When Clevinger became their scapegoat

Catch-22 is perhaps one of the most original novels of the 20th century, that, while being outrageously hilarious, mirrors human nature with a kind of accuracy not often seen in fictional novels. It mocks and satirizes the evil in people, especially when they are subject to conditions where their raw nature can come out unhindered, not bounded by any limitations. Such as in World War II, the background of this story.

The entire novel is as funny as funny can get, but towards the end of the eighth chapter it takes a serious tone for the first time. And the seriousness of it is so powerfully presented, it gave me an episode of depression after reading it. Depression not just regarding the character in action, but over the harsh truth about humans that is so starkly depicted in those few words. I'll quote them for you.

But before I do that, here's a brief summary of the scene that's happened till the quote: Clevinger, a cadet for the US Army, is brought on trial in front of the US military Action Board in his camp - consisting of three men: "a bloated colonel with big fat mustache", Major Metcalf, and Lieutenant Scheisskopf - for conspiring to overthrow the cadet officers appointed by a paranoid Lieutenant Scheisskopf, who is frantic that if nothing is done about it, Clevinger will one day overthrow the world. After a long and very hilarious trial, Clevinger is found guilty, without any evidence or relevant claims, and is sentenced to walk fifty-seven punishment tours. A punishment tour for Clevinger was fifty minutes of a weekend hour spent pacing back and forth before the provost marshal's building with a ton of an unloaded rifle on his shoulder. (And just for reference, Yossarian, whose name is mentioned below, is the unbelievably stupid and funny protagonist of the novel.)

These two paragraphs follow and conclude the chapter:

It was all very confusing to Clevinger. There were many strange things taking place, but the strangest of all, to Clevinger, was the hatred, the brutal, uncloaked, inexorable hatred of the members of the Action Board, glazing their unforgiving expressions with a hard, vindictive surface, glowing in their narrowed eyes malignantly like inextinguishable coals. Clevinger was stunned to discover it. They would have lynched him if they could. They were three grown men and he was a boy, and they hated him and wished him dead. They had hated him before he came, hated him while he was there, hated him after he left, carried their hatred for him away malignantly like some pampered treasure after they separated from each other and went to their solitude.

Yossarian had done his best to warn him the night before.

"You haven't got a chance, kid," he told him glumly. "They hate Jews."
"But I'm not Jewish," answered Clevinger.
"It will make no difference," Yossarian promised, and Yossarian was right. "They're after everybody."

Clevinger recoiled from their hatred as though from a blinding light. These three men who hated him spoke his language and wore his uniform, but he saw their loveless faces set immutably into cramped, mean lines of hostility and understood instantly that nowhere in the world, not in all the fascist tanks or planes or submarines, not in the bunkers behind the machine guns or mortars or behind the blowing flame throwers, not even among all the expert gunners of the crack Hermann Goering Antiaircraft Division or among the grisly connivers in all the beer halls in Munich and everywhere else, were there men who hated him more.

That quote, right there, SPEAKS to me!

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Roots of inequality? Maybe

I might be a little late to this, but I couldn't let it be just a passing thought. Being exposed to Jared Diamond's work lately, I had the luck of acquiring a copy of his 1987 five-page essay titled The Worst Mistake In The History Of The Human Race (pdf accessible here). This was published almost a decade prior to his much-acclaimed, Pulitzer-winning non-fiction book Guns, Germs, and Steel (here onwards referred to as GGS), and was written during the course of his 30-year research into the question that both the book and this essay deal with - namely, the influence of weapons, environment, diseases, geographical luck, and most importantly, agriculture & domestication on the development of human race and evolution of world civilizations and societies (the question being: "Why are some parts of the world, and the people living in them, more advanced than others?"). But before I proceed with my criticism and comments, I need to state clearly that Jared's approach to explaining the development of human societies across the globe is strictly and firmly non-racial; he downright discards all notions that genetic factors, notwithstanding rare and minor implications, were in any way responsible for the advancement of some civilizations and the stagnation of others. This view is shared by modern science as well, with the 2000 Human Genome Project discovering that 99.98% of all human genes of all races are identical.

Judging by such a bold title, I was initially skeptical of what he had to say, but as I went through the essay page by page, I was to some extent convinced by the argument, but (but again!) soon, much to my disappointment, I uncovered certain holes or "skipping" of logical next-steps in a couple of places. Over the evening I was preoccupied with the argument in an attempt to find more holes and thus feel proud of my critical reasoning skills, but to the contrary, I could fill in the already-found holes by myself and felt the argument to be at least partly convincing once again. (I was like, "Well yeah, it is plausible.") I'll address them in a while.

