Arrowheads

I was reading a brief synopsis of an article recently submitted to some professional journal of Archeology. It was online at Physorg.com, where I go to keep up with what’s happening in the wacky world of science and technology.

The author (I never write this stuff down and I have no short term memory, and I’m not online right now to look it up—I’m taking my shift in the hospital to be with my Uncle who broke his hip and is waiting for surgery. He’s 62 and has Down’s Syndrome and we don’t want him to be alone) has an interesting new theory, developed, he said, because of some research and testing he and others did. The theory involves early Americans, Neolithic and later. I don’t remember if he mentioned Europe or other places.

His theory (I’m giggling now because every time some one says “my theory” I do that Python sketch about the Brontosaurus in my head) involves the extent to which the Amerinds actually relied on chipped-stone arrowheads. Apparently he made a bunch of arrows from sticks, sharpened some and put arrow heads on others. Then he and his friends shot the arrows and discovered that the sharpened ones performed about as well as the others (which, in the case of modern Archeologists, I suspect was worthy of submission to America’s Funniest Home Videos). They determined, through careful and thorough observation and record keeping, that it took less time to make the sharp sticks that it did to make the stone tipped ones. I’m assuming all the arrows were fletched, but with these kids today, who knows?

So, based on this exhaustive study (probably a Saturday morning on campus) which determined that it took longer to make stone-tipped arrows, and that the sharpened sticks worked pretty good, he is theorizing that the Neolithic people all the way down to the Indians (oops, sorry, Native Americans) probably didn’t depend much on the arrow heads. He thinks the importance placed on stone hunting implements is over-rated and played only a minor role in the lives of the Bearing Straight Land Bridge Association. (BSLBA—check out their website).

Let’s see now . . . that would make those people way to stupid to breathe, wouldn’t it? Much less kill anything. I’m thinking this: millions of arrow heads have been found, all over the world, surviving long past the shaft and feathers because they’re made of stone. Which means they could be used again and again, but probably weren’t because arrow heads were so quick and easy to make with some practice. In fact, a friend of mine, a practical-joke-making Paleontologist, told me that most professionals now believer that they (the “primitives”) didn’t bother to make the head until they actually spotted game. Then they would squat, take the makings out of a pouch, and chip the head right there, lacing it on to a prepared shaft, and then stalk, shoot, and dress. Hopefully with more accuracy than I envision the scholars managing.

I was skeptical of this claim by my friend since he was well know to lie, steal, cheat, and rob other people’s sites. (Not really. Although he did enjoy salting sites with artifacts of his own making that the experts invariably took for the real thing). But he convinced me when he whipped out a leather patch, put it on his thigh, took a chunk of flint and used part of a deer antler to chip a nice piece off then turned the antler over to the point and carefully chipped it into a perfect arrowhead shape, all in about five minutes. And he’s a dorky, pasty, white guy who digs things up for a living. (Think of Ross Geller). I could easily imagine someone who was actually competent doing the whole thing in a minute or so, including tying it on.

I spend what time I am able out in the woods, fishing streams mostly (you try catching a stream sometimes—it’s hard work!) and hunting, Although not for many years) and even I, who doesn’t know anything about such things, have found both arrowheads and lots of little piles of stone chips, which, after my friend showed me what to look for, are easy to spot. These are places where someone stopped and made something, more or less on the fly.

I don’t remember if the academics shot their arrows into anything other than a target, but I have been bow hunting and I can tell you that an arrow head with sharp, tapering edges will do a great deal more damage than a practice arrow (which only has a sharpened point—sound familiar?). Now, I realize you might not enjoy the mental image of some nice deer or Elk getting shot, whatever the projectile, but arrows kill, for the most part, by blood-letting, (Bullets by massive trauma and systems shock). The more surface area on the edges of the arrowhead, the more veins and arteries are severed, the more it bleeds and the faster it dies. If we’re going to kill the thing, we want it done with the least amount of pain and suffering possible—contrary to popular belief. A wooden stick stuck into an animal that size is not likely to kill it at all, unless it happened to his a vital organ, which is equally unlikely. It’s the bleeding that does it, most of the time. There is a hunting term known as the Blood Trail. Bow hunters are especially familiar with it because 95% of the time they have to follow the trail for miles, waiting for the animal to lie down and die. You haven’t lived until you and your buddies are out in the middle of the night with lanterns and flashlights, trying to find spots of blood (black at night) and find your kill. I shot a buck once, with a rifle (.30-.30) from about fifteen feet (that’s another story . . .) which means I got a good shot off and the bullet went through both lungs. That sucker still managed to run about an eighth of a mile before it collapsed and every step it took left a quart of it’s life blood on the ground. Incredible.

