Of Pendulums and Progress

We live in a world of uncertainty. We're never quite sure what's going to happen when we open our doors in the morning. And that's why we cling so tightly to things that seem like known quantities, sure things, done deals. And yet, underlying all this is the knowledge that there really is no certainty about anything. There's nothing we have that can't be swept away on an otherwise unremarkable Tuesday.

The world itself can change on a dime as random influences swirl and converge around us. There are two ways of coping with this: you can either build a rigid structure of understanding around you, shoehorning everything you believe into one immutable sense of Truth, or you can accept that you don't know everything and forge an adaptable mindset.

There seems to be more sense in the latter, at least for me. There's a strength that comes from accepting that there are things that you don't know. When you think about it, many of the great institutions we have are based on that principle. Take the United States itself, for instance... it's explicitly worked into the government that anything up through and including the Constitution itself can be amended and changed as the times call for it.

The smartest thing the Founding Fathers did was admit that they weren't smart enough to know everything. They knew they were striking out into new territory, and where they believed monarchy had failed them. They dove back into history, looking to past democracies like the Greece of Plato and Aristotle, wedding it to their secular Masonic beliefs and imagery, and crafting something entirely new -- a self-aware democracy that could adapt to meet whatever undreamt-of situations the future could throw at it.

Recently, I heard someone in an interview talking about the frustrating, never-ending push and pull of our government's process. It seems that every few years we enact some new legislation that is immediately opposed on multiple judicial levels. This new legislation sometimes gets overturned, only to be introduced again, over and over, until it either finally gets through or fades into obscurity. I've been frustrated about this in the past, too. It seems like no-brainer advances are always met by those who don't want change, fear it or fear the often-imaginary "slippery slope" that it will inevitably lead to.

The point that this interviewer brought up was really enlightening... he said that the interminable back and forth was *the* *very* *point* that the Founding Fathers meant to build into their new government. They meant for there to be debate, trial and error, not too much power falling into anyone's hands. The pendulum is designed to swing, but eventually tend toward the will of the people. That actually made me feel better about the state of our current government… until I realized there's a caveat to the whole thing.

This ongoing debate, and eventual settling of things on the right path, works as long as everyone goes into it with good intentions and a spirit of compromise. The sad fact is that there are factions in our government today who are not entering the process in this manner.

Who are these people? They are the ones who are beholden to their own personal Truth. They base their political decisions on the contention that they hold the moral and ethical high ground and are unwilling to budge their position, even if the majority of people think otherwise. Usually, this unwillingness takes the form of holding back progressive legislation, expansion of human rights, dealing with climate change, etc. Some of these paradigm shifts are costly but necessary, such as moving away from reliance on fossil fuels. But the backers of these political figures usually owe their livelihood (and often, multi-generational fortunes) to the old infrastructure.

At its root, this disruption of the intended use of representational democracy stems from the belief that only a small group has the insight into what is true, and what the destiny of the country should be. Often, this consists of rolling back the expansion of rights to people who truly need them, strengthening the bastions of what has propelled us forward in the past, regardless of how the world is changing around us.

Look, I understand the attraction of a belief system that says that everything will be fine. Here's what is true, it says, it's been true since the beginning of time, and it always will be. But that's not how anything in the Universe works. Everything is in a stage of either growth or decay, and that's as true of ethics as it is of planetary systems. The natural state of everything, like it or not, is to be in flux, to be changing from one thing into another. Survival means accepting and incorporating the randomness of life.

For an example of how these two ideologies are butting heads, take a look at climate change. Here are two opposing sides, the scientific community, who has reached a consensus that global temperatures are rising and that human activity is responsible, and political conservatives, who claim that there isn't a consensus and that more studies need to be done.

This is where the scientific method has trouble. Its beauty lies in that it is, by definition, accepting of change. If someone came along with one proven instance where gravity works differently than we always thought it did, we'd have to set aside the old ideas of Newton and Einstein and modify our thinking, with a hearty "thank you" to the mind that corrected our errant path. This is true of any part of objective science.

The trouble comes in because of the very constant of uncertainty that makes it so noble. If someone who doesn't want climate change to be true comes along and says, "Are you 100% sure that we're responsible for it?" a scientist would have to say "no". Which would lead to the naysayer to state, "Well, then let's not change anything we're doing, then! How can we make informed decisions when we don't have *all* the facts?"

