A Eulogy For Big Al

My long-suffering grandfather, Big Al, finally kicked the bucket on Wednesday. I've been saying "died" instead of "passed away" because although I do eulogies, I don't do euphemisms. Last night I did learn another euphemism for dying, though, as I was watching I, Claudius, a 1976 BBC miniseries based on the novels by Robert Graves. Being "called to Rome" meant that you were going to die; in this particular case, Caligula was reigning emperor, so getting called to Rome meant a particularly nasty death. As far as my grandfather is concerned, I actually prefer "called to Rome" to "passed away," because he was half Italian, and as close to Roman nobility as anyone I will ever meet. I get my Anglicized-Italian surname from him, and the curls in my hair (when I let it grow long enough). Most importantly, I got my family clan from him.

In pretty much every family, people don't spend equal time with their maternal and paternal relatives: usually there is a split. In my family, we spend more time with the paternal side. My dad's parents are the grandparents I know well. My dad's brothers are the uncles I know well. His nieces and nephews are the cousins I know well. How exactly did that happen? Most of my mom's family live close enough that I could have seen a lot of them when I was growing up, but I didn't. There was something that brought my dad's side of the family closer together, and the only common link is my grandparents. They were yin and yang: my was grandmother a Southern Belle, who speaks slowly but articulately (and she speaks a lot); my grandfather a New York yankee, of all things, as well as a child of immigrants and a WWII war hero. There is something about that combination that seemed to work, in spite of many hardships, because when I fly home next weekend, I expect to see most of the clan at the memorial service. This in spite of the fact that Big Al has been close to dead for the past five years, at least.

About 20 years ago he had a stroke that left his left side paralyzed and his personality altered in a way that tormented my dad, who said his father was no longer the same person. There have been several bouts of illness that we were sure would kill Big Al, but he always managed to hang around. It was horrifying to see a great man being chipped away like a marble statue. A couple years ago his useless left leg had to be amputated, and he got lighter and lighter. He stopped eating on his own around that time, instead receiving a nutrient solution and liquid Paxil through a tube in his stomach.

Did I mention that Big Al became a lot meaner after his stroke? He had moments of giddiness, but was generally unloving and ungrateful to my poor grandmother for the twenty-or-so years she cared for him after the stroke. He had a little bell that he would ring when he needed something, and she (or sometimes I or another relative) would drop what she was doing and attend to him in the bedroom or bathroom or wherever he was. If it sounds like it wasn't much fun to be around Big Al in his final decades, you're right.

The first ten years, he did a lot of writing. Memoirs, mostly. A lot of stories about dodging flak in the European skies during WWII. He was flying above the beaches of Normandy on D-Day, and you can find pictures of him and his crew in several books that were written about D-Day. Or at least one of his crews. Big Al watched far too many of his friends get blown to bits, torn apart while he managed to get home relatively unscathed. He got a purple heart and a hearing aid for getting an eardrum blown by an explosion, but that's nothing compared to the emotional pain of watching your friends killed, pieces of them splattered in the fuselage.

Thankfully, not all his stories were about the war. He had also lived through the Great Depression. While his future wife, my grandmother, was in fairly good shape during the Depression (farmers outside of the Dust Bowl didn't starve), Big Al went to Florida as a teenager, trying to escape poverty. He even stole bottles of milk off people's porches to keep from starving. He got a job working at an insane asylum. When he was 14, bank robber John Dillinger was killed, and he told me a story about that, but I'm a bit confused about whether what he told me was common knowledge or was from first-hand experience. Regardless, it was a good story. He had plenty to tell.

To me, it's notable that my family continued to care for him and care about him as much as they did, when he was a total pain in the ass so much of the time. He probably should have been given Paxil years earlier, because he was seriously depressed for so much of the time I knew him. I have nebulous memories of Big Al before the stroke. I remember going to the beach for a family get-together. I remember when he gave me a tiny piece of chewing tobacco to taste (it burned my tongue). I remember when he and my dad built a garage and apartment in the backyard of my grandparents' house. But the good thing is that I don't really need my own memories, because other people can fill in the gaps. I know he was a good man, who cared for his wife and children. I know he played pranks and told jokes. I know he didn't feel very successful in his line of business, which was construction and real estate, but he certainly succeeded in raising his daughter and three sons.