Jared's theory in this essay is focused mainly on the changes taking place in any one arbitrary hunter-gatherer society with the advent of agriculture, as opposed to his theory in GGS which focuses on the changes taking place in the human race as a whole with the advent of various factors. In a nutshell, he submits that agriculture, with all its advantages and benefits, brought upon us an unanticipated evil so great that it plagues the world to this day and has had dire consequences on civilizations throughout human history. And that evil is inequality - inequality in all its forms, ranging from class to gender to skin tone to you name it! It was only after we invented agriculture, says Jared, that the first signs of inequality began to show up. Hunter-gatherer societies, that is the pre-agriculture groups, had little to no reason to divide themselves into classes; everyone had such a crucial role to play in the food accumulation process alone that any division of a society on any basis would only threaten the very survival of the entire group. But with agriculture, all that changed.

The emergence of agriculture was a turning point in history, as the cliché goes. It provided, in relatively abundant quantities, the one indispensable source of survival: food. Farming cut down the time and labor expense needed to find scant and scattered sources of food in the forests through hunting by many fold, effectively reducing the burden on much of the population and hence freeing them of, or at least stripping some of the work load previously borne by them in hunting and gathering. This is a well-established fact in archeology, one that is supported by evidence. As the burden came down, they were able to devote time to other activities (not necessarily leisure), and women, especially, were able to either better care for their children or, because of the dwelling at one place - a new lifestyle - brought about by agriculture, were able to carry more children and hence grow their population faster and provide sufficient food for the extra population through the harvests. (Read the essay for a more in-depth explanation of this section).

Agriculture almost seemed at the time to be a godsend, all-encompassing boon, giving them not only a year-round supply/storage of food they used to so desperately search for but also ample time to expend on developing other survival skills. But amid all this progress and without their knowledge was also taking birth the seeds of inequality which would later determine who amongst them gets to eat, who doesn't, and who does how much. This is where I tumbled upon a missing logical next-step in Jared's argument.

To quote from the essay: "Hunter-gatherers have little or no stored food, and no concentrated food sources, like an orchard or a herd of cows: they live off the wild plants and animals they obtain each day. Therefore, there can be no kings, no class of social parasites who grow fat on food seized from others. Only in a farming population could a healthy, nonproducing elite set itself above the disease-ridden masses."

The part about hunter-gatherers not having classes is obvious; as I mentioned earlier, everyone played an equally important role in food production process that division would preclude survival. But the last sentence in that quote - about a healthy, nonproducing elite setting itself above the disease-ridden masses - is the part that is elusive, as Jared fails to explain exactly how that is possible. Why, you might ask, would a producing "lower" class feed a nonproducing "higher" class and let them live healthily at the expense of their own health. If you were a farmer when farming was invented, would you grow crops and domesticate animals only to feed an elite class that doesn't? You might as well ask them to sod off and eat all your crops yourself rather than just giving it away to some other higher class that neither produces nor shares your ill-health. And even if you are crazy enough to do that, why on earth would you be tagged "lower class" while those who don't produce and feed on your food be tagged "higher class"? Why can't it be the other way round? For, you are the power house of the community, and if anything, it is you who should be placed and revered above everyone else in the community because it you who has saved them all the labor of hunting and provided them with the time to fuck about. Why, then?

Jared conveniently skips answering all those questions and hops from "man invented agriculture" to "man succumbed to deep-class division". He partly draws his conclusion from the way it is today: look at the state of farmers, regardless of the country, and compare them with the nonproducing class of the same country that depends on the farmer for food demands. Or, on a larger scale, an example which Jared himself cites, look at America depending for oil on oil-producing nations of the Middle East and still being better off economically and socially than those nations. The conclusion is clear: producing class is often given a lower social status than non-producing class. But how and why did it happen are the questions that have been denied an answer here. (Additionally, while comparing the farmers of today with the farmers of those day, one needs resist the temptation to ignore the pivotal role money plays. Farmers today produce for money, and farmers of those days had no concept of money.)

The answer lies partly in human nature and partly in the characteristic of agriculture. As noted, farming is an immobile form of food production. Populations harvesting a crop need to dwell at a single place - close to or next to a farm, for example - over long periods of time. In the fullness of time, the population grows, communities become villages, villages grow in size. While this dwelling does provide several advantages over hunting, it also poses a serious threat: the threat of invasion by a foreign group. This behavior has been confirmed by evolutionary biologists for apes, and anthropologists, historians and evolutionary biologists for human beings as well. When food sources run low (either because of the food reserves running out or because of the population exceeding the sustainability of those reserves), we, the modern apes, go in search of other sources elsewhere. During the search, if encountered by other groups (which are by now rivals) who have already taken control of the much-needed food, a conflict occurs and heads roll. The winner stands alone, the winner takes it all. All this is true even today, although with humans today greed plays a role as important as the survival instincts. But with the hunter-gatherer communities, this didn't pose a major problem because they were always on the move and never had the worry of an invader invading 'their' land. They had no land of theirs. Even with them conflicts of this nature occurred, but they were insignificant enough to not make a difference to the social structure of their communities. Farming, however, needed protection from invaders, and that is where the security-providing soldiers enter into the equation.