But the truth is that we'll *never* have all the facts, not until what is predicted actually happens. And there will *always* be a few people who think they know better than everyone else -- not that it's impossible for some against-the-grain eccentric to be right once in a while, but that just proves my point. It's not physically or ideologically possible for us to have an iron-clad scientific certainty of anything. That is what has led us to all the scientific achievements we've made, from the quantum tunneling in your smart phone to the software in GPS systems that accounts for the warping of spacetime. If we believed that we knew everything there was to know, we could dust off our hands and kick back until the end of time.

This is the war that's being silently (and sometimes not-so-silently) waged in our country today... between those who understand that we don't know everything and those who can't accept that. Unfortunately, the latter group tends to fall into two factions... the heads of large corporations whose livelihoods and legacies depend on keeping the status quo of pulling energy out of the ground, and religious zealots who believe that either God will intervene before we destroy the world or that we're in the End of Days anyway.

These two groups, the most vocal (and therefore most powerful) in politics today are up against scientists, who in general would rather be left to make their discoveries rather than brave the Beltway to state their case.

So these are the forces at play in this push-and-pull designed by our political forefathers... a softspoken band of liberal thinkers, questioning old ways, exploring the fringes of reality and the consequences of our actions on Nature (and vice versa); and a raucous tribe of why-fix-what's-not-yet-broken conservatives whose monetary and spiritual livelihoods are dependent on certain things being true, even if the evidence is to the contrary.

In a battle like this, who can win? And even if the eternally-swinging political pendulum can continue to usher us toward a more responsible, workable world, will it swing fast enough? No matter what the answers to these questions are, the reality is that we, ironically, have to lose our love of finding ultimate answers. We need to stop determining what we think is true before we see the evidence.

It may seem scary to step back and question what you've always believed is true. But it has to be done, in order to move things forward. One of my favorite people, Neil de Grasse Tyson, recently said something that might help ease the transition. When asked what to do when faced with the inherent ambiguity of the scientific process, when you're faced with questions that you know you're never going to find the ultimate, final answer to, he said "You must learn to love the questions themselves."

I'd go Neil one step further, with my own interpretation of what I think he's saying... you need to love the process of learning more than what the answer is going to get you in the end. It's the only way to stay on the path to the Truth.

The Heroes We Choose

I know it's hardly a new bit of psychological insight, but you can tell a lot about a culture by the stories it tells. Right now, the most interesting part of Western pop culture is the evolution of the superhero, particularly the way it's been moving toward the rise of the antihero (see: Tony Soprano, Walter White, etc.). I could go on about that subject, and probably will at some point, but right now I want to take a look at the heroes themselves.

Our culture is entering a unique position where superheroes are omnipresent, and at the same time we're struggling to find our place in a changing world. Superman has always stood for "Truth, Justice, and the American Way", but the definition of all three of those things has started getting fuzzy around the edges. That's why our superheroes have been getting more internally conflicted. At the same time, there's also a need to amp up the excitement surrounding any one particular hero, and this usually comes in the form of greater and greater superpowers -- it's the easiest way to cut through the noise and grab people's attention.

But when a hero's power makes him more and more invulnerable, the conflict similarly has to be increasingly internalized. This thought came to my head when I recently watched Star Trek: Into Darkness. While the experience was enjoyable at the time, I was surprised at how soon the buzz went away. It got me thinking about how "genre fiction" -- and by that I mean everything from sci-fi to fantasy to superheroes -- doesn't really work unless the struggle has some sort of metaphorical aspect to it along with the cool powers and amazing technology.

The thing that was revolutionary about the original Star Trek show was that Gene Roddenberry created little morality plays in each episode. In a 23rd century where racism, class, poverty, and war had been abolished, the alien cultures that the Enterprise crew encountered all obliquely reflected the struggles that Earth of the 1960s was going through.

But there was nothing like that in Into Darkness. The villain, a genetically manipulated human named Khan, lightly skipped around the whole prospect of eugenics ethics that the original series (and subsequent movie) put front and center, and he became merely a pawn in the real villain's plan. Not only that, but most of the fun of the movie seemed designed to be the "ooh, that's different than the original!" game. That's why I think Into Darkness will eventually be regarded as a "good" Trek movie, not a "great" one.

But like I said, it got me thinking... how does this power-vs.-morality idea find its balance? When does it work, and when does it fail? Here are the first four heroes I could think of with near-God-like powers, and how successfully they've all fared:

1. In the most recent Superman film, Man of Steel, director Zack Snyder flipped the script on us: we were given a hero with no weaknesses meeting with moral challenges that most audiences believed that he failed (which, after all is said and done, was maybe the point). Superman used to represent the American ideal, strong to the point of dominating. I'm sure Snyder thought that, in an era where we're questioning America's place in an increasingly egalitarian world, this unsurety about whether we still are (or should be) perpetually on top should be reflected. Clearly, America wasn't ready for such a drastic reinvention of its most enduring avatar.

