THERE IS THE BLACK BOX & THEN THERE IS THE WHITE BOX

The Black Box has become legendary. We are always hearing about recovering it from the downed plane. The idea -- applicable to modern society in general -- is that somewhere, somehow we are able to recover all the facts & stats needed to learn what went wrong.

Applause. Applause. Surely it's better to have Black Boxes in our lives rather than simply uninformed blackness. There's the cliche: "Research is finding out what went wrong only after it goes wrong."

Wouldn't it be grand if humanity had something more than a Black Box to fathom more than simply the facts & stats? These are important of course, but like the fallen bricks to some ancient desert site, researchers can't always be sure how the bricks once stood. Was this a temple or a bank? a jail or a brothel? Some cynics suggest 500 years from now our high school sites might be thought of us prisons, what with all their straight-line corridors, closed-in rooms, and metal-detectors.

To get a fuller picture, researchers at the sites need also to know something of the people. Their thoughts, their feelings, their fears, their gods. Hard not to recall another cliche: "Once we have all the facts, we have only part of the truth." An arguable proposition which says the aficionados of  Black Box thinking can only tell us so much about us. The rest [and perhaps best] about us and our doings depends on those sifting not only through the bricks, but imagining the buildings themselves.

Enter today's other kind of researchers: philosophers, poets, novelists and composers. Is it not possible there is more to learn about our species --  whether at the plane's controls or lunching back in the cabin -- from a Shakespeare or a Dostoevsky than from a dozen site-sifters?

While that question echoes, here's a second. In this time of growing anti-government sentiment and voting, what has happened to that White Box which has sat under the American Christmas Tree sent by Washington? Ever since the 1930s New Deal, whenever opened it's been the reason for both hope [social security, medicare, highways, drug control, food inspections, scholarships] and for derision [the new anti-hero Wisconsin Governor Walker].

Two boxes, two ways of opening them, maybe too little time to be sure how best to use their contents.

AHHH, THE CARNIVAL IS COMING TO TOWN

This summer all over America local communities will watch the familiar ferris-wheel going up, and smell the cotton candy being spun. It's the traveling carnivals which breeze into town for a magical few days, then just as quickly dismantle on their last night to haul their magic to the next stop.

In a time of enormous space shuttles, Caldron Colliders, and instant  Apps, these old fashioned tent tours must seem a tad insignificant. And yet it's in their very insignificance we find their magic. For you see fellow patrons, they are altogether more real and more substantive than those others. What's more, they are just small enough to get inside our eyes, nostrils, and hearts.

But first be sure to free the child in you to find out what can happen. The rides become stairways to to the stars. The games turn into playing dice with destiny. As for the laughter and the giggles, oh they sound an awful like a chorus of angels beckoning the sleeping innocence in us to dare once more to be fully innocent.

And there's more.

Next be sure to free the adult in you to discover what can happen. Suddenly the whole silly, frilly experience takes on the feel of a journey. Whooshing you from the dreariness of your everyday days,  up up and away into an encounter with what lies in wait beyond the everyday. Perhaps your dreams-come-true. Maybe your finale-finally-here. Whatever it is, it's there waiting just for you.

So... at the first sound of the traveling tent show in town, grab both the child and the adult in you. Take them by the hand, and learn what magic waits for both. No fair just guessing. You have to really  plunge into the sawdust magic with both feet!

If this sounds like an advertisement, you're wrong. Better than that, it's a wish....

180 DAYS TO FIND THE NEXT BIG IDEA

In another election year another First Lady said something that fits any election year. "Great minds discuss ideas. Average minds discuss events. Small minds discuss people." [Eleanor Roosevelt]

But it's a good bet the next 180 days will be all about the people and the events. As for the ideas, they will remain fuzzy in our minds. Spun and re-spun as they travel from their points-of-origin [ the candidates' major speeches ] to those would-be thousand-points-of-light [ the networks' major pundits ]. If ever we actually understood the big ideas in those speeches, chances are by now no one can actually explain them, including the speech writers.

Yet make no mistake. There are about 141 million very different voters scattered among 3,141 very different counties. Few presidents have succeeded without hoisting the banners of at least one big, unifying idea. For Washington it was preserving our new-won freedom. For Lincoln, preserving our now-challenged union. For FDR, preserving our now-broken economy. Surely today's candidates have no shortage of issues to grapple with. Jobs, productivity, taxes, health, education, human rights, security, world peace. Not a single one much different than 100 years ago. A 1000 years ago. And yet each now more complex, because it is inextricably wedged inside a global economy which runs by a clock no longer set only in Washington. The campaigns' task the next 180 days will be to seize and shape these conflicting issues into another of those single, unifying big ideas.