An average American farmer today feeds the stomachs of 165 people worldwide, i.e., a producer-to-consumer ratio of 1:165. (I wish I had the numbers for Indian farmers). 40 years ago, that American farmer fed 28.5 stomachs (source). This drastic change can be attributed to the research and development in agricultural practices of yesteryears. So the farmers of nascent agricultural era can be expected to have produced a much lower yield for their crops, as their practices of farming were much more primitive and undeveloped than today's. Even if we assume a producer-to-consumer ratio of 1:1.25 for them (note that it has to be greater than 1:1, else it wouldn't have made much sense to migrate from hunting-gathering to farming), that is, one farmer feeding 1.25 stomachs, it would have still freed up about 12.5% of the population from the duties of food production. This 12.5%, being skilled as they were at hunting and handling weapons, could now put their skills to use in developing a defense system for the farming community. And the deal? Since money didn't exist, the farmers would pay them in the form of food in exchange for protection, as they are already producing an extra 12.5%. This has effectively formed the first societal division: the division between the farming class and the defense class. The defense class now needs to be organized, as an unorganized army is as easy to defeat as a community without an army. This therefore calls for leadership, resulting in the subdivision of army into various levels of hierarchy, at the top being the leader or commander-in-chief who has control of the army and over how the army advances and occupies surrounding land area for the needs of growing community size, thereby establishing himself as the King, the royal family, or the supreme owner of the land. He now begins to collect taxes in the form of food from farmers - not just for the land they are being allowed to farm in but also for the protection and other facilities such as road, housing et cetera he is providing them (not very different from the tax system we have today in our government, except that in our system much of the tax money comes back to the public in the form of services). Wealth (food) now begins to accumulate more than the needs of the royal family and at the expense of the needs of the producing class.

Despite being responsible for production, farmers would end up paying their share of food in the form of taxes to the royal family and through them a share of it to the army. Even if their production ratio continues at 1:1.25 or higher, because of the taxes and the growing army size, they might have to cut down their own share of the '1' and add it to the '1.25'. This apparently leads to poor nutrition and ill health of farmers and the good health of royals. Since protection is obviously more necessary and important than just good health, farmers are left with no choice but to yield to the demands of the King and his soldiers. The King being the commander and the farmer being the obeyer, and the King being 'richer' than the farmer, the former gets a "higher" social status while the latter gets a "lower". And with that, a new master-obeyer relationship was born.

Meanwhile, during the formation of this defense system, because of increased food production-to-consumption ratio over time, several sub-classes are formed which aren't directly part of the army but without which the army would be worthless. Blacksmiths, an example, are essential to armory (the fact that farming allows a part of the community to devote entirely to the development of arms cannot be ignored). Cooks, another example, are essential to providing cooked food to the soldiers and the King. And since these blacksmiths and cooks themselves need protection from foreign invasion, they are as obliged in their duty to the King and his men as the farmers, but are not farmers in themselves, leading to the inception of two more social classes. Likewise, many other classes could have formed feeding almost entirely on the food produced by the farmer and at the same time leading to a division of society into various classes of various ranks, the farmer being at the bottom of the pyramid.

A mere 1:1.25 producer-to-consumer ratio could produce that much inequality within a community, and with every incremental rise on the right hand side of the ratio, a higher percentage of the population was freed of its food-producing duties which could then be handed over to other self-preservation activities. In fact, it is very tempting to conclude that the more food a farmer produced (i.e., the higher the producer-to-consumer ratio), the more the social classes that took birth and the more the ensuing inequality that propagated in the community. Look at the modern world today. If you strike off the 1:165 producer-to-consumer ratio and if one individual was solely responsible for producing food for oneself, directly or indirectly (i.e., if the producer-to-consumer ratio came down to 1:1), then not only would the world population drop drastically, but almost all societal divisions would vanish altogether. Development, in all its form, would come to a grinding halt, since if every person is expected to produce and consume his/her own food, there wouldn’t be much time or energy left for any other activities that propel the modern world towards progress. The only activity then would be to grow/hunt food, cook, eat, and regurgitate. And perhaps some spare time for recreation.

That finally brings me to the end of this criticism, which oddly is almost as long as the essay itself. Jared asserts that the shift from hunting to agriculture was the biggest mistake in human history, that hunting, despite feeding very few stomachs and therefore limiting human reproduction, was better than farming in that it precluded inequality amongst the people who practiced it. I beg to differ. While it may be true (I said in the second paragraph that I'm only partially convinced by this theory, given that there isn't sufficient evidence to definitively and conclusively make any claims) that farming brought about certain additional inequalities in human society (keyword: additional; I'm not convinced that agriculture is the root of all inequalities, and certain inequalities such as gender and age and appearances could already have been present in hunter-gatherer societies), it also cleared the way for exponential human progress on unprecedented levels, the likes of which the human mind had never before imagined. Farming made the modern world possible, farming gave birth to innovation on mind-boggling scales, and, most importantly, farming provided the very sustenance for our species to survive on and grow. Farming, in other words, regardless of all the evil it imposed upon us, is the biggest best-thing to have happened to us in all human history. Every coin has two faces. Deal with it!

