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I hate this.  A cop in Ferguson, Missouri, suburban St. Louis, shot and killed a teenager Saturday, in broad daylight, for the crime of looking suspicious, by being black.  He was walking with a friend, to his grandmother’s house. I hate that this is not a new, or even unusual thing.  I hate it that there seems to be no solution to this continuing problem.

Oh, I can think of solutions:  Don’t give the police guns.  Fire any cops who act like total jerks when they are dealing with people on the street.  Make it so the police are actually subject to the laws.  Just no solutions that are likely to be adopted.

They sure don’t look like the good guys, do they?

There have been protests over the last couple of days and it’s turned a bit violent a couple of times – how much of that was caused by police provocation is hard to tell.  Two sides to every story.  But when the police hit the streets in huge, armored vehicles carrying military style artillery, when they break up peaceful protests for no reason, when they flood the streets with tear gas, when they start targeting news crews and vehicles and arresting reporters, when they refuse to release the name of the officer who did the shooting (it’s unlikely that he’s even been suspended, because if he had been, they’d say so), it’s pretty easy to see who the real bad guys in this movie are.

American cops are looking very much like the cops in Hunger Games, or  Soylent Green.  They actually seem to be yearning for a bizarre, fascist dystopia with high tech weapons.  They are insane.

I don’t know how this is going to play out, but the power is definitely in the hands of the police, so it’s their move.  They can continue with their oppressive tactics, but their public support is eroding and things will only escalate.  This may end very badly for the police – they’ve got the guns but we’ve got the numbers, as the saying goes.  Or, they could try to de-escalate,  which might actually do a great deal of good.  Nobody wants a police v. people civil war.  Except for, perhaps, for those few who actually ARE yearning for a plice v. people civil war.

The usual people are saying the usual things.  Obama said it was ‘heart breaking’ but stopped short of saying “Out of line cops, gotta be stopped.”

One who has surprised me on this issue is Rand Paul.  He came out and said this is about race and anybody who can’t see it is a moron, and something needs to be done about it.  It’s a very impressive statement because it’s not likely to play well with the right wing of the Republican party, i.e. his base.

It’s either a moment of rare political courage or, he thinks the libertarian elements of his party will outweigh the racist elements.  I think that’s a gamble he will lose, but it’s still a sign of courage and, if he’s right, the payoff for him could be huge.

Has Hillary  Clinton weighed in on this issue yet?  If so, I haven’t heard about it.

This is already a couple of days old but, since I haven’t written about it yet, here we go.

I never thought I’d say this, but I feel a bit sorry for Sarah Palin.  Sure, her politics are seriously ugly and just her candidacy had the effect of lowering the level of political discourse but, fortunately, she lost, taking John McCain (who would have been a disastrous president) down with her.  She will probably never be elected to another public office again, which is a very good thing, but it’s also why I feel safe in feeling sorry for her.

Sarah Palin

Also, I would like to point out that, contrary to popular belief, Sarah Palin never said “I can see Russia from my house.”  That was Tina Fey.  What Sarah Palin said was that one can see Russia from Alaska, which is actually true – on a clear day, you can see the easternmost Siberian island from the westernmost Alaskan island.  That is the kind  of interesting trivia that the governor of a state might very  reasonable want to bring up.  But, shit happens in politics.  Al Gore never said he invented the internet, either.

But, in this video you can actually see a point where her brain stops, the old motor of her mind just seized up, the donkey stopped stock still in the middle of the road and said ‘I ain’t gonna pull this cart no more.’  Still, Sarah bravely carried on, making sure she got in all the buzzwords: liberals, liberals, fast food, purgatory, something.

The weird thing is, it was not an interview like that time Katie Couric caught her off guard by asking  her what newspapers she read and she couldn’t think of any.  It was not a hot mike moment, when she thought nobody was listening.  It was not  even a public speech, where it is easy to forget your lines, or screw them up.  I’ve done that myself.

No, this was a taped speech, that she then put up on her internet channel.  So, not only was it an incredibly stupid speech, but she was not even aware that this was an embarrassingly stupid speech.  That is one seriously mind-boggling level of stupidity.

I take it back.  I don’t really feel sorry for her.

There is only one thing everybody has been talking about all day and so there’s only one possible topic for my blog tonight, and that is the death of Robin Williams,  one of the funniest men who ever lived.

It was the first thing I read when I signed on to facebook this morning and I’ve spent the day watching Mork and Mindy reruns (There were some laugh out loud moments for sure but it was not quite as funny as I remembered – what struck me was how different the 70s were, how puritanical and corny compared to today’s shows).

Williams in The Fisher King

I’m not going to dwell too much on the manner of his death.  I see suicide as a choice rather than a sin.  A tragic choice, and I’m sorry to learn that he was such a tortured soul, but he joins the ranks of Hemingway, Hunter S. Thompson, Kurt Cobain, Alan Turing, Vincent Van Gogh and Socrates.  Their importance to history, their contribution to human culture, the heaviness of their loss is in no way diminished by the manner of their passing.

