In the Shadow of the Bomb

-- By Tom Phillips

In my lifetime, Western Man's greatest fear has always been that he will be "hoist by his own petard," blown up with one of his home-made  bombs.  Baby boomers grew up in the shadow of the A-bomb, then the H-bomb.  Today, the fear of nuclear war has receded, but another spectre of the post-war era has returned -- babies themselves. 

With the earth warming and seas rising, the "Population Bomb" is upon us again, bigger and uglier than ever.     

Why God Created Woman

Botticelli:  Birth of Venus

The Bible tells us that God created woman as a helper to man, because it was not good for man to be alone.  But God's thoughts are not our thoughts, God's ways are not our ways.  For this St. Valentine's Day, let me offer another theory of Why God created Woman:

Maybe God saw the flaws in his original design, and wanted to fix it. Woman was a new form of humanity, not just a helper but a refinement of the original.   This was a new being -- more beautiful, subtle, gentle, peaceful, more like God herself.

End Game

The Seventh Seal

-- By Tom Phillips

The game is on, and I'm already losing.

The game is chess, in which I have little experience and no aptitude. My opponent is ranked number one in the world, having checkmated every player who ever lived, excepting possibly one.

I didn't make this up. I saw it in a movie, Ingmar Bergman's "The Seventh Seal," from 1957.  A knight plays chess with the hooded figure of Death. He plays his best, he draws out the match, but Death makes a surprise move, takes his queen -- and soon, checkmate.  I saw it at 19 when it was new, and couldn't comprehend it.  I saw it again at 39, and it scared me, but I held out hope that I could avoid this defeat, by staying out of the game.

At the time I was a Buddhist, sitting on a cushion every day, achieving an equanimity that supposedly went beyond birth and death.  It's true, I'm sure, that the universe is One, and we simply pass from one form of existence to another -- eventually into a many-tiered heaven that rises to Nirvana, the end of suffering, extinction of desire.  I was fairly good at that game. 

Then, I had the misfortune of marrying a Presbyterian minister and losing a challenge match with her, in which the loser was bound to adopt the religion of the winner. I found myself in a new world, where this earthly life mattered, and you had one chance to make yours mean something.  Equanimity was neither the path not the goal -- life was a struggle to bear witness to the truth in a world that didn't want to hear it, to show mercy in a world that lived by conflict. Worst of all, other people mattered. Suffering was not to be contemplated, but fought on every front. Our job is to not to get out of here and into God's Kingdom, but to prepare the way for God's Kingdom on earth.

And where does death fit into that?  I have no ready answer. 

Recently, I made my first move -- a stupid move -- and only then realized the game was underway.  Visiting children and grandchildren on the West Coast, my wife and I went to see an apartment complex designed in part for the elderly and infirm.  No need to climb stairs, the agent assured us. It was new and sterile, but comfortable and affordable. 

I found myself tempted by the prospect of an easy decline, with daughters and sons-in-law nearby to scrape me off the floor when the inevitable fall came. A comfortable end. But something in me screamed NO, that's not what I want.  I want the struggle to continue -- my pride intact, my faculties working, my words read, my music danced to.  

My second move was even worse, and in direct contradiction to the first. Unconsciously I set out to prove I was still young and strong, in no need of Senior Living.  I tried to make myself attractive to a much younger woman -- for no reason, just to see if I could do it.  She seemed to like my stories and jokes, so I set out to impress her further. At that point I immediately became self-conscious and lost my charm, becoming a clanging bell, a nattering nabob. The rest of the evening was painful. Still, at bedtime, I preened in front of the mirror, puffed out my chest and asked my wife, "Do I look young and strong?"

"Sure," was all she said. 

Two moves -- two pawns advanced on opposite sides of the board. That can't be right. Meanwhile Death has moved his ranks into some classic position, the first steps to an invasion that will inevitably destroy me.  I have no more strategy than Donald Trump, sitting in the West Wing in his underwear, watching TV for his next cue to act. 

Come to think of it, I don't really want to play chess!

I'd rather not identify with the hero of the movie --  the knight, a tortured, self-hating intellectual searching for God -- especially when there's another character more to my liking, the knight's squire. He's a cynic, a jester, a fighter, a singer, a ladies' man -- and facing death, his counsel is to savor the incomparable feeling of life, right up to the end.      

Oops! I knocked the pieces off the board.

See you later, Mr. Death.

-- Copyright 2017 by Tom Phillips

Knight and Squire (Max von Sydow, Gunnar Bjornstrand)

Concluding Unscientific Blogpost (Poor Tom's Philosophy 3)

-- By Tom Phillips

(After fasting through the Winter Solstice, Poor Tom puts on his clothes and comes in from the cold.)

OK friends, I apologize.  As some of you realized, Poor Tom was just a naked disguise, and his impenetrable essays on Irony were no more than a post-election distraction for an old man -- an old man fearing for his grandchildren, trying to step back and love the world from an ironic distance, a literary perspective.

Still, it was a timely topic.

The primary definition of irony -- saying one thing and meaning another -- is Trumpspeak, the new lingua franca of our land.  A University means a scam.  I grabbed her by the private parts means I didn't do anything. "Make America Great Again" means make the rich richer.  "Lock her up" means drop the case.  A Wall means a fence, and then nothing.  NATO means NADA.

