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Transcript

WORLD WAR COVID

From WeaponWorld to PeaceWorld

Learner, begin

- ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS -

The quest for Learner has led me from one oasis of fellowship to the next, across a Tartar steppe of blazing solitude. At each way station, tenders of support from a handful of friends revived me somewhat before my scorching, dismal trek resumed.

In The Language Instinct, Peter Pinker says he never met anyone bored by his topic of passion. I cannot admit as much. Passive indifference begot lively antagonism when I interrupted routine patter with Learner’s discontent. 

I am a genius at stirring ire. I recite the same truth to absolute power and to feeble apathy, defying each in turn. Sexual harassment would not have triggered such bitter confrontations. My wife Linda suggested it was not so much what I said that bought me trouble, but how I said it. That may well be. This work would never have come to light without her heartfelt support, if at times bemused. Ah, my beloved manuscript widow!

I’m proud of my family and friends: Learner role models all. Many more people furthered this work in their own way, even if without a clue. 

I owe special thanks to foreign volunteers and kibbutznikim (Israeli collective farmers) from Kibbutzim Evron and Dorot, as well as to our Palestinian hosts whose birthright is Peace. To distant ancestors of those ancient domains: Hominids, Pagans, Jews, Christians, Muslims and those in between: the ultimate survivors of the Wrath of God. 

PeaceWorld Learners, rally here!

I’ve been shown many gifts: Plutarch’s passion, Voltaire’s star-field clarity, Ursula Le Guinn’s The Dispossessed, John Brunner’s Stand on Zanzibar and The Sheep Look Up, the Dupuy Brothers’ Encyclopedia of Military History, Carroll Quigley’s Weapon Systems & Political Stability, and Mortimer Adler’s How to Think about War and Peace. 

My thanks to Lewis Dartnell for his book, The Knowledge: How to Rebuild our World from Scratch, The Penguin Press, New York, NY, 2014. An elegant, compact work filled with hope and desperation, packed with solid instructions. A must-read for thoughtful Learners, notwithstanding, my categorical veto of his counsel at the end of the Learner chapter “Is Ecology Constitutional?”

I used to draw sanity supplements from The Nation magazine, but had to give it up eventually, due to its galling rejection of my project and other calls for transformation. Like other “liberals and progressives” its editors whine endlessly about things they refuse to change. They and their peers producing The Progressive, Dissent, Z, Harpers, Utne Reader, Mother Jones and other periodicals, who dare call themselves Leftist or Progressive despite their stuffy, middle-of-the-road fainéantise (faynayonteez, “best do nothing attitude”). As things get worse, they whine louder about more and more tragedies and scandals, while more and more horror-struck subscribers pay them more to whine. Yay! If there were any significant improvement, their “don’t-touch-it!” critique would go out of business. In the final analysis, the union of meddlesome meliorists and atomistic progressives only note in passing the worst mayhem.

There are only two political parties in the USA: one Conservative and the other Reactionary: Democrats who haven’t had a good idea in six decades or adopted anyone else’s in three, and Republicans who never met a bad idea they didn’t love. Bad ones the Democrats never resist effectively, as if by black magic or some veiled urge (well-funded) to see Republican projects succeed with their anonymous help. We’re caught between these two packs of political mercenaries: kleptocrats and hypocrites. Take your pick.

The major difference between them is this: Democrats can’t tell the difference between good policies and bad ones, while Republicans, between bad policies and illegal ones. Bipartisanship is achieved when they agree on policies akimbo between bad and illegal.

The editorial formula of The Nation (assuming there is one; it is carefully masked) entails fumbling the initiative to the reactionaries. Handing it over, rather. Our political quagmire confirms this conclusion. So-called Progressives are more to blame for the sewage backflow of American politics than the reactionaries themselves. We could easily dismiss those stupid, stupid reactionaries; but the subtle monopoly and sabotage of progressive ideals by “liberal leadership” is a paralytic of fearsome potency.

With such friends, who needs enemies?

Many people and publications have confirmed one or more of my conclusions, even if they never understood the subtext of their words, motives and deeds. 

The natural world has shown me many heart-breaking wonders. Each new revelation confirmed our entitlement to abundance and justice in peace ― from the God of Love, the Comforter Jesus promised us pending His return. Could that have been Mohammed?

Until we come up with PeaceWorld, current events offer us nothing more appealing than the next psychopath in line who claims imminent leadership.

