THAT’S WHAT FRIENDS ARE FOR: The older I get, the harder it gets to get into the spirit of Thanksgiving; i.e., to be thankful for all the wonderful stuff that life is full of. Problem is, life is full of a whole lot of other stuff that makes it hard to be thankful sometimes. I’d like to get sentimental here and tell you about my wonderful family and friends and how I’m so thankful for all of them. But I’m just not a very sentimental person. I’ll leave the sentimentalism to country-western singers. Nevertheless, I’ve posted a stylized picture taken today which includes a family member, and a friend of the family. Family and friends are definitely not an unmixed blessing (and I’m definitely not an unmixed blessing to my family and friends). But then again, they’re better than enemies and strangers — most of the time, anyway. So in the partial spirit of Thanksgiving, here’s my semi-tribute to family and friends. Hope that you and your family and friends had a happy one.

I’ve got an office tip for you young folk who have been out of college for a few years and have moved up a few steps in the company. No, this is not about the program “The Office” on NBC (Tuesday night). But wait . . . . maybe it does sort-of relate. That show is delightfully off-beat but mostly genuine, even if bossman Michael Scott is a bit “over the top”. (Bosses are usually jerks, but it’s hard to find one that jerky and yet that harmless; bosses usually have a streak of evil genius that gets them promoted to the job, in spite of their jerkiness.)

There definitely are lots of guys like assistant-boss Dwight Schrute out there, although puff-balls like Dwight usually don’t possess the frustrated mean streak that NBC writes into his character. NBC keeps a blog for Dwight on its web site, called “Schrute Space”. I read it the other day, and it actually made a good point about robots. Dwight, being kind of a techno-geek, said in his blog that robots are often depicted in science fiction as evil, menacing things — but guess what? Robots are all around us right now, and no one seems to be running from them in fear. The fictional Mr. Schrute points out in his blog that if you have a Mr. Coffee in your kitchen, you have a robot there. So wake up and smell the robotic coffee.

Oh, back to my own office tip . . . . which might be the subject for a future episode of The Office (you never know). Once you’ve been with a company for a couple of years, they start taking you a little more seriously. That means that sooner or later you’re going to be called into some kind of important meeting with some kind of high level boss. You know, the ones with the big offices and the nice carpeting and furniture. When that happens, just remember this: stay cool and don’t say anything unless you are asked to speak (unless it’s your third or fourth big meeting and you know something vitally important and relevant to the discussion — and even then, make it fast).

And most important, always listen for that point where the conversation slows down, which means that the main meeting is winding up. At that point, grab your pen and pad and sit forward in your chair, ready to bolt for the door. Usually the big boss will look at you at that point and graciously say “thank you” – that’s your cue to leave. Big bosses are usually quite gracious. You should then graciously smile back and walk briskly back to your cubicle. Everyone else, including your own immediate boss (who you came in with) will remain seated for the after-glow discussion about the heavy crap. That’s the kind of stuff that goes on above your level. If you haven’t already left, i.e. if you think you’re just as important as everyone else at that table, it will get awkward — they will tell you to leave, and you will then lose points.

But if you know just when to leave, you gain points. Big bosses and little bosses love it when the minions know just how important they are. And even though it’s all b.s., you don’t want to hang with that crowd anyway. You want to get back with your fellow minions. So play the stupid status game with them, and keep collecting the paycheck. And then go home (or better yet, go out to a bar with your friends) and watch The Office, and laugh about it all. Until they can finally make a Dwight-like, quasi-intelligent robot to take your place, you can laugh all the way to the bank.

What’s Bad With General Motors Is Bad With the USA. I’ve read that GM is going down the tubes. Sales are declining. Bankruptcy looms. An American dinosaur is dying.

Actually, GM was warned quite a while ago. GM was always good at knocking out big cars by the millions. Since the mid-1960s, GM stopped innovating — they would leave that to Ford, then Volkswagen and Volvo, then the Japanese. Their cars were still stylish — GM knew and still knows how to make a car look good — but the quality was declining. But as to compensate, GM gave you what seemed like more value by expanding the dimensions.

