem, this “blog” is largely a quest for understanding. I want to understand how people think, and why. I want to know why we’re doing the astonishing things we’re doing.

It’s nothing new. People who know me will tell you I’ve been doing this sort of thing all my life. The picture that leads this essay is one that has been in my residences since I was fifteen. It’s famous, of course – seventeen year old Galileo saying, “Shut up – let me think!” It’s how I’ve always thought of my relationship vis a vis my fellow human beings.

As I said elsewhere on my website, it was the reason that classmates and townspeople back home called me “Lip” and “Paladin,” and the reason I would one day bear the nickname “Spock.” High school classmates said in our Graduating Class Prophesy that I would one day be the one to capture the Abominable Snowman. I was always investigating news, trying to find out what the truth was. I wanted to know what was real.

I couldn’t, for instance, help being suspicious of what the papers and radio reported. All too frequently, what they reported as truth was obviously false to a mathematician or scientist. One day – still a sophomore in high school - I discovered a quotation from Aldous Huxley – “The great tragedy of science,” he remarked, “a beautiful theory slain by an ugly fact.” I made the quote and the reasoning behind it mine.

History became my favorite subject of study – after physics.

My penchant for putting to the acid test what people believed and demanded that I believe didn’t make me popular. My inquisitiveness where things like the Holocaust, Biblical stories like the Great Flood, and the like kept me in hot water continually – and always with those in authority.

When people tell you that you must believe what they believe and tell you, they don’t take kindly to having you prove they’re wrong. In fact, it infuriates them.

Still, I can’t help it. It’s what led me to make my living as a private investigator. I love forensics, the questioning and proving or disproving of anything. So it is that the only television I watch these days is the news and the pundits associated with it.

So it is that I’m really worried about my country.

There a dozens, scores, of examples, but let’s use one from last night’s news. Four more of our young people are dead in Iraq. More are wounded. More are being returned for second and third tours there, another chance to be among the dead and wounded being reported anew every, single day. Astonishingly, the country goes on dithering about what ought be done.

Worse, words-only warriors, heroes like Rush Limbaugh, Glen Beck, Sean Hannity, and others, continue the harangue that says things like the new Iraq Study Group Report are treasonous, not to be taken seriously, and the like.

The report says generally that things aren’t going well in Iraq. Wow! That’s a revelation, isn’t it? But it’s treasonous to notice. If you don’t hear the echo of Germany in 1933 there, you know nothing of its history (you haven’t seen the movie, “Mortal Storm,” either). If you don’t recognize the tone and tenor of Josef Goebbels’ radio addresses then in that of Rush Limbaugh; well, it means you haven’t heard the Reichsminister’s speeches.

Typical of the Iraq Study Group’s report critics is Glen Beck. Beck, for instance, points out that none of the people on the study group are generals. If, he says, we pull out of Iraq – “cut and run” – we will have “lost the war.”

Let’s indulge me my penchant for dialectic, forensics, logic, and scientific method and hold it right there for a minute. That happens to be the very kind of rhetoric that made me the eternal skeptic I am. To begin with, I ask myself who is this guy? Normally, in debate or a court room, anyone who asks that his opinion be considered presents credentials, reason to believe that he knows more about the subject than is generally known. The logical fallacy otherwise is known as “disputandum ad verecundiam” – appeal to authority.

More, it is Beck himself who by way of discounting the study and those who made it points out that none of the people on the Iraq Study Group are generals. Beck wonders how the members of the group came to be chosen for it.

Well, now – that’s an interesting point. How is it that a guy who didn’t so much as wear a uniform dares criticize the Iraq Study Group because they aren’t generals? Who is Glen Beck? Check his biography.

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=Glen+Beck+biography&btnG=Google+Search

Who are any of the pundits foisted upon us by FoxNews, CNN, MSNBC, and the rest? I’ve already published here the military records of people like Bill O’Reilly, Sean Hannity, Michael Savage, Rush Limbaugh, et cetera. “Did not serve.”

I spoke of things conspicuous by their absence the other day. Conspicuous from all the bloviating done by these words-only warriors is any evidence – hardly a scintilla – of anything one might recognize as reason for anyone with even the most fundamental knowledge of military tactics to believe anything they say.