I am grateful to Govind Naidu, Professor of Political Science at the University of Alaska, Anchorage. The Post Office fluttered on his desk my unsolicited little manuscript. His thought-provoking reply galvanized this odd quest of mine. After one ephemeral phone call, I settled for his unique inspiration. 

I owe undying thanks to Ted Fagin: affable neighbor, gentleman gambler, anarchist, bibliophile and Dog Soldier: the mentor I prayed for and now grieve. Cheerily, he set aside his terminal affliction and grave misgivings about the content of my book, to mentor me English. Thanks also to my sister Leslie who landscaped the prose after Ted had undertaken its civil engineering, to Karen for calling me outside my comfort zone, and to Jill’s passion for fairness. 

My best adult friends, Doug Dean and Paul Lackman, plowed through rough drafts of this text and offered many more suggestions than my few attributions to them suggest ― Doug, from first drafts until his regretted demise such a long time ago, and Paul more recently. 

Thanks anyway to swarms of thugs, hooligans, hypocrites and fascists (flaming, blaming or crypto-), for whom:

The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

The best lack all conviction, while the worst

Are full of passionate intensity.

W.B. Yeats, “The Second Coming”

It doesn’t matter if they donned battledress or class-A drag, institutional silks or the rags of dissent, TV makeup or the ashes of mourning? We are all naked monkeys underneath. Their stupid meanness, raised to new heights of genius, shot my rancor to new depths of loathing. Without the awful fecundity of their malice (the best fed topic of passion on WeaponWorld), I’d never have found enough outrage to monkey wrench this project. 

I owe a great debt of gratitude to the kind souls at the U.S. Department of Education, Office for Civil Rights (OCR) Seattle, for whom I’d worked so long; and earlier, to the staff of the Damage Assessment Branch, US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), also in Seattle. A less distracted clerk would have served them better, but they found work arounds for my Learner daydreams.

The ideas presented here are my own and do not reflect the policies of the U.S. government, of NOAA or of the Department of Education. Were that they could…

The AltaVista Babelfish online translation service let me turn my impossible dream of translating Learner into French, into an entertaining if challenging impracticality. It translated my Keyword page into a dozen language pages. Likewise, Google Translation for Arabic, Farsi and Indonesian versions. In addition, I thank Microsoft, Inc., and its Bowne Global Service auxiliary for useful if cranky online translation services in the Word 2000 package. To http://www.wordreference.com/fr/index.htm, where I found French translations I could not think up, and http://www.touchon.net/annuaire-site-plans-dictionnaires.php for synonyms in French. Also Médiadico and, finally, http://www.linguee.fr/, the most useful automated phrase translation service I found.

Even in those that translate entire texts, their end-quality was at best dubious. We are nitwits at coming together in peace. Much work remains to be done.

I must also thank Mamiehiou. Her grammar page at http://mamiehiou.over-blog.com/article-verbes-qui-se-construisent-avec-a-infinitif-ou-de-infinitif-86346139.html taught me which French prepositions go where: a hard thing to keep track of in French, like their genders I will never learn in this lifetime..

Learner scorns entrepreneurial software companies. Such services should be consolidated into a public utilities renowned for their consistency, free use, effortlessness and reliable security, making use of WANG word processing as one of many free Learner Agora services. 

Ancient Rome had good fountain water flowing for free in unlimited quantities in every neighborhood; PeaceWorld will require that good data flows freely in unlimited quantities throughout the human biofilm.

In the meantime, Mr. Bill Gates, thank you for easing my burden in many instances and complicating it tremendously in others (Styles, really?).

Thanks also to Jean Bacon and son, whose book Les Saigneurs de la Guerre and translation The Greater Glory lit my way through the catacombs of WeaponWorld. To the others listed in my Bibliography, whose stepping-stones across the crimson quagmire of WeaponWorld led me to the shaded groves of PeaceWorld.

To the lovely Esmeralda Arana, whom I never met, the author of The Path: A Practical Approach to Sorcery. She gave me a kick at just the right time, if only in a direction unforeseen.

Few ideas herein are solely mine. Most of Learner’s recommendations unfold as a natural part of the Tao, as reactionary arrogance collapses from its own contradictions. 

Mine the errors contained herein. Please address your concern to me. I welcome your corrections and thank you for them. My feeble wit is not up to the task; that’s obvious. The shared understanding of the world’s Learners may suffice, once assembled in the PeaceWorld Agora. That is my hope.

Thanks finally to the poets.

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COMMENT?  markmulligan@comcast.net