Full disclosure:  I am not a professional magazine writer.  Magazine writers have to do fact-checks and protect their sources and say things like “full disclosure”.  I’m an oracle, as per the famous Oracle at Delphi who answered questions no one knew the answer to, like “Why is there a setting on the iron for Permanent Press?”  Of course, the Delphic Oracle was inhaling the fumes from a natural gas deposit in her cave whereas all I – the Delta oracle – have got in the trance-inducing department is the Shopping Channel.  Still, give me a question like  “What’s the deal with Earth Day?” and before you know it, I’m having an oracular vision of the relationship between Earth and Mankind

My vision takes the form of a romantic comedy:  Girl Meets Boy; Girl Loses Boy; Girl Gets Back at Boy.  (Full disclosure: Before I was an oracle, I was a film and television writer.)

GIRL MEETS BOY

FADE IN on Earth orbiting the sun, spewing volcanic ash, oozing primordial slime.  At this point, she’s around 13.5 billion years old (for evolutionists), three thousand years old (for creationists) or 21 years old (for dogs).  The point is, she’s a woman in her prime.  I know there’s some word play to be had here with “prime” and “primordial,” but I’m an Oracle, not Larry Gelbart.

Now we come the “cute meet” that every romantic comedy requires.  Man falls out of a tree right on top of her.

Of course, Earth doesn’t recognize Man as Prince Charming; she thinks he’s a complete Neanderthal.  But over time, he evolves into Homo Sapiens, smart man.  Smart enough to worship Earth.  Literally.  He showers her with gifts, like in “Pretty Woman”, where Richard Gere buys Julia Roberts a diamond necklace, except Man’s idea of a present is a sheep with a freshly slit throat.  Still, it’s the thought that counts.

CUT TO the second thing every romantic comedy needs, the montage:  Earth and Man riding a carousel; gazing into a fire; taking long walks on the beach – oh, wait, the earth is the beach.   The point is, Earth  returns Man’s love.  She showers him with gifts: her mineral deposits, oil deposits, rich topsoil …all without a pre-nup.  That’s how green Earth is.  She’s like Vivien Leigh in “The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone.

(Full disclosure: I’ve never seen “The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone” but according to my manicurist, Kay, Warren Beatty takes Vivien Leigh for everything she’s got and abandons her.  Talk about depressing. I’d have stuck my fingers in my ears except the polish was still wet.

On the other hand – the one Kay’s putting lotion on – that scenario sounds disturbingly familiar, like the Girl Loses Boy part of the movie.)

GIRL LOSES BOY

Flash forward 50,000 years.  Man has evolved from Homo Sapiens (Man Who Know Things) to Homo Fabricans (Man Who Makes Things) to Homo Economicus (Michael Douglas in “Wall Street”).   As CEO of Planet Earth, Man now demands ever higher levels of productivity, ever higher yields.  Maybe this part of the movie should be called “Girl Does All the Work in the Relationship”.  Plus, he’s become very controlling.  He monitors her behavior, points out every (San Andreas) fault, makes mountains out of molehills.  Well, actually, he makes mole-hills out of mountains what with pit-mining and everything, but  basically, Earth’s in an abusive relationship.

Worse for her, she’s menopausal.  That’s what global warming really is: hot flashes.  But does Man care?  No.  In fact, since his first clumsy telescope, Man has been looking to see what else is out there.  Maybe another planet, a younger one.  It’s the old story: Man wants his space.  So where do we go from here?

(Full disclosure: The reason I stopped being a movie and television writer to become an Oracle is I could never think of a third act – at least not one that made anybody happy.)

ACT THREE

Man does leave  Earth.  At first she is desolate.  You can tell because she’s eating Rocky Road ice cream straight from the container.  But out from under Man’s thumb, Earth begins to flourish.  Once arid regions become green.  Rain forests re-emerge.  All the animals Man had wiped off her face come back.  Earth’s like Brad Pitt in “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button”:  she regains her youth.  But even more, she regains her self.

So the third act of this movie isn’t “Girl Gets Boy” or even “Girl Gets Back at Boy” but “Earth Gets Her Mojo Back.”

It’s not an ending that would make everyone happy.  Executives wouldn’t like it.  (“You call this a romantic comedy??”)  And it sure doesn’t look good for Man.

But it would make Earth happy.

And isn’t that what we should be thinking about on Earth Day?

Full disclosure:  I am not a professional magazine writer.  Magazine writers have to do fact-checks and protect their sources and say things like “full disclosure”.  I’m an oracle, as per the famous Oracle at Delphi who answered questions no one knew the answer to, like “Why is there a setting on the iron for Permanent Press?”  Of course, the Delphic Oracle was inhaling the fumes from a natural gas deposit in her cave whereas all I – the Delta oracle – have got in the trance-inducing department is the Shopping Channel.  Still, give me a question like  “What’s the deal with Earth Day?” and before you know it, I’m having an oracular vision of the relationship between Earth and Mankind

My vision takes the form of a romantic comedy:  Girl Meets Boy; Girl Loses Boy; Girl Gets Back at Boy.  (Full disclosure: Before I was an oracle, I was a film and television writer.)

GIRL MEETS BOY

FADE IN on Earth orbiting the sun, spewing volcanic ash, oozing primordial slime.  At this point, she’s around 13.5 billion years old (for evolutionists), three thousand years old (for creationists) or 21 years old (for dogs).  The point is, she’s a woman in her prime.  I know there’s some word play to be had here with “prime” and “primordial,” but I’m an Oracle, not Larry Gelbart.