You will not, for instance, hear the term “Tactical Numerical Deterministic Model” (look it up – I’ve spoken of it before here). You will not hear of Sun Tzu, Clausewitz, Vegetius, Saxe, Frederick the Great, or any of the recognized authorities on military strategy. You will hear, however, the broadest possible generalizations, all but mindless recitations of emotionally appealing nonsense like “cut and run,” “stay the course,” and other examples of the “last refuge of a scoundrel.”

I can’t help wondering how these birds came to be in a position that millions take seriously their mindless haranguing. How does Beck – for instance, again - an alcoholic who “did not serve,” a guy whose logic and reasoning are demonstrably on a level lower than most high school kids locally, came to be in a position to criticize the Iraq Study Group?

Shades of Marshall McLuhan. What, being on TV makes you an authority? On everything?

In the recent segment that prompts me, Beck joins the words-only wannabe warrior cohort of the right wing news media in arguing that “losing” in Iraq will mean we have lost the “war on terror.”

Well, Spockian character that I am, I can’t help wondering – inasmuch as the “war” we seem to be talking about is supposedly world-wide – how “losing” in Iraq can mean we’ve lost the war. What, are we going to surrender? To whom?

Are the “bad guys” – the language being used these days concerning the “war on terror” kind of shows one the level of discourse we’re into here, doesn’t it? – going to invade? The Unites States of America – three hundred million people, with the biggest, most expensively equipped military in human history – will be defeated (that’s forced to surrender and be occupied by an enemy, isn’t it?) by AK-47, RPGs, and improvised explosive devices?

How in the hell is that supposed to come about? What the old Soviet Union knew it couldn’t do, what Red China knows it can’t do, and what every military strategist capable of playing parlor games knows – that to invade and successfully occupy the United States is impossible – is going to be done by al Qaeda or the “insurgents” in Iraq?

What the four hundred, sixty billion dollar a year U.S. military can’t do in Iraq – twenty-two million people with no army at all – al Qaeda is going to do here? Are you kidding?

Let’s back up a minute. First, and as every game theorist knows, all games are encapsulated by the rules of the particular game. That means you have to know what the game IS. What is “losing?” “Winning?” What’s “the course?”

Anybody who claims to be a tactician or strategist – and be accepted by other tacticians or strategists – first demands to know how he will win. What, or where, is the goal?

Dear reader, my primary interest in all this is no longer the war and how we got into it. It isn’t even my interest here to argue and prove my theory that the U.S. suffered a military industrial complex coup d’etat in the late fifties or early sixties. If you don’t add up the evidence of what’s going on to realize that the only possible goal for what the government is doing in Iraq is staggering – and my reference there is the nation and its middle class - profit for military industrialists, you’re too far gone (too “challenged” mentally) to rescue.

You’re a sheep and you’ll follow any Judas goat at all to any slaughterhouse.

What I’m wondering today is how a nation and society of people like this one can be hornswoggled into taking seriously the eminently absurd pronouncements of yellow, tabloid journalism like today’s television. Will someone – and I’m serious; write – tell me how in the hell you come to take seriously anything a Rush Limbaugh, Bill O’Reilly, Sean Hannity, Alan Colmes, Al Franken, or their incoherent like says?

And I mean “incoherent.” I’ve said it before here, but it bears repeating. Night after night, morning after morning, I fill tape recorder tapes with record of one illogical asseveration after another, argument after argument that wouldn’t hold up in an eighth grade English or debate class. Go back and consider again the crack-brained reasoning in that “cut and run” thing. THINK about it.

No, I did NOT say “emote” about it. THINK! Reason. How could terrorism possibly defeat us? If round the clock – for years - bombing be fleets of bombers couldn’t defeat Nazi Germany, if the horrendous B-52 raids of the Vietnam War could not defeat North Vietnam, how many terrorist attacks would it take to make the United States surrender?

More to the point, how could “winning” in Iraq possibly win the war on terror? Explain that to me. Tell me how is it then that “losing” the regional – national – war in Iraq means we’ve lost the global war, that on terror? Huh? Huh? Huh?!
Let’s assume for a minute that we “stay the course” – and the course demands “victory,” and “victory” is everything our fearless leader says he intended with “Operation Iraqi Freedom.” Iraq becomes a U.S.-style democracy, everything is peace and light.

