Frank Herbert’s “Dune,” NXIVM and the 2020 American electorate.

One of the shows we’ve been streaming during lockdown is HBO’s The Vow. It follows a group of people, some famous, others not, as they join and then attempt to escape a cult called NXIVM (“nexium”). A fascinating thing about this one-season documentary series is that it is not filled with re-enactments. The cult leader engaged a documentarian to tell the story of his life — and the subsequent creation and expansion of his “self-help” organization — and this documentarian is one of the cult escapees. Who kept all the footage. It’s very engaging.

And it raises some interesting questions.

What could possibly cause an otherwise intelligent and accomplished person to give up huge amounts of self-determination and control to a cult like NXIVM (or Scientology)?

In 2020, it raises another interesting question.

What could possibly cause an otherwise intelligent and accomplished elected official to give up huge amounts of self-determination and control to slavishly follow a would-be dictator like Donald Trump? Similarly, what could possibly cause 72 million American citizens to vote against their self-interest, ignoring the evidence of their own eyes?

While they heard Donald Trump promise middle-class prosperity and job growth, they saw tax cuts that gutted the middle class and a trade war that sent tens of thousands of blue-collar jobs overseas. While they heard Donald Trump promise that Mexico would build that wall, they saw him divert billions of dollars from U.S. military programs and national security (U.S. taxpayer dollars) to fail to complete even half of the wall he had promised. While they heard that the novel coronavirus was a hoax not even half as deadly as the flu, they watched while a quarter million Americans died of COVID-19.

How could 72 million Americans possibly vote in favor of four more years of Donald Trump? How could thousands of people fall under the spell of Keith Raniere (NXIVM) or L. Ron Hubbard and David Miscavige (Scientology), or even Jim Jones, Charles Manson and David Koresh?

When (and why) do people stop understanding and believing in objective reality?

I contend that if every human could be forced at an early age to confront the truth of its own existence and the reality of its place in the universe, that human could never be taken in by a NXIVM or a Donald Trump. Which brings me to Frank Herbert’s Dune.

I consider myself lucky — I found a sun-bleached copy of Dune in my grandmother’s house when I was eight or nine years old. I read Dune every summer for about ten years, gradually adding the other books in the six-book series and reading them every summer as well. It’s fair to say that Frank Herbert’s ideas on ecology, philosophy, religion, education, and politics shaped my own thinking. I still consider the Dune series and Isaac Asimov’s Foundation series the greatest efforts ever in the field of speculative fiction.

There is a moment early in Dune when the main character, a boy of fifteen at the time, is forced to undergo a “test of humanity.” He is made to place his hand in a box while a poisoned needle is held to his neck. He feels an intense, burning pain in his hand, to the point that he imagines all the flesh has been burned off of that hand, yet he is ordered to keep his hand in the box. When the test ends and he removes his hand from the box, he is shocked to discover that the pain was all in his head, and his hand is perfectly normal. As the proctor of the test says, “We can’t go around maiming potential humans.”

The test is one of self-control: If you keep your hand in the box, you may lose your hand. But if you remove your hand from the box, you will die. The theory behind the test is equally simple: an animal that gets caught in a trap will chew its own leg off to get away. A human who falls into the same trap will have the self-control to lie in wait and try to kill the trapper, knowing that it is removing a threat to its own kind.

In other words, an animal cares only for its own survival. A human cares for all of humanity.

Do we live among 72 million animals disguised as humans?

That’s a harsh word. I think we can just as effectively call them emotionally immature. We have to accept that humanity as a whole is emotionally immature. Collectively, we seem unwilling to recognize the fact that we are causing such damage to our environment that we may cause our own extinction. (It’s worth noting that the planet will undoubtedly survive; I think environmental activists suffer from bad messaging here.) We seem unwilling to recognize that we could feed, clothe and shelter every human if we chose to, yet we choose not to. We seem unwilling to recognize that there really is enough to go around, and that one person’s success does not take away our ability to attain our own success.