Now we come the “cute meet” that every romantic comedy requires.  Man falls out of a tree right on top of her.

Of course, Earth doesn’t recognize Man as Prince Charming; she thinks he’s a complete Neanderthal.  But over time, he evolves into Homo Sapiens, smart man.  Smart enough to worship Earth.  Literally.  He showers her with gifts, like in “Pretty Woman”, where Richard Gere buys Julia Roberts a diamond necklace, except Man’s idea of a present is a sheep with a freshly slit throat.  Still, it’s the thought that counts.

CUT TO the second thing every romantic comedy needs, the montage:  Earth and Man riding a carousel; gazing into a fire; taking long walks on the beach – oh, wait, the earth is the beach.   The point is, Earth  returns Man’s love.  She showers him with gifts: her mineral deposits, oil deposits, rich topsoil …all without a pre-nup.  That’s how green Earth is.  She’s like Vivien Leigh in “The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone.”

(Full disclosure: I’ve never seen “The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone” but according to my manicurist, Kay, Warren Beatty takes Vivien Leigh for everything she’s got and abandons her.  Talk about depressing. I’d have stuck my fingers in my ears except the polish was still wet.

On the other hand – the one Kay’s putting lotion on – that scenario sounds disturbingly familiar, like the Girl Loses Boy part of the movie.)

GIRL LOSES BOY

Flash forward 50,000 years.  Man has evolved from Homo Sapiens (Man Who Know Things) to Homo Fabricans (Man Who Makes Things) to Homo Economicus (Michael Douglas in “Wall Street”).   As CEO of Planet Earth, Man now demands ever higher levels of productivity, ever higher yields.  Maybe this part of the movie should be called “Girl Does All the Work in the Relationship”.  Plus, he’s become very controlling.  He monitors her behavior, points out every (San Andreas) fault, makes mountains out of molehills.  Well, actually, he makes mole-hills out of mountains what with pit-mining and everything, but  basically, Earth’s in an abusive relationship.

Worse for her, she’s menopausal.  That’s what global warming really is: hot flashes.  But does Man care?  No.  In fact, since his first clumsy telescope, Man has been looking to see what else is out there.  Maybe another planet, a younger one.  It’s the old story: Man wants his space.  So where do we go from here?

(Full disclosure: The reason I stopped being a movie and television writer to become an Oracle is I could never think of a third act – at least not one that made anybody happy.)

ACT THREE

Man does leave  Earth.  At first she is desolate.  You can tell because she’s eating Rocky Road ice cream straight from the container.  But out from under Man’s thumb, Earth begins to flourish.  Once arid regions become green.  Rain forests re-emerge.  All the animals Man had wiped off her face come back.  Earth’s like Brad Pitt in “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button”:  she regains her youth.  But even more, she regains her self.

So the third act of this movie isn’t “Girl Gets Boy” or even “Girl Gets Back at Boy” but “Earth Gets Her Mojo Back.”

It’s not an ending that would make everyone happy.  Executives wouldn’t like it.  (“You call this a romantic comedy??”)  And it sure doesn’t look good for Man.

But it would make Earth happy.

And isn’t that what we should be thinking about on Earth Day?

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Well, actually, I could believe it; this happens all the time to the Oracle.  Like when I first realized I was an Oracle, waiting to make a tricky left-hand turn against on-coming traffic.  Suddenly, I heard a loud crash and smelled smoke and realized that in an alternate universe a less patient of me had smashed into a car.  The very next day, I read a review of a book on alternate universes in the Los Angeles Times!

And what about this?  Last August, I had a vision that the universe was a giant computer game being played by two teen-age boys on a distant planet.  Once in a while, one of them hits the delete button by mistake.  Right there that explains why bad things happen to good people.

Of course I didn’t publish that particular vision because my scientist friends might have found it too fanciful.  So how do you think I felt just two months later, when I read an overview of alternate universe theories in the November 26 issue of “New Scientist”, www.newscientist.com/ and one of them was:  “…the universe we experience is just a simulation running on an advanced civilisation’s supercomputer.”  Swear to God!  That’s the worst part of being an Oracle – being scooped by actual scientists.

But that’s another story, one I’ve no doubt already written in another universe. In this universe, I’m apologizing.  Not for conjuring up Rick Warren from the blessed oblivion to which I’d consigned him, but for having made him sound genial and inoffensive.  In reality, I heard him speak once and was plenty offended, from his opening line about having had dinner with then-President Bush the night before to the end where he bragged about his wife’s saintly response to her breast cancer diagnosis, enlisting in the fight against AIDS in Africa.

That fight had, at the time, been severely compromised by President Bush’s insistence that any funds donated to the fight against AIDS be denied to organizations that handed out condoms.  In Uganda, condoms had been crucial to the most successful program ever in Africa until Bush’s policy brought it to a screeching halt.  The Oracle was betting Rick Warren hadn’t brought that up.

President Bush (proudly):  “So, Rick, what do you think about my AIDS program?”

Rick Warren (genially):  “It’s great.  Not a thing wrong with it.  Keep on truckin’.”