Footnotes:
1. Read the essay.
2. Watch a 3-hour PBS documentary based on Jared Diamond’s Pulitzer Prize-winning book, Guns, Germs, and Steel, which also deals with the same subject albeit with a different focus, here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bgnmT-Y_rGQ. And if you are lucky enough to be in my small circle of friends*, ask me for the documentary and I’ll give you a copy myself.

*Just kidding

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The Road - A Novel by Cormac McCarthy: Review

Rating: 8/10

On reading the jacket blurb or synopses of the novel, one would get the impression that The Road is a sci-fi novel centered on the survival of a father and his son in a post-apocalyptic world, where everything is dead or dying save a few humans, some animals that were lucky enough to survive, and hardly anything in the plant world. At the outset of the novel and until a few pages into it, the reader feels this is what he is in for - a mere survival tale akin to the hundreds of others in the post-apocalyptic fiction genre. But very soon they realize it's not so much a story about the father-son survival as it is about the father-son relationship itself and the challenges of fatherhood and the sacrifices it demands.

Emotions run high and higher than tension in this Pulitzer Prize-winning novel set in the near future where an unknown catastrophe - either gradual or sudden, it's difficult to say - has destroyed and burned civilization as we know it and has plunged mankind and indeed life itself to the brink of extinction. Everything is grey and ashy, and hopes of returning the planet back to its pre-apocalyptic state are as bleak as the cold wind that freezes the ground at night. The sun is blocked with the dark ashes that fill the sky, and the brightest light of day makes for only the faintest of vision. There is nothing left to eat except the sparse leftover canned food of yesteryears. Dry, rotting corpses are scattered everywhere. Cannibalism is a commonplace amongst the survivors, and humans, now back to their savage state, have become more skilled at hunting other humans than at hunting animals. And amid all this hellish mess, a man struggles to keep his son alive without losing their humanity in a world he believes god has abandoned a long time ago.

The moral dimensions of the novel, as opposed to McCarthy’s previous works such as No Country for Old Men and Blood Meridian, are simple. Everyone is divided into “good guys” or “bad guys,” and actions too are either good or bad. Although some readers cribbed about this being an issue, to me it doesn’t contradict the motivations of characters as the world they are living now is more primitive than the early stone ages had witnessed, and morals in such a world are anything but complex. Throughout the bulk of the novel the author builds for his audience such a subtle and strong bond with the main characters that the readers don’t realize how much they have fallen in love with them till the very end. And let me be quick to admit, and I’m not alone in this, this is the first novel that evoked such an intense emotional response in me that my eyes literally misted up, if not wept, in the final few pages of the novel. The sparkle of love in the backdrop of this gloomy, unforgiving and dismal atmosphere glitters like the last piece of pearl in the abyss of a dead and long abandoned ocean – an ocean which plays a pivotal role in the story.

The road to the coast of the ocean is purported to be a metaphor by many readers – and it may well be if that is what the reader wishes to think of it – but McCarthy in a rare interview said the road is just a road for him, although he wouldn’t deny his readers the freedom of interpretation. His writing style often and intentionally violates many rules of English grammar, such as constructing only sentence fragments instead of complete sentences, omitting apostrophes at many places, avoiding quotation marks entirely, et cetera. But to balance the act, McCarthy is such a master at what he does that his writing gets borderline poetic even in prose (“Borrowed time and borrowed world and borrowed eyes with which to sorrow it.”) and expresses so many thoughts and emotions in so few a words (“I envy the dead; it’s over for them,”) that it’s easy to get lost in the images and the weight of meaning they bear, to the length that we forget it’s words we are looking at. There are a few horrifying scenes, certainly not for the squeamish to read, embedded in the story. Character development is at the core of his creative writing process, and plot too serves as a platform for pushing them to the boundaries of survival and sanity and testing their instincts, especially the man’s paternal instincts. Another oddly interesting thing I noticed was that while I’m a staunch atheist myself, I thoroughly embraced the metaphorical and elegiac use of the concept of “god.” And like in the author’s entire body of work, women play a small role even in this novel, with only two of them appearing and only for a few pages.

All things considered, The Road is a modern literary gem that is as haunting as it is beautiful, and, at 300-odd pages, is not as thick as it is rewarding. Cormac McCarthy has set a benchmark for future authors of this genre and the whole of fiction writing to use as a definitive guide of storytelling and created a world so engulfed in both affection and poignancy that it melts the hearts of even the coldest of readers. This is emotive art the likes of which literature hasn’t seen before, earning McCarthy, among other things, the honor of being one of the great American writers of our age.