2. Wolverine (from X-Men): While not having powers as god-like as the others on this list, Wolverine is pretty close to indestructible (remember that his only real superpower is that his body can heal incredibly fast... the addition of his adamantine skeleton and retractable claws are only a scientific exploitation of that), but he has a lot of angst. He's looking for his place in the world, and in this way is like all the other X-men... he's a man, but just different enough to feel like an outsider. This superpower-as-otherness has been used as a metaphor for civil rights, gay rights, and variously as whatever social group is working its way to acceptance in mainstream society (if that term even means anything anymore). This is why it works so well. And now that there are seven movies featuring the character, it's clear that the public identifies with him in some deep way.

3. Neo (from The Matrix): I think everyone agrees that once Neo mastered his powers inside the Matrix, the movie franchise lost its appeal. And it's true: there's no dramatic tension if a hero has basically no limitation on his powers. As time wore on in the trilogy, the only way to make things interesting was to give him more and more powerful (or numerous) adversaries, and think up new ways to delay him while his slightly-less-powerful friends were in danger. It was actually really interesting to observe how moviegoers saw themselves in him when he had a little power, and were almost completely alienated from him when he got a lot.

4. Dr. Manhattan: In the Watchman graphic novel and film (ironically, which was also directed by Zack Snyder), this is a hero who used to be human, but was torn apart by a nuclear blast. He somehow managed to reconstruct himself, and reappeared as a bald, blue humanoid with complete control over time and space. He exists in all moments at once, and can be in multiple places at once (much to the frustration of his girlfriend), but has lost his essential humanity in translation. He's entirely disconnected from earthly life, although he tries to approximate it because he dimly remembers who he used to be. When he's not creating amazing new technologies in his lab, he's endlessly (and often randomly) wandering the Universe, contemplating his existence. He wants to engage with us, but it's like one of us trying to live among ants. In terms of character, there's actually an improvement in the film adaptation, where he sacrifices himself for the good of humanity, (although only figuratively because he's immortal).

With all these characters, as the power embodied in an individual ramps up, the importance of their moral decisions has to do the same, or else there's an imbalance. If popularity with the American public can be an accurate barometer, Wolverine and Dr. Manhattan have got it right, where Neo and Superman (at least in his current incarnation) have not.

It's an old story... the fantastical heroes and villains we see on our screens and read in our literature reflect what we respectively see and fear in ourselves. In past generations, Dracula embodied everything we were afraid of about sex, religion, disease, and mortality (all at once, which is why he's still such a potent character after 150 years). Gojira and all the other giant monsters of the 50s were the nuclear threat incarnate. Batman is our belief in philanthropy and personal power. Iron Man is our faith in technology and capitalism. Spiderman is our adolescent awkwardness, albeit inverted into amazing abilities.

I think this is why superheroes loom so large on our collective creative landscape now, and why they don't seem ready to go away any time soon. But they only hit their stride when they take our internal conflicts and turn them into exterior threats to grapple with. In the past, a superhero was someone who demonstrated how to use power. Now, we're going deeper... not only are we trying figuring out what it means to have power in the first place, we are also examining who it turns us into, and the price we pay for it.

Disorientation

Right before MLK's birthday, I found myself thinking about one of my formative experiences with discrimination, and thought it was time that I wrote it down and figured out exactly what I think about it. It wasn't about me being discriminated against, exactly, nor was it me discriminating against someone else. It was more of a sudden awareness I was given about what a tricky and personal issue it is.

In 1989, as I graduated high school, I was waitlisted for the University of Michigan (and if I remember correctly, it was the only school I applied to). I found out rather late in the year that I had actually made it in. I then went through a blur of getting ready, taking their orientation program, and signing up for classes, which involved a lot of leafing through paper catalogs and waiting in lines -- this was the 80s, after all.

It all went by so quickly that I don't remember a lot of the experience, except for one particular part of the orientation program. This is only because it left me with a strange feeling of unease that lasts to this day, almost perfectly balanced by an inability to process exactly why I was so uneasy.

It was a seminar about tolerance, led by a college student who couldn't have been more than a year or two older than the prospective freshmen he was talking to. We discussed our previous issues with discrimination, and I found that I didn't really have anything to relate. I guess this is because I had experienced such extremes in terms of diversity in the places I had lived. I had attended an elementary school in Ohio that had *just* admitted its first black student (due to the homogeneity of the surrounding neighborhood), and by middle school I was living in a college town that people from all over the world brought their families to. I'd never really lived in the middle ground where people of different colors and backgrounds don't really know what to do with each other.