There is one story I've heard my dad tell many times which illustrates the kind of father Big Al was. And like all the other stories that I've written in this eulogy, some of the details may be a bit off because it's all from memory. It was my dad's birthday. I'm guessing he was ten years old, or in that vicinity. My grandmother had spent a lot of time baking him a blueberry pie (or blackberry, or cobbler--it doesn't really matter) and had asked him to be home at a certain time. My dad, who was a hellion that must have been a pain to raise, showed up hours late. My furious grandmother demanded that Big Al whip my dad. Big Al took him into a room, and my dad started crying. Big Al told him, "It's your birthday, so I'm not going to whip you, but you've made your mother very mad, so you better make noise like I'm whipping you." And Big Al then whipped the bed while my dad howled and shrieked in mock pain. That solution satisfied both my grandmother and my dad.

For whatever reason, my dad was bait for child molesters when he was a child. No one ever abused him, but they made advances. Once my unsuspecting dad told Big Al of how some storekeeper (commonly thought to be a deviant) had asked him to come back to the store after hours, so he could show him a surprise. Big Al marched down to the store and confronted the shopkeeper. He pulled out a sausage and told the man, "this is what's going to happen if you talk to my son again," and sliced the sausage in half with a big knife. Again, the reality of this story may have been altered due to percolation in my memory, but I think that's fairly accurate. Another time, Big Al defended my dad against a teacher who had unfairly punished him. The important detail here is "unfairly," because my dad routinely deserved the punishment he received at school, and Big Al didn't intervene. So many parents have difficulty finding that middle ground between being too lax and too strict. Either their child is always at fault, or never. Kids can't trust those kinds of parents to make fair decisions.

Big Al was always faithful to my grandmother. It's ridiculous that I even have to mention that, but it seems that these days adultery is more common than not. Men and women both cheat on their spouses, and it makes me sick to my stomach. Are there so few people of integrity in this world? I'm not talking about Christians who don't stray from their spouses because of fear of damnation, but people who don't cheat simply because it is wrong, and hurtful. What's more, it is weak to cheat on your spouse. People cheat because they are too cowardly to confront their problems. Infidelity is only one manifestation of cowardice, but there are many others. My dad told me that men in our family don't cheat. Period. And though I have no proof, I believe him. Big Al didn't raise any cowards, and neither did any of his children. There are nine of us grandchildren (so far), and not one is a loser or coward.

No one is perfect, and certainly no one in my family. I see in myself and others plenty of faults, including pride, impatience, and depression. But I also see integrity, bravery, and above all, love, which trump any of those faults. The same goes for Big Al. He could be mean, rude, ungrateful, and cantankerous in general. But the way he conducted his life and the way that he raised his children trumped any of those faults. That encourages me, that the meaning of a person's life is really the sum of their deeds and experiences, rather than how they end up.

The last time I saw Big Al was over three years ago. He didn't speak, and since he was practically deaf, he couldn't hear, either. To communicate with him, I wrote on a white board and held it up for him to read. I really don't know if he understood anything. I held his hand, and he gripped mine tightly, and I thought to myself that it was probably the last time I'd see him. He may not have even recognized me, but that didn't matter to me like it did to my aunt and my sister. He may have been lying immobile in bed, but that's not who I saw: I saw the person who raised my father, my aunt, and my two uncles; I saw the man who flew perhaps eighty missions in WWII; I saw a great man who had been eroded, but whose greatness was still apparent to me.

Rest in Peace, Big Al. You will not be forgotten.

Nothing Is True, Everything Is Permitted

Supposedly, that is what Hassan-i-Sabah, the leader of the ancient Hashshashin once said. It sounds simple enough, but it's a very controversial statement, once examined a bit more closely. Nothing is True. That goes against what nearly all of us believe, including the die-hard Bible-beaters and the atheists alike. We all believe in the existence of truth, even if we may not know precisely what the truth is.