Trivia: While I’ve come to dislike comparing books and films, which frankly is like comparing apples with oranges, the film adaptation was lacking one crucial element: the sense of time. The novel has it, and gives the feeling that the story is taking place over a long period of many years, which it is. But the film makes it seem like the story occurs over a two-day period, which is a shame because half the connection between the audience and characters is lost there, with the result being a woefully inept adaptation in terms of sentimentality. I won’t, however, take away from the director the stark imagery he has so skillfully crafted - an important aspect of creating the mood for the action to take place in.

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A spark neglected burns the house...indeed

Alex Wiens, cold-blooded murderer of Marwa El-Sherbini, was sentenced to life imprisonment three days ago on November 11, 2009. The murder took place in a very unlikely place and in a painfully disturbing way.

Before I go any further, I should note that the title of this post is so chosen because of the nothing-short-of-accurate portrayal of such a tragedy in a story of the same name by Leo Tolstoy. And also because of its nothing-short-of-accurate encapsulation of the events leading up to the murder.

Wind back the clock one year. August 21, 2009, Dresden, Germany. In a pleasant evening and in the backdrop of a playground where children, accompanied by their parents, were playing merrily with their peers, El-Sherbini, an Egyptian female immigrant, and Alex Wiens, a self-supposed male ethnic German, both in their late 20s, both never having met each other before, met near a sandbox swing with two swings for kids. Alex sat in one while his niece was playing in the other. El-Sherbini, clearly distinguishable as a muslim due to dress code (headscarf), approached the man and politely asked him to give up his seat for her son. He didn't. He turned towards her and said he didn't want to see muslims in that playground. Predictably, the woman did not take the malicious racial slur of the xenophobic bigot and thought it would be in her best interests to say something back at him, as if in an attempt either to facilely defend herself or to get down to his level of bigotry and heat up the exchange. And so it did. One word led to another, with both of them progressively clenching their eyebrows and digressively losing their temper and manners. Pretty soon he was calling her an "Islamist," "Terrorist," and a "Slut," and also yelled that her son would soon become a terrorist himself. Due to the obviously loud nature of the altercation, surrounding people gathered around the duo and tried defusing the situation by asking Alex to shut the hell up. He didn't. He now started throwing tantrums at the bystanders, especially those speaking Russian. At the moment, it seemed as if Alex wouldn't stop slurring in rage (for no apparent reason at all) until he is dead or at least until the force of the Law is acted upon him. A police car, called in by one of the bystanders/witnesses, arrived and he was taken into custody, later charged with charges of slander as filed and testified by El-Sherbini.

That would have been the end of this ordeal, but he refused to pay the fine of €330 and requested a trial by jury, consistently denouncing her scarf and muslims (not Islam) and referring to her only as "that woman" in scare quotes. A date for November 2008 was set and then he was fined €660 after being found guilty again. In this trial, he even suggested that "people like her" were not real human beings and therefore legally incapable of being insulted. It was a second opportunity for Alex to end the case, but he, assisted by his public prosecutor who somehow initially failed to see the blindingly obvious outcome of the prosecution, even after such a shameless act in the trial, appealed for prosecution in a district court, and was assigned the date of July 1, 2009. Many things happened between November 2008 and the date of trial that at one point made the public prosecutor try and retract the case, but upon Alex's persistent pressure not to, he had to oblige.

Then came July 1. Room 10 of Dresden's historic district court; nine people present including two judges and El-Sherbini's husband and son. The trial commenced and Alex resounded the courtroom with his extreme-right wing sentiments and unabashed hatred for muslims. El-Sherbini testified, and Alex asked her several irrelevant and disallowed questions, such as why she was in Germany at all, which was struck off the record. As the trial was approaching the end, El-Sherbini and her family decided to leave and were about the leave the courtroom when Alex attacked her with an 18 cm long blade, stabbing her 16 times in her upper body and arm while shouting "you don't deserve to live." Her unarmed husband, who tried as best as he could to stop the violence, also received 16 stab wounds to his neck and shoulders. The Judge raised the security alarm and a police officer, who was the only cop in the scene in this no-security, no-security-checking court and who was attending another unrelated trial, came to the rescue but mistook her husband as the perpetrator and shot him in the leg. Alex's defense lawyer also tried helping El-Sherbini by forcing Alex away with the use of chairs. El-Sherbini died in the scene of crime, Alex was arrested immediately after the crime, and El-Sherbini's husband remained in coma for two days after having received life-threatening stabbing injuries. Alex had preplanned the murder, as was evidenced by his bringing into a court of Law a malicious weapon of murder.

After more than four months of legal procedures from the day of murder and after growing national and international media coverage and pandemonium from uproarious muslim communities throughout Europe, Alex Wein was sentenced to life imprisonment on November 11, 2009, for the murder of Marwa El-Sherbini and the attempted murder of her husband Elwi Ali Okaz. Residing judge concluded that the murder took place “in front of the child, against two people, in a treacherous way, and in a court of law,” and therefore, according to the Law, the “convict is to serve a minimum of 18 years before a board will review the possibility of parole for the first time.”

If only he had let go of the swing that fateful day in the playground, and if only she had ignored his slur.