Think of each of the worried voters in each of these counties as intuitively searching for a banner to rally round. With their hearts as well as their heads, with their dreams as well as their fears. Both campaign camps are searching for that very banner! For that one big idea that encapsulates our worst fears then catapults them into our best dreams. Is there some word, some phrase, some vision that might electrify us again? After all, it takes only a majority in enough of these counties to do the job.

Whatever big ideas are being birthed now, each candidate understands it must somehow bind and bond as many of us as possible. A task made historically complicated in 2012 by the fact six of our seven national institutions can no longer be counted on to translate our differences into our destiny. Say like other big ideas once did: The New Deal, the Fair Deal, the Great Society, Sunrise in America.

Of our seven national institutions, the government is now held in suspicion more than admiration...the law is seen as working for the rich more than the rest....marriage is lately a debate more than a decision...schools are using more money to produce poorer results...the media are slanted by whomever owns them...religion is no longer something we can all agree upon...only the military stands as an institution still commanding general and binding respect.

About 180 days are eft to give birth to the next big idea. What shall it be, gentlemen? Making your search all the harder, the national budget you will inherit will no longer permit you to woo us with the usual promises of More. For one of the few times in our history, you will have to motivate us with warnings of Less. 

More-With-Less...!  Well, yes, now there's an idea. But is it big and bold and binding enough? I just mailed it in with my donation to the candidate of my choice.

CAN YOU LEARN HOW TO BE UN-AFRAID?

This is as good a time as any to test my philosophy professor's favorite theme: "The more you learn, the less you fear."

After a week of scanning the news, this is some of what I learned:

* Two chaperones at a Colorado HS prom sprayed disinfectant on students who in their words were "dancing like they were having sex with their clothes on"

* A single parking space is on sale in the heart of Manhattan for $1 million

* After Facebook's initial public offering, hundreds of 20-somehings became instant millionaires

* Having children can add or detract from a couple's happiness -- pretty much all depending on which survey by which committee of experts you read

* In the battle of the 99:1 %, facts suggest the 1% benefit generously from the federal outlay of $2.1 trillion in social programs like Social Security, Medicare, food stamps, and Pell Grants

* About 93% of immigrants applying for US citizenship can correctly answer six out of 10 questions about our history and government; only 65% of native-born Americans can

* Dr Daniel Wilson, best selling author & robotics engineer, is featured in this week's Wall Street Journal predicting, "High-tech implants will soon be commonplace under our skin and inside our skulls, making us stronger and smarter." In effect, prospects for a new superman

The first five items are a mixed commentary on our shifting social values. But those last two...When you place them side by side, you're reminded that tens of millions of uninformed native-born-citizens are about to vote our nation's future. And yet equally distressing is the memory of the last regime which spoke of creating a new superman.

One is left to wonder which is more dangerous: Our ignorance or those who would replace our ignorance with their neural enhancements? Sixty years later, I still wonder about Professor Link's pledge: the more you learn, the less you fear.

AS WE GET OLDER, WE DON'T GET ANY YOUNGER

There are more people over 65 than ever before. And yet Americans  seem to resent old age. The beautiful people downright hate it. Among those who never reached it: Alexander the Great (33), Mozart (35), Byron (36), Raphael and Van Gogh (37), Virgil (50), Shakespeare (52).  Cicero said, "Old age begins at 46." He died at 53.

Our strength and coordination peaks at 19...skeletal maturity in our early 20s....IQ is highest between 18 & 25...stamina dips by the early 30s ...creativity slows by the late 30s. By 50, according to George Orwell, "Everyone has the face he deserves." He died at 47.

What are young people to make of these data? Old people have already begun reconciling to them. Weight, wrinkles, memory loss are aging's unforgiving companions. Debbie Reynolds, one of Hollywood's perennial juveniles, nailed it: "Gravity sucks" Bette Davis, one of Hollywood's perennial heroines, added the exclamation mark: "Aging ain't for sissies!"

There is some measure of consolation. When you're 45, your vocabulary is three times as large as at 20. When you are 60, your brain possesses four times the information it did at 20. Time has happened, life has happened. As a consequence, you may not be wiser but at least you are less surprised.

Is there some common denominator both youth and age can share in this free enterprise culture?

In " My Dinner With Andre," Wallace says: "I grew up on the Upper East Side, and when I was 10 I was rich. An aristocrat riding around in taxis, surrounded by comfort, and all I thought about was art and music. Now I'm 36 and all I think about is money."

