Simulated Fine Dining

Capgras Delusion is a psychiatric syndrome that manifests itself in this way: one morning a person awakes to find that the people close to him have seemingly been replaced by exact duplicates, each a perfect impostor in every way, lacking only in authenticity. It can happen also that one so stricken gains a sense that he, himself, is a mere facsimile.

Perhaps this is something like waking in Las Vegas, where the simulacrum of reality has appropriated the original, engulfing it in the way that one snake might swallow another. Any preservation of serpentine morphology asserts itself as a mockery, where the joke is on you. And though in many ways this can be, perhaps inexplicably, an entertaining experience, I am always left feeling that, somehow, reality is just out of reach. You grab for it and your fingers slip through handfuls of anhydrous desert air.

My bewilderment overflows its vessel at the prospect of having a gondola ride in a shopping mall. Nonetheless, I urge you to visit the Venetian Hotel and Casino. Watch the passengers, a fascinating demographic spectrum, from grannies with kids to mischievous intoxicated business travelers, all bobbing along peacefully as they traverse the 100 meter length of a concrete pool, led by the operatic whooping of their 'gondolier,' which echoes through the cavernous shopping arcade. After such an observation, I challenge you to compound your own explanation. Is this a representation or is it a real experience? The answer, I suppose, is that it is a little of both, yet surely one's 'willing suspension of disbelief ' must soar to previously unattainable heights to overcome the brute fact that the actual tour, through dyed and heavily-chlorinated 'canal water,' occurs not at ground level, but on the second floor of this miraculous destination-attraction.

Is it not delectable to imagine an abandoned, primordial, subterranean level, concealed beneath the verity of Venice, and what treasures, in place of gaming tables and slot machines, would now lie crumbling amongst long-forgotten ghostly forms of ancient pelagic concretions? For my part, I'll wager that more than a few American tourists would happily lob chlorine pellets into that renowned, opaque Venetian broth, which has steeped nastily for many more generations than there has been a nation called "The United States of America."

Some related ideas can be found in an essay by Ada Louise Huxtable, from her 1997 book The Unreal America, where she deconstructs Las Vegas at some length in a chapter originally appearing in the NY Times, as "The Real Fake and the Fake Fake." Certainly I've unearthed a few of her ideas from my cranium here, however, in the intervening years since the publication of her book, events have unfolded that transcend the situation she described. Huxtable drew a connecting line between Las Vegas and art museums, the traditional "guardians" of authenticity. But the notion of "authenticity" itself has been mutating lately, and is possibly, even perhaps probably, headed toward obsolescence. Enough has been written about the innate property of the digital world to reproduce artifacts as perfect clones, so I would like to turn to a different domain, the subject of "simulated fine dining." Its essence is the cloned restaurant, a high-brow manifestation of the franchise-restaurant form we have come to associate with McDonald's and its kin.

My first experience with simulated fine dining occurred a number of years ago at Todd English's Olives restaurant in the Bellagio. We ordered a few dishes we knew from his original restaurant in Charlestown, MA. The food arrived, plated elegantly and bearing an uncanny resemblance to real food. But the first bite gave me a shudder, as if I had watched a dear friend metamorphose into a Madame Tussaud wax doll, the wisp of animation departing for parts unknown via unseen routes. I suppose it was akin to eating the sushi in the window of the sushi restaurant instead of the sushi behind the sushi bar. Not that Todd's Las Vegas crew had served us actual plastic, just that they had served us something that tasted like actual plastic.

And as regards sushi, I recall a visit to Nobu, at the Hard Rock Casino in LV, which was kicked off by a memorable delivery from a young, mustachioed waiter with a Nevadan accent. "Now if you take a look at our menu," he said with a modest squeamishness, "you will see listed the 'sushi', and that's going to be your raw fish." It brings to mind a quote from the Huxtable essay, where André Corboz describes a quality he names the "the poverty of the re-invention of the not-known."

So here we find ourselves in the 21st century, an era replete with simulated happiness, simulated arousal, and even simulated money- itself a mere simulation of wealth. And this, perhaps, is the nature of the schism that separates the Information Age from all that has preceded it. We have now entered the Capgras World, where everyone has been replaced by their exact duplicate.

del.icio.us tags: simulated fine dining, replacement reality

Falling

There have been some spectacular falls in the news lately, and for those into gravity impact porn, the following videos provide ample pleasure.



