Themon the Bard

Spoiler Alert — Superman The Movie
(Not that there are any surprises to spoil)

So you might guess that I didn’t like the movie. I did like it, but I also didn’t. I think it was a great 20-minute story that dragged on for two and half hours of mano a mano slug-fest. It was an incredibly noisy movie, visually and audibly. And I didn’t care for the score, at least on first hearing: I didn’t even stay through the credits.

This is Christopher Nolan’s dark re-imagining of the Man of Steel, much like the re-imagined Batman of his Dark Knight series. It’s a first step toward trying to put some real motivation behind a guy who wears tights and a cape and can’t be touched by bullets. Given the incredible basic premise, it isn’t a half-bad attempt.

Kal-El (Superman’s Kryptonian name) is born on a planet collapsing from extractive resource depletion, genetic reprogramming of the race, and war. The war part is very odd, because there doesn’t seem to be anyone the Kryptonians are at war with. Nor is there any indication that they’ve even met any other intelligent races in their attempts to colonize the galaxy. They’re all alone out there in the big, harsh, empty universe with its wretched, stony, poison-wreathed rocks for the Kryptonian colonies to die on, weapons in hand, apparently screaming in rage at the sheer emptiness of it all. Nonetheless, they have their Supreme Commander, General Zod, a fleet of dreadnoughts large enough to take on the Death Star, ceremonial armor, deadly hand-weapons, and imposing, militaristic, decadent architectural monstrosities straight out of a Geiger painting.

In an extremely noisy escape from dreadnoughts commanded by General Zod while mounted on a giant, leathery dragonfly, Kal-El’s father, Jor-El, manages to steal the entire genetic database for Krypton, beam it into his newborn son’s genetic structure, slap him into an infant-sized escape pod, and launch it toward the Earth. Huzzah.

We see Kal-El’s childhood on Earth as Clark Kent through flashbacks throughout the movie. Those flashbacks are the only interesting and touching parts of the whole 150 minute film. Comic book heroes have always appealed to adolescents — that’s who pays for them, after all — particularly their sense of alienation: the X-Men, Spiderman, the Hulk, the Batman. This movie explores Superman’s alienation pretty well — a sweet kid with good instincts who really, really, really doesn’t fit in. Like the day at school that his X-Ray Vision kicks in, and he panics and locks himself in a closet. Weirdo, the kids say. What’s wrong with him? He saves a school bus full of kids that drives off a bridge into the water, and the parents of the children he saves are terrified, though they can’t quite believe what their kids have told them. Weirdo, they say. What’s wrong with him?

His adoptive Earth-father, Jonathan Kent, is no easier on him. This is not the kindly Glenn Ford of the 1978 Superman, dealing out folksy Kansas platitudes and blue skies of endless optimism. Kevan Costner comes across as a real product of the 1950′s midwest — stern, hard-edged, distant, a little afraid of his son, and a whole lot afraid for him. It’s a bitter lesson he teaches Clark — stay hidden. Otherwise, people will hate you. They’ll try to kill you. So thorough is this indoctrination that Clark lets his father die in a tornado rather than reveal his powers.

That’s enough to mess you up for life.

So we first meet the adult Clark as a drifter, kicking around fishing boats and oil rigs, blending in as best he can and moving on when he’s forced by his strange sense of honor to save people from industrial disasters of their own making, like the oil-rig fire we see in the previews, where he stands like Atlas under a world of flaming steel.

It’s this compulsion to help the people of Earth that makes this Superman an enigma. He has no reason to love humans — just the two that raised him, and frankly more his mom than his dad. Weirdo, they all say. What’s wrong with you? Yet compelled to help, he certainly is. He doesn’t seem to understand it any better than we do, and that’s what makes this work. There’s no real reason for it, and no apology. It’s just a fixed constant in his character, like Batman’s fear of cowardice and impotence that drives his endless thirst for revenge.

We’ll breeze right by how the drifter Clark just happens to be handling bags for Lois Lane at a super-top-secret military dig in the arctic where they’ve found a spaceship under 20,000 years of ice. Of course, the spaceship is Kryptonian, sent out as an automated seed probe some 20,000 years ago, only to crash on Earth and get buried in ice (it was apparently piloted by a Kryptonian version of Microsoft Windows). Clark carries a little key-fob with him from his escape pod that turns out to be the Universal Ignition Key for all Kryptonian seedships, dreadnoughts, and computer systems; it also contains the stored Mind of Jor-El, his Kryptonian father. He discovers this, of course, when he uses his heat vision to bore through the ice, enters the ship, and puts the key in the ignition.