People seemed to like big cars, even if they didn’t run right, and GM was there to sell them. Then came the gasoline lines of the mid-70s, when GM tried to make small cars. They weren’t very good, but instead of committing to research and development so as to perfect the small car, GM decided to go back to big cars. They got back into the spotlight in the roaring 1990s when everyone wanted an SUV or pickup truck. Instead of investing in research and development in things like hybrid power, GM kept on bashing out monsters and would loan you the money to buy them (they made a big portion of their profits from financing). Now, whether because of increased gas prices (which have actually come down quite a bit lately; I saw regular for $1.99 tonight) or changing public tastes and values (wouldn’t that be something if small and smart becomes fashionable again in the auto world), SUV and truck sales are down. GM’s regular cars are OK, but they’re not Toyotas or Hondas. GM ignored all of its warnings, and now the vultures are circling overhead.

GM is a reflection of everything that is wrong with America today — a once-great empire that still appears powerful and technically advanced, but got lazy and disinspired over the years and is now living off the left-overs from the glory days. Sooner or later the reckoning will come. GM forgot about the balance of virtue that made it great (the balance of quality and style, the balance of standardization and customer choice, the balance of production efficiency and personalized marketing), and replaced them with extremes (extremely large vehicles, extremely little innovation, extremely good credit financing, extremely poor quality). America seems to be moving from balances to extremes, too (extremely rich or extremely poor, extremely caring but extremely capitalist, extremely nice but extremely greedy, extremely low taxes but extremely indebted, extremely religious but extremely militarized).

At GM, it was style over substance, bigness over quality, power over finesse. GM defined the American Dream for our parents (if you are a Baby Boomer) or grandparents (if you are Gen X, Y, Z or whatever). If GM hits the skids, how much longer can that dream hold up? We shall see.

I’ve been a vegetarian, more or less, since 1987. I still eat some egg and milk products (in cookies and cake) and I eat clams sometimes. I read somewhere that true vegetarians give clams “the benefit of the doubt” as to whether or not they have any feelings and consciousness. I guess that I give my own appetite the benefit when I’m in doubt. Nonetheless, my daily diet is still pretty far from the standard American diet. And that works for me. I eat what I like and I like what I eat.

It occurred to me that vegetarianism, whether perfect or somewhat compromised like my own version of it, is made possible by the modern industrialized world (I’m gonna give it credit for once). Because of our extensive trade, transportation and distribution networks, most of us Americans can buy a wide variety of foods cheaply and conveniently. We have access to fresh fruits and vegetables and grains all year long. We have available a wide variety of food items that substitute for meat protein, like nuts and soy products and pasta. Even without meat or animal products, we can still eat a wide variety of foods available in the typical supermarket. And if we do have a problem with a vitamin or nutrient (I have the typical vegetarian deficiencies in calcium and B vitamins), we can buy supplements pretty cheaply.

So, for better or worse, vegetarianism is made practical and possible by modern society. Just go back 200 years or so and you absolutely had to eat meat to get by in a lot of places on this planet. There just wasn’t any other way of getting calories and nutrients down your gullet for many months. In warm places, especially near a lake or an ocean, you could get a fairly wide range of grains and veggies and nuts; but in the colder places (like Poland, where my ancestors came from) or up in the mountains or deserts, there just wasn’t a whole lot of stuff that you could grow and store. Maybe you had some potatoes or cabbage, but not much else. So you had to take advantage of all the proteins and fats and minerals that your near-by animal friends had stored up in their flesh, for your own survival.