Okay? What have we gained where our own safety is concerned? Al Qaeda and all the Arabs who hate us as the Great Satan will stop shooting and rush to contribute to our slipping standard of living? The price of crude oil will drop to twenty dollars a barrel? Iran will stop trying to develop nuclear weapons?

Let’s concede everything the words-only warriors hand-wringingly harangue about. Iran gets the nuclear bomb. They magically get a flying carpet – it’ll take that, because they’re at the Katyusha and Silkworm rocket stage right now otherwise - with which to deliver it to a target here. Or just in Israel. THEN what?

Put yourselves in Iran’s shoes. Put Iran where the Soviet Union was during most of the supposed Cold War. Or Communist China. Imagine that that you’re crazy enough – and Ahmadinajad just might be that crazy – that you launch a nuclear attack. What do you KNOW will happen?

Let’s say you manage to kill fifty million people – “infidels” - here. Or somewhere. What do you think – KNOW – will happen?

Sure. You – and everybody in Iran, your country – will be with Allah and seventy-two somehow horny virgins (shows you how far from reality those characters are, doesn’t it?). And there will still be two hundred, fifty million of your enemy here in the real world you never managed to locate. All the faithful you left behind get to start that part of the arms race you lost all over again – from scratch. Another six hundred years and you’re back where you started.

Try to imagine (just from the little that you know about strategic military tactics that you’ve been permitted to learn through blizzard of behavioral conditioning and misinformation on the subject you’ve been subjected to by your government in the past three decades) what it would take to force the United States to surrender – give you everything you want. Convert to Islam. Lay down our arms, so you can kill us all.

You’re al Qaeda and you’re planning the demise of the Great Satan. What do you do?

One last, thing, a question for the military-industrialists who are running this show, and whose pundits are leading us to slaughter: With the fifteen trillion dollars we’ve paid you since 1946 to protect us from our enemies, this is what we get? With fourteen nuclear carriers and scores of nuclear submarines packing god knows how many nuclear missiles, fleets of B-1s, B-2s, and bat-turning supersonic jet fighters of every possible capability and description; with Buck Rogers, gee-whiz weaponry beyond the imagination of all but the most imaginative, we have to surrender to raggedy-ass, assault rifle armed, al Qaeda ankle-biters?

Here’s another “study group report,” from one guy: We need another security team, a better bodyguard. Things aren’t going well.

White House "Snow Jobs," "Issues," and "Challenged" Truth.

"Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hope of its children . . . . This is not a way life at all. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron."

That was General Dwight D. Eisenhower, 34th President of the U.S. According to the U.S. Accounting office and others, we have spent, thus far, on George W. Bush’s attempt to position himself in history as a great man, $99,380,000,000. That’s ninety-nine billion, eight hundred thirty-four million, and that’s per year. That’s $278,000,000,000 – three hundred, seventy-eight billion, total.

I like quotations. They’re the past, so they give you perspective, a measure of what you’re doing or about to do. Here’s another, from Mark Twain. He wrote this in 1906, in a work entitled “Glances at History.”

"To be a patriot, one had to say, and keep on saying, 'Our country, right or wrong,' and urge on the little war. Have you not perceived that that phrase is an insult to the nation?”

In the aftermath of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita, the President of the United States asked the U.S. Congress to allocate sixty-nine billions, that spread over five years. That’s $13,800,000,000 per year. Thirteen billions, eight hundred million.

The numbers are also a measure of priorities where the George W. Bush Administration and the Federal Government of the United States are concerned. The measure tells a citizen, for instance, what to expect when his interests are compared with those of an illegal alien from Mexico – and who will get the most sympathy, effort, and assistance. The measure tells the poor what to expect when their interests are compared with those of the nation’s military-industrial complex (it was also President Eisenhower who warned that a coup-d’etat was about to take place in our country).

Humanity, in other words, will be hung on a cross of iron.

“To speak of atrocious crimes in mild language is treasonous to virtue.” Edmund Burke.

A couple days ago, the “Iraq Study Group” published its much-ballyhooed report. Guess what? “Things aren’t going well in Iraq.” Believe it or not, I not only knew that, but I said things would not go well in Iraq months – years, in fact - before the invasion. What an amazing guy I must be – a real seer.