Starting up the seed ship causes it to phone home (a Kryptonian version of the iPhone), which call is intercepted by none other than General Zod, who has survived the destruction of Krypton because he was chilling in the Phantom Zone, a rather nasty form of solitary confinement to which he and his minions had been sentenced for their abortive attempt to take over Krypton during the little fracas with Jor-El. Krypton’s destruction frees them all, and they spend a couple of decades cobbling up a star drive and scavenging hardware before the unexpected call.

So Zod comes to Earth. He wants the Kryptonian genetic database to bring back his people, and he doesn’t care what he has to do to get it. Meanwhile, Kal-El has had a long father-son chat with the holographic projection of Jor-El, and now he Knows Who He Is. And why he’s on Earth. And how to fly, and not dig a canyon-sized divot when he lands, and how to cook a perfect three-minute egg with his heat vision without making it explode.

From there, the story descends into a very noisy CG slug-fest as Superman takes on Zod and his minions. He wins, of course, by virtue of his ability to grit his teeth and fly into a gravity-beam that’s ripping the Earth apart. I’ve never understood why gritting your teeth and making fists helps you fly better, or hit harder, or think faster. But apparently it is the key ingredient that allows the hero to overcome pretty much anything. Remember that the next time you’re puzzling over a test question. Grit teeth. Make fists.

Zod and his minions are sent back into a black hole, Superman is now out of the closet, and Clark Kent dons his glasses and joins the staff of the Daily Planet. Happy ending. Huzzah.

—-

There are several things I did find interesting about this re-imagining.

I grew up on the Superman of the 1960′s and early 1970′s, and he was definitely comic-book fare. Given the politics of that era, it was only natural that he should align himself with Truth, Justice, and the American Way. Any space alien — any earthbound god, for that matter — who wasn’t just plain stupid was going to present himself on the White House lawn, not at the bloody Kremlin, and of course he would want to shake the President’s hand: there could be no higher honor in all the galaxy than to shake the hand of the President of the United States.

The world has changed a lot.

In 1978, the Mario Puzo script had Superman quoting his old line about “Truth, Justice, and the American Way.” The audiences invariably laughed — something that would never have happened in the early 1960′s. Even so, Kansas was painted with spacious skies and amber waves of grain — the cinematic shot when Clark leaves his mother, shortly after Johnathan Kent’s death, is one of the most glorious shots of a Kansas field I’ve ever seen.

In this film, the Kansas flashbacks were color-unsaturated and tinted an overcast gray, like faded 8mm movie film. There was a grimness to all the characters more reminiscent of my actual memories growing up. Adults took themselves very seriously back then, and there was tremendous social pressure to conform, to not stand out. Boys all wore long pants and short hair. Girls all wore long hair and long skirts. The constant bullying and jockeying for dominance among the school kids — Weirdo. What’s wrong with him? — was certainly a big part of my experience. There was nothing salutary about it: it was simply ugly, and this film captures that.

The Krypton of this film was a crystal clear (if heavy-handed) allegory about our own Earth, particularly the United States, especially in the fact that Krypton makes no sense.

They have genetically pre-programmed citizens who, nonetheless, revolt or commit crimes regularly enough that they have a standard process of “somatic reconditioning” — extended torture — performed for centuries on end in a gravitational black hole dedicated to that purpose. They have a civilization spread across the stars that has died out everywhere other than Krypton without meeting any other intelligent life, yet they’re all perpetually geared up for the highest possible levels of war. They’ve mined the core of Krypton until the world is on the brink of literal collapse. Why? Because they needed energy and other “resources.”

What a bunch of Nimrods!

Every bit of this, of course, has direct connections to current events in the US: GITMO, our military-industrial complex, fracking, financial fraud, global warming. Put our story together, and it makes as little sense as Krypton.

Perhaps most interesting, however, is the portrayal of the military. For most of my adult life, we’ve had movies that either brazenly glorify the military and its traditions, or paint the Pentagon as a bunch of bumbling fools who are easily outmaneuvered by a couple of plucky kids.

This is the first blockbuster film I can remember that paints the paranoia and naked terror that lies just beneath the surface of our national military bravado.