Near the end of the session, we took part in an exercise... our discussion leader had us all stand in a line along one end of the room. Then, he would ask us to step forward if we belonged to a particular minority group. "Now," he said, "step forward if you're homosexual". And with that, he stepped forward. This eventually prompted another two or three people in our group of twenty-five to move forward to join him.

"Now, step forward if you're of Asian descent," he said, and a few more people stepped forward. "Now, step forward if you're African-American." A few more people. He continued through a list of races, colors, and creeds, and the thing that struck me most about the process was that, as he worked his way through the permutations of human heritage, no group name he called out ever applied to me. By the time he was done, only I and one white girl were still standing against the wall.

The seminar leader wrapped up this informal anthropological study by declaring, "You see? The majority of us are part of some kind of minority!" Which was all well and good, but I suddenly felt rather isolated, not having been given any kind of reason to step forward.

I kept waiting for the leader to say something to the two of us who had been left behind, but he never did. He acted as if everyone had stepped forward, and to be honest I'm sure he would have been happier if we all had, driving his point even further home. Of course, later on I would realize that I should have raised my hand and asked exactly what this fact meant for those of us still standing against the wall, but those sorts of things hardly ever come to you in the moment. Instead, I just felt vaguely embarrassed, the seminar wrapped up, and we were sent on to the next stage of orientation.

Two things bothered me about that exercise, and I've been turning it over in my head for more than twenty years now. First of all was the fact that an exercise designed to show how we're all equal left me (and, I assume, that other girl) feeling excluded. Here I was, about to enter the student body of a Big Ten school. I should have been proud and confident, but I had been left feeling unremarkable and without a particular identity. The reality of this had never crossed my mind before. All the people who stepped forward had some sort of defining trait or heritage. I was suddenly lumped into some amorphous "majority" in an exercise that was trying to show that there really was no such thing. Ironically, in trying to eliminate minorities, the exercise had created a new one.

The second thing that bothered me was that I was bothered so much by that feeling. I left wondering if that were part of the point of the exercise... to make me realize how lucky I was, never having had to think of myself as belonging to a particular group or being filed under a particular label. Should I be grateful that society hasn't looked at me and assumed things about me because of something I have no control over? And if that's what I was supposed to take away, why didn't the seminar leader take the time to point that out?

Maybe it was simply a matter of his not going far enough down the list. If the seminar leader had continued, saying things like "Step forward if you're half-Latvian," or "Step forward if you like to write," or "Step forward if you're not even sure that you deserve to go to this school," I could have joined everyone else. That would have made his point that "there is no majority" better. In truth, we're all minorities of one.

Dear Dr. Emmott:

Dear Dr. Stephen Emmott: Last night, I read through your recent book, Ten Billion. In it, you outline the global ramifications of the growth of the human population, covering how it will affect the global carbon cycle, climate change, crop and water demand, and how greater demand for everything that humans need in general will eventually tip the world into spiraling hothouse-mass-extinction decline. In fact, the last line of the book (and I should point out here that, even though it tops the 200-page mark, most pages only have a sentence or two, and every image and chart is given a double-page spread) clearly states that, in your educated opinion as a scientist, "I think we're fucked."

Now, I don't question your statistics. I'm sure that in your lifelong quest as a scientist, you are more aware than the vast majority of us about the troubles we face, and what would need to be done to overcome them. What I call into question is your moral irresponsibility in publishing your book. Because what we come away with is a definite statement that we have already gone too far, and there is nothing that can be done, short of changing every social, political, economical, and instinctive (re: procreative) behavior we have. Globally.

So my question to you, sir, is: What purpose does your book serve, exactly?

I think I am a rather practical person. I think I have a pretty good idea of what I can control and what I can't, and don't spend much time worrying about things that are beyond my ability to influence. Some people might even say that I embody this trait to a fault. Which is why I can say that after reading it, Ten Billion left me with a stronger sense of futility and fatalism than I have experienced in a long time. And, I wonder, if *I* felt this way, what might your book do to someone else, someone who is more sensitive to declarations about the ultimate fate of the human race?

And this is why I wonder whether your heart is in the right place on this issue. Because while your book is quite clear on how many gallons of water it takes to make one hamburger patty (800, which is mostly wrapped up in the growing of feed and maintaining of cattle), it doesn't give us any idea of what to do about it other than "consume a lot less". And even then, as you say, we're still fucked, because the change we have already presented to the world is enough to send us past the ecological tipping point. You present a hellish vision of the future, but offer no solutions on how to change it. Is that because (and here I know I'm guessing at it) you don't see the point in attempting any?