Yes, I'm discussing philosophy again, but not in a completely abstract sense. Unless you've been living in a hole, you have heard at least some discussion about this concept of Intelligent Design as a supposed alternative to evolutionary theory. Before I write another word, I have to issue a disclaimer: I think "Intelligent Design" is just a sneaky way for the fundamentalist fascists to try to insert religion into education, as a way to subtly "groom" schoolchildren for future mental molestation in the form of organized religion, just as pedophiles groom their future victims with gifts of candy or toys. So how is it that so many people are swayed by these anti-scientific, heads-buried-in-the-sand Luddites? They appeal to our aesthetic ideal, to feelings we have that are so deep that we can't objectively divorce ourselves from them in order to make good decisions. It's a cheap shot, really, and the saddest part is how no one has called them on it, as far as I know. Sure, people have refuted the notion of Intelligent Design, but without addressing the reasons that people find the idea so convincing.

It's sad that I don't read as much as I used to.it's so easy to watch TV instead, when I have free time, but I do get to catch up on my reading on the plane. I had ample time to finish reading Nietzsche's On the Genealogy of Morality, which I've mentioned before. The third, final essay in the book was about the ascetic ideal, and what that means for different people. Rather than rehash the whole essay, I'll get straight to the point, which is that there was a logical progression from the Christian ideals of Truth and the Absolute to the Enlightenment and secular ideals, to rationality. And, ironically, those ideals inevitably lead a rational person to reject the same Christian religion that helped propagate the ideals in the first place. "Inevitably," because belief in Christianity depends on blind faith, or at least severely visually-impaired faith. People who really want to find the truth will rely on the scientific method, which makes reliance on the Bible unthinkable. But reliance on Science is still a type of faith, however enlightened it may be.

So Science is a faith, says I. Then what is there that we can believe without relying on faith? Descartes figured out the answer to that question long before I was ever born: I think, therefore I am. That is the only one certainty, and it's only certain to the person who is doing the thinking. I know that I exist, but you might not. While I certainly don't subscribe to solipsism, I can understand how someone would. I can't say who I am, or what I am, or anything about what it means to be "I," but some thinking is going on, and I am part of that. When I was a small child, thinking about this made me incredibly anxious and upset. I couldn't get past the fact that my consciousness is confined to this particular body I inhabit. Why do I see the world through my eyes, and not yours? And how did my consciousness get into this body, anyway? It is no fun to experience an existential crisis at any age, but especially not before kindergarten.

Descartes said "I think, therefore I am" (but in French, of course). Exodus 3.14 said "And God said unto Moses, I AM THAT I AM: and he said, Thus shalt thou say unto the children of Israel, I AM hath sent me unto you." Put the two together and you get "I think, therefore God." That's a philosophy I can dig. It supposes nothing about the nature of God, or of the universe, or of the laws of physics. It just equates thinking with existence, and existence with God. And since existence is the only thing we can really believe in, that's a pretty appropriate definition for God. Rather than being the "creator," God is existence itself: the trip rather than the destination, the process rather than the product. Existence isn't designed, it just is.

So that's what I believe, sorta, but how is that at all relevant to Intelligent Design? There is a connection, believe it or not. Aside from all its logical flaws, Intelligent Design should not be taught in US classrooms because it advocates a particular religion, or at least a certain dogma which says an intelligent creator exists. In many Eastern religions, such as Buddhism, the self is considered an illusion, an artificial barrier between ourselves and the universe. Intelligent Design promotes the notion of self, of an ego that remains intact even after death (in order to be rewarded or punished for individual behavior). Intelligent Design also advocates belief in a beginning, which completely contradicts the Hindu notion that the universe is cyclical, without beginning or end. That mistake highlights the largest fault of Intelligent Design: the inherent lack of comprehension of the infinite.

Humans have difficulty grasping the magnitude of large numbers. Even a million is hard to imagine, let alone a billion, or 6.022 x 10^23 (Avogadro's number, the number of atoms in 12 grams of carbon). Thus, it really isn't so surprising that most of the idiotic arguments by proponents of Intelligent Design stem from a lack of imagination--specifically, the inability to imagine how old this planet really is.