People and their institutions are often studies in opposites. Military might, police procedure, and all other forms of institutional force are about maintaining control through one-sided threat of violence. Just underneath that attempt at control is the terror of not having control. Of chaos. Of disorder. Of counter-violence.

In Superman, the military gets to stand by and watch two gods duke it out. Bullets bounce off them; big bombs knock them off their feet and muss their hair; they move faster than any human can even follow with their eyes, and can vaporize you with a glance. If they notice you as an inconvenience, they might turn around and swat at you like you would swat a fly. If you survive, it’s only because they missed, and simply didn’t care enough to follow up with a second swat.

You cannot tell them what to do.

Defiance is the first fracture in the illusion of control, and generally brings a swift escalation in threat of violence. Try telling any cop who has just told you to get out of your car to stuff it sideways, and you’ll see exactly what I mean. This is why Superman allows himself to be handcuffed and led into an interrogation room, and he says as much: it makes the humans feel more comfortable. But then he tires of the posturing, and stands up, and the cuffs fall off like they weren’t even attached. He’s polite, but firm. He’s here to help, but on his terms. End of discussion. He waits patiently for them to get used to the idea.

They cannot tell him what to do. It terrifies them, because it destroys their illusion of control.

The fact is, in real life it is always an illusion of control, regardless of whether those who are charged with being in control realize it. The government cannot stop the Chinese from hacking US computers. The gun-wielding thief cannot actually force the store clerk give him money. The parent cannot control the child’s behavior. All any of these can do is threaten mayhem and hope the other person responds to the threat.

Superman is a myth, or an allegory, that can show us what happens when the illusion of control by threat of violence is dispelled, because he cannot be controlled by violence.

That was an interesting twist I wasn’t expecting.

People argue about what is unique about human beings in the animal kingdom.

I’d approach it from the most obvious angle: if you were an alien passing by the Earth in a flying saucer, what’s the very first thing you’d notice?

I’d say it would be the lights. Our cities can be seen clearly from space, shining out through the very narrow band of electromagnetic frequencies — above the radio bands — to which our atmosphere is transparent. A closer look reveals the immense complexity of our cities, our highways, and our patterns of traffic over the face of the earth.

No other species on Earth builds such complex hives and lights them this way.

Our city-building is just one example of a more general thing that humans do, which is that we deliberately coordinate and thus multiply our efforts, using the symbols of language to keep us together.

Members of most species communicate with each other: bees dance, birds call, marmots whistle. Some, like bees, tightly coordinate their activities through their language, but coordination is a necessity for survival of the individual bee: a single bee can’t survive long on its own, being too specialized in its body shape and capabilities. Species in which individuals can survive on their own, generally do so without all the fuss of such elaborate cooperative behavior. Species other than human, that is.

If we take this extreme degree of cooperation through symbols to be one of the unique identifying features of human beings, then it seems to me that the symphonic orchestra — whether of the Western or Eastern or some other variety — is the quintessential symbol of human uniqueness.

I’m thinking about this at the moment because I’m in the process of writing a symphony. I just finished an extended pizzicato passage in the strings, envisioning with a wry smile the conductor screaming “Keep your eyes up here!” as he tries to get thirty or forty people to all pluck their strings at exactly the same moment.

I’ve always been of the musical opinion — when writing music, anyway — that each part should have a certain stand-alone beauty, but what makes it a “symphony” is the way all of the parts come together into a whole that is greater than the sum of the parts: the word “symphony” is a Greek term that means “sounding together.” Simply doubling a melody in the flutes and clarinets, for instance, creates a rich, vibrant sound that can’t be produced by any single instrument. Weaving two different melodies creates at third thing that is nothing at all like either melody alone. But each part must be played precisely in time, precisely in tune, and precisely in balance: otherwise, “symphony” swiftly becomes “cacophony.”

Music is all the more quintessentially human in that it is of no practical use whatsoever.

All of the effort that goes into writing and performing a symphony serves only to make vibrations in the air that pass away almost as soon as they are produced. Creating music does not produce food, or shelter. It doesn’t drive away predators. It is not an essential part of human reproduction. It has no practical justification at all.

Its justification — its only justification — is that it evokes emotional states in its listeners. Some of those emotional states — fear, anxiety — can be easily produced by other means. Other emotional states — the pleasure of experiencing musical beauty, for instance — can be evoked only through music: there is no drug, no activity, no stimulus other than music that tickles that particular combination of cells in the brain and endocrine system.