It's your clear cynicism of global politics and business that motivates most of your reasoning for why things cannot change in time to stave off disaster. You argue that fossil fuel companies are too big, have too much power, and are responsible for making too much economy-fueling money to change course, politicians' only interest is in getting elected again, and geo-engineering is too poorly understood to fix the problem. And yes, many globally-supported programs to curtail carbon emissions and resource consumption have already failed. But does that mean we should stop trying?

If humans are going to change this disastrous course, then they need to only be given one thing, the thing that is sorely lacking in your book: hope. Cynicism has never produced any result other than apathy, which I think we can both agree there is too much of, and has been for too long. (And I considered the possibility that your book is a double-feint, a dare for the rest of us to prove you wrong, but I honestly don't think you thought about it that carefully.)

Ultimately, what you're leaving out of the equation is exactly what you see as the source of the problem: humankind itself. True, if we continue on the current track, there will be ten billion people before the end of the century. But if, as you say, the world profoundly changes sooner rather than later because of our influence, won't our own growth be part of that affected change? Any number of the effects you talk about in your book will cause overpopulation rates to slow, and some would argue that the change is already starting to take place.

So here's something that I've been thinking about for a while now, and it seems to have been fully brought up out of the depths by my ruminations about your book: that the ones who really control the world aren't politicians, or titans of industry, or even great ethical leaders. It's storytellers. Think about it... Most of what inspires us as human beings, what grounds us to the world and also lets us fly beyond it, investigate its realities and imagine its possibilities, are the stories that we tell each other. In the end, stories are the only thing we really have that lasts. And I'm not just saying this because I fancy myself a storyteller. I say it because we all are, in our own way. And that's where moral responsibility comes in.

There's a story Ray Bradbury wrote in the mid-20th century called "The Toynbee Convector", where a man announces to the world that he's created a limited time machine that allowed him to see 100 years into the future, and he describes the beautiful, near-utopian society he glimpsed there. In response, humanity bands together and works toward the common goal of a bright future that they already know is going to happen. They do it because they now know it is possible; not only that, it is destined. And they make it happen. Taken in this light, what do you think it is likely that your book will do?

I know, I know... scientists deal with facts, not fancy, and your job is to seek the truth, no matter what form it takes. But what you have done with Ten Billion is to present the facts and then extrapolate them, in effect writing a story about what you believe will happen, in the guise of inevitability. Yes, your opinion is more educated than most, but what is the price of putting this problem-with-no-solution book into the world? The twist ending of "The Toynbee Convector" (fifty-year old spoiler alert) is that the man who saw the future was lying. He never built a time machine. But what he did understand is what I already stated earlier: people need hope to change. So here we come to a place where fancy is more useful than fact, in fact is better at ensuring the survival of the human race.

Do I think you should have presented a rosy, I'm-sure-we'll-come-up-with-something ending, wrapped in a bow? Of course not. But I think that you could have split the difference between your instincts and Mr. Bradbury. Don't just point out the problem, but endorse new solutions, instead of knocking them down known ones like ducks in a shooting gallery. As much as science likes to pride itself on its impartiality, it doesn't exist in a vacuum, either. I can't imagine any thinking person coming away from your book with anything less than a vague sense of despair, maybe even a profound one. And I then have to question your motivations in publishing Ten Billion. Maybe your responsibility as a human should at have at least partially eclipsed your responsibility as a scientist.

Henson’s Legacy

First of all, I'd like to thank those of you who have been following the blog links I post here every week (or at least try to). My pageviews often get into the triple digits, and I think it's significantly beyond awesome that so many of you take the time to see what I'm blathering about any given week. That being said, my outpu here is about to slow down a bit... that's going to be happening for two reasons. First of all, I've gotten a new job, and of course that's necessarily going to demand more of my time. Secondly, I'm taking the next few months to focus on a new project, one with a deadline, so that's where my mind is going to be.

This new project I'm talking about is a contest that is being run by the Jim Henson company. I've followed them off and on over the years, and they always seem on the verge of getting a new Dark Crystal project off the ground. This time, they're preparing to publish a YA prequel novel, and they're allowing submissions from anyone who thinks they are worthy of adding a new tale to the mythology of Thra. Seeing as I was squarely in the target audience for that film – just having turned 11 before its mid-December opening – and have spent more than the average person’s time contemplating the first in the 30(!) years since then, I’ve decided to try to come up with a compelling story to add to its ever-evolving story.

