Why We Lionize Our Lyin' Eyes

Seeing is believing. But, to employ one of my favorite analogies, seeing is like the truth but it is NOT the whole truth. Not even close.

We all know that dogs, for example, can smell and hear things that we humans can not. We are also intelligent enough to accept as fact that whenever a dog smells or hears something that we cannot, that thing does in fact exist. It must exist, or else the dog could not smell it. In this situation we do not take our failure to smell it as evidence of its nonexistence.

Yet when it comes to sight, we stray across this common-sense thresh hold and seem to believe that absence of evidence is evidence of absence. When we consider how little of the spectrum our eyes can see, we understand the error of that assumption.

By definition, we cannot see the huge majority of what is around us. UV rays, X-rays, microwaves, and sound waves are just a few examples of the universes that are right in front of our face yet utterly invisible.

This is do to the logic of evolution, which has so far dictated that we are most efficient with our current arrangement of senses. And it does seems reasonable that if we could actually see everything that there was to see, it would probably immediately result in a mental breakdown due to sensory overload.

I do not understand biology or evolution nearly well enough to make educated observations of how and why our senses evolved in the ways that they did, but I know history well enough to understand that this naturally-selected blindness does not stop at physical perception; it's the perfect metaphor for how we see and remember our lives, whether individually or collectively.

Have you ever seen film footage from the early 20th century? If you have, you can call to mind the way people move in those films. They are jerky and sporadic in their motions, as if people back then simply hadn't learned yet how to walk gracefully.

This illusion, of course, is not caused by our ancestors lack of grace; it is caused by the film. Back in the day, film had far fewer frames per second than it does now, so the end product actually looked a lot more like what all film actually is: a flipbook of individual photographs shown in quick enough succession to give the human eye the illusion of a continuous motion picture.

And an illusion is all it is, of course. There's no such thing as a "movie", per se; all movies are simply rapid fire photograph shows. But when the film is of sufficient quality to obscure all the blank spaces in between the photographs, we are left with the illusion of motion.

This dynamic serves as a useful metaphor for many things. But it is not only metaphor. The motion picture illusion, which is made possible by the evolutionary limits of the human eye, is actually the illusion that nature employs for all of "reality".

The smallest things we know of used to be atoms. Now the smallest things we know of are subatomic particles, of which several specific types have been identified. These elemental pieces will no doubt be further broken down by science, but they've already been studied sufficiently to learn one amazing thing: the universe itself is an illusion, just like a movie.

Science has learned that the smallest particles, of which everything that exists are by definition made, do not continually exist. Instead, they blink in and out of "existence" hundreds of time per second. This is obviously far too fast to be perceived by the human senses, just like a movie. But the result is the same.

If you ask a scientist where a certain particle was located at a certain moment in time, he or she will tell you that the question cannot be answered because the building blocks of everything are NEVER in one place or fixed in one time. Instead, they flutter in and out, like a movie at thousands of frames per second, creating a perfect illusion for our limited senses.

The most important thing that can be taken from this is that for every image, there must be an equal amount of empty space. If you have 100 frames of images per second in your movie of life, you must also have 100 frames of nothing. Our senses are not developed to perceive this emptyness, or even to understand what it is, but we know it is there.

While emptyness of often associated with loss or death, due mostly to our sensory limits, they need not be seen that way. In fact, since this "emptyness" makes up so much of the invisible universe around us, it is an integral part of our lives.

I suspect that if we could truly see everything around us, we would learn a few truths very quickly. Firstly, we would be able to see previously invisible forms of energy and light and to perceive how connected people are with each other, even by virtue of passing one another on the street.

If we could also slow down our universe so that our eyes could perceive its true nature, that of a light being flicked on and off a million times per second, we would have to being a whole new inquiry: what happens when the lights are off?

Our Favorite Murderer

Dinesh D'Souza recently wrote a book entitled "The Roots of Obama's Rage". It's actually slightly more level-headed and interesting than one might suppose by virtue of the title, but there was one anecdote about Winston Churchill that says some good things about Obama and some awful things about most of the rest of us.

We all know something about the Churchill cult in this culture, which is profoundly repulsive to myself and to anyone else with even a passing knowledge of history. Churchill is praised in this nation under the apparent assumption that he was born on September 1, 1939.

In other words, most of us associate Churchill only with his role in World War II. That role in itself is full of treachery and war crimes as well as inspiration and fortitude. But let's just skip World War II. Let's just assume (falsely) that Churchill was "the good guy".

What D'Souza lambastes Obama for is removing a bust of Churchill from the White House. Gasp! Why does Obama hate England?? For the same reason most of us should hate England: an accurate knowledge of their conduct over the past couple centuries.

Obama's father was a Kenyan, which means that Obama knows full well of Churchill's role in starving and killing his ancestors. I, on the other hand, am German and Irish, which means....oh, wait...I guess it means the same thing.

Churchill was a racist and imperialist of the fullest and crudest sense, clinging to these convictions even as he waged a war for "freedom" against the racist and imperialist Nazis. Indeed, even after that war for "freedom" Churchill refused freedom to Indians, Kenyans, Irishmen, or anyone else.

Every six months or so, I learn something new about Churchill that makes his true identity even more clear, and even more clearly repulsive. I've reached the point by now where I applaud Obama for removing his bust from the White House, just as I would applaud him for removing a bust of Tojo or Hitler.

Here's my latest discovery. World War II can only be accurately understood as a continuation of World War I. The question of how World War II began, therefore, must correctly be phrased "How did World War I begin?"

The story of World War I is overlooked in our culture because it is far harder to spin it into a "good" or "necessary" war.