That is, perhaps, why we would bother to invest so much effort into such a profoundly unpractical activity.

The symphonic orchestra is a signpost of civilization. It requires a kind of leisure that allows a talented individual to withdraw from the grain fields and the rice paddies and the fisheries and the mines to devote years of intensive practice to becoming skilled in the art of producing certain sounds at will. It requires a kind of leisure that allows for enough of these trained individuals to come together in one place, at one time, to practice making those sounds together until the result is ready for others to hear. It requires a tradition of communication — a musical language, a notation — that allows such a group to coordinate their efforts and play more than the hundred or so pieces they might memorize in one lifetime by listening and improvising.

As such, it strikes me that the symphonic orchestra is bound to be one of the most fragile of civilized artifacts. It cannot come into existence until a civilization reaches a certain point of wealth and stability — it will be one of the first things to vanish as a civilization declines.

There’s a sadness involved in writing a symphony for a symphonic orchestra, because I have little reason to believe it will ever be performed.

This isn’t quite as terrible as it sounds, because technology has put the symphonic orchestra within reach of the individual. With a computer and some software, I can generate a “demo” disk of my music that is almost as good a what would be produced by a good orchestra, and a darn sight better than what would be produced by a mediocre civic orchestra. It may even be superior to the orchestra that originally performed Beethoven’s legendary ninth symphony — since sound recording wasn’t invented until nearly a century after that performance, we have no idea what it might have sounded like.

So I will write my symphony, and I will perform it myself on a computer, and I will make the recording available to anyone who wants to hear it. It will make me happy, and probably most of those who hear it: it will tickle the appropriate nerve centers and endocrine systems.

But I can’t help but notice that the symphonic orchestra — that most fragile of civilized artifacts — is beginning to vanish.

I recently took a business trip to Minneapolis, and considered attending a concert during my stay, only to discover the Minneapolis Symphony lockout. One could view this as simply bad luck on my part. Or, one could take sides with the wicked, greedy, and self-centered musicians’ union, or with the wicked, greedy, and self-centered orchestra management, and yell and point fingers of blame.

The truth is simply this: the ticket sales just aren’t there any more.

There are lots of specific reasons for this, ranging from sluggish economic recovery, to the diversion of concert hall performances into “inaccessible” musical forms that have little general appeal as music.

I think the underlying cause is that our civilization is losing the ability and desire to support anything so frivolous as a symphonic orchestra.

I don’t see that as a good sign for our civilization.

 

No, you didn’t read that title wrong. In fact, it’s probably causing you as much confusion as it caused me when I was eight.

I grew up in the 1960′s, in Cheyenne, Wyoming. I started Kindergarten in 1962, a year before JFK was assassinated. Wyoming has always been at least ten years behind the rest of the country — “the 60′s” wouldn’t begin for another fifteen years. We were still buried deep in the 1950′s, maybe even the late ’40′s. The closest thing we had to “pornography” was Playboy Magazine, which in those days was just a tiny bit racier than a pin-up calendar you might find in the mechanic’s office: bare breasts, maybe a glimpse of a patch of pubic hair peeking out from behind a draped towel or a silk robe. The hardcore magazines weren’t easy to come by: you had to know someone whose father kept a stash in the footlocker in the basement where he kept his gun.

As a result, everything we actually knew about sex (and girls) came from older brothers, who were not very much more knowledgeable than we were. On top of that, they enjoyed tormenting their little brothers with misinformation. “Santa Claus” doesn’t even amount to a sno-cone shaved off the iceberg of misinformation we carried around daily.

I didn’t have any older brothers. But I had plenty of friends with older brothers, and those friends were the “worldly” kids in our school classes. They were the ones who taught the rest of us how girls got pregnant, and how babies were born, and what kissing was all about.

It reminds me now of the old joke:

Q: Why do blonde women have bruises around their belly buttons?
A: Because blonde men are dumb, too.

Yes, when I was in third grade, belly-buttons had something to do with sex. We weren’t entirely sure what, but we were sure of that much. After all, Craig Johnson’s brother had told him so. And he had a girlfriend.

So I think it was around third grade — I’d have been eight, going on nine — that the term “tittiebone” entered into our vernacular. Not a single one of us knew what it meant, so it quickly became an all-purpose pejorative. It’s something you’d shout at the opposing pitcher in a Little League game: “You TITTIEBONE!” School cafeterias served up tittiebone sandwiches. We’d call someone we didn’t like a tittiebone.  Anyone who touched a tittiebone got girl germs.