In America, age, family name, caste, and inherited land have never quite become the crown to treasure and to wear. Wealth has. And so -- be we young or old, strong or weak -- wealth has remained the one enduring national gospel. The next question is: Does it make it easier to sleep at night? Or does it simply mean that Wallace has more time in which to fear its loss?

DURING ANOTHER SWEATY SEX ACT, DO THE ACTORS ON THE SCREEN MISS THE OLD FADEOUTS?

I've known a few Hollywood cameramen in my time.  I can assure you both they and the other dozen or so crew members on the set will agree: During those sweaty bedroom scenes, we're almost as  embarrassed as the stars. And yet movies, like everything else, reflect their times. Like it or not.

The times usually go by the name "culture." By which is meant a particular form or stage of civilization. In America we give them names: The Colonial Age...The Gilded Age...The Jazz Age...The Age of Anxiety. We haven't agreed yet on a label for the early 21st C. How about The Animal Age? A time when all those old post-Victorian repressions have been swept away by the post-Freudian Sixties: If it feels right, how can it be wrong!

Now here's what's so ironic. Currently the Victorian novels of the Brontes, Jane Austen and Mary Shelley are once again selling briskly. PBS's Masterpiece Theatre features their works along with the Upstairs Downstairs, Downton Abbey, and Sherlock Holmes series to high praise and viewership.
What's going on  here?

Perchance our sweaty how-can-it-be-wrong culture can't entirely resist the charm of the form-and-formality of another and nattier time. No, the young generation is not about to adopt bustles and spats. Maybe just take a curious peek at a previous culture which has taken on the charm that many previous times do. Like watching the Oscars when a string of gutsy guttural winners are followed at the microphone by the sudden eloquence of a Helen Mirren or a Christopher Plummer.

Oh My God....! Do people still dress and speak and bear themselves with such articulate dignity? Yes, yes they do.

So....!  Just maybe the old movie fade-outs in the bedroom were more MRI-exciting than keeping the cameras rolling while naked limbs and breasts flop and grunt in their own heavy-breathing sweat. Thin here the pulsed-up thrill of a bikini undulating down the beach versus seeing her buck naked in the nearby shower stall. It's the tease not the totality. The hint not the pubic hair. The technicolor  dream of a Renaissance nude versus the black-and-white reality of an actual nude.

But then I am so old-fashioned Victorian that I suspect Victoria's Secret's real secret is not laughing at the old Victorians....it's their size-6 models laughing at all those size-16 buyers who actually believe these exotic items are going to make them look exotic too.


 

LOCATING LONG-AGO-AND-FARAWAY ON YOIUR GPS

Today's GPS systems are one more modern marvel. They seem capable of locating virtually anything anywhere anytime. Or can they...?

I tried a simple experiment knowing it would fail -- locating that special long-ago-and-faraway in my life. To be sure, neither computers nor satellites promise to do what memory alone can. Which means these marvels cannot conjure up on their screens those special where-and-when's in our lives. The June graduation night embracing dear friends we promised never to leave...the shoreline where first we  met....the celebration where all that was you sang and drank with all that had made them so important for so long....the altar where you locked hands, hearts and vows before death did you part.

So it is agreed then!  Machines, marvels that they are, have their limits. A formidable thought which came back to mind during a night-long conversation with a geneticist friend. Over Milanese pasta and Tuscany wines, my gifted friend hoped his career would someday prove part of a genetic revolution.

"Our genes are the code to our future," he asserted. "They come down to us from our past intact, but someday we will be able to alter them for our future. A future maybe without the predestination of cancer, diabetes, Parkinson's, and Alzheimer's." He spoke with enthusiasm of steroids, growth hormones, genetic engineering, and other enhancements current research is beginning to grasp.

It was more than the wine that heated our usual dinner exchange. I asked: Isn't tinkering with humans tricky? He smiled: Skeptics have grumbled that ever since the ancient Greeks.  I insisted: I always sound out-of-step with the times, but who's to say our steps are heading in the right direction? He shook his head the way he usually does when he thinks me hopelessly unaware: If humanity refused to probe the unknown, you and I would still be talking 15th C Spanish about our a flat earth!

Which was of course the classic blade to the heart with which modernists slay medievalists.

Bleeding a bit as I usually am after these long lovely dinners playing rival gods, I couldn't resist my own blade. "I grant your mother and father might theoretically have been genetically enhanced as better workers, bakers, PTA members, and voters. But tell me how this would have made them better parents? Grant me this much. Tinkering with the parts -- like genes and hormones -- can have terribly unintended consequences with the whole. The whole which over these last 84 years has brought who-you-are to this dinner tonight."

He closed his eyes with his you-don't-get-it silence. I closed mine hoping when they re-opened, he would still be the same genetically-imperfect friend he has always been.