Another Wall-Street Bonanza

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by Richard Crews
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I guess you heard--Wall Street is straightening its green eye shade, adjusting its armbands, and licking its pencil (and its chops) to start handing out $145 billion in bonuses this year. This represent a new, all-time high, beating the previous record set in 2007 just before the bottom fell out of worldwide financial systems.

And why the hell not? Didn't they earn it?

No, they didn't--and that's problem three (be patient--"one" and "two" are coming). Banking (in the broadest sense) is a service industry. They don't grow or manufacture or even transport anything. They manipulate (ok, ostensibly they "guard") other people's money. You simply don't pay more for the cop on the corner or your home security system or even an insurance policy than you do for food, a safe and comfortable place to live, an education for your kids, or the tools and resources of your trade. It's crazy. It's like "protection" money. It's economics on its head.

But we do. Thanks to historical circumstances such as globalization, exploding information technology, and laissez-faire deregulation (with a healthy dose of ingenuity and normal human greed thrown in), we divert a major fraction of our national wealth to what should be oiling the economic system.

Why is this a problem? Because the extent to which one is paying protection money, one isn't building up ones business--building inventory, trimming prices, tailor fitting customer needs--or securing and enhancing ones lifestyle--living in a cleaner, more comfortable, more secure home; saving for the kids' education and for retirement; etc. Put in national terms, when the money-service industry dines on thousand-dollar wine and butterfly tongues, roads and bridges and power lines fall into decay, the atmosphere gets polluted from archaic vehicles and dirty power plants, scientific research and education founder, health-care and retirement go untended, etc.

So reason "three" is that the Wall-Street bonanza diverts money from healthful and productive uses.

Reason "two" is a little subtler but in fact more important. I won't go into it or argue it in detail, but cultural pay patterns that increase the gap between the very wealthy and the rest of us weaken and undermine our economy--and hence our democracy and in fact our entire network of social systems. They decrease the buying power of the vast middle class and increase the rolls of the even-more-vast impoverished and disadvantaged beneath them. They bring our very beliefs and lifestyles into jeopardy.

But reason "one" is the real killer--one that is often overlooked and underrated. The Wall-Street bonanza drains the best minds as they graduate from college and graduate schools away from careers in science, education, engineering, health, and public service.

Every graduate these days makes a choice about where to apply their energy and talents and learning. And on one side of the balance is the lure to make millions--no, tens of millions--of dollars taking their math, law, science, language, or other skills to Wall Street.

That is the real tragedy of the Wall-Street Bonanza syndrome.
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Passing Quietly

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by Richard Crews
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My point of consciousness seems significant to me--in fact, it seems like all there is. When I hear about things from other people or read about them in the newspaper, there is a different kind of reality associated with them--they seem more shadowy, more hypothetical.

Yesterday morning when I was walking in the woods, I stopped to rub some poison oak leaves on my arm. Bright, red-lacquered leaves they were--autumn's finest--which I have heard are particularly potent in bringing on the rash. I rubbed them hard against my arm. It's now been 36 hours and I've had no reaction to them.

I tell you this because the incident was a quiet, passing moment in my life. I did not plan it in advance; and I had no particular expectations for it. It could have been fraught with preliminary trepidation, or considerable lingering annoyance--but it was not. It will now fade from my memory as if it never happened.

Recently I had occasion to apologize to a young lady for a terrible, hurtful insult I leveled at her several years ago. As the anger of the moment subsided, guilt and sadness took its place. My apology was heart-felt--even laced with tears. But she said that she did not recall the incident.

My father died in 1963. Thirty years later I wrote a poem--


When I look back at the book my father wrote,
it is thinner than it was,
the pages fewer, the type fading,
the metaphors less vibrant year by year.

Soon there will be only a single page
with a single bleak and tired cliche
hardly visible among the wrinkled, acid-torn scraps.

Then he will be gone.

"Who?" people will ask if I chance to refer to him.

And I, when they ask--
I will not recall.


I wish I understood this stark dichotomy. My perceptions and recollections seem so vast--they fill up the world--they seem infinite. But they are also clearly zero.

I suspect that yours seem that way too.
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Apocalypse Pending

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by Richard Crews
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On May 8, 1945, "Victory in Europe Day" (V-E Day), the World War II Allies formally accepted the unconditional surrender of the armed forces of Nazi Germany and the end of Adolf Hitler's Third Reich. I was seven years old. A remarkable change came over my family that day: I realized that my parents had been scared as long as I had known them and that they weren't scared any more.