But another fall, just as painful, is the plummet of those formerly known as working Americans and their wages.

A seattle newspaper analyzed jobs data in Washington state (and here too) to find an unsurprising yet horrifying trend: Jobs that are being created do not pay a living wage.

If this is the case in Washington, hotbed of tech, trade, and transportation, it's probably not better in the rest of the country.

Summary of the summary:

• The fastest growing jobs categories are in retail, hospitality, agriculture and social services, which are at the lowest ends of the pay scale.

• 46% of jobs pay less then $10/hr, and less than 25% of the jobs pay above $15/hr.

• Even if some numbers classify our economy as in recovery, the highest paying sectors — telecom, electronics manufacturing, and air transportation — continue to cut jobs.

What this means is that if you lose your job to cost-cutting by the Board or CEO, you'll make less money if you find a job at all. And that job will probably be in the service sector, not in the field for which you spent the first half of your life preparing.

Don't even think about getting sick, and forget about your career in skateboarding.

Cheaters Win

When we heard about massive systematized cheating at Duke University's business school, many lamented the state of today's youth. How is it they think they can get away with such breaches of integrity, we asked with indignant rhetoric.

But our entire culture is now a perversion of right and wrong.

These are not young people cheating at Duke, but rather students whose average age is 29 years, and they are completely normal. A study from Rutgers University found that about half of all graduate students admit to cheating, while the number of undergraduates confessing to cheating is about 75%.

This is the generation which has long been of the mind that music, movies, and software are things that should be downloadable for free.

It's difficult to make a case for succeeding without cheating when so much of our culture proves otherwise. Is not the point of our most watched TV show, American Idol, that talent is not a requirement of fame?

Since 2000, one message has been very clear: Integrity is for losers. You can win elections without a majority of votes. You can make a case for going to war by lying about the evidence. Being qualified for a job is not a requirement of getting that job. When questioned under oath by prosecutors or congress, it's OK to lie. Torture is justified if your army is bigger. The purpose of holding public office is to enrich yourself.

So, of course we are a nation of cheaters. What is the incentive to do otherwise? Where are the plaudits for the upright and moral?

Men Who Rage

If you play the audio from Alec Baldwin's voicemail tirade alongside the silent self-portraits of Seung Cho, you get a perfect match. It's a vivid depiction of the rage of men that explodes all over us day to day: the rage of manhood affronted.

I'm sure many can relate to the extreme emotions around divorce and custody battles, but Baldwin's language reveals his own fragile ego that defines his own manhood. He is self-centered and sees himself as the victim of his daughter, the 11 year old "rude little pig."

You have insulted me for the last time … You have humiliated me for the last time … I'm coming just to straighten you out … coming to let you know how...angry I am that you've done this to me … you've made me feel like shit, you've made me feel like a fool over and over again.

Seung Cho blamed the world for his crimes, too:

You forced me into a corner and gave me only one option. The decision was yours. Now you have blood on your hands that will never wash off.

In his column this week, Bob Herbert quoted a former prison psychologist, turned NYU professor:

What I’ve concluded from decades of working with murderers and rapists and every kind of violent criminal, is that virtually always present, to one degree or another, is a feeling that one has to prove one’s manhood, and that the way to do that, to gain the respect that has been lost, is to commit a violent act.

This bald display of testoster-rage reminds me of the 1993 Joel Schumacher film, Falling Down, with Michael Douglas. That was the story of a conservative white man, laid-off and divorced, who responds to his really bad day by shooting and killing those who pique his ire in any way. He starts with the Korean grocer who refuses to give him change. George Will called it a "catharsis film," and the producer boasted that after one screening a mass show of anger erupted as incessant horns in a traffic jam, just like in the movie.

In '93, the angry white man was a cultural trend. Clinton had just taken over, and he brought his Congress with him. The people who were into Political Correctness had won, and that put the Conservatives up in arms. We were talking about militias back then, too, gun toting groups of men from Michigan, training for a showdown with overreaching Femi-nazi's.

Some things are similar now, like the decline of the Republican party and the failure of conservatism. If one's ideology totally fails, violence might be a normal reaction. Should we now be expecting a resurgence in testosterone-fueled rage? —You know, like this NASA guy.

ps - Manly danger from the archives - Ahab's Townhouse

Apocalypse Soon: The Trouble With Space

The feat of knocking a golf ball into orbit got me reminiscing about a joke I tried out a few months ago. Nobody thought it was funny, and because I couldn't figure out why, I decided to provide a detailed explanation to go along with it. Here's what I came up with-

JOKE:

The first European lunar mission, SMART-1, ended today in a dazzling success when it crashed into the moon’s surface after a three-year journey.

