Circular Logic

Fat Kids and Monsters

Food as a theme this week.

A health promotion conference in San Francisco this week brought a good friend to town to listen to the ex-Surgeon General and to hobnob with 9,000 other healthcare activitists. The steady fattening of Americans -- particularly kids -- was cause for concern. As was indifference in Washington. Perhaps to reinforce the point, conference organizers all but eliminated meals at the event. Attendees were left to fend for themselves. Naturally, we went out to a terrific and decidedly fat-inducing North Beach Italian feast.

A few days later we caught the terrific Korean film, The Host (Gwoemul). A slithering monster crawls out of a polluted river and begins eating people and spitting them out -- some alive -- in its sewer lair. One of the victims is the young daughter of a dim-witted food stand owner, who, along with his estranged family, sets out to rescue her. Oh, and a virus may be related to the monster as well.

But there's more to this film than meets the eye. Food, in particular, plays a dominant role throughout the movie. The dad is slow-witted because he didn't have enough food as a kid; he runs a food stand; homless kids brave the monster to steal food; the daughter, caught in the monster's lair, scavenges dead bodies for food; and, of course, the monster itself is in a constant quest for food.

And then there's news from Singapore, where government officials recently scrapped a school anti-obesity program because parents complained that kids were being singled out and teased by classmates.

All these themes brought back memories of the infamous billboard here in San Francisco that drew protests from self-described "fat activists." But I think they got it wrong. When "they" come, the fat ones are more likely to be the ones doing the eating.

Bon appetit.

 

Water Under the Gate

Chickens seem to be coming home to roost for the Bush Administration, and comparisons to Nixon and Watergate are on the rise. These comparisons go back years, however, and with every fresh scandal the press floats a raft of new "Could This Be Bush's Watergate?" stories.

I'm not sure what it says about our culture that we are continually shocked...shocked!...to discover our elected leaders monkeying with facts. Carl Bernstein calls this administration the most dishonest he's ever seen. Fair enough. But as readers of this blog know, I hesitate to take modern superlatives at face value. In fact, while all the lies and deceit of the Bush Administration fill the nightly news, HBO dresses up some good old-fashioned Roman history every weekend to help us put things in salacious perspective.

Bush and his cronies are amateurs when compared to those ancient Romans and their realpolitik. Want to outflank the Senate? Call their leader a traitor, send an assassin to cut off his hands and nail them to the chamber door. Need to fund a surge of troops? Kill the richest families in town and pocket their fortunes. Worried about securing delivery of a key commodity from an unstable foreign land? Provoke a war based on trumped-up evidence (oh wait, I guess our guys read that chapter after all).

Sizing Things Up

Today's New York Times has a story (registration required) about the remnants of Saddam Hussein's so-called "supergun," a Dr. Evil-ish example of meglomaniacal military hubris. The gun, which was never produced, would have had a barrel over 500 feet long. It would have shot a 300 pound projectile 600 miles, or even fired things into orbit!

The whole thing has elements of a crazy SCTV skit about it as well, due to the fact that the gun was supposedly designed by Dr. Gerald Bull, a Canadian genius who once fired a small projectile 100 miles into the air as part of a research project (no mention of where it came down), and who was later assassinated for helping Hussein.

There is some precedent for this idea. In fact, a notable supergun in the 15th Century known as "The Basilic" played a role in the fall of Constantinople to the Ottoman Empire. That gun could only be fired a few times a day, and ultimately collapsed under its own recoil.

About 100 years later, what the Guinness Book of World Records calls "the largest howitzer ever made" was cast in Moscow. The 18 ton monster, known as the Tsar Cannon, was never fired. It accomplished its PR goal, however, and remains on display to this day.

There is surely something Freudian in all of this. Cannons are the quintessential masculine symbol, embraced by military leaders throughout the ages as symbols of strength, virility and power.

Yet today, at the 5-year anniversary of 9/11, the idea of a big imposing cannon is slightly ridiculous as we turn our thoughts to innocent victims and a castrated skyline that once thrust two enormous symbols of world trade dominance into the sky.