Within a year, the word was gone, swallowed up into the etymological void from which it sprang. It’s a word that will bring a faint smile to the lips of anyone who was in third grade in Cheyenne in 1965. Anyone else will scratch his head in befuddlement.

I don’t know if it’s appropriate or inappropriate to be talking about this subject after the tragedies recently in the news. But I’m troubled, and angry, and sad — and disgusted, and appalled, and then sad some more. I doubt that I’m the only person in the country who feels this way.

A friend and I, both distressed by the news, fell to talking the other night until the wee hours of the morning about a wide range of subjects that included terrorism, bombs, and guns, and that led to the discussion of a gun for “protection” in the house.

I don’t own any guns for any purpose, and I’ve occasionally wondered if I should have one for protection. I had a girlfriend once break up with me because I didn’t have a gun I could use to protect her and her daughter when the End of the World came, which she was convinced would be initiated by the Y2K computer bug.

I’ve tried to picture any realistic scenario in which a gun would protect me in my home.

I fail.

For instance, there’s the nightmare scenario where I live in a bad part of town, and someone bursts through my door without knocking. It turns out to be a SWAT team that really meant to be knocking down the door of a neighbor down the hall who runs a meth lab in his kitchen, and when I reach for my trusty nine, they make hamburger out of me before it clears my belt-line…. Skrrrrk. (That’s the sound of the rewind-erase button being pressed.)

For instance, there’s the nightmare scenario where I live in a bad part of town, and someone bursts through my door without knocking. It’s a drug-crazed customer of the neighbor who runs the meth lab in his kitchen. When I reach for my trusty nine, he puts sixteen bullets through me before it clears my belt-line…. Skrrrrk.

For instance, there’s the nightmare scenario where I live in a bad part of town, and someone bursts through my door without knocking. It’s a drug-crazed customer of the neighbor who runs the meth lab in his kitchen. He catches me with a beer in one hand and a bowl of popcorn in my lap. My trusty nine is on the end-table next to my bed in the other room; I don’t wear it inside my own apartment, particularly on a hot summer evening when I’m in my underwear, because it chafes. I smile and politely ask the meth-head to excuse me while I go get my gun…. Skrrrrk.

Right, so there’s this nightmare scenario where I’ve gotten a little older with a better-paying job and I’ve moved to a better neighborhood so I can raise my kids in relative safety, and some guy breaks into my house to steal my 12-year McCallan (even the thieves are higher-end here). It’s two in the morning, and I have to turn on the light to find my glasses, so I can hunt around in my dresser drawer for my trusty nine, which is currently unloaded because I keep the ammo separate from the gun, as is recommended by even the NRA when you have children in the house. The light and sound scares off the intruder, and I spend the rest of the night cursing up a blue streak because I can’t find the key to the ammo drawer…. Skrrrrk.

So the intruder at two in the morning is hopped up on bad drugs. When I turn on the light, he gets angry instead of scared and comes looking for me. He catches me in my underwear, blinking in the light, my trusty (unloaded) nine in my hand, trying to remember where I put the key to the ammo drawer, and …. Skrrrrk.

Okay, I keep my trusty nine in my dresser drawer next to my bed, loaded and ready to go, safety-on of course, and … wait, there are grand-kids in the house…. Skrrrrk.

There’s one simple, central problem with any “intruder came into my house” scenario. The intruder is already prepared for a confrontation. If he’s got a gun, then the gun is out, it’s loaded, and the safety is off. Even if he’s unarmed, he’s keyed up and ready to throw a cell phone at my head and run like hell at the first sign of trouble. By contrast, I’m invariably caught by surprise, because I’m not expecting an intruder. I’m watching television with a beer in one hand and popcorn in the other. I’m sitting at the dinner table. I’m catching up on my bathroom reading. I’m asleep in bed. The gun that I keep for protection is almost certainly out of my immediate reach, maybe in my dresser drawer, probably in a locked drawer or gun cabinet, likely unloaded.

Of course, there are the other nightmare scenarios.

I used to work late on contract down in Boulder, and my boss gave me a key to his house so that I could sleep there rather than making the late-night drive to Fort Collins. One evening, I forgot that he’d told me he had house-guests that weekend. He went home early to entertain them, and promptly forgot that I was working late.