Here's an example of one particular idiot who was allowed to spout nonsense in the NY Times:

My guess is that "Doctor" Behe didn't do well in math classes. Anyone who has taken Calculus knows that it can be really hard to determine the long-term behavior of a function by looking at the short-term behavior. One way to express Euler's number (e) is by a limit: e = [1 + 1/n]^n as n approaches infinity. That's one way to find an approximate value for e, by using smaller numbers for n. Let's look at a few examples. When n = 10, [1 + 1/10]^10 = 1.1^10 = 2.594. When n = 100, [1 + 1/100]^100 = 1.01^100 = 2.705. When n = 1000, [1 + 1/1000]^1000 = 1.001^1000 = 2.717. The actual value of e is 2.7182818284 . . . The point is that ANY number greater than 1, when multiplied by itself an infinite number of times, will approach infinity. A billion is 1000000000. One over a billion is 0.000000001. Our planet is SEVERAL billion years old. It takes humans about 15-20 years to reproduce, but for the bacterium E. coli, there is a new generation every 20-40 minutes. That's about 13000-26000 generations per year. And then multiply that by a billion years. You can see that all those "incremental changes," the slight mutations from generation to generation, might start to add up after a billion years or two.

Although many of the people who have spoken against Intelligent Design appear to have severe deficits in their ability to debate, to make a point, I did read a very well-written editorial (also in the NY Times, of course) by an author with the amusing name Verlyn Klinkenborg. Mr. Klinkenborg (heheh) succinctly argues against Intelligent Design highlighting our inability to fathom really huge numbers:

(Cut to the end)

Evolution, and life itself, are pretty fucking amazing. There's no debate about that. But we have very strong evidence supporting Darwinian natural selection as the mechanism for development of all these complex systems. Life is so complex and elegant that it seems pretty magical on its own, even though the origin of species can be adequately explained by evolution and natural selection, so why add unnecessary magic in the form of some mystical "designer?"

There's another asinine argument I commonly hear from idiots who think they can "prove" the existence of God, or any creator, I suppose, which involves a misunderstanding of thermodynamics. The second law of thermodynamics basically says that the entropy of the universe, which is a measure of disorder, is constantly increasing. Ice has less entropy than water, which has less entropy than steam. Some creationists--ahem, proponents of Intelligent Design, as they call themselves these days--claim that because living organisms are more complex, less disordered than inanimate objects, it follows that life itself violates the second law, meaning God must exist. The wikipedia article discusses this nonsense in more detail, but the basic problem is that these morons think that the second law implies that entropy everywhere must be constantly increasing, when in fact, local entropy can decrease as long as the global entropy increases. If that were not true, it would be impossible to freeze water, or stack wooden blocks on top of each other. Earth gets its energy from the sun, mostly. Energy can be used to create pockets of order in the midst of disorder, as long as the total disorder increases. That is why running an air conditioner inside is counterproductive: the AC spits out a small amount of less entropic, cooler air on one side, and spits out a larger amount of more entropic, hotter air on the other side. What I don't understand is how creationists must assume that the physicists who formulated the second law were fools, if the existence of life were such an obvious exception to the rule. These guys (Planck, Clausius, Maxwell, etc.) were smarter than anyone I know; they wouldn't have overlooked the biological systems surrounding us.

Anyone who does not declare themselves a Christian has certainly heard of the book Why I Believe by D. James Kennedy, even if (like me) you haven't read it. You've heard of it because some Bible beater say something like, "You know, there was this guy who didn't believe in the Bible, and he tried to disprove it, and in the process, he was unable to disprove Christ's teachings and became a Christian." Yeah, sure. And if I don't believe the supposedly divinely inspired words of the Bible, I'm going to believe this D. James Kennedy guy. No one claims that he was divinely inspired, so maybe he just wasn't smart enough to figure out how to disprove the Bible, or maybe there simply isn't enough evidence to fulfill the burden of proof. After all, a lot has happened in the past 2000 years, and we don't have any evidence of most of that history.

