We Like to Kick the Poor and Lick the Rich

My friend Peter Clough put it well. “We can be such terrible fools,” he said.

“Wealthy people present such luxurious homes and lovely clothes and hair and self-satisfaction — it is difficult to think of these things as often paid for through the denial and toil of others less fortunate.

“In a class-based society, the winners are not questioned about their circumstances, their exhibitions of extravagance, their gated lives, their disregard for those who struggle to have even minimal lives — however, those who live in the margins must account for their desperation and need. It is a hallmark of hyper-individualism that our fates are viewed entirely as self-made (wealthy) or self-inflicted (poverty).”

The Science of Mindfulness

Harvard researchers Matthew A. Killingsworth and Daniel T. Gilbert wanted to find out if the premises underlying the philosophy of mindfulness were true.

“Unlike other animals, human beings spend a lot of time thinking about what is not going on around them, contemplating events that happened in the past, might happen in the future, or will never happen at all,” they wrote. “Indeed, ‘stimulus-independent thought’ or ‘mind wandering’ appears to be the brain’s default mode of operation. Although this ability is a remarkable evolutionary achievement that allows people to learn, reason, and plan, it may have an emotional cost. Many philosophical and religious traditions teach that happiness is to be found by living in the moment, and practitioners are trained to resist mind wandering and ‘to be here now.’ These traditions suggest that a wandering mind is an unhappy mind. Are they right?”

The answer, according to their research, is yes.

They learned three things: that people’s minds wander frequently no matter what they are doing, that people are unhappier when their minds are wandering than when they are not, and — most importantly — that what people are thinking is a better predictor of their happiness than what they are doing.

Supervillainy Under the Big Top

You wouldn't think that it would be that difficult to catch something as ponderous as a “Circus of Crime.” It's not easy moving elephants after you’ve hypnotically cleaned out a whole town, after all.

Nevertheless, circuses of crime have a long history in the Marvel Comics universe, starting with Captain America in the 1940s (Nazis were running the show then).

But even that wasn’t “really” the start, for we learned in the 1960s that the heroic outlaw Kid Colt had fought a circus of crime in, what, the 1880s?

The Circus of Crime ran afoul of the Incredible Hulk in September 1962, Spider-Man and Daredevil in September 1962 and the Mighty Thor in November 1967.

Falling on hard times, like other circuses, I understand they were eventually taken down by Howard the Duck.

However, don’t get your circuses of crime confused with your legitimate circuses that serve as hideouts for disguised monsters. That’s a whole other thing.

The Circus of Crime captured and exhibited the Incredible Hulk.

That did not end well for them.

Wtf?

The X-Men had to tackle the carnival super villain the Blob...

...And his giraffe pals...

...And his elephant pals.

My Version of a Selfie

Getting Around Creative Obstacles

You’re writing, composing or painting — doing any work that employs your creative intelligence — and you run into a wall. You can’t see how to proceed. What to do?

“When I hit a wall, I usually stop and do something else,” noted the singer-songwriter Carole King. “This effectively turns the problem over to my subconscious mind, which keeps working on it under the radar. When I return to the task, my subconscious has often solved the problem before my ego has time to assert control.”

King is describing a technique I‘ve used successfully throughout my writing career, and so did my friend and mentor Elleston Trevor, the British novelist who wrote “The Quiller Memorandum” and “The Flight of the Phoenix.”

Elleston advised that you forget about the project entirely and let your already-programmed unconscious mind work on the problem without flogging it.

To that end, he recommended any semi-automatic activity that would keep you busy without absorbing your attention — driving, shaving, mowing the lawn, that kind of thing. The old saying about “sleeping on the problem” taps into the same wisdom.

And then, sooner than you’d think, without conscious effort, the detour around to your creative roadblock simply appears before you.

How to Blow Up Reality

David Hemmings confronts an ontological problem in Michelangelo Antonioni's "Blow-Up"

The climax of the 1966 film Blow-Up is an eloquent statement about consensus reality.

The London fashion photographer played by David Hemmings has discovered a murder. But because no one else will believe him, his discovery has no weight and no point. The murder never happened.

At the film’s finish, the photographer sees a crowd of rowdy young people dressed as mimes. Two of them play tennis with an invisible ball, while the others watch raptly, their heads moving from side to side. The photographer watches too. When the “ball” sails over the fence, one of the players gestures for him to throw it back. He does, and as the camera moves in on his face, we hear the sounds of a tennis ball being hit back and forth. The tennis game becomes real because everyone seems to believe it is.

Not so far-fetched, really. We’ve seen that very process at work. In 2003, for example, despite thin or nonexistent evidence, the emotionally overwrought American public chose to believe that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction and ties to Al Qaeda, and to go to war on that basis. The fact that both those claims have subsequently and definitively been proven false has not changed the minds of many people. They still believe those lies, merely because they and others like them want to.

For many people, sadly, factual evidence is nothing more than something to which you pay lip service.

Neither Here Nor There

A photo that captures the most common psychosis of our times. Most of us can see this as perfectly ordinary, a person supposedly enjoying the natural world who is completely cut off from it. That's what's chilling.
"Never be bored again." As if no one can now dare face life without the drug of constant digital stimulation, flitting from topic to topic with the attention span of a gnat.

"Stress is caused by being 'here' but wanting to be 'there'."

— Eckhart Tolle