I let myself into his house quietly, well after midnight, set down my things, and padded through the dark house up to the guest room, which was pitch black. I started to undress, when I heard a sudden snore, and someone turned over in the bed I was about to climb into. A big, male snore. I suddenly remembered the house-guests. Crap.

I very quietly slunk out of the room, down the stairs, and out the front door.

As it turns out, the father-in-law was upstairs; he never woke, and never knew I was there. The mother-in-law, however, had not been able to sleep, and had moved down to the couch in the living room. She was still mostly awake when I came in. She saw my dark silhouette enter silently, slink up the stairs, then slink down a few minutes later and vanish. She was too terrified even to scream: she was certain I’d murdered everyone upstairs in their sleep. Then she wondered if she’d been dreaming.

I was the intruder.

My friend said that he had experienced a similar situation, except he was the person at home, and one of his wife’s out-of-state co-workers walked into the house at midnight. She’d forgotten to tell her husband he would be arriving late and spending the night in the guest bedroom.

Or there was the time my sister barged straight into my house, carrying an infant in one arm and a folded crib with the other hand. She just turned the knob and shouldered the door open. No knock, no phone call, no notice at all, and she lived five hours away: the last person in the world I expected to walk through my door.

Thank goodness none of us had a loaded gun handy.

---

Of course, there are situations outside the home. A gun seems a little more practical outside the home. After all, you’re going out into that big, bad, scary world full of terrorists and drug dealers and thieves and murderers — you should be frightened, keyed-up, ready to react, right? You can strap on your six-gun and swagger a little, and if it chafes? Well, you can take it off again when you get home. In the meantime, you’ve made the world a little safer for everyone with your public display of lethal armament.

So the NRA argues.

Then I look at cops. They train to deal with physical confrontation. They keep their gun in easy reach, in a holster. They use a target range regularly. They call for backup at the first sign of real trouble.

With all that going for them, they can still die in a shoot-out with a terrified seventeen year old kid. So what chance do I really stand?

I like to play first-person shooter video games. They’ve taught me a valuable lesson: that I die a lot in a firefight. I die even when I know exactly what the other guy is going to do, because I’ve watched him make the same moves each of the fifteen times I’ve already died.

All of those miraculous bits of split-second timing in the movies use the same principle of repetition (plus a big helping of computer graphics): multiple takes of the same scene, over and over, practice makes perfect, until they finally get it right once. Then they cut-and-paste relentlessly until it looks natural.

In real life, muffing the first take means you lose an eye, or an arm, or your life. You don’t get a second take.

We had a tragic real-life situation a number of years back, where a woman, stalked by her psychotic ex-husband, was gunned down on the steps of the police station where she sought sanctuary. Someone wrote a letter to the editor claiming the tragedy would not have occurred if she’d had a gun and “stood up for herself” instead of running to the police.

I thought about that. The police station was diagonally across from the Catholic elementary school playground, and there were children playing there during recess who saw her get shot. I believe the husband was shooting from somewhere between the playground and the police station. Had she pulled out her trusty nine and shot back, she’d have been shooting toward the kids.

Just how good is her aim when her hands are shaking?

Plus, we need more mano a mano shootouts on our public streets? We’re sure the good guy is always the better shot? No one ever misses their target and hits someone in a nearby apartment or house or schoolyard?

The whole concept seems incredibly dim-witted.

Ah, the argument goes, but if everyone had a gun, the bad guys would be too intimidated to use theirs.

I pointed a gun at someone, once, to intimidate him.

It happened like this: I was working at my employer’s house in his extended home office, when he suddenly burst into the room and told me he needed my help. He had a shotgun.

“Jesus!” I said. “What’s going on?”

“Hoodlums,” he said. “They come up on my property and take drugs.”

“You’re going to shoot them?” I asked, appalled.

“Nah,” he said. “It’s not loaded. But I don’t want them to run off while I call the police.” He cracked it open and showed me — it was a simple, single-load shotgun, a bare metal pipe, and I could look down the barrel and see daylight.

I followed him outside, and he confronted two teen-aged kids sitting in a grove of trees just on his side of the property line. On the other side was a railroad right-of-way, and beyond that, a Wal-Mart parking lot. I couldn’t read the kids very well — they were probably pretty high on pot, so they were too mellow to react much, but I think they were also terrified and trying to cover it up. They just sat there with defeated “oh shit” expressions on their faces. I felt sorry for them.

