Category Archives: Americana

Believing Is Seeing

Americana, Evolution

Eyeball

A couple of parts in my right eye have come loose. It is a little uncomfortable but my vision is still the same so my main problem is my concern that it will get worse. Still, even though I can see as well as before, it is turning out to be a remarkable experience (not really remarkable, I guess, but remarkable to me). When the damage first happened, I saw floaties in my field of vision, pretty big floaties, that I guessed were just debris from the loosening. But now I usually don’t see the floaties, they are still there but my brain has wired around them filling in the blank spaces with information from the other eye, I think, sort of like Content-Aware Fill in Photoshop.

Except that my brain only wired around most of them, not all. While I am standing in the kitchen doing dishes, for example, and a floaty drifts down to the corner of my eye, I will be distracted by seeing the cat just at the edge of my vision field. When I turn my head and look, she is not there. In other words, when the floaty is floating around where there shouldn’t be anything, my brain sort of fills in the blank spot but when the floaty is somewhere where there might be something, my brain uses the information from the eye and makes it something reasonable, like a cat crouching down next to the dishwasher.

We don’t see with our eyes, we see with our brain. The eyes just provide the necessary raw information required for the for the brain to turn it into an image. However, the required information doesn’t have to be very much information. We are incessantly trying to connect the dots, trying to make patterns out of the constant flow of information coming from our eyes. At a very basic level, our brain is overriding our lying eyes.

I suspect that when we know the answer, really know the answer, it is even easier for our brains to override those lying eyes.

Lies, liars, post truth reality, and the fight for the National Truth

Americana, Politics

Crowds

We want our politicians transparent, yet we want them powerful as well, and power, even in the best of circumstances, means the management of information, and telling the truth is not managing the information. Nathan Heller in The New Yorker some time ago.

“I have a running war with the media. They are among the most dishonest human beings on earth.” Trump at CIA Headquarters.

“You’re saying it’s a falsehood and Sean Spicer, our press secretary, gave alternative facts to that,”  Kellyanne Conway, senior Campaign Manager and now counselor to President Donald Trump, to NBC’s Chuck Todd.

What most irks me right now is when my fellow Liberal dismiss Trump as stupid or deranged. The problem is that when one thinks of him as stupid and he does something like the crowd size press briefing, the natural reaction is to say Look how stupid he is, doing something so stupid and counter-productive?  But Trump is not delusional – he just believes what he wants to believe which, BTW, will be much easier now that he is in the Presidential Bubble – he is very smart and he is nasty and cunning; the question should be Why would he do something that seems so stupid and counter-productive, what does he have up his sleeve? 

Thinking out loud far from the actual Trump Presidency

Americana, Current Affairs, Politics

President Trump and MelaniaI have been relatively sanguine about Trump, mostly because I think he is more of a Populist than a Conservative. For me, the worst case scenario would be for Trump to be impeached and Pence takeover. But, while Trump says “[we] are transferring power from Washington, D.C. and giving it back to you, the people,” he keeps surrounding himself with the Conservative Establishment. That is very worrying.

I keep looking at Trump’s daughter and son-in-law who were formerly Democrats and part of the New York Liberal Elite and are now trusted advisors, and I think They sound so sane, they will keep him from going off the rails, and then I watch the first thing that comes out of the White House. The first Official press briefing wasn’t about building a wall or saving a factory or, even, canceling Obamacare, no, the first press briefing, the most important thing on the agenda, was about the size of the crowd during Trump’s speech. It was just a sad little man lying, trying to make us believe that this inaugural crowd was the largest in history.

This guy is out of control; the sane ones don’t tone him down. It is impossible to change Donald Trump because this is a family operation and President Donald John Trump is the family patriarch. He sets the tone. He is the boss. That is more than a little disquieting.

Living the Good Life in the rain

Americana, Around home, Film, General U.S. Grant

hidden-figuresWe got hit by the big storm over last weekend and, as often happens in our neighborhood, a tree was blown over, taking out the power to three homes. But, to safely work on the power outage, PG&E shut down the whole neighborhood. Sitting in the dark, with no heat, did not seem like the best way to pass a Sunday, even though it was in the 50s outside, so we decamped and went out to a late lunch at La Viga, my favorite upscale Mexican restaurant.

After the distraction of a seafood stew for lunch, we still had a Christmas tree to take down and wanted to go home and get busy. In our new interconnected world, all we had to do was check the PG&E website to get all the details of the power outage and its repair which is handy and would have been even handier if they said we had power. But we still didn’t (although it was on the schedule). We decided to go see a movie because…what else are you going to do on a rainy Sunday. Hidden Figures was on our short list and was just at the right time, so Hidden Figures is was. We were not disappointed.

Hidden Figures is sort of an old-fashioned movie, the kind with a happy ending – wherein the white bosses redeem themselves – that you know is coming. Getting to the ending, however, is a rough journey. The movie centers on three black woman Katherine G. Johnson played by Taraji P. Henson, Dorothy Vaughan, played by Octavia Spencer, and Mary Jackson played by Janelle Monae, who worked for NASA  as computers in an era when engineers often did the conceptional engineering but the complex and tedious math was done by people called “computers”.

This happy ending is one of those happy endings that leave the audience teary-eyed and it left me a little ashamed and embarrassed as a white privileged male. While this is an uplifting movie about three “colored” women, like any movie about people of color in the 50s and 60s, it is really about race, prejudice, institutionalized segregation, and our ugly past that has only somewhat been diluted in the ensuing years. There are very few white heroes in this movie – duh! – with the notable exception of John Glenn, and the story the movie tells about the interaction between Glenn and “the smart one” is, according to all accounts I can find online, true.

The opening sequence is about the fear that every black person has of the very police whose sworn duty is to protect them. This is 1961 or 1962 in the Jim Crow South and prejudice is institutionalized but that fear of the police, if one is black, sadly is still just common sense anywhere in the United States. Towards the end of the film, one of the white women supervisors, in talking to a black woman who should be a supervisor, says “I have nothing against you” and the black woman answers, “And I believe you believe that”. If all this makes Hidden Figures seem like a downer, it isn’t. The movie is fun, interesting, and touching while feeling very real. I highly recommend it, it is one of the best movies we have seen in the last year.

After the movie, the rain continued and we still had no power so we had a light dinner and returned to the multiplex to see Passengers with Chris Pratt and Jeniffer Lawrence. Passengers is gorgeous, a couple of the special effects are especially good, and Jennifer Lawrence is transcendent but, in the end, it was not what I had hoped.

As an aside, Michele says that I always think Jenifer Lawrence is transcendent which is pretty true, but, in Passengers, her acting is luminous, even for her. End aside.

After Passengers we still didn’t have power so we just went home and climbed into bed. We woke the next morning to a warm house with power, only slightly inconvenienced.