Tales from the Third Lobe - The Smoke of the Burning

About the author: Descended from old English money, Vidicon was raised by spiny echidnas in the mountainous rainforests of the North American Southeast. Lured back to society by time-traveling gray/reptiloid alien hybrids posing as renegade Jesuits, he has managed to maintain his outsider's perspective and an appetite for crunchy insects. Today, Vidicon is a world-class synchronicity surfer and an unlicensed quantum mechanic. He has a fourth-degree black belt in weird. About his bi-weekly column: Tales from the Third Lobe are the unfocused meanderings of the World's Smartest Moron. Topics range widely over the sciences, religion, philosophy, technology, modern culture, mysticism, Vidicon's personal history and viewpoints, and whatever pissed him off in the media last week. View all articles by Laszlo Q. V. St-J. "Vidicon" Xalieri, 2HC Columnist...

Last night I saw Santa Claus kissing those wasps that come out of all the little holes in the ceiling tiles when you doze off at your desk.

In fact, do it on the whiteboard in your office or cubicle. And then—once you're absolutely sure you have done it correctly—put it on a t-shirt. Then, wearing the t-shirt, duct-tape the sleeves closed around your arms and tape the bottom edge down around your middle (or hips or thighs if you went the XL route) and mail yourself to Margie Arrant Palmer, Vice Principal, c/o Park Elementary School, 13185 Highway 27, Hamilton, GA 31811.

And beware the red pen.

It's a trick, of course. If you use the standard method of diagramming sentences, the lines you draw are in actuality a sigil that invokes a middle-ranked demon that induces suggestibility in others but also conveys strange powers of clear communication. And can locate lost treasures—like that missing remote for your VCR.

It seems they all can do that. Go figure.

Today's mystery: What's Vidicon been smoking? Unfortunately, I give you only 0.61803398874989484820458683436564 guesses. But here's a hint. The only thing burning is everything.

(Man, that's the last time I spend all day out in the sun without a hat.)

Which brings us to demons and spirits and the magic smoke.

Back in the old days, when literacy was magic, well, every other kind of science was magic, too. Spirits lived in everything and you basically let the spirits out by holding whatever it was over a fire for a while.

(Or baking it in the hot sun for a few hours.)

Booze has been evil for ages, especially distilled (ahem) spirits. When you eat or drink things, if they have powerful spirits in them, then those spirits will get into your system and influence your behavior and your thinking and potentially even drive you mad. Fire was the tool you used to set them free from their base substances and concentrate their powers. And then you captured them in sealed bottles and jars and kept them until you needed them.

So drinking alcoholic beverages—especially those beverages you cooked and/or distilled as part of the process—was putting yourself in the power of demons and spirits. And when you smoked something, you basically set the spirit free and inhaled it immediately into your body, inviting demonic possession.

And so forth.

Wizards ("wise people") and witches ("wise people") were scientists—chemists and doctors, to varying degrees, and possibly psychologists too—and were accused of trafficking with spirits, which were motherfucking substances in jars. And for their crimes of actually coming to some sort of limited understanding of scientific principles and medicine, they were thrown on the fire themselves by religious freaks and had their own animating spirits expunged and purified.

And I twitch any time I hear about religious freaks taking action to limit or suppress science. Because I know my history. A new Dark Age is just a book-burning away.

Can't happen again, you say? Not in this day and age? Well, that's just not true.

Afghanistan, battered and bruised since the Soviets started trying to invade in the middle of the previous century, had been a moderately enlightened civilization. Then the Taliban took power and completely reversed the direction of their society. Women were forced out of the workforce, books with illustrations in them were collected and burned, and just about anything that could be interpreted as a representational painting or sculpture was destroyed. And let me tell you, it's a pretty rare science text that has no pictures.

See, all you have to do is get outvoted by religious fundamentalists—the insidious sort who believe that the events depicted in their creation myths are literally true—in a country where those in power get unlimited control of military hardware and have tremendous sway over the popular press.

Don't forget the Prohibition happened. In the USA. With enough votes to amend the Constitution.

The people we have in power now still think in terms of spirits and demons. Such language is permanently written into our constitution and our laws. It's a legal given that human bodies have spirits that can be released by trauma and death (and, of course, burning), and most arguments concerning abortion are voiced in terms of determining when a fetus should be judged to have a soul, so that killing one would be considered the sin of murder by one's God. And most arguments against cloning are spoken in terms of infringing on God's patents and copyrights, arguments against men playing God.

In the words of our own President, "We are in no way, shape, or form should a human being, play God." (George W. Bush, 20/20 on ABC, Washington, D.C., Jan. 14, 2005)

Please note that in reading some of the post-tsunami context for this quote, I believe he may have actually been trying to say that we should stop blaming God for Acts of God—something I kinda agree with, as long as the principle is also expanded to apply to conception, mitosis, and protein folding. But even if the context is a bit bruised, we all know the sentiment is correct, or else that wording wouldn't even be in his vocabulary. It's a matter of public record that Bush's policies have always tried to suppress science—so that God and/or the oil-drilling companies can go on with their work without the interference of mere mortals.

Okay, you say. Bush isn't very progressive scientifically and he gives religion a lot of lip service. How does that instigate a new Dark Age?

I get your point. It doesn't—and it won't. Not by itself. All we have right now is fertile ground.

See, ordinarily I wouldn't have thought that the US would have, as a nation, condoned torture and forfeiture of rights of expression and rights to due process and expected privileges of comfort and privacy, and invasion of sovereign nations on a motherfucking pretense, and yet all it takes for such a massive swing of popular support is a single event. And a media snow-job or two.

Who do I blame? Bush or you guys?

I say you guys. You see the limits of Bush's prowess above. And you guys are swayed by that?

I can tell you why. It's because you, as a nation, can't understand a sentence that's more than three words long. In fact, given a sentence that is longer than three words, you tend to take your favorite three words out of the sentence, file them away, and then claim you understood what was said.

That kind of functional illiteracy plus some kind of nearly inevitable future event that can be ascribed to the Evils of Science equals the onset of the New Dark Age. If I could find a way to say that using only three small words, I sure as hell would.

So screw it. I'm going back outside to back my brain in the strong summer sun. Diagram your fucking sentence. Meet me halfway, dammit.

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Vidicon was the Buddha but the pay was lousy.