Leading European space scientists hope to crash men into the moon in a future mission. 

EXPLANATION: 

Forty years ago the US landed Surveyor 1 on the moon and it didn't crash. It made a soft landing and sent back data, and that, justifiably, was considered to be a success. Could it be that the European Space Agency set their sites a bit low?  Was a crash landing the only successful outcome they could guarantee? Has some cabalistic recalibration brought about a situation where zero is the new +1? Maybe they are so SMART they will crash spacemen into the moon next. Keep in mind this is supposed to be a joke.

AFTERMATH:

The billion-dollar "International Space Station", which seems primarily to have served as a research platform for determining the best ways to ferry garbage back to Mother Earth, has now become the ultimate 18th hole. Slice it to Venus or hook it to Mars. If you've got the twenty million, you've got your tee time. A new crop of space-golf tourists is certain to pump up the flagging space exploration coffers.

Think of the payoff to Mankind. Maybe we'll find a cheaper way to  produce Polonium-210. Who knows when the possibilities are endless?

Perhaps the notion of "technology transfer", which had previously found its most perfect expression in the form of Tang, the powdered orange breakfast drink, could now be applied to the thorny problem of, say, trash removal in New York City, which has vexed mayors from Thomas Willett to Michael Bloomberg.

 This latest development comes on the heels of a giant copper spheroid hurled at a comet, the meanest beebee ever, the high aspiration of the pocket-protector set: the World-Crushing BeeBee. I know there is a compelling need to study the ensuing dust plumes, but the resemblance to conceptual art is hard to efface.

The Fading Rubric of Mankind's Curiosity

Meanwhile back on Earth, ideologies grate on one another, producing conflict with no apparent end.  Among the greater community of faith, the transcendent belief that God has divinely authorized the destruction of non-believers has served to perpetuate war, even as the means for nuclear devastation proliferate.

Here all paths cross. The scientific method perfects ever-deadlier weapons of war faster than blind Nature can raise a pond full of amoebas. From brilliant pebbles to smart bombs, proof of innovative prowess is proudly stenciled on ordinance to be lobbed amongst the seamy nests of the enemy.

Neo-apoclayptists are lapping it up. Milleniallists transform themselves effortlessly into peri-milleniallsts and wait fretting for the next significant date. Could it be 2012, the end of the Mayan calendar? What about the Doomsday Clock, which stands at 17 minutes before midnight and keeps on ticking, hastening forward and falling back ever more infrequently?

Does Mahmoud Ahmadinejad believe he can hasten the coming of God's dominion on Earth by obliterating Israel with a freshly-minted Islamic bomb? Does President Bush study the Book of Revelations? We shall see.

Recall that science too has its myth of an end time, expressed in the avatar of the Doomsday Asteroid, aloof now and roaming the Kuiper belt with impunity, but always on the look-out for that one perfect trajectory which leads imperturbably to Earth and the subsequent annihilation of all of its living inhabitants. Anyone doubting this proposition need only examine the fossil record.

Bodies In Motion

In another time, Micheal J. Fox is Terri Schiavo, Rush Limbaugh is Bill Frist, and Washington is where God does His work. So again we're shown the body politic. Only this time it's the left asking us to look at this body, interpret its movements, and take a position.

The media have long been a branch of government, and nothing heals better than television, but these phenomena make way for new versions, inversions, and perversions of politics, celebrity, religion, and medicine. The Great Mashup continues. Get ready for more celebrity victims, suffering sinners, pundit policy makers, and global baby snatching.

Making (Up) History

There are many ways to make up truth. The most effective technique requires multiple sources that reference and reinforce each other. For this to work, disparate authorities make seemingly small contortions of fact, and then others refer to these aggregated authorities to make the case that a falsehood is true.

This is what a Committee of the US House of Rep's was doing when the UN's Atomic Energy Agency (IAEC) busted their work. The House committee wrote a report exaggerating the nuclear threat posed by Iran, but the IAEC called that report, "incorrect and misleading," as well as "outrageous and dishonest."