My brother took aim at a nice buck once and when he had it in the scope he saw an old aluminum arrow sticking through it’s neck, bent, head long gone, each end visible. That arrow had been there for years. Somebody didn’t look hard enough or long enough, but the point is, these animals are hard to kill—they do not want to die. (And my brother let that one go, he figured any buck tough enough to live through that had earned his right to be left alone). Anything ancient hunters could do to facilitate feeding the family group, they would have done. They used the best technology available, just like we do now.
In summation, I have concluded that it was not the ancients who were too stupid to breathe, it is in fact, the archeologist dumb enough to come up with such a theory, mush less publish it. I have a friend (she died yesterday in fact) who has her grandfathers collection of arrowheads he found in the hills around Boise, Idaho. There are hundreds of them. Museums have thousands and thousands, private citizens have hundreds of thousands, collectively. There are places you can go in this country and walk around and you can’t not find one. They were ubiquitous. But, the expert says they were of little consequence. I guess they made them just for fun and then tossed them around for some one to find, like my friend the Paleontologist does. Those Neolithicists, fun-loving pranksters every one.

Science and Religion

Science and Religion. What is it with these two? Is it love? Is it hate? Is it professional jealousy? I can’t decide which one is capable of more pretensions and hubris.
I was sitting in church today, listening to the talks in a mildly desultory way, when something someone said made me think of science and religion and how, despite the strident protests to the contrary, the two clubs have a lot in common. Now, I know that there are a lot of ‘scientists’ who are devoutly religious and a bunch of very religious people who nonetheless are working in one scientific field or another, which leads me to suspect that they are not as incompatible as both camps would like to believe.
What I started thinking about was dark matter and dark energy, the new hot topic in cosmology, and how the method of arriving at the necessity for each has striking similarities to how many people make their progress toward faith in God.
Since one or two of you may not be fully aware of the Dark Twins, let me give a very brief and wholly-made-up synopsis of what has been going on. I won’t take the time to refresh my memory, because, as we all know, (say it with me everybody!) I hate research!
In the past decade or two really bright guys and gals made some startling discoveries having to do with the nature and ultimate fate of, the universe. First, it is much bigger than we thought—or even imagined. (I’m happy to say that we Mormons already knew that based on some inside information). Then, the most recent observations, done with highly sophisticated sensors, satellites, telescopes of various types, and trillions of digital calculations, informed us that the universe is expanding at a much faster rate that was previously supposed. And accelerating. This is known as an “observable phenomenon”. No one had a clue as to why that might be happening because the theoretical models then being used did not predict such a thing, and could not be tweaked into accepting the new data. Then, to add insult to injury, it was discovered that massive objects ( like galaxy’s, galactic clusters, Very Large Attractors and the like) were not behaving as they should, according to the completely accepted notion of Newton’s laws and gravity. This phenomenon could only be detected when the gravitational influence was truly massive—thus families of galaxy’s were what clued them in.
As you can imagine, there was a certain amount of anxiety in the worlds of cosmology, astronomy and physics (to name a few) as careers became suddenly irrelevant.
Why was the expansion accelerating when gravitationally it should be at least slowing, if not shrinking? And why were very massive objects behaving in ways not predicted by current models?
A great deal of work, and thought, and experimentation went into finding the answers to these questions, and the answers are; Dark Energy and Dark Matter.
Dark Energy is some kind of unknown and undetectable energy which must be counteracting gravity (which wants to pull everything together), and which is powerful enough to not only keep the entire universe expanding, but is able to accelerate the process. It is calculated that at least three-fourths of all the energy in the universe must be Dark Energy in order for observed phenomenon to be explained.