And clearly, millions of our individual fellow citizens suffer from emotional immaturity as well. “I want mine, and I don’t care what happens to you!” Responsible (and well-resourced) parents try to correct such behavior. Other parents can’t or don’t. And we find ourselves here.

Let’s go back to Dune. What if we could develop an intervention that we performed on every child at the appropriate age? I would love to talk to developmental psychologists about this idea. Children are born selfish; it’s a survival mechanism. It’s completely appropriate for early human development. But at some point, in order to mature as an individual, you need to come to terms with the fact that you share this planet with 7 billion other souls. What if we could develop a technique that would rip the scales from a child’s eyes, force that child to realize that they are both a unique, special individual and an insignificant mote in the universe? Could we do that in a clinically structured, safe environment? Like a benevolent brainwashing? Could we do it without destroying that child’s sanity?

Would it be moral? Would it be effective? Would it save humanity? Would it be wrong to do this to a child without their permission or understanding?

Can we afford not to do it?

Magic in fiction.

I guess I took a break from writing because of this Covid-19 quarantine thing. Huh.

Well, that’s enough about that.

I have always been a fan of fantasy and science fiction literature. In fact, I’m delighted to hear that these genres are now legitimately considered literature; it’s something I always assumed was true! The earliest books and writers I can remember reading and enjoying include Dune, The Dragonriders of Pern, A Wizard of Earthsea, Katherine Kurtz’s “Deryni” series, Mary Stewart’s The Crystal Cave, anything by Piers Anthony and Andre Norton—these works shaped the way I think, the way I read, and the way I see the world.

For many years in the middle of my life I did not do a lot of reading for pleasure. And when I started again, I read a lot of real literature: Gore Vidal, James Clavell, James Joyce, Salman Rushdie, Jane Austen. Then I got back into mysteries. And finally back to my first love, scifi/fantasy. (And I do see them that way, as two sides of the same coin.)

I have recently been reading a lot of fantasy books that are new to me (Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time series, Anthony Ryan’s Raven’s Shadow series, James A. Moore’s Seven Forges books) as well as revisiting some old favorites (Lord of the Rings, Earthsea, Mercedes Lackey’s “Last Herald Mage” trilogy)—and I have a few things to say about magic.

In general, there seem to be two ways in which writers approach the performance of magic by their characters: in this essay I name them “spellcasting” and “psionics.” Spellcasting requires the use of something external—a book, some herbs, dice, words or ritual—to accomplish a magical feat. Psionics requires only the use of the mind.

In my opinion, psionic magic is by far the superior. In fact, when you think about it, spellcasting is kind of ridiculous.

I simply cannot accept the notion, for example, that “knowing the true name of a thing gives you power over that thing.” The notion that there is a true language that predates history and whose words exert power over the universe that we see. They’re just words, for God’s sake. Anyone who knows anything about linguistics sees how ridiculous this notion is.

I also cannot accept the notion that a series of elaborate hand gestures (Lev Grossman’s The Magicians) are necessary to perform magical feats. Even in that fictional universe, the fairies don’t need those ridiculous trappings. So why does anyone else?

In Buffy, the witch Willow starts out by reading (Latin and Sumerian, often) spells out of books and conducting rituals, but reaches a point where she addresses the magic forces of the Universe directly with her mind and her will (and in English). This is an implicit acknowledgement that spellcasting is a mere trapping, and the real work of magic is psionics. I can accept the idea that that ritual and sacred objects can be used as tools to focus the mind, but that’s the critical part: they help focus the mind, which does the actual work of magic.

In fact, the more I think about it, the madder I get. Which is weird. Magic isn’t real, right? So why does the idea of spellcasting exasperate me like this? Spellcasting implies that anyone can perform magic, while psionics implies that only certain people have the power. As a liberal democrat with socialist leanings, you would think that I would be cheerleading the idea of spellcasting over psionics. But I’m not.

Maybe I don’t want everyone to have the power. Maybe I like the idea that only certain people have the mental acuity to perform magic, and the courage and will to actually do it. Maybe I secretly spend a little time each week trying to find that little door in my mind (I know it must be there) that, once opened, will allow me to exercise that power.

For the record, I haven’t found it yet. But believe me, I keep trying.