This unspeakable, heinous act of crime raises many questions at many levels, from ethics to human nature to Law to even security. But to avoid the trite, I’ll just conclude that if there was anything in the universe that could be called immutably impossible, then it is cleansing ourselves of all human prejudices, bigotry, hatred, and the biases that arise from them all – no matter who or where we are and regardless of how highly we think of ourselves as the Nobel Savage. If pushed far enough, we all will unleash the Alex Wein in us that is manifesting himself in other, subtler ways right this minute. There’s no use saying “it’s time to wake up,” because we never will.




left: El-Sherbini's body being transported in a muslim community of relatives, non-relatives and those angered and grieved by the the hate crime; right: El-Sherbini being commemorated by Germans and other non-muslims who spoke against the hate crime and were for the fair treatment of muslims and non-Europeans in Europe

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Curb Your Enthusiasm...and the temptation to watch it!

To get to the point, and simply put, this is the greatest, funniest, and the most hysterically entertaining show in all of television history.

Created by Larry David, co-creator of the megahit TV show Sienfeld, Curb Your Enthusiasm circles around Larry David himself in all of his daily predicaments and embarrassments, and his relationship with a demanding wife Cheryl and friendship with his fat friend Jeff. But when I say "himself," I need to make clear that this isn't a reality show. Far from it, it's metafiction. The character Larry David in the show is a fictionalized version of his real-life self - part true personality, part just made-up. Not just him; most other characters appearing in the show also are fictionalized versions of themselves, and to signify this, they change the second name of their character and retain the first from their real names. This concept was first created by Larry David for Sienfeld (in which he never acted) and now for CYE.

To quote the tagline of the show, "He's got it all: a loving wife, good friends, a successful career, a great home...what could possibly go wrong for Larry David?" That's right, he's just perfect! Except that he regularly trips into disastrous social humiliations, sometimes because of his obsessive nature of blowing things out of proportion, sometimes because he can't figure out what's really important, and sometimes because he just forgets what politeness is. He has a naive outlook on human nature, and he is agitated over trivial things said and done by others when a lot more is at stake. He tries to be affable at times, but always ends up saying the wrong things. He is insensitive to the feelings of others and runs into the the wrong people. He can neither foresee the ramifications of his actions nor watch his tongue in social gatherings. He is a victim of misunderstandings.

The embarrassment that rushes at you when watching the show is similar to the experience of watching Borat for the first time. (Some episodes are even directed by Larry Charles, director of Borat). I feel it would be apt to classify this show as foot-in-mouth comedy. But beneath all the humor, I think Larry represents the irrationality of the common man in many ways. Everything he says and does represents some aspect of our stupidity, which is why it's easy to relate to the character.

And Jeff Greene and his Italian-American, psychotic wife Susie Green make for a lot of entertainment as well.

Watch it once, and you won't stop watching the rest of the seaons or laughing while you do. A word of warning, though: sometimes, the humor can be subtle. Remember that, unlike most sitcoms and comedy flicks, CYE has its hilarity in the characters, not in dialogues or jokes. A sample should prove it:

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Nostalgia and regret

It's always, always, "either...or..."

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Symbolized

For the past four years, and for many years before that, I’ve seen mechanical engineering being invariably represented by gears. At least two of them together each time, both usually spur. If you’ve been perceptive of things around, you too would’ve seen much the same. Additionally, for evidence of this, run a Google Image search for “mechanical engineering” and crack how many of them have spur gears associated with them.

And all this when mechanical engineering is so vast a subject as to cover elements from safety pins to satellites.

Such a generalized outlook on mechanical engineering is likely in part because of the “age” of mechanical engineering, in part because of the popularity of gears, and in part because of the perception of ruthless operation people have about machines. I mention age because mechanical is one of the oldest branches of engineering, and since gears have been around for almost as long as the branch itself, they might subtly hint a feeling of its longevity. Secondly, it's hard to find someone that hasn't seen gears in action, be it in watches and clocks, motors, engines, turbines, vehicles, and a myriad other mechanical devices. Gears enjoy more popularity amongst us than any other tool of their league. Even if only the outside of an engine is visible, our mind immediately thinks of the gear mechanism inside. This undue familiarity of the common man with gears would naturally lead to, especially when present for long as suggested here, a generalized representation of the whole of mechanical engineering with the object of familiarity. Lastly, gears are ruthless! If you’ve seen two huge spur gears in action, you will know the kind of emotion they generate. And this emotion itself is representative of machines in general, making gears all the more symbolic of mechanical engineering.

But whether such symbolism is justified or not is an altogether different matter.

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Pynchon's letter

I just found this awesome letter written by Thomas Pynchon, published in Daily Telegraph, supporting and in defense of Ian McEwan. For the uninitiated, Mr. McEwan was the object of a plagiarism controversy in late 2006 as regards his bestselling and highly acclaimed novel, Atonement. What made the whole charges of plagiarism absurd on its face was that it wasn't plagiarism at all; the author had acknowledged, both in the novel and vocally on many occasions, the source of historical information he is purported to have plagiarized. Nevertheless, some unscrupulous attention whores desperately wanting to muster some attention for themselves accused him anyway.