One interesting thing in the comments is that, while everybody loved Robin Williams, we didn’t all love the same Robin Williams.  Some people raved about his stand up, while others were much more fans of his movies.  Among those who were fans of his movies, not everybody liked the same ones.

He sure made a lot of films and I’m a long way from having seen all of them.  Two that a lot of people liked, which I’ll have to see now, are Moscow on the Hudson and Patch Adams.

Films that everybody raves about but which I think are over-rated include Mrs. Doubtfire and Dead Poets Society.  They were both pretty good films, I’m glad I saw them and there were scenes which made an impression, but I really have no desire to see either one ever again.

Films which were big hits, and I totally agree that they were masterpieces, include Good Morning Viet Nam, Good Will Hunting and The Fisher King.  Matt Damon owes his career to Robin Williams.  And The Fisher King is one of the most perfect movies ever made.

A couple of lesser known films of his that I thought were brilliant are One Hour Photo and The Night Listener.  When a movie reveals its entire meaning at the very last second and then ends and it surprises the hell out of everybody, that is art, that is genius, and One Hour Photo did that better than any movie since Citizen Kane, which is ancient.

One that nobody else mentioned and I get the feeling few people have ever seen, but I really liked, was called Being Human.  It was a series of vignettes, with Robin Williams playing a prehistoric character, a Roman slave, and a modern man trying to reconnect with his children after a divorce.

Being Human.  It’s something Robin Williams was exceptionally good at.

So, this book I’m writing is all about a guy who is seeking enlightenment, like millions of people around the world are seeking enlightenment and, in that respect, it’s sort of a modern Siddhartha but it’s all mixed up with his everyday trials and adventures and travels and the people he meets in the very real, very current world.

It’s going to be an interesting book.

As I was writing today, I thought of how millions of people around the world are seeking enlightenment and following one cult after another and for the most part they are sincere, well intentioned people but, just as with conventional religions, the vast majority of them must be completely misguided because each group cancels out the other and if any are right, all the rest must be wrong.

Then I thought “What if it’s not an individual quest? What if it’s the next step in the evolution of our species?”  Like, in the beginning, there was the void, a big nothing stretching out and out forever and then there was the Big Bang and massive waves of energy everywhere, just moving in waves according to the natural physical laws of energy and then some of that energy coalesced into matter and there were stars and planet and moons and comets and asteroids, still all mindlessly obeying the pull of gravity and stuff like that and then there was a planet, our planet, with water lying in shallow pools on the surface and somehow a ray of sunshine zapped some chemicals and life was born, cells which self-replicated but they weren’t really conscious and then the cells bumped up against each other and became multi-celled organisms and then some of those cells started to specialize and higher life forms, like fish and plants and dinosaurs and cockroaches began to involve and some of them did have some actual consciousness, enough to seek food and avoid becoming food, to feel hunger and fear.  Then mammals evolved, helped along a bit by an asteroid that killed all the dinosaurs who would have killed us long before we had a chance to evolve into what we’ve evolved into,  and then primates, and homo sapiens, which is not just consciousness, but intelligence, an ability to analyze and control our environment.  That’s where we are now.

Maybe enlightenment is the next step and maybe attempts to take that stop individually are just evolutionary experiments and someday we will take that step as a species  and we will all be enlightened.  Wouldn’t it be nice?

A facebook friend, a Russian poet who lives in Massachusetts, posted: Just because it’s ugly doesn’t mean it’s the future.

I totally agree, but every statement includes it’s opposite, and just because it’s beautiful doesn’t mean it’s the future either.

I do not believe in God.  Therefore I do not believe in fate, predetermination  or inevitability.

We have a choice

We have billions and billions and billions of different possible futures, ranging all the way from contrived  dystopias such as The Hunger Games, or The Postman, or Soylent Green, or Blade Runner, or Logan’s Run, or Water World, or  1984, or Planet of the Apes, to a golden world where there is no poverty, pollution, hunger or war.

The reason we have so many films of dystopian  futures is partly to warn us of the possibilities, of what could happen if we make the wrong choices now.  The other reason is because they make for a much more interesting film than a positive, normal future would.  Can you imagine a romantic comedy set in the 24th century?  How lame would that be?

And yet, despite the fact that we don’t really want to see it in films, that nice, boring future where all of our major problems have been solved is the one we should want, if we are at all sane.  In  a sense, it is the Star Trek universe.  Earth is at peace, Earth is one world and its problems are basically solved which is why they have to go out and explore the universe, looking for trouble.

I’m  getting away from the point I wanted to make.  We have billions and billions of possible futures, considering the number of people in the world and the number of small choices each one of us makes in any given day.  They are lined up in front of us like doors, and which door we go through will change everything.  The thing is, these doors are even labeled, although not always  very clearly.  With a little bit of thought, and a second and a third look, we should be able to figure out which doors have ‘danger’ written on them and which ones have ‘extreme danger, do not open unless you are insane and want everyone in the world to die.’

Which of these trillions of possible futures we choose will be an aggregate of the choices of everyone alive today. We have the technology. The struggle is within ourselves.