So yes, I’m sorry I didn’t come clean about Rick Warren.  I’m sorry I didn’t predict he’d side with the Catholic bishops against birth control here in America.  But the Oracle is trying very hard not to be self-righteous.  That’s why I didn’t write a cogent argument about freedom of religion and freedom from religion because Bill Moyers already has and without a trace of self-righteousness (www.truth-out.org/bill-moyers-freedom-and-religion/1329422932).   That’s why I’m not writing about Rick Santorum, whom I dismissed as a non-contender for the nomination and who turns out not only to be one, but now that he’s winning feels free to be even more hostile to women.  That’s why I’m not making a joke about why the Catholic Bishops want more babies born – so their priests don’t run out of kids to abuse.

Okay, I’m sorry for that joke.

 Next week, Charles Murray, David Brooks, Occupy Oakland and Complex Adaptive Systems.

Or the week after.

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Danny: “That’s because he’s a missionary.”

The Oracle (before she was one):  “But, Danny, I’m a missionary.”

Danny: “No you’re not.  Missionaries want to convert people. You’re an evangel.  You’re just bringing the good news.”

Aha!   So now you’ll understand why the Oracle spent the last week wondering what’s happened to Rick Warren.  Remember him?  Ten years ago, he was the face of the new kind of evangelism sweeping America, a convivial marriage between Christianity and capitalism.  No fire and brimstone; no telling people what they could and couldn’t do.  Not so much preaching the Gospel as selling Brand Jesus: “Be Nice and Prosper.”

Which made perfect sense because, really, who could be nicer than Jesus?  Jesus invented niceness.  “Do unto others what you would have them do unto you.“ “Let he who is without sin cast the first stone.”   “The meek will inherit the earth.”  I don’t know if it was actually Jesus who said all those things because 1) I’m a Jew and 2) I prefer science-based narratives; and 3) Oracles don’t do research.  Still, I completely applaud those values.  I applaud Brand Jesus for preaching those values.  And though I heard Rick Warren speak once and didn’t like him, I applaud the people I imagine make up his congregation who embrace – nay, embody – those values.  I say “Imagine” as opposed to “know” because I haven’t actually researched the demographics (see above re: Oracles and research), but I see them as a bunch of genial white people whose distinguishing characteristic, aside from being white, is being Middle Class.

That’s the epiphany at the heart of this week’s Oracle: Rick Warren and the Middle Class vanished at the same time.  Without a middle class there’s no one to embrace his middle class values.   Brand Jesus doesn’t sell in a Broke America.   Instead, Evangelicals have rallied around Rick Santorum.

For those of you not sure which Rick is which, here’s a quick rundown.

Rick Warren, Hawaiian shirts.  Rick Santorum, sweater vests.

Rick Warren, laissez-faire.  Santorum, legislated morality

Rick Warren, evangel.  Santorum, missionary.

Of course Santorum’s unlikely to win the nomination, even with his recent surge.   Of the two more likely contenders, neither Newt nor Mitt fits the missionary profile.  Newt’s too grandiose; if anything he wants to be Pope. (C’mon, why do you think he converted to Catholicism?  For love of Callista?  Get real.)  And although Mitt actually was a missionary, he wasn’t very good at it: during his 30-month tour of duty in France, he only converted ten people (as per “The Real Romney” whose authors are not Oracles and presumably do do research).

Still, both Newt and Romney are playing to Santorum’s so-called-evangelical-but-really-missionary base.   Both toe the no abortion/no birth control/no same sex marriage legislated morality line.  Worse, both trumpet their belief – shared with Santorum – in American Exceptionalism.   According to this doctrine, America is a beacon of light in a dark world.  Specially chosen by God to lead the way.  With a moral obligation to remake the world in its own image.   In other words: America, missionary.  Yikes.

Meanwhile, guess who is turning out to be an evangel?  That’s right, Obama!  According to the NY Times (1/28/12), the President “rallied House Democrats…with an address that inched toward a ‘morning in America’ tone’.”  Okay, he also emphasized collective responsibility which is maybe a little earlier in the morning than most Americans want to get up, but the larger vision is all about reinvigorating the middle class.  That’s what the Chrysler Superbowl ad was all about.  Detroit, long the symbol of America’s lost manufacturing dominance, the symbol of a lost middle-class, becomes a symbol of a newly muscular, resilient, competitive America with a Rosie-the-Riveter middle-class determined – and able – to get the job done.

No wonder the Republicans are frothing at the mouth:  Instead of making a major donation to Obama’s campaign so it could hire some branding people and create an ad campaign, Chrysler did it for them.  America the Comeback (Middle-Aged) Kid!  Take that Citizens United!

And yes, I know that it’s going to be hard for Obama to win over the people he’s disappointed.  After all his last campaign was evangelical too – Hope!  Change!  A post-partisan America.  Believe me, no one knows more than an Oracle the pain of seeing your vision come up against reality.  But this election isn’t about a President, it’s about re-defining America.

Brand America #1: the Come-Back (Middle-Aged) Kid

Brand America #2: American Exceptionalism:

Brand America #1.  God helps those who help themselves.

Brand America #2: God helps those who help themselves to more than their fair share

Brand America #1: Internal nation building

Brand America #2: Nuke Iran

That’s why I think Obama has a chance.  Because in this one respect at least, I believe America’s like me.

Brand America #1 sounds like good news.

Brand America #2 makes me uncomfortable.

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HOW TO WIPE OUT THE DEFICIT BIG IDEA #1:

According to the NY Times, Congress is now debating whether we should stick with paper currency or switch to metal coins.  Which side you’re on depends on who’s made the bigger contribution to your campaign fund:  the steel industry or to the paper-mill industry.  The Oracle doesn’t like to take sides – especially when neither side is throwing money at her – but if we’re looking to wipe out the deficit, my money’s on the metal.