Dark Matter, on the other hand must exist—again, despite being invisible, undetectable, and having no known characteristics—in unimaginable quantities. This is the only explanation for the observed behavior of RSMO’s. (Really, seriously, Massive Objects). Oh, and Dark Matter has to make up about ninety percent of all matter in the universe.
To recap: Despite absolutely no evidence whatsoever, other than what is seen to be happening, science has had to invent two new theories in order to explain the latest observations, and has been forced to allocate the vast majority of everything in the universe to these two, invisible, unknown, non-emitting, undetectable forces. They are looking hard for evidence other than the necessity of deduction. There are all kinds of theories and ideas floating around vying for attention. “Hey look here guys! Here’s a spot with nothing in it that might be attracting that galaxy over there . . . must be dark matter huh?”
It makes sense that if everything is moving away from everything else faster than we thought, and despite the homogenous influence of gravity, there must be a force providing the energy, right? Ergo, Dark Energy. It exists not because we can see it or sense it, but because it must exist. It is self-evident. But, it could be gremlins pushing everything, their little gossamer wings beating a million times faster than a hummingbirds, getting traction from the Dark Matter. It could be that too, right? Because no one knows. I guess Occam’s Razor suggests the Energy to be more likely, but who knows?
What’s the point Wayne? You’ve been rambling for thirty minutes now.
Well . . . let’s look at another example of belief in something unseen. Got any ideas? Have I let it out of the box? That’s right! It’s God. For thousands of years people have been saying virtually the same thing the scientists are now resorting to. “I look around, I see things I can’t explain, mysterious things, and I conclude based on all this observable phenomenon, that there must be a God. I can’t see Him or describe Him or prove experimentally that He exists, but nature and the endless series of cosmic ‘coincidences’ and the human condition, all compel me to deduce His Reality. And, just like the current state in Cosmology, theologians have been running around for centuries arguing, brain-storming, trying to build a picture of God’s Characteristics based on what we can see of His work. Hardly anybody agrees because its all a matter of perspective. The one thing they do agree on is the Reality of the Necessity of God. Similar in many ways—don’t you think?—to the agreement that Dark Energy and Matter are real because of the necessity of their existence—and no other reason.
Now, some people look around and see no evidence at all. “Just because all this stuff is here, and happening, and there seems to be some order to the universe, doesn’t compel me to believe in a God. I can explain those things without God,” they say. But really, it’s just a mind-set; nothing to do with reality one way or the other. If God can be so easily dismissed by so many, am I not justified to dismiss the idea of Dark Matter and Energy on the basis that there is no evidence of any kind that they exist?
Don’t get me wrong now, I’m perfectly willing to accept the Dark Twins until they are either proven to be real or a better explanation comes along. Personally, I like the gremlins. I like the image of a gazillion of the little tykes pushing against—oh, say . . . anything—a star or galaxy or atom, their little wings buzzing (in frequencies we cannot detect obviously), their cute little faces screwed up with exertion so extreme it makes little balls of Gremlin poop shoot out their butts (forming Dark Matter), which makes them all laugh, which explains the phenomenon of humor.
I’m a huge fan of science and technology, I love all that stuff, even when I don’t understand it—which is nearly all the time. But I find it amusing that science routinely relegates itself to faith, and never realizes it’s happening, while at the same time, so many of its practitioners ridicule religion for the same thing. At least most religious people have the good taste and humility to admit they can’t prove anything, that their faith is based on the unseen, the unknown, on a feeling in their hearts. While science pretends it can know everything. Again, what hubris. They can’t even find the mind, much less the spirit.