If I had the power… well, that’s a story for another day!

The moment of death.

I don’t fear the moment of death.

I think.

I mean, how can I know until I’m there? But I think it’s true.

See, I spent a lot of time thinking about my own death when I was young. I’m not sure why. But an idea had occurred to me at a pretty early age: You are 100% alone when you are born, and you are 100% alone when you die. There may be people surrounding you at the moment of your death, and certainly your mother at least is present with you at the moment of your birth, but no one can actually go through those experiences with you. Your consciousness is truly alone when you come into this world, and your consciousness will be truly alone again when you leave it. And once I realized that, I had to find a way to be okay with it.

So I practiced. I meditated. I imagined nothingness, infinity, the void. I imagined myself fading away into that nothingness. I would lie awake in bed at night and project my consciousness out into the emptiness of space. I would try to feel the cold, try to sense the complete darkness and solitude. And somehow, finally, it worked. My consciousness became so diffuse that I sensed what it would be like to cease to exist. It was very strange. But it was not frightening.

It’s hard to explain this, but I was ultimately not frightened because I sensed something looking back at me. And that something may or may not have been me, or an aspect of me. But I knew in that moment, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that my being, my consciousness, had existed in some form before the moment of my birth, and I knew with equal certainty that it would continue to exist after my death. And I have never forgotten that feeling, that knowing.

(I don’t honestly know how any of these ideas came to me at such an early age. My next-door neighbor, Jack, used to call me a “little old man.” I don’t believe in the notion of “old souls” versus “young souls.” I think all souls are actually the exact same age. But maybe some just remember more of where they come from.)

All of that being said, I have learned, however, that I am afraid of many things surrounding death. I am terrified of being surgically disfigured. I don’t want to be forced into a wheelchair. I don’t want a diagnosis of stage 4 cancer. I don’t want to be anesthetized into oblivion.

What does this mean?

I recently got an unpleasant diagnosis, and I (unconsciously) fought the doctor at every turn on every issue. Scheduling. Cost. The procedure itself. It wasn’t until the diagnosis was repeated a third time, after two unsuccessful attempts to correct the problem, that it dawned on me: Perhaps I have a problem giving up control. The doctor, whose job it is to deal with these situations and who certainly has the experience to know what should work, had suggested a course of treatment. But I was unwilling to accept that I couldn’t figure out the best solution for myself. I simply couldn’t give up that control.

I think I don’t fear the moment of death because I can tell I will be making a choice in that moment to accept (welcome?) the transition. I will presumably recognize that a moment has arrived when the only forward step is death. And while I may miss people and things, I’m not afraid to make that choice and take that step. Alone. But these other situations I describe above—surgical disfigurement, stage 4 cancer—I think what I really fear in them is the lack of control. I fear giving control of my physical body over to anyone or any situation. And I shudder to think that I might have to depend on someone else for my basic needs.

Is that weird? Does everyone feel that way?

Grandview, U.S.A.

There are a lot of drug commercials on TV, and this troubles me on several levels. (This is an almost exclusively American phenomenon, by the way, as the only other nation in the world that allows direct-to-consumer advertising of prescription medications on television is New Zealand.)

I have always found the idea of drug commercials to be strange. I mean, shouldn’t your doctor be the one to suggest that you might need this prescription medication or that based on a specific condition you might actually have? Isn’t it putting the cart before the horse (or having the tail wag the dog) to expect a patient to request a certain medication from his doctor? And setting aside the fact that there are people in the world who suffer from hypochondria and hardly need new ailments to worry about, who on earth would actually take any of these medications after hearing such a litany of terrifying side effects?

But lately, the commercials themselves have gotten … weird.

Participate in this little experiment, and I think you will see almost immediately what I mean. The next time a commercial comes on for the charmingly named Farxiga (or Humira, or Trulicity, or Jardiance, or Ozempic), mute the sound and try to ignore the text appearing on the screen. And then ask yourself: Who are these people? What exactly are they doing, and why? Do I know people like this? Do actual humans interact in these ways? Would my grandson really enjoy picking olives with me? Would my preteen daughters really rise before dawn to have breakfast with me because my skin has cleared up? Are laundromats that much fun? Does the town I live in even have a gazebo? And, perhaps most importantly, how many piers are there in the world, and do they all feature jazz bands?