Here’s my line of reasoning, should you care to follow it.   (Full disclosure: the Oracle’s license plate reads: NOT SACAJAWEA).  Metal coins will create more jobs.  In the fashion industry alone, the back pocket in men’s trousers that currently houses their wallets will give way to accessories in which they can carry the heavier, bulkier coins. But we’re not just talking fanny-packs, knapsacks or wheelbarrows.  No, if we’re serious about creating jobs, a new status symbol will arise.  Out: dogs-in-designer-handbags.  In: personal human change carriers.

I’m no economist, but if every member of the 1% hires at least 1 member of the 99%, that would be…let’s do the math here… LOTS of jobs.   And that’s just the beginning.  Forget the innovations metal coins will make possible, given that we can mint them in any denomination – coin-operated dialysis machines anyone?  Let’s go directly to how those newly minted coins to pay off the deficit: We could sell the naming rights!.

That’s right. You heard me.  Out: the founding fathers who currently grace our paper currency, people who earned that distinction through service to the country.   In: Coins that honor the highest bidder.  We’re not talking chump change, here; we’re talking Trump change.    Out :  Benjamins and Hamiltons.   In:  (Barry) Diller dollars.  Bezos bucks.  Or, now that corporations are people, Star-bucks and iBucks.  Then,  5 years from now when virtual money replaces actual money and we have a going-out-of-business-sale, 99cent Store Bucks.   Honestly, I don’t see a downside, do you?

Okay, then how about this?

BIG IDEA #2:  HOW TO WIPE OUT THE DEFICIT REDUX

Take all the money from the War on Drugs and all the money from the War in Afghanistan and give it to the Mexican drug cartels to go fight the Taliban.  Perfectly matched in terms of viciousness and ruthlessness, odds are they’ll kill each other off.  Right there, that’s two wars we won’t have to finance.

Added plus:  Since it’s the Taliban who basically finance the poppy trade in Afghanistan (and use the profits to buy weapons to promote their cause), farmers in Afghanistan might be encouraged to grow food crops instead.  Or else – just an idea – we could legalize heroin, invest in the poppy trade ourselves and who knows, instead of a deficit, we would have a surplus!

(On second thought, is morphine a derivative of heroin?  Because if so, after reviewing the first two Big Ideas, the Oracle isn’t sure it should be legalized.  So how about this:)

BIG IDEA #3: THE DEFICIT DOESN”T MATTER

I know, I know.  The deficit is debt.  Fiscally reprehensible.  Morally reprehensible.  And not only that, say deficit hawks, but if we continue on this wayward path of spending, we’ll BANKRUPT OUR GRANDCHILDREN!!!!

There’s only one way to save our kids from this grim future, insist deficit hawks: stop spending money on them now.   Education, health care, food-stamps – cut the funding.  Cut whole departments while we’re at it: the Department of Commerce, the Department of Education, the Department of…wait, what was the third one?  Never mind, if Rick Perry can’t remember, why should I.  (Okay I just googled it:  the Department of Energy.)

Here’s the first problem the Oracle sees with this argument:  the Heisenberg Principle of Uncertainty.   What you find depends on what you’re looking for, or, more precisely, what you’re looking with.  Light is a wave if you’re measuring with an instrument that measures waves.  It’s a particle when you measure with an instrument that measures particle.  So if metrics is your instrument of choice – and where isn’t it these days – then the only things that count are things you can count.   The only things we hold people/corporations and even non-profits accountable for.   We don’t know how – or choose not to – measure creativity or collaboration or any of the skills that an educated work force will need in the years to come.  Instead we measure students’ ability to pass standardized tests.

But wait, you say, I thought this was about the deficit? Okay, here’s the other part of the Heisenberg Principle:  the more precisely you measure one thing, the less you know about the other.  That’s what bothers me so much about the deficit hawks: they’ve conflated the economy and the society.  By measuring the country’s health in terms of its economy, they’re not counting the cost to our society.  Why don’t they count up how much it will cost our grandchildren to deal with the high rates of crime and unemployment that go hand in hand with an uneducated populace?  The asthma and cancer and other diseases induced and/or aggravated by an unhealthy (i.e. unregulated) environment?   The toll on mental health that stress, distrust and isolation all take?   You think that won’t bankrupt our grandchildren 50 years from now…if they live that long?

Of course, deficit hawks aren’t really worried about our grandchildren.  That’s because if their no-spend, no tax policies are enacted,  their grandchildren will be able to buy a one-way ticket out of here.  On a space-ship.   Seriously, why do you think wealthy entrepreneurs are investing so much in commercial space travel?  Because they’re planning a real life version of the Rapture.   Their grandchildren will be lifted up into space and leave the 99% behind to suffer the agonies of hell.  The meek will inherit the earth all right, because the 1% will have left to colonize other planets.  (Honestly I wrote this before Newt Gingrich started talking about moon colonies!)

So here’s what the rest of us need to do:  shift our thought frame.   Why are we focused on counting everything?  What about the intangibles:  trust, empathy, a sense of community, the ties that bind a society together?  Why don’t those matter?

Because what matters depends on our definition of what matter is.  In the old thought frame, particles are discrete entities, what we call things.  They occupy space.  They inhabit time.  That’s what makes them count, what makes them matter.