Life is a Fascinating Topic

Life is a fascinating topic, don’t you think? What it is, how it came to be, and why, and does it have any purpose outside of itself? Is there a relationship between living and non-living things, between life and the universe-at-large?
Sometimes I think about stuff like that—Kurt Vonnegut Jr. believed that this habit was the result of having “bad chemicals”.
How did life on earth begin? With a bang, they say. There are actually at least four theories I know of.
Spontaneous Generation
Panspermia
Intelligent Design
Seeding by advanced, Extra-Terrestrial Races
Spontaneous Generation is the idea, spawned from the Theory of Evolution, that life was the result of a nearly infinite variations of a complex set of original parameters, including; heat, pressure, electrical energy, and the slow accumulation of more and more complex proteins until somehow, (a huge blank in the theory) a few of these “experiments” managed to wriggle. I call it the “First There Was This Soup Theory”.
Panspermia is the theory that life traveled here on pieces of galactic detritus, like rocks and ice and stuff, from somewhere else, or lots of somewhere else’s, over millions of years, and ended up here by accident, at a time when conditions were pleasing to the spores or whatever they were. (I prefer large, tentacled creatures on the order of Cthulhu).
Intelligent Design is the code word for God, used in order not to damage the pudding-brained sensibilities of people unwilling to acknowledge even the possibility of such a thing. This idea suggests that someone or something, always alive, created life for purposes unknown, perhaps incomprehensible. Opinions vary as to why. Some people think it was part of an ongoing experiment, others believe it was a passing fancy and that whatever started it all has long gone on to other things, and a few of us (two or three billion, more or less) think it was an actual intelligence, with comprehensible motives which include (paternal or maternal) feelings for humans and some kind of plan involving progression, education, experience and a system of punishments and rewards, otherwise known as natural consequences. The details are still being debated.
Seeding by advanced, Extra-Terrestrial Races is the notion that some other life-form, for mysterious, inscrutable reasons, planted the seeds of life here ( and probably elsewhere) and then went on their way. A variant of this idea is that actual, already complex creatures were set down on earth after the planet had agreed to be nice. Hominids, we call these creatures—humans, homo-sapiens.
Here’s the interesting thing; all of these theories are equally valid, relevant, and possible. One reason for this claim is that in an infinite universe everything is possible. What can be imagined, is. Another is that none of them offer any hard evidence as proof (despite the strident claims to the contrary by certain factions of the science community). But only one of them actually addresses the origin of life. Aliens brought us here? Fine, where did they come from? Why do they exist? The same for Panspermia—great, life traveled here on random blocks of rock and ice; but how did the bacteria, virus, spores—whatever—come to be? Spontaneous generation (which is the foundation of modern evolution) does not address itself, in any meaningful way, to the actual process of the formation of life—of dead, inanimate objects transforming into live, animate, organisms. I know, I know, someone out there in reader land is saying;
“Yes we have! We know almost everything about it!” and they will give us a long, detailed description of what probably happened. But they have nothing to explain that moment between not-alive and alive. Did you catch that ‘probably’ thing? We use that word when we don’t know for sure. A certain type of technical mind will insist that it deals with ‘facts’ which makes it’s position on a subject superior to the rest of us. Sometimes we call this kind of mind a scientist. I know several scientists and I respect each of them, enjoy their company and love to listen to them. I am not anti-scientist. I am, however, anti-presumption, arrogance, and conceit. They deal in facts only? Nothing could be further from the truth, and any good researcher will tell you that. Have you ever watched one of those documentaries on dinosaurs or the big bang or black holes or possible disasters, climate change, geological prognostication, early man, the deep ocean, plate-tectonics, the formation of the solar system, etc? Next time you do, keep track of how many times words and phrases like “perhaps, maybe, could have, may have, it can be assumed, we think, we believe, some scientists predict, possible, likely, probable, reasonably certain, assume, promising, feasible, computer models suggest, ad naseum, are used. They like facts, they pine for the absolute, the verifiable, they worship the “proof”, but they actually deal with very few facts. Mostly it is creative guesswork. Extrapolated theory based on observable phenomena heaped on top of a nearly-infinite number of assumptions. And there’s nothing wrong with that—I do it all the time. I just resent the holier-than-thou hubris, the exact same kind of certainty, of wild-eyed confidence they ridicule in other, less empirically-minded people, like, say, religionists. (Nor am I defending true-believers—many of those people have toe-jam for brains).