That “things aren’t going well” remark is a quote for the latest White House “Snow job” – one of those “briefings” (of course, a White House briefing is a briefing the way a FoxNews newscast is news). The pundits are now telling us about the schism that occurred in Islam centuries ago, and how Sunni and Shiite Moslems have hated and killed one another for all that time.

That’s over which relative of the Mohammed should have become boss (things like that, to an historian, also provide perspective – what to expect of people who follow that particular break with reality called religion).

In case you think I forgot about the Kurds, I didn’t. It’s just that the Sunni-Shiite issue is trouble enough. The choice of words “issue” and “trouble” should provide even more perspective that having to do with the matter – not the choice of term) of the likelihood that an “American” – note the perspective – has any chance of knowing what the hell the reality is where any of this is concerned.

My point? Well, there are several. First, a very tiny percentage of the people who read this will have any way to know what numbers as large as $378,000,000,000 mean. They will have even more trouble – try to make “issue” work there – dong the division or multiplication necessary to know what the perspective I refer to where illegal aliens and U.S. citizens is.

What are the odds of your receiving help, if your problem – “issue?” – is to be weighed against that of an illegal Mexican? How much will your government spend on you? How much on the Mexican? How much is your government taking from Social Security to spend on an Iraqi? How much are the poor being deprived of, in order to assure that CEOs of military-industrial giants live like maharajahs?

How much is $13,800,000,000, divided by $99,834,000,000? Is that the way to calculate the odds in your favor or against?

What do you calculate the chances that a White House “Snow job” relates to any kind of reality? What do you think the reality might be? How do you figure it? How about a FoxNews “newscast?” What numbers do you use to diminish or increase the truth of what they tell us? What’s been the ratio – no, not “issue;” there’s no argument about it – between what they said was the truth and what WAS the truth?

How about Iraq? What did they say costs would be? What are the costs again? How about casualties? Time we would be in Iraq?
How do things like “stay the course,” “cut and run,” and the rest of White House “Snow Job,” FoxNews palaver relate to Mark Twain’s “our country right or wrong and urge on the little war’ relate. How do you compare them?

What is a liar? If I think the U.S. has “issues” in Iraq, what does someone mean when they say trouble? Disaster? How big an “issue” is a disaster? If I think a liar is someone who is “truth-challenged,” what is a lie? A challenged truth? Is THAT what an “issue” is?

What is insanity? Is it “challenged” reality? Is reality an “issue?” Seems so, doesn’t it . . .?

U.S.S. Ship of Fools, 2006

Microcosms. Fascinating word, isn’t it? Webster’s defines “microcosm” as, “the universe in miniature; anything regarded as being the universe in miniature.”

Now – owing to the debilitated state we find ourselves where literacy, education, erudition, and mental processes dependent upon the several - I am obliged to digress parenthetically here. (I might have said instead of “debilitated state” challenged, but that would be to lapse into the dyslalia, dyslexia, and dyphasia (go look it up) that is my topic here.) I propose to use the term “microcosm” by what is called extension. Experience over the last two decades has demonstrated that speaking to an “American” – still another example of our “challenged’ state: there are two hundred, thirty-four other nations in the America, but U.S. Citizens consider that only they are “Americans” – by way of anything by the eighth-grade English, Spanish, or any of fifty other tongues he is semi-educated in immediately leads to misunderstanding.

This, after all, is where a few years ago a headline in a major newspaper read, “Children who have been artificially inseminated should be informed.” The same paper demanded on another occasion that the Texas legislature fund research into “why so many people in South Texas are born with half a brain.”

I pause to let that last sink in; and to note that my remark regarding that last, a remark to the effect that the “research” referred to in the article might also explain why persons in South Texas drive the way they do, is worth considering.

To resume where I digressed, I mean by “extension” that I will use the term “microcosm” in an extended sense, meaning that I will use a personal experience in order to demonstrate what might be expected in similar circumstances of a macrocosmic experience – that of the nation. The microcosm of something, in other words, is used as an analog of the macrocosm, by what is called analogy. ‘Kay?

Recently, when the federal government’s cyber-warriors had taken down my computer for the I-don’t-know-how-manieth time, was obliged to buy another. Inevitably, that meant – as it had already meant nearly countless times – being further obliged to deal with the non compos mentis world of today’s service personnel. Here beginneth the microcosm, that of the dyslalia, dyslexia, and dysphasia I spoke of a moment ago.