It sometimes amazes me how humans have occupied pretty much every corner of this planet, no matter how cold or dry or nasty the environment. But then again, they couldn’t have done it without having animals to eat. Before the advent of supermarkets, you could only be a veg-head in places like Italy or Africa, where plenty of beans and vegetables and fruit were always available. In Norway or the high Andes Mountains of South America, you had to rip into flesh in order to get enough energy to stay alive. Which makes me wonder, as an imperfect vegetarian, why even settle in such crappy places? I guess that the inner drive to control your own plot of soil is strong, even stronger than the urge to have something more than meat and potatoes on the table every night.

Here in modern America, land and houses are terribly expensive; which proves that the primal urge to control one’s own domain is still strong. But at least food is plentiful and relatively cheap, allowing those of us who can overcome the other primal urge (i.e., to rip into flesh when the stomach starts growling) to follow our enlightened wills. I’m glad to be one of the enlightened . . . .

Uh oh . . . . .

The other day I was thinking a bit about Plato and his notion of “The Forms” (i.e., the perfect ideal behind every crude and imprecise concept here on earth; e.g. the perfect circle, perfect harmony, perfect love, or maybe perfect justice). This was the basis of Plato’s metaphysical view; in effect it was his religion. The Forms supposedly exist in a heavenly realm where everything is perfect. Our souls come from the World of The Forms, and after we die they return home to that World. While here on earth, our souls are pretty much lost in the muck of decay and the struggle of daily existence. However, once in a blue moon they experience something that reminds them (if just for a moment) of the perfect world from which they came. When it happens you feel a thrill, a deep-down sensation, a religious experience.

For people like me, the way of having such a religious experience is through learning and education. Reading and studying are generally pretty boring. But once in a while you have an “ah ha” experience, a moment of great insight when the pieces all come together and you feel thrilled by the rush of understanding. That’s the kind of thing that an eternal student (like myself) lives for. It’s a bit like a drug trip or like falling in love, but without the hell to pay afterward.

Not to say that moments of love aren’t also temporary visions of an ideal. It’s just that reality and basic human needs and misunderstanding so quickly intervene in human relationships. Perhaps where and how you “follow your bliss” (as Joseph Campbell would say) is a matter of individual temperament. People who are extroverted and sensory-oriented will find their visions of heaven in physical moments (including, but not always through sex; it could also be a mother’s rush of joy in holding her baby, or an embrace among teammates after a great play in a sports game). People who are introverted and intuitive, however, will tend a bit more towards study, thinking and abstraction as their window on the holy.

I’m in no hurry to die, but I hope that Plato is right and that there is an eventual reunification with the forms. (Plato said that the ultimate purpose of philosophy, which means love of wisdom, is the preparation for death.) But I’m sometimes worried by a recurring thought, a rather silly one — that the forms are really “Colorforms”, those vinyl shapes that I played with as a child. So after death, your soul would then go to a place with a dark background having bright, colorful shapes floating about, e.g. red triangles, green squares, blue rectangles, and orange circles. Arg, sounds a bit like a bad acid trip. Say it ain’t so, Plato.

TV TIME: I try to keep up with 2 or 3 TV shows a year. That isn’t easy, as there aren’t very many good shows out there. I was a big Fraiser fan, but that show finally bit the dust two years ago. However, The West Wing has kept me in touch with the tube. I’m glad that Martin Sheen and company are hanging in there. At the moment, in fact, the West Wing literally leaving us hanging. President Bartlett/Martin Sheen’s term is just about up, and Jimmy Smits and Alan Alda are fighting it out on the campaign trail to succeed him. Fortunately, whoever the scriptwriters pick to win the election, the show will go on; either one of them could keep The West Wing interesting for years to come. A live debate between Santos (Smits) and Vinnick (Alda) is coming up this Sunday; that should be great . . .