So lets take a look at this ‘how did life begin’ thing. Did you know more and more researchers are beginning to question the whole “primordial ocean” idea? Look it up.
Supposedly, life began in a thick, nutrient-rich liquid which was being bombarded with cosmic debris on a constant basis, was hot (well, warm anyway) and was being stirred up by thermal vents, volcanic activity and excessive lightening discharges. All this kept mixing and re-mixing until things began to curdle out of the soup. Amino acids, proteins, hydro-carbons, and according to urban legend, Twinkies. None of these things were “alive” however. They wanted to be, they tried. But they just couldn’t quite get the hang of making themselves live. Some very clever scientists back in the fifties or sixties, tried to reproduce these primal conditions in the laboratory, mixing raw ingredients and warming them up, them zapping them with thousands of jolts of electricity. And low and behold! They managed to create amino acids and proteins and hydro-carbons. (Possibly Twinkies as well, but this was repressed in the literature). Except, none of those things were alive either. How dare they not live! Somebody goes to the trouble of getting a grant, setting up a lab where the experiment can take place, mixing stuff in a bowl and plugging in a toaster to toss into the sludge . . . and nothing happens! Now they know how Dr. Frankenstein felt. In, fact, isn’t that what Dr. Frankenstein did, more or less? Put a bunch of inanimate pieces of flesh together (which had at one time actually been alive) and zap them with lightening?
“Elevate me!”
“Right here, Herr Doctor?”
And yet, we call that fantasy, fiction.
Let’s review, shall we? So, we have this sludge full of all kinds of ingredients, and lots of energy being pumped into it and eventually we find “the stuff of life” coagulating into slimy clumps of snot-like objects. But it still isn’t alive, is it? Maybe we need to define life. “I’m not sure what it is but I know it when I see it!” Ba-da-boom.
Okay, as a minimum set of requirements for very simple, one celled “life” let’s try this.
It must be able to ingest nutrients.
It must be able to convert the nutrients to fuel.
It must be able to eliminate waste.
It must be able to reproduce.
It must be able to dance (a well-known pre-requisite to reproduction.)
Soon after it comes into being, but not right away, it must be capable of mobility and defense.
It’s possible to get really close, to form complex chains of protein molecules, have them bunch together and even begin to organize themselves. But that isn’t life.
All this happened over millions and millions of years, so the proto-organisms were able to occur imperfectly, again and again, going through the endless permutations of chaotic, random, chance. It came about gradually. So say the experts.
Really? So . . . one came along that could eliminate waste, but had no way to take in nutrients? Interesting. One came along that could move around but not reproduce? Not even with itself? (thus eliminating the need to dance).
Oh, I get it, eventually, after hundreds of millions of years, and hundreds of millions of failures, something came along one day, at an actual moment, a point in time, and existed with each and every one of these requirements for life, where nothing had existed before. Because, if it couldn’t reproduce, we’re never going to, that’s for sure. And isn’t it lucky that the nutrients it evolved into needing were the very nutrients floating around in its immediate vicinity—because it couldn’t move around yet—not for several million more years. But you know, even with all these characteristics, how did it go from being not alive to alive? From ingredients with no life, to an organism with all of it? Can a thing be a little alive? Almost alive? Can it gradually become alive? (Well, that last one is verified every morning in my classroom . . .).
Vladimir Verdansky (biochemist, geochemist, radiogeologist, mineralogist, cool beard) once said “only life is capable of creating life.” Think about it. Have we ever seen any evidence, ever, that life sprang spontaneously from inorganic, non-living matter? No. Some people assume it did because they can’t think of it happening any other way.
Life is not an intrinsic characteristic of matter. Matter is an intrinsic characteristic of life. We do not find a rock animating itself into a living thing. We don’t even see those hundreds of attempts in the lab, full of energy and promise and all the building blocks life needs, crossing the gap from non-living to living. Think about it some more. It never happened. Not spontaneously, accidentally, randomly. I don’t know what did happen, but I’m just not willing to accept an idea so replete with inconsistencies. I’m really good at the willing suspension of disbelief, but this is way beyond what I can swallow.
“So what did happen, you loud-mouthed, opinionated, obnoxious freak?”
Glad you asked. I have no idea. But! Panspermia and Alien Seeding both have the same basic problem. They can only speak to life on earth, not life itself. The only one left, through a near-genius process of elimination, is Intelligent Design. As yet, I haven’t figured out all the details, but I’m working on it. If someone could prove to me that something came along which was alive, and therefore could somehow pass aliveness on, and did something to the Soup, I could accept that. Barely. But I’m working on an alternative theory. It’s called Genesis.