But the end of World War II signaled the arrival of a new era of fear. Over the next few years it dawned on our consciousness that nuclear weapons--newly discovered, then enhanced and proliferated--could destroy our planet and our species (or any national segment thereof) and that the U.S.S.R. was aggressively bent on our destruction.

For the next 45 years until 1989, I (we) lived on the brink--second by second, minute by minute--of annihilation. Perhaps you remember this feeling clearly; perhaps you do not. It was very real. There was nothing hypothetical or emotionally detached about it. The Doomsday Clock hovered at a few minutes before midnight. A friend of mine in college (a straight-A student, a history major) seriously decided not to study for final exams because it seemed so likely--so clear--that the civilized world would not be around much longer.

Then in 1989 with a vast, worldwide, collective sigh of relief, the Berlin Wall came down. Those of us who had lived our entire lives under the second-by-second threat of nuclear annihilation--waiting for the blinding flash in the sky so that we could "duck and cover" before the shock wave hit so that we could prolong our lives a few minutes--a few hours--a few days at the most . . . we simply didn't know how to feel. We had never lived in a "safe" world and didn't know how to do it--we didn't know how to think, how to feel.

As we got used to it--as we began to learn to celebrate and to revel in it--it became clear that the "war" was not over. Terrorists with suitcase-size weapons of mass destruction (with "dirty" radioactive bombs or with chemical or biological agents powerful enough to kill millions) were all around us, driven by strange, violent ideologies. "Normal" business and finance had gotten so fast and massively global that a malevolent act--or a simple mistake strategically located--could bring the worldwide economy to its knees in a matter of minutes. Political paralysis and debt financing seemed poised and ready to destroy our civilized way of life. And behind it all "the wheels of the gods grind slow, but they grind exceeding fine"--pollution, global warming, the population bomb, famine, groundwater loss--or for those more sophisticated and "in the know," nanotechnology, biogenetics, the digital take-over....

Perhaps it has always been so. In millennia past, ice ages, droughts, predators, and the like have threatened our survival. (Some scientists believe, for example--on the basis of genetic studies--that at one point a million-or-so years ago the human race was nearly driven to extinction--reduced in numbers to a single small group--perhaps to a single breeding pair.)

In more recent centuries, plagues of disease or invading barbarian hoards (or even more local, adventurous potentates) have repeatedly hit the "reset" button and driven civilization as we (or "ours") knew it to the brink of destruction.

This essay--this stream of ruminations--may not have any "conclusion." Or for some it may be, "See, God has always looked after us and always will." For others, "If you put your head in the lion's mouth often enough, sooner or later you will lose it." (Even Steve Irwin did.) Or perhaps the amazing human intellect should merely cast all this as a fly speck in geologic or astronomic time.
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My Life Balance Sheet

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by Richard Crews
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It's time to look back at what I GOT and MISSED in life--at what has fallen my way, and what I wish had taken a different turn.

First, the good stuff. And first and foremost among the good stuff is the realization that I have been lucky--very, VERY lucky--again, and again, and again.

To start with, I got a remarkable set of genes. There was no particular "reason" for this in the long flow of the Universe; I certainly didn't "earn" or "deserve" the genetic foundation I got. As far as I know, the great DNA lottery just spun the wheel and I won. So I wound up, for example (for a HUGE example), going through life with an IQ that is high in the top percentile. Able to see and remember and figure things out that almost everybody misses.

In addition (in the "very lucky" department), I got a physical body that is very solid--very durable and reliable. Sure I had nephritis that almost killed me when I was 14 (and chronic kidney limitations since), and hepatitis that likewise almost did me in when I was 32 (and left me with lingering, background liver disease ever since), and heart disease that has put me on the brink--seconds away--from saying "sayonara" any instant in the past 35 years, and chronic lung disease, and GI disease, etc., etc. But basically this body I got to drive for the past 73 years has done one helluva stalwart, steady, reliable job.

Another bigee in the "lucky" department is being born into the socio-economic upper crust--high in the top percentile worldwide. I've never been "rich" by anybody's standards (except those of the bottom 95% of the world's population), but I was never hungry or cold or destitute, I always had a place to live and food to eat and clothes to wear--not to mention a car to drive and whatever were the latest toys and play-tools that were bubbling up through our amazing technological culture.