Churchill was in charge of the English navy at that time, and as such he had 2 responsibilities: blockading Germany and getting America to jump in against Germany.

When one wonders what Germany was so angry about, this should shed a little light on it: Winston Churchill directed his navy to deny an entire nation of food. Germany was intentionally starved. Millions died.

In addition to starving a whole nation, Churchill was occupied with pulling our nation into the war. He did this by seeking to get Americans killed by Germany submarines. He gave orders for civilian ships carrying American passengers to be armed. This, he hoped, would cause Germany to fire on those ships, thereby killing Americans.

He also urged "civilian" ships to carry weapons in their holds, again giving Germany cause to fire on them. The more Americans on these ships, the better (for Churchill). The Lusitania is a case in point. A British passenger ship, Churchill ordered the ship to carry tons of weapons both on and below its decks.

No American passengers were told that the ship had been transformed into a warship. No American passengers were told that Churchill knew of German plans to sink this very ship. No, to Churchill, the death of American civilians was a desired outcome. And he got the outcome he sought.

It's hard to think back to a time when Americans did not reflexively side against the British. But such a time did exist. It began, obviously, with the Revolution. It did not end until World War I. And the person who convinced us that England was our friend was the same person who was intentionally getting American civilians killed so that we would stumble into his war.

Unfortunately, we obliged him. But we should not fool ourselves. The only reason we value Churchill's role in World War II is that he was our ally. But so was Stalin. And there is no bust of Stalin in the White House.

In fact, if you asked the average American whether it was Churchill or Stalin who intentionally let American innocents be killed in order to force the country into an unwanted war, we all know what the answer would be. And now we know that answer would be wrong.

The Deepest Cut

Assassination is a subject that fascinates us for any number of reasons. The sudden disruption of seemingly great men and institutions. The seductive power of a person willing to give his own life for something he believes in, regardless of how absurd those beliefs may be. But there is a tendency to lump all assassinations together in a way that obscures profound differences between them.

Assassinations should be categorized into two groups: those with a rational political motive and those with notoriety as the primary obsession of the assassin. To take the 4 presidential assassinations in American history as case-studies, we quickly see that the former are far outweighed by the latter; the most common motive of the American assassin is narcissism or mental illness.

The assassins of Presidents Garfield, McKinley, and Kennedy were motivated by a non-descript and historically unsatisfying mix of boredom, frustration, and chance opportunity. Garfield was shot by a disgruntled job-seeker (and was killed more by his doctors than his assassin). McKinley was shot by an unemployed, deranged anarchist who seemed to have no specific quarrel with McKinley or any of his policies.

And President Kennedy, whose death has been transfigured into so many different absurd renditions that it has lost nearly all meaning, was shot by, quite simply, a loser. Oswald had no motive. Weeks before killing the President, he had fired that very same rifle in a failed attempt to kill a certain General Walker, a rabid right-winger. This alone proves that Oswald was far more concerned with killing than with motive.

In an interesting aside, one of my students proved that Oswald was the shooter after viewing the film of the assassination for the first time. This teenager with absolutely no prior knowledge of the event viewed it once and saw things that conspiracy theorists are blind to no matter how often they rewatch the gruesome spectacle.

Whenever I show the Zapruder film to students for the first time, I ask them "where did the shots come from?" They inevitably say "the front", which is the reaction of most people. But this time, one student said, "from behind". I was very intrigued by this, so I informed that student that he was correct and asked him to explain his reasoning.

"That nigga in front of him got shot, too", he casually observed. And there it was. The person in front of the President (Governor Conally) could only have been hit if the shooter was behind them. Case closed. The case was already closed for me, of course, but I was very impressed by this clarity of observation.

The sad truth is that John F. Kennedy was killed for no reason at all. His slaying has been elevated for some absurd reason to take its place next to the crucifixion of Christ or the stabbing of Caesar. But there is one American assassination that was a "real" assassination as classically understood. The killing of Abraham Lincoln.

This one has it all. The assassin with an actual motive. The American Brutus, John Wilkes Booth who, like the original Brutus, felt that his target was a tyrant worthy of tyrannicide. Whether one agrees with Booth's critique of Lincoln, it is manifest that the man had a genuine and comprehensible motive.

Booth aimed to slay the warlord who had laid waste to his homeland. And this Lincoln had indeed done. Again, we can argue with the justice of the Civil War, but not with its reality. The South was invaded, burned, and looted for the sin of an attempted peaceful disunion.

Booth wanted revenge. This is a motive which all people can comprehend. He also felt that Lincoln had become a tyrant, another charge to which there is no small amount of truth. Booth also had to assume that the cost for his crime would be his life, yet he willingly carried it out, a sacrifice which the original Brutus sought to avoid.

Lincoln's assassination was so "real" because friend and foe alike saw it for what it was: a rational act carried out by a disciplined if criminal mind, the intention of which was to undo certain concrete political and military realities. And friend and foe alike understood that the assassination had succeeded in undoing (or at least derailing) the great undertaking of its victim.

Despite what I consider Lincoln's crimes, his assassination was truly a tragedy for this nation and probably for the Confederacy as well. None of our other slain Presidents were irreplaceable, despite what people may have thought at the time. But Lincoln was. This, then, was assassination in its purest and worst form.

And it was the only true presidential "assassination" that this country has ever experienced. The other assassinations were simply murders. To paraphrase Chris Rock, the other presidents didn't get assassinated; they just got shot. But as Lil' Wayne points out, "when you're great, it's not shot, it's assassinate".

And therein lies the contradiction. Assassination can not be all about the victim. The motive of the killer must matter as well. If we take this more precise and more mature definition, we find only one true presidential assassination in our history. The other sordid acts say far more of far less interest about the criminals than they do about their victims.