The controversy was much analogous to a news network filing charges of plagiarism against a filmmaker for having based his story on real events reported only by that network...despite the fact that the filmmaker has acknowledged it.

Thomas Pynchon was quick to speak against such wild accusations, as is seen in this letter (dated December 2006):

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When nouns and trademarks become verbs

There is a tendency in people to replace longer words with the shorter (‘faking’ for ‘counterfeiting’), to cut down the length of the words (‘fundas’ for ‘fundamentals’) and to abbreviate words, especially when such words are used in high frequency. (This helpful site ranks words on the basis of their usage). But at the same time, there is yet another tendency to replace an entire group of words with a single word, changing the very grammatical construct of the replacing word. In the course of this treatment, adjectives become nouns, nouns become verbs, verbs become nouns, and adverbs become something else. Some, presumably traditionalists, frown upon meddling with language like this, more so when it is done on a large scale, but such frowning speaks more of their own lack of understanding of the development of language than it does the so-called offenders.

Linguistics reserves a special chapter for the study of functional changes taking place in words: Conversion. Conversion is a form of Derivation (also a linguistic terminology, meaning the creation of a new word from an existing word, the new word being of a different spelling) wherein a word changes its part of speech without undergoing any change in its spelling. As mentioned earlier, nouns becoming verbs, for example, is a kind of Conversion and is specifically called verbification. Verbification is a much happening, though less noticed, process in all languages of the world, and more so in widely spoken ones – in our case, English. It facilitates word economy in written as well as spoken English and cuts down redundancy and awkwardness. This example makes it clear:

Statement A: Don’t tell lies. (lie: noun)
Statement B: Don’t lie. (lie: verb)

Both sentences mean exactly the same, but B is always more preferable. It’s concise, economic, and doesn’t sound awkward.

Since the dawn of the Industrial Revolution, particularly 20th Century onwards, such Conversion is no longer restricted to words already present in the English language. When Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone, he might not have thought so much of the linguistic usage of his invention as much as he did of its working, but very soon, to his and everyone else’s convenience, the word ‘telephone’, while a neologism, was verbified. It isn’t very uncommon today to hear someone saying, “I’ll telephone you tonight.” And the same applies for the term SMS (a.k.a. text messaging in the West). It’s verbified. Or you could also look at 'blog'. With the technological invention, it was a neologism, a noun. Now, blog is a verb, too ("I love blogging").

Lately, this verification has taken another step forward with trademarks, albeit with a slight twist. Despite the fact that verbification is a productive process in language, it is, say the corporate representatives, an equally unproductive process for the companies whose trademarks are being verbified. In fact, they would go so far as to call it “genericide” and call those who use it as “guilty of genericide.” Nice.

Xerox is perhaps one of the most commonly verbified trademarks. While the actual process is to be called photocopying, almost all of us have at some point made the statement, “xerox it” (with a small x, though it doesn’t make any difference in speech). It even finds an entry as a verb and with a small x in all leading English dictionaries. The problem these companies have with their trademarks being used as verbs or nouns is that the trademark loses its association with the company and becomes a generic term for the process of doing it or for the generic product and hence the brand loses its popularity ‘rights’ over the trademark. Xerox, for example, is so widely used as a verb that the other day I overheard a guy saying he’ll xerox the paper in this machine when the machine in question was a Canon photocopier. It’s good for linguistic conciseness, yes, but bad for the company Xerox that has lost its market value to the now-generic term xeroxing – the process of photocopying. "Using a Xerox photocopier" gives more credit and attention to the brand Xerox than does "xeroxing".

Google, too, has been the victim of genericide, and its founders woefully dissented, in vain, against Oxford Dictionary’s decision of including google as a verb in the dictionary in 2006. Google is now the generic term for searching the Internet for keywords using Google Search Engine, and soon it’ll be a generic term for the process of searching keywords on the Internet. Other trademarks belonging to this category are Hoover (a manufacturer of vacuum cleaners; now hoovering – the process of cleaning with a vacuum cleaner), Photoshop (Adobe Photoshop, a software for editing photos; now photoshopping – the process of editing photos in Adobe Photoshop), and most recently, as voted second by people in Merriam-Webster's Word of the Year 2007, facebook – a verb – for the process of browsing (doing whatever) in the popular social networking site Facebook (“Did you facebook today?”).

Maybe there is an inherent logic to the structure of these words (trademarks) that give us the tendency to verbify them. Photoshopping is structurally similar to ‘shopping’, facebooking is to ‘booking’. That can explain why very few these trademarks get verbified and most do not. But whatever the tendency, it increases the ease with which language is spoken, written, and concisely expressed, and that is what language is all about.