Maybe those are the big two in my lucky, lucky life--getting smart and sturdy-body genes, and an upper-crust socio-economic start--but they barely begin to tell the story. I have been so incredibly, astoundingly lucky again and again, minute by minute, hour by hour, day after day, year after year as I have stumbled along blindly and half-conscious in life--it almost makes me believe there is some Great Benevolent Force guiding my hand. When I think of the times . . . of careening down a coastline highway late one night at 80 miles per hour in the rain with no brakes; of walking into an Army prison shower room where an scared and angry young soldier with a loaded and cocked 45 was threatening to kill anybody who came near him saying to him, "Sit down--I just want to talk to you for a minute"; of having my bike whacked by a pickup truck trying to beat the light and the traffic going around a downtown corner and walking away without a scratch (a couple of weeks ago) . . . but those are just the "big" times. I'm talking about every second of every day. Often shielding me from my own "desires," expectations, and beliefs. I've come to expect that it doesn't really matter what I think or want or plan--what winds up happening will turn out to be best in the long run.

On the "bad" side, I wish I had learned several foreign languages fluently before I was 12. Lots of people do. It's no big "brain" thing--not at that age--it's a matter of opportunity. And it teaches a person to think outside the box for the rest of ones life. I wish I had learned to play the piano--or "keyboard"--when I was age 5 to 15, not to perform but everyone should be able to sit down at a keyboard and read through a piece of music. It's another language; not being able to do it facilly cuts you off from a whole other world of feeling and communication. I wish I had gotten more into gymnastics when I was in my teens; it provides a kid with a balanced and coordinated sense of dealing with ones body and the physical world for the rest of ones life.

Most of all I wish I'd learned to get along with people better. I've been socially obtuse--basically a loner--a hermit--all my life. It's been a good life. But it might have been more fun, more satisfying, if I'd been better able to share it more fully with some of the people who have passed by.
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Reasons for Penal Incarceration--Philosophical, Moral, and Sociological

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by Richard Crews
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It seems to me there are nine distinct reasons one can dissect from the historical and cultural web surrounding the practice of incarceration for a crime.

The first three of these revolve around the idea of PUNISHMENT, the most basic idea being that the individual is dealt a measure of pain (physical or emotional) for having violated society's rules. Perhaps this is easiest to separate conceptually from the other reasons if one considers a whipping or beating as punishment for a crime. Clearly this has no direct relationship with the crime itself, for example, with the goods stolen or the victim harmed.

When one moves to the second reason, retribution, the connection or relationship of the punishment with the crime begins to be asserted. This is conveyed in the concept (first embodied in the Code of Hammurabi, 1790 B.C., and later in the Old Testament of the Bible, the 1400s B.C.) of "an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth." This was originally a directive for mercy: that the criminal should not be mutilated or put to death for merely stealing something or causing an injury which was not fatal. The principle is highlighted in the operetta by Gilbert and Sullivan (1884 A.D.) when the Mikado sings, "My object all sublime, I shall achieve in time, to let the punishment fit the crime...."

The third reason under the general heading of punishment is restitution, that the individual owes recompense or repayment--that after serving ones prison term, one has "paid ones debt to society." Occasionally (mostly since the late 20th century) this incorporates a concept of victim's rights, that the victim should be paid back by the criminal commensurate with the victim's loss or the value of the crime.

There are three further reasons for penal incarceration that revolve around the idea of PROTECTING SOCIETY: First, to dissuade the individual by fear of punishment from committing further crimes. Second, to dissuade others from committing crimes by showing them a fearful example of punishment. And third, to protect society by segregating the criminal from society at large.

Finally--especially in modern, humanistic times--there are three reasons for penal incarceration that involve PROVIDING VALUE. First, to provide a convicted criminal with rehabilitative education and socialization skills so that the individual can become an integrated, non-criminal participant in society. Second, to provide society with, instead of a criminal, a productive, contributing member. And third, to enhance and extend a system of moral principles and patterns of conduct that provide for a safe and stable culture.
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Ruminations

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by Richard Crews
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I sat in my big, padded easy chair in the dark this evening listening to Haydn string quartets played by The Amadeus Quartet on the Stradivarius instruments owned by the Library of Congress--a sparkling performance--DDD and played on Bose speakers. I have had the recordings for a couple of decades and listened to them from time to time, but not for several years.

My inquiry this evening was to listen to see how Haydn plays with and paints and shifts the emotions he delivers. My conclusion: he doesn't; he was a hack; he worked at the court-composer trade and generated music for his master by the yard. He was no Bach; he was no Chopin.

While I listened, I thought about what sort of things should obsess me now in my later years? Growing old? Watching my mental and physical abilities fade? (Sometimes pretending that they are not?) Dying?

