Strange Irony of Fate

 In his immortal collection of concentration camp stories, This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen, the Polish writer and Auschwitz survivor Tadeusz Borowski recounts one episode of attempted resistance. As a group of people were being herded into the gas chambers, one woman made a lunge for one of the guard's holstered weapons. Freeing it from his belt, she waved it around and fired several shots into the commandant's gut. 

As he lay expiring on the ground, the commandant seemed genuinely shocked and indignant about what had just occurred. What could have made the woman want to do such a thing? "Oh God, my God," he reportedly said, "what have I done to deserve such suffering?" (Vedder trans.)

Stabbed in the Back

 At one point in his 1904 book of political and social commentary, The New Star Chamber, Edgar Lee Masters (one of my personal writer-poet-lawyer heroes) observes of the Spanish-American war and its aftermath: "Everyone knows that the Filipinos were our allies and that we betrayed them; that we broke our word with Cuba and that the course of the president has been uncandid and inconsistent."

He was referring to the fact that the U.S. pretended to support the national liberation struggles of both Cuba and the Philippines, in their effort to free themselves from Spanish domination—and then, when the U.S. had used the blood of their patriots to defeat Spain, turned around and stabbed them in the back by trying to assert a new U.S. claim to imperial rule in the former Spanish Empire. 

Alone Again (Naturally)

 I've always found the second half of Gilbert O'Sullivan's song "Alone Again (Naturally)" to be much more effective than the first. The 1972 hit single opens, as you may recall, with a story about the speaker being stood up at the altar and threatening to hurl himself off a tower in order to punish his erstwhile bride-to-be. After the chorus and bridge and all that, the song then shifts to a second narrative: about the death of the speakers' two parents. 

The first part of the song always strikes me as a bit forced and artificial. It has all the makings of a sentimental, mawkish scenario that the songwriter invented purely for the sake of wringing self-pity. The events position the speaker too perfectly as a unilateral victim, with the jilting bride as a cartoonish villain. I can't really bring myself to believe that any of this happened—or would happen to anyone—as described. 

Last Call for the AI Ark?

 There is an odd disconnect right now in the public's attitude to AI. On the one hand, the era of hype and fear about the new technology appears to have peaked around 2023 and to have been on a downward slope ever since. We've all gotten used to the presence of chatbots now. And however impressive they are—and I do indeed continue to be wowed that we have built a robot brain that can convincingly mimic human conversation—they also seem to be transforming our lives rather less than we had either hoped or dreaded. In daily life, they often provide little more to us than a variant on the old-fashioned search engine experience—a handy way to gather information from the internet quickly. 

Generative AI is in many ways so extraordinary compared to prior generations of information technology that I think we all assumed it would have to change the world. But sometimes, it may in fact be possible to build something amazing that nonetheless has little discernible impact on our daily lives. A few years into this collective social experiment, and jobs have not been systematically displaced by the new tech. The chatbots have proved most adept at drafting unwanted discussion posts or term papers for lazy college students; but any writing or creating that requires going beyond the most generic, mediocre, statistically-average boilerplate still requires a human touch. 

A Visit from Ahor

 Arthur Koestler's memoir Arrow in the Blue—a book that held great personal meaning for me when I first read it as a young aspiring writer and aspiring lefty activist—begins by introducing us to a sort of private cosmology that Koestler developed in childhood. It was largely a Manichaean universe, in which two countervailing forces battled each other eternally, with no ultimate victor.

On one side of the fight was Ahor—which stood in Koestler's mind for "Ancient Horror." It was a presence that Koestler associated in childhood with visits to the dentist; but which in adulthood would assume much more serious forms—his stint in a French concentration camp at the outset of the war, for example; or his sentence to prison in Franco's Spain for his reporting on the civil war. In essence, Ahor represented the forces of writhing, squirming evil—ever present in posse—that lie just beneath the superficial appearance of normality and stability in human life. 

A Pleasant Fiction

 In his Reflections on War and Death, Sigmund Freud writes at one point of the "feeling of strangeness in a world which used to seem so beautiful and familiar to us," which he and many of his contemporaries experienced at the outbreak of World War I. (Brill/Kuttner trans. throughout.)

The feeling, he said, came from a sense of "disappointment" or disenchantment at the spectacle of the way so-called "civilized" societies had descended into barbarism. The governments that had set themselves up as the embodiments and enforcers of morality internally were now behaving with crude brutality and dishonesty in their relations to other states. 

Wild Spiders

 At most news out of the Trump administration, I feel only a kind of impersonal disgust, revulsion, contempt or indignation. 

The current crisis over Greenland, though, is one of those times in the Trump era (and there have been a few before) when I have felt something closer to actual panic. 

These are the moments when you realize we are not led merely by a cruel and incompetent man—but by a kind of Hitlerian maniac, who would destroy the whole world and everything in it just to impose his arbitrary will on others.