The Secret Garden (or CS Lewis: Secretly a Buddhist)

This week my family had an opportunity to go see The Secret Garden at the Fifth Avenue Theater. The musical, based upon Frances Hodgson Burnett's 1911 book of the same name. The play follows the book for the most part, but what interested me most are how the themes in the play match the themes in CS Lewis's The Great Divorce, and how both of them sync up with some of the most basic teachings of Buddhism.

In The Secret Garden (the musical; I can't speak to the book), everyone is attached to a vision of him or herself that's at odds with their happiness. Archie sees himself as a failure, and rather than act to resolve the problem runs away. Neville seems himself blocked from the life he could have had by his brother's success and by his own conflicted responsibilities to his brother. Mary sees herself as both an imposition on others and imposed upon by the accidents of her birth. Even Mary's mother, who is portrayed as a ghost throughout the play, remain unreconciled to her sister Lily's decision to marry the physically disabled Archie, as well as her own failings as a mother to Mary.

By the end of the play, every major character has clearly identified what causes him or her to suffer, and with the exception of Neville, has taken steps to reconcile and transcend that suffering. (Neville is forced to take a step into his new life, and while it's most of what he wanted, he goes into it embarrassed by his failings.) What causes each and every character to suffer is their attachment to something that has passed from their lives: Lily from Archie, primacy and practice from Neville, parenthood from Mary's mother, stability from Mary. Every one of them wants, and it's wanting more than what they have before them that hurts them.

In CS Lewis's Great Divorce, you can almost see the same sort of progress at work. First off, I think Great Divorce is a bit of universalist literature: Lewis doesn't intend for the damned to stay in Hell forever, and the bus comes regularly. What Lewis does say is that the damned are attached to something other than their own salvation: the artist wants to keep making art, the fat bishop wants to not have been wrong, the poet wants to be smarter than everyone else, the big man wants to never have been humbled, and the mother wants never to have a love for anyone greater than her child.

In all these cases, the want is more of a fear: a fear of every being smaller than the vision of themselves to which they are attached. It's this attachment to themselves, to an image of themselves, that causes them to suffer, and to be unable and unwilling to enter Heaven.

It's interesting how every modern religion's idea of self-worth comes from being able to give up toxic attachments. Buddha went further and argued that all attachments are ultimately toxic in some way, but Lewis's Christianity isn't very far from Buddha's, down at the bottom.

Alex Jones, Court Jester, Traitor

Alex Jones is a traitor to all of humanity.

Okay, bear with me. Jones comes across as a lunatic. The other day a friend of mine mentioned just how unqiue Jones was, and I had to refrain from pointing out that there are Alex Jones-like characters throughout the world, and that Wilson & Shea were making fun of their particular brand of paranoia back in the mid-1970s.

It was Raen who asked me to explain Alex Jones, so here's the most coherent worldview I can come up with. Jones believes that the wealthy desire power and will stop at literally nothing to maintain and increase it. This isn't new. What Jones brings to the table is this: ever since the very start of the Enlightenment, the view of progress as we understand it has been fueled by the wealthy because the wealthy saw it as a lever to power. More importantly, they knew if they didn't participate, someone else would, and they didn't want to be left behind.

So Jones' second major belief: All of scientific progress has been an arms race, sometimes between wealthy groups, sometimes between a unified wealthy elite and the hoi polloi. While this is hardly new as well, Jones brings an especially trenchant point about the use of ever better technologies toward the building of walls, and the deliberate funding of technologies to make the wealthy enclaves of the world secure from a howling mob of any size.

Jones' third major belief: ever since the application of technology to medical science started to work, basically at the start of the 20th century, those same wealthy have worked tirelessly to overcome aging. Jones deeply believes that the wealthy are literally pulling away from the rest of us, outfitting their bodies with an ever-advancing array of technological advantages that will eventually lead to a posthuman condition.

The only reason any of us ever get any of those medical advantages is because (a) the wealthy need guinea pigs for their research and (b) the wealthy do need quite a few of us to research and run the technology they're funding.

(Where do things like his Sandy Hook denialism fit in? Easily, actually: Jones believes his story so strongly that he's sure one of the ways "the elite" will control us is to "take away our gunz," and he believes that at least some of the more outrageous mass shootings are intended to spark the revolution that disarms America. He believes he's right, and if he's right even once, he'll have saved the world, and it doesn't matter how many grieving parents he has to malign to find the fakers.)

But Alex Jones is a traitor.

For years, he actually fought against the elites he's convinced are out to rule the world. He railed against them, all of them. Now, with his hooks into a significant portion of the Trumpist phenomenon, he's convinced more than ever that he's going to finally unmask the elite and show us who they are. Finally, someone other than the elite will have access to all the new posthuman techonologies that are so important.

Except Jones doesn't want to share this with you and me. You see, Jones believes that while there has always been an ongoing class war between the elite and the rest of us, he also believes that there are factions within the elite class.

Jones no longer expects the elites to lose. He just expects that one faction or the other will prevail. He wants to be on the winning side. For years, Alex Jones portrayed himself as a rabid opponent of our posthuman masters.

Now he, for one, is ready to shake the hands of his posthuman masters, sit at the foot of the throne and play court jester, as long as he gets their gifts.

The Feds Have Stopped Pretending To Care

Omaha and I went to Shellfest 2017! Not to be confused with Hellfest (a local heavy metal event), Shellfest is an biannual event to celebrate Washington State's crab, clam, oyster, and other shellfish, as well as both amateur and commercial interests in those areas.

Like all such events, there were booths touting the various agencies that contribute to this important Puget Sound industry. Omaha and I took a tour with the waterfront biologists who took us along the blustery natural jetty of Key Peninsula and showed us crabs, clams, worms, barnacles, and all the other really cool critters that teemed in the tidal zone. It was a lot of fun.

As we walked back to the parking lot, we walked through the booths area and I realized there wasn't a single federal agency represented. Usually, the USDA and the Coast Guard show up to something like this and have their own booths. Not this time. County, city, and state agencies were there: Tacoma Public Health, Pierce County Water, Washington State Fish & Wildlife. Even the state's boat safety program and the University of Washington had booths.

But no feds.

It's really starting to feel as if our federal government is in the hands of corporate interests that have only one goal: to strip mine the land and our wallets, to extract every last ounce of shareholder value and leave nothing behind. And it's the state governments that are left with the dual role of trying to preserve the environment from future generations, and protect its citizens from the deprivations of our corporate federal oligarchs.