As with most West Wing junkies, I’ve taken interest in Commander In Chief, a new drama offering from ABC. In case you’re not familiar with CIC, it features Geena Davis as the first female President. According to the plot, Congresswoman Mackenzie Allen (Davis) was selected for the VP spot as the token female on a conservative Republican ticket, as to steal the womens vote from the Democrats. It worked, but the true blue GOP President (true red, actually) unexpectedly dies soon after taking office. Since “Mac” wasn’t really a true-red Republican, they encourage her to step aside and allow the Speaker of the House, played by Donald Sutherland, to “take the purple” (as the Romans used to say about new Emperors). She was ready to comply, but then Congressman Nate Templeton (Sutherland) had to go and say some stupid, chauvinistic things about women in front of Mackie. Next thing you know, she’s the Commander In Chief. And in doing so, she gains an instant enemy in The House, where Templeton / Sutherland will have to remain.

Templeton aside, the really big crisis is this: President Mac has a husband and three kids, and they are all in the needy mode. They all want her attention; they all want her to keep the family intact just as before. And she’s trying her best. But now she’s got the world’s last great superpower to run. Thus, the show becomes a desultory mix of The West Wing and All My Children. Can Mac have it all? Can she be a good wife and mother, and still have the time and energy to run what we used to call “the free world”?

Even if the writing and acting and plot lines thus far have not been Emmy material, Commander In Chief does raise an interesting question. It pushes the female career and family issue to the limit. Well, almost anyway. Thus far, every episode gives President Allen a limited set of challenges: the Speaker gives her a political headache; her husband or one of the kids gives her a mommy crisis; and wouldn’t you know it, some nasty terrorist or tinpan dictator out there in Blahdististan gives her a military / diplomatic situation to deal with. (Or maybe mother nature spits out a hurricane or an earthquake at the wrong time.) Superwoman Mac gets pretty frazzled by all of this, but somehow she sorts it out by the end of the day, and is ready for whatever craziness tomorrow might bring.

If you’re a West Wing fan, or if you just follow current events and presidential politics, you know that this is more than just a bit contrived. Where is the rest of the government? Where are the cabinet members, the speechwriters, the media people, the generals and admirals, the foreign diplomats, the political advisors, and for that matter, any other member of the House or Senate? The Commander In Chief here doesn’t seem to have all that much to command. As such, she has time to attend to her daughter’s indiscretion with boyfriends and her son’s fighting at school. The West Wing — and everything I’ve ever read or heard regarding the Presidency — makes it pretty clear that there isn’t time for that. You keep the family around for the photo ops so as to satisfy the American myth about home and hearth; but in reality, someone else has to tend to the kids. And the first lady (and someday, the first guy) just have to keep themselves busy (albeit, with a staff and a budget to help). I think that the cold, hard truth is that you can’t be President and raise kids at the same time; no one even tries. Maybe they should; if Bill Clinton had in fact given more time to Chelsea’s homework, he might have avoided the Monica Lewinsky hijinks.

So, is Commander In Chief unintentionally saying that women generally don’t do as well when faced with the cruel choice between duty to the family and duty to the world? Is it asking whether it’s right that men traditionally choose worldly duty over family needs? If it is, then CIC needs to do a better job of it. The show has created an interesting tension, but it avoids the ultimate consequences. If Commander In Chief can’t be another West Wing (which I would have liked), then at least it should do a good job with the “soap opera” issues that it takes on. Perhaps it should be honest about the fact that Mackenzie Allen / Geena Davis can’t be both soccer mom and Madame President, and is going to hurt someone (or maybe everyone, including herself) by trying. Maybe this show could convey to guys like me the wrenching personal and social dilemmas that women face when they try for career success and family life. Maybe that would make us ponder whether it’s fair that men get a pass on this issue, while women are held accountable if their kids or their husbands go wacky because they work late. Bring on the psychological intensity.

But CIC is not set up for psychological intensity. Nor political intensity. Nor dramatic characterization and realistic dialog. It sets up a good story line and an interesting situation, but doesn’t seem to do too much with it; just basic, easy-to-swallow entertainment. I think it’s another thin-veneer, one-season-and-out show at best (which is so typical for ABC; this is something that CBS might have done better with). And that’s too bad, when you consider what could have been done here with the right actors and the right writers and the right direction.