So many creationist, or anti-evolutionist, arguments are based on gut feelings. On intuition. Anyone who's studied quantum mechanics knows that sometimes matter behaves very counterintuitively. Does it really make sense that time slows down when you approach the speed of light? Seems odd to me, but there's a lot more evidence to support Einstein's Special Theory of Relativity than there is to support belief in a Judeo-Christian God. Here's another tidbit from the NY Times, about a scientist who became a believer after appeals to his gut feelings:

When I read the quote, I said, "I thought, my gosh, this guy must not have read Nietzsche." If you think moral law is universal, think again. Most qualities we now consider "good" were once considered "evil," and vice-versa. There is no universal morality, because it depends completely on your perspective. That's patently obvious in an example we're all familiar with: the current war in Iraq. Does everyone consider Americans good? Does everyone consider Americans evil? If the concept of right and wrong were really so universal, then the only conflicts would be between individuals, not nations. There would never have been any Crusades, because either the Muslims would have seen the obvious truth of Christianity, or the invading Christians would have seen that there is no God but Allah, and Muhammed is his prophet.

I only have two more points to make, then I'm done with this bullshit. The first point is what Mr. Klinkenborg (heheh) wrote in his editorial, which I'm going to quote again (since repetition is required for a memory to be strengthened: "To present the arguments of intelligent design as part of a debate over evolution is nonsense. From the scientific perspective, there is no debate. But even the illusion of a debate is a sorry victory for antievolutionists, a public relations victory based, as so many have been in recent years, on ignorance and obfuscation." I completely agree with every one of those words, but I'll take it a step further, since I have a much smaller audience, and don't need to worry about losing ad revenue if I piss someone off. Some advocates of evolutionary theory might think it beneath them to debate Intelligent Design, since it is so clearly unscientific, but there is a PR battle to be won: every mention of Intelligent Design should be nipped in the bud, smacked-down like an errant child who is trying to push his boundaries. We can't give even an inch on this matter, else we end up having to recite the Lord's Prayer in the classroom like our parents and grandparents did. That is a regression, a step down the wrong path, the beginnings of devolution. As a supposedly tolerant society, we have to accept that people will teach their children nonsense. What they do in their own homes is their business, even though it may be harmful to themselves and to society in general. I believe people should have a right to be idiots, to ride a motorcycle without a helmet, drive a car without a seatbelt, smoke crack and shoot heroin. But when that self-destructiveness infringes on other people's lives, as it does when people try to teach magical mumbo-jumbo in public school science classrooms, it has to end.

A call to arms, for any thinking man, woman, or child: the Christian Right has missionaries on every corner, just waiting to pounce on us in moments of weakness, when we are susceptible to the saccharine promises of heaven and salvation. We have to be reverse-missionaries, to spread a more enlightened viewpoint that doesn't involve ignoring science just because it happens to conflict with a particular dogma. Why do people believe in heaven? Because they fear death. They want to be immortal. They want to believe their lives have meaning so desperately that they cling to faith like Linus clings to his security blanket. Faith is a type of false courage, based on comforting fairy tales that no one would believe if there weren't millions of other believers out there clapping their hands and singing, "Praise Jesus!" How much easier it is to leave the burden of soul-searching to a minister, priest, imam, rabbi, whatever. The alternative is a never-ending, lifetime search for meaning. The Religious Right have their bandwagon, but so do independent thinkers. We should encourage those fearful believers to draw courage from the one thing they know is true: I think, therefore I am. Nothing about that statement implies that life has no meaning, but perhaps the existentialists were right, and our lives take meaning based on our decisions, our choices. Perhaps that's too much responsibility for most people.

And now my final point, which takes us back to the beginning of this entry: Nothing is true, everything is permitted. That is the epitomy of free-thinking, a rejection of our most strongly-held belief in an ultimate truth. It is certainly hard for me to believe that there are no absolutes, that anything is possible, but I have to try. If I didn't, I'd be just as narrow-minded in my faith in Science as Christians are in their faith in Christ.