But quantum physics discovered another kind of matter. These particles, like the gluon, which carries the strong force, aren’t so much “things” as go-betweens.  The glue that holds things together.  As Louisa Gilder says in her excellent book, “The Age of Entanglement”, relationships between quantum “things” are more fundamental and objective than “things” themselves.   Out: metrics – the business of measuring things.  In: Websight – the ability to see how to see how everything interconnects, to understand why society matters.

The Oracle will have more to say on the subject of measurements, but for now…Roger and Out.

The Oracle has spoken.

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That’s where Oracles have it all over scientists as well.   Quantum physicist and Nobel Laureate Niels Bohr once said: “Prediction is difficult, especially about the future.”  Sure, because scientists have to prove their Big Ideas.  They have to run experiments and submit the results of those experiments to peer review.  Not so Oracles. If you ask the Oracle a question and her prediction doesn’t come true, it’s not her fault, it’s yours: you mis-interpreted her.

Take King Croesus, he of rich-as-Croesus-fame, who in the hey-dey of Oracledom, in the sixth century BC, asked the Delphic Oracle:  “Should I make war on the Persians?”

“Do so,” said the Oracle, “and a mighty empire will be destroyed.”

“Aha!” said Croesus, “Mission Accomplished!” and off he went to what he thought was certain victory.  It never occurred to him that the mighty empire to be destroyed was his.

Big Idea #1:  Croesus was stuck in the wrong thought frame. 

Just to be sure we’re on the same page:  a thought-frame is like a mind-set or a paradigm: an integrated set of assumptions that tells us who we are, what we’re doing here and how we fit into the universe.   Whew, now that we’ve got that settled, we can concentrate on more important things, like the Kardashians and the prevalence of zombies…or is that redundant?

After a while though, we forget that the thought-frame is based on assumptions; we think it’s actual reality.  It hardens into ideology.  So when things change and new information challenges “the way things are”, we perceive it as a threat.  To our identity.  To our integrity.  To everything we were taught to believe.

What ensues is something Wikipedia calls “Paradigm Paralysis.”    In the face of change, people deny the new information; they cling to old certainties.   They look backwards.  Towards the Founding Fathers.  Towards the Bible.  Towards Ayn Rand, for crying out loud.  Gripped by fear of uncertainty, we lose our most precious asset, our imagination.  We can no longer imagine a future, how we might adapt to change, how things could be.

Sound familiar?

Big Idea #2:  America has paradigm paralysis.   

So now you know why I became an Oracle.  Not for fame and fortune, although, hello, reality TV:  what could be more interesting than a woman who lives in a cave with a natural gas deposit whose fumes send her into a state of altered consciousness from whence she derives her hazy visions of the future and whose lover is the Sun God Apollo?  Okay, maybe not that interesting and anyway, I live in a house in Berkeley where the Sun God rarely makes an appearance and all I’ve got going for me in the trance-inducing department is the Home Shopping Channel.  Absent those perks, it’s all about the mission: to move America beyond its paralysis and into a new thought frame.

To accomplish that lofty aim, I’ll be using the same device scientists use to explore territory they don’t yet have the tools to analyze:  a thought experiment.   Only instead of figuring out how cats can be alive and dead (a famous thought experiment called “Schrodinger’s Cat” which wouldn’t be so famous if Schrodinger had remembered that cats have nine lives), my thought experiment consists of a simple question:

“What if everything you’d been told was true turned out not to be?”

Stay tuned.

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I hate action movies but because I have a 14-year old friend who loves them – and, okay, because I’ll go see anything with Robert Downey Jr. – I went to see the original Ironman. That’s when I realized the era of action movies was over. Action movies are structured as dramas. They follow – however loosely – the formula laid down by Aristotle: there’s a hero, there’s a villain, they fight, the hero wins, end of story. Everything must lead inexorably to that end.

But in movies like Ironman, it’s not the end of the story. There’s more story coming, next year, in another movie. The whole point – the only point – of the movie is to set up the next one. Everything leads inexorably not to a conclusion but to the sequel. Basically, the franchise movie is a trailer.

Which is fine with me. I don’t even like Aristotle (don’t ask). But I do like trailers. Or would like them if they really were trailers. If that is to say they weren’t two and a half hours long and tickets weren’t $14.

So here’s what I propose to the movie studios. Do one franchise movie if you must – to establish the franchise – then just do trailers. They could be like serials, except we wouldn’t be watching them in a theatre. We could watch them on our iPhones or our iPods, so right there, enormous savings Plus, you could probably get tax breaks for helping break our dependence on oil.

Or, hey what about this, we could watch them at work. If they were just ten minutes long – the exact amount of time it takes to smoke a cigarette or drink a cup of coffee, we could have a franchise break. Get that testosterone mojo where it’s most needed: in the workplace. Want to rally the troops? It beats a weekend retreat playing Twister.

Don’t think you have to go slumming in the B-list for actors to star in your franchise trailers. After all, you’re signing them to maybe a year of steady work. That’s worth a bundle. It would be like Estee Lauder signing Giselle Bunchen. Okay, maybe a cosmetics company isn’t how you’d want to brand Gerald Butler or Vin Diesel, but let’s not forget Angelina. She already is a franchise. Every year she gets another kid.

So okay, that’s as far as I’ve fleshed it out. I’m sure professionals in the entertainment media can take it to the next level. And when the whole franchise trailer thing takes off, I won’t even ask for a cut. I’ll just settle back and enjoy them with everybody else. At least the ones starring Robert Downey Jr.