The intended purpose of the report was to give the White House and other war mongers an illusion of evidence to support an attack on Iran. Once the lies had the imprimatur of a "government study," they could then be used as a tool of persuasion. The task of anyone disagreeing with the report would then be to disprove the multiple inaccuracies. In this way the debate becomes a level removed from the question at hand. This technique puts layers of questions into the discussion, making it more difficult for facts to separate themselves from the fiction.

The full effect can be seen by reviewing the work of the White House Iraq Group, and Judith Miller, former "journalist" for the New York Times. In this scam, White House officials led Miller to sources for stories that made their case for the invasion of Iraq, and then those same officials would refer to the New York Times to support their arguments. Much of that reporting was later discredited by the NYT editors, but long after the war had started, and with little public notice.

This technique is tried and true. We've seen it used effectively to cast doubt on the existence of global climate change, the probability of evolution, and the hazards of smoking.

It can also be employed locally as well. To dismiss an employee, for example, supervisors might place small and questionable concerns into an employee's file. When these one-sided anecdotes are taken together, they seem to add up to a larger issue. The employee, to defend herself, must then pick apart and dispute all the smaller complaints. These layers of fallacy are usually too much to overcome.

Systems: Blaming and Gaming

The military gang rape of a 14 year old girl in Mahmudiya, Iraq, had systemic causes. The NYTimes elaborated on this today. The defense strategy for the trials will be based on blaming the system.

It's a desperate, but fascinating approach because, to the degree it's effective at all, we'll have a system that continually and automatically absolves itself. In other words, we'll have created a system that can now be blamed for our sins.

This seems a bit more elegant than say, clunkily working with Congress to turn the heretofore illegal into the new legal. (like this, and this.)

But, for the simplest circumnavigation of law, nothing beats the presidential signing statement.

PS - more on beating the legal system.

oops, Your Dead

Last week, English authorities announced that the cops who killed an innocent man in the London subway will not be charged with any crime. On July 22, 2005, gunslinging officers of an anti-terrorism unit shot a Brazilian man 7 times in the head. The world was told the victim resembled a suicide bomber in all sorts of ways that turned out to be untrue.

The men who carried out this execution could not be held responsible because they "genuinely believed" that the victim, Jean Charles de Menezes, was a suicide bomber — an honest mistake, they said. It seems such genuine belief is a vital part of a system of authoritative murder.

We saw this in the Amadou Diallo case when the jury acquitted the officers who shot the unarmed man because they genuinely believed at the time that their own lives were in danger.

In this system, if a police officer is sincere when he testifies, 'oops, I made a mistake,' then killing innocent people appears to be OK.

For Want of a Nail . . .

With every penny pinched, there is increased risk. And with a debacle like Boston's Big Dig, somebody finally died. I'm sure several others profited in some way, too, because why else would someone choose to use substandard concrete, for example?

These falling ceiling panels seem to be more about epoxy on screws, but really, how does a construction project take twice the projected time to complete, and four times the projected cost?

Oh, and then still be so lame that it kills someone?

Somebody's making money, somebody’s asleep at the switch, and somebody's dead.

P.S. - Crime or no crime?

Obscene Crime Systems

Steven Green, the Army private who allegedly raped a 14 year old Iraqi girl and then killed her and her family, represents a near perfect breakdown of a system. A fundamental concept of General Systems Theory is the notion that elements of the world relate to each other and affect each other. Basically, there are consequences to decisions, actions, and natural phenomena. Some consequences are good, and others are like Steven Green.

After invading Iraq, the Army had trouble meeting it's needs for willing soldiers. So military recruiters increased deployment of "moral waiver". This is the device used by recruiters to make exceptions to their own rules that disallow the enlistment of those without high school diplomas and those with criminal histories.

It is clear that Green should have never been allowed to carry a weapon for the US Army. He never graduated high school, he had a criminal record, and was eventually discharged for psychological disorders.

So the approach here was not to increase incentives for young people to join the military, but a relaxation of restrictions on who is eligible to join. This is classic conservative strategy, and can be seen in all areas of government regulation. The idea is to simply reduce regulations that impede the goals of the larger organization, be it industry or government.

What is ignored in this approach is the original purpose of the discarded regulation - generally to protect individuals who may be harmed by the goals of government and industry.

One must only ask, why did the military restrict its recruitment to those without criminal histories in the first place? With this question in mind, obscene crimes like rape and murder by US soldiers should not be unexpected.

And neither should we be surprised by the effects of such crimes. (more)