Go look them up – otherwise, you’ll be in the same state as people from South Texas (“challenged,” with “issues”).

Examples of the problem – no, NOT “issue;” my children are “issues,” and this is not a debate – abound, but none more elucidative that what occurred this morning when I tried to get assistance with determining why I was unable to install my Norton Password program in my new computer (Symantec’s installation disk obliterated the brains in the previous computer wherein I tried to install the disk, necessitating purchase still another computer)

Note, please, that I do not necessarily single our Symantec or Norton here; I have encountered similar absurdity with literally (the word, incidentally means “exactly as stated,” “I emphasize what I just said”) dozens of companies, companies like Verizon, Hewlett-Packard, Microsoft (want to talk to India or Japan” – just ask for service form Microsoft), APC, and I’m tired of reciting company names.

Having logged onto the Symantec (Norton?) site, I am confronted with a work of abstract, computer website designer art. Boxes, ovals, and geometric figured scattered about the screen of here, there, and roundabout. So confronted, one begins searching with intent upon finding something related to his purpose. Forget it. The designer of this, what I predict will become another of those “periods” in the world of visual art, had little or no interest in providing information. This, as I said, is art.

Clicking from page to page, I come to example after example of the same, non sequitur nonsense. Always, I am addressing “issues.” God damn! – but that word annoys me. My problem is an “issue?” Does the artist creator of this visual orgasm mean that whatever my trouble is is a matter for debate? They’ll help me only when I have absolved them of any fault? What? If there’s going to be an argument over the fact that the damned program doesn’t work – or that it functions like this @#$%&! Website – I’ll just go to the place I bought it and demand my money back.

Try it. That starts more of the same. Try calling Verizon on the telephone. Remember when you picked up the phone, called the company, agency, or what have you and someone answered your question in less than five minutes? No, I don’t suppose – that was long before you were born. Remember when you could use a dime to call home from anywhere on the planet? I do. I once called my wife in Iowa from Germany, and the phone company had her on the phone in five minutes.

Recently, I bought a cellular phone at Radio Shack. When clerk called to have the thing “registered,” activated, and al the rest that make your name, phone, number, and pedigree available to every data bank on the planet, he stood listening for a minute, then handed me the phone. “Can you understand what she’s saying,” he said lugubriously.

Taking the phone, I could see what he meant. The English – I think – was unintelligible. Thinking I recognized the accent, I said, “Nippongo ga dekimasuka?” (Do you speak Japanese?). “Ah, so – hai, hai,” the woman said gratefully and with obvious relief. “Kono denwa o kaitain desu ga. Hitsuyou no yoyaku shitain desu ga,” I said. I want to purchase this telephone and make the necessary registration.

From there, things went smoothly, and I soon had a functional – such as they are – cell phone. Around me, customers in the place including my airline captain companion that day watched and listened with amused amazement.

“It’s not the same country it use to be,” I groused.

Anyway, after a typical half hour of utter frustration with Symantec’s Gordian Knot website, I gave up. No help there. The disk that came with the program destroys the computer it’s installed in, so I guess I’ve flushed another c-note down the toilet of cyber-commerce.

To learn that the Microsoft Publisher program I bought would not do word wrap, I spoke with three young men in Bombay – or was it Calcutta? English was obviously not the first language of any of them. Only the third was sufficiently knowledgeable about Publish to tell me it wouldn’t do what I had bought it intending to do.

Endeavoring to order a book the other day from eBay, I wandered through pages of Salvador Dali-ian visual salad, trying with futility to find a way to pay for the damned thing. Worse, when the book I ordered hadn’t showed up months later, I went back to the website for another mental and psychological beating. In the box provided for my shipping address, I found an old one, given literally – that word, again – years before. Each time I tried to change the address to the current and correct one, the website insistently changed it to the old one. When I had wandered through the jungle of geometrical figures, esoteric jargon, fractured English, and obtuse diction that is the website in question, I happened – and we’re talking serendipity here – upon another of those execrable boxes, this one labeled change of address. So, thanks to the wonders of modern technology, I was able to purchase and obtain a book in only five months, five days.