Thinking of the Past

I was young once. I know it sounds odd to say it, but it’s easy to forget when you’re fifty-seven and have grandchildren. Maybe we were all young once, I don’t know. Some of you are still young, not even thirty. It’s a mystery. I have children older than that. I’m not suggesting I’m old—far from it. But I’m sitting at home, taking care of my uncle while Nita helps our daughter-in-law with Salem, their one-and-a-half year-old, because she’s (mom) about two hours away from delivering the second, (Grahson—a few of you will smile at that) and is tired, and needs a break. So I’m watching some CMT special with Faith Hill because she can sing and picks mostly good songs and is easy to look at. And while I watch, I am taken back to that time when I was young and knew things I have slowly forgotten, or perhaps I didn’t know enough.
When I was seventeen and eighteen, in Glen Burnie Maryland, going to school while dad snuck away to the Pentagon every day to do secret stuff for the Air Force, I fell in with a couple folkies; Rick and Kay. Rick was a good friend, although I’m not sure why—Dever calls the phenomenon of friendship “filling gaps”, and I suppose Rick and I filled some gaps for one another—and he had been singing with Kay for about a year, and her last name was Funk, so you can see right away that fate was playing a Royal Flush, and I was helpless. They were into very old, traditional folk music. Rick played a fine twelve-string guitar and harmonica, and had a rough, gravelly voice somewhere between George Thoroughgood and Bob Dylan, (and if you know who all these musicians are I will be talking about, you either had rockin’ parents or you are, like me, no longer young.) Kay on the other hand, had a voice like an angel, a true soprano, great control and a whole lota soul. I started hanging out with them and pretty soon I was singing along while they practiced, putting on harmonies (I knew the songs) and then playing a little guitar as an accent for Rick, and one day they came to me and said “we’ve talked it over and we want you to join us and be a trio.”
Well, sure, I said, that’d be fine. So I did. We began to rearrange the songs to fit another voice, and I began to gently push them into a more contemporary direction, while not forsaking the heart of folk music. We started playing Peter Paul and Mary, The Kingston Trio, Donovan, Dylan, Gordon Lightfoot, Buffy St. Marie, Joan Baez, Judy Collins, Leonard Cohen, all those greats—even a little Tom Waits. I tricked ‘em into doing a version of Ghost Riders in the Sky because my dad had turned me on to The Sons of the Pioneers, and they are still one of my all time favorites. We even messed around with writing original material. We worked hard and got pretty good and started getting gigs. Not paying gigs of course, but we worked steady, and eventually a little money came our way. We played the coffee house circuit between Baltimore and Washington DC, when there was such a thing as a coffee house circuit. And we got a following, which consisted of our friends at school and then even strangers were tagging along, following us around, (and by strangers, I mean extremely odd people from parts unknown, and, more than likely, unknowable).
I miss it sometimes, and I want to tell you why—which is the point of this silly little diversion. (As an aside, we once were kicked off the Governors Mansion lawn in Annapolis, by the Gov himself, Spiro Agnew. He was in a bathrobe and a cigar and used language I’d never heard before. We had a gig that night at a place called the Toadstool and were practicing on what we thought was the greensward of a park).
Here’s the thing. While I’m watching Faith, the close-ups, her interaction with the guys and gals in the band, I’m suddenly back there with Rick and Kay, singing Well, Well, Well, and Polly Von, Who Knows Where the Time Goes, and Tom Dooley, The Story of Isaac, and Looking for the Heart of Saturday Night, among many others. I’m remembering what it felt like, and it felt good. We went through several names for our little group, all horrible and pretentious, but we always called the music we made “The Great Song”, and vowed that would be the name of our first album. I can see that same feeling in Faith’s eyes and the faces of her band and singers—because everyone shares in the magic that is live music. I cannot describe what that feeling is like, but when we were on and in the groove, it was amazing, timeless, intense beyond feeling, and extremely contagious. It fed on itself, and grew, until we were smiling at each other—or nobody—without knowing we were, our faces no doubt contorted, but not in pain—we were transformed by genuine ecstasy. When you hit that unexpected note perfectly and get that response from the audience, and you’re shivering because the chords on the guitars mingling with the three voices, all belting out their own parts makes a moment, an instant, which only lasts as long as the melody demands and is gone, but in that instant, you discover it’s possible to find eternity, and visions are seen, invisible voices are heard, and you are, as C.S. Lewis puts it, “surprised by joy”. Practicing was sometimes the same; transcendent, taking us beyond what we could possibly do. We became more than the sum of whatever talent each of us brought to the sound. And we made each other better. Kay and I had some kind of bizarre, annoying gift for harmony. We came up with the same one so often that we worked hard at trying to invent new, strange, and compelling harmony and counterpoint. And then we’d still end up singing the same one! It got to the point where we had to come up with each harmony together, then go one to the next one, again, together, and so forth. I guess we were good enough to have been given a record contract—at least if we’d kept going with it, but my family moved back to Albuquerque at the end of that two years.
We sang a few songs for Kay’s voice teacher in Baltimore one Saturday. He taught at the Peabody Conservatory, and offered me a scholarship right then and there, but I was so naive, I barely knew what a scholarship was and had never even heard of Peabody.
I’ll never forget those two years. And I’ll never forget how it felt to be inside that moment, inside the Great Song. Most people don’t ever get to experience it. There are similar moments in other areas of life—I’ve felt something like it playing basketball from time to time, when we all got into the “zone” and lost ourselves to the motion and seamless team-mind, and while playing with my kids certainly. All night talks with good friends, moments of real, intimate communication between God and me, that kind of thing. But music is different. Not better, but more, visceral, more . . . something. I have no regrets about it ending—I would never have met Nita if I’d stayed back east, and she is the ultimate transcendent experience. Wouldn’t change a thing. But sometimes I miss it a little, and wonder how Rick and Kay are getting along and if the Great Song still exists out there somewhere, like it does for Faith and her band. In the scriptures there’s a verse about using our God-given talents or we will lose them. I can’t sing anymore—I’ve lost a third of my range, most of my wind, and the control I used to have—and I only play the guitar once or twice a year, living proof of that warning. Over the years other things took the place of the music; bereft of Rick and Kay, and the Great Song, I sort of grew up—it was an accident, I swear!—turned to raising a family, school, and work while it slipped through my fingers. I tried, but I’ve never found it again.