“Here,” my boss said, and shoved the shotgun into my hands. “You keep an eye on these two while I call the cops.” He took a few steps away, turned his back, and pulled out his cell phone.

I stood with the gun pointed at the ground in the kids’ general direction and wondered how many laws I was breaking at the moment.

I’ve thought about that situation on and off over the last sixteen years, and in hindsight, I wish I’d handled it differently. While the boss was looking the other way, arguing with the dispatcher — he argued with everyone — I think I’d have pointed the gun away from the kids, and quietly gestured for them to beat feet and get out of there. The point had already been made: this is bad property to trespass, the guy who lives here is crazy and he has a gun.

Had our roles been fully reversed — had it been my property — I think I’d have handled it very differently. On the one hand, I’d probably have ignored it. Kids grow up and move on: the problem solves itself. On the other hand, there’s a reason these kids decided to light up right there and not somewhere else — probably convenience, and that will be the same for the next batch of kids, year after year — and there’s always the risk of a “tradition” forming around the spot. So if it really bothered me, I’d likely have walked up to them, hunkered down, maybe bummed a toke off them, and talked. I don’t personally care for cannabis, but there are proprieties to be observed when approaching members of a foreign and potentially hostile tribe. If you approach with respect, you’re generally okay.

I learned this from a different girlfriend — long blond hair, sexy, beautiful — who had once lived in one of the roughest neighborhoods of a big city. She didn’t have a gun. She didn’t need a gun. She had bikers. She befriended those rough, tough bastards who surrounded her, and they treated her like a favorite kid sister. Had anyone raised a finger against her, he’d have been hunted.

All it required from her was a little respect.

I think I could have reached a workable deal with the kids. Who knows — maybe a tiny touch of respect would have turned their lives around in a good way. Probably not. But being sucked up into the legal system as enemy combatants in the Drug War had zero potential for helping them in any way.

I’ve often thought about how dangerous my boss’s action was. The gun wasn’t loaded; even if it had been, it was a single-loader, and there were two kids. Suppose they had been armed? Supposed they had been jacked up on something crazy-making? Suppose they were as crazy and suicidal as the two kids at Columbine? Or the Sandy Hook shooter? What my boss did was classic escalation of threat of violence, simply assuming it would overwhelm these two kids and make them fearful and compliant. That’s not a reasonable assumption.

There’s an old saying: if you’re going to hunt bear, for God’s sake, use enough gun. If you’re going to threaten another person with deadly force, you need to be willing to use deadly force and then, for God’s sake, use enough gun. An unloaded single-shell shotgun pointed at two potential threats is not enough gun.

What I can say with absolute personal certainty is that pointing an unloaded shotgun at two teen-agers to bluff them into not running did not feel good, and it isn’t something I’d ever want to do again.

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I can’t leave this topic without at least a mention of the paranoid, delusional “defending our nation against tyranny” argument for private ownership of assault weapons, which is basically an argument that owning a machine-gun with hollow-point rounds is a patriotic duty.

For those of you who aren’t familiar with this idea, it’s based on the belief that The Real Enemy is Government: specifically the United States Federal Government. It claims the Second Amendment to the Constitution as the basis for our right to bear arms against our own government, should it get too uppity.

Well, that’s not what the Second Amendment is about. Truth is, they don’t teach what the Second Amendment is about in the schools, because it’s part of our shameful past as a nation.

The Second Amendment is about preserving slavery. Read this article — it’s an eye-opener. In a nutshell: the slave states had what they called “militias,” also known as “slave patrols.” White men in the slave states were required by state law to serve in the patrols — it was their duty, just like jury duty. Their job was to keep the African slaves under control, and to do so effectively, the militias needed to be armed. The slave-states feared that the wording of the Constitution was such that the federal government could disarm (and therefore abolish) their militias, thus destroying their ability to keep their African slaves, so they insisted on the Second Amendment as a condition to signing the Constitution.

We no longer have “militias” of this sort, because slavery is now illegal. The Thirteenth Amendment abolished the principle reason for the Second Amendment.

That isn’t to say that States could not organize militias against internal threats other than slave revolts, but the idea of “well-regulated” means that they are organized under and subject to state law, and are therefore subject to federal law as well. The State Highway Patrol could be considered a “well-regulated militia” organized under the Second Amendment.