There same was true when I tried to order medication from an on-line Pharmacy. That I didn’t die of my condition is due only the fact that I was ordering the medication for somebody else.
Calling – by telephone, mind you; their website, too, is more of what I’m telling you about here - my internet service provider recently to ask why with purchase of the latest my computers I could neither access my “control panel” there or work on my website, I was informed that was because my password had been changed. It was? - I said with astonishment. Why wasn’t I told?

The “technical support specialist” said, and I quote, “We assume that you will know – and call us.”

I sure as hell have missed something there, and I continue to think about it now – several months later. It makes you wonder if you’re beginning to slip.

When my recent change of residence necessitated doing business (Does anyone still remember that, essentially, that’s what things of this nature are? Does anyone still remember what that means? Or used to mean?) with Verizon, my wife and I were on the telephone one morning for four hours and eight minutes. “If you want . . ., press one; if you want . . ., press two; if you want . . ., press three,” etc. “If your dog is black, press nine; if you dog is white, press ten; if you want telephone sex, press six and pound (what do I pound?) At something like eight – no it was zero – we were able to reach a human being.

Yeah – except that the human being then did only what the recording had been doing. Handed to another cyber-programmed human being, we were handed to a third only when it had become apparent that the last – these were all women, by the way – couldn’t answer even the most basic question. She got snippy, too – that when I asked how long she had been where she worked.

Handed off to still another “support specialist,” we were given a set of instructions which we wrote down as they were being received. We also followed the instructions given us by the voice on the line, using the computer in question and before me on the desk where I was sitting.

When nothing the young man – English was not his first language, either; and when I tried to speak with him in my fluent Spanish, he got snippy, too – worked, we were handed off to another.

That’s when we were cut off. Having re-dialed, we go through all the numbers again, then all the ditzy babes. We get Fred, then Jaime – I’ve long since started talking names – then Frank. Frank is a stud. In less than two minutes – that’s literally, again (remember what “literally” means?) – Frank has solved our problem.

That, incidentally, is because Frank gave us the one, simple – “you have to click on” – instruction all of his fellow “support specialist” co-workers failed to mention.

Shall I tell you that took care of our hook-up problem? I’d be lying. The next day, when our password wouldn’t work, we were back on the telephone.

This time, though, the missus and I had decided that the only way to endure Verizon “support” was to get naked and have sex while going through the otherwise excruciating procedure. “Hooking up” while hooking up, so to speak.

Yup – all the numbers. All the girls. All the guys. Rita and I were doing the Shinjuhatte – the forty-eight positions of the Japanese Kama Sutra – so, changing positions with each time Verizon inflicted another of its “specialists” upon us, we managed.

By the way, if you want to experience a thunderous orgasm, let one of these Verizon, Microsoft, VIAnet, Symantec, APC type drive you to the point of killing fury, then have sex. You’ve never had it like that, believe me.

This time, we asked for Frank, but Frank seems to be the Verizon Wizard of Oz, the go-to guy once the customer calling Verizon “support” has been reduced to apoplexy. Finally, though, Rita having suggested that I might have had a heart attack, we got Frank. He’s still a stud – just failed to mention that letter in the password was upper case. Why did it work the first time, but not the second? Well, that’s when Rita’s second orgasm started, and I forgot to ask.

So there you have it – microcosm. Want an explanation for New Orleans, before, during, and after the hurricanes. Think about it. Want an explanation for a presidential administration like the one we’re hoping to survive? Go on the internet and try to get “support.” Want to know why damned near nothing works in the land of the free (where one in thirty-two people is in jail, on probation, parole, or the rest)? Have a look at the language.

In every instance I’ve cited here, the utter linguistic fecklessness of the people involved was the cause for chaotic result. From young people who grope for words – every sentence, for instance, punctuated by “you know,” one solecism or Malaprop after another – to immigrants who speak our language only at work, to pseudo intellectuals who would foist their “professional design” (go paint on a wall some place, Nacho) upon us, we are constructing a cybernetic Tower of Babel, babbling C.O.I.K., feminism-ese like “issues.”

A few months ago, with the visit of the Bolivian sailing ship ARC Gloria, the ship’s executive officer observed in response to our question that every minute part of the ship and its rigging had an inviolably precise name. That, the officer said, was essential to handling the ship. Without communication that was perfectly clear, the intricately complex process of handling sail would quickly turn to chaos.

Remind anyone of our own “Ship of Fools,” ship of state?