Intergalactic Memo Marriage and Divorce

Let’s talk about marriage today. Don’t worry, I’m an expert—I’ve been married almost 38 years and I have a license, which means I’m a licensed professional, like a teacher or a doctor.
On the way home from work this afternoon, I heard what sounded like a PSA, although there was no credit given, and the voice-over sounded like Dick Morris, but I can’t imagine Dick ever doing something for free, or out of any altruistic impulse, so its kind of a mystery.
Whatever . . . . in the ad we are told that despite everyone’s assumptions, the divorce rate has been going slowly but steadily down, since 1970, a little bit every decade. Counter-intuitive huh? There wasn’t even a point to the piece that I could discern. But it got me thinking. (Are we noticing a recurring theme here?)
Unless you’ve been living on the Nautilus with Captain Nemo since the turn of the century (the last century) you have probably noticed a decline, not only with the success and value of marriage, but as a critical social lynchpin as well. It has been battered, denigrated, scoffed-at, maligned, ridiculed as hopelessly outdated and bourgeois, misunderstood, taken for granted, abused and rendered morally impotent. (Is there a pun in there somewhere?)
A significant portion of this decline, I believe, is the urban legend that divorce had been on the rise all this time. The belief that divorce is increasing has a tendency to become a self-fulfilling prophecy, which places the thought in people’s minds that the stigma of divorce is loosing it’s behavior-tempering animus, gives us the idea that marriage is a convenient social contract and nothing more.
But what would happen if that belief were brought into serious doubt? What would happen if marriage was seen to be more healthy than it currently is? Would we care? What would happen if we discovered that divorce has been declining for thirty years? Would our attitudes, our unconscious, collective identity shift back to believing in a more reasonable and nurturing—and dare we say it, sacred—institution?
Now let’s add something explosive to the mix and see what kind of boom we get. What if the state and national divorce rate percentages were skewed enough to give us a false reading? Of course I realize the chances of this are extremely slim—because we’re dealing with government statisticians, and the dreaded ‘Computer Modelers’—that the question is just silly, but bare with me. The states all calculate the divorce-rate ratio (to marriage, which would be the opposite) with the same formula. They compare the number of marriages in the state, in a given year, to the number of divorces, (hopefully in the same state and the same year, but who knows?) then some kind of mystical mumbo-jumbo called long division takes place, and before you can say “I do!”, we have a fifty percent divorce rate.
But! This is a spurious comparison, and everybody knows it. (you probably just haven’t thought about it yet). In order to get a valid percentage, we have to compare the number of divorces in a given year, in a given state, (It’s important to be specific with these bureaucratic bean-counters because they’re so easily distracted by things like Brittany Spears sans underwear) with the total number of existing marriages in the same state. Think about it now, don’t let it scare you. The number of divorces is relevant as a ratio to all the marriages, not the marriages in the same year. And when you do that math (I assume, because, you know, I’m never gonna do it) you find the actual rate is more like fifteen percent. (Again, I made that up, but I’m sure it’s close). I have anecdotal evidence too. All the people I know have never been divorced, almost. Okay, my brother has, twice, and a few of my friends, and Elizabeth Taylor, but hey, Even Bill Clinton figured how to keep a marriage going.
Oh yeah, there’s another well-know method of forcing marriage to win. You can add up the years. Take all the marriages in the state and add up the total number of years they represent. Then take all the divorces and add up all the years those people were married, and marriage beats the crap out of divorce. I think I’ve run rings around the bean-counters, logically.
Heck, my great-great grandfather Dudley had five wives for like, ever, and he didn’t divorce any of them. Although Jane’s descendants are pretty seriously pissed at the rest of us and I don’t know why. Jane was a Piute.
To summarize, marriage is almost always better than divorce, despite the mountains of anecdotal data to the contrary. God likes marriage, because He really likes kids, which is why He gave us the institution in the first place, to create a commitment powerful enough and deep enough to make sure the kids (which, c’mon, we made) were taken care of. And you thought it was about you . . .