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Until recently, I have inhabited a space well outside the mainstream, which is to say I never get an answer right on “Family Feud.” They say “Name a job that’s almost always done by men.” I say “Pimp!” It never makes the survey. And yet, my last few Crackpot Theories have been rated “Sober as a Judge”. A theory I cooked up twenty years ago this week received unexpected validation from the L.A. Times article. What gives?

Let’s begin at the beginning, in Israel, where I made an impromptu visit in 1985 to escape the Christmas traffic in Los Angeles. Why I thought Israel – the actual birthplace of Christ – wouldn’t make a big deal out of his birthday, I don’t know. All I knew was I wanted to go horse-back riding.

Friends had told me about “Vered Ha’galil – a dude ranch between Tiberias and Sfad where you could horseback ride right into the Sea of Galilee. That was all I needed to hear. I hopped on a plane, landed in Jerusalem…and that’s when the trip went south. Well, north actually, but – oh, you know what I mean.

Having heard that Israel has more deaths by automobile than by anything else, I decided to go by bus. The concierge at the hotel wrote down the number of the bus I would need and told me to hurry. It was Shabbat. Buses stopped running at 5:30.

I raced to the bus station to find hundreds of buses and no one who spoke English – or even Yiddish. (Not that it would have helped me if they did speak Yiddish, since the only two phrases I knew – learned at my grandmother’s knee – roughly translate as: “Good for the Jews” and “Bad for the Jews.” But at least I would have felt at home.)

I ran up to person after person, holding up my little scrap of paper with the bus number written on it, my tone of voice increasingly quavery: “Vered Ha’galil”? Finally, someone pointed to a bus. The number matched the number on my slip but it didn’t say “Vered Ha’galil.” Or “Tiberias.” Or “Sfad.”

“Vered Ha’galil”, I asked the driver.

He waved me on board.

As the bus pulled out of the station, it was already dark. Every time we passed a marker for Tiberias, the bus went in the opposite direction. The first time, I asked the woman in front of me, “Vered Ha’galil”? She nodded. By the fourth or fifth time – at which point “quavery” had up-graded to “bleating” – she pretended not to hear. Ditto the other passengers.

Just in case I appear to you now as I did to them – i.e. crazy, keep in mind that Vered Ha’galil is in the Golan Heights – the Gaza of its day. There was shooting going on. Plus, at the rate we were going it would be midnight when we got there. What if there weren’t any taxis?

Indeed it was a quarter to midnight when the bus made a stop. The road was pitch-black, but by the bus’ headlights you could see…nothing. No bus station. No sign. No cabs.

“Vered Ha’galil”, said the bus driver. He motioned me off.

Awash in what I know as “flop sweat”, I saw ahead of me someone else who must have gotten off the bus. At least I hoped he had. Fellow passenger or serial killer – or both – he seemed my only hope. I followed him, into a copse of thickly leaved trees where I quickly lost him. Or he me.

Flailing on through the brush, regardless, I suddenly caught sight of glimpse of light. I approached to see the warmly lit interior of a house. No, a lodge! There it was. Ver’ed Hagalil. And although this was before the whole “Yes!” with the clenched fist/bent elbow thing caught on, I felt exactly what that was designed to express: the thrill of victory!

The next morning – Christmas morning – as I galloped through avocado groves, clinging for dear life to the horn of my saddle whilst the wrangler harangued me with an Anti-Papist screed, my life in Hollywood flashed before my eyes. There I was cushioned from the ordinary stresses of life. The dry-cleaner lost my dry-cleaning? That was the gofer’s gig. Stymied by the labyrinthine menu of options when I called, oh, anyone? Not really – my secretary placed the calls. The insurance company balking at a re-imbursement? Refer to business manager. Let them have the satisfaction of these small victories, I was focused on the BIG one – selling a pilot or getting a script green-lighted or, in lieu of that happy event, seeing somebody else’s script – that had been green-lighted – fall apart. Now we’re talking satisfaction!

Of course, big victories are harder to come by than small victories, the upshot being that you rarely feel satisfied. You’re supposed to find your satisfaction in money. But money is to satisfaction what shoes were to Imelda Marcus – you can never have enough. You’re always going to want more. And more. And…just before my horse plunged into the actual Sea of Galilee, I had an epiphany: Hollywood success was an addiction!

Okay, flash forward to last week when I saw this headline in the LA Times: “For True Fulfillment, Seek Satisfaction, Not Happiness.” I read the article because I had been thinking about happiness, specifically why the Founding Fathers changed John Locke’s definition of human rights – “life, liberty and property” to “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness”. (And why the UN Charter changed it once again, to “life, liberty and security of person”. Does anybody know? ) But according to “Satisfaction: The Science of Finding True Fulfillment” by neuroscientist Gregory Berns, happiness and satisfaction are two different things.

Berns uses brain-mapping to explain the phenomenon of satisfaction. Normally, I don’t truck much with brain-mapping. It sounds like phrenology to me and we all know how good that was for the Jews. But okay, there’s a structure in the brain called the striatum which houses more dopamine receptors than any other part of the brain. Dopamine is the feel-good chemical released when something unexpected and challenging occurs. At the same time, the stress of the situation produces cortisol. Something in the interaction of these two chemicals, Berns suggests, produces the feeling I had upon arriving at Vered Ha’galil.

But not only has Nature has designed our brains to crave novelty and challenge… As “novelty becomes more routine, so the stakes keep getting raised for more novelty….we must constantly seek higher levels of experience to maintain the same level of satisfaction.”