Everything he says means nothing -- he speaks in the moment only, and the meaning disappears like a post on Snapchat.   This is the ultimate in irony -- not the distance between one meaning and another, but the distance between meaning and non-meaning, being and nothingness.

However!

(With little hope but firm resolve, Poor Tom puts on a scholar's robe, shakes his sleeves and begins to speak into the air)

Listen up, Mr. President-elect: 

Poor Tom 's Philosophy 2 -- The Irony of Irony

-- By Tom Phillips 

Poor Tom

Kierkegaard says irony is like a dwarf wearing a hat that makes him invisible.  But Poor Tom has discovered it's not so simple.   It's like a whole bunch of dwarfs -- and every time you look at one of them, they all put on their hats and become invisible.  The most you can perceive is distant laughter, as they chuckle among themselves at your vain pursuit. For irony takes many forms, none of them with any substance.

Thirty years ago, Tom took a shot at identifying the clumsiest of the dwarfs -- the slowest at putting on their hats.  At the time he was skulking along the dirt floor of Academe, disguised as an assistant professor of journalism.  So he set out to define at least the kinds of irony you find in newspapers.  He was able to identify three for his thesis, titled "Irony in Journalism: Teaching the Twisteroo."

• The first type he called "surface irony" -- a clash of appearances, such as the bluenose senator caught in the bus stop restroom... 
• The second was "dramatic irony" -- the reversal of intentions, as in the defendant who sneaked out of court, only to be found not guilty, then charged anew with jumping bail.  Or President Nixon bugging the oval office, creating evidence against himself. 
• The third he dubbed "cosmic irony"-- bizarre or baffling coincidences, outcomes that seem wrong, but actually happen.  A twisteroo: which is more newsworthy, a car crash in which four people are killed, or one where no one is killed?  The standard answer is the fatal crash.  But what if a car carrying four teenagers plunges over a thousand-foot cliff, and they walk away unharmed?  (It happened..)

Today, Tom laughs at "three types of irony."  He knows now that there are as many "types" as there are types of human being -- a number equal to the population of the world.  Irony, we say offhandedly, takes place in the gaps between perception and reality.  But we have no access to unperceived reality.  Irony begins in the gap between perception and perception, person and person.

In 2001, after the 9/11 attacks, the editor of Vanity Fair magazine declared that the "age of irony" was over -- from now on we had to face things head-on, as if we could.  Today the age of irony is back, big-time.   How else to look at a president-elect who regards himself as the greatest man who ever lived -- and is perceived by much of the world as a narcissistic buffoon?  The gap between Trump's view of himself and say, Alec Baldwin's, is YUGE, a yawning entry into a gold mine of humor.  Garry Trudeau has been working it in "Doonesbury" ever since Trump's presidential ambitions surfaced in the 1980s.  But Trump, by his own account, has no clue what this cartoonist is up to.  "It's too bad he's allowed to write this garbage," says the man who will be defending our freedoms.      

Poor Tom's Philosophy

-- By Tom Phillips

Poor Tom's a-cold.  Thus spoke Edgar, the hero of "King Lear," disguised as a naked beggar on the moor, adopted by the homeless King as "my philosopher."  Come in, Tom, and philosophize.


For 50 years, Poor Tom wandered on the moor, trying to understand an idea that others seemed to handle effortlessly.  They call it irony.  Somehow Tom felt irony was the key to his philosophy, but he couldn't quite grasp it.  What is it?

About 30 years ago, the earnest jester Kierkegaard offered a clue -- trying to picture irony, he wrote, is like trying to picture a dwarf wearing a hat that makes him invisible.

Thirty years later, Tom had something like a fever dream in which such a picture appeared, or at least the idea of a picture.  Irony is not something in itself, he dreamed, but the distance or disparity between things.  One can experience a gap without making it into a thing.  The dwarf is invisible because it doesn't exist, but it has outlines, therefore a shape, therefore an effect, because it is bordered by actual phenomena.  He leaped out of bed.  Eureka!

I Liked It Better When... #5

-- By Tom Phillips

An elegy for the baseball season:  I liked it better when it was about winning the pennant.

Fenway Park, Boston 

Up until 1969, when Major League Baseball began divisional play, there were just two leagues, and two champions at the end of the 162-game regular season.  The two pennant winners then met in the World Series, a best-of-seven playoff, to crown one or the other.  But both were legitimate champions, and flew their banners proudly at their home fields.

Today, big-league baseball has 30 teams in six divisions, but just one winner.  The regular season is no longer a race to the finish line, but more like the starting line. Teams spend all spring and summer jockeying for position in the October post-season, where ten teams compete for the final two slots in the World Series.  Six times in the last 20 years, the World Series winner didn't even win its division, but sneaked in as a wild card in the playoffs.  Any team that's healthy after the grueling regular season stands a chance.

It's been good for fans, and baseball as a business.  Fans stay engaged when their team stays in contention, and more playoff spots mean more games, bigger crowds and TV audiences.

It's not so good for players.  The season used to end early in October, but now it goes until Halloween, 20-odd playoff games added to an already punishing schedule.  World Series teams face a short winter, less time to rest and recuperate.  Not once in this century has a World Series winner been able to repeat.