Intergalactic memo—Language, Borders, Culture

I read an “article” tonight, emailed from a friend, which was talking about English in America. A veteran wrote it in response to the Senate voting against making English our official language. Some of us are going to approve of that vote, believing such a move to be unnecessary, and others of us are dismayed, or at least disappointed, by the Senates failure to enact something which seems so obviously necessary. I thought I might take a moment to throw my two cents worth into the storm.
I am in favor of English as the official language, and not just because it happens to be the (only) language I speak. Nor, I hope, is it out of any chauvinist sentiment, believing America to be superior to all other nations (which I do.)
There is a man in talk radio (who will remain nameless because he is a raving lunatic) who proclaims to anyone who will listen, that it is about “Language, Borders, and Culture.” Despite his lunacy, he is exactly right on this one point. Some who will read this will be angry that I would take a stand so “Selfish” or “Parochial” or even “evil”. Obviously, I don’t agree, as I don’t think of myself as any of those things. Every nation, however, has not only the right, but the absolute imperative, to maintain at least a core of commonality. No nation survives for long if it contains competing cultures and languages. The former Yugoslavia is an example, as is Iraq and even Canada. An argument will be made that people should be free, especially in America, to speak what they want, etc., etc., and I would agree. But the commonality, what my brother in law calls a “common cultural base” is an absolute requisite for a people to remain a people.
It is often said, these days as a slogan for “diversity,” that America is, and always has been, a melting pot. And this is true. But we’ve gotten sloppy with our definitions. People now use the phrase to mean a stew pot. Let me explain.
A stew pot is where we cook a delicious soup with a variety of ingredients, bringing them together with herbs and spices, creating a kind of new thing out of separate parts. But in a stew, the parts remain separate; we can pick them out (which I do with the celery), identify them individually—this is potato, this is carrot, this is Thumper, etc. In other words, while the flavors combine, the raw ingredients never do. They maintain their unique, molecular identities.
A melting pot is different. A melting pot is used to combine metals into an alloy. We might want to put several different metals in, like iron and nickel, chromium and carbon, some metallic salts, etc, depending on what we are making. Each metal has unique characteristics which add specific and important elements to the alloy. But when we melt metals they become an amalgam, they recombine on the molecular level to make a truly new thing. Think of putting three kinds of chewing gum into your mouth and chewing for an hour, then trying to separate them again. Can’t be done. Same with metals in the furnace.
So it is with cultures, nations and people. We are in fact, a melting pot. Unique in history. We bring every tradition, language, religion, ethnicity, culture, and history into this country and make a new thing. We are a crucible, purified in the refiner’s fire until what emerges is better, stronger, more beautiful and useful. The people and their traditions still exist—they are what make the alloy strong and flexible. The religions and languages still exist, so that we might all celebrate one another’s heritage and customs. I am reminded of that very powerful scene in A Walk in the Clouds when all the vintner families in California’s wine country come together to celebrate the harvest, each in the traditional costumes of their native lands, accepting, forming bonds of friendship and respect in the growing commonality, the core-culture, new to them all.
For a people to remain intact, especially when they are as diverse as we are in the U.S., it is absolutely necessary to maintain that core, to accept, even celebrate all good things we share in common. If we don’t do this, we are merely a collection of diverse and suspicious tenants, with no compelling reason to cooperate, to form those bonds so desired by all decent people. So we have our traditions, our rituals and celebrations. We speak a hundred languages in this country, but everyone needs to speak a common one as well. We share one another’s holidays and sacred days, while respecting those which were here from the beginning, brought by the people who colonized the country. And yes, I know the Spanish were here hundreds of years ago. I lived in New Mexico for nearly twenty years and have known people whose ancestors were deeded land by the King of Spain—that’s how long they’ve been here, and we should respect that. I quietly celebrate, Cinco de Mayo, The Day of the Dead, Chanukah, Ramadan, The Corn Festival of the Pueblo Indians, and others, not because they are mine, but out of respect, and because I like the food. We need to keep our diversity while allowing it to be gently subsumed by the core culture. We see signs of our country splintering around us and wonder why it’s happening. This is why; too few of us understand how great societies work. We no longer appreciate the glue which holds us together. We are separating into cabals of pride and isolation, all in the well-intentioned but badly miss-informed name of diversity and tolerance. Both of which are fine values, unless taken to extremes. Is anyone seriously suggesting we tolerate everything? Does anyone not understand the importance of a balance between commonality and diversity?
The veteran mentioned that four people running for President voted against the “English as official language” bill; Senators Dodd, Obama, Clinton and Biden. All Democrats, incidentally. They could not be more wrong. No one (I hope) wants an “English Only” country. I don’t. I want a universal language, under which as many other languages as possible should survive and thrive. Hell, they speak five languages in my sister’s home! (Not all of them—except English—but five different languages.)
Yes, passing such a bill would be a burden on new immigrants from other nations. But that has always been the case, and still is in every country on the planet. People would be at a disadvantage for a while, because they couldn’t read the signs or understand the television, but making one language “official” is the compelling incentive to learn that language. In the long run it is by far the best thing to do—in fact the necessary thing to do. It does not put anyone at an unfair advantage, since all immigrants suffer equally. Remember, those of us who speak only English can’t understand them either. It motivates people to do what it takes to learn the common language. No one is going to be kicked out of the country because they don’t speak English. But it will set a precedence that all people can understand; the American Dream speaks English. Would any of us, if moving to Germany or France or China, expect those countries to bend over backwards and alter their laws and traditions just for us? The idea is absurd. Does it make more sense to print voting ballots in over a hundred languages (with the risk of poor translations) or to let citizens vote as soon as they can read the ballot in English? More incentive.
It had never been necessary, in the past, to worry about this issue, because people learned English when they got here. (Yeah, I know your grandparents didn’t, but we aren’t dealing with anecdotal anomalies). But these days, may people refuse to learn it as a matter of pride. That kind of short-sighted, self-serving attitude will become a socially and financial self-defeating behavior in the end. No one should come here who does not want to become an American. In every sense of the word. And we should be accepting, patient and as helpful as possible, to all the ones who do. But being American does not preclude retaining the traditions and culture of our original home.
Most of us (not all) are Christians, practicing or not. In our tradition Christ accepted the Jew, the Gentile, the Samaritan, the sinner, the rich and poor . . . everyone. But when they came to Him, they found common ground in His teachings and learned to live His commandments, becoming “one mind and heart.” They retained their ethnicity, their status or lack thereof, their various traditions, and adopted new ones as well. They became one people, a new thing, an alloy, made up of diversity. I feel strongly we need to do the same, or we are not long for the world—at least not as a nation. It is a moral imperative that we retain our Language, Borders, and Culture, while celebrating all that is good about all other traditions which come to us in the hearts of those “yearning to be free.”