Okay, so it’s not exactly the same thing as my theory. His is “novelty becomes more routine”; mine is “less opportunity for small victories”. His “higher stakes”, my “more money”. But as far as I’m concerned, this research corroborates the theory I had twenty years ago in Israel. Just as Hollywood success is an addiction, so too is “the pursuit of happiness” – it’s all about the chase.

All of which leads me not to further reflection about John Locke and the Founding Fathers, but to the question with which I began this piece: why, after a lifetime of being Crackpot, have I suddenly made the acquaintance of the Zeitgeist? If it’s a result of my own hard work – having strayed off the main road I hacked through enough underbrush to find my way back – shouldn’t I feel more, well…satisfied? But what other explanation could there for my current standing on the Crackpot Scale? There’s only one I can think of and it’s this month’s Crackpot Theory:

The moon is in the seventh house. Jupiter’s aligned with Mars. It is the dawning of the Age of Aquarius.

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Gadzooks, I expostulated, how did he know? In fact, I’ve been thinking about the Mind/Body split since my first grade class put on a show for our parents. We all wore the same thing—a white undershirt, black pants and a white and black Mickey Mouse mask—so I was mystified when my parents told me afterwards how good I was. How did they know which one was me? We were all costumed alike and wearing masks. I had no idea my body had given me away.

At six, my sense of myself as all head/no body may be understandable, particularly when—did I neglect to say this?—the school was in France, home of René Descartes, the French philosopher who invented the Mind/Body split when he said: “I Ain’t Got No Body.” Oh, no, wait, that was David Lee Roth, former lead singer for Van Halen. What Descartes said was: “I think therefore I am.” Which—trust me on this—amounts to the same thing.

For those lucky few who weren’t drilled in Cartesian rationality, the Mind in the Mind/Body split is the grand fromage. It’s not just Mind and Matter, it’s Mind over matter. Mind says Matter doesn’t matter. Mind dismisses the evidence of its senses, of its eyes and ears, like the jurors in the Rodney King trial or the Bush Administration’s jury-rigged insistence on WMD in Iraq. Or the “perception of a liberal bias in public broadcasting”— just in case you thought I’d forgotten my nightmare.

The man hawking the “perception of a liberal bias” is Ken Tomlinson, the Bush-appointed head of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, the Congressional oversight committee intended to keep government out of public radio and television. That there is no actual evidence to support this claim is no worry to Tomlinson or anyone else in the Bush administration because they don’t believe in empirical data, they believe in Empire reality.

Yes, I know I already wrote about Empire reality in December’s Crackpot Theory but here it is in shorthand for those who missed it and are too lazy to click on Crackpot Archives and scroll down to December: Empirical reality is supported by evidence, it’s Science. Empire reality demands that we take it on Faith. Which brings us back to Tomlinson and the Mind/Body split.

Note that Tomlinson doesn’t say “there is a liberal bias”; there is a “perception” of one. The fact that surveys of PBS viewers and NPR listeners don’t reveal such a bias makes no never-mind to him. That would be empirical reality. Instead, he insists to the Senate that the perception requires correction. That’s why he put Paul Gigot, editorial director of the WSJ, on the air—in the name of “political balance”.

Which just goes to show how “unbalanced” Empire Reality is – “unbalanced” as in “crazy” or “insane”. It’s the Mind/Body split tipped into pathology, like anorexia, a perfect example of a perception—“I’m too fat!”—over-riding the evidence of your eyes and ears—“You weigh ninety pounds!”. That’s where therapy comes in, to try to bring the perception in line with reality. But hey, therapy’s for wimps, not for Empire builders.

Here’s how Empire builders deal with anorexia—by pandering to the perception. If the body politic were anorexic, the Empire builders would put it on a diet. No, wait—there’s no hypothetical “if” about it. That’s exactly what Tomlinson and his ideological cohorts are trying to do—starve the public of an evidence-based narrative. The “liberal” in “liberal media” means that the media promote a secular narrative. So the “political balance” Tomlinson’s talking about isn’t putting Paul Gigot on the air. “NOW with Ann Coulter” doesn’t cut it either. They’re aiming for “NOVA: how God created heaven and earth.” “NOVA: how the Rapture works.” “NOVA Scotia and the Christians who Live There”.

Hence, this month’s Crackpot Theory: The real agenda of the attacks on the “liberal media” is to replace Science with Faith as the author of our collective narrative.

You want proof? Just take my word for it.

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And that right there is all you need to know about the sexual abuse scandals that have rocked the Church.

Granted, I’m not an expert on shepherding. My only experience of shepherding is when I took my dog Bartleby to an arena in Los Angeles where for a small fee they let your dog herd their sheep

Despite the fact that he’s half Australian shepherd – which is why I took him in the first place; God forbid he should have some need or instinct that wasn’t being met – Bartleby did not warm to the task. He preferred to rest against my legs than to take the shepherd’s cues, causing the shepherd to call him a “Momma’s boy” and hand the crook to me. Suddenly, I’m Bo-Peep.

And by the way, this crook was no dainty little Marie Antoinette thing, it was hefty. I mention this so you’ll understand my response when the shepherding pro told me to hit Bartleby with it to get him to commit. “Thy rod and staff they comfort in me” indeed.

Other than that, all I know is what I read in the papers, like this article in the NY Times about a group of French shepherds who, faced with a cut in their subsidies, walked their sheep to Paris to protest. When they encountered a cordon of policemen blocking their entry to the Place de la Concorde, the French shepherds picked up their sheep and threw them at the flics.