PS — On metacritic.com, they summarize a variety of newspaper reviews of Commander In Chief, and have a board for write-in reviews. The write-ins each give an opinion score of 0 to 10. I decided to list the scores, broken down by the reviewer’s sex, and take the averages. It turns out that the female average is 8.7, and the male average is 6.2. Not a very surprising result. What is surprising is that 7 women sent in reviews, whereby 19 men took the time to make a comment. So the guys are taking this show seriously, even if they don’t always like it.

Halloween has become a lot like Christmas. When I was a kid, there was plenty of trick-or-treating. But other than having some candy at the ready on the big day, parents didn’t make such a big deal about Halloween back then. Other than an occasional pumpkin on the porch here or a cardboard window print of a witch or a ghost there, we didn’t have much preparation for “spooky season”. Today, houses are decorated in early October with orange and purple lights, along with figurines of skeletons and spiders and tombstones. Much like Christmas, just different colors and symbols.

Halloween has become more like Christmas over the years, and at the same time Christmas has become more like Halloween. As with trick-or-treat day, Christmas is now mostly a children’s holiday. It’s something that adults do for kids, not something that has any other meaning to them (not that doing something for kids is such a bad thing; I can understand that children are a very big part of many adults’ lives). To the degree that adults do celebrate “the season”, it’s mostly thru drunkeness and maybe even lust (think about the sterotypical office party; I can almost see the Christmas episode of The Office right now). In other words, it’s the worst of both childhood and adulthood.

Both Christmas and Halloween are now secularized versions of what were once major Christian religious holidays. And in turn, both of these Christian holidays were co-options of ancient pagan festivals. The early Christian church set Christ’s birthday in late December so as to coincide with the Roman winter solstice festivals; and All Saints Day (called “All-Hallows Day” in olde English, the eve of which became “Halloween”) replaced the Celtic new year of November 1, when the worlds of the living and the dead were said to temporarily blur together (giving people the creeps). I’m surprised that the religious groups that urge us to keep Christ in Christmas haven’t started running ad campaigns about “putting the Hallows back in Halloween”.

As an aging adult, Halloween seems more and more ironic each year. At least Christmas offers adults the ideal (however unfulfilled) of peace on earth and goodwill towards men (yea, it’s sexist, I know). But I really can’t share the kiddies’ delight in all the fake cobwebs and gravestones and skeletons and all the other cute little reminders of death. I can get all the fright I need and more these days by going to the doctor’s office and talking about biopsies and colonoscopies and blood test results and HMO coverage policies. I hope that the medical establishment becomes a bit kinder and gentler by the time the little trick-or-treaters of today have to start worrying about their cholesterol count.

I saw a lot of kids out with their treat bags during my ride home from work today. That was nice. Nonetheless, I always feel better once Halloween is over. Thanksgiving is coming soon, but it ain’t such a big deal. Thankfully, Christmas and New Years are still a ways off, along with the miserable cold and snow of January and February. For about 3 or 4 weeks, it’s back to just plain weather and just plain life. And that’s just fine with me.

TOUCHING THE PAST: I’ve been studying the history of the Roman Empire a bit lately. In a lot of ways, it was the United States of two thousand years ago. There were plenty of great empires that came and went after Rome fell in the Fifth Century. One was the great Islamic caliphate of the 11th and 12th centuries, which inherited the southern and eastern part of the Roman Empire and merged it with the former Persian Empire. Al Qaeda and its imitators draw much of their inspiration from this, just as we here in the USA unconsciously draw inspiration from Rome. Maybe that’s why we can’t get along with the new Islamic imperialists; deep down, we’re just too much alike.