You see the weirdness now too, I think. The people who suffer from these conditions (psoriatic arthritis, atrial fibrillation, DVT, diabetes) all clearly love to exercise in groups in the park, walk/dine/dance on the pier, play exotic percussion instruments—and would do all of these things more freely and more frequently if they could only treat their conditions with one pill a day. That’s strange enough.

But do these people also all live in Grandview?

I should explain. There was a TV show in the mid-2000s called Ghost Whisperer. It starred Jennifer Love Hewitt as Melinda Gordon, and it took place in the fictional town of Grandview, where Melinda owned an antique store. And helped earthbound spirits resolve their problems and cross over into the light. That part of the show never bothered me. But Grandview drove me insane.

Grandview

You see, I’m pretty sure this Grandview has never existed. It is an idealized American small town with a gorgeous little town square (complete with gazebo) surrounded on all sides by thriving storefront businesses and populated with multiple coffee carts and residents who walk everywhere, know everyone, and carry their groceries in eco-friendly mesh totes. The streets that radiate away from the central square are lined on both sides with stately, impeccably maintained Victorian homes and charming cottages whose front yards overflow with rosebushes, trellises, and wheelbarrows spilling forth masses of impatiens and geraniums. And, apparently, a shit ton of ghosts.

Could this place actually exist?

Before you remind me that “This is television,” let me remind you that Jessica Fletcher, the author and sleuth featured in Murder, She Wrote, lived in charming Cabot Cove, Maine; and while that town was idyllic, attractive, and had a generally agreeable populace (setting aside the shocking murder rate), it seemed real in a way that Grandview never did. The streets were imperfectly paved. People had bad moods sometimes. There were hills, for God’s sake.

I have friends who live in small towns here in Minnesota and elsewhere. I love small towns. I love a good gazebo, and the one in St. Peter is one of the finest. But it happens to sit on a major state highway and shares land with a Vietnam War Memorial (which is stunning, by the way), and there is not a small business within blocks. Off the main streets of St. Cloud, the Victorian homes are stately, and the cottages are charming, but they are all in varying, often dramatic, states of disrepair. You would fall in love with downtown Watertown, South Dakota. And you would have your choice of storefronts in which to open your antique store, since the occupancy rate is only about 15%. But I couldn’t guarantee that you would ever have any customers.

Back to the commercials. Setting them in these fantasy towns is clearly intentional. Someone somewhere decided that the target customer for these ads is a person who dreams of living in a place like this. Here’s a hint: the famed retirement community in Florida called The Villages feature two “downtowns,” one done up in the style of an idealized (white) American small town, and one done up like an idealized (white) southern plantation community.

But there is another curious characteristic to these ads. In addition to featuring small town schools that have guitar ensembles (is that even a thing?), they also show a lot of interracial couples. And interracial families. In fact, if you look closely, you will notice that the cast of characters in every scene is perfectly balanced in terms of gender, age, and skin tone, and there are a lot of people who could be described as “soft ethnic” (an appalling term from the commercial world: A “soft ethnic” person is someone who is not white, but also not too black or brown, and so presumably not too off-putting).

I don’t really know what is going on here. I’m getting mixed messages from these ads. Among other things, I’m getting the sense that my idealized vision of the way my life should look is not shared by everyone else in America. But I would offer this critique to the makers of these ads: By trying to show everyman in everyplace, you have actually created a world so far removed from anyone’s tangible reality that you risk alienating everyone.

What’s in a name?

Jim and I are blessed to live with two cats, brothers no less, named Omelet and Eisenhower.

Omelet and Eisenhower

There they are on a typical afternoon, resting in between bouts of eating, walking the perimeters, and doing battle for supremacy.

Actually, Eisenhower’s supremacy is not in doubt. He is the alpha cat, and he reinforces that status daily, in big ways and small. Which is interesting, because he was not always the big man in the house.