For a period of time, The Dark Crystal was one of those movies that obsessed me. In a world where every sci-fi/fantasy film wanted to be the next Star Wars, Jim (along with conceptual artist Brian Froud) brought us a weird, beautiful, grotesque, almost dream-like movie about a broken world and how it was healed. And while I still loved Star Wars, there was something about the Dark Crystal that intrigued me. It was altogether different, resonated on a deeper level. I took time during school to draw pictures of my favorite scenes, at home read the movie novelization (which I still have, and apparently fetches a fair price for a used copy on Amazon ), and wondered about what came before and after. And that’s why it’s such a no-brainer that I should try to write something new. So before December 31st, I'm hoping to do just that, and turn in 7500 words, representative of the Dark Crystal prequel story I would tell, to the Jim Henson offices.

But it’s kind of a daunting task. First of all, there’s more to learn about the history of the world of Thra (only the first part being that the world has a name). There's the film itself to consider, along with graphic novels and ancillary tales. It's all part of Jim Henson’s original design in creating a deep, rich world that you feel has existed for a long time. I've just finished the first two Dark Crystal Creation Myth graphic novels that have been released in the last few years, and have been trying to get my head around all the new backstory.

Thinking about this particular creation of Jim’s has got me thinking about him more than I have in the past decade. I remember exactly where I was when I heard he had died... I was at Disney World, of all places. I was on spring tour with the U of M Men's Glee Club. We did one every May at the end of the school year, and that particular year we were traveling the southeastern part of the country. That day, we were free to walk around Epcot Center and then had an outdoor evening performance to meet for, but when we arrived that morning on the bus someone had heard the news and passed it on to everyone. I was pretty shocked -- Jim Henson was still a relatively young guy -- and was profoundly sad to hear it.

My first thought on hearing of Jim's death was, "Damn. I was hoping to get to work with him someday." At the time, I was all geared up to be a filmmaker, and honestly thought that I was going to break into the industry one way or the other. Movies had been my childhood and adolescent obsession, and it would be a few more years until the indie film revolution came and went, and even a few more before I realized that making up the stories was the only part that I really wanted to do.

The news that day affected me the same way all this Dark Crystal research has: it got me thinking about what a product of Jim's imagination my own imagination really is. When I think about it, he was an almost constant presence for the first fifteen years of my life, when I learned how to act toward others, how to create, and how to dream. I started with Sesame Street in the early 70s, then switched to The Muppet Show in the late 70s (which I would watch religiously every Sunday night, and marvel every time at how fast a half hour could go by), Fraggle Rock in the 80s, then The Dark Crystal and Labyrinth after that. My favorite Christmas album always has been (and I assume always will be) A Christmas Together, a collaboration the Muppets did with John Denver -- it's the only one that is actually funny and moving as well... which is a spirit that also infused the HBO special Emmet Otter's Jugband Christmas. I absorbed all of this in my first fifteen years of life, and didn’t really lose touch with it until high school brought me under its sway.

So what did Jim teach me? Well, he taught me that you don't have to be a grandstander to be a good leader. Kermit the Frog never made a big deal about the fact that everyone seemed to answer to him, in fact he questioned it often -- most notably in a strange conversation with himself in the middle of a midnight desert two-thirds of the way into the first Muppet Movie. But Kermit didn't need to doubt himself. He never used his position to force his ideas on people. If anything, what he really showed was an ability to let everyone around him be themselves, and good things would come from it. The Muppets were the quintessential band of misfits -- the comedian who was never funny, the diva who had questionable levels of talent (and was a pig to boot), the cook who kept getting antagonized by his own ingredients, the scientist who constantly blew things up... But Kermit was the rock, the focal point of all their attention, because he was really their audience. I don't think Fozzie ever cared that his jokes bombed every night, because Kermit was still his friend afterward. I imagine that Kermit's relationship with his performers was much the same as Jim's was with the artists he surrounded himself with. He was the one who took all their disparate talents and brought them into focus.

But Jim showed us the darker side of leadership as well. Aside from that conversation with himself I already talked about, Kermit does encounter other moments of profound self-doubt. The most famous one, of course, is the song "It's Not Easy Being Green", which I still think is one of the most profound meditations on identity and self-acceptance you can find under three minutes in length. In that time, he goes through what for most people is a lifetime of second-guessing yourself and your worth, and breaking through to realize how important you really are with the question, "It could make you wonder why... but why wonder?"