Now I can’t speak to the broader question of whether or when we’ll need to throw off an oppressive Federal Government, a la The Hunger Games. But it’s quite clear that it isn’t legal to do this now, and isn’t going to be legal to do so then, with or without the Second Amendment. Furthermore, we come back to the earlier notion that if you’re going to hunt bear, for God’s sake, use enough gun.

A rabble of disgruntled citizens armed with assault weapons isn’t even close to enough gun for the job of overthrowing an oppressive national government. The only gun big enough for that job is a citizenry that is substantially willing to die rather than submit to continued oppression.

Such a citizenry doesn’t need guns to overthrow the government.

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So how do I come down on the moral issue of owning guns for safety?

I have no idea: I can’t get that far. I can’t get past the practical issues.

When it comes to promoting safety, guns simply don’t work.

What guns provide is a means of projecting lethal force with great accuracy over a relatively long distance. They do that quite well, but that’s all they do. There are certainly times when that is appropriate. But it is lethal force. If you’ve used enough gun for the job, it will kill your target. If you don’t intend to kill your target, you’re using entirely the wrong tool.

Using a gun for intimidation does not promote safety: it is one of the riskiest things you can do. You rely upon the other person being afraid of death, and willing to stand down in the face of your threat of force. But the only thing you know about their mental state is that they are already outside the bounds of civil behavior: they’re in your house without permission, or they’re stalking you on the street, or they’re robbing a convenience store with a gun of their own. They’re a little bit crazy at the moment. How will they react if they see you pull out a gun?

You have absolutely no idea how they will react. No one does.

Maybe, like in the movies, they’ll suddenly come to their senses, and they’ll put down their weapon and meekly submit to being tied up with a convenient bit of rope lying nearby, so you can call the police and have them “taken away” to wherever the police take the bad guys when they tidy up.

And maybe Gwyneth Paltrow really will step out of her hiding place behind the Coke machine and smother you with kisses.

Maybe.

I sure wouldn’t bet my life on it.

Cold fusion seems to be picking up steam.

A NASA scientist has now weighed in on this, Dennis Bushnell of Langley Research Center, and he seems to think there’s something to it.

There’s even a first theoretical framework for it, called the Widom-Larsen theory. It’s similar to what I outlined in general terms in a previous post, but with a small twist. Instead of needing to overcome the Coulomb barrier and jam a proton (hydrogen nucleus) directly into a nickel nucleus, this proposes that the hydrogen atom itself collapses into a neutron, which — lacking any electrical charge — effectively gets sucked straight into the nickel nucleus to produce an unstable isotope of nickel. The nickel then decays by emitting an electron and a gamma ray, converting it to copper.

From the outside, it looks exactly the same: same energy yields, same gamma rays, same everything. However, this mechanism is much more energetically plausible.

I find the signs of retrenchment even more interesting. I commented in my earlier post on how this is no longer called “cold fusion,” but instead “low-energy nuclear reaction” or “lattice-assisted nuclear reaction” (LENR or LANR, respectively). Dr. Bushnell had this to say:

The Strong Force Particle physicists have evidently been correct all along. “Cold Fusion” is not possible. However, via collective effects/ condensed matter quantum nuclear physics, LENR is allowable without any “miracles.”

The distinction here has to do with the “strong” nuclear force versus the “weak” nuclear force. Dr. Bushnell is doing some face-saving redefinition here, by making sure that “cold fusion” is directly tied to “miraculous” claims about the strong nuclear force, while what is actually happening is probably a result of the weak nuclear force. As it turns out, the strong force has been studied extensively, because it allows us to make big bombs. The weak force has received relatively little attention over the past century, because there was no obvious way to use it to make things blow up.

What Bushnell is really saying here is, “All right, we physicists were dead wrong about cold fusion, and we collectively and very publicly destroyed two scientific careers, as well as suppressing an entire field of research for twenty years. But you see, we weren’t really wrong at all, because it isn’t ‘Cold Fusion’ — it’s LANR, which is something we’ve just never looked at.”

It’s traditional face-saving, and while I’m going to point it out, I’m not going to pick it up and force him to eat it. What’s done is done.

What I find interesting is that this retrenchment indicates a radical shift in the politics of physics. This is covering fire to allow future research to reach some safe harbor of respectability, yet without requiring recantation or apology from any of the still-living and influential physicists who called cold fusion a load of bunk. Neatly done.

The fact that face-saving has begun indicates, to my mind, a very high degree of interest.