Here they are in their infancy.

Baby Omelet and Baby Eisenhower

You can see that baby orange tabby Omelet was much bigger than his brother, baby gray tabby Eisenhower. And of course, those were not their birth names. They were born part of the “Sunnydale Five,” or the “Scooby Gang,” which fans of Buffy the Vampire Slayer will understand. Here is the zoomed-out version of the previous pic, featuring Spike (Omelet) and Xander (Eisenhower), as well as younger sisters Buffy and Willow. Baby sister Angel came along later. (And yes, fans of Buffy will know that Angel was actually a boy vampire, but hey, it’s 2020. Who are we to impose our ideas of gender on others?)

Spike (Omelet), Xander (Eisenhower), Buffy & Willow
Xander (Eisenhower), Spike (Omelet), Angel & Buffy

We are lucky enough to have their baby pictures, as well as the complete story of their birth, since all five cats were rescued by my brother and sister-in-law in Indiana in the spring of 2018. Brian and Julianne had already rescued one backyard kitten abandoned by its feral mama in 2016, and a second in 2017, and both are still living happily ever after with their rescuers. But feral mama cat invited a second mama cat to the backyard maternity ward in 2018, and Bri and Juls decided five new cats would just be too much. They took them all in, but immediately started looking for forever homes.

Little Spike (latterly Omelet) was very sick. He needed trips to the vet, doses of antibiotics, flea medicine, and two daily visits to the steam room (shower), which my brother Brian undertook gladly and lovingly. Little Xander (the future Eisenhower) loved his sick brother very much, and the two were inseparable from birth.

Jim and I fell in love with the pair, due in no small part to a series of heart-tugging videos sent to us by Julianne, and in the summer of 2018 we went and picked them up and brought them to their Minneapolis forever home.

And that’s when we changed their names. And I got to thinking: What, exactly, is in a name? What do our names really say about us? Do they shape our development? What if our names change, either through our own agency or through the agency of another? Does knowing a person’s true name, as Ursula K. LeGuin asserts in her Earthsea series, give one absolute power over that person?

Xander / Eisenhower

I don’t happen to put much stock in names. But it has been a fun exercise, thinking about the once and future names of our cat roommates. Take Eisenhower, for example, above. He was christened “Xander,” and he had very goopy eyes when he was born. Fans of Buffy will remember that in season 7, Xander was dubbed “the one who sees everything” (right before one of his eyes was taken, but let’s not go there). So okay, goopy eyes, Xander, eye-related… I get it. And he became Eisenhower. What does that name tell us? Well, General Dwight D. Eisenhower was the Supreme Commander of the Allied Expeditionary Force in Europe during WWII, supervising the invasion of Normandy, and later served two terms as president of the United States.

Our Eisenhower is definitely in charge around here. He is alpha cat to Omelet, and leads a daily invasion of the food stores and the toy box, as well as twice-daily assaults on his brother.

Spike / Omelet

This young charmer was born “Spike.” Fans of the show will know that vampire Spike spent several seasons with a chip in his head that prevented him (mostly) from feeding and defending himself, just like our feline Spike. He was sick and needed tending. And then he became Omelet.

/ˈäm(ə)lət/

noun: omelet; plural noun: omelets

a dish of beaten eggs cooked in a frying pan until firm, often with a filling added while cooking, and usually served folded over.

“a cheese omelet”

Hmm. Well, his favorite place to stretch out and get petted is on top of the stove. And he has the coloring of a cheese omelet, that’s for sure. Covered with Colby Jack, perhaps. Forgive me while I stretch for the rest.

Our Omelet is kind of like an egg. Self-contained. Full of potential. Secretive. Covered in a brittle (emotional) shell, but all soft and gooey inside.

And very often folded over.

Folded Omelet.

The eyes have it.

I know the nature of the Universe is change. Still, when my body decides to make a change without my prior approval, I do find it somewhat startling, and since I became middle-aged, less than pleasant.

Around the time I turned 42, my vision suddenly changed. Not gradually, suddenly. Overnight I was unable to read while wearing my glasses or contact lenses. Startling. 