The thought that I might get the chance to add something to Jim's vast set of worlds and characters is one of those instances where you find that after all the years and miles, you've somehow come back around to where you started, and the thought that all the dreams and stories and adventures you've had all along were just small parts of a glorious, uniform whole. I thank Jim and his family for this coming opportunity to show my appreciation for all that he gave to us.

Ozzy Explains It All

I used to work with a young woman who had no idea that Ozzy Osbourne was a celebrity before his family's reality show in the 90s/00s. When she casually mentioned that, I was stunned. "No no no," I wanted to say, "He wasn't always a bumbling, mush-mouthed sitcom dad. He was BIG, he was dangerous, he was scary!" I'm glad that Ozzy now has re-established himself as one of the founding fathers of metal, and that maybe these youngsters are getting a much-needed schooling in pop culture history.

Ozzy has gone through a number of transformations over the years. In the 80s, he started leaning more heavily on synths after the untimely death of his guitar muse, Randy Rhoads, which was in a way fortunate because that was the way the winds of change in metal were blowing anyway. He even participated (somewhat half-heartedly) in the mid-80s glam metal boom, when it seemed that the formula for success was spandex, sequins, and at least one power ballad that would get teenage girls to buy your album. He didn't start working his way back toward his heavier, crunchier roots until he found guiatarist Zakk Wylde.

It was during this time that he wrote the song that's prompting this essay, because I think it offers more emotional depth than any other metal song I can think of. In fact, it attempts no less than to encapsulate Ozzy's whole twenty-year rock-idol experience. It's a hidden track on his 1988 album "No Rest for the Wicked", so well-hidden that I didn't realize for many years that it actually had a title: "Hero".

You might not notice the psychological importance of the song on the first listen. It's full of Zakk's arena-filling power chords, and Ozzy's trademark wailing vocals soar over the top, as razor-sharp as on the album's other tracks, but it's the lyrics that really showcase an artist laying his soul bare. While it's not entirely out of character for Ozzy, an artist who has often used his music to let us in on his inner torment, I'll tell you why this song is really different...

It starts out with the lines "I don't wanna be a hero/I don't wanna ever let you down", and right there we realize we're in different territory. He's giving equal weight to the idea of shying away from being a celebrity, and realizing that he has a responsibility to his fans. This is the crux of the song, and he's put it right up front for us. The song is actually filled with imagery that signifies his reluctance to be seen as important: "I don't wanna wear your broken crown", "Don't want to sit upon your crippled throne".

Then comes the chorus, which for a long time I thought I must be mishearing, because in it, he actually tells us -- his fans -- that we've been wrong all along to believe in him. Underscored by the power chords that opened the song, he bellows, "I don't wanna disappoint the fools no more, the fools no more." Now, I've heard music artists talk in interviews about how they don't want to be perceived as role models, some have even written songs about it, but I've never before or since heard one that outright calls their fans fools.

But here's where the genius of the song comes in. We've just been called names, but Ozzy keeps us from being offended by then telling us exactly *why* we shouldn't admire him, and why if we want someone to look up to, we should look elsewhere... He also says, "Don't think you'll ever understand me/*I* don't even understand me", and "I couldn't answer all your questions/And if you're lost, I couldn't find your way". He's actually harder on himself than he is on us.

But it's the final verse that puts the exclamation point on the whole idea. After a typically blistering Zakk Wyde guitar solo, Ozzy finishes the song by executing an incredible lyrical sucker punch. "I am not your destination, or a road that's gonna lead you home/So, baby, please don't go." Then he keeps repeating those last three words over and over, going so far as to be joined by a choir that assists him the whole time the song is fading out.

It's that last part that really gets to me. You have to remember that it's coming from a man who, at that point, had been in the music business for almost 20 years, and finally had, admittedly not for the last time, overcome his inner demons. In fact, the track before this one is called "Demon Alcohol", and talks about how hard it is to stay sober, narrated in the voice of his addiction, a relentless hunter of souls. By the end of the album, Ozzy seems to understand the corner he's painted himself into, with a mind clearer than ever. He's idolized by millions, but is painfully aware of his own shortcomings, as an artist, a husband, a father, and a man.

But he chose to make the last refrain of the album a plea, begging for everyone to stick with him, despite all the reasons he doesn't think he's worthy. Even though he knows he doesn't deserve it, he knows that he's come too far to turn us away. He's shown us the frailty behind the mask, the quasi-symbiotic relationship he (and by proxy, all celebrities) have with their fans. He needs us, actually much much more than we need him. I can't think of another artist as prominent who has expressed a sentiment like that, or ever would.