Well, doesn’t that just give new meaning to the term “animal husbandry” – animal abusive husbandry.

Then came a story in the science section of the New York Times about oxytocin, a hormone that promotes bonding. The article said that sexually stimulating a woman results in the release of oxytocin, thus explaining not only the deluge of “women like to cuddle after sex” letters that rained down on Ann Landers, but also explains, says the NY Times, the long-standing practice of shepherds when dealing with ewes who reject their young: to get them to bond with their lambs, they sexually stimulate the sheep.

So that’s what the whole priests abusing altar boys thing was – trying to get them to bond with the Lamb of God. Omi…well, God.

Because I just remembered another story in the L.A. Times in which President Bush disclosed that when he was 14, he’d spent the summer in Ireland…herding sheep! President Bush, who wants us all to love Jesus, who, some of his followers think, was appointed by God to be our leader – if not Jesus, then Jesus-adjacent. And he’s screwing the entire country!

But revenons a nos moutons, “let us return to our sheep,” as the French say (and now we know why). Or let us at least return to Bartleby. It’s not that Bartleby lacks the herding instinct; just ask the kids at one particularly disastrous Channukah party when, overstimulated by the jelly donuts the children were feeding them, he became a veritable Border Collie and literally herded one into a cactus plant. But since then, he’s seen the movie “Babe” at least seventeen times and developed a whole different take on shepherding

For those of you who haven’t even seen it once – and really, what’s wrong with you? –“Babe” features two kinds of shepherds. There are the afore-mentioned Border Collies, who think sheep respond only to intimidation. “It’s all attitude,” says the sheepdog Fly to the would-be sheep-pig Babe, “They just have to know who’s boss. You have to dominate them. Do that and they’ll do anything you want.”

Indeed, Pope Benedict is being lionized for being just such a disciplinarian, running a tight ship. The White House speaks openly about the need to assert dominance. We’ve got Jerry Falwells and Pat Robertsons nip at our heels, yipping and yapping to keep us in line.

But this command-and-control style of leadership doesn’t work for Babe. Babe respects the sheep. He recognizes them as equals. He engages their cooperation. He says things like “I’d be very much obliged…” “I can’t tell you how grateful I am”… And the sheep, who are not as stupid as the Border Collies would have it, who, as reported in New Scientist can distinguish a smiling human face from an angry one and respond more to the smiling face, cooperate to help Babe win the Champion Sheepherder title he – or his “Boss” – so wants.

And what can we learn from this parable, my little lambkins? This month’s Crackpot Theory: Never elect or follow a leader who has shepherded sheep. Or else: Make the movie “Babe” required viewing for Priests, Presidents and Popes.

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1. Women are judged by their looks, both by prospective spouses and prospective employers, which is why nine out of ten women are on a diet at any given time. This means keeping a running tally in their heads of the number of calories they consumed that day, dividing the overage by x to determine how many calories they must subtract from their diet and over how many days (y) to achieve the weight loss necessary to fit into the red dress they bought two (2) sizes too small. Who has time for calculus?
2. Little girls are too good at math. It’s their precocious grasp of math that leads them to realize when reading “Snow White and the Seven Dwarves” that
   1. there are only two kinds of men in the world, dwarves and Prince Charmings; and
   2. the odds of them finding the Prince are seven to one.

   That’s why little girls don’t do math; it’s too depressing.

3. Even if little girls do soldier on, K-12 math problems show an unconscious bias towards boys, who, for reasons best known to Freud, are fascinated by trains rushing towards one another at variant speeds. Why not pose problems that might interest girls? Read Ivana Trump’s explanation of how she buys bras:“I go to Bloomingdale’s, to the 9th floor, and I buy 2000 of the white, 2000 of the beige, 2000 of the black…Then six months later, I go back and do it all over again.”Now multiply 6000 by two, divide by 365 and multiply again by two to solve for: How many breasts does Ivana Trump have?Little girls solving problems like these might grow up to be economists, solving even more important questions, like “Is it possible to have too much money?”

And speaking of economics, President Summers might have also turned for an answer to why women are absent in the higher echelons of science to the things women are good at, like, well…

1. Economics. Okay, maybe not Rational Choice, a school of economics which is rigorously mathematical (i.e. which excludes any reality that doesn’t conform to its mathematical models), but Behavioral Economics, which looks at how people actually behave. While Rationalists got caught up in the irrational exuberance of the 90’s bubble, women looked at how the A-list traders spent their nights — stuffing C-notes into the G-strings of exotic dancers — and decided to invest in real estate. They don’t need to teach.
2. Women are good at history. They remember the “science” of Phrenology, in which measurements of the skull “explained” the inferiority of non-Caucasian peoples. They remember the words of that eminent Victorian Matthew Arnold “explaining” that the thicker lips of people of African descent made it impossible for them to pronounce Latin correctly and therefore to teach Latin. They are therefore suspicious of any science which is more narrative than fact, particularly when the narrative serves to justify discrimination or at least to make discrimination moot, like the psycho(evolutionary)babble that led President Summers to pose his ill-considered question. Because finally, women are good at…
3. Logic. Taking the logic of evolutionary psychology to its own extreme, the evolutionary advantage of evolutionary psychology is to tell a story that pleases the people in power, to wit, a story that reinforces the prejudices and paradigms that keep them in power.

Come to think of it, that could answer the question I started out with, why President Summers resorted to speculation in the first place.

Or is that too cuckoo?

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