However, I would like to point out at Sony’s shameless attempt to verbify their logo. It’s one thing if people verbify a word, but a totally different thing if the company itself forces it down. And fails. It doesn’t even belong to the field of linguistics, since it’s a damn logo, but here it is, whatever it means ("I Sony it"? or maybe "I Ericsson it", or perhaps "I love it", in which case it is even more shameless than it is to verbify their own trademark):

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World War III

As I was researching the possible scenarios for the outbreak of a Third World War, and meanwhile learned that Churchill actually had plans of starting one (as outlined in Operation Unthinkable) in 1945 but was, much to his dismay, overruled by people smarter than him, I came across two interesting quotes:

"If the Third World War is fought with nuclear weapons, the fourth will be fought with bows and arrows." —Lord Louis Mountbatten

"I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones." —Albert Einstein

Eloquent as they are, I feel my modification to the above quotes is more accurate:

"If the Third World War is fought, there won't be a Fourth one."

But there will always be dense politicians who would, in response to my version, say, "Well then, let's just put an end to World Wars and fight the Third."

You've gotta love this crazy, German-accented satirical video I found on YouTube:



"But I'm le tired..." Hahahahah

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All the pretty horses

Are all horses in the world of the same color? You’d think not.

But you can’t be too sure. Especially not when nutcases like George Pólya are around. His argument is adduced much like this...

There are five very pretty horses. Their color(s), unknown as of yet, but we’ll arrive at that shortly through the givens.



Now the given: Of the five horses, any set of four horses contains horses of the same color. (Will be proven later).

Meaning, if I made a set of four horses out of the first four horses, they’d all be of the same color. If I made a set of the last four horses, they’d again be of the same color. Likewise, a set of first two and last two horses would also give me horses of the same color, and so with any other combination of horses in sets of four. Which color, we don’t care. But do pay heed to the fact that the statement doesn’t say all horses are of the same color. No. Let’s sketch out one set, set 1, for clarity…



Similarly, we have another set, set 2…



Math time now. Let the first horse in the entire group of five be denoted by A, the fifth horse be denoted by B, and the middle three horses be collectively called C. From set 1, it is clear that A=C. From set 2, B=C. And anybody with an understanding of even elemental math knows that when all humans are monkeys and all monkeys are apes, then all humans are apes. So, we have A=B from those two equations, leading us to the (obvious) conclusion that the first horse is of the same color as the fifth. Meaning, all five horses are of the same color. Phew.

That wasn’t so difficult a reasoning as I made it seem, but here comes the fun part. We have to prove our initial given statement. To do that, let’s shoo one horse away into the fields and be left with only four. Now let’s commence the whole logic again with the same initial givens. Color(s) of horses, unknown. A set of three horses in this group of four will always be of the same color, regardless of which three of them you choose for your set. Follow the same line of reasoning and end up arriving at the same conclusion that all four horses are of the same color. Shoo off another horse and do these calculations with three and two and one horse. Since a set of one horse has to be of the same color, the initial statement that any set of four horses in a group of five contains horses of the same color is proved by backtracking the deduction.

Okay, recess time just got over for our horses in the field and it’s time to get back to the stable. All five horses are back. Add another one. Wherever it came from it doesn’t matter, just add. Now you have six. Apply the logic all over again. Arrived at all horses of same color? Make it seven horses. Again all same color. Go on increasing the set one horse at a time to get the same result. 1000 horses, all same color. 10,000 horses, all same color. A million, still all same color.

ALL horses in the world…why would that be any different? They would all be of the same color, wouldn’t they? Of course they would.

Except that our own real-world experience tells us they aren’t, even though this seemingly perfect logical reasoning deduces that they are!

What went wrong then? Maybe George Pólya really is a nutcase. Case closed.

Or maybe not. Maybe, he’s just smarter than us to have fooled us with this. As it happens, he is. Pólya used this reality-contradicting “logic” to expose the, or demonstrate the, fallacy arising out of apparently all-encompassing general statements (laws/rules) when specific cases in which they are demonstrably false aren’t considered. The fallacy in our horse game has been cleverly planted in mathematical induction. Our math equations of if A=C and B=C then A=B are universally valid for all arguments containing three or more elements. However, it just doesn’t apply, indeed it is impossible to apply, when you have less than 3 elements. A=C and ?=C, therefore A=?. Nothing can take the place of ‘?’ as there is nothing to take its place. Therefore, our reasoning is valid only up until we have 3 horses to work with, but the logic breaks down once we are down to two horses. Since we cannot continue the till-now-valid reasoning after reaching two horses, we cannot prove the initial statement, thereby making it a false initial statement. Any theorem based on false assumptions collapses on its face like Nazism.

Hence, all horses in the world are not, as unlikely as it may seem, of the same color.

This type of logic in which the fallacy is intentionally planted in the reasoning is called Falsidical Paradox.

And oddly, I've plagiarized the title of this post from Cormac McCarthy's All the Pretty Horses. Sue me.

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