This was not the first time my vision had been an issue. In fact, it has apparently always been poor. When I was 15, a sophomore in high school, my mother noticed that I was squinting to read the hymn numbers posted at the front of the church we were attending at the time. She asked if I was unable to read them without squinting. What a ridiculous question! No one can read anything that small and far away without squinting. Right? I mean, this is why I always sat at the front of the classroom in school. Clearly none of my classmates cared that much about reading what was written on the blackboard. Right? Apparently, none of those assumptions was true. So one eye exam later (20/125 is shockingly bad vision, actually—how had my pediatrician not noticed my squinting earlier?) I was fitted with the glasses I would wear for the next ten years. A change, an adjustment; I carried on.

(As a point of historical interest, it was also at this juncture that I learned my mother was not universally opposed to cheating. Between the time I saw my optometrist and the time I received my new glasses I was due to take an eye test to get my driving permit. She whispered the letters to me so that I could memorize them and appear to pass the test with perfect vision. It was a valuable lesson. In something. But we agreed that when my license came up for renewal, I would own up to needing corrective lenses.)

My eyes treated me with equanimity for the next 27 years, apart from the usual minor annual fluctuations in their ability to see at a distance, and their acceptance of contact lenses in place of glasses, at some point in our collective twenties.

And then that big change, at 42. Startling, as I said, but not insurmountable. My optometrist and I settled on a monovision prescription for my contact lenses—one lens to correct for distance, one lens to correct for close vision, and one brain to (eventually) process all the information into a semblance of normal vision. Good job, brain! Way to join the team! I figured the four of us (self, two eyes, one brain) would now carry on like that forever. We had made our adjustments to the latest change, and surely now things would settle down.

But this past year my eyes startled me with yet another less-than-pleasant change. It was my eyelid, actually, and the change was a basal cell carcinoma. I’m told that this is the least serious kind of skin cancer, and for that I am grateful, but still: Someone was going to have to cut a big chunk out of my eyelid. Like, right next to my eye. Which I use for seeing. This was a scary change.

I won’t leave you in suspense. Everything is working out, although I had to have the excision procedure twice over six weeks, since the cell margins were not 100% clear on the first pathology. But it’s all over now, I’m healing, and apart from a tightening of the skin under one eye, you would never know that anything had been seriously wrong.

But I’ll know.

I guess I’m not young anymore. And these middle-aged bodily changes are truly unsettling. I can easily accept that if I trip, fall down, cut myself, bang my head, eat spoiled food, consume too much sugar, too much alcohol, the resultant negative effects—action and reaction—will be predictable and therefore manageable. I learned these lessons as a young child, and they have stood the test of time. Except the alcohol one; I was quite a bit older when I learned about that. But when something unexpected arises in my body that I seem to have no control over (Where did these abnormal cells come from? Did I do anything to cause them? Are they all gone? When and where else will they appear?), I find myself succumbing to anxiety and fear.

America is also not young anymore. America is (hopefully) middle-aged. And lately she has been undergoing some startling, less-than-pleasant changes that have been interfering with her (our) ability to see clearly. Widespread state-sanctioned propaganda. Lies and conspiracy theories polluting the mainstream. Shocking displays of racism and hatred. Abnormal cells. It is unsettling.

So I’ve been thinking about change a lot lately. Change and the nature of the Universe. Change and my ability to accept it. Change and our collective ability to adapt. Openness. Agility. Preparation. Not prevention. That’s not a real thing.

2020 is a big year. My antennae are up, and my eyes are fully open. I hope yours are too.

The responsibilities of being a grandchild.

Jim bought me Ursula K. LeGuin’s No Time to Spare, a collection of her blog posts from 2010 until her death in 2018. I had been revisiting Earthsea, and thinking a lot lately about how much I wanted to be writing myself. These blogs showed me a way I might get started.

As it turns out, she was also inspired to start blogging by reading the blogs of another writer, José Saramago. So there’s a chain of inspiration here. A literary lineage, if you will.

Maybe someday I’ll figure out who that guy is.

DC