Clouded Thoughts

I told some friends a few weeks ago that I was going to watch Cloud Atlas, and enough of them wanted to know what I thought about it that I started writing down some notes. Turns out, I had a lot more to say than I expected, and so I'm turning to my blog to give me room to put it all down. I hope they don't think that's too impersonal, but when the ideas start going, you've got to give them room, don't you?

Anyway, after a few days, I've been thinking about the movie a lot and trying to piece together what I'm left with after watching (and, I should say, being entertained by) the whole thing. When all is said and done, I've come away with an appreciation for what Tykwer and the Wachowskis were trying to do, telling a huge, sprawling epic with emotionally resonant stories, but it’s also incredibly apparent how they could have made it much tighter and better.

The overall theme of the film seems to be that our actions have effects -- sometimes far-reaching effects -- beyond our own existence. Like Sonmi says, "Our lives are not our own." We're responsible for not only what we do with our lives, but what those lives will ultimately do to others' lives. It's almost enough to make you not want to do much of anything, for fear of causing hardship for those around and future generations, but if you can get past that, the idea gives you an awareness of your place in the tapestry of the world.

We're presented with versions of the same people in six different epochs, from the 1800s to the 2200s. Their personalities and circumstances change every time, and there's always some sort of connection between one epoch and the next... someone reads a book or hears music written by one of the other epoch's characters, or visits the same place. And here's the first instance in which I think the storytellers missed an opportunity. Sometimes the connection between one epoch and the next is really tenuous, and the influence characters have on each other isn't really clear. Take Jim Broadbent's modern-day publisher, for example. You can fleetingly see him reading the book written by Luisa Rey (Halle Berry in an earlier epoch) while he's on the train, but never mentions it. Whether her story of uncovering a nuclear power lobbying conspiracy inspires him to break out of the nursing home/asylum he's forcibly placed in is not clear. I think the movie would have been much stronger if there had been a clear line where one character's overcoming of adversity had clearly affected another. Even a further explanation of "The Fall", some kind of man-made apocalypse which apparently led from a futuristic society to a broken-down wilderness, would have helped.

There's also the issue of what these characters are fighting against. It's usually a human rights issue of one sort or another, and stories separated by 400 years end with blows being struck against human slavery. If the movie’s central theme is the progression of the human race, one has to wonder how far we have come if we're struggling with the same issues over and over again.

That idea of improvement over time is a missed boat with the individual characters, too. I understand that it's a neat selling point (both to actor and to audience) to have movie stars playing up to six vastly different characters – e.g. Halle Berry as elderly male Korean cyborg doctor! -- but it doesn't seem to have any real value in the story itself. For a while, I thought that maybe Tom Hanks' character was really the same soul, making better decisions as he came back time and again. He did go from a corrupt doctor who would slowly poison a man for his gold to a selfless peasant of the future who risks his life for a stranger in need. But then I remembered that in the modern-day epoch (chronologically the fourth out of the six stories), he was a disgruntled Cockney author who, in cold blood, killed a man who gave him a bad review. How much richer would the story be if you could see him improving from life to life instead?

Now, keep in mind that reincarnation isn't something that I brought to the table myself. The recurring characters all have an identical shooting-star birthmark on their bodies somewhere. And at one point, Hanks and Berry actually talk pointblank about how they get the feeling that they keep meeting over and over again in different lives. But after all that, I'm not sure what the birthmarks are supposed to represent. Are these people marked in this way to represent the unique way they are linked? Because if that's the case, it's blunting the movie's message about how we *all* are linked and *all* are responsible for those around us. Or maybe the birthmark means that these are special people, destined for this cycle of lives in a way that the rest of us aren't. That muddles the idea even more.

I'm ignoring the fact here that it's also kind of distracting to play find-the-star in each of the epochs, especially with extensive make-up jobs that often change the race of the actor. Admittedly, there were more than a few that I missed, which I learned from watching the recap that precedes the end credits. Like I said, it would have meant more if there had been a reason for it, but clearly a fair number of these "links" were background cameos and weren't even necessary. Wouldn't it have been a better, more cohesive story if they had been, if we could have seen relationships and situations evolve across centuries? Is it really worth the credibility lost when Hugo Weaving plays a Nurse Ratched-like Englishwoman? Or when Jim Sturgess tries to pass as Asian in a room full of actual Asian actors?

Like I've said, I appreciate what the filmmakers were trying to do, and maybe going back to the source novel would help in explaining what all these stories really have to do with each other. But what I see is six stories that don't have a lot to say in and of themselves, loosely woven together into an ambitious film that appears to be deeper and more important than it really is.