 

Coming Attractions

Delayed while ramping up activities at my new company and working through some fascinating late-Roman empire history. More on that soon.

However, in the spirit of this blog, I feel compelled to focus some attention on the mess in the Middle East. If anything is an example of returning again-and-again to a zero sum argument, surely it is the clash of cultures and values that have been playing out for thousands of years in that region. More on that soon as well.

The Circular File

Seems that as the blogosphere continues exploding with content, there are more than a few of us who see something appealing in the term "Circular Logic." A quick search yields the following:

• A music technology company
• A cleverly "circular" mathematics FAQ
• A hedge fund trading system
• An amateur bike racer blog
• A "half snarky" Korean girl's personal blog

...and I'm sure there are more.

Now as some of you know, I'm a marketing guy. I understand the importance of carving out a distinctive space and defending one's brand. However, I have no interest in "marketing" this blog in any way. It started as an experiment to get myself familiar with blogging tools and to have a creative outlet beyond the boundaries of work. It has grown into something different, something enjoyable (for me, at least) in its own right.

So for the time being, I don't particularly care that there are other Circular Logics out there. In fact, the proliferation has a kind of poetic reasoning all its own. After all, I'm writing this from the city of Saint Francis, half a world away from the home of its namesake monk who, with what I'm convinced was more than a touch of playful irony, preached diligently to the birds.

Right to Exist

Hamas, the radical and decidedly terroristic party voted into power by the downtrodden Palestinians, does not recognize Israel's right to exist. I was reminded of this earlier in the week after hearing news reports about President Bush's meeting with the new Israeli prime minister.

Presumably, Hamas leadership thinks Israel should never have been created as a country. If so, they join a painfully long list of displaced and conquered peoples who feel similarly about their neighbors. It is likely that Crazy Horse, strident on the Dakota plains, refused to recognize the existence of the white man's United States. Aztec Montezuma may have harbored similar feelings about King Charles V's cruel Spanish empire. Hundreds of years later, the descendants of mixed Spanish-Aztec culture besieged The Alamo, no doubt refusing to acknowledge the existence of the upstart Republic of Texas.

On a day-to-day level, I wonder how you go about not recognizing one's right to exist? Is it like not recognizing -- or acknowledging -- a homeless person? Or is it more like not recognizing an annoying co-worker seated nearby when you're out to dinner? What if you're just no good with names and accidentally forget to recognize someone's right to exist? Is that subversive, or just a sign that you're getting old?

Also, how can something have a "right to exist?" It either exists, or it doesn't. Israel exists. Bush exists. Terrorists exist. Whether those things should exist is beside the point. During Bush's first term, many people refused to recognize his presidency. Others, citing his bubble of self-reflecting news reports, note that Bush himself refuses to recognize reality. Yet Bush remains Oilman in Chief, and the reality of Iraq does not require his validation.

Normally in this country, arguments over something's right to exist are more personal: Terry Schiavo, unborn children, death row inmates. Countries and ideas rarely make the cut, although Intelligent Design did come close for a while.

Still, I can't help thinking that Hamas is a bit confused. Refusing to recognize an existing country's right to exist is like refusing to recognize that Enron was a catastrophe (oh wait, that was the crux of Ken Lay and Jeff Skilling's defense). To get the Palestinian leadership back in sync with the world, I'd suggest that there are more appropriate things in existence they could refuse to recognize. Global warming. Nuclear waste. Hanging chad. The San Andreas Fault. Trans fats.

History.

Short Changing

It appears that the rebuilt levees in New Orleans have been "underfunded." This according to a report from the Associated Press today.

One would think that the first objective of any government would be to protect its people. True, we are gleefully lining defense contractor pockets to the tune of nearly $100 billion for a non-functioning missile shield. And we seem to have no problem spending ungodly amounts on the War in Iraq, presumably protecting...our oil supply?

One wonders what kind of spending we'll be doing come this year's hurricaine season?

The Shakespeare Code

It is difficult for most of us to feel any connection to William Shakespeare, the person. His name has become synonymous with refined literary language, highbrow culture, and ivory tower platitudes. Like Homer -- the poet, not the hapless dad on The Simpsons -- Shakespeare is more an icon of Western Civilization than a living, breathing person.