I found ease again in refreshing my realization that the human brain is a special-purpose computer. It was designed through the evolution of DNA to fear death (one of DNA's little ploys to perpetuate itself), to believe in God (a brain designed to solve problems seeks cause-and-effect patterns), and surely not to "go gentle into that good night" but rather to "rage, rage against the dying of the light" (DNA fights for every point no mater how long or how lost the match). Moreover the human brain was designed (through the evolution of DNA) to grok the world on our work-a-day level, not to visualize more than three dimensions, the quantum paradoxes, or the billion-light-year vastness of interstellar space.

I was pleased to think of God as "the world of mystery and perceptual distortion that surrounds us." And of death as Socrates saw it--without fear since, he said, he didn't know anything about death and wasn't daft enough to fear something he knew nothing about.

The Haydn came to an end. I realized I have not written you, my friends, lately. So I sat down and wrote this. I hope it finds you well--as brimming over with love and joy as it does me.
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What Is Consciousness?

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by Richard Crews
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Consciousness is a problem-solving strategy, the result of a long, complex, and arduous evolution of a most curious chemical compound, deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA).

DNA first happened on the scene about three and a half billion years ago. Exactly how this came about is not entirely clear. A few billion years after the Big Bang (which occurred 13.7 billion years ago), supernovae burst forth all over the Universe. They came from stars that had accumulated so much hydrogen--gradually accreting it under its own gravitational weight--that they had grown hot and pressured beyond nuclear synthesis of helium and other small elements. They had grown so fiery bright and massive that they exploded. In doing so they spewed forth into the cosmos an array of medium-small chemical elements they had synthesized in their pressure-cooker phase--elements such as carbon, nitrogen, and oxygen--elements necessary for life. This enriched cosmic dust raced outward from its exploding star. But gradually, because of its own gravity, it began to coagulate into gaseous clouds; these clouds were pulled into rings around other stars, and ultimately they coagulated into planets.

These planets--such as the early Earth--were hellish places, full of molten rock, volcanoes, and violent lightening storms. But gradually they cooled--more and more, here and there--and the rich chemical soup they had inherited from supernovae billions of years before was churned and frothed a million, million different ways. Out of this came--among many, many failed attempts--the first primitive building blocks of life: ultimately, DNA.

DNA has one unique and curious characteristic: given the right chemical froth, it makes more of itself. There is no other (known) chemical compound among the vast array of compounds the Universe plays with that has this characteristic. But DNA is a complex and delicate chemical structure and so, like any chemical (even ones with far simpler and hardier chemical bonds) it is subject to degradation. It can fall prey--and its unique characteristic, self-duplication, can be lost--due to heat, acids or other harsh chemicals, or even bombardment by electromagnetic radiation such as X-rays or by cosmic rays.

Imagine, then, that primitive forms of DNA brewing on Earth in its fertile stew were occasionally struck by cosmic rays coming from outer space. Usually nothing happened--the cosmic rays were too weak or not aimed precisely right; the chemical bonds of the DNA were strong enough to withstand them. Often, on the other hand, if the rays were strong enough to have an effect their effect was catastrophic--the DNA was destroyed. But on rare occasions the cosmic rays caused subtle damage; the DNA continued to be able to function, but in some altered way. It had been mutated.

Most of the mutations--rare as they were--were disruptive. They caused the DNA to function poorly and to die off. But ever more rarely--much rarer than rare--a mutation would occur that improved the DNA's functions, for example, one that enabled the DNA more easily to find and bind the chemical constituents it needed to perform its magic self-replication process.

Imagine now this salutary mutation process, though it occurred rarely, happening--over a billion years and more--millions and millions of times. Gradually the DNA became more and more complex, and better and better at reduplicating itself. Gradually it "learned" to join forces with other, slightly different DNA molecules for mutual advantage. Gradually it formed colonies, organisms, and then more and more complex organisms; gradually it became better and better at replicating itself--and at performing the other functions that supported that self-replication process: finding the necessary raw materials (food) including moving around and searching the environment; getting rid of useless byproducts (excretions); protecting itself from disruptive influences; and making more, faster, better copies of itself (procreation).

But how does this advanced, complex DNA organism make the myriad decisions necessary to survive and thrive? It does so by developing a way of evaluating the choices it must make and comparing their hypothetical outcomes. In other words, it does so by sorting through the incoming sensory data, comparing them with remembered experiences, imagining itself dealing with the data this way and that--and choosing the optimal behavior that is most likely to produce the desired outcome. In other words, it develops a network of neurons--a brain--and a way of imagining itself in a series of behavioral scenarios. In other words, it develops a reproducible and more or less consistent image of itself. In other words, it becomes conscious.

What Is Consciousness? Consciousness is a problem-solving strategy, the result of a long, complex, and arduous evolution of a most curious chemical compound, deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA).
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