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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...
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Did You Feel It?See, at this point, we've put up with that raucous clanking noise that seems like it would go on forever. Now we've crested the hill—almost—and then there was that lurch. Did you feel it? That clank, and that attendant hitch, like something important has been cut loose and is falling away. It's something akin to the closing of a book when you get to the end. It almost doesn't matter whether it was a good book or a bad one, because the feeling I'm thinking about is the same for either. It's the feeling that says, "And now, back to reality." It's kinda like getting fired or quitting in a spectacular fashion. Or even dying, I'd imagine.
On a roller coaster, that lurch was the gearing disengaging. That was the hook letting go. We now have enough momentum to carry us the rest of the way to the top, and then over. And after that? Well, you know what happens after that. Everything else, in rapid succession.
That part that comes next—that's the part we're here for. That's the part we paid money for.
Here comes the ride.
What the hell am I talking about? Everything, potentially. The past is words in a book, the drive mechanism for the carts on the coaster. It's happened. It's unchangeable. It's what got you here. That feeling? That's the past falling away. It's also the future headed toward you at a less-than-safe-looking speed.
Where we are now is the tipping point. Or, more accurately, just past it.
If you know your algebra, I could explain the curve we're on in terms of graphed polynomials, maxima and minima. If you're up on your calculus, I could mention first- and second-order derivatives: the instantaneous slope of the curve we're on and its rate of change. I suppose I could also bring in the spacetime physics rubber sheet models and get you to imagine a marble on a bumpy path, transitioning from orbiting one body to another. I could talk in terms of permutations of strange attractors in dynamic nonlinear systems.
But math isn't visceral for many people. Instead, think of the roller coaster. Or being in an express elevator when it gets to the top of where it's going.
What you feel is a change in weight—a change in the forces acting on you. A change in gravity, if you will. It's one of our primary senses, especially if you spend any amount of time vaguely upright and moving. Yet somehow this sense doesn't rate in the top five of sight, hearing, smell, taste, and touch. We rely on many of those five to tell whether we're moving, but we need that other sense to notice and analyze those forces that act on us. If you can imagine being a sighted person in the kingdom of the blind, I think you can imagine what it's like to be the only person who can tell whether you're speeding up or slowing down, whether the ground you're on is tilted and in which direction and how far. If that were you, you'd be the only one left standing.
Well, you're not the only one who can feel it. We all feel it.
That lurch, that hitch, that whatever just happened.... For me, it was political.
Which, if you know me at all, isn't very surprising.
Tom DeLay gets booked on charges of, well, doing whatever it is he does best, which does not necessarily include legislating. At the point of this writing, Karl Rove was canceling all of his appointments for the foreseeable future and sitting tight, awaiting his indictment, along with Scooter Libby and three quarters of the White House staff. Cheney is rumored to be considering resigning, but I'm not sure I buy that yet. (Check back with me in fifteen minutes.) And Bush is sitting there with whatever booze he can sneak in his system trying to control his nervous foot-tapping and eyeblinking, mentally trying on Nixon's old gilt lapel pin that reads Unindicted Coconspirator.
The entire corrupt network that put this batch of bastards in office back in 2000—and before that,in Texas—is rolling up. From Abramoff and his crew of bribe-laundering "lobbyists" and campaign-fund-laundering DeLay, two of the principal links connecting the Bush Administration and the neoconservative organization to their corporate and loony fundamentalist money sources, to the we-didn't-learn-anything-when-we-worked-for-Nixon-and-Ford personages who specialize in cloak-and-dagger political monkey-wrenches and and propaganda. When it's all over, Bush will be surrounded by whatever friends he has left that got their jobs through, well, being friends of his. Unless they can sprout some competency, they'll all go down together.
And that gives me hope. Hope that we can shut down our unjustifiable program of military dominance that has, by the way, no damned strength left; hope that we can return to a path of greater social justice: reduction of poverty, reduction of the burden of bad luck, and reduction of the abominable inequalities and ground-in bigotries that make life hell for the undeserving; and hope that civil liberties and the concept of "justice for all" will be restored.
That shift I felt was a fundamental change in the forces of political gravity. A bottom-line rule changed. That rule used to be the one that said that people in positions of wealth and power were unassailable. People who were friends of wealth and power were unassailable. And now? No amount of favors that Bush and his cronies owe you will protect you. That's a pretty damned big change. I felt it and it cheered me immensely.
But that was just me. I'm apparently a political junkie, and that's the kind of thing I'm attuned to. I'm happier when I think that the common person has shifted just a bit closer to getting a fair shake.
How was it for you? Did the earth move?
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Vidicon needs to fasten his seatbelt. |
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