I've got a different view after finishing Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare, by Stephen Greenblatt. The book was a birthday gift from my good friend and former college housemate (and published author himself) who has become adept at book recommendations. In fact, it was all the more relevant since Will and I share a common birthday.

A biography of Shakespeare reminds us that there is flesh and blood behind some of the most powerful and poignant literature ever created. In the book, Greenblatt traces the known facts, and speculates about the local glover's son from Straford and his likely trajectories during mysterious blank periods.

I was an English major, and I've had more exposure to Shakespeare than most, but I was struck by a fact that isn't often explored in college Shakespeare seminars. Namely: Shakespeare grew up in an extremely dangerous religious period. Protestants and Catholics were fighting a kind of insurgency of terror in the midst of everyday English life. If you're a 12-year-old boy and you see a suspected Catholic spy tortured, hung, sliced open and hacked to pieces in the town square, it is bound to make an impression. Also, if you assume that informers are everywhere, it makes sense to try to be as invisible as possible if you have some Catholic connections. Hence the absence of many "facts" about Shakespeare. Facts could get you killed.

There is, of course, extensive scholarship on the plays themselves, as well as  intriguing hypotheses about Shakespeare's real intentions and influences glimpsed obliquely throughout his body of work. Critics of the book fixate on these unprovable hypotheses -- about whether Falstaff was a recasting of Robert Greene, Macbeth a risky family horror show for King James I, Prospero the voice of the world-weary poet himself at the end of his career, etc.

Those looking only for provable facts miss the point, I think. Biography is always a story, and the more powerful stories are those that reflect some truth about the reader -- not necessarily the subject. "Truth" in biography is a slippery concept, for what is the truth of someone's life? You can see this playing out today in controversies surrounding James Frey's Oprah-shamed autobiography, A Million Little Pieces, and the ever-inflammatory story of Jesus and Mary Magdalene as imagined by Dan Brown in The Da Vinci Code.

In the end, Greenblatt seems to be inviting us to remember that Shakespeare was a man, "taken for all in all, [we] shall not look upon his like again."

Hey Judas, Don't Look So Sad

The publication of the 1700-year-old Judas Gospel this week created a minor media event, and presumably some theological soul searching among Christians. The document is one of many early Christian texts found disintegrating in a cave in 1945 and recently published after painstaking re-assembly and translation.

The news here is that Judas, famous betrayer of Jesus and symbol of back-stabbing throughout the ages, may have just been following orders. In other words, Judas was actually a misunderstood loyal partisan doing his part for the greater good.

One would think that the overtly religious Bush administration would grab onto this at a time when betrayal is in the air. Scooter Libby festers, pointing fingers ever-higher to explain his role in leaking sensitive intelligence data about Iraq. Michael Brown continues trying to deflect blame for FEMA's Katrina debacle by implicating his boss, Homeland Security chief Michael Chertoff. And a modern day version of betrayal with a kiss is playing out among the viper's nest of Tom Delay associates.

What better time to have a moral examination of the nature of betrayal, and about how reality may be different than appearances?

Then again, there is a good chance that this administration may have a hard time telling the difference.

Fight or Flight

How many times have we heard the adage: "It's the journey, not the destination that matters." It might be true in an Obi-Wan universal wisdom kind of way, but when you're stuck in the Portland airport due to flight delays, it's the destination. Pure and simple.

I travel quite a bit for work, and like most travelers I've had my share of unexpected delays. Each time it happens I've noticed that people fall into predictable patterns of behavior:

• Stare blankly into space (this is the most common reaction)
• Look at watches and complain to traveling partners while shaking heads
• Storm the gates, demanding special attention and some apology or justification from irritated gate agents.
• Execute a flanking maneuver, quickly getting on a cell phone or jumping to a different airline's counter to book a different flight.

In this case, a live-for-the-moment philosophy would suggest relaxing and letting life take its course -- "we'll get there eventually!" True, but I think life has more to offer than crowded airports and cramped airline seats.

Sometimes, what matters is the destination.