But in the west, there really wasn’t anything like Rome until the USA conquered the Pacific frontier in the 19th Century. Sure, there was the British Empire and the other European colonial expansions. But they were mostly inspired by trade and by natural resources, by the establishment of an exclusive right to exploit the timber, minerals and people of far-off lands in Asia, Africa and Latin America. Like the United States, Rome didn’t just want your copper and gold and frankincense; they wanted your soul. They wanted to turn all the barbarians into good Romans, not simply into slaves (although that was certainly part of it too).

That’s still our policy today; consider the situation in Iraq. We could leave right now and declare victory, having successfully deposed a vicious dictator. But no, we want to turn the Iraqis into responsible voters. Is that good or bad? As with Roman assimilation, it’s a mix of both. Rome started going downhill when it lost the strength to keep forcing the tribes beyond the borders into the Roman mold (mostly because of all the civil wars it fought in selecting new Emperors). It’s uncertain whether America has the strength to stay in Iraq long enough until everyone gets to like our way of doing things.

Thus my interest in the ancient Romans. I was surfing thru eBay the other day and I checked out the ancient coins section. It turns out that old Roman coins are pretty common, and thus you can pick them up for between 5 and 10 dollars. I decided to buy one, given my interest. It turns out that the bidding is rather competitive; you’ve got to be a little Roman yourself to avoid getting outbid. But I finally managed to win this provincial bronze coin with a portrait of emperor Severus Alexander, from about 225 AD. You see it below in the palm of my hand.

It’s pretty neat to touch something that was actually a small part of what you are studying. That coin was used day to day by common people, folk who were depending upon the Roman system for their jobs, their food, their security — just as we depend upon the United States of America today to provide us with civil order and economic opportunity. The Roman system would continue to work for another 200 years after my coin was minted. When I look at those nifty quarters that our government mints today with tributes to the provinces (the newest one I’ve seen is Kansas), I can’t help but wonder, how much longer does our empire have?

Now that I’m deep into the second half of my career life and it’s crystal clear that I’m never gonna be much more than an all-star paper pusher / major-league bureaucrat, I often think about what could have been. When I was young and in college, I had a pretty good mind I’ll have you know, sonny boy. I pulled down a 3.89 GPA, which might have been a 3.91 if I hadn’t got caught in a senior year feud between a prof. and the department head. Thus, I wonder if things would have been more challenging and more rewarding had I gone the ivory tower route. When I was young, I wanted to stay out of the protected environs of academia and get out there into the real world. Academians seemed like a bunch of wooses. But in doing so, I found out that real world people consider guys like me to be wonderful candidates for paper-pushing bureaucrats. In other words, I couldn’t escape woosdom. But hey, somebody’s gotta dot all the i’s and cross all the t’s while the policy guys and the movers and shakers get all the glory and do all the interesting stuff.

Yea, so maybe I should have stayed in school and gotten a PhD (instead of a law degree). Maybe I would have gotten involved in some really interesting research, and would have been one of those guys who get interviewed on NOVA. Sometimes I almost see myself on TV explaining some new kind of mathematical concept or expounding upon the inner programming structure of the brain or laying out the implications of string theory for the interference of gravitational waves. Yea, that might have been fun.

But then again, there was a reason why I didn’t go into academia. I was aware that a whole lot of academians are in the pocket of the military, especially those like me who had good quantitative skills. Lately I’ve been interested in the subject of consciousness and the interaction of the brain and the mind. Well, guess who’s also interested in such research? DARPA, the Pentagon’s technology wizards. There was an article in the local paper the other day about how DARPA is sprinkling some big bucks on the college campuses (including my alma mata, Rutgers) to study human thinking and awareness. They’re trying to come up with weapons that work more like the flexible, teachable human mind, and less like structured robots. As with the military’s co-option of atomic energy, I’m sure that ain’t going to lead to kinder and gentler warfare.

Yea, maybe it’s just as well that I’m spending my life popping out cost reports and chasing down purchase orders in a county office. It ain’t much, but at least I’m not channeling my technical fascinations to make the world an even crueler, deadlier place than it already is.